History 7
Presented on: Saturday, August 14, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History Seven, which means that in two weeks, by History Nine, we will go to a new pair of books. And the new pair of books will be Jacob Burkhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, and a German philosopher named Hegel, his little book on Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. So that we have coming up in two weeks one of the most popular books on History ever written and one of the most difficult books in philosophy ever attempted. And we're pairing them together. There's something about this pair, this third pair, that I think you need to know and you can be alert.
Burkhardt is writing about the Renaissance. The Renaissance, while it spread everywhere, many places, began in Italy and Burkhardt says it began in Northern Italy, and he says in fact it began in Florence and he says it began because a had full of individuals in Florence rediscovered the essential wisdom mystery of antiquity and brought it back to life. Brought it back into the play of living people's lives and that the long dormant seed was still alive and brought civilization back to its rebirth. So that classical civilization, which had died, lived again. And this had a very deep esoteric appeal. Which was not able to be articulated in Italy during the Renaissance. In fact it couldn't be articulated for several hundred years. It took a long time. But the, what seems to us, obvious association and link is that ancient civilization had died and had been mummified and that the mummified body of classical antiquity had been brought back to life and that this is the major theme of Egyptian civilization. This is what Egyptian civilization was all about. Why the pyramids, why the mummies, why the whole of Egyptian civilization is to preserve the dead for their eventual resurrection, for their rebirth. And that not only does an individual have this capacity, but evidently an entire civilization can be reborn after death.
So that there was an Egyptian seed to the Renaissance that took at least 250 years to mature and to be appreciated and the person who finally got the maturation of that Egyptian seed in the Renaissance was Napoleon. And the First Council made it his personal responsibility to lead his armies and take over Egypt and bring back the esoteric Egyptian learning to complete the Renaissance for a new world. And modern Egyptology is born with Napoleon. Not just to go and find the things buried there, and in Napoleon's time a lot of things were just on the surface. In the Renaissance in Italy, people had gawked at the buildings in Italy. At the antiquities in Italy, they went to Rome and they discovered that what for long ages had been considered mountainous ruins were actually not hills at all, they were the ruins of huge buildings from antiquity. People in the Middle Ages so misunderstood the scale of classical civilization. They thought the ruins of the baths of the Emperor Caracalla were natural forms or hillocks, because they had no idea of the scale of classical civilization. We today still do not have an idea of the scale of classical civilization. The Pharaoh's tower in Alexandria was a forty story building, twenty-three hundred years ago. They were huge, they were monstrous. Rome and Alexandria were metropolises of a couple of million people.
The whole idea of Napoleon was that he was going to bring back and finish the work of the Renaissance which was to completely start a new era of human civilization, completely. So Burkhardt's The Civilization of Italy in the Renaissance is a primal work, very formative. Because one of the keys there was that the great individual, the personal individual who was an artist for their own life can be good enough sometimes to become an artist in History. And that the great man, so called, or the great woman, the great man makes History to reshape the world. And Napoleon, while he began his First Council, was so successful that very soon he considered himself the right person for the job. Not just the Emperor of a very large France, but the re-shaper of the world. And so the bringing back of the Egyptian esoteric mysteries to Napoleon was one of his prize purposes.
The book that we're pairing with Burkhardt, Hegel's lectures on the Philosophy of History, is one of the most difficult books to read. Hegel, as a young man was completely taken up with the lion of German literature at the time, Goethe. Because in a way, Goethe as a contemporary of Napoleon was another candidate for a man who would redo civilization completely. But instead of having troupes and legions and winning battles and going into war and conquering territory, Goethe waged war on ignorance on every single front of human capacity. He mastered every single human literary talent. Histories, literature, poetry, science, whatever, he was the universal master of written language forms of consciousness and was very much the differential hero, much like Napoleon was the integral hero of the age. There was a time when they were in the same city at the same time; Goethe and Napoleon. And oddly enough the witness to it was Beethoven who was there at the same time. And Beethoven and Goethe are walking down the sidewalk when Napoleon comes riding down the street with his coterie of generals with their capes and their helmets with the plumes looking exactly like reborn Roman Councils. Goethe wanted to get out of the way, just let him pass through, let him do his stuff. And Beethoven tugged on Goethe and pulled him into the street and said no, he should get out of the way of us. He's just a world conqueror. Beethoven was that kind of a character.
