John Colet

Transcript (PDF)

March 15th, 1983. This is a lecture by Roger Weir on, John Colet: The Florentine Vision in London, the Education of Man.

There are there are no books that could be found to show you on John Colet. There are a couple of lives and a couple of studies of his but they seem to have been ignored by most of the libraries. So I'll give you a few pointers on where to find information. Actually the best short article on Colet is in the Catholic Encyclopedia because Colet had most of his life before the Protestant split so that the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia is very fine. In fact there's a portrait of him in here, an engraving, and you can recognize from the portrait the semi-stern, forthright figure with the cap that you recognize from portraits of Henry Moore and Erasmus - two of his very very close students and friends.

Colet is necessary in our sequence in Hermetic science because he was the first one to be able to take the sense of community camaraderie which Ficino had discovered was an essential element in the learning of the higher philosophies. That is to say the statements in Plato made attributable to Socrates that we must have a sense of community before we can learn any of the higher spiritual truths are elements which are structural and therefore necessary to keeping a tradition and a sense of quality. But most importantly of all to the developing of the personality. We hear very often in our time that the personality is something which must be jettisoned. And indeed in some purificatory processes this may be held up as a paradigm. But in actual fact in order for us to learn anything and to integrate anything we must have a development of that aspect of our being which is called the personality. And so John Colet was able in his understanding in his life to take the sense of community of the very high Hermetic teachings from the Platonic Academy in Florence and take it to London. And it was very important that this be done because it set the stage and created almost the archetypal pattern which would be followed after Colet by John Dee, and then by Francis Bacon, and then finally as we will see by the Royal Society and Isaac Newton so that the development of the sense of camaraderie or even higher than that of spiritual companionship was one of the great transmissions that John Colet affected.

Now he was born in 1467 and he was born at a time when England was going through a huge change. In his early life Henry the seventh finally won the right to be the King of England at a very important battle and John Colet's father, who was very close to Henry the Seventh, was in fact twice in his life made Lord Mayor of London. So Colet came from a very powerful family economically wealthy, politically because of the proximity to the King, powerful. Colet was sent to be schooled at Oxford and he received a somewhat nominal education at that time but because of the family ties and his background he was directed into the church as a young neophyte priest and given several positions of prominence. One of them noteworthy was that he was made an ex-officio member of the York Cathedral and it's interesting because later on Catherine of York would figure into the plans of the social life of London. When Colet was about 24 or 25 years old he realized I think in his conversations with various individuals, among them was his very close friend Thomas Linacre that there were important events happening in northern Italy, especially in Florence, especially in those towns like Padua and Mantua where there were universities. So money being no object with the Colet family, John Colet traveled first to Paris and then within a few months to northern Italy. Ostensibly he was enrolled at the University of Padua but in fact he spent almost all of the next three years with Ficino. Now his friend Thomas Linacre had been with Ficino. Linacre incidentally was the founder of the Royal College of Physicians in London, and one of the most prominent men of his day, he was the personal physician to Henry the Eighth for instance. But when he was young Linacre had begun to study with Ficino as early as the late 1480s and by the early 1490s when John Colet arrived at the Ficino circle as we have seen there was there had been a tremendous development which had run from the early translations of the Orphic Hymns through the Corpus Hermeticum through the entirety of Plato's Dialogues and all of Plotinus had been translated. The final remaining translation to be done was to translate the works of Dionysius the Areopagite - the short but oh so powerful mystical theology which occupies but 5 or 6 pages. But in almost a enfolded symbolic language presents the core of the Neoplatonic Christian understanding. And then there were the great Dionysian documents, the divine names, and the celestial hierarchies. So these three great works of Dionysius the Areopagite remain to be translated and John Colet arrived in Florence at about the time that Ficino set himself to this task. Pico was still there. There were any number of so-called geniuses present. Just to mention a couple of artists Sandro Botticelli was there and Michelangelo was there, Andrea Mantegna was there, Albrecht Dürer came around from time to time. So it was a population of geniuses who had spent a great deal of time. By that I mean years and years together and with a maestro, a magician like Ficino to be the congenial host and the wonderful exemplar and the great translator and he who brought all of this into a meld - if I can use that term - the atmosphere was one of very very high integration.

John Colet at this time being a fairly mature individual, brilliant individual, realized the value of this companionability. And he made friends with Pico, in particular, and realized that in the mystical writings of Dionysius the Areopagite was a secret key to the wisdom of the antique Greek world. And later on towards the end of his life John Colet wrote two great commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite. They unfortunately are very difficult to come by in translation. John Colet's works remained for 350 years completely untranslated and uncollected in England and it was only a hundred years ago that anyone even thought to discuss him. And it was only about 20 years ago that the first studies of John Colet and the platonic tradition began to come out. So he has yet to be discovered in his fullness. But the two commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite reveal Colet's wonderful appreciation for the fact that having been written at one of those crisis points of the classical age the writings of Dionysius easily commit to memory the idea of a symbolic enfolding of mystical vision which plays itself out when there is a community of personalities as a context for its revealing, for its discovery, so that there is this double process again. The process whereby a sacred vision is made immanent and the audience for whom this sacred vision is made eminent is given a transcendental method by which they can have that most sublime of all communions, the interchange of their sacred selves, that is to say integrating the personality brings to the fore a center, a focus, which while being nothing particular in itself is in terms of an integrated personality the mystical summation of the whole. And it is this mystical center which Ficino, having rediscovered the old Socratic method, brought to life again in Florence and that Colet took to London. In fact when he returned to London, in about 1496, Colet went back to Oxford and was absolutely appalled at the fragile, brittle, shallow teaching that was going on. It was not so much the stupidity of the professors, but it was the inanity of the process of teaching that there was absolutely no way in which the glimpses of the true sacred self or the higher spiritual message could be had. There was not a companionable personable context within which it could reveal itself. In other words, what had been perceived occasionally from time to time throughout the ages the necessity for purifying oneself to gain the inner silence was in fact, in its contrapositive, a needed was a sense of affability among kindred spirits in order to float this sense of higher realization so that Colet in order to make the strongest case possible, delivered a startling series at Oxford - 1497, 1498. He chose to discourse upon the letters of Saint Paul without once referring to the amassed scholarship of the age. Instead he focused upon the personality of Saint Paul as the context and the discussion between those persons attending the class for the revealing of the doctrine. In other words, he took the Ficino method and he took the Neoplatonic message and he transplanted it to Oxford intact without anyone suspecting that they were being given one of the most mysterious of all secrets. An actual experiential method by which wisdom could be revealed and the very practice in tone by which it actually is revealed. In other words there was a sacred mystery school of antiquity which Ficino had brought alive again in Florence and which Colet transposed to Oxford.

