Hermes Trismegistus and the Renaissance

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Hermetic America: A Vision of Our American Future Presentation 2 of 15 Hermes Trismegistus and the Renaissance Presented by Roger Weir Tuesday, September 17, 1991 Transcript: Apparently the material that I am presenting is over the heads of most of the people who would be here. Those of you who are hee(are able to hear it evidently. We are trying to consider a very large form. We are trying to consider what the United States might be in terms of its destiny. And for a very large complex form like this and its movement in world history we need to have an enormous context within which to see this shape, the shape of this form. It is impossible without this particular perspective to extricate ourselves from living within inside the form itself. That is to say, as long as we are completely guided by a life within a form it is impossible for us to understand what the whole of that form might be. We have to get outside of it. And so history is the context within which the United States as a form has come to be. And so I am trying to trace in these first three lectures the basic way in which the United States fits into the largest patterns of civilization. In other words, the United States is not just an offshoot of Europe, but in a very powerful way, is the flower that has been prepared through at least 5,000 years of written history. And we live on a transformational node, that 1991 and 1992 are a transformational node in this whole development, larger pattern development. In other words, there are tides in history and we live at a particular time when the tide is coming in. I traced last week how the beginnings of Western civilization are in Egypt and how the earliest written record that we have, that is to say, records which are not just commercial notations, not just tablets, but a real presentation in terms of a book, in terms of a text, a complete view of what the religious .... experience of life was and what the political form of existence might be given that view of life, and the place of the individual in it. And the earliest text that we ran across was the Pyramid of Unis in Egypt not very far south of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and we saw how the interior of the Pyramid was covered with hieroglyphics text that recorded the journey from the moment of death all the way through to the moment of resurrection. The complete of the after life was engraved on the inside of the tomb and we saw how these Pyramid Texts in ancient Egypt are the first indications of a new kind of development of life, a conscious history, a sense that there is a recorded direction to which we are moving. And we say how the Pyramid Texts where were the inside of the Pyramid for only the pharaoh eventually came to be texts which were painted on the coffin for the higher nobility, the aristocracy. So there was a democratization. This spread of democracy in ancient Egypt is the first indication of a differentiation pattern which will become characteristic of history. That is to say history in its recorded mode shows us a differentiation process. This is contrary to the experience in tribal cultures. Tribal cultures do not enjoy a differentiation process. Their mode of existence is an integration process. A culture is different, therefore, than from a civilization. A culture tends to conserve its traditions, its elements and to allow for each-------- living much the same that the previous generation went on. Now this is a distinguishing fact and it it doesn't really matter what century one would live on this level. If you remain within a culture within this kind of tribalism, if your live is within that of a kind of people then the whole movement of language is to conserve tradition and to aid in the integration process, whereas the written histories, the whole historical sense of civilization, is to fan out, to differentiate. To cross over cultural limitations, tribal limitations to include new developments, mete-tribal levees, intercultural exchanges. And so a civilization has history as a differentiation process and we can see that this is a radical development at the time in ancient Egypt and the United States will come to exemplify all of the points, all of the principles that will have been developed in the 5,000 years between the early Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt and the beginnings of the United States with the now Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson writes, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, he is not speaking in terms of a barrister presenting a certain limited case. He is speaking in terms of this vast view, this comprehensive view of history that by now, by 1776, there are certain truths about history and civilization and man which are self-evident to anyone who is familiar with them. We saw how the Pyramid Texts evolve into the Coffin Texts. And we say how the Coffin Texts, which are painted on the wood of the coffin, not engraved hieroglyphically on the wall of the Pyramid is an advance. And the next step is to left the material off the coffin and put it into the page of a pylorus scroll. And that is where The Egyptian Book of the Dead comes from. So in three steps: one, two three, the Pyramid Texts, The Coffin Texts and The Book of the Dead we find that by about 1800 B.C. the development of the written tradition has come into the form of the Egyptian Book of the Dead which was then available to many individuals, not to just the aristocracy but to many individuals, certainly not popular like books are today, but nevertheless there is a further advance of the differentiation of the availability of this most essential sacred material. The Egyptian Book of the Dead has certain chapters in it, I read one last week for you, chapter 64, which survived all the way into the times of Jesus. So that by the first century A.D., by the time of Jesus, this tradition has gone on for almost 2500 years and if you look at early Christianity in terms of the Egyptian archetype you will find a great deal more similarity with ancient Egypt than you will with ancient Isreal. Jesus is much more of a resurrection figure in the Egyptian tradition than he is a reader of the Torah in the Jewish tradition. So the Hermetic tradition, and I am going to read now from some pages I have prepared for you for tonight because this is a complicated argument. The Hermetic Tradition begins in ancient Egypt with the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom. The Pyramid of Unas (2350 B.C.), contemporaneous with Sargon of Akhad, is the first such "text." That is, the Pyramid interior surfaces record the hieroglyphic writings that constitute the "text." The Pyramid is the Book, the first book. The first book. Exactly what does this mean: "the Pyramid is the first book?" It means that the Pyramid, which is the first three divisional form in geometry, takes language from the mouth and deposits that talk on the interior surfaces of an architectural structure. Language lines the solid geometrical shape. Language is given a form: interfacing with a primary geometrical form. For the first time written words come into play in history, and in a concerted sequenced way, and we have a "work," a "text," a "book," "literature" if you will. The Hermetic tradition begins with written language. Writing which has a Spiritual Purpose. Language which is not purely mythic, not oral; but written; a magic language. The Hermetic tradition begins with man discovering the use of magic in the specific form of written language on a geometric form. Magic writing on a form is a symbol. So now we are going to consider that the archetypal symbol for a civilization is its book of wisdom, its written document of wisdom. So that thousands of year later when we have something like the Deceleration of Independence or something like The Constitution, this is