Francis Bacon

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The date is May 3rd, 1983. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the origins of Hermetic science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Francis Bacon: The Advancement of Learning, 1605; and the Novum Organum, 1640.

So this is the 10th lecture in the series. And we're trying to trace the development of what I've chosen to designate as Hermetic Science. And Hermetic Science is an enigma. That means that there are contrary spiraling meanings and forces. So that while one movement generates an outward or an upward mobility there's a counter movement which generates a downward and inward movement. And this constitutes an enigma. And we're at now the point where the enigma becomes visible. And it's a peculiarity of Western civilization that this should have developed. This enigma, or this conundrum of philosophy did not develop in China. Indian history is devoid of recording such a bind. The history of the Americas has no parallel for us and there are no developments in ancient African or Egyptian civilizations that show this bind. So it's a peculiarity and the 17th century European mind struggled mightily to adjust itself socially and religiously to this developing enigma but to little avail. And when we read the 17th century history of Europe we are struck by enormous polarities manifesting themselves at the same time and increasingly so till at the end of the century that phenomenon which we know as modern science is born independently in Germany and independently in England. But the two births are related in the very fashion of the form of this enigma and the two great protagonists of modern science occur at the same time from the same roots going in different directions as fast as they can. In fact they had a famous feud in print in letters largely by proxy on one side. And we'll get in this course to that expression and I hope that we'll be able to have a better understanding of the problems of the 20th century because all the latent problems have manifested in our time and they were laid like booby traps in history during the 17th century. So we, in a very strange way, are left with this knot, this puzzle to figure out for ourselves. And we've not been faring so well in this century. And science has almost run us ragged with its polarities because we have not been in a position to historically understand how it came about. And without the historical matrix we cannot clearly fashion for ourselves a correct psychological assessment.

So with this course hopefully we’ll achieve the effect of at least raising in some clearer fashion the hermetic caduceus with its intertwining serpents which often go in different directions, but in the long run collectively harmonize themselves around the staff of life and that at the top of that staff of life is that mythical center the Eye of Horus, or that hermetic center the eye of transformation, or as we would say today, that sacred self which we know we must recover and we are determined to recover it, but we have been forced by ignorance and misunderstanding to take one path or the other and constantly then end up in a fragmented half-way limbo. And in order to set ourselves a right we must see in the large matrix of wholeness that both science and religion have a harmonious positing of energy in the beginning of the 17th century and we must reestablish that again in the 20th. If we are successful - and it is problematic at best at this time - if it is successful the 21st century will be similar in tone to the 14th century, which was the mystical century and all the great mystics occur in the 14th century. And we will have that if we are able to resolve this issue.

So this is really a practical course. I often hear people talk about how the self-help courses outdraw the philosophic courses. As if more instruction in astrology, or tarot, or I Ching, or any of the other excellent entertainment philosophies which do yield models of insight and do give us information, but all that tutoring must be put to work in a very practical way. We have to do something about ourselves, and ourselves includes a very large, powerful subconscious field. Not just a stream, but a whole field, an energy field, a matrix which has entertained enormous developments and if we do not tie them together, if we do not blend them, weave them, together into a fabric of life those loose ends will electrocute us. So these frayed endings of history which jangle our nerves, our sense of cultural anxiety today came undone through the creation of an enigma which we are now in a position to understand.

Last week we had John Dee And we noted that John Dee, very early in life, achieved some eminence. By the late 1540s he was in fact lecturing in Europe. He had left Cambridge and gone to Leuven, the University of Leuven. But this was the late 1540s. The last great representative of the Hermetic tradition in a living sense died in 1541 - that was Paracelsus. He died at the young age of 48. He died on the road. He was unable, personally, to transmit the lineage. Now we have not until just very recent history been able to appreciate what this might mean, that the importance for a spiritual tradition to have a lineage and not just to be recorded in books or documents - and I prize books very highly, and I prize documents and art very highly - but there is no substitute in a spiritual tradition for the first hand acquaintance with the master. The master disciple link, link upon link, producing a lineage, is indispensable for the wholeness, the wholesomeness of a spiritual tradition. And Paracelsus ended one enormous phase and flow, one lineage the Hermetic lineage and left it open. And for all of his great genius in reconstructing, through his library, through his contacts, John Dee's outstretched hand never touched Paracelsus in the flesh. Agrippa had died. Even Copernicus had died. Erasmus had died. Thomas More had died. The 1540s in European history is a gulf. The 8 or 9 years that separate - for symbolic purposes I use the hand of Paracelsus and the hand of John Dee. The seven or eight or nine years that separate these two hands are a break in the Hermetic tradition in the sense that the wholesomeness, how it all fits together in a living person, was interrupted and lost. And John Dee tried his best with great genius and tremendous insight to reconstruct it. But the difference between someone like Trithemius for whom it was a natural flow and someone like John Dee, for whom it was an act of being a international magus, there's a difference. And we found that Dee paid the price. He eventually led himself with all his intelligence and insight into experimenting on the continent of Europe - with what was later called angel magic - trying to reproduce in some ingenious and clever combination Jacob's Ladder to reach up to talk with the Lord. An impossible task.

