Quick Summary

• How Secret Drugs BIRTHED The Legend of the Holy Grail

• Why Christianity Destroyed the FEMININE Trinity

• How the HOLY GRAIL Came to Represent a Lost Feminine Secret

How Secret Drugs BIRTHED The Legend of the Holy Grail

In the centuries before Christianity, the Eleusinian Mysteries were the central axis around which Greco-Roman spiritual life revolved. The Roman orator Cicero gushed: “Among the many admirable and divine things your Athenians have established to the advantage of human society, there is nothing better than the Mysteries.”

The Romans borrowed Greek philosophy, art techniques and even gods like Zeus—who enjoyed a second life as the Roman god Jupiter. That fact that Cicero singled out the Mysteries as the single greatest thing Rome ever received from Athens reveals their massive significance.

Eleusis is a small town just outside Athens, where the cult of the grain goddess Demeter held secretive annual ceremonies for over a thousand years. Anyone who was anyone in Greco-Roman society—from Plato to Julius Caesar—made their pilgrimage to Eleusis to drink from the mysterious Kykeon chalice.

The rites of Eleusis were celebrations of femininity. To drink from the chalice was to worship a trinity of goddesses. The virginal daughter Persephone, the motherly Demeter, and wise old Hecate symbolized the three phases of a woman’s life for Eleusinian priestesses, who passed down the mysterious recipe of the Kykeon over generations. Death-and-rebirth, or resurrection, was a major theme.

The recipe was a closely-guarded secret. Revealing it was punishable by exile—as with the Athenian statesman Alcibiades—or even death. Stiff punishments like these ensured that the contents of the Kykeon remained an enduring mystery for millennia.

But now in the 21st century, that mystery has finally been solved. Recent archaeobotanical evidence (Juan-Stresserras, J., & Matamala, J. C., 2005) has all but proven that ergot was the active ingredient in the Kykeon, which turns out to have been a beer-like substance.

Ergot is a psychoactive fungus that grows on cereal grains. Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann used this fungus to synthesize LSD for the first time back in 1938. High enough doses of ergot induce an experience called “ego death”, where the mental understanding of the self is chemically disabled—just as inhibitions can be chemically disabled by alcohol. The experience feels like a personal death-and-rebirth.

A mental conception of self is an invaluable tool for planning and survival. But a keen enough mental reflection of any physical body means awareness of that body’s mortality. That’s why humans are constantly tortured by the awful knowledge of our guaranteed deaths.

But pilgrims to the Eleusinian Mysterious claimed to have discovered the secret of immortality, or to have been “saved.” With a sip from the mystical Kykeon, they briefly freed themselves from the prison of ego. For the Greeks and Romans, immortality and salvation were feminine experiences that came from drinking out of a magical chalice. These are the origins of the legend of the Holy Grail.

Why Christianity Destroyed the FEMININE Trinity

Humans are like actors who forget to change out of their costumes. The humdrum of our daily lives sucks us into the illusion of inhabiting bodies. But it is possible to break that illusion. The crashing realization that we’re much more than just narrow egos feels like a personal death-and-rebirth and was regarded by the ancients as feminine in character. The association came from the “costume-change” they saw in motherhood, when a single individual forks into multiple individuals.

The Greek and Romans portrayed their goddess Demeter as a mother because her cereal grains grow a psychoactive fungus that temporarily shatters the illusion of ego.

Likewise, Greco-Roman wine was frequently laced with hallucinogenic ingredients like henbane and Bacchus the wine god was effeminate. He had the distinctive long hair of a woman (faithfully captured by Caravaggio centuries later) and was sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite with both male and female genitalia.

Early Christianity combined Demeter’s grain and Bacchus’ wine into the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The old death-and-rebirth motif was reanimated by the story of the Crucifixion, where the Holy Grail makes its debut. On the eve of his execution, Jesus invites his disciples to drink from a cup. Matthew quotes him saying, “Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”

Christ inherited many of the wine god’s traits. He sported the same long, feminine haircut. And because wine grapes were originally introduced to Greece from the Near East, Greco-Roman wine gods were said to come from that direction—just like Jesus, who hailed from Palestine. Furthermore, Bacchus and Jesus both transform water into wine.

Jesus’ mother also inherited much from a feminine trinity of goddesses worshipped across the Mediterranean Basin during pre-Christian times. Mary assumed the combined roles of both the motherly grain goddess Demeter and her virginal daughter Persephone. This curious combination of mother and virgin has been vexing theologians ever since.

Though the feminine trinity was highly significant in the ancient world, its third member was cast out by the early Church. With twin torches held aloft, the wise old crone Hecate was supposed to have led the grain goddess into the underworld in search of her kidnapped daughter. But Christianity rewarded her efforts by transforming Hecate into the terrifying archetype of the witch.

Apart from Mary, the early Church opposed goddess worship because it was protecting a fragile spiritual monopoly. Roman authorities had already co-opted the cult of the effeminate wine god Bacchus in 186 BC, citing the nefarious influence of the Cult’s high priestess.

During the twilight of the Empire, Christianity got the same treatment. The last emperors of Rome converted to Christianity and assumed control of it to generate solidarity in a crumbling society. They eventually banned all competing religious practices in a bid to shore up their waning political power.