not just a legal document, this is an archetypal expression of a magic language for a spiritual journey purpose. We are not use to thinking of American history in this way and obviously it too new to have any recognition value for more than just a handful of people. Upon deep meditation this symbol of magic writing can be divided, distinguished into two different kinds. Each kind characterizes a particular universal mode of operation. Man, humans, Egyptians in this first case of the Hermetic Tradition, learned to make an amulet and also a talisman. The Pyramid of Unas is both an amulet and a talisman. The Pyramid ever after will be the archetype of the symbol. Any "mound," any earthen or masonry mound contributed to this symbols meaningfulness. But the Egyptian Pyramids of the late Old Kingdom are the Archetype in its finest most comprehensive form. The amulet side of the symbol performs an integrative function. It conserves meaning. This conservation of meaning leads to compacting content and correspondingly to the completing of form. Thus, the integration process makes complex forms to hold the burgeoning content. The burgeoning content is selected by essentials and salient details; both being important, Essentials and outstanding details. - This conserving function of integration is one of the two driving forces in evolution, bu the way. Only the inherent conservation of form starts the explosion of content from swamping the life development. If there were no conserving principle, there would simply be like an explosion of possibility with nothing to give it shape. So that in the very first level of response in our natural response, we are conservative of form. It is the principle, the universal principle upon which life is based, upon which animal nature, plant nature, evolution is based and tribal cultural life is also blended into nature, blended into life in just this way. And intimately bound up with this function is the complementary one of differentiation of form. So along with conservation of form there is a differentiation of form. They are not paradoxical. Since the amplification of content is checked by conservation of form, this would lead to a dead end were the development not revived, "rebirthed" by new forms. The push for more in this burgeoning content is then translated from content to form. In other words, the conservation of form puts limitations of form on the developments and so life has shape. There are cats, there are dogs and not just indiscriminate mammal life. But that push, that tendency for this burgeoning gets transferred, transformed from the content to the form, so that the forms change, the forms tend to change. They carry on the tendency for change. And we will see later on that evolution is still happening in terms of the expressions of civilization from the human mind and from differentiating experience. And we live at a year where new human form is emerging, 1991. New species insure the ongoingness of life. And this proliferation of forms instead of just "more content''-! am speaking simplistically for illustration purposes-makes differentiation of form indispensable in a complementarity with conservation of form. this pair (which, incidentally, is an old pair from Plato, an old Platonic pair derived in Plato's lifetime from the philosopher Parmenides), differentiation/integration-they go together, the tendency of integration to come together and, the other side of differentiation, to go apart. And both of these together form a unity, a kind of a pulse of life, if you will. And so human nature has this kind of movement in it. Civilization makes differentiation the major mode whereas a culture, a tribe makes integration the dominate mode. So that human beings who for tens of thousands of years grew up in a culture when it came time to develop a civilization they had to find a way to transform themselves, because it was like a supernatural experience to become civilized. It was as difficult to go into a civilization as it was to understand religiously that one would be reborn in heaven, that one would have an afterlife. And so all civilization at the beginning had transformative initiatory ceremonies which brought people out into this new higher form. Notice that in a tribal initiation you experience the way in which content relates to you and weaves you into the people, but in civilization a different kind of initiation is required, the kind of initiation which we would call an education developing, initially, a critical mind, the ability to see a situation or to see a person or to view yourself in number of different ways and compare them on a basis of wider experience. Notice how we are beginning to lay the groundwork for a very delicately sophisticated experience. The United States is one of the most refined forms that has ever been seen on this planet, because it is no understood and appreciated by any of the political parties that are running the surface show at the current time is in no way districts from this more esoteric aspect. In the Hermetic tradition the unity, higher unity if you will-but really it is not "higher," it is not transcendent only but also eminent too, has a, "manifestation" life-this unity is the wholeness of the soul. And notice that from the very beginning a civilization is based upon an individual's experience of their religious wholeness. If the individual does not have an experience of their religious wholeness, they are not able to extract themselves from their culture, from their limiting conservation of form life pattern. Only the individual who has come alive, alert in themselves with an independence of maturity are able to participate in the mode of differentiation which history and civilization are dependent upon. Or rather, this life is a WHOLENESS only capable of being discerned and understood by the VISION of the soul when that soul has invested its integration back into life. So the old ''Rosicrucian" motto was: ''The life lived is the doctrine received." Beware, of course, of the phoney imitations­ fake gold as it were-groups parading as "Rosicrucian": there are no specific Rosicrucians that was an early 17th century idea of this universal principle. The true carrier became through history, the true carrier was the Hermetic tradition. Pyramids and alchemy were fused in Alexandria in the Hellenistic era, that is to say, from about the 3rd century B.C. in Alexandria you would find that this written tradition was fused together into a pattern which had as its transformation node the spiritual maturation of the individual. But went on from there to bring the individual back out of their spiritual maturity into this differentiating mode that the developed the art of the person and the history which led to the science of understanding. The tradition centered around an archetype of the teacher named Hermes Trismegistus. This person, that by the first century in Alexandria history was known as the mind shepherd. In other words, by the first century A.D. the pyramid which had been replaced by the coffin which had been displaced by the pypohis book had become replaced by the mind, so that the place of transformation was no longer the pyramid of the pharaoh but was the mind of the individual. And so by 2000 years ago the important point was to insure the maturity of the person in their mind. This mode at that time was known as contemplation. The Greek word for contemplation is theory (theoria). And so the theory was mastered an out of the theory came the practice. Theoria and Practica. And the practice of life became the conscious practice of life, became the mode in which not only did the person occur for the first time, but also history for the first time, and also science occurred for the first time. So that the roots of science and democracy and individuation have a common root and the fulcrum of this common root is the spiritual realization in ones own mind. Now the Renaissance which