Now it did not stay at Oxford. It didn't stick. So Colet, realizing that one has to work with one's time one has to wear the clothes of the age, set his sights to moving to London as soon as he could. While he was at Oxford though it became apparent to almost all of those around him that Colet was somewhat of the grandfather. That is to say even though he was of the same age as many of the people who were around him, learning from him, they recognized that Colet was in the words of Erasmus, “Plato himself come alive.” He couldn't say a reincarnation of Plato, but that's what he meant. While Erasmus the great scholar and translator. I guess you must know that Erasmus of Rotterdam went to England half a dozen times specifically to learn from John Colet. And when Erasmus produced in 1516 the first complete Greek edition of the New Testament that is the first in the thousand years he wrote to Colet saying that you have been the master of all this and that in fact he was the inspirer of the whole project. The idea being of course that this was not just an exemplifying of one's critical scholarship that one could produce a Greek Testament but that there was an audience that had been tutored and raised to a language level where they could read this together. So that the practice of simply having someone in authority like a priest read to you from a Bible which you couldn't read to that more secret and sacred communion where a group of friends could sit around and read the words themselves in the original in your living room. This was indeed the revolution that was taking place, and even though it would not bear full fruit for another hundred years it was due to the genius of John Colet that this seed was transplanted to London and the general context was set up.

Now when he moved to London he became, around 1504, the Rector, the Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London - which is the big cathedral. And the next year when his father died who had been Lord Mayor of London twice his father left him an enormous sum of money and properties and holdings. Colet took all of this money, some several hundred thousand pounds worth of money, and he set up what we would recognize today as the university system. He made stipends so that poor and starving scholars would have a chance to do their work. He did all this personally. He set up funds so that the great and famous Saint Paul School, which he set up at that time, was funded and so that students coming in would have a chance to have some of their expenses defrayed so that teachers coming in would have some basic salary upon which they could operate. And when he set up Saint Paul's School he set up a very famous man, William Lilly, as the first director of it. And about this time one of his very favorite students and friends, Thomas More, who was having problems with himself. More had gotten to that stage of inner development where one is tempted to become extraordinarily ascetic. More had taken to wearing rough hair shirts and sleeping on bare flat boards and taking one meal every other day and he was slowly wasting away. And More recounts, in some of his letters, that at this time it was John Colet who became his spiritual director and who literally saved his life. And Colet like a masterful teacher, knowing exactly where to center the energy, introduced Thomas More to a very nice young woman who became Mrs. Thomas More and bore him four children. But at the same time gave More all the kinds of background that he lacked. The perspective that what we are doing in developing a personality in this world is developing a way, in manifestation, for the soul's energies to register to bring God's Word into this realm and therefore it is no sin but rather a wonderful exercise in wisdom to develop a balanced personality full of equanimity and decency to live a life which includes increasingly the development of a decent family a decent homeland and a decent one world. So all of these elements Colet was just masterful about. And he of course was the person that both Thomas More and Erasmus looked up to as their spiritual director. And not only More and Erasmus, and dozens and dozens of other persons for whom their names may not mean too much to you, but he was the personal spiritual advisor to King Henry the eighth of England and he was a tough one to be a spiritual advisor to. He was precocious. He was every bit the grand personality. And before Colet died in 1519 at least the first ten years of Henry the eighth’s reign had a sense of greatness about it. It was only after Colet died after that influence was taken away that the ruffian personality of Henry the Eighth sort of went to seed. But remember that Henry the Eighth was quite a literate individual. Able to think for himself. And this was because Colet had done a great deal of tutoring. In fact Henry the Seventh had chosen his older son Arthur to be his heir and the next King of England. And Arthur's tutor had been Sir Thomas More. And of course Colet was in the background of that. But when Arthur died very young, as a young man, why Henry came along, Henry the Eighth came along.

Colet spent the last 15 years of his life trying to set up a process of continuity whereby this community could be engendered. At Saint Paul's he set up what he called a perpetual spiritual lecture series. Three times a week year in and year out as long as he was alive there were lectures. So that one was never more than yesterday or tomorrow away from some sense of guidance some sense of continuity. This perpetual lecture sequence it would be somewhat like on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, because Colet could see that there needs to be most of all in the weaving of a complex personality a continuum, a sense of ongoingness so that the integration could have some sort of pattern that it could follow through. Then in connection with his school he realized that in the teaching of languages to make people literate in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, that one needed to have decent grammars and decent textbooks. And Colet realized that most persons who had the ingenuity to be able to understand the inner processes of why this was important would not take these long tasks upon themselves. And those who could take these long boring scholarly tasks upon themselves would be somewhat truncated, not able to appreciate the flashing higher spiritual purposes for which they were being done. So like a champion, Colet did it himself. And in fact Colet did such a wonderful job that his Latin textbooks and grammars were used for over two hundred years in English schools all over England.

So what we're dealing with is a man who was really the master of the background, the master of the context, of making all those dozens and dozens of basic requirements that persons needed to develop in order to establish a civilization and a personality type within that civilization where these high truths of the Neoplatonic and higher Christian and deeper Hermetic tradition could register because without such a personality of equanimity, without such a capacity of erudition it could not happen. And of course we'll see that a hundred years later Colet's ideas took blossom and we had the Elizabethan Renaissance where a typical learned English man of the time had four daughters and they all read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as well as English and French and thought nothing of it. It had just become one of those codes of behavior that everyone in polite society did this. But you can see that there were secret purposes and sacred missions involved in this. And in fact Erasmus's great 1516 Greek New Testament and Colet's emphasis on the personality, rather than the footnotes, eventually gave us the King James Version of the Bible which changed the character of the English language because you see as soon as you make a work of literature on this magnitude it integrates all of the elements of a civilization together and that integration, every time it is participated in, produces in almost a magnetic way the kind of personality that is required that went into the making of this object. In other words, if you like to think of it in a sort of a colloquial phrase a massive epic work of literature is the largest cosmic magic spell you can cast.

So Colet realizing the efficacy of this action realizing that what Ficino had done with his great translations and with his Florentine Academy was to bring this personality back into play emphasized again and again that when we are working with the person who is preparing himself to receive higher spiritual truths we need to emphasize equanimity that only then do we become permeable to those higher influences. And in fact you can see later on in this wonderful book by Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch scholar, there is a portrait of Martin Luther as a monk at the time that he nailed the theses up to a door in 1517. And at the same time a portrait right next to it of Erasmus in the same year. And you can see in the face, in the personality, the difference between someone who is fighting to make a claim and someone who is living the life of spiritual equanimity for whom the claim is the quality of his life every day. He doesn't have to nail any theses up. He exemplifies at any given moment the truth of the matter. And so we have the bringing back into play with Colet the idea of a civilized personality whose object is not just the dilettantish politeness but is the carrying of the great life wave of high wisdom itself. And this of course was quite an accomplishment.

