This is a tremendously entertaining and mind-bending overview of the beliefs held by the inner circles of various secret societies which have historically played an important role in the development of Western Civilization.

Starting with an anti-materialist axiom-- that matter arises from mind-- THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD lays out a history of the world that is in many ways the inverse of the history that is commonly accepted.  Mainstream histories start with a big bang and arriving at the comparatively recent emergence of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the emergent complexity of life.  This other history-- which, the author claims, with substantial documentation, is the view accepted by many of the most revered and influential thinkers in our civilization, including Pythagoras, Francis Bacon, Newton, America's Founding Fathers, etc.-- begins with consciousness and descends into increasing levels of benighted density.

None of the material here is new in any way.  It doesn't claim to be-- it claims to be very, very old.  I have read many parts of this history in many places-- from Blavatsky's SECRET DOCTRINE to various Rosicrucian tracts to Gnostic hypostases-- but I wish I had read this first, as it is an excellent overview which would have allowed me to make more sense of those other books than I did when I first encountered them.