we are talking about tonight, the Renaissance was the renaissance of this whole experience. Why was there a renaissance of it. Because it did not continue. By the 4th century A.D. this particular development was forced underground and from the times of the late 3rd century until the times of the 15th century, almost 1200 years, there was no public teaching of this method. The Roman Christian Church by the 4th century made sure that this particular method was transferred completely to the Church. Within Christianity there were places that you could go to practice contemplation, but they were the monasteries, they were the caves, the retreats, the deserts, the mountains. The Renaissance of the Hermetic tradition led directly to the Reformation and the realization about the place of Jesus, and the Christian tradition which had glassed over with ritual politics this entire development. The central figure in this development was a man named Marcelleo Ficino. Now - imagine going back about 500,550 years. We are going to Italy, northern Italy. We are going to go to Florence. And at that time the powerful currents in Europe, in that part of the world had to do with international trade. And just as now the guarantors of that international bankers. The most powerful banking family at that time in Italy were the d'Medige who were based in Florence. One of these d'Medige, Cosmo d'Medige, was insatiable in his curiosity about, ''Why do we have a mind? Why do we not just have the facility to make business and to make loans and enjoy rich fabrics for clothes and fine villas? Why do we have this deep impulse in us to realize things beyond us? To use our mind, to come into a relationship with the divine?" And so he commissioned the son of his personal doctor, his personal physician, to take over a villa, a villa upon a hill outside of Florence, the Villa Coregi which is still there, still on the site all these centuries. And Ficino had the responsibility exclusively of reinstating Plato's ancient academy offering classes, making translations, having banquets, having these symposia with meals where they could talk about ideas and it was at this kind of a setting that the Renaissance had its origins. Now Ficino first translated the Hermetic documents. Those were completed in 1463. Those particular documents made everyone aware of the fact that there was this enormously long tradition, that history didn't begin with Rome, that it had been going thousands of years before Rome even came on the scene. That history did not begin with the Jews but history had been going on for a thousand years before Abraham was even born. And so there was this realization of a time frame in the 1460s in Florence for the first time, an enormous time frame. We, in our own time, are not too impressed by the fact that there were several thousand years added to the time frame because in our own century the time-frame of man has been pushed back several million years. We are aware now that we are a physiological species that has had several million years of development. And we are aware of many frames of reference which would completely have been surrilistic to people 500 years ago. They would not have been able to think in the terms of the perspective which we take for granted today. Our minds would have seemed like scientific aliens to people 500 years ago. That is to say, further advances of consciousness seem surreal to stages that haven't reached those advanced stages yet. - - Five-hundred years ago, after the Hermetic tradition was brought back into play, you see this explosion of a new idea of man, and out of this comes the humanities, out of this come the humanists, out of this comes the perspective that man, a man, a woman, a human person must individualize themselves first, that their whole process of maturation is guaranteed, as it were, by the degree to which they are able to realize themselves and become conscious of themselves as a whole. And once they have done that, it is then natural to that, to that person who has a degree of self-realization to want to put their capacities into play, to try themselves out in life. To develop, in other words, a life which of characteristic of the kind of person that they would like to be, that they understand that they are. And so two different things come in a tandem pair. One is the spiritual understanding of my individuality, and two, is the content sense of my person in the world, not just having political writes, but having these existential capacities to realize my person in my life. The movement from the mind of self-realization to the person, that first movement, has largely to do with language. And the movement from the person forward in their life has largely to do with the form of government. And the farther, a kind of third area has to do with one's sense of the cosmos. So that we will see that language, political forms of government, and scientific ideas of the universe, all have there origins together. So that science, democracy and individuality have a common derivative, and that individuality, democracy and science belong to a differentiating mode which has come to a transformation point in our time, not just generally in our time, this year. Ficino influenced directly a number of individuals by letters. Many people traveled to Florence to hear him speak, to have conversations with him, but largely through his correspondence which was enormous he seeded these ideas throughout Europe. There were two language groups of people who took a great deal from Ficino. They were the Germans and the English. The English language people where highly influenced by a man whose name was John Colet. Colet was independently wealthy, he was a professor at the University of Cambridge and he eventually became Dean of St. Paul's in London and started the first boys school at St. Paul's in London. Colet's good L .... .... friend was Sir Thomas Moore, and Colet also influenced the grat reformation thinker, Erasmus. So that in a way, the English language tradition was for a measured kind of development leading to a complete sense of a, as Thomas Moore wrote in his classic Utopia, a sense that the measured individual will eventually produce a comprehensive form of life where everyone will have their place. So that the English language development of this Renaissance idea of the Hermetic Tradition comes out in the English temperament that we recognize so well of the measured application of the individual to fashioning a mode of government which will then allow for everyone to find their place. The English idea of a cosmos eventually in our time became the British Empire which lasted up until the second world war. The German language mind, on the other hand, took a slightly different direction. The German language mind took the direction that this initial contemplation needed to be a shared experience. That, whereas the English seemed to prefer to have individual contemplation, an English language person will always prefer to pray alone, whereas a German language mind will prefer to pray in a community. And so on the Continent the German language mind developed this idea of shared religious communes leading to a different kind of a sense of government. Whereas the sense in England was always to have one England, the sense in the German language areas of Europe was to have mariy principalities, many little kingdoms. The idea of having someone who dominates all of the little principalities is one that is essentially imported into the German language mind. And the first person to try that was name Bismark and he was late in the 19th century. And the second person to try was the Kaiser, the German pronunciation is Caesar in the First World War, and the third was Adolf Hitler. These are forms which are characteristic and well handled in the English language mind but completely flubbed in the German language mind. Whereas the German language mind became exceedingly