Johannes Reuchlin

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I'm going to begin with a quotation from Johannes Reuchlin. Stephan wanted to be sure that I got my German pronunciation right. Reuchlin, rising smoke. The only extensive English translation of Reuchlin is in Renaissance Philosophy, volume two, published in the Modern Library and there is about 20 pages of him translated here. At the Philosophic Research Society we have Reuchlin's namesake, John Reuchlin donated the two great books in Latin, De Verbo Mirifico (The Terrific Word) and De Arte Kabalistic (The Art of Kabbalah). Both together in a small blue volume and if you go to the PRS library it's hidden away with all the books on magic in the upper annex so you won't find it on the normal shelves. I feel that if a magician can read Latin in this day and age, he's welcome to the information. But that's a prejudice on my part.

This is a translation from book one of De Arte Cabalistica and Reuchlin writes, “The difficulty is even further increased by the destruction of that natural aptitude which might be of efficacy with suitable training. Boys of a tender age not yet prudent deluded a long time by false teachers having abandoned the study of the best literature are driven to sordid sophisms by the persuasion of those whose ears admit nothing other than quote whether this or that is so.” In other words that blocky type of thinking, it's either this or that, and in our time that mentality has perfected its idol in the computer. Yes or no, positive or negative, and you may proceed only if you are one or the other. “As determined by their propositions and corollaries and abetting. This is the quick promotion of students to the higher levels. Students to whom such lofty topics should never be entrusted as they were previously unpracticed in humane letters. Wherefore in vain are they worn out with heavy labor they become ensnared in so many great brambles and thickets that they must retire before they reach the ripe years of venerable old age. Listen to the words of Job in the ancients is wisdom and in much time is prudence.”

This critique of education of course holds all the way through. It holds in our own time. But one of the few times in which it was accurately criticized and fought against in a constructive way was in the time period that is occupied by Reuchlin's life. He was born in 1455 and died in 1522 and in that time period, roughly 1450 to 1520 in that 70 years, we have one of those rare windows in the history of mankind where really great minds were able to be matured and able to come in contact with each other and produced an insight into the potentiality of civilization that has only been seen in our own time because we also are on a pinnacle of possibility upon an apex of potential in our own time. But if history is any guide at all - and it must surely be seen as a guide - those conditions never last for long - at a generation at the most, maybe two generations on the outside - before the conditions change. The patterns seem to seethe before our very eyes: individuals die off, ideas are curtailed, contacts are not allowed. So that the opportunity of the moment is of the essence. This condition, this opportunity, this pattern was seen with extraordinary clarity by most of the individuals that we have taken up so far in this course. And with Reuchlin tonight I'll try and sum up as I go along some of the insights that they had, some of the legacy which they sought to leave when they saw how precarious was the perch that they had made. We will see that after 1520 fewer and fewer individuals understood what had been created, what had been given them and it rapidly in the next generation goes underground. And when it is revived 80 or 90 years later in a brief flourish of about ten years almost all the major participants at that time cover themselves with a masterful labyrinth of oblique cover-ups so that those in power are unable to affect cases against them. And we will in fact see that the first indications of threatened authority on a massive scale occur near the end of Reuchlin’s life. And surprisingly one of the few figures in world history takes on the powers that be on their own grounds and beats them soundly and one gets the feeling that they let him off the hook because they could see that there were very few people who could follow up with the trophy won.

Now Reuchlin was born in Pforzheim in the Black Forest area of Germany, 1455. His father was a minor official at a Dominican monastery there, so that the young Reuchlin's schooling was in the monastery school. And I think from what I've been able to ascertain he was somewhat of a favorite there because he had a beautiful voice. He could speak extemporaneously with gorgeous tones. He could sing and was admitted to the choir as a young boy. And because of his excellent voice he was given a chance to attend school. He was briefly sent to the University of Freiburg at the age of 15, actually very early 15, just 15. He really learned nothing there. Did not stay there very long - six months, eight months - something like that. When the third son of a Count of Baden, Germany came of age to go to the University of Paris and the count recalling the wonderful manners, the excellent voice of Reuchlin, decided that Reuchlin was an excellent companion for his son and sent them both together, paid for everything off to the University of Paris.