One must start over in those kinds of conditions. One simply must start over. There's no sense in trying to reconstruct a lineage lost. One can appreciate it historically but for the veracity of the spirit one must go back, inside, indefinitely until a new lineage is established. This is the importance of a lineage, and this is the importance of keeping it intact. We have in our time that quandary before the Tibetan people who appreciate the value of lineages perhaps more than any other people and are faced with the quandary today, how to keep each of the varying lineages alive. So John Dee represents a break but he didn't recognize the break. It didn't occur to him that it was that important. He was young and talented. He was intellectual, capacious. He, very young, was published and had many international friends. He had their books. He had every advantage that we would like to see him have except the personal contact. And this showed up as it always does when it came time for him to transmit what he had learned. He didn't know how and the last years of John Dee are a sorry plight of an old man grown old and left to see. So that the individual that we come to this week has very little respect for the tradition. In fact Francis Bacon was willing to junk it. Although he was capable of picking it up, of carrying it on, and if it had been given to him in a living fashion he would have been the logical man to carry it on, the person. But as it is, Bacon chooses the other way. He decides to start all over again, which is intelligent, except that having junked the Hermetic tradition he starts by not going inward but by saying this is going to be a second philosophy. We're going to start all over again because we're going to put it on an external basis. We're going to put it on the basis of interpreting nature and we're going to use this time an inductive reasoning and we're going to use a method and this hopefully will yield a new view of the universe.

This was all well and good as we'll see for Bacon because of his genius, because of his close proximity to Dee, because of his close proximity with the still living tail ends of the Hermetic tradition. But when it came Bacon's turn to pass on what he had, there's the rub, there's the kicker in the works. And we find that European civilization, at this time, reflects very accurately in its large forms the spiritual problem that had been engendered. Europe is torn apart by the Thirty Years War. From 1618 to 1648 they spend all their time slaughtering each other. The countryside is devastated, the towns are depopulated. The sweeps of various attacks of plague and famine and war decimate Europe. It was much the experience that the Second World War brought. And in England we find that the problem becomes so acute that they depose the King. And a rough shod individual named Oliver Cromwell has Parliament take over the running of the country and the desecration of the monasteries, and the old tradition goes on for year after year. And England has a civil war so violent that even the protagonists of the civil war finally get tired of it and restore the kingship.

So that from about 1615 to about 1660 the heart of the 17th century we have war upon war upon war and it's an accurate reflection of what is happening spiritually to the human being at that time. In this welter of, almost like a maelstrom, of hopefulness and expectation many universal plans of redemption for man are born, and the hope is for a restoration. In fact, the English word for bringing culture and civilization back was, the restoration. And it owes its vocabulary and its impetus to Bacon's idea that what we need is not a reformation. The word Renaissance incidentally doesn't come in until the 19th century. But we don't need a reformation so much as we need a restoration, but a restoration back to a more primordial state of man. And in fact, Bacon shows in his person and in his influence this overwhelming conception that the Hermetic tradition had been linked up with the Greek and the Neoplatonic and the medieval and that all of this occurred within a larger context which was the development of biblical Judeo-Christian civilization and that the restoration of man then should go back to the beginning. So that constantly one is aware in Bacon of an idea that we must return to the wholesomeness of creation. And so he convinces himself and his followers and even his opponents that the object is to restore man to a religious wholeness which is given in the scriptures.

But given very early on and for a paradigm of this wholeness Bacon will center around the figure of Solomon so that Solomon symbolized by his temple will become for Bacon a first lamp of wholeness in civilization and that we should seek somehow to reorient ourselves not in terms of a tradition from Hermes or Plato but in terms of going back to restoring the Temple of Solomon. The building of the Second Temple becomes a very moot problem for Bacon. And in this we have to recognize some background. The Jews had been taken away from the Holy Land and had been taken to Babylon in the captivity under Nebuchadnezzar. It was a time of Daniel and Daniel's great vision was a presage of a returning back to Jerusalem. And within a generation the Jews did return back, but they found Jerusalem in ruins. It's about 550, 500 BC, 450 BC. All that was left of Solomon's Temple were a few walls and some plans and some memories. And so the reconstruction of Solomon's Temple was a historical phenomenon of the time of Ezra and the putting back together of the ancient Jewish wholeness to find and rebuild that temple. One of the primary symbols became the plumb bob which was like an architect's or a builder's reconstruction, the beginning of the reconstruction, finding out just how the temple lay. And this symbolism in Bacon's hands and in his mind becomes transmuted into a new plan, and a new program, and becomes one of the primary symbols in the Masonic orders. And all the other tools that are needed to reconstruct the temple, in terms of architecture, become symbolic instruments to reconstruct and restore man's wholeness, his life. And so the square and the compass and the plumb bob, all of the Masonic emblems, the two pillars and to go with the two pillars the central arch, the Royal Arch, and holding the Royal Arch in place the 30 degree keystone that would fit at the top. One-twelfth of a circle, a full sign of the zodiac.

All of these complications occur within one of the most complex minds that man has ever seen. And so with all of this is sort of a prelude in the background we come now to try to take a look at Bacon as a person in some sense in a short biography in some sense looking at his work. And what we find is an enormous pile of obfuscation. Nothing is clear or at least one finds a page clear and then one finds hundreds of pages that are clear but one is absolutely stymied at how all these clear pages fit together in any structure. The strategy of Francis Bacon's mind was to make it so vast and so specific that it would in fact be tantamount to invisibility. And so we have a great enigma of a man right at the center and right at the juncture of the enigma of Western civilization. And our problem becomes thus doubly complicated because in order to appreciate how a major bifurcation in the religious consciousness of Western man came about, the key figure for us is also bifurcated and full of obstructions granted, needed by the exigencies of the time and handled by a mighty genius. But it produces for us a real quandary.