When they failed and Rome fell, the Roman Catholic Church carried its bizarre relationship with femininity into the Middle Ages. Christianity retained the veneration of motherhood it had once borrowed from paganism and adopted similar magical sacraments. But it tolerated no competition from rival sacraments unsanctioned by the Church. Those who defied the Church’s spiritual monopoly were condemned as heretics or burned as witches. During the late Middle Ages, millions of women suffered agonizing public executions for the crime of witchcraft.

How the HOLY GRAIL Came to Represent a Lost Feminine Secret

During the High Middle Ages, storytellers picked up on the mystical chalice used at the Last Supper and expanded it into the Holy Grail. They placed Joseph of Arimathea at the scene of the Crucifixion, catching the blood of Christ in the same cup His disciples had used the night before at the first Communion. Joseph then brings the Holy Grail to England, where the magic cup that grants immortality pops up in the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

The next great update to the Grail legend didn’t arrive until 2003, when Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code. He missed his chance to directly connect the Holy Grail to the mystical chalices used in Greco-Roman paganism. But Brown nevertheless wove his plot around the idea that the Holy Grail symbolizes the veneration of femininity.

In Brown’s book, the Grail is not a cup but the physical person of Jesus’ pregnant wife, Mary Magdalene. After the Crucifixion, her supporters smuggle her out of Palestine and into France, where their descendants faithfully keep Jesus’ secret bloodline hidden from jealous Church authorities.

The Da Vinci Code takes its title from the idea that one such descendant was none other than Leonardo Da Vinci, and that the Mona Lisa uses a bizarre split horizon to symbolize an imbalance between femininity and masculinity. Dan Brown suggests that Da Vinci rendered Lisa androgynous–like the wine god Bacchus—to symbolize the restoration of a sacred union between male and female.

The Holy Grail itself is a Christianization of existing motifs surrounding salvation and immortality that swirled around the Mediterranean Basin in the centuries before Christ. The notion of achieving immortality or salvation by drinking from a mystical chalice matches themes common to pre-Christian cults like that of the motherly grain goddess Demeter.

In The Da Vinci Code, Lisa’s wry smile is a hint that her painting is an elaborate inside joke about the suppression of the sacred feminine. The joke is that Christianity is based on many of the same ancient traditions that it still violently persecuted back in Da Vinci’s day. The pagan history of the Holy Grail exposes the Church for having suppressed its own spiritual precursors.

Conclusion

The moral of the story of the Crucifixion is that we are not our bodies, as we appear to ourselves to be. Christ was so confident that he was not actually his body that he volunteered it for gruesome public execution. Over the centuries, that story seeded another legend about the mystical cup that held His blood and which confers immortality. That chalice allegorizes the secret fact that the physical world is an illusion, and so is our identification with our physical bodies. During ancient times, this secret was realized pharmacologically with the ritual drinking of certain psychoactive substances capable of inducing the experience of ego death. Christianity evolved out of those traditions, adopted their symbols of death-and-rebirth as its own, but then outlawed its predecessors. Thereafter, whispers of a profound and magical secret took the form of the Holy Grail.

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Further Materials

Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today’s troubled world, and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to “reeducate” the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific.
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum—or The Witches’ Hammer—indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women” and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.” Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth—a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.
The propaganda and bloodshed had worked. Today’s world was living proof.
Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice … woman.
Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church’s defamation. In France and Italy, the words for “left”—gauche and sinistra—came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity,and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003, Page 105

Quick Summary

1. The ARK OF THE COVENANT Was Lost to History when Jewish Captives Discovered Babylonian Debt Forgiveness

2. The HOLY GRAIL Comes From The Crucifixion When Jesus was Punished for Demanding Debt Forgiveness

3. The KNIGHTS TEMPLAR Supposedly Found The Holy Grail as They Introduced England to Banking

The ARK OF THE COVENANT Was Lost to History when Jewish Captives Discovered Babylonian Debt Forgiveness

As a flashpoint in Middle Eastern politics, Jerusalem still dominates the modern news cycle. But back in 586 BC, the Holy City was little more than a smoldering ruin. In that year, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar besieged it and razed the Temple of Solomon.

Prior to Nebuchadnezzar’s demolition, the Temple had been central to the lives of Jerusalem’s Jewish population. That was where they stored the Ark of the Covenant, a golden box containing the remains of the original Ten Commandments smashed by Moses. The 1980 film Raiders of the Lost Ark cemented this holy relic into the popular imagination.

The Ark was also supposed to contain the Staff of Aaron. Aaron was Moses’ brother, whose rod turned into a serpent and flowered miraculously during the Exodus story.

According to legend, Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem was the last time anyone saw the Ark of the Covenant. During the chaos, it vanished without a trace. Some suggest that the Ark ended up among the Tewahedo Christians of Ethiopia. Others believe Nebuchadnezzar seized the Ark.

But with or without the Ark, Nebuchadnezzar dragged the Jewish population of Jerusalem back to Babylon as war captives. That makes his siege of Jerusalem highly significant to the history of debt, in addition to being the moment when the Ark of the Covenant was lost.

As slaves in Babylon, the Jews learned about the Babylonian tradition of debt forgiveness. This practice was a fixture of Bronze Age Mesopotamia. A thousand years before Nebuchadnezzar’s time, the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi commanded periodic debt forgiveness in his famous Code of written laws.

