Hidden London

Hidden London: Secrets of the City Revealed
By Andrew Gough

American by birth, I have lived in London for fifteen years and consider it my home. During that time I have explored many of the city’s esoteric sites and have concluded that this remarkable metropolis is only just beginning to reveal its true occult significance.
London has been inhabited for thousands of years and the diversity of its settlements has resulted in a rich, if not peculiar, collection of occult traditions. The earliest humans hunted here over four hundred thousand years ago. While a rich abundance of wildlife and a strategic riverside base would have attracted many different colonies of people, one wonders how the ancients truly saw their landscape, and how many were drawn here due to the distinctive snake-like curvature of the River Thames.
The serpent is one of the oldest occult symbols, representing many esoteric concepts, including duality, good and evil, and harmony with the earth. Thanks to the wonders of technology, an image of the serpent in the form of the winding Thames has been broadcast daily to millions of viewers across the globe for nearly three decades, courtesy of the television programme Eastenders, whose opening credits feature the unique landscape from the air.
Like other ancient settlements in Europe, London was inhabited by megalithic societies who constructed stone circles and burial mounds. The Iron Age introduced more sophisticated settlements and hill forts which, sadly, can only really be appreciated today by aerial photography. These include settlements at Wimbledon Common, Heathrow and the present-day Houses of Parliament, to name a few. Urbanisation has all but erased the megalithic footprint of London, but some remnants, such as Primrose Hill, with its curious burial mound and breathtaking views of London, remain. In fact, Primrose Hill would become a haunt of occultists William Blake and Dion Fortune, amongst others, and plans, albeit later aborted, would be made to construct a colossal pyramid burial complex on top of the hill, complete with over five million honeycomb-shaped tombs.
There is considerable evidence for occult practices having occurred in London in ancient times: beeswax effigies, thought to be five thousand years old, have been found in the Thames, representing man’s attempt at harnessing occult powers via shamanism and many stylised Bronze Age swords have also been discovered in the Thames, suggestive of votive offerings to Celtic deities. Similarly, albeit over a thousand years later, a golden-horned, apparently ceremonial Viking helmet was discovered in the Thames, near Waterloo. The amazing artefact is unique in Europe and appears to reinforce the occult tradition of London’s ancestors and their reverence for the serpentine river.
The Trojan leader Brutus established a city here in 1100 BCE and named it Troia Nova, or Trinovantum. Later, the 1st-century BCE King Lud renamed it Caer Lud, which evolved into Caerlundein, Londinium and finally London. It is said that giants lived in London in Brutus’s day and that he captured two, Gog and Magog, and employed them as porters at the gate of his palace. Brutus is also

associated with another legend, the London Stone, a curious rock of which little is known for certain. Some say it came from Troy, others believe it was a druid stone or even the stone from which Arthur extracted Excalibur.
A medieval proverb states, “So long as the stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish.” William Shakespeare wrote about the stone and, intriguingly, many believe that his plays were actually written by Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, both of whom were esoterically connected. Another London occultist, William Blake, wrote of the London Stone in his poem, Jerusalem (1820): “At length he sat on London Stone and heard Jerusalem’s voice.” Clearly, the relic once cast a magical spell on the city. Sadly, it is now embedded in an abandoned building across from Cannon Street Tube Station, its former glory but a distant memory.
The arrival of the Romans marked a significant milestone in the evolution of London’s occult tradition and in 54 BCE Julius Caesar and his men crossed the Thames in West London, signalling the new era.
The Romans were especially threatened by the Druids, who, according to Caesar, were involved in divine worship and human sacrifice, including the burning of prisoners, or even innocents, in ‘wicker men’. Sure enough, London’s native tribes appear to have paid homage to their gods for protection from the Romans, as indicated by a decorative bronze shield with inlaid coloured glass found in the Thames near Battersea that dates to this time. The original inhabitants of London were incredibly resilient and fought bravely to maintain their cultural identity. One hundred years later Queen Boudica sacked the city and soundly, if not brutally, defeated the Romans in retaliation for the rape of her daughters and the killing of the Druids; but the Romans would soon avenge this attack and all but extinguish the Druids and their largely oral occult traditions.
The Roman invasion changed the landscape, language, culture and thought process of native Britons forever. There are many museum exhibits in London that document these changes via artefacts and re-creations. From an occult perspective there was a less tangible, but no less fundamental, change in consciousness starting to take place: the introduction of Mithraism, and the theology of ‘as above, so below’.
Not much is known of this ancient mystery school, other than it involved Mithras, the Roman God of Light, but we do know that it also involved the ritualistic slaughter of bulls and included a seven-grade system of initiation. Like the Masonic rituals that would be conducted some fifteen hundred years later in London’s Grand Lodge, Mithraism included ritual meals and a secret handshake.
The Romans conducted their rituals in underground temples called mithraea, and several of these evocative temples have been discovered in London, including one remarkable 60-feet long, 26-feet wide temple beneath the now underground River Wallbrook.
The origins of Mithraism are uncertain, although it is known to have been popular amongst Roman soldiers, most likely because it provided a comforting framework for the afterlife, and understandably so. In their profession a premature death was almost inevitable. The cult is thought to be Roman or Persian in origin and the name ‘mi-it-ra’ has been found inscribed in a 1400 BCE peace treaty between the Hittites and the kingdom of Mitanni in Northern Syria. This is interesting, for both regions have a rich tradition of bull veneration and each was contemporary with Dynastic Egypt, where I believe the tradition of Mithraism originated. In Egypt, the slaughter of Apis (‘bee’ in Latin) bulls resulted in 1,000 souls, represented as bees, being born out of the body of the dead bull. The occult tradition of bull slaughter, which is referenced in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ceremony, commemorates what the ancients observed in the constellation of Taurus: a hunter killing a bull with distinctive marks (3 stars) on its forehead, just as the Apis bull has distinctive marks on its forehead.

