His Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, published by Oxford University Press in 1995, expounds a radically new approach: he demonstrates that the heart of the message expressed by the ancient Greek philosophers was experiential. It was not merely a system of argument and discussion - that came later, especially in the hands of Aristotle – but was a far richer system which through meditation, contemplation, music, chant, and ritual aimed at bringing the seeker to the very deepest and Divine levels of our reality. It encouraged entry into darkness and silence where one could ‘incubate’ and receive dreams and visions from the Divine source – and ground – of all Being. Furthermore, Dr. Kingsley pointed out that there was much in common with shamanism: ancient philosophy was influenced by such teachings coming through Persia and Asia Minor to Greece and Italy.
    Dr. Kingsley subsequently wrote a host of academic papers and then two books aimed at the popular market. Reading his work I was constantly struck by the parallels which modern Freemasonry has with these ancient philosophers, with their symbolic expression and their spiritual teachings. I wished to explore their works and the parallels further.

The Journey of Freemasonry

I explained to him that Freemasonry, behind all the symbols, rituals and conventions, was a journey, a personal journey towards insight and wisdom. Freemasonry is designed to be lived, I explained, not just talked about or played with and I read him a quote from the explanation of the Working Tools of the Second Degree:

To steer the bark of this life over the rough seas of passion without quitting the helm of rectitude is the highest perfection to which human nature can attain … and in all his pursuits to have eternity in view.

He recognised the imagery immediately.
    ‘This body is nothing but a vehicle for steering us through life. This physical world is difficult to navigate in but we must, as best we can. We are on a journey: the ancient Philosophers used the image of a ship at sea. What does this mean? The ancient Greeks were in awe of the sea, they were scared of it. You cannot control it. The weather affects you intimately. You have to use skill and alertness to navigate. The Greeks called this skill mêtis and it was a very important spiritual concept to them.’
    ‘It means to be tricky, cunning, skilful, attentive, to be alert to everything around you, aware of the depth of every moment of time. The sailors needed to be attentive to the stars, to the winds, to the taste and smell of the winds.’
    He explained that to philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles such steering successfully through life always involved mêtis. Furthermore, it was considered that this ability came from the gods themselves.
    ‘We can see the body as a ship on a journey into the unknown. With the sea there are no patterns, nothing ever stays the same, all things change. On the sea of life even though things may seem familiar they are in fact always different. The Divine can sweep through. You need to have a solid sense of yourself.’
    ‘And what is rectitude? Steering with rectitude? The etymology of the word links it with right-angles – Latin, rectus means upright, straight, correct, thus rectitude here suggests taking your bearings with compasses and this is an esoteric meaning behind the moral dimension of rectitude. We have a very limited idea today of its meaning for the word has lost its idea of intelligent cunning and craftiness. These qualities have now become degraded, linked more with dishonesty. Originally cunning was considered part of the spiritual path; there are deep currents always shaping our lives and we need this alertness, this sensitivity, and we need to acknowledge that any such journey is dangerous.’
    I asked whether a journey without some danger is perhaps not a journey worth taking?
    ‘We need to be able to deal with the dangers; we need some guidelines. But with all the guidelines we still need, at crucial moments, to use our mêtis. We need to know when and how to embed this wisdom into our lives, into the moment.’
    ‘Making a journey involves a point of focus, a direction, if you are not to get distracted at every turn. The ancient philosophers were helping people to cultivate their longing, to focus their longing, for otherwise it gets scattered. General activity often contains a part of this longing, but it does not embody the essence of it and so the true journey never has a chance to begin.’
    ‘We always scatter ourselves. We need to gather our longing, to nurture it, focus it, for only then can it take us somewhere. We need to remember that this world is set up to keep us scattered and diverted. Of course, this brings us back to mêtis – the focus, the 360 degree awareness which we need on our journey.’
    Interestingly for Freemasons, one of the ancient symbols for mêtis is a circle - for it is ‘the encircler … the awareness that allows us at any moment … to connect the beginning to the end.’1

Discoveries in Southern Italy

In 1958, in Italy a little to the south of Naples, at an ancient site called Velia, archaeologists made the first of a series of astonishing discoveries. In the ruins of an ancient building’s hidden gallery the stone bases of three statues were found. The statues had long disappeared but the bases carried inscriptions. They marked a succession of healer-priests surviving after the death of the founder of their tradition – or, more accurately, the death of the priest who first established this ancient tradition in Velia. This first priest turned out to be the ancient Philosopher Parmenides (5th century BC). Yet the latest date marked on a stone base for his successors was an astonishing 446 years after his death! That is, probably reaching into early Christian times.
    Further information carried by these inscriptions revealed that the priests they commemorated were all OULIS that is, priests of Apollo, and were further called IATROS (healer) and PHOLARCHOS (Lord of the Lair). This latter title is particularly revealing: these priests were using a special technique once widespread in the ancient world, a technique which used ‘suspended animation’ or ‘incubation’. The patient or candidate would lie down in silence and darkness in an enclosed space, an underground room or a cave. They would either sleep and have a powerful, perhaps prophetic, dream or they would enter a state which was described as something other than waking or sleeping and, in this state, they would have a Divine vision.
    The Pholarchos priests were masters of this technique; they supervised the dark spaces and watched over those incubating within. Dr. Kingsley described this process at length in his book In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999) and it is by means of such techniques that the early philosophers like Parmenides travelled to the ‘Otherworld’ and encouraged others to do the same.
    In September 1962 another marble inscription was found in the same building. It read Parmeneides son of Pyres Ouliades Physikos: Parmenides, a healing priest of Apollo concerned with incubation, with dreams, oracles, riddles and ecstasy and who, as Kingsley writes, ‘used incantations to enter other states of consciousness’.2 For these men and their students – men and women - philosophy was a way of life, not an expertise with intellectual argument. That was to come later.

Freemasonry and the Mysteries

I explained that an integral theme in Freemasonry is the idea of knowing how to die. As the ritual for the Third Degree states:

Nature… prepares you, by contemplation, for the closing hour of existence… she finally instructs you how to die.

I asked whether he saw this as in any way paralleling the ancient Mystery traditions, a suggestion which has often been made by masonic writers?
    ‘Absolutely. In Parmenides’ writings it is clear that he is given the wisdom he has by going into the world of the dead. He can only do this by dying before he dies, driven by his own longing. It is a very lonely affair. Just you, face to face with death. At that moment you are on your own. Plato, in his Phaedo, states quite specifically that ‘the practice of philosophy is the practice of dying’. Reason cannot help us here.’
    Dr. Kingsley stresses the importance of the practice of stillness; ‘through stillness we come to experience a reality that exists beyond this world of the senses,’ and ‘the greatest achievement is to listen.’ He would find support in our masonic ritual which teaches us to ‘Continue to listen to the voice of Nature...’ by which, it explains, we can know our own immortality. He added,
    ‘The journey is carried out in stillness. That’s the paradox.’

1 Kingsley, Reality, Inverness (Calif), 2003, p.187.
2 Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, London, 1999, p.159

Dr. Peter Kingsley’s latest book, Reality, was reviewed in the last issue of Freemasonry Today. See his website www.peterkingsley.org or contact his publishers, info@goldensufi.org