There is a letter in here from Erasmus to John Colet and I'd like to give you just a paragraph from it. This was written in October 29th, 1511 and you realize when you look at the dates, you realize that from 1460 to about 1520, maybe 1530, there was a tremendous rise in the quality of civilization. And then with the ordered assassination of Sir Thomas More, with the passing of Erasmus, with the growing guilelessness of Henry the Eighth, with changes on the continent, it seemed as if the, what was so common and ordinary in external affairs, suddenly became brutalized. And we will see starting next week how the tradition then went underground and those masters who carried it in the esoteric realms were the only lifeline that was left in a trustworthy way. But for now, 1511, there was a tremendous sense of civilization afloat with the purpose. Erasmus writes,

“To friend Colet, Greetings. Something came into my mind which I know will make you laugh in the presence of several masters. I was putting forward a view on the position of the assistant teacher when one of them, a man of some repute, smiled condescendingly and said who could bear to spend his life in that school among boys when he could live anywhere in any way he liked? I answered mildly, says Erasmus, that it seemed to me a very honorable task to train young people in manners and literature. Do you see how it's making sense now? That Christ himself did not despise the young. That no age had a better right to help and that from no quarter was a richer return to be expected seeing that young people were the harvest field and the raw material of the nation. I added that all truly religious people felt that they could not better serve God in any other duty than the bringing of children to Christ. He wrinkled his nose and said with a scornful gesture, writes Erasmus, if any man wishes to serve Christ altogether let him go into a monastery and enter a religious order.”

Do you see the seesaw from one extreme to the other? Yeah and that's the mentality that persevered in the schools. And Erasmus with great equanimity answered the first and now he answers the second with the very same argument and statement.

“I answered that Saint Paul said that true religion consisted in offices of charity consisting in doing our best to help our neighbors. This he rejected as an ignorant remark as that sort of personality always does.”

It always mistakes the profundity for the mundane. Nothing could be so ordinary as taking care of children. My God how boring can one be? You can see how the obscured mind is truly ignorant that it has no perspective of reality whatsoever. And you can see how Colet in the words of Erasmus would have been just laughing over this whole issue because Erasmus is showing him how he had mastered Colet's and Ficino's and Plato's method. You see? “Look said he we have forsaken everything in this is perfection. That man has not forsaken everything said I who when he could help very many by his labors refuses to undertake a duty because it is regarded as humble. And with that to prevent a quarrel arising I let the man go. There you have the dialogue. You see that philosophy once again. Farewell.”

Well you can see with some of the background I've given you in the insight and so forth how revealing this short little paragraph from Erasmus to Colet is. And Colet as a great teacher had managed to pass this on to an enormous number of individuals so that he embodied in himself this very quality which his students like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were able to undertake. Now More when he wrote his great Utopia, and incidentally his Utopia came out the very same year that Erasmus’s great Greek New Testament, 1516. In other words there was the sense that a whole program of development was happening. When one has a spiritual director of the quality of someone like John Colet. A whole sense of strategy of the civilisation can develop. And like Mother Nature herself, it moves on hundreds and hundreds of different parts and then of course when it comes to manifesting into shapes and forms all of a sudden one has these sophisticated powerful works and manifestations coming up. Not just great books but great people, human beings that in themselves exemplify this. The original title of Sir Thomas More's Utopia was actually Anusquam, Latin for nowhere. In other words this series of expectations and descriptions of the perfectibility of human science and human civilization takes place nowhere. And then of course that was changed to Ontopos that a utopia could actually be anywhere anywhere. That one had those basic constituents by which a paradise would manifest itself on earth human beings who understand in and of themselves by an integrated personality and a means of communicating among themselves on using basic informational sources that were not smeared by commentaries. And that as long as they had the basic works the truth of the tradition the Chronologica Mystica and themselves intact and a chance to work together human beings might at any time anywhere on the globe produce a utopia.

Once this notion had been seeded and set down of course very very quickly the powers that be are jeopardized and they take umbrage and all the little petty tyrants rise to the fore and seek to have these individuals removed or truncated or hushed up. They are not allowed to speak openly. They may not proceed. And so in the last years of Colet's life we see again and again charges of heresy being drummed up against him. But again and again he had laid his foundations well. He was a man beyond reproach. He had a guarantor in the form of the King, Henry the Eighth. He had his position in school at Saint Paul's which was impeccable, and he had his personality exemplifying the inner equanimity and of course the whole range of friends around. Colet had found a way to survive in public. A way in which to manifest in the most mundane areas of life - family, church, community - the most sacred tradition of all this mystical direct connection with the divine. So we can see what a tremendous individual he really was. There are many references to Colet in quite a few of the works, I guess I'll skip over almost all of them. They just emphasize what I had been giving you but I think I must give this that. Well I needn't even even read it just to give you the background.

Colet instituted the idea of the banquet of friends together, the notion of the Platonic Symposium so that quite often the best conversations took place while they were seated at a meal. And all of these instances, like Ficino, Colet realized that there must be someone who is the spiritual host to use Plotinus term the genius of the event the guardian spirit of the event so that the interchange takes place all on an increasing discovery of the spiritual interchange in fact of the event of the purpose. And at many of these dinners and meals Colet would bring together individuals who were growing in power. He was for instance present when Thomas Wolsey was made Cardinal. He was the officiating person and very often people like Wolsey were invited to meals where people like Erasmus were available so that those individuals who worked with power and those individuals who understood aspiration would have a chance to interpenetrate and influence each other, all in the context again of the symposium of the meal together. The great scene of the disquisition was the partaking together of the nourishment. These tasks that Colet was able to bring to the fore also included the playing of appropriate music at the time. And at this time we see in the late Renaissance in this early period in England and we'll see it again somewhat in Germany with Michael Praetorius, music became the basic spiritual pace and flow of the interchange and the camaraderie. And this was due again to Ficino's great insistence that music of all the arts touched the soul the most direct, and that in fact in the Hermetic recognition of music leading one up to the harmony of the spheres, up to the eighth level of the fixed stars in the Ptolemaic universe. That as one goes up the seven planetary scales there are associations for the Neoplatonists in this kind of astrological music. These are the correlations that the realm of the moon, the lunar realm, is affined to stones and metals, that the realm of mercury as feed to plants and fruits and animals. The realm of Venus is affined to words, songs, and sounds. And the fourth level which is the sun or Apollo which is not just the fourth in a series of ascending, but it is also the mean of the seven so that the sun the Apollonian level which pertains here to the making of language intelligible, the meaning comes through. The fifth level, that of Mars is emotion and imagination. Jupiter the sixth is discursive reason and Saturn the seventh is intellectual contemplation divine intuition. So that we have the songs, the sounds, the meaning of these things associated with the mean, the registry of all information. And Ficino traced this back in his writings. And I'll try and give you just two basic references in the Corpus Hermeticum in that great hermetic dialogue known as the Poimandres. There are two sections that concern themselves with hermetic music and the understanding. The most direct one is book 18. So if you have a copy of the Poimandres you might look it up. Book 18 and just to give you a quotation from it this is a translated from the Greek by Scott about 60 years ago. G. R. S. Mead also has a very good translation of this and the Poimandres called the Poemander and some English translations translated by Reverend Everett in 1650 about the time when all the Hermetic materials of Thomas Vaughan were coming into play in England. This is it. When musicians undertake to make harmonious melody then if in the performance their good intent is thwarted by the disconsolate discordance of their instruments that is if you're making music and suddenly you hear a discordancy because of the instruments one does not impute the blame to the musician's inspiration but one ascribes the fault to the unsoundness of the instrument. It is this we say that has made the music fall short of perfect beauty, obstructing the musician in his rendering of the melody and depriving the audience of the joy of hearing the clear sweet strain. You can now follow the metaphor that's being taught here in the Hermetic dialogue. The sense is we may make music together. We may understand meaning and its melodious flow between ourselves. If there is a discordancy let us further seek to perfect ourselves rather than to impute that the message is flawed that the source is flawed so that the impetus is upon us to build good instruments. What instrument do we have by which the divine music most manifests itself through the spheres? The soul of man. And how does it express itself in the world? The personality. And how is there an interchange, a communion, an orchestra of these souls, these personalities through the communion, the civilization, the tradition. So in this way some of the most esoteric doctrines that were ever handed down and rediscovered were made available through the genius of someone like Ficino through the genius of someone like John Colet. Understanding how to take those highest most difficult almost inaccessible realizations and bring them into everyday life so that practicing them seemed like the most mundane of matters so that the ignorant would look upon a master or a sage in the Hermetic tradition for many centuries and see nothing extraordinary. In fact it was of little interest because it didn't seem to be addicted to this wonderful authority and power which they had come to equate with truth. This of course will as we go on reveal itself more and more in the fact that those masters of the Hermetic tradition became completely disenchanted with any of the more worldly offices and in fact sought to impart what they could onto students in a very quiet way. The esoteric became the focus rather than the exoteric - especially on the continent - and it wasn't until around the turn of the next century, around the turn of about 1600, 1604, 1605, that we'll see the two, the esoteric and exoteric, coming back together again and this time coming together with a great resounding splash in the world as we'll see. In fact at about the time when they came back together two new stars were seen. There was a supernova in the constellation of Cygnus and the next year a supernova in the constellation of Sagittarius. So that in 1604 seeing these two new stars in the most interesting constellations of the time sort of a signal to them that God had been paying attention and that in fact everything that they had learned was true. And now it was time to bring it out in the open again and we'll see that.