I believe London’s adoption of the occult tradition of ‘as above so below’ can also be found in the legend of King Arthur, whom every Celtic nation claims as their own, most notably England. In a recent documentary on King Arthur that I presented for the National Geographic Channel, I expressed my belief, much to the producer’s chagrin, that the ambiguity around Arthur’s origins is due to the fact that he never existed. Rather, he was an archetypical hero, who lived in the constellation of Ursa Major, known as the ‘Great Bear’, meaning Arthur. Man would have observed the Big Dipper, which resembles a platter (the object that was considered to be the Grail in the first complete account) rotating around the Pole Star, promising to return, like Arthur. The night sky also includes an outline of a man with a wounded thigh, which sounds very much like the Fisher King. And, of course, Arthur fought twelve battles and there were twelve knights of the ‘round’ table; one for each of the twelve constellations perhaps? Was the legend of King Arthur just another archetype, much like Mithraism?
The Arrival of the Knights Templar
The Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem was founded in 1099, shortly after the First Crusade. Less than fifty years later they established their headquarters at the Priory in Clerkenwell, the remains of which are now a museum. Across town, the Knights Templar established a base in High Holborn, in a Roman temple once revered by Hugues de Payens. The Knights Templar outgrew their headquarters and built Temple Church between Fleet Street and the River Thames, a round church based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In keeping with their power elsewhere in Europe, the Order installed the Master of Temple Church in Parliament, thus ensuring that their powerful occult views would become part of the nation’s legislature.
The land between Fleet Street and the Thames was owned by the Knights Templar and divided into Outer Temple and Middle Temple, with Temple Church serving as Inner Temple. Each existed above the covered-up River Fleet and, in occult tradition, an underground stream provides divine augmentation to rituals and spiritual attainment.
Come the middle of the 19th century the tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, began to emerge. The gory urban myth appears to be without historical merit, causing some to speculate that the legend of a serial killer in the vicinity of the Templar precinct may be a memory of former ritual sacrifices. Today a dragon guards the entrance to Temple Bar and reminds one of the esoteric traditions once practiced there.
Despite the recent Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, the legend of Sweeny Todd has largely been superseded by one that took place half a century later, in 1888, when a serial killer by the name of Jack the Ripper murdered five women, forming a 5-sided pentagram in the process and removing their organs along the way, including, in some instances, their hearts.
Ritual killings continue in London, and the river Thames continues to be the depository for the ritual remains of victims. In recent years the analysis of limbless torsos discovered in the Thames has prompted authorities to suspect ritual murder and superstition as the reason for the crimes. This is not a new tradition in London. The nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’, is said by English Myths and Legends author Henry Bett to be the folk memory of the ancient practice of human sacrifice at the building of a bridge.
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