For instance, one of the basic physical facts about Bacon was that he was born in February of 1561. We're not sure just who his parents were. It is traditionally said that Sir Nicholas Bacon, very prominent at the court of Elizabeth, was his father and his mother a very educated woman. And yet it is asserted by many individuals who have looked at this era closely, come to the conclusion that he must have been the son of Queen Elizabeth herself, and that his father was Robert Dudley. It's impossible looking at the material and the evidence for me to make a clear distinction, I cannot tell. There are good cases either way. One of the most peculiar incidents is when you hold a portrait of Sir Francis Bacon up to his father. There are very few physical characteristics that carry over so that the sense of character and portraiture tells me that this man was not the other man's son. And yet the facts, the information, seem to indicate that that would be the case. When one holds Sir Francis Bacon's portrait near a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the first one gets an uncanny sense that this is the mother of that man. It is a quandary as I say, and as far as I can tell, unsolvable.

The basic situation was that Sir Francis was raised from birth in the household of Sir Nicholas Bacon, that they were frequently visited by Queen Elizabeth, and the young Francis was given every opportunity to become a darling of the court. He was beloved. He was ingenious. He was one of those little boys who insightfully seemed to know everything and within a week can prove it to you. That sort of a character. By the time that he became an adolescent it seemed that Elizabeth took umbrage in particular to this young man and increasingly for the rest of her life seemed to despise him with some intent, held him back from promotion, showed absolutely no favoritism, which is in itself is an indication. And it was not until after her death that Francis Bacon enjoyed the quick rise to eminence and power under Queen Elizabeth's successor James the First. It's very peculiar.

When he was 15 or 16 he decided that the English university system held nothing for him and he was sent to France, to Paris, for three years. So he came of age in Paris at the University of Paris and its environs. And when he came back to England he had a great appreciation - not just for the Parisian outlook on life with its elegance, its sense of benevolence, but the Italian learning, the new learning which had penetrated in a very fulsome way at Paris had influenced Bacon. If some of you are interested, one of the Italian thinkers that influenced him was Telesio, Bernardo Telesio. But I rather think that Bacon had the sort of mind which Carl Jung would have characterized as neither introvert nor extrovert, but as centrovert. That everything coming in gets woven in a skein around an ever-widening sense of self. And so what would become in a frozen or a static form, egotism saves itself from that tragedy and that end by ever-expanding and ever-increasing. And it's a way of maintaining balance in an egotistical way by ever-expanding by having an encyclopedic range increasingly in life. And this encyclopedic range was constantly fed by Bacon. His entire life was a learning experience for him. He never considered himself to matriculate beyond the student realm, and in a sense laid a pattern for the later development of the encyclopedic reference system which would manifest itself in France with Diderot and the French encyclopedias. It became apparent in other words after the pattern of Francis Bacon that in order for Western man to maintain his balance with the choices that he was about to make, he would have to go on learning indefinitely and increasingly.

Now this is extremely famous as a position psychologically and the figure that embodies this symbolically to a T is Doctor Faustus who must increasingly know all to save himself. And it's peculiar for us to think of Francis Bacon and Doctor Faustus in the same breath until it occurs to us with an astounding penetration that it was exactly, at this time, that Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus, 1592. And it's not so much that Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus about Bacon but that he wrote it in that atmosphere that was maturing around the time that Bacon became 30, 31 years of age, just about the age that Plato says we are at last able to learn something for real because we realize at last that we are definitely in it before 30. You seem not to quite believe that you're involved so that the appearance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in 1592 is a landmark, a milestone, a beacon light, which we must be conscious of. And in fact conscious for another large reason. The eminent appearance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was a cause celebre among the Hermetic community in London.

Now Marlowe was a brash young man who died fighting in a bar. His reddish hair went with the yard long steins that he hoisted and I'm sure that he must have been talking about his work long before he finished it. And a group, very much concerned with the defamation of the Hermetic magus figure, which would occur by the publication and the staging of Doctor Faustus, very quickly found a playwright to rush into print the antidote before the poison could be spread. And two months before Doctor Faustus was published and performed, two months before that in 1592, a playwright named Robert Greene brought out The Tragical History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Now Friar Bacon very interestingly is about Roger Bacon, the great hermetic alchemist of England from the 13th century. But it was at a time when Sir Francis Bacon had reached his maturity and was coming into his own. And to salvage the figure of a man named Bacon, representing the fruits, the best fruits of the Hermetic tradition, at a time when Doctor Faustus was just coming out on stage is almost too good to pass up.