The Jewish captives recognized the immense value of the societal stability afforded by regular debt forgiveness before the Persian king Cyrus destroyed Babylon and liberated them from captivity. The Jews returned to Jerusalem and consecrated a Second Temple to replace the one destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar.

It was at this time the Jews formalized the Hebrew Bible and—in numerous passages—incorporated commands for debt forgiveness copied from the old Babylonian tradition. Five centuries later, during Roman times, Jesus directly referenced these Old Testament passages when he announced that “forgiveness” was the only hope of salvation.

Without the episode of the Babylonian Captivity where the Ark of the Covenant disappeared, there would have been no ministry of Jesus.

The HOLY GRAIL Comes From The Crucifixion When Jesus was Punished for Demanding Debt Forgiveness

In almost the same year that Nebuchadnezzar laid waste to Jerusalem, the stabilizing power of debt forgiveness reached Greece. That’s when Solon of Athens laid the groundwork for his city’s golden age with a widespread forgiveness of mortgage debts.

Later that century, the King of Rome considered copying Solon and stabilizing his own society by “cutting the heads off the tall poppies,” as the Roman historian Livy put it. But his wealthiest subjects ran him out of town before he could act. They convened the Roman Senate to rule in his stead as an oligarchy and established a powerful taboo against kingship. Here, the economic fates of Greece and Rome diverged dramatically.

Five hundred years later, Rome had exploded into the largest empire the world had ever seen. Because the expansion was largely accomplished through merciless exploitation of its working class, popular revolts and labor strikes roiled Roman society. This was the economic stage onto which Jesus of Nazareth stepped. His debut sermon was a reading of the scroll of Isaiah, one of the many places in Jewish scripture that called for Babylonian-style debt forgiveness.

Jesus’ advocacy for economic justice famously landed him in hot water with the Roman authorities. He suffered through a gruesome public execution for the crime of violating the Roman taboo against kingship. Augustine of Hippo went on to reinterpret Jesus’ demands for forgiveness as forgiveness for personal moral failings, instead of forgiveness for debts owed to the oligarchy. But telltale signs of Christianity’s original meaning can still be found in the 1611 King James version of the Bible, which renders the Lord’s Prayer as, “and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Despite St. Augustine’s reinterpretation, the ministry of Jesus was a significant inflection point in the history of finance. For the duration of the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church banned interest-bearing loans. The morality of debt went on to become a major factor in the politics of the Protestant Reformation.

As with the Babylonian Captivity and the Ark of the Covenant, this history of debt coincides with a legend about another magical artifact: the Holy Grail. Indiana Jones also sought this holy relic in the 1989 film The Last Crusade. According to its lore, the Grail was the cup used at the Last Supper before Jesus’ execution, and by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of Christ at the Crucifixion.

Joseph was the owner of the plot of land on which Jesus’ tomb was located, and he’s supposed to have brought the Grail to England. He’s believed to have arrived at Glastonbury with a flowering staff, eerily similar to the Staff of Aaron contained within the Ark of the Covenant. From there, the Grail became a focal point in the tale of King Arthur, who was said to have been buried at Glastonbury after his death. Sprigs of flowering Glastonbury hawthorn are still cut twice a year and presented to the British Monarch in acknowledgement of this Grail legend.

The KNIGHTS TEMPLAR Supposedly Found The Holy Grail as They Introduced England to Banking

A generation after Jesus’ lifetime, the Roman military drove the Jews from their homeland. They fled to Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Netherlands. Just like Nebuchadnezzar five centuries before, the Roman general and future emperor Titus laid siege to Jerusalem and demolished the Second Temple of Solomon that had replaced the original. Only a portion of the western wall remains today, and it stands as the holiest site in modern Judaism.

During the Crusades, the Knights Templar arrived in Jerusalem and established their headquarters on the Temple Mount, situated over the ruins of the Second Temple. Their name “Templar” comes from this location. Rumors began to circulate that the Knights had located a mysterious object of immense power while excavating the ruins. Possibilities included both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.

In the real-life history of finance, the Knights Templar actually did accumulate immense power. They accomplished this not by discovering some holy relic, but by skirting the Church’s ban on interest-bearing debt. During the Crusades, the road to the Holy Land was rife with bandits. For safety’s sake, pilgrims began trading in their coins for letters of credit at Templar Churches, like the one you can still visit today on Fleet Street in London.

Unlike coins, letters of credit were worthless to thieves and cutpurses on the pilgrim trail. And upon arrival in Jerusalem, pilgrims could swap these letters for coins again. The Knights charged a fee for this service that was built into the exchange rates they offered. This practice was mathematically identical to charging interest on a loan, but it didn’t immediately arouse the suspicion of Church authorities. Another significant moment in the history of finance comes with strange stories about magical artifacts.