Now Reuchlin had been somewhat of an intellectual prodigy as a youngster. He had learned Latin well enough to be - at 14, 15 - a part time tutor. His character was always remarkable. He had the capacity to be both serene and lively at the same time. I'm sure you know individuals like that. They're vibrant but they have an inner equilibrium so that they're good to be around. They're calming to be around, but their quick wit and their insight also makes it delightful. Reuchlin was this kind of a figure and it shows that he early had a sense of envisioned presence unto himself. These are the qualities that develop with contemplation, and when they're present in youngsters we say, colloquially, in this time that they're old souls. And by that we mean by the perception that they're well acquainted with life and the vicissitudes of the conditionals of phenomenal time-space and therefore they are at home. Reuchlin was this kind of a figure and a character.

When he got to an atmosphere like the University of Paris he took off. He was in his own milieu, the French would have it. And very quickly Reuchlin made all kinds of contacts. Now the University of Paris at that time, had in 1470 had just initiated the study of Greek. Enough of the wandering scholars from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 had made their way into positions finally. And at the University of Paris there was a teacher of Greek there that originally he was from Sparta and this particular individual, unnamed in the sources that I've checked on, not only taught Reuchlin Greek but taught him calligraphy which would have gone with the practice of making copies of books, illuminating manuscripts, and with his singing and his ability to use his calligraphic talents his penchant for languages he was already very good at Latin and quite quickly Greek became to him a very easy language. At the same time as learning Greek he began his studies of Hebrew and this was one of the first places, really, that Hebrew was able to be had. And Hebrew was taught at the University of Paris by Old John Wessel - W-E-S-S-E-L - who had been a disciple of Thomas a Kempis, the great extraordinary author of the Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ). Old John Wessel, in teaching the first fundamentals of Hebrew to Reuchlin, got him interested in the possibility of reading for himself the Old Testament. So that at the University of Paris the young boy, in his adolescence from 15 to 19 roughly, had the world opened up to him that one need not learn secondhand about life from anyone - even on the great levels of the Bible and Aristotle - that one in fact could learn the languages and that the command of the word would open up the portals of direct firsthand contact. And this of course was seen by someone of Reuchlin's caliber as both practical and as a mystical metaphor of the way in which life works. That if one learns the language one then has the key to open the threshold of direct contact and this would bear extraordinary fruit later on when it came to man's contact with God because for someone like Reuchlin it was simply a practical issue of learning God's language. And man would have that contact that you couldn't expect to have accurate visions and fulsome lives if you couldn't understand the language of divinity. So that this idea had its seed, and its genesis, and its nourishment, first for him at the University of Paris in the early 1470s.

Now this is just about the time when Ficino was getting his feet in Florence, just about the time that he was making his great translations of the Corpus Hermeticum. And his first coming to a sense of the translations of Plato so that Reuchlin at the University of Paris, and Ficino at the Florentine Academy, are two sparks of light coming awake and into capacity in Europe of the time, almost in consonance with each other. And the extraordinary feeling that one gets about Reuchlin the young boy that he accomplished became the Bishop of Utrecht eventually, some really famous position. But the sense that one gets is that Reuchlin was using his education not simply to prepare himself for a career - and that's why I read this quotation from him at the beginning - but that there was an exfoliation of human character that created a receptacle, an amphitheater, wherein the drama of real life was lived and played out. And along with his Greek and Hebrew studies at the University of Paris, there was a philosopher - termed in philosophic histories a realist as opposed to a scholastic or nominalist - and his name is several ways to use it but I think the correct form is Jean a’Lapide - A apostrophe L’A-P-I-D-E - Who died in 1496. It's the only date I could find in connection with him. But A’Lapide moved from the University of Paris to the University of Basel in 1474 and Reuchlin went with him. And the University of Basel of course being at the juncture of France and Germany and Switzerland, a real international intellectual crossroad, especially at this time, brought Reuchlin again into contact with an even larger world. And in 1477 he received a master's degree from the University of Basel but before that had written a Latin lexicon. Its title is the Vocabularius Breviloquus and that lexicon, written incidentally for a bookseller - booksellers in that day and age were not like the Crown B. Dalton Gang, they were educated individuals. The bookstore was a school without walls, a campus off-campus. And this bookseller published and promoted this volume. It went through many editions. It was used for a very very long time.