Hegel prized this kind of elan that Goethe had and he never placed very high when he was a student. He was always sort of like C+ and consequently couldn't really get a good job and he spent many years just sort of like being on the fringes marginally. He used to, when he taught in a Swiss venue, go for walks in the Alps and get these nature visions. And then he would come home and he would read Goethe and the big philosopher was Kant, Immanuel Kant, who wanted to have a complete reworking of the way in which the human mind was structured. His Critique of Pure Reason, perhaps the most famous book since antiquity in philosophy, that the mind has a transcendental dimension which makes it introspectively more powerful than anything in nature, because when the human mind is added to anything in nature it can change it, it can transform it. One thing that Hegel picked out of Kant was the idea that Historical movement in conscious dimension is the key. For Hegel he saw that it was a key to a higher synthesis than had obtained before, that transformation re-birthed integration on a higher level and that what you had from before was now transformed into something new, a higher integral. Which is like taking the powers of vision and putting it back into the mind so that the mind steps up in orders of power, the symbolic comprehension. To someone like a Goethe, what happens is that the transform produces Art. But to someone like a Hegel produces more penetrating symbols capable of integrating on a synthesis finally outstrips the capacity of most minds to follow. So that the transform has to be applied to the mind itself. And the mind itself is a spiritual form. So that History becomes the movement of a vast spirit through the evolution of the world. The God is a really subtle phantom warrior evolving through us to some higher level of Cosmic synthesis that has never ever been seen before because it is new; it's creation ongoing.
And so Hegel and Burkhardt as a pair are very powerful. Extraordinary, you're getting the idea now, History is an enormously complex phase; it's a process that is daunting. There are many people who step to the threshold and for whatever reason, don't go any further. They just don't show up anymore. They just don't continue. They drop out. And of course the world has so many reasons ready and waiting for that; oh we have other things to do, we have to go other places. The scape-goating is infinite. It's actually a fractal infinity.
What is inescapable is what's brought out in the pair that we have now. Not Burkhardt and Hegel. They're good in their way, but the pair that we have now are the right pair to hold us by the shoulder, or if need be to grab us by the neck and to not let us move one step further away or to the side or falsely imagining that we're moving forward, because the situation is crucial. And that pair is Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Tacitus' The Annals of Imperial Rome. Hannah Arendt and Tacitus pin us to the moment existentially, sociologically, philosophically, Historically and do not let us squirm out from this. This is not a situation that you have an opinion about which effaces the importance of it. It's like a line of people in the 7-11 who listen to a snatch of Mozart and say we don't care for it, it's not interesting music. Mozart is always interesting music and just because the whole line of customers can't appreciate it means that they're uninteresting, not that Mozart is uninteresting. This material at this particular juncture is the only interesting material on the planet here. It's all that's of interest, because we're faced with what could be an ultimate tragic denouement, over exactly this historical point. This threshold of being caught by the throat and unable to move forward in any realistic way or to the side in any realistic way. And it's all bound up in the issue: what relationship would Hannah Arendt have to Tacitus? Why? Why would this man and this woman, separated by almost two thousand years, have anything to do with each other? Well, she's like writing about politics, and he's writing like about History, and so it's politics and History. And one wants to say that's very cursory. What does that mean?
Politics. Another Frenchman once said politics is the art of the possible, meaning how to get something done when there are whole factions of people who want to do it different from you, and you have to find some way to, at least temporarily, get enough of them to agree on a course of action. It's called manipulating power; it's called factions. And the set that holds factions into order is usually called a political party, and political parties are born in the age of Caesar. Exactly the time that Tacitus is writing about. Political parties are born with the age of, not the Caesars plural, or Caesar. What man was simply known as Caesar? That man was Julius Caesar. And the first person to simply call him Caesar was himself. He's the root source of Tacitus as a Roman Historian. Hardly ever brought out.
You can go to the classical Oxford University Press, annotated edition of The Annals and you will never find in here that Julius Caesar is the seed of Tacitus. When you open, here's a little translation of four of Caesars Histories: History of the Civil War, which he participated in, A History of the Alexandrian War, which he participated in, of the African War, which he participated in and of the Spanish War, which he participated in. In other words he writes always at the beginning in the third person, here is from the African War: "After traveling several days, doing a full day's journey everyday without exception, Caesar arrived in the seventeenth of December." At the beginning of The Spanish War: "Parnassus had been defeated, Africa taken over and the survivors of these campaigns fled with the young Gnaeus Pompeius while Caesar was detained in Italy by the celebration of his triumphs." And when you come to any of these, like the Alexandrian War, when the Alexandrian war flared up Caesar sent for all the ships from Rhodes, Syria, Cilicia he sent for archers from Crete, Cabalry, from Malkas. In other words, he garnered arms and armies from the entire Mediterranean world. When Caesar went to war, he called up his troops from every nook and cranny. The Mediterranean sea had become a Roman lake for the very first time, and Caesar third person, Caesar was the undisputed master of this. He sent an envoy one time to the legions that were up on the German borders and the troops were mutinying because they were not being handled in the right way, their term of service, their pay and the whole thing, and so the mob of officers yelling at the legate saying well who sent you anyway. Did the Roman people send you with excuses? Did the Senate send you and he looked at them and calmly with authority said, "The Master of Italy sent me". And they shut up.