refined at these little prayer communities, so that you find that German language communes and monastic communities were extremely effected and wherever they are put into a mature kind of an operation, they tend to last for centuries. For instance, there are utopian groups like the Hutterites, or the Mininites, or many of those kinds of German religious communes that come from the 1500s that are still operating in the 20th century. So that they are extremely successful at that aspect, where they are very poor at the overall of putting together. Notice now the United States at its beginning will have both the German and English language minds at the formation of its particular development. So the United States has the best of both worlds. There was a third development, a third language mind that comes into play and that is the French. The French are a direct continuity with the Italian. As when Ficino died in 1499 the Plotonic Academy went on for a little longer, but eventually closed down because conditions had changed, but the French in Paris continued with academies exactly like the Floritine Academy right up into the times of the beginnings of the United States. I will talk a little bit about those next week, but up until about 50 years ago no one had studied these French academies. The first book ever written on these particular academies was written by Francis Yates called The French Academies, written about 1940. Francis A. Yates, a women, a very tall English woman who has passed on now quite extraordinary. The French consider that they are a continuity with the Renaissance, and so the French never had very much of a sense that the Renaissance was over, and that then there was a Reformation. But the French have always had a sense that the Renaissance matured in France, the Italian Renaissance began there, but "we matured it in France and that it became the Enlightenment." And so by the time we get to individuals like Montesque or Russeau or Votaire, they consider that they are the ongoing flowering of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment is the continuation. And so the French language tradition, unlike the German language or the English language tradition, is a third aspect. Early in the United States' development with Franklin and Jefferson, the French tradition, the French language tradition will be the one that dominates. Later on, the German language tradition will come into play with Emerson who's library included about... one-third of his books were German language oriented. Emerson had more than 140 books on or by Guirte, for - instance. He read German perfectly. In the beginning of the 20th century the English language mind will come into play. That is to say, after the Civil War the United States begins to stress this English language vision, and along with the rise of the United States in .... the 20th century comes the ideas of running some competition to the British Empire. In 1898 the United States will make the Philippines a colony. Halfheartedly, but nevertheless it's an emphasis which we have to be aware of. So the United States has a changing complexion and we need to understand this kind of historical background or it will not make sense to us. And the various developments of ... we have to understand that Emerson is quite different from Franklin, not radically different, but appreciably different. And just so Henry James is quite different from Emerson. James prefers England, Emerson prefers Germany and Franklin prefers France. Yet, there is something running through all three and other that we will concern ourselves with which show this deeper affinity. That the affinity doesn't stop at the Renaissance, it goes all the way back to classical antiquity, and goes back to the apex of classical antiquity which was the culmination of the Egyptian­ several thousand years of the Egyptian archetype. So that when we come to try to understand why the United States is in such a peculiar situation today, such an odd situation in the world today, why we are Tape: Side Two This becomes the volcanic kind of psyche. Erasmus and Paracelsus are contemporaries and they are kink of like the Jekel and Hyde of this individuation process. If one has the time to read enough Erasmus to get the flavor of the man you are impressed by the absolute gorgeous equanimity of the personality. How in torrential times almost never having a real place to live his personality is beautifully integrated, and his perspective is always multidimensional. The perfect personality to make a translation from the Greek Bible into a modern European language. In other words, it is because of Erasmus that the Greek text of the Bible was correct was editorial restored back to its fairly pristine level. The Greek text of the Bible, one would think, had been preserved all through antiquity. Wasn't there the Byzantine Empire? etc. But this is not true; this is not true at all. There was editorializing, emending all the way through those centuries. And it is only in the lifetime of Erasmus, by say 1530, 1535, that the Greek text of the Bible was restored back to some semblance of what it really had been and translated, then, into contemporary languages, living languages, so that it was possible for the first time in the 1530s for whole groups of people to listen to the Bible being read in a way which they had never heard before. Instead of sections being read at them to force them to live a certain way according to certain moral rules, the Bible, the New Testament especially, was read in this kind of nourishing way with complete books, the whole Book of Matthew, not some kinds of quotes, the whole Book of Mark, the whole Book of Revelation. So that by the 1530s you begin to get this sense that there were great populations of people, men and women, whole communities of people, for whom Bible reading was like this soulful, nourishing aspect. We don't understand that today, but perhaps the experience can be paralleled at 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I guess it is now, whole groups of people use to read J.R.R. Tolkin's Lord of the Rings together out loud, and just enjoy the story together, enjoy that the Bible in the 1530s and 40s was enjoyed by families, by communities, not just excerpts of it but the whole picture of it. And this, incidentally, will be one of the earliest memories that Benjamin Franklin has. Benjamin Franklin writes that they use to tape the family Bible to the bottom of a three lagged stool. And the grandfather would turn the stool upside down, and read the bible to the family and they would keep somebody at a window as a lookout. Why would it be dangerous to read a Bible out loud to your family? Because, even at the time of Franklin's youth, there was still this kind of fear by those in authority and power that if the people get a vision they will not want to queue-up in our lines any more. They will go and live their lives; they will create whole new aspects of life, and our monopolies will not do us any good. Now this has been a constant since the 1500s and Ficino is the beginning of this. He is the one who really brings this whole process into play. Notice that translation has has to do with shifting the language. Ficino's translation of Plato came out in 1468 and he wrote commentaries in the following years and toward the end of his life he finally translated Plotinus. Plotinus was translated in his entirety in 1492. 