But for now I think it's important to see how the transition went from Ficino in Florence to John Colet in London how the Platonic Academy in Florence was not replicated but re-presented all over again at Saint Paul's in London and that the difficulty of such a task is almost astronomical. When you think of all the variables involved with the fact that all this had to be done under some of the most headstrong people of their age. Ficino worked under Lorenzo Il Magnifico and Colet worked under Henry the Eighth. So if you have troubles in your life with somebody who seems domineering, work cheerfully, it can be done even under the most tyrannical of conditions and done in the most open way possible so it looks like you're just doing your guard duty, but all the while you are manifesting the very highest truths. Now when Ficino was working with his notion of the personality finding its fulfillment. If you recall last week we looked at his Book of Life, the third book, and we read how Plotinus had tackled this most difficult of tasks of how to make that quintessence, that presence in the soul, and his final statement in that sequence. And if you don't recall it there are tapes available. His final statement in that sequence was to cut away everything. Cut everything away. The old Orphic purification. The way in which one finally pares down. And Plotinus gave us this quotation.

“Are we to think that a being knowing itself must contain diversity that self-knowledge can be affirmed only when some one phase of the self perceives other phases and that therefore an absolutely simplex entity would be equally incapable of introversion and of self-awareness.” In other words must there always be the emphasis on one aspect or another of dominating the self? The answer is no. It's no in Plotinus, it's no in Ficino, it's no in John Colet. That in fact this is to invite the travesty if one emphasizes one element over any of the others. One has a natural imbalance in one of the very definitions of demon in the ancient tradition was that of mindless elemental. In the Chaldean Oracles this is what it is to invite these kinds of powers in is the height of folly so that the making of a personality of equanimity is the very best defense against all of the aberrations that could occur. And Plotinus and Ficino and Dionysius the Areopagite and John Colet. All of them emphasized the fact that when one has a sense of equanimity to the personality that the divine participates directly God participates directly with the individual So that all of these free ionized mindless elementals in the world also get organized automatically. So that the whole world begins to reflect when the kingdom is established in one individual pretty soon the whole community and pretty soon one could have a Paradise a utopia but that the key to all of it was establishing the religious personality and a way for religious personalities to come together in this world. And that given just those bare minimums that rudder and that mast one could construct the ship of salvation anytime, anywhere whatsoever. And so that straight from the grand synthesis in Alexandria of the third century coming back into northern Italy in the 15th century and leaping into England with John Colet around the early 1500s, 1504, 1505, we have a straight line tradition which has undergone many vicissitudes but which then once re-established allowed the next generation of individuals to be able to see that in fact if this were the case if this were the truth if indeed this obtained in ourselves they could look back in retrospect and they could pick out individuals that heretofore had been scattered in the phony histories that had been given to man and they could reconstruct the mystical tradition as it had always obtained in the world. And so we find that there is increasingly, among the Hermetic scholars as we've said before, the great concern with establishing the fact that one understood the tradition and one's lineage went back to so-and-so and they to so-and-so and they on back through to the most ancient of sources. And that increasingly in this one would find the transformation of the individual to such a state and to such an extent that they would no longer even use the name that they had been born with. So that we find individuals who come up and they choose for themselves, or have given to them by a teacher, a new name almost like the American Indian practice. That now that you have come of age and you have transformed you are someone else. And you have every right to have a new name. So we have people named Theophrastus, Bombastus who get called Paracelsus. And we have some German man. Probably his real name was. Pfeiffer who calls himself not Hermes Trismegistus but Solomon Trismosin - thrice Moses.

So we have individuals like this that come up. We have people referred to just by these names and they assume that those who understand who have ears to hear will understand that a new integration has taken place and there's something new involved. I wish I had had time to bring in the Neoplatonic poems of Michelangelo which reflect Ficino's great influence and I wish I'd had time to show you some of Botticelli's portraits. Wish I'd had time to bring Mantegna's tarot deck and I wish I had time to show you Albrecht Dürer's Great Arch of Triumph for Maximilian. All of these visual evidences would have created for you just more convincing assurity that this had created in fact a civilization of its time as it always does. But the important thing for tonight was to have seen and recognized how a tradition transposes itself from one country to another from one language to another from one group of people in one kind of a civilization to another group of people and a different civilization because the northern Italy of the 1480s is quite different from the England of the 1520s. And yet and yet there was a continuity, there was a point of contact. And we'll see increasingly that because England had been involved in this transplanting in this re-presentation, that the tradition that fed almost like a waterfall into Germany from northern Italy. Many of the individuals we're dealing with are Germans. But there was from this time forward a kind of a resonance almost a paralleling between England and Germany. So that again and again we will see in the next 150 to 200 years that as soon as there is a development in Germany there is some kind of a response in England. And when there's a development in England there's some kind of a response in Germany. And it is no small wonder that at the end of this whole series that a German house, the House of Hanover, became the Kings of England about the time that the whole kit and caboodle, as somebody once described it, moved to this country.

Well I don't know where we've gotten to but I think I've gotten to a stopping place. Next week we'll see the great Trithemius and I'll try to bring some material which very few people have ever seen. Trithemius will be someone who's a contemporary of John Colet and in fact, if one makes a little template for oneself, and you put Ficino here as the thumb. You have Colet and you have Trithemius and the one we'll have next week Salomon Trismosin you have in those four individuals almost the basic quaternary structure of the secret brotherhood that so many people allude to from time to time. And in fact when the Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood comes out and talks about the original four members and how one of them lived in England well some of these things become a little more understandable and not so mythologically flamboyant but a little more accurate in terms of Mystica Chronologica. Enough said.