Julius Caesar used to wear red boots and a Royal purple cape so that everyone could see that he was different from any other man you would ever meet because he was the master of history. He was the lord of whatever destiny had thought it was, but destiny is paltry compared to History. While destiny is a chance operation of nature, History is a planned operation of God, and God is much more superior to nature. So that the first great office that Julius Caesar held was the head of the Roman religion. He was the Pontifex Maximus, an office that's still operative in the world. It's called the Pope. Julius Caesar was a Pope before there was a Christianity. His grand nephew, Augustus Caesar (Augustus' mother was the daughter of Caesar's sister. So he wasn't his uncle but he was his grand-uncle), Augustus Caesar didn't become Pontiff Maximus until about 12 BC. He had taken over the world in 31 BC, almost twenty years, a whole generation. But Julius Caesar was Pontifex Maximus when he was still a young man and considered himself to be the rightful carrier of the higher conscious God planned History which dwarfed the mere destiny of mythic people. Mere people wrapped up in the myths of tribal outlook, of cultural styles, of dabbling in life were very little shrubs compared to the enormous forest of divinely planned and ordained historical development, and he was the head of this. And one of the terrifying structures of Roman religion was that it became so permeated with authority in the world, that anyone who controlled the structure of Roman Religion eventually controlled the way in which the world thought of itself historically. And Julius Caesar was the very first person to ever establish that that was the defining line of authority in this historical office. Absolutely.
So that when Tacitus, who comes long after Caesar, Caesar was born about 100 BC, died about 44 BC, was killed, was killed by his best friends on a fine sunny day in the very spot of Roman power, right in front of the entrance to the Senate. He was not killed by enemies, he was killed by his friends. Not because he was a failure but because, exactly and precisely, he was a success; he was doing exactly what he said he was going to do. He was going to reshape the entire world in a way in which only he knew how to do. He'd become, not only Pontifex Maximus but dictator for life. Julius Caesar styled time itself; the month of July is named for him. The month of August is named for his grand nephew Augustus. Time forms are named for them still to this day. Do you understand the scale of power we're dealing with here? Julius Caesar considered that he was a direct descendant of the Goddess Venus, Aphrodite. He carried, not only the political acumen of the greatest military general since Alexander the Great, perhaps even greater than Alexander, who knows. Napoleon used to think that it was Alexander or Julius Caesar or himself, one of the three was the greatest general of all time. But Julius Caesar saw himself, not only as a general without peer and the head of the Roman religion, but he carried the power, the transforming energy of the Goddess of Love, personally.
Not an Eros like in some erotic thing, this is a puerile understanding of Venus, of Aphrodite. Love is the energy of transforming natural forms, especially in bringing things to life. Love is the energy of birthing, of conception, of making a child, of making new life. And what other energy is responsible then for making rebirth? The same energy as makes birth, but on a higher more esoteric level. That while the natural capacity of Love is to birth, the supernatural capacity of Love is to rebirth, to bring the dead back into life. And that that higher power, that more condensed power of love is what Julius Caesar was convinced that he carried, he alone carried it. So he always refers to himself as simply Caesar. The Penguin Classic author of this book is simply Caesar. The German pronunciation of Caesar is Kaiser. The people in power just before Hitler, Kaiser so and so, still around, still there, has not left at all, has not budged. Because civilization also like us has been caught by the throat and held exactly immobile until some real step can be taken and no step has been taken for two thousand years. Not any step at all.
And this is where Hannah Arendt comes in because Hannah Arendt is looking, looking, looking at these situations, not only the Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Violence, Between Past and Future, On Revolution, she's looking at this entire panoply of themes that will not go away. In fact they're there more than ever and the problem is that on the level of Historical indexing of spiritual power there's some issue here that has something to do with God and God's relationship to man and that that relationship to man has something to do with Judaism. Because it got to an integral way back when, where that particular formulation was made the crux (I use that word advisedly), it was made the crux of world empire. It was something to do with the Universal State as a political form and the Jewish religion, especially effecting the prophetic future happenings of history. And it won't go away. How can it go? Where's it going to go? And so the problem is to try to find, how does this happen? Is this some kind of peculiar play of ideas, is somebody making this up, what is going on here? And it's illusive because it is so subtle and so massive, not that it is hard to find, but that it is so easy to find that it's illusive for that reason. Because it is everywhere, it is not noticeable that it is anything in particular. It's like a tint of a color that has been added to every color so that every time you look you see with that color factored in and you don't realize that it's been factored in. Or it's like a key to a type board where that particular letter is always held down so that whenever you write that letter is factored in all the time in the course of whatever composition, it's all factored in.