If you recall in the lecture on John Colet. Colet’s textbooks were used for several hundred years so an excellent text in this day, then, would carry your name and your fame throughout the educated world because there were not that many really good textbooks. So this Latin Lexicon and Grammar of Reuchlin - 1475, he was only 20 years old - made a name for him and sort of paved the way and made contacts for him all over Europe. And when he got his master's degree in 1477 he left to study law and it's a very curious thing. He went to France, he went to Orleans and then he went to Poitiers. He received his Licentiate in July of 1481 and took all of his learning, everything that he had, to a small university about 20 miles south of Stuttgart, Germany, a university which had just been founded in 1477. About four years before he got there, the University of Tübingen, which is one of the great German universities. It had been founded by an extraordinary man, Count Eberhard, whose home ground was in Württemberg. But he had founded the university there at Tübingen. And when Reuchlin arrived at the university he was brought to the attention of the count. And the count of course very much taken with the fact that here was a first-class genius, somebody who could teach on almost any subject in the university. So he became the patron of Reuchlin as long as he lived. He lived on into the 1490s. So that Reuchlin was suddenly raised up to a place where he was the interpreter, the companion, the voice of one of the most powerful German nobles at the time.

And the first thing that Count Eberhard did was to schedule an Italian trip. And in 1482 at the age of 26 he took Reuchlin with him and they went to Florence. And when Reuchlin met Ficino it was like blood brothers. There are very few individuals who ever meet a twin, someone whose intellect and whose spirit resonate in a similar pattern. And it's an extraordinary experience. Someone once likened it to two open doors facing each other. All the possibilities there are, exist. And it's just a matter of time and circumstance to select what one will do. Reuchlin and Ficino meeting in 1482. Both of them, extremely capable. Ficino a little bit older more the experience priest, but jovial, exquisite, profound gradual. Reuchlin more the young genius, the young accompaniment to the count. And yet the two of them together with their meeting ground formed the beginning of a lifelong liaison. And it is also the way in which the Florentine spirit made its way into German learning. And in fact later on when Reuchlin and Trithemius and Trismosin form a kind of pattern in the Hermetic tradition, Ficino really, had he have lived, would have been the fourth man. Because he dies in 1499, the fourth man becomes John Colet in London.

Now the trip also took Reuchlin to Rome. And at Rome he was a sensation. Here was a 26 year old German who could speak elegant exquisite Latin. He could speak Greek and he could even speak some Hebrew. The Pope was extraordinarily impressed with him and marked him down, as men of power and authority and that level will do, that here was somebody worthwhile. And this set the tone because 50, 40 years later when Reuchlin would have a trial on his Hebrew books, the whole works would be taken to Rome and the papacy would vote for Reuchlin and clear him and paved the way for the publication of the great book De Arte Cabalistica which we’ll come to and you'll see it marks an epoch of human freedom. At this time when he returned to Germany it was with the understanding that the liaisons and the contacts would be kept up and in fact Reuchlin often went to Italy and kept up his contacts with Ficino. Later when Pico came onto the scene he had a great meeting of minds with Pico also. So that all of this is going on in the background.

When he returned back to Germany. He was given the extraordinary elevation to a Count Palatine by one of the German emperors, Frederick the Third at that time. And we have the son of a very poor official in a monastery being raised up to, almost to what we would call nobility, the minor nobility. All on his own effort, absolutely an extraordinary event. And in this he was present at the coronation of the Emperor Maximilian and was present at the courts in Frankfurt and Cologne. And he became acquainted with Maximilian who we have seen throughout the lecture series is always involving himself with the major figures - Albrecht Dürer, Trithemius - again and again we find the individuals - Agrippa and so forth - all involved with Maximilian. And if I can ever find the Arch of Maximilian by Albrecht Dürer I will bring it and we will take a look at some of its symbolism. I'm still hoping we can find that. The center portion of that I have in a translation of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo showing Maximilian with some of the occult symbols around, but the entire arch must be seen. It was executed by Dürer about the same time that Mantegna was doing his tarot deck, which Mr. Hall republished in facsimile in his little book on the tarot.