There are there are no books that could be found to show you on John Colet. There are a couple of lives and a couple of studies of his but they seem to have been ignored by most of the libraries. So I'll give you a few pointers on where to find information. Actually the best short article on Colet is in the Catholic Encyclopedia because Colet had most of his life before the Protestant split so that the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia is very fine. In fact there's a portrait of him in here, an engraving, and you can recognize from the portrait the semi-stern, forthright figure with the cap that you recognize from portraits of Henry Moore and Erasmus - two of his very very close students and friends.

Colet is necessary in our sequence in Hermetic science because he was the first one to be able to take the sense of community camaraderie which Ficino had discovered was an essential element in the learning of the higher philosophies. That is to say the statements in Plato made attributable to Socrates that we must have a sense of community before we can learn any of the higher spiritual truths are elements which are structural and therefore necessary to keeping a tradition and a sense of quality. But most importantly of all to the developing of the personality. We hear very often in our time that the personality is something which must be jettisoned. And indeed in some purificatory processes this may be held up as a paradigm. But in actual fact in order for us to learn anything and to integrate anything we must have a development of that aspect of our being which is called the personality. And so John Colet was able in his understanding in his life to take the sense of community of the very high Hermetic teachings from the Platonic Academy in Florence and take it to London. And it was very important that this be done because it set the stage and created almost the archetypal pattern which would be followed after Colet by John Dee, and then by Francis Bacon, and then finally as we will see by the Royal Society and Isaac Newton so that the development of the sense of camaraderie or even higher than that of spiritual companionship was one of the great transmissions that John Colet affected.

Now he was born in 1467 and he was born at a time when England was going through a huge change. In his early life Henry the seventh finally won the right to be the King of England at a very important battle and John Colet's father, who was very close to Henry the Seventh, was in fact twice in his life made Lord Mayor of London. So Colet came from a very powerful family economically wealthy, politically because of the proximity to the King, powerful. Colet was sent to be schooled at Oxford and he received a somewhat nominal education at that time but because of the family ties and his background he was directed into the church as a young neophyte priest and given several positions of prominence. One of them noteworthy was that he was made an ex-officio member of the York Cathedral and it's interesting because later on Catherine of York would figure into the plans of the social life of London. When Colet was about 24 or 25 years old he realized I think in his conversations with various individuals, among them was his very close friend Thomas Linacre that there were important events happening in northern Italy, especially in Florence, especially in those towns like Padua and Mantua where there were universities. So money being no object with the Colet family, John Colet traveled first to Paris and then within a few months to northern Italy. Ostensibly he was enrolled at the University of Padua but in fact he spent almost all of the next three years with Ficino. Now his friend Thomas Linacre had been with Ficino. Linacre incidentally was the founder of the Royal College of Physicians in London, and one of the most prominent men of his day, he was the personal physician to Henry the Eighth for instance. But when he was young Linacre had begun to study with Ficino as early as the late 1480s and by the early 1490s when John Colet arrived at the Ficino circle as we have seen there was there had been a tremendous development which had run from the early translations of the Orphic Hymns through the Corpus Hermeticum through the entirety of Plato's Dialogues and all of Plotinus had been translated. The final remaining translation to be done was to translate the works of Dionysius the Areopagite - the short but oh so powerful mystical theology which occupies but 5 or 6 pages. But in almost a enfolded symbolic language presents the core of the Neoplatonic Christian understanding. And then there were the great Dionysian documents, the divine names, and the celestial hierarchies. So these three great works of Dionysius the Areopagite remain to be translated and John Colet arrived in Florence at about the time that Ficino set himself to this task. Pico was still there. There were any number of so-called geniuses present. Just to mention a couple of artists Sandro Botticelli was there and Michelangelo was there, Andrea Mantegna was there, Albrecht Dürer came around from time to time. So it was a population of geniuses who had spent a great deal of time. By that I mean years and years together and with a maestro, a magician like Ficino to be the congenial host and the wonderful exemplar and the great translator and he who brought all of this into a meld - if I can use that term - the atmosphere was one of very very high integration.

John Colet at this time being a fairly mature individual, brilliant individual, realized the value of this companionability. And he made friends with Pico, in particular, and realized that in the mystical writings of Dionysius the Areopagite was a secret key to the wisdom of the antique Greek world. And later on towards the end of his life John Colet wrote two great commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite. They unfortunately are very difficult to come by in translation. John Colet's works remained for 350 years completely untranslated and uncollected in England and it was only a hundred years ago that anyone even thought to discuss him. And it was only about 20 years ago that the first studies of John Colet and the platonic tradition began to come out. So he has yet to be discovered in his fullness. But the two commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite reveal Colet's wonderful appreciation for the fact that having been written at one of those crisis points of the classical age the writings of Dionysius easily commit to memory the idea of a symbolic enfolding of mystical vision which plays itself out when there is a community of personalities as a context for its revealing, for its discovery, so that there is this double process again. The process whereby a sacred vision is made immanent and the audience for whom this sacred vision is made eminent is given a transcendental method by which they can have that most sublime of all communions, the interchange of their sacred selves, that is to say integrating the personality brings to the fore a center, a focus, which while being nothing particular in itself is in terms of an integrated personality the mystical summation of the whole. And it is this mystical center which Ficino, having rediscovered the old Socratic method, brought to life again in Florence and that Colet took to London. In fact when he returned to London, in about 1496, Colet went back to Oxford and was absolutely appalled at the fragile, brittle, shallow teaching that was going on. It was not so much the stupidity of the professors, but it was the inanity of the process of teaching that there was absolutely no way in which the glimpses of the true sacred self or the higher spiritual message could be had. There was not a companionable personable context within which it could reveal itself. In other words, what had been perceived occasionally from time to time throughout the ages the necessity for purifying oneself to gain the inner silence was in fact, in its contrapositive, a needed was a sense of affability among kindred spirits in order to float this sense of higher realization so that Colet in order to make the strongest case possible, delivered a startling series at Oxford - 1497, 1498. He chose to discourse upon the letters of Saint Paul without once referring to the amassed scholarship of the age. Instead he focused upon the personality of Saint Paul as the context and the discussion between those persons attending the class for the revealing of the doctrine. In other words, he took the Ficino method and he took the Neoplatonic message and he transplanted it to Oxford intact without anyone suspecting that they were being given one of the most mysterious of all secrets. An actual experiential method by which wisdom could be revealed and the very practice in tone by which it actually is revealed. In other words there was a sacred mystery school of antiquity which Ficino had brought alive again in Florence and which Colet transposed to Oxford.

