This never made it into When a Tree Falls. It did not really work with the plot…
According to Plato’s School:
According to Plato’s School:
In the time of the dreaming the One God, who was known as Jeff (for Nigel would be stupid name for a major deity), had an idea. According to Plato, normally Jeff’s Ideas were to create tables, the duck-billed platypus, caves, or Belgium, but this time it was more important.
I created the universe as a perfect mirror of who I am, so that I can understand myself better, he reasoned. Therefore I shall create, within humanity, a method so people can be like me. The more people are like me, then the more they will understand and the more I shall understand.
And so it was, in the dreaming, that the path of Magic was born. And humans picked up this idea and became Mighty. But a small human with magic was a terrible thing. The Magic would take the small human inside and make it think it was a God and say “look, here are the powers to prove it”.
Jeff was perplexed for he had cocked up and he had not really learnt much at all.
This magical stuff is good, but it is not for everyone and it needs order so the right people are trained. And so Jeff created the Idea of an Order which was based on himself as the Chief and Adam and Eve. They had got so good at this Magic stuff that Adam had become adept at the active principle of the universe and Eve and adept of the passive. So it was that the Order began and ended with the Chief of all Adepts and then there were the second and third adepts.
And together they created rules and divisions so that humanity learnt magic in stages. There was the magic of hearthfire, where people learnt to control their own personalities. And these people became adepts of Matter. Masters of their bodies, homes and in some cases whole empires.
But those who succeeded were offered the chance to became magicians where they learnt to use magic. And finally there were those who after testing became the Magic and took up their place alongside Adam and Eve.
In each age of humanity, the Order flourished in different forms and on different levels. On earth these formed Mystery Schools, which rose and fell, and sometimes small magical groups meeting in secret.
They might not have always met the Idea and mirrored the True and Invisible Order completely, but the needs of each age were met.
But the world started to change. People began to forget the power of the Story and replaced ideas with scientific method. In the 17th century, Johann Valentin Andreae realised that this was happening and wrote what he knew about the Order in the form of a story, so that the information may not be lost.
And the scientists of the age saw the story of the Rosicrucians as a call to science, others a new religion, still others hoped to make money off it.
But the story survived and those who understood it started to make contact with the real Order and they created groups even within others.
And over hundreds of years it came to be that out of a hundred groups, one would be chosen to connect to the real Order. The closest a human group came to reflecting Jeff’s idea the more likely they were to be accepted. On earth they could appear alike, but on the deeper levels they would reveal their True connections.
The hands of the three chiefs gave lineage both to individuals and groups, but the lineage was to the Idea rather than the form. The hands of Jeff could be on one small lodge meeting in an upper room as part of a huge group.
Yet there were those who considered the form of the story and did not think that the Idea created a deeper reality. So they looked for the Order on Earth when it was in heaven. In absence of lineage they created their own idols out of paper signed by dead humans. But the hand of Jeff did not live in paper but in the work. And those who looked at the Idea literally were lost. They looked for human masters to serve and when they could not find worthy candidates they dreamed that they were talking to Secret Chiefs.
But still the True Order continued training, testing and making its connections. Those who heard its voice knew that they were not speaking to invisible creatures, but a hidden reality.
Sometimes they even told stories of these voices, so that their followers could understand the idea. And some of their students got it, and others took them literally.
Humanity really is a funny thing, thought Jeff.
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