Reuchlin, very quickly around this time around the mid 1480s, was given all kinds of accolades. He was made the proctor for all of the examinations in Germany. That is he is the one who oversaw the giving of exams and the grading and the giving of degrees and so forth. It was a job that he held for 30 years. It was not a paying job but it was a position of eminence. It gave him a recognized place in the intellectual world as being one of the handful of the really greats of his time. He was 30 years old. He was also given a doctorate degree, which is extraordinarily rare at that time, from the University of Tübingen. Mainly people would have Baccalaureates or Masters but he was given a Doctorate. And it was at this time that he began to travel extensively throughout Germany and also throughout Italy. And it was at this time, in the late 1480s, that he became very close to Trithemius. And if you recall that Trithemius was at Sponheim at this time, had collected one of the largest libraries of the time, over 2000 volumes all handwritten out. Had gotten the entire Monastery of Sponheim into a book copying spurt. And it was at this time that Trithemius was working on many of his great projects. Trithemius did an ecclesiastical dictionary which gave someone for the first time an overview of church history in terms of people and events and processes. He made the great cipher manual, the Steganographia. He was working on the Chronologica Mystica, the Great History. In other words, he was working as Ficino and Reuchlin were working on basic reference materials, not just books, but whole scales and horizons of reference material, so that the mature mind would have great scopes and capacities of information immediately available for thought, for freedom of conception. It's very difficult to think from scratch continuously on high levels. One needs to have a certain ground, a certain horizon lifted up.

The great merit in our time of the encyclopedias and dictionaries and the manuals and so forth is so common that we almost overlook this tremendous capacity. These men were making these basic major reference works and they were new because there hadn't been anything like this in Western Christendom for a thousand years. And all of them realizing that something was afoot in their generation in their time began to send students back and forth among themselves. And whether someone stayed put, as Trithemius did or Colet did at Saint Paul's in London, or whether they traveled, like Trismosin or Reuchlin, the sense of keeping in touch was really attenuated at this time. There were many wars. There were many religious movements at the time.

Just to give you some kind of an insight the breakup of the monolithic medieval psychology had produced a yearning, a hunger, inside individuals much like ourselves to want to know God, to want to have an experience themselves of the divine. And there were large groups of these persons. There were many communities of brethren that had come up. If you were at the lecture at PRS last week on Avicenna you know that a certain brethren of purity in the 10th century were influencing Avicenna and his father. There always have been these kinds of groups of questers communal religious fundamentalists who are looking for (A) way to have an experience on a personal level of the divine, (B) to have some communal expression some application in a social way of this vision and the freedom to enjoy it. The great boon to all of these people of course was the freeing up by printing of the great books. And the first book that came into the hands of individuals was of course the Bible. And the fact that a man could own a Bible, he could have his own Bible, was the sword that severed one of the major ties that had made many men puppets for untold centuries. The problem was how to read that book. And so these great movements, like Reuchlin studying Hebrew, were of the utmost importance. And in fact he persevered. He studied Hebrew with several individuals. At Linz he studied with the court physician there, a man named Jehiel Loanus and he studied the Old Testament and at the same time he worked on his Kabbalah. It is said in most of the standard references that he learned Kabbalah from Pico, but the fact is Pico really investigated for just several years. Reuchlin had spent decades with this and his great publication then of the mirific word, De Viribo Mirifico in 1494, was an extraordinary event. And you have to envision to yourself that the essence of the language was to open up thresholds of direct contact. That if a language like Hebrew had a secret mystical structure to it, which could be learned however difficult it was. And that the structure had a hierarchy of values and that that hierarchy of values led upward increasingly to a single unifying personage - God himself - then the name, the secret power name of God was the most efficacious instrument in the universe. And this was the mirific word. This was the capacity, the root source of all energy and transformation on whatever level or horizon of matter existed. And Reuchlin put this into a masterful treatise - 50, or 60, 70 pages at the most - and showed that a European man, a Christian man, a German man had understood the Hebrew language well enough had understood the Kabbalistic bones of the mystical vision of that language well enough to bring it to a head and write the mirific word.