Conclusion

Albert Einstein once quipped, “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” He was remarking on the exponential power of interest-bearing debt, which isn’t intuitively obvious to the human mind. This lack of intuition makes debt a convenient mathematical rationale for the rich to claim the meager possessions of the poor. On the other hand, spiritualist traditions view our apparent confinement inside individual bodies as an illusion—and the accumulation of wealth to glorify individual egos as a dangerous trap. But history is not driven not by spiritualists. It’s driven by materialists who control the physical resources necessary to dominate others. Most of us live out our lives under somebody else’s economic regime with a festering sense that something is terribly wrong. On some level, we understand that we’re temporary nodes in a grander network. We should be sacrificing on behalf of future generations, not hoarding wealth to dominate our neighbors. That’s why major inflection points in the history of debt come accompanied by whispers of holy relics with immense magical power. It’s a subconscious recognition of our grand existence as a collective whole.

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Further Materials

If a man has a debt lodged against him, and the storm-god Adad devastates his field or a flood sweeps away the crops, or there is no grain grown in the field due to insufficient water—in that year he will not repay grain to his creditor.
The Code of Hammurabi, Law 26–k

Quick Summary

• Compound Interest WITHOUT Debt Forgiveness Caused The Fall of Rome & The Rise of Platonism

• The Alchemical Dream of Creating Gold Came True With Fractional Reserve Lending

• Central Bankers Became Modern Caesars & Popes by Applying Fractional Reserve Lending to State Finance

Compound Interest WITHOUT Debt Forgiveness Caused The Fall of Rome & The Rise of Platonism

Platonism is the idea that we inhabit a false reality—like the characters in the 1999 film The Matrix. This way of thinking always becomes fashionable during times of economic collapse, when material conditions deteriorate and despair sets in.

The Greek philosopher Plato was more popular during the twilight of the Roman Empire than he had ever been during his own lifetime. During those dark times, various schools of Platonic thought whispered of a hidden realm waiting beyond their dismal reality.

Those dark times were the direct consequence of using compound interest WITHOUT the guardrails of periodic debt forgiveness. The kings of Bronze Age Mesopotamia traditionally reset their economic scoreboards at regular intervals. Solon of Athens had set the stage for his home city’s Golden Age with a mass debt forgiveness.

But the Romans broke with this long-standing tradition and chose the sanctity of private property over economic stability. Christianity was one of many Platonic reactions to that, but Neoplatonism and Hermeticism are other examples.

For Christians, Plato’s hidden realm of ideal perfection became the Kingdom of Heaven. They insisted that God had intervened from that realm to restore an equitable distribution of wealth through debt forgiveness. Early Christians left no doubt that debt was the cause of earthly woes; the Jesus of the New Testament goes so far as to physically assault moneylenders.

But in the 4th century, a former Neoplatonist reinterpreted the forgiveness commanded by Jesus as forgiveness for personal moral failings. He went on to become St. Augustine, because he didn’t threaten the wealthy with canceling debts owed to them by the working class.

The Roman aristocracy seized on Augustine’s version of Christianity and made it the state religion of their dying empire. The last emperors of Rome banned all rival interpretations of Christianity and schools of Platonic thought as heresies, rendering them powerless to reverse Rome’s economic fortunes. The Empire’s fate was sealed.

The Alchemical Dream of Creating Gold Came True With Fractional Reserve Lending

A thousand years after the Fall of Rome, the feudal economy of the Middle Ages began to unravel in the wake of the Black Death. As economic conditions deteriorated, Platonism reemerged as Renaissance Magic.

Early Christianity was a branch of Platonism where miracles proved the existence of a hidden realm. As Renaissance magicians, Alchemists dreamed of transmuting base metals into gold to prove that we are living inside an illusion, as the Greek philosopher Plato claimed. The superpowers of the character Neo play a similar role in the film The Matrix.

But as the Renaissance wore on, Alchemy devolved into the domain of hucksters and charlatans. By the 1600s, English goldsmiths had discovered that they could create gold on the pages of a ledger instead of in the Alchemical fires of a crucible.

In those days, people stored their coins at their local goldsmith because they were the only ones who had the heavy vaults needed to keep it safe. Goldsmiths issued receipts in return for these deposits, which worked like claim checks for specific amounts of gold.

Trading the goldsmiths’ paper receipts was far more convenient than carrying around heavy gold coins. When people needed to make a payment, they simply handed over a claim check for the right amount and it was accepted. Those receipts circulated as the earliest form of paper money.

The goldsmiths soon noticed that only a small fraction of depositors ever actually traded their notes back in for physical gold coins. Most paper receipts kept circulating endlessly as currency without ever being redeemed.

The goldsmiths gave in to temptation by issuing extra receipts for more gold than they actually had in their vaults. Unlike gold itself, paper IOUs could be easily manufactured. As long as their customers didn’t try to redeem more gold than was actually in their vaults, goldsmiths could run this scheme indefinitely.

This practice of Fractional Reserve Lending later became our modern banking system. We expect our bank to loan out our deposits because interest is how they make their money. But we’d be livid if our debit card was ever declined for anything less than the full balance in our checking account.

Like the goldsmiths of 17th-century England, modern banks work on the principle that everyone doesn’t empty their checking account every day. Therefore, they can get away with issuing far more credit than they have actual deposits. And bank credit is money when merchants accept credit cards.

Modern banks are licensed by the state to conjure money out of thin air—and charge the public interest to rent their manufactured product. But perhaps the most magical thing about this fulfillment of the Alchemical Dream is that the rapid expansion of bank credit financed the Industrial Revolution. That dazzling miracle made humankind forget about Plato.