Now it did not stay at Oxford. It didn't stick. So Colet, realizing that one has to work with one's time one has to wear the clothes of the age, set his sights to moving to London as soon as he could. While he was at Oxford though it became apparent to almost all of those around him that Colet was somewhat of the grandfather. That is to say even though he was of the same age as many of the people who were around him, learning from him, they recognized that Colet was in the words of Erasmus, "Plato himself come alive." He couldn't say a reincarnation of Plato, but that's what he meant. While Erasmus the great scholar and translator. I guess you must know that Erasmus of Rotterdam went to England half a dozen times specifically to learn from John Colet. And when Erasmus produced in 1516 the first complete Greek edition of the New Testament that is the first in the thousand years he wrote to Colet saying that you have been the master of all this and that in fact he was the inspirer of the whole project. The idea being of course that this was not just an exemplifying of one's critical scholarship that one could produce a Greek Testament but that there was an audience that had been tutored and raised to a language level where they could read this together. So that the practice of simply having someone in authority like a priest read to you from a Bible which you couldn't read to that more secret and sacred communion where a group of friends could sit around and read the words themselves in the original in your living room. This was indeed the revolution that was taking place, and even though it would not bear full fruit for another hundred years it was due to the genius of John Colet that this seed was transplanted to London and the general context was set up.

Now when he moved to London he became, around 1504, the Rector, the Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London - which is the big cathedral. And the next year when his father died who had been Lord Mayor of London twice his father left him an enormous sum of money and properties and holdings. Colet took all of this money, some several hundred thousand pounds worth of money, and he set up what we would recognize today as the university system. He made stipends so that poor and starving scholars would have a chance to do their work. He did all this personally. He set up funds so that the great and famous Saint Paul School, which he set up at that time, was funded and so that students coming in would have a chance to have some of their expenses defrayed so that teachers coming in would have some basic salary upon which they could operate. And when he set up Saint Paul's School he set up a very famous man, William Lilly, as the first director of it. And about this time one of his very favorite students and friends, Thomas More, who was having problems with himself. More had gotten to that stage of inner development where one is tempted to become extraordinarily ascetic. More had taken to wearing rough hair shirts and sleeping on bare flat boards and taking one meal every other day and he was slowly wasting away. And More recounts, in some of his letters, that at this time it was John Colet who became his spiritual director and who literally saved his life. And Colet like a masterful teacher, knowing exactly where to center the energy, introduced Thomas More to a very nice young woman who became Mrs. Thomas More and bore him four children. But at the same time gave More all the kinds of background that he lacked. The perspective that what we are doing in developing a personality in this world is developing a way, in manifestation, for the soul's energies to register to bring God's Word into this realm and therefore it is no sin but rather a wonderful exercise in wisdom to develop a balanced personality full of equanimity and decency to live a life which includes increasingly the development of a decent family a decent homeland and a decent one world. So all of these elements Colet was just masterful about. And he of course was the person that both Thomas More and Erasmus looked up to as their spiritual director. And not only More and Erasmus, and dozens and dozens of other persons for whom their names may not mean too much to you, but he was the personal spiritual advisor to King Henry the eighth of England and he was a tough one to be a spiritual advisor to. He was precocious. He was every bit the grand personality. And before Colet died in 1519 at least the first ten years of Henry the eighth's reign had a sense of greatness about it. It was only after Colet died after that influence was taken away that the ruffian personality of Henry the Eighth sort of went to seed. But remember that Henry the Eighth was quite a literate individual. Able to think for himself. And this was because Colet had done a great deal of tutoring. In fact Henry the Seventh had chosen his older son Arthur to be his heir and the next King of England. And Arthur's tutor had been Sir Thomas More. And of course Colet was in the background of that. But when Arthur died very young, as a young man, why Henry came along, Henry the Eighth came along.

Colet spent the last 15 years of his life trying to set up a process of continuity whereby this community could be engendered. At Saint Paul's he set up what he called a perpetual spiritual lecture series. Three times a week year in and year out as long as he was alive there were lectures. So that one was never more than yesterday or tomorrow away from some sense of guidance some sense of continuity. This perpetual lecture sequence it would be somewhat like on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, because Colet could see that there needs to be most of all in the weaving of a complex personality a continuum, a sense of ongoingness so that the integration could have some sort of pattern that it could follow through. Then in connection with his school he realized that in the teaching of languages to make people literate in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, that one needed to have decent grammars and decent textbooks. And Colet realized that most persons who had the ingenuity to be able to understand the inner processes of why this was important would not take these long tasks upon themselves. And those who could take these long boring scholarly tasks upon themselves would be somewhat truncated, not able to appreciate the flashing higher spiritual purposes for which they were being done. So like a champion, Colet did it himself. And in fact Colet did such a wonderful job that his Latin textbooks and grammars were used for over two hundred years in English schools all over England.

So what we're dealing with is a man who was really the master of the background, the master of the context, of making all those dozens and dozens of basic requirements that persons needed to develop in order to establish a civilization and a personality type within that civilization where these high truths of the Neoplatonic and higher Christian and deeper Hermetic tradition could register because without such a personality of equanimity, without such a capacity of erudition it could not happen. And of course we'll see that a hundred years later Colet's ideas took blossom and we had the Elizabethan Renaissance where a typical learned English man of the time had four daughters and they all read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as well as English and French and thought nothing of it. It had just become one of those codes of behavior that everyone in polite society did this. But you can see that there were secret purposes and sacred missions involved in this. And in fact Erasmus's great 1516 Greek New Testament and Colet's emphasis on the personality, rather than the footnotes, eventually gave us the King James Version of the Bible which changed the character of the English language because you see as soon as you make a work of literature on this magnitude it integrates all of the elements of a civilization together and that integration, every time it is participated in, produces in almost a magnetic way the kind of personality that is required that went into the making of this object. In other words, if you like to think of it in a sort of a colloquial phrase a massive epic work of literature is the largest cosmic magic spell you can cast.

So Colet realizing the efficacy of this action realizing that what Ficino had done with his great translations and with his Florentine Academy was to bring this personality back into play emphasized again and again that when we are working with the person who is preparing himself to receive higher spiritual truths we need to emphasize equanimity that only then do we become permeable to those higher influences. And in fact you can see later on in this wonderful book by Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch scholar, there is a portrait of Martin Luther as a monk at the time that he nailed the theses up to a door in 1517. And at the same time a portrait right next to it of Erasmus in the same year. And you can see in the face, in the personality, the difference between someone who is fighting to make a claim and someone who is living the life of spiritual equanimity for whom the claim is the quality of his life every day. He doesn't have to nail any theses up. He exemplifies at any given moment the truth of the matter. And so we have the bringing back into play with Colet the idea of a civilized personality whose object is not just the dilettantish politeness but is the carrying of the great life wave of high wisdom itself. And this of course was quite an accomplishment.

There is a letter in here from Erasmus to John Colet and I'd like to give you just a paragraph from it. This was written in October 29th, 1511 and you realize when you look at the dates, you realize that from 1460 to about 1520, maybe 1530, there was a tremendous rise in the quality of civilization. And then with the ordered assassination of Sir Thomas More, with the passing of Erasmus, with the growing guilelessness of Henry the Eighth, with changes on the continent, it seemed as if the, what was so common and ordinary in external affairs, suddenly became brutalized. And we will see starting next week how the tradition then went underground and those masters who carried it in the esoteric realms were the only lifeline that was left in a trustworthy way. But for now, 1511, there was a tremendous sense of civilization afloat with the purpose. Erasmus writes,

"To friend Colet, Greetings. Something came into my mind which I know will make you laugh in the presence of several masters. I was putting forward a view on the position of the assistant teacher when one of them, a man of some repute, smiled condescendingly and said who could bear to spend his life in that school among boys when he could live anywhere in any way he liked? I answered mildly, says Erasmus, that it seemed to me a very honorable task to train young people in manners and literature. Do you see how it's making sense now? That Christ himself did not despise the young. That no age had a better right to help and that from no quarter was a richer return to be expected seeing that young people were the harvest field and the raw material of the nation. I added that all truly religious people felt that they could not better serve God in any other duty than the bringing of children to Christ. He wrinkled his nose and said with a scornful gesture, writes Erasmus, if any man wishes to serve Christ altogether let him go into a monastery and enter a religious order."