This document was extraordinary and the reaction to this document was also extraordinary. Most of the hidebound monkish population looked with great jealousy upon this man and this publication. How dare he! And not only that he was going to show people how to read the Jewish language. It was the Jews who were the Christ killer. It was the Jews who were the problem. And all this anti-Semitic cloud began to raise its ugly head. And the papacy of course sensing a very very great threat, because if coupled with the fact that the printed Bible could go into every man's hand, if he could read the original he would need no translations. And the very last string of hierarchical power over man would be cut. Because if it became an everyday occurrence for people to read the Old Testament in the original themselves, what kinds of wonders would come out of this? And this of course is exactly the massive strategy that Reuchlin was thinking of. It was exactly the massive epochal revolutionary strategy that this hermetic pattern of Trithemius and Ficino and Reuchlin and Trismosin were aiming at - to prepare a fertile ground for the total transformation of man. Not by telling him what to do, not by making a corral of a new order for him to herd himself into, but to create a fruitful ground whereby generations to come could find themselves in their own ways and create whatever changes they needed in their own ways. And so we have really, an almost Jeffersonian view of democracy arising mystically at this time in Europe in these individuals, and the tools they were using, it was not a Declaration of Independence, or a Constitution, but the texts the grammars the basic material to put man in individually the driver's seat to see where his own traditions come from. If you want to understand Plato and Aristotle or if you want to understand Moses or Job or John or Matthew go yourself, with your own mind, your own capacities. This indeed was a great revolution and something worth thinking about.

And of course whenever there is a turmoil like this, Jung uses the term ‘enantiodromia’ - a complete topsy turvy, a turning over of the complete cultural matrix of the time, and that's what was happening - one gets all kinds of odd skews in the fallout. One gets phenomenons like the extremes of the various confessions at the time. Many people 70 years later would consider you worth talking to only if you had, for instance, signed the Augsburg Confession. You couldn't possibly be worth talking to unless you were of this particular rule and brand. Or you had to be Roman Catholic to the tee, or you had to be this or that or the other. This kind of true believer mentality, this kind of a psychology of clinging desperately to the delineated forms, the orthodox rules is one of the concomitants of this kind of enantiodromia, this freeing up not just of a viewpoint but of the entire possibility of man's life. Everything was up for grabs for a few decades in the early 16th century. It was a time of extraordinary genius and it spread internationally through all the countries of Europe.

And you had Erasmus doing his great edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516 because he expected there were going to be a lot of readers who needed to have the Greek. They're going to be able to read it. You had people like Reuchlin making Hebrew translations and then giving the Hebrew text of the Psalms believing that there were going to be lots of people reading this. You had Thomas More writing Utopia in England at the same time. All of these movements happen at the same time and are all linked together. And if we look at the wonderful, scintillating translations of Ficino, of Dionysius the Areopagite, we also have to see that his contemporary was Hieronymus Bosch who paints the Garden of Earthly Delights showing all kinds of chimeras and monsters of swallowing people, terrible visions of hell and damnation, at the same time all coming out as a fallout from this tremendous upheaval at the time. And the Hermetic tradition had an enormous responsibility to not only go ahead with this, keep on going with it - “let's get these things done” - but also to make those kinds of patterns of transformation. Those contacts between people, those transitions between institutions that would allow for this tremendous incoming energy. And they saw it quite distinctly as having made the correct forms to receive God. And of course in a natural world when the forms are there for reception the divine power comes in. Nietzsche once observed in great wisdom that when the half gods go God really does come.