1492 is an epochal year: Lorenzo Demedigie dies, the last Moslems are expelled from southern Spain, Columbus discovers America, Plotinus is brought back in a complete accurate translation for the first time in 1200 years. And the whole sense of the world changes. The focus of this change will be America, the discovery of America. It won't be conscious at first. It will take almost a hundred years for the consciousness of this event to sink in. And by the time of Shakespeare it will have sunk in-what America means. And the whole lecture next week 13 is about the sinking in of the significants of America in the greatest mind of the time, the mind of Shakespeare. So 1492 is an apex of the Hermetic tradition. Likewise, Plotinus in his time, was an apex of this tradition in classical antiquity. In other words, you can go from the Pyramid Texts in ancient Egypt to the Coffin Texts, to the Egyptian Book of the Dead all they way through to the Hermetic writings of the first and second centuries A.D., to Plotinus' Emends. And all of those writings are of one tradition; they are all of a single peace. They are all conscious developments again and again and refinements so that Plotinus who was born in Egypt, who was educated in Alexandria, who didn't leave Egypt until he was almost 40 years of age, is the archetypal teacher. He is the Hermes Trismegistus of his time. And the whole point of Plotinus is the maturation of the individual sole and the encouraging of that soul to live the kind of life that leads to the development of capacities that will transform the soul into a real person, and a real person in to a spirit which is free to go back and join the cosmos. In other words, what had been a cycle for the after life experience in a culture, in a tribal mentality had been transformed into a life journey to the rebirth in a living cosmos. What had been natural humanity an after-life death-journey to being reincarnated in its civilized differential mode was a life-journey that lead to an apotheoses of man's personality having his spirit free to join God in his cosmos, the complete and radical transformation, the node where this chain takes place was the time of Jesus. The basic lineage is Egypt to Greece to the Hellenistic, and then to the Roman world. Basic Egyptian contact with Greece, while it goes back to far ancient times, Homer is already quite familiar with Egypt. The Mycenian precursors of the classical Greeks are contemporaneous with the New Kingdom in Egypt. But with Pythagorus about 500 B.C. you find a Greek language mind mastering the Egyptian mysteries. Pythagoras lived in Egypt for 22 years. In other words, Pythagorus is the first Greek language mind who mastered the entire Hermetic tradition and brought it back out of Egypt and sought to find some place to put it into operation outside of Egypt. He tried Pursia, he tried the !onion Islands, and finally settled for what was the "wild west'' of that day, Sisily, southern Italy and Sisily. It is incipient at Pythagorus and goes on from Pythagorus to Plato and culminates with Jesus whose esoteric method of soul transformation, the Mind Shepherd, was expressed in the Corpus Hermeticum beginning with the Poinmander, the Mind Shepherd about 90 A.D. and then on to Plotinus who died in about 270 although his writings, the Inniedis were not published until about 300 A.D. by one of his students, Porphory. From Plotinus the tradition lead to Dionysos the Areopagite who was a Christian mystic living about 500 A.D. By then the Hermetic tradition was often referred to as Neoplatonism. And by then it was outlawed by pain of death from the exoteric world authorities and had been forced to become esoteric. Its secret underground flowing would surface only once in European culture in all that ensuing time, that was by John Scotus Arigenia who ignited a renaissance in his own time-it was called the internal engine renaissance, about 800 A.D. and the precursor, directly, before John Scotus Arigena was the venerable Bead one of whose works made well be the Old English national epic Bewolf which he wrote about 735 A.D. Bewolf is the perfect interfacing and dub­ tailing of the Christian individual person with a Danish Viking old Sacon lifestyle in its mythic development. The Hermetic tradition which had gone underground then by a, at least by.. .it was outlawed in 365 A.D.. In other words, if you had those books you were killed. That is why the Nodghamoti books that were found about 45 years ago in Egypt were berried in 365 A.D., because you were simply killed if you had those books. The persecution was on the other foot now so that the Christians being persecuted, those who were in the old ancient tradition, were persecuted, were killed. From Pythagorus through Plato to Jesus is an integration cycle of 500 years. From Jesus to Plotinus to Dionysos the Areopagite is a differentiation cycle of 500 years. Together they constitute the millennium archetype in Christianity, that is Jesus based Christianity. This is the thousand years which understood perfectly would one day lead to the other millennium, the second thousand years of these paired millenniums because the larger form of this time archetype was always two vibrant parts brought together into a transcendental unity. A thousand years of peace would follow a thousand years of struggle, just as release follows compression. A complete-and I am going to use the old Greek, Hellenistic Greek, term "a complete Aion," A-1-o-n, as the ancient - - - ..... Greek language would say it. Two-thousand year time form in a complementation of millennium was the Aion. Aside from the two thousand years in a line sequence this thousand years, then a second thousand years following it, there was an esoteric form of this Aion. The esoteric form was that there was an inner thousand years and an outer 500 years on both sides that was an outer thousand years. In other words you can go one, two. our you can go inner and then outer. So that the inner thousand years would have been 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and the other thousand years would be one-half of it from 1000 B.C. to 500 B.C. and from 500 A.D. to 1000 A.D. The period from 1000 B.C.... what is characteristic of 1000 B.C.? In this time form the archetypal achievement was the Temple of Solomon. So from the Temple of Solomon to Pythagorus is about 500 years. What about the other one, what about 500 A.D. to 1000 A.D.? What was characteristic of 1000 A.D.? Generally the First Crusade. So that the Aion would have been from Solomon's Temple to the Christian recovery of the Holy-land in the First Crusade with its center at Jesus. In other words, this was not somebody's idea about history, this was an archetype, this was a pattern which was completely integrated and full if you like on the unconscious level, but not on the unconscious level: in the very structure of life itself, of existence. In the Jewish rendition of this 500-year period it doesn't go from Solomon's Temple to Pythagorus, it goes from Solomon's Temple to Daniel, so that the Book of Daniel was an archetypal expression of the way in which this whole movement of an Aion happened from Solomon's Temple upon the hill in Jerusalem to Daniel, the religious genius in exile who had found God within himself. That even though he was in exile, he found he didn't need the Temple in Jerusalem to be with God. Daniel was the archetypal Jew who found that God was with him even in his exile. This would have been, in fact, from Solomon's Temple to the First Crusade...this would have been, in fact, roughly, was in fact in the historical record, a "Great Cycle of happenings," complete in its form, satisfying in a feeling-tone intelligence on the physical or natural level. The architectural Temple in Jerusalem and the geographical Holy-land in the eleventh century constituted this archetype whose innermost fulcrum-point was Jesus Christ. Now Ficino died in 1499 which is almost 1500, and 1500 is another 500-year cycle after 1000 A.D., roughly another whole smaller cycle after the First Crusade. 