SOURCE OF THE SOURCE:
HOLY KNOWLEDGE, OR DEMONIC INSURRECTION?
The Torah, the Emerald Tablet and the Holy Grail
Discovering Hermes’ Emerald Tablet
Energized Enthusiasm, A Note on Theurgy
WHY SOME SECRETS SHOULD BE KEPT
Solomon’s Secret
The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
—William James (author, The Varieties of Religious Experience)
I hold it true that thoughts are things;
They’re endowed with bodies and breath and wings;
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results, or ill.
That which we call our secret thought
Speeds forth to earth’s remotest spot,
Leaving its blessings or its woes
Like tracks behind it as it goes.
We build our future thought by thought,
For good or ill, yet know it not.
Yet, so the universe was wrought.
Thought is another name for fate;
Choose, then, thy destiny and wait,
For love brings love and hate brings hate.
—Henry Van Dyke (chaired the committee that wrote the first Presbyterian printed liturgy, The Book of Common Worship)
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE in the summer of 2007 to watch television, browse the internet, listen to the radio, read newspapers or magazines, or go to bookshops without being deluged with a phenomenon paradoxically known as The Secret.
A publishing sensation in its hardcover, CD, audio and DVD entities; on the top of New York Times bestseller lists, featured on the Amazon.com home page, stacked on the front tables at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Millions of hits on youtube.com, videogoogle.com, news sites, blogs, and a sweeps week cavalcade on Oprah, Larry King, and Regis and Kelly. On everyone’s lips at the water cooler and yoga class.
The smog of commercial success that hangs over The Secret makes it easy to overlook its essential pitch: that the “greatest people in history” achieved their financial, intellectual and political success due to their knowledge and use of forbidden ancient teachings, despite the attempts of church and state to withhold and destroy these ideas.
Author Rhonda Byrne tells us that she originally discovered The Secret’s secret in the obscure century-old book: The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles. The practical directives of Mr. Wattles’ occult belief system inspired Ms. Byrne to embark on a quick and voracious consumption of other “secret” texts. These included the ancient Hermetic Emerald Tablet and later writings from New Thought, a nineteenth-century philosophical movement that says the physical world can be affected and changed through ideas and thoughts, particularly in regard to wealth and health, as expressed by the Law of Attraction.
For more than a century, Hermetic ideas have been filtered down for the American public as New Thought, Prosperity Consciousness, New Age—and most recently as The Secret. The Secret has re-introduced Hermeticism into mainstream consciousness on a large scale, but this publication merely scratches the surface of a tradition and knowledge that requires no small amount of discipline, experience and rigor to comprehend its truths. Scholars and alchemists have spent lifetimes attempting to understand the meaning of the Emerald Tablet alone, which is quoted and lionized at the beginning of The Secret.
Hermetic wisdom has infused every major religion and countless schools of thought for over two millennia. The Hermetic tradition comes to us in various guises—Platonism, Pythagorean philosophy, Sufism and Gnosticism, even in certain Christian principles.
This information has been kept secret for hundreds of years through brotherhoods, not only to retain a fraternal group’s sense of exclusivity, but also to guard the information from competing religious and political power structures, and to protect the ignorant from the power of its implications. If you believe that knowledge must be restricted by the directives of church and state, then the idea of the masses becoming aware of these teachings could clearly cause trouble for those in charge; certainly the misuse of some of these teachings could backlash on the user poorly.
“Fragments of a Great Secret,” says The Secret’s flap copy, “have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together . . . .”
What actually comes together in The Secret is just one fragment of Hermetic thought which has been otherwise available throughout the centuries in hundreds of books. But The Secret artfully simplifies this fragment of Hermetic Law into the kind of language that can be easily digested by modern minds, minds that are constantly distracted by the aggressive multimedia bazaar.
Singing its praises, a yoga teacher says, “I know at least three people where The Secret has changed their lives. A friend said his life became immediately much better when he realized that when he complained his life became worse. And when he was grateful for what he had, his mental state and his health improved right away.”
As a motivational work encouraging readers to reprogram themselves with a more positive frame of mind, The Secret