All this was going on and the mirific word in 1494 was like a clarion call uniting together those individuals in Germany to the possibilities. The count who had been his patron, Count Eberhard, died in 1496 and the young son that took over - a bad lot as they say in England - caused Reuchlin to reconsider his position at Stuttgart and Tübingen and so he left for a couple of years. The new Count lasted about two years before court intrigues against his stupidity finally did him in. And in those two years Reuchlin made yet another trip to Italy. It's almost like a basic pattern that had been there for almost 20 years by then. Going back to Italy renewing his contacts visiting Ficino and he went to Rome and he studied Hebrew there with a very strange man Obadiah Sforno of Cesena - C-E-S-E-N-A - and there Reuchlin got training in the Kabbalah on a level which probably Pico had not realized was available. And in fact, Reuchlin, when he came back by 1500 he was back in Tübingen, he was back in Stuttgart, in that area, back in power. In fact they made him a very high judicial official. He was that until he retired in 1512. So he was assured of a very high position.

When he came back he worked on a preacher's manual which has in Latin the title De Arte Praedicandi. And with this preacher's manual - this was for Christian preachers - he began putting in some of the fundamentals of Greek and Hebrew along with the Latin so that he was preparing this mentality that would finally surface especially in Elizabethan England where people would be literate in the three great languages of antiquity: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. And by the time we'll see of Sir Francis Bacon in England one could find whole rooms full of people who were literate in all three of those languages could speak it could read it and could write it with elegance.

And of course what occurred to that generation was we will make our own translation of the Bible. We don't need Rome's translation and we'll make it into an English which is very much in tune with the mystical poetical possibilities of Hebrew and Greek. And from that we have the King James Bible - and we'll get to that. We'll see what a wonderful thing that is.

Reuchlin then did the first great textbook on Hebrew in Western Christian civilization. It was called De Rudiments Hebraicus - Hebraicus - and it was published in 1506 and was absolutely a smash. It didn't sell so much. It was enormous and it was costly. But the arguments became virulent and raged across Europe. Should Christians learn Hebrew? Why should they not learn Hebrew? Is our New Testament not based on the Old Testament? But how much is it based? Is there not a break? Is not Christianity different from Judaism, or is it somehow linked? Is there some mystical tie? All of these problems became focused and Reuchlin was the center of this controversy. And for years books came out pro and con. Finally Reuchlin in his elegant capacity, challenged long enough, wrote a book called Augenspiel and this book infuriated his opponents. He came right out and said that we are on the verge of either having a stupid society that will dead end itself in habitual idiocy, or we will have a new age where man will understand his own condition in terms of which God has always wanted him to understand and has never withheld the promise. Finally this book ended up in Rome some ten years later at the papal courts and of course they remembered Reuchlin. They loved him. And so in a way of power politics which the Vatican understands they put off the hundreds and hundreds of priestly recommendations that Reuchlin be flogged at least, perhaps much worse, and the papacy okayed the fact that Christians could learn Hebrew. That in fact, maybe there was something to be understood in that.

And it was at this moment that the great strategic genius of Reuchlin came roaring to the apex of his career. It's at this time that he brought out a manuscript that he'd been working on all his life the great De Arte Cabalistica. Because as soon as he had won the day for the learning of Hebrew he pushed the whole situation and said we're not only going to learn Hebrew but we're going to learn mystical Hebrew, we're going to learn Kabbalah. And the intellectual world was absolutely startled by yet a second publication to go with the mirific word and balancing it out, and the two of them present the Kabbalah in terms which it has always been understood in the West since then.

In fact, just to give you a couple of of insights in here. This is from Gershom Scholem’s Selections from the Zohar. Most of you have seen the Zohar, five big volumes in translation. This is just a little selection of tidbits, high points from the Zohar. The Zohar, written by Moses de Leon about 1280. And it's talking in here about the ten Sephiroth in this particular paragraph is quite interesting. It's about written word, and what written words mean and so forth and their references. Then Sholem gives us this in translation, “because in the beginning shape and form having not yet been created he that is God had neither shape nor form. Hence it is forbidden to one apprehending him as he is before creation to imagine him under any kind of form or shape not even by his letters hey and va, not either by his complete holy name nor by letter or sign of any kind. Thus for ye saw no manner of similitude unquote means you beheld nothing which could be imagined in form or shape nothing which you could embody into a finite conception.”