1492 saw the discovery in conscious, sustainable, exploreable terms of America. America was the "New Holy-land" archetypally. This amounted to a shift in the Aion for those Hermetic teachers living in Florentine Renaissance. In other words, they had to take their own time into consideration. They couldn't stop with the First Crusade, that was 500 years before them. So when they integrated themselves into this pattern, it produced a shift, it added 500 years which meant that it moved from Solomon's time to Pythagorus' time and it meant that the fulcrum shifted from Jesus in his time, to the expression of Jesus in the time of Dionysos the Areopagite about 500 A.D. The beginning of this new Aion was now Pythagorus 500 B.C. and the fulcrum-point had become Dionysos the Areopagite about 500 A.D. with the end-point being at 1500 A.D. In other words, 1500 became an archetypal realization that this was a threshold, this was a watershed. So that when you look at one of the most conscious artists of that time, Albrect Diirer, you will see his initials, Albrect Diirer or A.D. just the same as ano domina. So all of his prints which are done in 1500 all have very large on the prints 1500 A.D. saying, "I understand that this is it. This is the computed year. This is a new millennium. And our beginning goes back to Pythagorus and the center is the expression of the mystical theology of Jesus in the works of Dionysos the Areopagite. Not only that, not only the mystical theology, but three separate related works in Dionysos the Areopagite. His writings became extremely influential at this time. For instance, supposedly stayed John Collet, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London running a boy's school writes an enormous commentary on the writings of Dionysos the Areopagite. And out of those writings comes a whole development of millennial thought in England culminating in Shakespeare's time. The Aion, that whole Aion was to be perfected in our understanding then by consideration in deep contemplation of the mystical significants of Jesus in Dionysos the Areopagite's writings. And here are the three. Especially in the Divine Names so that in 1500 the whole archetype manifests itself in a way that The Divine Names became extremely potent as an exploration subject area. So that you find for the first time in history a development of Christian Cabola, a sense of esoteric 17 Christian numerology which is a development out of the Jewish Gamotrian. All of these things you do not find in Christianity before then, and all of a sudden you find it not just in the writings of Pico, Delo Marindola, Johnas Reischline, or like the beginnings of that development, but within a generation you find thousands of people interested in Christian Cabola. You find this whole theme beginning developed that language, especially the language of names has a numerological significances. And the Uhr Text, the basic text of this, the starting point of the mystical contemplation was Dionysos the Areopagite's book on The Divine Names. The second book of his was The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. And so the same meditation was devoted to The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy theme, and out of that came the Reformation, the reforming of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy on these mystical contemplation lines. And the third book is The Mystical Theology about the nature of the heavens. And out of this comes the Copernican revolution in astronomy. And the whole beginnings of the development in science. And so you find all of a sudden at 1500 these three related areas being developed at the same time: Cabola, Reformation, and the Copernican revolution in science. In this symbolic vision new language forms, a new church and a new science are the three cognate poles of a complete transformation of man: new language, a new church, a new science leading to a view of the cosmos, a new view of the cosmos. This triad structure of transformation is a universal principle. It is good anywhere in the universe. It doesn't matter what time on what planet in what star system. This triadic structure of transformation is a universal principle. It is a key structure in evolution as well as in theology and philosophy. But we can see now, that is to say in our time, the great Hermetic vision of the Florentine Renaissance was the true appreciation of man. We could now read Decodelomarindola's book Oration on the Dignity of Man. And I had made some readings to give to you but I may not have time tonight. We could read it and understand its significants. He says that after the whole of creation was made God made man by taking the essential parts of everything and putting it together into one so that man is like an index to the whole spectrum of the real. That what is powerful about man is that he can be at home anywhere and everywhere in creation. In a 18 way, man is God's Hermetic messenger to existence. We could also sympathize with Pico's interest in Cabola and in the Divine Names. We can see in what I have presented before your attention in a symbolic way, seeing time as a form. Plato says in the Timeas at 37d in the Timeas that time is the moving image of eternity. In our own age we might understand the Aion for us is characterized by beginning 2000 years before us with Jesus so that it has shifted again in our time. In other words, every 500 years there seems to be a radical shift in the whole orientation of what constitutes the creative matrix of time, of a time form. In the Renaissance it had shifted from Solomon's Temple time to Pythagorus. In our time it is shifting now back to Jesus. He is the beginning, and having the Crusades for the Holy-land now at the middle point, at the pivotal point, not concerned with a mystical theology, but concerned with a crusade to return the Holy-land back into those who understand God, back to their hands. Our own Aion would then be a new crusade for a new Holy-land. Now in a very odd way, a kind of bastardization of this archetypal process is the trying to force an Isreal to come into play geographically in the twentieth century. And if you look at a map, a 1991 map of Isreal, and you look at its geographical shape and everything, you can see that it is a spitting image, to use an old Hermetic phrase, it is a spiting image of the Kingdom of Achra that the Crusaders established in the eleventh century, early twelfth century. But the New Holy-land for this New Crusade is not the old Holy-land-it doesn't work like that, imitation is fools-gold here. The transformation is our time is that the development of space exploration has this archetypal nature. So that our own Aion would be a New Crusade for a new Holy-land, that of space, the final frontier. The the New Holy-land would be stealer civilization of our suns whole star system-all the planets, all the moons, all of it as a whole, as a pattern of a new home for an enlarged sense of humanity. Notice that while it expends to a stellar amplification it has Jesus as its fount. Notice the time form has this archetype: it is not per say a Christian monopoly; it is a Hermetic time form which is then characteristic for many thousands of years. In Jesus' time, what was 2000 years before Jesus-Abraham. So that Abraham was the beginning of that whole Aion. What was at the midpoint of that? Moses. So at the time of Jesus, those people conscious at that time, Abraham was extremely important to them. Moses was extremely important to them. 19 - And the new responsibility to carry on the current time form early Christianity had this kind of ilan, this archetypical ilan. If you go back, just skip back in your mind to 2000 B.C., 1900 B.C. at the time of Abraham, what is 2000 years before Abraham? Adam, 4000 B.C. So in Abraham's time it is Adam that is of great interest and value. And what comes midway, no one. So that this archetypal structure... and this is not saying that it is a Jewish time structure or a Christian time structure, but that it is inherent, archetypally inherent in human nature and translates its structure into the religious visionary values that human-beings hold. One is tempted to ask, would this be true in China? And the fact is that when the Chinese minds are exposed to this.. .in contact with this, they respond, they respond. So it is inherent. Also