Central Bankers Became Modern Caesars & Popes by Applying Fractional Reserve Lending to State Finance

Only an Emperor with supreme political power could forcefully bind together the warring economic classes within Roman society. After the Fall of Rome, popes ruled Medieval Europe from the Eternal City instead of the Caesars—often invoking the same imperial rituals, symbols, and clothing from the Roman period.

But in 1648, the dominance of the popes over European politics came to an end. The Treaty of Westphalia established nation-states with sovereign borders, which the Pope was no longer allowed to reach across. States that wished to be Protestant rather than Catholic were permitted to do so by international agreement, free from influence by the Vatican.

Less than 50 years later, central bankers rushed in to fill the power vacuum left by the popes atop the hierarchy of European geopolitics. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 with the simple idea of transplanting the magic of Fractional Reserve Lending onto state finance.

At the time, King William III was desperate for cash for his war against France. A small group of London and Edinburgh bankers bailed him out with a Faustian Bargain he couldn’t refuse. They paid for the right to issue claim checks on the King’s future tax receipts, which he now owed to them.

Within a century, this paper money became the only medium accepted by the English government to satisfy tax obligations. Central bankers directly controlled the nation’s currency from that point forward, granting them immense political power. Similar banks now control the currencies of virtually every country in the world. These have been connected by the Bank for International Settlements in Basil, Switzerland since 1930.

Central bankers now enjoy near total control over international geopolitics. They determine which political actors gain access to liquidity in global financial markets. Our nominal heads of state must operate within boundaries set by unelected central bankers, just as the Roman emperors used to dominate client kingdoms, and the popes once inflicted their will on the crowned heads of Christendom during the Middle Ages.

Conclusion

The fundamental question that drives human history is whether the observable universe exists within our minds, or whether our minds exist within the universe. The miracles of Jesus and the magic of alchemy are supposed to be demonstrations that our minds create the reality we experience, just as it creates the convincingly vivid dreamscapes we experience while we sleep. Whether real or legendary, these demonstrations arouse suspicion that Plato was right about the observable universe being an illusion—and therefore rankle temporal authorities who wish to rule over said universe. Christians were once thrown to lions in the Colosseum. Practitioners of Renaissance magic met grisly fates in the dungeons of the Inquisition. And anyone professing a belief in magic is still marginalized and dismissed today. But as central bankers drive our modern capitalist economic system toward the end of its lifecycle, Platonism is once again bubbling up in the collective subconscious, just as it did during the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Look no further than the 1999 release of The Matrix to witness humankind again confronting the age-old question of whether or not we live in a world of magic and miracles.

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Further Materials

Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.
David Graeber, The Truth Is Out: Money Is Just An IOU, And The Banks Are Rolling In It, 2014

Quick Summary

• The Mental Conception of Self is a Phantom

• The Individuality of Our Physical Bodies is an Illusion

• Mistaken Identification with Ego Drives Human History

The Mental Conception of Self is a Phantom

The Apology is Plato’s account of the speech Socrates gave in his own defense at his trial in 399 BC. Apology comes from the Greek word “apologia”, which means a formal, reasoned defense—not an admission of wrongdoing.

Plato recounts his mentor claiming to have an inner daimon, or oracle, whom he consults on matters of right and wrong. Socrates testified that he was in discourse with his conscience, just like Pinocchio consulting Jiminy Cricket.

Another Disney movie, the Pixar film Inside Out, portrays multiple inner voices personified. In the movie, characters representing a little girl’s competing emotions interact with each other inside her head. The movie works because we all have multiple voices like the one Socrates described riding around inside our mind.

When you ask yourself, “What did I just come into this room to get?”, to whom are you speaking?

Each of our minds is really a cluster of voices. But because we must interact with each other in physical space, we assume a convenient 1:1 ratio between minds and bodies. When we coordinate with others, we throw a tablecloth over these little committees of voices and regard the whole group as a single, discrete individual.

These tablecloths are frameworks that package a variety of subpersonalities into a single identity. It is the ego. Though it’s the most useful of fictions, your ego is entirely a mental construct. The late ethnobotanist Terence McKenna loved to define the ego as a tool we use to know which mouth to feed at the dinner table. It’s the mental reflection of your physical body. You walk around all day behaving as if this reflection is really you, but it’s actually just a phantom. You are no more your ego than you are your reflection in the mirror.

The Individuality of Our Physical Bodies is an Illusion

Beethoven’s symphonies are conventionally experienced in a concert hall as sound. But they can also be visually experienced as sheet music. Because sheet music represents time as a physical dimension, lengthy sequences of notes which take minutes to hear are instantly visible at a glance. Those who read music can identify different symphonies by listening OR by seeing.

This trick of swapping time (measured with a stopwatch) for distance (measured with a ruler) presents a fascinating thought experiment. If you swapped these dimensions in your own life, your body as it exists in each moment—from infancy to old age—would similarly be visible at a glance.

From that bizarre perspective, you’d appear to be bodily connected to both your ancestors and to any descendants you might have. That’s because, at some point in the past, every person on the planet shared a body with their mother. Motherhood is the forking of a single individual into two or more individuals, just as a tree trunk forks into multiple branches.