Robert Greene spelled G-R-E-E-N-E, who wrote this, had been put up to it not by his own intuition. He was at that time in his life quickly wasting away what wonderful genius he had. Also in the bars and with as many different ladies as he could manage. In fact the group that put Robert Greene up to this task who considered this a very sacred task indeed took umbrage at the fact that Greene who would have been chosen and wrote this for the group should have continued to dissipate his life so disgustingly so that one of the group published four letters and some sonnets in 1592 castigating Robert Greene so as to show that Greene himself was not to be respected, although the play about Friar Bacon was to maintain itself. And the man who published these letters and these sonnets at the time is one of the most unsung heroes of world literature, at least by his real name. His real name was Gabriel Harvey. And Gabriel Harvey was really somebody. And maybe in some future time I will have a real good lecture, or maybe if things work out a good lecture series on the pen name of Gabriel Harvey. He was one of the Elizabethan giants. He was born in 1545 so he was about 16 years older than Francis Bacon. And Gabriel Harvey was the only man in England who had Bacon matched - learning for learning, scope for scope. In fact Gabriel Harvey was one of the real geniuses of the Elizabethan age, and he was able to pass through all of the degrees at Cambridge. And when it came time to be elected Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, enemies who suspected him of not really being one of the boys, but being of another group another clique refused to have him elected. He was finally elected, and then the court refused to validate it, and so Gabriel Harvey in 1585 left Cambridge and went to London to practice as a lawyer, and on the side to practice as a playwright. In fact, Gabriel Harvey was involved with a tremendous dispute that arose and reached such proportions that the theater world of London at the time was in an uproar for the entire decade of the 1590s. And the other person involved in this uproar was the great Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe.

Now Nashe took umbrage at the fact that Robert Greene should have been slighted. He was a drinking buddy of his and well-known. So he published a volume getting back at Gabriel Harvey. In fact the title of it was Strange News, 1593. And in Strange News he takes apart Harvey, and his brother Richard, and his sister Mercy. And Gabriel Harvey, one of the world's greatest wits replied in 1593 to Nashe's work in Pierce's Supererogation or a New Praise of the Old ass. And of course Nashe could not take this lying down. So he published a tract in broadside called Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem and it was so vituperative that he published a broadside apologizing for what he had done. And Harvey of course paraded it around London in the back green room of The Globe and other places that he often frequented that he had won this debate and Nashe republished Christ's Tears with even more information. So Harvey, having command, more command, of the English language than any living person has ever had wrote a tract which was called The Trimming of Thomas Nashe gentleman. And the argument by this time reached such proportions that the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered both men on pain of losing their soul to burn all of their diatribes. It had become that important.

Now if there is any candidate in all the welter of Elizabethan hidden gentlemen for the penship of some of the greatest plays in the English language, I think you would do well to consider the oft maligned figure of Gabriel Harvey. I know you haven't heard of him, but you haven't heard of a number of individuals and neither have I. And we should all have some humility in this regard. Gabriel Harvey lived to be 85. He lived until 1630 and he went into retirement to his estate in Essex which had the wonderful universal name of Saffron Cloves, or Saffron Walden as it's known. And so this Saffron Walden is really a shrine that students of English literature should approach from time to time. The gent was buried there.

In all of this Sir Francis Bacon was involved. He was very close to the group, but he was close in a sense of being a younger generation. Now Gabriel Harvey's best friends were the cream of the literary giants of England. Edmund Spenser, his first work The Shepherd's Calendar, characterized his friend Gabriel Harvey as one of the major characters and himself as the other major character. The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, dedicated to raising the allegorical understanding of Elizabeth's reign, had a lot of intelligence and learning in it due to his great friend Gabriel Harvey. Sir Philip Sidney who was one of the most dashing young men of the time, one of the literary giants, who if he had not died in his 30s would have been at least the equivalent of some of the major figures like John Milton. Sir Philip Sidney was one of the closest friends of Harvey and of course we have seen that Sidney was largely influenced by John Dee. All the other individuals who are available in Dee's life, Sir Edward Dwyer was a great friend of Harvey, and in fact Gabriel Harvey, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Edward Dwyer were responsible for lifting English poetry out of the 15th century 16th century doldrums that it had been in and left it in the shape that we know today as Elizabethan poetry. And these three men are the creators of that literary style and of that literary vocabulary in drama, in poetry, in epic, and in prose. So these are really major figures.

Bacon was a younger member of that group. The first time that he is noted in John Dee’s diary and the only time is when he goes visiting there at the age of 19 in about 1580. Now Bacon had to find a way to make a living. His background and his parentage what should have sustained him quite well simply played out for him. It was as if he had too many enemies. Too many persons were willing to see Francis Bacon not really make it. And so the young genius settled for a law career and took apartments, quarters at Gray's Inn in London along with a lot of other barristers and began to practice law. He also began to size up his life with a mentality that we would recognize today as almost that of a James Bond thriller. He began to see labyrinthine ways that people around him in positions of power, and positions of decision, were filled with possibilities and quite often were subject to the most intricate plots of revenge or ambition. And to protect himself from the vicissitudes of these labyrinthine plots, Francis Bacon began to seek for a better and better perspective on the whole.

In other words, he began to practice a very peculiar kind of yoga, a perspective yoga very much like what someone I used to know would call the game of parentheses, that whatever was happening you were able to manufacture a larger context and see that whole labyrinth within an ever larger context and that within an ever larger one. And so matching the sense of gaining stability by ever increasing knowledge. There was a sense in gaining insight by ever increasing depth. And this process in a very natural way, like any yoga, once organized to a point of single-minded perception produces a wonderful transformation in the individual. He becomes able to see the world revisioned, that it no longer appears to him in the habit of the age no matter what that age is. He has worked his way out of the habitual mentality which most of his fellow beings would still assume to be real. And from this vantage point Francis Bacon became very much for a while a peculiar soul loose in London. He was able to look around himself and to see that in fact most of the so-called operations toward wisdom in his time led only to blank dead ends. And he became increasingly aware of the fact that there must be a real destiny for man somewhere, and that most likely it was created at the beginning and needed to be restored in the future. So that there was no use in crying over spilt milk for traditions that were not working out or getting involved in trying to keep alive traditions that could clearly be seen to produce individuals who were just scattered.