American Indian mentalities also respond to this. So it is an archetypal human nature. It is not an artefact of Egypt, it is not an artefact of Europe, it is an example of an archetype in human nature. It is an archetype of existence, as a matter of fact. Once one understands it, you can see it in play in forms of life no matter where they are on the evolutionary development scope. So that for the next 500 years from our time, this could be seen as a Hermetic direction of history and in 500 years the beginning would shift from Jesus roughly to the time of Dionysos the Areopagite and his supercelestial Christian vision, and the middle pivot of that Aion 500 years from now in the twenty-sixth century, to the beginning of it, would be Ficino and the Florentine Renaissance. They would then be at the pivot. In 2500 A.O. their Aion would thus be the extension of our stellar civilization outward amplified to other star systems and thus an inner-stellar civilization for the following 500 years. And this would accompany them until 3000 A.D. when another shift, another Aion would come into play based, then, on 1000 A.D. with the middle pivot in our own time of about 2000 A.D. Our life work now would then be paramount as the pivotal focus of those people, so that a thousand years from now, a millennium from now, what we do now in terms of our spiritual realization is the fulcrum upon which their whole their whole ability to realize themselves, to generate their persons and to free their spirits of rests. Now this 500 year cycle was called in classical antiquity the cycle of the Phoenix. Tasitus, the Roman historian of the first century in his Annals of Imperial Rome gives a very terse outline of that form, the cycle of the .... Phoenix. If you wonder why I am lecturing at the Phoenix its one of those sychronisities. Two cycles of the Phoenix back to back or front to front, as it could be, make the millennium. So that the millennium could be symbolized, and was, by a double-headed phoenix, that is to say, in the Greek language archetype it was a double-headed phoenix. In the German language version of that archetype it was an eagle and not a phoenix, a double-headed eagle which is a very royal symbol to the German language psyche. I have half German blood in me and in one archetypal dream a number of years ago I was coming onto a freeway, driving in this dream, a highly charged psychic dream, and when I was coming onto the freeway I glanced over and I say the road sign had a black double-eagle on it. And I was so shocked that I woke up. And it took hours and hours to realize what that was. It was being on a major throughway of the psyche in terms of this, this language bloodline tradition. The millenium could be, then, symbolized by a double-headed phoenix or a double-headed eagle. In alchemy it was symbolized by a double pelican and was not put in the form of a graphic symbol, but alchemy came of the era when the Hermetic tradition had to go underground, so the symbols were not put into graphics, but they were put into work-a-day industrial type tools. And in alchemy the double pelican retort is made at that time. And you can still see in old alchemical texts or in modern scientific histories of the origins of chemistry you can see these double pelican retorts, and this is the symbol again. Very, very clear. Sometimes you see in alchemy, the king and the queen joined together in this alchemical pot. It's not a mutual cannibalism that is going on, it's the symbol that is being expressed again. Or a double­ headed person, a person with a single body with two nicks and two heads. It is this kind of a symbol. So that time as the moving image of eternity in Renaissance Platonism, in this Renaissance rebirthing of the Hermetic tradition vision, yields the need to seek a higher external wholeness of their time taking themselves out of the mundane culture of this world and putting themselves into a vision of the more complete aspect of live. Now I brought a translation of Ficino's Book of Life published by the Jungians in a translation by Charles Bore. I don't know if I will have time to give you the whole development, so I will give you the last quotation first. Ficino write this Book of Life, in other words, you have to understand that in the Hermetic tradition, all the way through, it is not enough to have mastered contemplation. It is not enough to have mastered prayer. It is not enough to have awakened your soul. You have to bring it out of yourself and do something with that in life. You have to add to live. You have to nourish life. So here is how Ficino about 1495 expressed it. Deep inside your house you might set up a little room, one with an arch and mark it all up with these various symbolic figures and symbolic colors, especially the room where you spend most of your time and where you sleep. When you leave your house, do not pay so much attention to the spectacle of individual things, but look at the shape and colors of the universe. But makers of images will see to this. That is to say, one of the reasons of making images and surrounding yourself with them, especially in the place, the room in which you sleep is to affinitize your psyche with certain archetypical images, certain archetypal shapes, certain archetypal geometrical arrangements. Later on next summer when I do a course here on the Hermetic taro... there is so much junk written on the taro I can hardly believe it, and so I am going to give a short two-month course on the real uses of the taro, the Hermetic taro. Ficino writes, You will make a more excellent image then in yourself when you have learned that nothing is more orderly than the heavens, and that nothing more temperate can be contemplated than the image of ... In his time, he writes "Jupiter," it means this aspect of the radiance of the sun being brought into this equanimius play. You can expect at last to obtain the benefits of heaven and Jupiter if you thus distinguish your thoughts, your feelings and your actions making your life itself orderly and temperate. So this is characteristic of Ficino, it is characteristic of the Renaissance. Let me sum this up-a quotation was the first study on Ficino in the English - - ..... - language was published in 1943, Columbia University Press and this is a reprint of it. Here is a quotation from Ficino: The divine Plato thinks that the celestial and immortal soul dies in a certain sense when it enters the earthly and mortal body, and returns to live when it leaves the body. Leaves it first through some effort of meditation before leaving it through the law of nature. When philosophy, the medicine of human sickness, purifies and revives through moral remedies the little soul berried in the pestilent dirt of vices. Then elevating it from the lowest place through physical instruments it leaves the soul through all things composed of the four elements, and through the four elements themselves up to heaven. Afterwards, by mathematical steps it gradually makes the assent to the highest spheres of the heaven possible. Finally, and this is admirable beyond all speech, lefts the soul on metaphysical wings beyond the peak of heaven to the craftsmen of the whole heaven and the world. This whole movement that we have seen characterizes the Renaissance development in and involvement in the sixteenth century. The sixteenth century is the age grandiose individuals like Hernando Cortez, or Megelon or the late Michaelangelo, or Lenarado Devenci, individuals larger than life, heroic individuals so that in the sixteenth century what becomes apparent is the idea of character. What we would call the person today they would call the character. And the character needs a certain intermediary vehicle through which the mastery of the energies of life is learned and generated and effected so that the character could then free its spiritual essence. The vehicle towards the end of the sixteenth century that became favoured for this