That’s what makes the family tree such a common metaphor. But we’ll take a head of broccoli for an analogy instead, because it’s the same shape but smaller. Stalks propagate along the length of a head of broccoli, just as generations of human families propagate over time. A single stalk divides into several branches, which then divides into still more branches.

Our broccoli metaphor is just like sheet music, where time is swapped out for distance. The length of our broccoli head represents the time signature, and cross-sectional slices along that length represent snapshots in time, like a single musical note.

If you take a cross-section near the florets, you’ll get a cross-section of many small stems. But if you chop the broccoli in the middle, you’ll get a cross-section of a few medium-sized stems. And if you slice it at the stalk, you’ll get a cross-section with only one large central stem.

Within each cross-section, each stem appears to be an individual circle, totally disconnected from other circles. Only in the fullness of 3 dimensions are these individual stems revealed to be part of one continuous whole. So it is with humankind. In the fullness of 4 dimensions, our sense of individuality—or our ego—is revealed to be an illusion.

Mistaken Identification with Ego Drives Human History

The famed Flammarion Engraving is a woodcut by an unknown artist that dates back at least to 1888. It’s probably much older. The cutting portrays an individual escaping from the narrow confines of spacetime, as if they’re climbing under the apron of a circus tent.

The thought experiment of swapping time for distance allows us to make a parallel escape into the fullness of 4 dimensions. If we imagine reading the sheet music of our lives instead of experiencing the symphony, the past and future would be hidden around a corner in time—like the first and last notes of a symphony appearing on the same page.

If we could take in the entire human story in a single glance, a particular geometry would become clear. Each successive generation sacrifices on behalf of the next. Some parents will always be neglectful, but the human species owes its evolutionary success to a broad strategy of heavy investment in our offspring.

This geometry suggests a particular moral imperative. When we operate “correctly”, parents make sacrifices on behalf of their children. Their children, in turn, do the same for the next generation. In this way, humankind bootstraps itself ever upward and onward into the future.

But what is the opposite of sacrifice? Instead of stocking the cupboard for the future, some of us have been known to steal from it. The ego motivates people to hoard resources for themselves or for an ingroup, forgetting that—in the fullness of 4 dimensions—there’s really only one human family. We make a grave error when we identify as our egos, rather than as the entire human species at large.

Conclusion

The Greek philosopher Plato identified pleonexia, or wealth addiction, as the driver of the great political and economic cycles of civilization. Human history is animated by an eternal tension between what’s good for the species as a whole, and what’s good for the individual ego. Evolution has provided us with the anatomy and the instincts to propagate our species over millions of years. But as a final modification, natural selection also outfitted each of us with an ego. Egos are indispensable tools for coordinating between people. But if they grow too large, a single ego can threaten entire human societies, like a cancerous tumor. Our interconnectedness as a species is hidden by our handicap of perceiving time as a series of snapshots, rather than as a contiguous whole. The result of this blindness is a tendency to wander through life, seeking to glorify our own individual egos instead of the human race as a whole.

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Further Materials

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture 31: The Anatomy of the Mental Personality, 1932

Key Takeaways

• Platonism Led Sir Isaac Newton to Revolutionize the Sciences

• Music Illustrates the Relationship Between Space & Time

• Spacetime Suggests That Mortality is a Trick of Perception

Platonism Led Isaac Newton to Revolutionize the Sciences

According to his contemporary biographer, angels revealed to René Descartes that “the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.” Shortly thereafter, he single-handedly merged Western philosophy and science with the philosophical concept cogito ergo sum (which means “I think, therefore I am”).

But Descartes’ purely mechanical view of the universe was rejected by Isaac Newton. Newton was heavily influenced by Henry More, his mentor at Cambridge and the most famous of the “Cambridge Platonists.” Under More’s tutelage, Newton arrived at a Neoplatonic view of space and time as absolute aspects of God’s omnipresence.

Early mechanical philosophers argued that physical contact was necessary to move objects. But Newton’s revolutionary theory of gravity acting at a distance was inspired by Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and alchemical schools of thought. These traditions affirmed the existence of invisible, non-material forces operating in nature.

In his Allegory of the Cave, the Greek philosopher Plato compared our perception of the universe to shadows flickering on a cave wall. A shadow is a 2-dimensional projection cast by a 3-dimensional object. His use of shadows as an allegorical device invokes what we today call “dimensionality”.

Calculus was co-invented independently by Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It is the mathematics of rates of change. The rate at which measurements along any particular dimension change can be compared to rates-of-change along other dimensions.

Calculus compares the rates-of-change over dimensions like space and time that describe real-world relationships. Distance over time (speed) might be measured with a simple rate, like miles per hour. The rate of change in speed over time (acceleration) is a compound rate, measured in miles per hour per second.

Though perceived wholly differently by our brains, calculus reveals that space and time fit together like interlocking Lego bricks. Whether measuring rates of change or of accumulation, that math is indispensable to modern physics. Without calculus, Einstein couldn’t have formalized his field equations, which fuse space and time into the dynamic geometry of spacetime.

And we wouldn’t have calculus if it weren’t for Plato. Like Newton, Leibniz was also obsessed with that Greek philosopher. He famously wrote, “If someone were to reduce Plato to a system, he would render a great service to the human race, and it would be seen that there is in him much more than is commonly thought.”