So he became increasingly convinced in himself that what was needed was a group of cooperating human beings who worked together in terms of a future refinement of man that no matter what they knew at the present time, however grand and glorious that might seem, it would soon be palled and dwarfed by what man could discover with working groups refining themselves through actual experience. And more and more Bacon set himself the task to organize this group, this brotherhood, this fraternity. And he tried many ways. And one of the ways that comes down to us is the form that Freemasonry took. Another of the ways that it came down to us is the structure that the Royal Society for the Advancement of Learning in London took. And another way was the development of the Virginia Colony. And another way was the development of mathematical and physical science which became, finally, a blossom in the genius and hands of Sir Isaac Newton.

Now all of this development by Bacon reached a culmination after Elizabeth died. She died in 1603 and it was apparent within a year's time that Bacon was finally going to be alright. James the First had come in, and he recognized that he, representing the Stuarts, instead of the Tudors, had to have some talented individuals who could work and who could run this kingdom. And Francis Bacon seemed to him a pretty good boy, a real right hand man, somebody that he could give a problem task to and consider it solved no matter what it was. So that increasingly under James the First, Bacon rose until he finally became Chancellor of England and raised to the peerage made Lord Verulam and given Saint Albans as a castle home. All of this very very quickly, within 15 years, 17 years, Bacon was Chancellor of England - the second most powerful man in England.

In 1605 sensing that his destiny was finally come round and hoping that he finally had the conditions under which he could work Bacon with great certainty and firmness published his first major work which was called, The Advancement of Learning - that was in 1605. Now The Advancement of Learning was put out to the world at the same time as a whole raft of publications were coming out on the continent. The foremost of those would be Johann Arndt’s True Christianity. And Johann Arndt - an extraordinarily famous - and next week when we get to Johann Valentin Andrea we'll talk a lot about Johann Arndt. One of the giants of the Reformation, the later Reformation, and True Christianity by him is still in print. And in fact when the American colonists came over if they had any other book besides the Bible they would have Johann Ernst’s True Christianity. Both these seminal works came out exactly at the same time - along with other publications which we'll get into next week - in a concerted salvo to open up the cultural awareness and the psychological conditions of the time, open up the perception that a new age had dawned. And of course to go with this in the most forceful way imaginable there were two supernovas in the sky. There was a supernova in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan and a supernova in the constellation of Sagittarius within a year or a year and a half's time of each other. So that Europe was simply astir with great portents. And Bacon's Advancement of Learning laid a foundation of saying that what was wrong with man was that he had not learned to learn, and that the capacities of man had never been tested to the full, and in fact the quandaries that man increasingly and constantly would find himself in were problems and problems are solvable by the mind. But they are only solvable by the mind if the mind works in a logical way. And in fact what was wrong was that through centuries, if not millennia, of habituation man misused his mind terribly. And that in fact the criticism radically ran back to the phenomenon of the very form of logical thinking itself. In fact one of the classic documents that had been kept in translation through the entire medieval period was Aristotle's logic known as The Organon. And Bacon within 15 years of the Advancement of Learning would publish the Novum Organum. The New Learning, The New Logic, a new form of thinking. And with the advancement of learning and the Novum Organum Bacon shook the intellectual world of Europe. It was never the same afterwards.

In The Advancement of Learning he says, he writes that, “There is no end of making books and that much reading is weariness of the flesh.” And again in another place, “that in spacious knowledge there is much contestation and that he that increaseth knowledge increaseth anxiety. We shall not be spoiled through vain philosophy.” In other words we have a built-in problem because any solution that we come up to, entertaining in face of the problems of life, is the wrong solution. Not because our decisions are so much wrong but that the basis of making the decision is wrong. The methodology by which we make any decision is wrong, so that until we change our methodology we are never going to have workable answers. So that what we have to do - and Bacon is reiterating what he had to do to survive - is that we have to step back outside of all the frames of reference which have been handed to us and take a chance that we're not going to disappear or fall down or perish or go crazy and stand outside those frames of reference and take a good clear look at where we actually are. And when we do this we discover that we occur within nature. We actually do occur within nature. And so if we are bereft, as Bacon if I have time to show you. Bacon rejects. Rejects. Rejects. You can't have this. You can't have this. You can't have this. No hermetic tradition. Plato is nice but he's not right. Aristotle is even worse. What are you left with? You're left with patient experimenting with nature. Brick by brick patiently, manifestation by manifestation, building up some trustworthy body of information. In other words, developing science as we know it today.

