Inside-Out Thinking

Graham Hancock

Graham kindly invited me to contribute a piece to his awesome website, and it's now posted...

Colin Wilson

I hear on the grapevine that Colin Wilson says this The Secret History of the World is the most controversial book he has ever been asked to review - gosh, that must be saying something!

WHY YOUR DREAMS WILL BE MORE VIVID TONIGHT - SEPTEMBER 26TH

TONIGHT is the first full moon after the autumn equinox. The veil of matter that separates us from the spirit worlds will be especially thin.

In the ancient world this was the time of year when the highest initiations were performed - 'the greater mysteries'.

There may be a scientific explanation too, another way of looking a the same phenomena. When the moon is big and full our pineal and pituitary glands, which play a role in regulating the fluctuations in our consciousness, grow big and full, like oysters in a tray.

Dawkins, Oxford and the Church

Last week The Times reported that leading theological colleges in Oxford were having funds withdrawn on the grounds that they were not intellectually rigorous enough.

Another victory for the Dawkins tendency!

I wish I could be outraged on behalf of the colleges. But the Church's responses to scientific materialism have always been either the God-wants-you-to-be-stupid approach - 'faith is good because it rises above the evidence' - favoured by the evangelical right - OR to compromise so much that it has nothing left to defend except a form of doubt.

Most people find both of these unsatisfactory. That is why it is a good time to make secret teachings public. If you have had a genuine spiritual experience, you don't believe, you KNOW. This is what Jung said when questioned on the BBC - and as I show in my book, he went beyond the pale and deep into esoteric philosophy late in life.

The Spiritual Meaning of Autumn

The autumn equinox - September 23rd is the time when the Green Man, the vegetation god, begins to weaken and die.

In personal, spiritual terms this means that the material world is fraying and becoming thinner, whilst the spirit worlds come through, come closer and more vivid. Our dreams become more vivid, especially on the first full moon after the equinox, as the spirit worlds press in on us and try to communicate with us.

This will reach a kind of climax on Halloween, the ancient festival of the dead, when the spirits of the dead walk more freely on the surface of the earth than at any other time.

(To get my usual plug in, I also show in The Secret History that the green man peering down from the walls of many of our churches is none other than Osiris, the original vegetation god.)

I-pod I-Ching?

One of my colleagues asked me this the other day, on what she brilliantly called 'I-pod I-Ching':



"Is it just me, or do we all experience this strange shuffle synchroncity? When I'm listening to music on my Ipod - on the shuffle setting - it seems, in many instances, that the music selection is not 'random', but instead can appear to have a distinct and timely significance. This can vary from a seemingly humble coincidence - thinking about someone and then a song of their name suddenly coming on, to a more meaningful sense of a song answering some kind of nagging, important question or dilemma - and in such a direct and powerful way as to make it hard to ignore. Might this be an example of the deeper laws you write about in your book?"

Yes, in short, I do think this is an example of deeper laws at work. Anyone who has an I-pod knows that shuffles aren't random, and, as i argue in the The Secret History, we all experience supernatural phenomena all the time - patterns which just could not be happening if science accounts for everything there is.

Can anyone give an example of a meaningful track sequence?

Jumoke Fashola

I talked with Jumoke on her Secret Soceities evening on BBC Radio London on Thursday. I didn't know what to expect - scpeticism, maybe even hostility from the Religious Broadcaster of the Year. But it turned out that her father had been a Roscirucian of some kind, and a man rang in - Alex, I think he was called - who had lived in a village in which another man was rumoured to be a Rosicrucian. Apparently after this Rosicrucian died he would knock on the doors of other villagers in the night. I was reminded of Paracelsus's claim that he could visit people in their dreams.

An hour's conversation with Jumoke finished in no time at all as I was were carried along by her wonderful, golden, good humoured torrent of energy - and plenty of what my old friend Mark Hedsel - the initiate who was subject of The Zelator by David Ovason - liked to call 'wise fooling'.

Me on Brightcove

My recent interview with Nina Sebastiane is now available online, so I thought I would try and post it here. I do hope it is of interest!

The Secret History of LOST, and other stories

The Secret History of the World shows how many of the great writers have secretly been steeped in a philosophy that is sometimes called arcane or esoteric. Some of them have used their writing to inculcate in their readers an upside-down inside-out, other way round of thinking that subverts the conventional, common-sensical ways of thinking that issues from scientific materialism. As The Secret History... shows, these writers have included Rabelais, Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll.

In fact my book shows that traces, symbols, codes have been left in the world all around us - in public buildings and monuments, churches, famous paintings, music, in the names of the days of the week, fairy stories and many other surprising places.

The secret philosophy also lies at the dark heart of the TV series Lost - as I shall explain more fully in a post soon. Locke, Jack, Sawyer, Hurley and the others are acting according to a code that can also be found, for example, in Gulliver's Travels, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins and Lord of the Flies.

And when it comes to the secret philosophy all these writers - Swift, Baum, Travers and Golding knew very well what they were talking about...

Hello and Welcome

Hello and welcome to the weblog of Jonathan Black, the author of The Secret History of the World.

I do hope you enjoy the blog. If you have any questions you would like to ask me, either about the book or about the esoteric, the occult or about the secret societies, please leave them in the comments box below.