Do you see the seesaw from one extreme to the other? Yeah and that's the mentality that persevered in the schools. And Erasmus with great equanimity answered the first and now he answers the second with the very same argument and statement.

"I answered that Saint Paul said that true religion consisted in offices of charity consisting in doing our best to help our neighbors. This he rejected as an ignorant remark as that sort of personality always does."

It always mistakes the profundity for the mundane. Nothing could be so ordinary as taking care of children. My God how boring can one be? You can see how the obscured mind is truly ignorant that it has no perspective of reality whatsoever. And you can see how Colet in the words of Erasmus would have been just laughing over this whole issue because Erasmus is showing him how he had mastered Colet's and Ficino's and Plato's method. You see? "Look said he we have forsaken everything in this is perfection. That man has not forsaken everything said I who when he could help very many by his labors refuses to undertake a duty because it is regarded as humble. And with that to prevent a quarrel arising I let the man go. There you have the dialogue. You see that philosophy once again. Farewell."

Well you can see with some of the background I've given you in the insight and so forth how revealing this short little paragraph from Erasmus to Colet is. And Colet as a great teacher had managed to pass this on to an enormous number of individuals so that he embodied in himself this very quality which his students like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were able to undertake. Now More when he wrote his great Utopia, and incidentally his Utopia came out the very same year that Erasmus's great Greek New Testament, 1516. In other words there was the sense that a whole program of development was happening. When one has a spiritual director of the quality of someone like John Colet. A whole sense of strategy of the civilisation can develop. And like Mother Nature herself, it moves on hundreds and hundreds of different parts and then of course when it comes to manifesting into shapes and forms all of a sudden one has these sophisticated powerful works and manifestations coming up. Not just great books but great people, human beings that in themselves exemplify this. The original title of Sir Thomas More's Utopia was actually Anusquam, Latin for nowhere. In other words this series of expectations and descriptions of the perfectibility of human science and human civilization takes place nowhere. And then of course that was changed to Ontopos that a utopia could actually be anywhere anywhere. That one had those basic constituents by which a paradise would manifest itself on earth human beings who understand in and of themselves by an integrated personality and a means of communicating among themselves on using basic informational sources that were not smeared by commentaries. And that as long as they had the basic works the truth of the tradition the Chronologica Mystica and themselves intact and a chance to work together human beings might at any time anywhere on the globe produce a utopia.

Once this notion had been seeded and set down of course very very quickly the powers that be are jeopardized and they take umbrage and all the little petty tyrants rise to the fore and seek to have these individuals removed or truncated or hushed up. They are not allowed to speak openly. They may not proceed. And so in the last years of Colet's life we see again and again charges of heresy being drummed up against him. But again and again he had laid his foundations well. He was a man beyond reproach. He had a guarantor in the form of the King, Henry the Eighth. He had his position in school at Saint Paul's which was impeccable, and he had his personality exemplifying the inner equanimity and of course the whole range of friends around. Colet had found a way to survive in public. A way in which to manifest in the most mundane areas of life - family, church, community - the most sacred tradition of all this mystical direct connection with the divine. So we can see what a tremendous individual he really was. There are many references to Colet in quite a few of the works, I guess I'll skip over almost all of them. They just emphasize what I had been giving you but I think I must give this that. Well I needn't even even read it just to give you the background.

Colet instituted the idea of the banquet of friends together, the notion of the Platonic Symposium so that quite often the best conversations took place while they were seated at a meal. And all of these instances, like Ficino, Colet realized that there must be someone who is the spiritual host to use Plotinus term the genius of the event the guardian spirit of the event so that the interchange takes place all on an increasing discovery of the spiritual interchange in fact of the event of the purpose. And at many of these dinners and meals Colet would bring together individuals who were growing in power. He was for instance present when Thomas Wolsey was made Cardinal. He was the officiating person and very often people like Wolsey were invited to meals where people like Erasmus were available so that those individuals who worked with power and those individuals who understood aspiration would have a chance to interpenetrate and influence each other, all in the context again of the symposium of the meal together. The great scene of the disquisition was the partaking together of the nourishment. These tasks that Colet was able to bring to the fore also included the playing of appropriate music at the time. And at this time we see in the late Renaissance in this early period in England and we'll see it again somewhat in Germany with Michael Praetorius, music became the basic spiritual pace and flow of the interchange and the camaraderie. And this was due again to Ficino's great insistence that music of all the arts touched the soul the most direct, and that in fact in the Hermetic recognition of music leading one up to the harmony of the spheres, up to the eighth level of the fixed stars in the Ptolemaic universe. That as one goes up the seven planetary scales there are associations for the Neoplatonists in this kind of astrological music. These are the correlations that the realm of the moon, the lunar realm, is affined to stones and metals, that the realm of mercury as feed to plants and fruits and animals. The realm of Venus is affined to words, songs, and sounds. And the fourth level which is the sun or Apollo which is not just the fourth in a series of ascending, but it is also the mean of the seven so that the sun the Apollonian level which pertains here to the making of language intelligible, the meaning comes through. The fifth level, that of Mars is emotion and imagination. Jupiter the sixth is discursive reason and Saturn the seventh is intellectual contemplation divine intuition. So that we have the songs, the sounds, the meaning of these things associated with the mean, the registry of all information. And Ficino traced this back in his writings. And I'll try and give you just two basic references in the Corpus Hermeticum in that great hermetic dialogue known as the Poimandres. There are two sections that concern themselves with hermetic music and the understanding. The most direct one is book 18. So if you have a copy of the Poimandres you might look it up. Book 18 and just to give you a quotation from it this is a translated from the Greek by Scott about 60 years ago. G. R. S. Mead also has a very good translation of this and the Poimandres called the Poemander and some English translations translated by Reverend Everett in 1650 about the time when all the Hermetic materials of Thomas Vaughan were coming into play in England. This is it. When musicians undertake to make harmonious melody then if in the performance their good intent is thwarted by the disconsolate discordance of their instruments that is if you're making music and suddenly you hear a discordancy because of the instruments one does not impute the blame to the musician's inspiration but one ascribes the fault to the unsoundness of the instrument. It is this we say that has made the music fall short of perfect beauty, obstructing the musician in his rendering of the melody and depriving the audience of the joy of hearing the clear sweet strain. You can now follow the metaphor that's being taught here in the Hermetic dialogue. The sense is we may make music together. We may understand meaning and its melodious flow between ourselves. If there is a discordancy let us further seek to perfect ourselves rather than to impute that the message is flawed that the source is flawed so that the impetus is upon us to build good instruments. What instrument do we have by which the divine music most manifests itself through the spheres? The soul of man. And how does it express itself in the world? The personality. And how is there an interchange, a communion, an orchestra of these souls, these personalities through the communion, the civilization, the tradition. So in this way some of the most esoteric doctrines that were ever handed down and rediscovered were made available through the genius of someone like Ficino through the genius of someone like John Colet. Understanding how to take those highest most difficult almost inaccessible realizations and bring them into everyday life so that practicing them seemed like the most mundane of matters so that the ignorant would look upon a master or a sage in the Hermetic tradition for many centuries and see nothing extraordinary. In fact it was of little interest because it didn't seem to be addicted to this wonderful authority and power which they had come to equate with truth. This of course will as we go on reveal itself more and more in the fact that those masters of the Hermetic tradition became completely disenchanted with any of the more worldly offices and in fact sought to impart what they could onto students in a very quiet way. The esoteric became the focus rather than the exoteric - especially on the continent - and it wasn't until around the turn of the next century, around the turn of about 1600, 1604, 1605, that we'll see the two, the esoteric and exoteric, coming back together again and this time coming together with a great resounding splash in the world as we'll see. In fact at about the time when they came back together two new stars were seen. There was a supernova in the constellation of Cygnus and the next year a supernova in the constellation of Sagittarius. So that in 1604 seeing these two new stars in the most interesting constellations of the time sort of a signal to them that God had been paying attention and that in fact everything that they had learned was true. And now it was time to bring it out in the open again and we'll see that.

