Mystery Schools

Isaac Newton, the man who more than any other founded modern physics, who cracked gravity and light and built the mathematics of the cosmos, wrote more words in his lifetime on alchemy and biblical prophecy than he ever wrote on physics. When this was rediscovered, a shocked economist who bought his private papers called him not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians. We open with that because it punctures a myth we badly need punctured before we can understand this chapter, and the two Parts of the book still to come. The clean story says that superstition ruled the world until science arrived and swept it away. The real story is stranger and truer: modern science was born, in part, out of the very underground streams of hidden and forbidden knowledge that the age of orthodoxy had driven beneath the surface, and its founders walked with one foot in each world.

Follow the stream back. When the official world of the last several chapters closed its temples and burned its heretics and branded the old knowledge as sin, that knowledge did not simply vanish. It went underground, into secret and initiatory traditions, and there it survived, coded, guarded, and passed hand to hand. Alchemy is the clearest example. On its surface a doomed effort to turn lead into gold, alchemy was in truth a vast, centuries-long, half-mystical laboratory tradition, running from the Islamic master Jabir in the eighth century down through the monasteries and workshops of Europe to Newton himself, and along the way its obsessive experimenters, heating and dissolving and distilling in pursuit of transformation, worked out an enormous amount of real chemistry, the acids, the apparatus, the methods, that genuine science would later inherit. Its guiding scripture was a cryptic little text called the Emerald Tablet, attributed to a legendary sage, whose most famous line, as above, so below, encodes the seductive and, it turns out, partly correct idea that the same laws run through every scale of the cosmos, that the pattern in the heavens is written also in the smallest things.

The hidden stream ran in many channels. In Jewish mysticism it ran as Kabbalah, with its Tree of Life mapping the descent of the divine into the world. In Islam it ran as Sufism, whose poets and whirling dervishes sought the direct, ecstatic experience of God that no orthodoxy could license or contain. It ran through networks of initiates who guarded their secrets with oaths and grades and symbols: the Knights Templar, the warrior-bankers who grew so rich and independent that a king and a pope destroyed them in a single coordinated stroke of arrests and burnings; the Cathars of southern France, dualist heretics who believed the material world itself was the work of a lesser and malevolent god, and whom the Church exterminated in a crusade against fellow Christians so thorough it invented some of the machinery of the later Inquisition. Again and again the pattern of the serpent chapter repeats in hard historical fact: a body of knowledge or belief is declared forbidden, its keepers are hunted, and the knowledge goes deeper underground, and survives.

And then, at the end of these thousand years, the stream broke back to the surface, and it helped to remake the world. In the Renaissance, long-lost Hermetic writings, the philosophy of that same legendary Egyptian sage, were rediscovered and translated, and they electrified the thinkers of the age with a bold and liberating vision: that the cosmos was a single, ordered, knowable whole, shot through with hidden correspondences, and that the human being was not a worm in the dust but a kind of magus who could come to understand and even command the powers of nature. That vision, mystical as it was, helped light the fuse of the Scientific Revolution. The men who founded the first scientific societies half-jokingly called themselves an Invisible College, borrowing the language of the secret Rosicrucian brotherhoods; and the greatest of them, Newton and Kepler among them, were driven by the frankly Hermetic conviction that a hidden mathematical order lay beneath appearances and was waiting, like a secret, to be uncovered by those with the wit and will to seek it.

We must be careful here, because this territory grows lush with fantasy, and the honest history is remarkable enough without it. The Templars really were suppressed, but they did not hide the Holy Grail or secretly run the modern world; the secret societies really existed and really carried esoteric traditions, but they are not the puppet-masters of a grand conspiracy behind all history, a fantasy that has done real harm. What actually happened is subtler and, to my mind, far more moving than any conspiracy. For a thousand years, the most dangerous idea in the world, the idea that a human being might seek out hidden knowledge for themselves, directly, without waiting for an authority to grant it, was kept alive in the dark, in codes and symbols and secret oaths, by alchemists and mystics and heretics who paid for it in exile and fire. And then it came back into the light, and it became, in a form scrubbed of its magic and armed with mathematics and the experiment, the thing we now call science. The serpent's old promise, that you may eat of the tree of knowledge, that you may know things for yourself, had been driven underground and demonized for a thousand years. It was about to return in triumph, and the world was about to change faster than it had ever changed in the whole long story we have told.

The parallel worlds were about to collide, the hidden stream was about to burst its banks, and the human story was about to accelerate past every speed it had ever known.