The Preservation of Knowledge in the Monasteries
One of the ideas found within Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization is that the monasteries in general but by the medieval times, the Benedictine and Cistercian orders in particular understood the ancient knowledge and had therefore, through Europe's dark ages, preserved it. This concept has become popular regarding recent books about the Knights Templar, the parallel order to the Cistercians, who are credited with the building of the Gothic cathedrals and employing the ancient numerical arts subliminally, whilst overlaying the ancient pattern of sacred sites and apparently following practices such as the observance of astronomical alignments on the horizon.
These ideas about monastic preservation of esoteric truths has a deeper recent history that emerged out of the application of Gurdjieff's ideas about world processes. This is found in the work of Rodney Collin in a book called The Theory of Celestial Influence. The joining up of historical dots using a process model is a reconstructive technique based upon the theory embodied in the model used. In this case Collin had been introduced to the Enneagram (see The Intelligent Enneagram) as an archetype of how processes are a round of characteristic stages: for the ordinary perception this is unfamiliar and for the scientific mind it is an unjustified over-simplification of reality.
In a sense the esoteric can be simply defined as being outside what is generally known and no apology should be expected in re-presenting esoteric ideas - one either has to work with them to discover if they are useful or discard them as does the general culture. There is some evidence that what was esoteric is entering mainstream culture, however tangentally, and perhaps the da Vinci phenomenon and Templar speculation are a sign that the structure of history itself has become an issue at the exact period (now) in which all of the history (that has survived) is going online. "Pseudo-history" can be seen as an inevitable symptom of this re-evaluation.
There is much of interest in the Collin model that relates to the monastries and the Templars, including as it does,
- The role of St Benedict was followed on by Bernard of Clairvaux. The monasteries were defensive survivalist enclaves with some intellectual traditions preserved in their libraries and scriptoriums that reproduced books. Could these have housed an esoteric core in order to maintain the older traditions? In any case, where else could hand-written copies of scrolls and books, for instance, be stored safely?
- The role of secret schools, in the centre, from which "new" ideas diffuse into the culture at large. Islamic Sufism and residual Celtism are often mentioned but also (of course) completely unknown groups are hypothesised under generalised names such as the The Masters of Wisdom, somehow privy to the greater world process behind "one damn thing after another".
As a way of "chunking" history, the above picture is attractive. It reveals credible sub-civilisations within Europe and very rarely will you find such structural analyses in regular historical presentation. It seems that such holistic structural analysis is part of the ancient science, as witnessed in the Ring Composition technique (see Thinking in Circles by Mary Douglas) used within ancient texts and this is probably a part of a lost traditional art. It was lost with the destruction of the oral tradition in which such compositions were performed in order to communicate the nature of the whole. According to scholars, some classical works and parts of the New Testament continued to employ parts of ring compositional technique and an understanding of it can reveal deeper meanings within such familiar texts.
The ancient science was focussed on understanding the world, and the history that ensued after that science was lost (or went underground) can be viewed with the same structural tools, as a story with an end that speaks of the beginning, stages that form an outer ring and inner connections between the stages: a ring composition.
Richard Heath
in myths & alternative history
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