And in this development what occurs to Bacon increasingly is that we not be seduced by vain philosophies. They may sound well to us at some time in our life. They may even actually seem to offer a synthesis from time to time. But there's a vanity because they are man-based, they are mind-based. And his criticism in The Advancement of Learning goes to the root of the problem that man's mind has been corrupted so long that its very structure is untenable. And since we cannot tear the mind out of the person we have to then restore man's mind back to its original state as much as we can. And that this then means a reharmonizing of man's mind according to the original design. For Bacon is absolutely convinced that a design is implicit in man and in nature and all of man's incorrect ideas have not larded up nature. It is exactly according to plan. So that if man will refashion the design of his mind he will go back to trying to learn from nature and mirror its design in himself. And by changing slowly, gradually, his mind, he will be able to entertain a clarification of process which will then allow him to learn at last in a real fashion so that The Advancement of Learning, enormous document that it is - more than just the 200 or so pages. Each page is enormously complex, a kind of a rhetorical style which has complication within complication. And in fact Bacon was so concerned that The Advancement of Learning be understood that he reworked it after it was published in 1605 and then republished it with nine additional chapters ballooning its bulk out enormously but published it in Latin and called it the De Augmentus Scientia. And in fact there is only one English translation of the full Advancement of Learning and that's very difficult to find. There's one copy at UCLA and one copy at the PRS in the vault and it was done in 1640.

Why would he do this? Why put it into Latin? Because the complexity of the Elizabethan Latin style could hold a densification of thought appropriate to the message that Bacon was seeking to deliver. And in fact Bacon was convinced that in order for man to realize the need for the restoration of his mind, and hence the restoration of his character, and hence the restoration of his civilization, that man needs to be confronted by a confusion, by a chaos. And this explains the need on Bacon's part and the reoccurring conditions under which a researcher must labor of finding bits and pieces and traces of Bacon all over the place but never the full story so that one is driven to the conclusion that the only way to understand it all is simply to read it all over and over again until it occurs to you what kind of a pattern it forms. And in this Bacon is mirroring the basic realization of the Elizabethan age, a realization that is mirrored in the plays of Shakespeare, that man's spiritual realization does not work on a linear, argumentative fashion but that it is a pattern realization. What we would today call a gestalt which comes from having seen hints and clues all over but that we with our own insight have to fill in. And it's only by filling it in, connecting the dots, solving the cipher, that we realize what it's all about. And if anything characterizes the Elizabethan mind it's the preoccupation with cipher and information granulated and refined to a point teasing the understanding that it does make sense. But that the only way it's going to make sense is if you learn our method of putting it together. And to learn our method you have to dissolve all the habits of a lifetime, all the habits of a civilization that you've been comfortable with. And only by reconstructing your approach can you reconstruct our message. And by the time you've reconstructed your approach you will understand our message very clearly. This is the mentality. This is the feeling that's involved.

And I guess I won't go into all The Advancement of Learning, it would just take a lot of our time. But I do want to present somewhat the Novum Organum. And for this we need to fill in now. Bacon had become increasingly a favorite of James, James the first. He had in fact finally taken a wife and he had received an estate. He was in a position to contact, because of his royal court position and prerogatives, he was in a position to contact most of the individuals of his time who were serious about reforming or restoring man. And as this group increased, one individual which I'll name for you was David Sir David Lindsay Lord Balfour's Lord Belarius who had a mystical garden in the French style where there was a labyrinth cut out of bushes and the person going through this garden would go through a certain initiatory process and later on that process would be mirrored in the initiation patterns of the Masonic orders.

Now if someone takes a look at the degrees of the Masonic orders you realize that there are major breaks constituting major sub-cycles and the first sub-cycle of degrees is from the first degree to the fourteenth degree. And from the first to the fourteenth degree is what would be known as craft masonry, that this would be a stage growth. Bacon loved to talk about growth by tables. What we would call stages today. Horizons of information. Until one had seen all of this phase, one could not move on to the next step. The first fourteen degrees of masonry end with the apprentice becoming capable of a transcendent experience, and the thirteenth degree is the Royal Arch degree which is the mystical keystone to the development of that lodge of the craft. And the fifteenth degree through the eighteenth degree are on a totally different horizon of experience and they are called the Rosy Cross degrees. And when one has reached the perfection of craft masonry, one is ready to entertain those four degrees which form a complete mystical reformation, or restoration, of the individual to a presence, a sense of presence, which is not based upon any previously held state of nature. It is a transcendental self which is presented, and one then becomes a Knight of the Rose Cross, having achieved this.

And the nineteenth degree, immediately after, initiates another lodge which is parallel to the lodge of the craft perfections, but this one is called the Lodge of Perfection. And from the nineteenth degree on one begins not as an apprentice but as a grand pontiff so that one learns to carry this Rosicrucian experience back into the world, and that as one goes up to the development of craft efficiency to the point of understanding what all of it is about, at the top of that pyramid forever there is a open space, a floating eye above the blocks which is free transcendent from them, which sees the other side too of how it comes back into the world. And so those degrees in the Lodge of Perfection, are the perfection or the completing of the whole pattern. And this was one of Francis Bacon's favorite ploys in his philosophy and in his mind, that if man will participate in nature he will discover that his place in nature is to fulfill it, to complete it, to bring about a restoration of mankind so that mankind belongs to the natural realm. This process he called science. And science for him was knowing, or gnosis, if you care to use that phrase.

In this program of creating enormous organizations, enormous plans and designs for organizations to carry this out, Bacon from the pinnacle of success as the Chancellor of England tried to write a master plan which would unfold itself over centuries and to create it in such a way that progressively generations after him would begin to discover hidden within the plan further possibilities and to ensure the fact that this plan would be discovered near the end of its completion and seen in retrospect to have been a unity of growth. He posited that many of the basic documents that went into this should be buried in vaults.