Music Illustrates the Relationship Between Space & Time

In 1824, Beethoven premiered his final 9th Symphony at the now-demolished Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. In a cruel twist of fate, Beethoven had been stricken deaf. He was unable to hear the music that defined his life. As the bent figure took the stage for the very last time, a packed house waved their handkerchiefs furiously so that the great composer could see their appreciation—even if he couldn’t hear their applause.

Before the advent of recording equipment, all music was live. For most of the standing-room-only crowd packing the Kärntnertor Theater, it would be the first and only time they would hear Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It’s easy to see why the spectacle of a hundred different instruments playing in concert used to be such a heady experience. And why riots sometimes broke out, as was the case with the premier of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

To explore the relationship between time and space, imagine you are sitting in a concert hall listening to Beethoven’s 9th. You’re stuck in the time signature with the rest of the audience, listening to each note in sequence. With no ability to rewind or fast forward time, audience members can hear only the current note being played in each moment. In the middle of the symphony, its very first and last notes are inaudible. But those notes haven’t ceased to exist. Rather, they’re hidden around a corner in time.

But reading Beethoven’s sheet music instead of listening to it frees us from the confines of the time signature. With enough space on the page, your eyes could take in the first and last notes of the symphony at the same time, along with every note in between, rather than having to experience those notes in sequential order.

Sheet music works by swapping out the temporal dimension—which we measure with a stopwatch—for a spatial one, which we measure with a ruler. One second might be represented by one eighth of an inch on the page. Once you see that the symphony can be expressed through both a temporal and a spatial medium, the deep correspondence between these two dimensions becomes clear.

Spacetime Suggests That Mortality is a Trick of Perception

The experience of hearing a symphony versus reading its sheet music offers a powerful metaphor for the philosophical idea that our linear experience of time is a trick of perception. Calculus describes a fundamental relationship between spatial dimensions and time. Our experience of that relationship is key to this perspective.

Evolution has outfitted the human brain with the capability to combine the 3 spatial dimensions of length, width, and height into a 3-D model. But these dimensions intersect at 90° angles, leaving nowhere to cram in a 4th dimension. So we evolved the trick of animating the 3 spatial dimensions along the 4th dimension of time.

We’re stuck in a time signature that we must experience sequentially, powerless to fast-forward or rewind when we listen to a symphony. But a glance at the sheet music confirms that the first and last notes of the symphony do exist in some sense of the word.

Similarly, we cannot fast-forward or rewind our lives. We’re stuck in the time signature along with everyone else. But though they may be hidden around a corner of time, this perspective suggests our youth and our old age still exist…somewhere, just like the first and last notes of a symphony.

When you begin to think in terms of this correspondence between distance and time, you become conscious of your ancestors stretching out behind you into the mists of the distant past. And of your descendants fanning out before you, proceeding into the uncertain future. Like the first and last notes of a symphony, these people, too, have an existence hidden from us by the way we perceive time.

Unlike other animals, humans are uniquely haunted by our mortality. We’re disturbed by the knowledge that we won’t exist after a certain point in time. But the experience of time is merely a trick of the brain. It’s just another way of apprehending another dimension like length, width, or height.

Conclusion

The grand trajectory of the human story has a geometry to it, sculpted in the medium of time. Dimensionality and calculus offer us a glimpse of that shape with our mind’s eye when we imagine the sheet music of the human symphony. We experience our lives as a fleeting melody, mourning the notes that have passed, and fear the silence to come. But calculus winks at us. It hints that reality is a robust multi-dimensional manifold, which the limited human brain interprets as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The combined efforts of Plato, Newton, Leibniz, and Einstein afford us a peek at the divine sheet music of the human symphony.

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Further Materials

With his culminating masterpieces now complete, Beethoven longed for an opportunity to present them to the public. But Rossini had so captivated Austria in 1823, and Viennese audiences were now so enamored of Italian melody, that no local impresario dared risk a fortune on two compositions so difficult as the Missa solemnis and the Choral Symphony. A Berlin producer offered to present them; Beethoven was about to agree, when a combination of music lovers, led by the Lichnowsky family, alarmed at the thought of Vienna’s outstanding composer being forced to go to a rival capital for the premiere of his latest and most prestigious works, agreed to underwrite their production at the Kärntnerthor Theater. After hard bargaining on all sides the concert was given on May 7, 1824, before a crowded house, and with a stoic program: an overture (”The Consecration of the House”), four parts of the Missa solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony with a stentorian German chorus to crown it all. The singers, unable to reach the high notes prescribed, omitted them. The Mass was received solemnly, the symphony with enthusiastic acclaim. Beethoven, who had been standing on the platform with his back to the audience, did not hear the applause, and had to be turned around to see it.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, 1975, page 584

Key Takeaways

1. Sir Isaac Newton Single-Handedly Unified Physics & Astronomy

2. Newton Wrote Far More About Magic Than Science

3. Isaac Newton Accidentally Created the Gold Standard

Sir Isaac Newton Single-Handedly Unified Physics & Astronomy

Empiricism is the notion that our minds are contained within a much larger universe, which we observe with our senses. This way of thinking is ubiquitous in our modern world, but it was first pioneered by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC.