And of course this came beautifully into harmony with the unconditioned experience of the Godhead on Plotinus. It came into the play of all of these theological controversies exactly at the joining point of all of their mobility because they were all arguing in their various confessions and rules and arguments and religious viewpoints. They were all arguing about the ways in which man conceives of God. And Ficino from his angle and Reuchlin from his angle were saying that there is no way for man to conceive of God. He is not bound by any shape or any form. And the essence of true religion is to recognize this and to work and live daily with this condition. That God is unconditioned, has no final shape, no final form. Therefore there are only increasing ways, infinite harmonies, by which man can again and again discover God's workings, especially in language, especially in his communication with each other, and that only by this ring of circumstance, by this clothing of language and various levels of meaning, can man hope to manifest God. And only by keeping himself open and keeping these forms and shapes of communication from bottling up into a conception does God actually come and manifest. So that this tremendous pushing of De Arte Cabbalistica in 1517 comes exactly at the same time as when Luther knocked the 95 theses onto the door challenging the Roman church - the very same time.

This was like a lance into the side of the organizational church. It was one of those situations that produced a tremor of primordial fear in those authoritarian figures who were used to wielding institutional power and used to using positions as clubs to keep people in line and it was different from having the criticisms of the dissolute monks and the drunken priests in the 14th century that could be handled. You could get rid of those priests. You could get rid of those monks. You could sweep it under the table. You could not talk about it. You could finally say well they're all bad but we're going to give the sermon next Sunday and you better be there, or we're going to give communion and you better be there. This was different. These were issues that could not be swept under the rug. These were individuals who had attacked the very essence of the understanding of form and shape and capacity, not only the institutions, but the language which they use, the traditions which they based themselves on, the experiences which were absolutely essential to hold it all together and the reaction was as to be expected. The Holy War was declared, not out front, but people began being taken into little rooms where three individuals will sit and each one asks you a question. And in a familiar staccato pattern they build up some kind of case from your own reactions which they say you've shown so much guilt we have to dispense with you. Well-known technique. If you haven't been through it you haven't lived. I've been through that. It's an extraordinary experience. And the more transparent the idiocy of the events, the more rabid like hunters scenting game become the individuals, the interrogators. And thus the Inquisition came in. And thus all of the individuals who were involved with this were suddenly being shunted aside and squelched. And it became very very difficult after Reuchlin died - he died in 1522 - Trithemius died in 1518. Trismosin about 1520. John Colet died in 1516. All of them within about five years of each other passed on and it produced a tremendous generation of students. Thomas More, Erasmus, Paracelsus, Agrippa. Many individuals. Francisco Giorgi. Many individuals. But almost all of those individuals had to go underground. Thomas More was killed. Agrippa was made into a famous sorcerer. Paracelsus was considered garbled and perhaps a mad genius. Erasmus was let to be very quiet. And we have a silence coming again. And all through the 1530s one gets an increasing sense that maybe all this was in vain. Maybe none of this really would take. And through the 1540s increasingly the sense became that, well we have a Reformation. We have one power group against another power group. We have all the little splinter groups in your free to have your meetings in the houses and so forth but you can't go very far.

Then we have a curious thing happen which so often happens at moments where a great period in history is betrayed. We have an individual who comes along who all by himself, taking his knapsack on the back, goes around and collects all the bits and puts it together in himself. And all by himself exemplifies Is every single aspect that was there and becomes a cosmic teacher, a cosmic man. And the individual, born in 1527, went to the University of Cambridge in 1542, the year after Paracelsus died, and became a cause celebre. A man we'll talk about next week, the great Elizabethan magus, John Dee. The secret advisor to Queen Elizabeth. The monumental intellect of his age. The man who put together all over again the lost parts of the puzzle picked them up before they had gotten too cold and fitted them all together again and this time was determined that he would win through to the promise, and the promise was even greater than just reconstructing Hermetic civilization, the true principles of traditional philosophy as it applies to all the levels of man. But the great dream of all of being able to, from scratch, produce a way, a system, a logic which led directly to God personally, nothing less. And we'll see him attempt that under the patronage of no less a patron than Queen Elizabeth herself.

Well we'll see that next week.