But for now I think it's important to see how the transition went from Ficino in Florence to John Colet in London how the Platonic Academy in Florence was not replicated but re-presented all over again at Saint Paul's in London and that the difficulty of such a task is almost astronomical. When you think of all the variables involved with the fact that all this had to be done under some of the most headstrong people of their age. Ficino worked under Lorenzo Il Magnifico and Colet worked under Henry the Eighth. So if you have troubles in your life with somebody who seems domineering, work cheerfully, it can be done even under the most tyrannical of conditions and done in the most open way possible so it looks like you're just doing your guard duty, but all the while you are manifesting the very highest truths. Now when Ficino was working with his notion of the personality finding its fulfillment. If you recall last week we looked at his Book of Life, the third book, and we read how Plotinus had tackled this most difficult of tasks of how to make that quintessence, that presence in the soul, and his final statement in that sequence. And if you don't recall it there are tapes available. His final statement in that sequence was to cut away everything. Cut everything away. The old Orphic purification. The way in which one finally pares down. And Plotinus gave us this quotation.

"Are we to think that a being knowing itself must contain diversity that self-knowledge can be affirmed only when some one phase of the self perceives other phases and that therefore an absolutely simplex entity would be equally incapable of introversion and of self-awareness." In other words must there always be the emphasis on one aspect or another of dominating the self? The answer is no. It's no in Plotinus, it's no in Ficino, it's no in John Colet. That in fact this is to invite the travesty if one emphasizes one element over any of the others. One has a natural imbalance in one of the very definitions of demon in the ancient tradition was that of mindless elemental. In the Chaldean Oracles this is what it is to invite these kinds of powers in is the height of folly so that the making of a personality of equanimity is the very best defense against all of the aberrations that could occur. And Plotinus and Ficino and Dionysius the Areopagite and John Colet. All of them emphasized the fact that when one has a sense of equanimity to the personality that the divine participates directly God participates directly with the individual So that all of these free ionized mindless elementals in the world also get organized automatically. So that the whole world begins to reflect when the kingdom is established in one individual pretty soon the whole community and pretty soon one could have a Paradise a utopia but that the key to all of it was establishing the religious personality and a way for religious personalities to come together in this world. And that given just those bare minimums that rudder and that mast one could construct the ship of salvation anytime, anywhere whatsoever. And so that straight from the grand synthesis in Alexandria of the third century coming back into northern Italy in the 15th century and leaping into England with John Colet around the early 1500s, 1504, 1505, we have a straight line tradition which has undergone many vicissitudes but which then once re-established allowed the next generation of individuals to be able to see that in fact if this were the case if this were the truth if indeed this obtained in ourselves they could look back in retrospect and they could pick out individuals that heretofore had been scattered in the phony histories that had been given to man and they could reconstruct the mystical tradition as it had always obtained in the world. And so we find that there is increasingly, among the Hermetic scholars as we've said before, the great concern with establishing the fact that one understood the tradition and one's lineage went back to so-and-so and they to so-and-so and they on back through to the most ancient of sources. And that increasingly in this one would find the transformation of the individual to such a state and to such an extent that they would no longer even use the name that they had been born with. So that we find individuals who come up and they choose for themselves, or have given to them by a teacher, a new name almost like the American Indian practice. That now that you have come of age and you have transformed you are someone else. And you have every right to have a new name. So we have people named Theophrastus, Bombastus who get called Paracelsus. And we have some German man. Probably his real name was. Pfeiffer who calls himself not Hermes Trismegistus but Solomon Trismosin - thrice Moses.

So we have individuals like this that come up. We have people referred to just by these names and they assume that those who understand who have ears to hear will understand that a new integration has taken place and there's something new involved. I wish I had had time to bring in the Neoplatonic poems of Michelangelo which reflect Ficino's great influence and I wish I'd had time to show you some of Botticelli's portraits. Wish I'd had time to bring Mantegna's tarot deck and I wish I had time to show you Albrecht Dürer's Great Arch of Triumph for Maximilian. All of these visual evidences would have created for you just more convincing assurity that this had created in fact a civilization of its time as it always does. But the important thing for tonight was to have seen and recognized how a tradition transposes itself from one country to another from one language to another from one group of people in one kind of a civilization to another group of people and a different civilization because the northern Italy of the 1480s is quite different from the England of the 1520s. And yet and yet there was a continuity, there was a point of contact. And we'll see increasingly that because England had been involved in this transplanting in this re-presentation, that the tradition that fed almost like a waterfall into Germany from northern Italy. Many of the individuals we're dealing with are Germans. But there was from this time forward a kind of a resonance almost a paralleling between England and Germany. So that again and again we will see in the next 150 to 200 years that as soon as there is a development in Germany there is some kind of a response in England. And when there's a development in England there's some kind of a response in Germany. And it is no small wonder that at the end of this whole series that a German house, the House of Hanover, became the Kings of England about the time that the whole kit and caboodle, as somebody once described it, moved to this country.

Well I don't know where we've gotten to but I think I've gotten to a stopping place. Next week we'll see the great Trithemius and I'll try to bring some material which very few people have ever seen. Trithemius will be someone who's a contemporary of John Colet and in fact, if one makes a little template for oneself, and you put Ficino here as the thumb. You have Colet and you have Trithemius and the one we'll have next week Salomon Trismosin you have in those four individuals almost the basic quaternary structure of the secret brotherhood that so many people allude to from time to time. And in fact when the Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood comes out and talks about the original four members and how one of them lived in England well some of these things become a little more understandable and not so mythologically flamboyant but a little more accurate in terms of Mystica Chronologica. Enough said.