The Scientific Revolution of the 1600s was a triumph of empiricism. By emphasizing repeatability, the philosophy of science presumes that experimental results which can be duplicated by different observers must be measurements of bedrock reality. That line of reasoning made science a powerful tool for improving the lives of ordinary people. It also gave rise to the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s.

There is no more titanic figure in the Scientific Revolution than that of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1687, he published the Principia, which is short for the book’s full title: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This groundbreaking treatise laid out Newton’s Three Laws of Motion, which are the foundation of classical physics.

The Principia also defined the mathematical formula for gravity. According to legend, Newton conceptualized the equation after being struck by a falling apple while sitting under a tree outside his home in England.

Isaac Newton left an indelible mark on history by unifying physics and astronomy with his remarkable book. He proved that the same equations which governed falling objects here on Earth also apply to heavenly bodies in the night sky.

Newton also discovered prisms and the light spectrum, among other major breakthroughs credited to him. No single individual contributed more to the advancement of the Scientific Revolution. That’s what makes his obsession with the occult so odd. Newton was heavily involved with the Renaissance magic of alchemy.

Newton Wrote Far More About Magic Than Science

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642, in the same year that Galileo died in Florence. He may have been somewhere on the autism spectrum. Newton kept to himself, had few friends, and remained a virgin until his dying day, possibly in emulation of Jesus Christ, who was also supposed to have been born on December 25th.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Isaac Newton was his obsession with alchemy. He secretly wrote over a million words on the subject, a larger body of work than all his writings on physics and mathematics combined. The most significant contributor to the Scientific Revolution took magic very seriously.

Alchemy became widely popular during the Renaissance, which—at its core—was a revival of Platonism. Like Newton, the Medici of Florence had been obsessed with alchemy. That banking family financed new translations of Platonic literature, which had been lost to Christendom since the Fall of Rome. The writings of the Hermeticists dated back to Rome’s twilight, and Renaissance alchemy was based on that Platonic school of thought.

Plato was Aristotle’s mentor, and he insisted that ideas exist independently of the thinker in a place he called the “Realm of Ideals”. Plato claimed that the observable universe is not bedrock reality at all. Instead, he argued that our minds create the reality we experience, just as we create the dreamscapes we experience while asleep.

The basis of Renaissance magic was the notion that because the observable universe is a projection of the mind, it must also admit of manipulation by the mind. The experiments of Renaissance alchemists were supposed to reveal the nature of the observer as much as they were designed to reveal the nature of the observable universe.

Today, magic is considered the domain of children. But Sir Isaac Newton’s eyebrow-raising biography illustrates how the ancient dichotomy between Platonism and Aristotle’s empiricism was an integral part of the Scientific Revolution.

Isaac Newton Accidentally Created the Gold Standard

As the Renaissance wore on and gave way to the Enlightenment, alchemists developed a reputation for charlatanry and hucksterism. Many a financial scam was perpetrated by “alchemists” who claimed to have discovered the secret of transmuting base metals into gold.

As an alchemist, Isaac Newton was no charlatan or huckster. But he did play a pivotal role in the adoption of the gold standard.

On Christmas Day in 1699, Newton became the Master of the Royal Mint. The job was supposed to be cushy and ceremonial, but he took it deadly seriously. It was Newton who popularized “reeding”—or ribbing—the edges of coins to prevent people from shaving off bits of precious metal before spending them at face value.

In those days, both silver and gold were used as currency. But silver began disappearing from circulation during the Age of Exploration. Because China mandated the use of physical silver, European merchant fleets carried the precious metal all the way to the Orient and there exchanged it for commodities like tea and silk.

Isaac Newton proposed setting a favorable exchange rate with gold to encourage the repatriation of silver. But his plan backfired. By setting the relative value of gold too high, Newton accidentally incentivized enterprising individuals to bring cheap foreign gold to London to buy undervalued British silver, which they exported abroad for a quick profit. As a result, even more silver left England, and gold became the de facto coin of the realm.

Conclusion

The life story of Sir Isaac Newton is like a roadmap illustrating the philosophical currents which transported humankind from the Renaissance into the Industrial Revolution. Because empiricism is today fashionable, Newton is widely renowned for revolutionizing the sciences. His closeted work as an alchemist is broadly overlooked, even though it was far more voluminous than his work on science. Furthermore, Isaac Newton invented calculus, which is the mathematics of rates, and of rates of rates. This type of calculation is critical to modern finance, where rates of return on investment are paramount. Coupled with his groundbreaking work on currency as Master of the Royal Mint, Isaac Newton was also a titan in the history of money and establishment of the gold standard. The significance of gold to alchemy leaves the thoughtful historian to ponder whether Newton’s lifelong obsession with alchemy was really as misguided as our modern scientific paradigm suggests.

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Further Materials

[Newton] made many experiments, mainly in alchemy, “the transmuting of metals being his chief design”; but also he was interested in the “elixir of life” and the “philosopher’s stone.” He continued his alchemist studies from 1661 to 1692, and even while writing the Principia; left unpublished manuscripts on alchemy totaling 100,000 words or more…Boyle and other members of the Royal Society were feverishly engaged in the same quest for manufacturing gold. Newton’s aim was not clearly commercial; he never showed any eagerness for material gains; probably he was seeking some law or process by which the elements could be interpreted as transmutable variations of one basic substance. We cannot be sure that he was wrong.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, 1963, page 531