And our major document which forms a beginning for this design was the publication, soon after The Advancement of Learning and just before the Novum Organum, of the King James Version of the Bible. Now the King James Version of the Bible in one fell swoop raised the comprehensive level of the English speaking world. It was the most radical publication probably in that time of history because it made available in a daily reading way one of the largest most significant symbolical vocabularies to the common man, to the average person, to the families. So that progressively as they would use this instrument of learning they would not only inform themselves about the content of the Old Testament and the New Testament, but they would train themselves in a highly sophisticated spiritual scientific revelatory language which they would appropriate for their own, and be able to pass on generation after generation. This of course was an enormous step forward and was linked to the publication in 1516 of Erasmus's Greek Testament. But whereas Erasmus had published it for the scholar, for the individual who could raise himself up through patient study to the Greek, the King James Bible sought to reform the intelligence of the English-speaking mind. And this it has done.

Bacon in his Novum Organum, which came out in 1620 about nine years after the King James Bible, says “everything depends upon our fixing the mind's eye steadily in order to receive their images exactly as they exist.” The fault depends on our ability to keep our minds stable and if we are able to keep our minds stable, without its baggage of habitual jumping to the gun inferences, man will be able to see things as they actually are, as they actually exist. He says, “to receive their images exactly as they exist and may God never permit us to give out the dream of our fancy as a model of the world, but rather in his kindness vouchsafe to us the means of writing of revelation and true vision of the traces and stamps of the creator on his creatures.” And then he inserts a prayer. And this is at the beginning of the Novum Organum. He says, “May thou therefore, O father who gave us the light of vision as the first fruit of creation.” The light of vision as the first fruit of creation. “And hast inspired the countenance of man with the light of understanding as the completion of thy works.” So that there is a beginning in creation of a vision which is a light of vision. It is not a physical creating of matter, but it's a creating of a condition of light which can be visioned and that the completion of that is the natural summation in its durational phenomenal manifestation of man being understand what that vision was. And in understanding it, tutoring himself in the ways of nature to be able to interpret nature to its completeness to its fullness.

And so he says of his plan which he called the Great Instauratio Magna, the great instauration. We're going to instigate this plan and make it happen. Bring it about. He says that the great part in this, which the Novum Organum occupies, is the art of interpreting nature. The art of interpreting nature. So that science with this new logic becomes the art of interpreting nature. And he says we have to steer in between two perils two diseases which have plagued the mind consistently since Adam. And those two perils are the arrogance of dogmatism on one hand the arrogance of dogmatism and on the other the despair of skepticism. Someone once observed very wisely that you can end up with skepticism if you like but you cannot start with it because there's nowhere to start. And that's what makes skepticism at the beginning a despair the despair of skepticism and the arrogance of dogmatism.

How do we keep between the two which ever pull at us? Bacon in many ways shows us that they have so entrenched themselves in humankind so habituated our minds that we to use a common 20th century term we unconsciously veer into either one or the other all the time. During the course of a day during the course of a week during the course of a lifetime we are constantly pulled. Almost to use the term subconsciously to one or the other. How do we stay clear of them? He says there's only one way a middle way. And that is the test of experience. The test of experience. And so that we're committing ourselves to the high seas of discovery. We don't know what's out there but we're not going to be afraid to sail into the unknown because we have a method which we can rely on which is the test of experience. And this is going to help us. Our method he writes is that we must reject the operation of the mind which follows close upon the senses and open up and establish a new and certain course for the mind from the first actual perceptions. And in order to prepare ourselves to entertain these actual perceptions we have to demystify all this penumbra of associative habituation which has come upon us time and time again. And this means that we have to prepare ourselves for a new kind of logic.

He says. He writes. This is in the preface of the Novum Organum 1620. After the mind by the daily habit and intercourse of life has become prepossessed with corrupted doctrines and filled with the vainest idols idols idols the art of logic therefore being as we have mentioned too late a precaution and in no way remedying the matter has tended more to confirm errors than to disclose truth. Our only remaining hope and salvation is to begin the whole labor of the mind again. Remember what I talked about? There had been a break in the 1540s. The Hermetic tradition had not been passed on. The lineage had stopped with the death of Paracelsus. And here we have it in 1620. In print the major mind of that time stating our only remaining hope and salvation is to begin the whole labor of the mind again. Not leaving it to itself but directing it perpetually from the very first and attaining our end as if it were by mechanical aid. So we're going to walk into the night. We're going to sail on the high seas. But we have a help for ourselves. We have the test of experience by an increasing range of science and that while we may look very foolish at the beginning later on when we get good at it we will look very good indeed and it will be firm. It will be certain, confirmable, and that this method will yield at the other side of this tunnel not only a light but a promised land.