was the Elizabethan play. ''The play is the thing." Why is the play the thing? Because the play is the vehicle by which character is transformed out of its provincial circumstances into its universal spiritual meaningfulness. Shakespeare's major playhouse was called the Globe, the whole world. And on the top of the stage were there was a canape, if you were on stage and looked, up you would see the whole zodiac ringing the rim of this canape. Under the zodiac in the Globe Theater the play is the vehicle by which character can released the soul's spirit into the cosmos. But notice, three things have to be done together. There has to be a spiritual language, a magical language powerful enough to be able to effect this transformation and release. There has to be a new form of the Church, of religious experience and there has to be a new sense of science, a new science. A new form in three related areas. The play of Shakespeare that relate those three directly to the founding of the United States is the Tempest. And next week we will take a look at Shakespeare's Tempest and the beginnings of the understanding that there is a Hermetic Eden of primordiality available across the sea. And for the first time in Shakespearse's lifetime this becomes a realized idea, and whole companies of individuals in the England of Shakespeare's time begin pooling their resources making companies, making what we would call today corporations to explore, develop and populate what became eventually the United States. And you will see that this was not a sweet endeavor at all. It was a very difficult endeavor. The early... The End - ..... - leads directly to Erasmus, basically inspired by John Colet. Colet also inspired Thomas More. Ficino also led directly to Paracelsus, then Trithemius. Erasmus and Paracelsus are the Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde of the Hermetic tradition: in the particular of their "lives lived." Ficino's translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (1463) and Plato with commentaries (1468 with commentaries in following years) and at last of Plotinus (1492), the apex of the Hermetic tradition in classical antiquity. The basic lineage is Egypt to Greece to the Hellenistic then the Roman World: incipient at Pythagoras, then to Plato and culminating with Jesus whose esoteric method was expressed in the Corpus Hermeticum beginning with Poimander c. 90 A.D. an to Plotinus ed. 269 A.D.): Enneads published by Porphry c. 300 A.D. From Plotinus the tradition led to Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500 A.D.). By then the Hermetic tradition was often referred to as Neoplatonism. And by then it was outlawed by pain of death from the exoteric world authorities and had become esoteric. Its secret underground flowing was surfaced only once in European culture: by John Scotus Erigena, who ignited passion time in a "Renaissance": the Carolingian (c. 800). He developed the beginning formed by the venerable Bede, one of whose works may well be the Old English national epic, Beowulf (c. 735 A.D.). - - 24 - The Hermetic Tradition then was reintroduced into 'Western Civilization" by Ficino and his Florentine Renaissance. From Pythagoras thru Plato to Jesus is the integration cycle of 500 years. From Jesus thru Plotinus to Dionysius of Areopagite is the differentiation cycle of 500 years. Together they constitute "the millennium" archetype in Christianity: that is Jesus based Christianity. This is the 1000 years which understood "perfectly would one day lead to the other millennium, the second 1000 years of the paired millenniums in the larger form of this time archetype. A thousand years of peace fallow a thousand years of struggle. Release follows Compression: a complete Aion as the ancient Greek language would say it. Two thousand year complementary was the Aion. Aside from the two 1000 years in a line sequence (first, second) there was an esoteric form in a matrix sequence (inner, outer). So that the inner 1000 years would be 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and the outer 1000 year would be 1000 B.C. to 500 B.C. (Solomon to "Daniel") and 500 A.D. to 1000 A.D. (mystical theology to the First Crusade). The Aion would have been Solomon's Temple to the Christian Recovery of the Holy Land. This would have been, in fact roughly was in the historical record, a great cycle of happenings-complete in its form, satisfying in its feeling-toned intelligence an the physical or natural level. The architectural temple in Jerusalem and the geographical Holy Land in the 11th century constituted this archetype whose innermost fulcrum point was Jesus Christ. Ficino died in 1499, another 500 year cycle after the 1000 A.D. mark, roughly another whole smaller cycle after the First Crusade. 1492 saw the discovery (in conscious, sustainable explorable terms) of America. America was the New Holy Land, archetypally. This amounted to a shift in the Aion for those Hermetic teachers in the Florentine Renaissance. The beginning of this ''New" Aion was now Pythagoras 500 B.C. and the fulcrum point had become Dionysius the Areopagite 500 A.D. the end point was 1500 A.D. That whole Aion was to be perfected in our understanding by consideration in deep contemplation of the mystical significance of Jesus in Dionysius the Areopagite's writings: especially the Divine Names (Cabala flash-point). The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Reformation flash-point) and the Mystic Theology (Copernican flash-point). In this symbolic vision new language forms, a new - 25 - - ..... - - - - church, and a new science were the three cognate poles of a complete transformation of man. This triad structure of transformation is a universal principle. It is a key structure in evolution as well as in theology and philosophy. But we can see now, the great Hermetic vision of the Florentine Renaissance the true appreciation of man. We could now read Pico della Mivandola's On The Dignity of Man and understand the significance. We could also sympathize with his interest in Cabala and Divine Names. We can see in what I have presented before your attention a symbolic way of seeing TIME which Plato in the Timaeus says is the "moving image of eternity'' (37d). In our own age we might understand the Aion for us in characterized by beginning with Jesus 2000 years ago and having the Crusade for the Holy Land as the pivot in its middle. Our own Aion would then be a new crusade for a new Holy Land: that of space, "the Final Frontier." The new Holy Land would be the stellar civilization of our sun's whole system, all the planets, moons and so forth. For the next 500 years this could be seen as the Hermetic direction of history and in 500 years the beginning would shift to Dionysius the Areopagite and his super celestial Christianity the middle's pivot would then be Ficino and the Florentine Renaissance. In 2500 A.D. their Aion would thus be the extension of our stellar civilization outward, amplified to other star systems and thus an interstellar civilization for the following 500 years. This would accompany them until 300 A.D. when another Aion would come into play based on 1000 A.D. with a middle pivot in our time (2000 A.D.) Our life work would be paramount in the pivotal focus of that Aion. The 500 year cycle was called in classical antiquity the cycle of the Phoenix. Tacitus in his Annals of Imperian Rome gives the terse outline of that form. Two cycles of the Phoenix, back to back, or front to front as it could be, make "The Millennium." The millennium would be symbolized by a double headed Phoenix (or double headed angle as in the German language version). In alchemy the double Pelican retort is related to this particular symbolism. Now time is the "moving image of eternity" in Renaissance Platanism and this yields the need to seek a higher, external wholeness of the time from beyond this world. For this let us go to Ficino's Book of Life. END OF RECORDING