All of these concerns that came out at this time found their expression in the American colonies. They seemed to this group, to Southampton and Raleigh and Bacon. They seemed to this group to offer a wonderful test ground because there was no European tradition there. There were no habits of thought there. There were no ghosts of the past there. It was in fact a chance to start over not only in human terms but in social terms. And so the first vision of America in the European mind at this time was that the new world would give us a chance to see what man looked like from scratch. And in fact there was a great deal of publicity at the time of the noble American Indian who was a primordial man and Mantao and some of the Indians that were brought to the Elizabethan court were the rage of London. They were looked upon as pristine, primordial human beings, healthy, able to conduct themselves without the benefit or the corruption of Plato or Aristotle, or any of the others. And so with these paradigms, coming into confluence, the supernovas, the development of the new World, the development of a new method, the indications that we were at last reaching a level of maturity, Bacon wrote his version of the Utopia which was called The New Atlantis. And in The New Atlantis, which he left unfinished just as Plato near the apex of his career also left his Atlantis mythos unfinished, the Critias, it breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Bacon broke his off about the same way. To indicate that it was not so much a written work, which was unfinished, but it was an experience which we have to have which is unfinished. That only by us participating in this drive does any utopia actually come to be finished because any real utopia must affect the reader in such a way that he is moved to finish that work himself. That if you find a utopia finished on paper it's as dead as the day it was finished. That somebody else has put the coat on it. Somebody else has punctuated it with a period and that's it. But that a real forceful utopia gives to the reader in mid-passage the ball, as we would say, and Bacon's New Atlantis is enormously interesting.

I'm sorry we don't have time to go into it fully. It begins by sailors leaving the coast of Peru and heading out over across the Pacific Ocean. Now in the early 17th century this was about as far out as you could get. This is about as unknown as you could get. Sailing westward across the Pacific Ocean from the coast of Peru was as unknown as anyone could conceive of. It was farther further away than going to the moon in our time. In this condition they lose control of their ship. They lose hope for their lives. And the crew by some miracle sights a cloud and the cloud has a peculiar shape and it leads them to this island, this land. And it's called Ben Salem. Ben, son; Salem, peace. Son of peace from the Arabic. And there the individuals are shown that this civilization this New Atlantis has survived for a very long time because they are able to organize themselves around a college of the six days work. And the six days of course are a creative primordiality mode and if man can school himself in that college then he is reinterpreting nature in a radically real way and is able to learn.

In The New Atlantis they have an interesting description - I'll skip over all the other selections I was going to give you but this description here. “At the same time in an age after or more the inhabitants of the great Atlantis did flourish. For though the narration and description which is made by a great man,” that is Plato in his Critias, “with you of the descendants of Neptune planted there and of the magnificent temple, palace, city and hill and the manifold streams of goodly navigable rivers which as so many chains and fire and the same sight and temple and the several degrees of ascent whereby men did climb up to the same as if it had been a Scala Coeli.” Climbing a ladder of heaven or perfection. “Be all poetical and fabulous yet so much is true that the said country of Atlantis as well as that of Peru then called Coya as that of Mexico then named Tyrambel were mighty and proud kingdoms in arms shipping and riches so mighty as at one time or at least within the space of ten years they both made two great expeditions. They of Tyrambel through the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea, and they of Coya through the South Sea. Upon this our island and for the former of these which was into Europe. The same author amongst you as it seemeth had some relation from the Egyptian priest from whom he cited. For assuredly such a thing there was.”

Now it's absolutely uncanny because it wasn't until the 20th century that archaeology uncovered a meaningful understanding of the word Coya in terms of the Inca civilization. And it's a viable term. There is almost no way that 300 years before Francis Bacon could have had access to that information except by some unknown or as we would term today occult avenue of information. The same for the ancient Mexico designation. So there are mysteries in Bacon, tremendous mysteries. But the point for him was not so much the disclosure of anything occult by tradition, great as that might be, but to him the tremendous drive was to disclose to man that he himself was a locked treasure box that would never open until he had the right key. And not only that until he knew what to do with the key. And like the fable of old, the key has to be turned a certain number of times in the lock. The old fable was seven times. It's not just having the key and having the treasure box but it's knowing how to make them work together. And knowing the cycles of decipherment of nature was to Bacon the only way by which man would save himself. Because he had inherited a mind so confused that it was only by this therapy of restoration that he could regain a sanity needed to be able to look upon himself and recognize who he was. And like any good Yogi the discovery of what you are comes as a shock. And this is the shock that Bacon was attempting to prepare any individual who would try to mount that sacred journey by putting all of the work necessary for that reconstruction into an order that could only be reassembled by the patient sifting of the person restoring his own mentality, learning the new logic, the new learning.

Well, when Bacon died in 1626 the tremendous influence of the Thirty Years War and the civil war in England all but washed out these expectations. And it was not until the 1640s that there really was the beginning of a move, on a few people's parts and a few homes in London and Oxford and Cambridge, a few places in Europe, where people began to whisper to each other what about this promise of the future? And it wasn't until the 1660s that they could actually get together and begin to patiently see and test the water. Is this going to work? Are we going to be able to use any of this? Are we in fact an unknown quantity? Someone said in our time, are we an actor looking for the production?

I think next week with Johann Valentin Andrea I'll be able to give you the compliment to the English side with Bacon to give you the European side because there we find the same development but in another way, another mode of apperception, because increasingly what happens in Europe is that an uncanny mysticism seems to rise almost as a mist. And as Bacon seeks to be more and more specific out here, the German mind and spirit seeks to be more and more specific in here. And in doing so sets up a similar quandary to that engendered by Bacon. Because if the outer world is confused to the English, the inner world is confused to the Germans in much the same way. For much the same purposes. At the same time, and yet and yet, strange as it may seem, both developments are related and both are held still within the crucible of the developing experience of Hermetic science. And there are yet great individuals on the horizon who will come to put it all back together again.

Well we'll see some more next week.