And so you have to learn to proof read in order to see that this is always there. One has to learn to proof read the spectrum of the history of ideas in order to see that there's something here that's always factored in. And that if you go far enough back it wasn't factored in completely, but it's still there and gets more so as time goes on and the period where it becomes crucial is the period that Tacitus is writing about. It becomes graphically plain in the first century AD, graphically plain. But it doesn't start there but was factored in hundreds and hundreds of years before that, thousands of years before that, but is plain at this time because it was factored in thousands of years before Tacitus in such a way that it is historically recurrent when certain time forms evolve and turn and come back again to a starting point and when they come back to that starting point, those starting factors reemerge again. And we live in a time where those starting factors have reemerged again, same. Exactly the same.
The key to it is to look at Tacitus the man. And in particular we would like to know about Tacitus, what sort of a man was he. And we know he was very successful in first century Rome. He was a military man who became one of the two pro councils of the roman empire, very powerful. Born in 55 AD and lived until the end of the Great reign of Trajan, 117, 118 AD. And in fact he begins writing his Histories about the time that Trajan rescued the Roman chaos at the end of the first century, About 96, 97 AD.
Trajan who was a very plain military genius, a kind of no cosmetic man, no PR, simply effective plain actions every minute of every hour of every day. And Trajan's Rome was the largest extent that Rome ever had; it was the apex of Roman power. Trajan's column still exists, still there. So under the aegis of the Trajan peace, Tacitus has the insight to look back on this unbelievably nightmarish century and write the History of it by focusing on the way in which the madness moved through that time form in the phases of the personalities of the Caesars and their successors, the Flavian Emperors. That the succession of Roman Emperors in the first century AD is a way to historically track a nightmare unfolding that leads up to the triumph of Trajan, that pulled people through. And that at the beginning of that nightmare is a man very much like Trajan only very sophisticated, Augustus Caesar. And that as long as Rome was under Augustus Caesar, Rome was run reasonably well. Not only was he born to the purple, as the saying goes, young Augustus Caesar, when he was an adolescent was apprenticed to his grand uncle, and Julius Caesar personally undertook his education. Personally drew out of Augustus universal qualities that no one else could have done; some of them very esoteric. He took the adolescent Augustus aside who was a mediocre physical sized man, not particularly impressive, and he said you have a birth mark here on your stomach that if you will look deeply into the pattern of this birth mark, this birth mark is the pattern of the great bear constellation in the heavens. My boy you are stamped with God's own greatness, don't disappoint him, or me. Do you get it.
So that when Augustus was seventeen, Julius Caesar made out his will and made him the heir of the emperor of the world, of the Master of Italy. This is my chosen heir. And so Augustus grew up in that way. And when he did conquer all of the opposition, he ruled Rome, he ruled the world for forty five years, which in antiquity was a life time. He was the undisputed master of the world for forty five years. So that when he died, the day that Augustus Caesar died was one of the most disarming days in the history of the world. We saw in the writings in our own time, the great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was in Moscow in Red Square the day that Stalin died. Stalin who'd taken over the lives, hearts and minds of the Russian people so long, most of them had grown up in his shadow, in his mindset, in his political terror, that when he died, Yevtushenko records that people, by the hundreds of thousands, milled aimlessly in Red Square and were panicked so much that they were trampling people to death and in order to stop everyone from dying of being trampled upon, the young students, of which Yevtushenko was one of them, started linking arms together to make human chains of structure in the seething nightmarish lost mob of orphans. Because a tyrannical dictator was gone and there was no one yet to replace him. This happened on the day of the death of Augustus Caesar to a nth degree. His chosen successor, the next emperor, he prepared everything, Augustus was complete, Tiberius, Tiberius Caesar.
And Tiberius Caesar had a false confidence that he could take over from his name sake because he had the power of astrology. He had control of the patterns of the heavens through his astrologers, and as long as he comported himself in that way, he was going to be alright, he was going to control the world. And for Tiberius, in his time, it worked reasonably well until the last years, but it transferred the confidence in running the Roman Empire from Earth to Heaven. From man to God. So that when Tiberius Caesar died, you needed a God/Man in order to run the world and his successor was Gaius Caligula, a nightmare brat if there ever was one. He lasted little over four years before everyone killed him. And for relief they brought in the blundering Claudius who was soon out maneuvered by his kinsman Nero who brought the Roman Empire down into the entire line of the Caesars. No one would touch anyone in that lineage after that so they looked for a new messianic figure who could be a God/Man and they found one who nominated himself, Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian dynasty. And when we come back from the break we'll take a look at all of this. How do we know all this? Because Tacitus wrote the History of that century, painstakingly from the seat of a man who was in power. He was the head of the Roman Empire in Asia when he started writing these things. He knew what he was talking about. But he also held a religious esoteric position that was even more mysterious than the one held by Julius Caesar. And we'll come back to that.
BREAK
So we come back to a very interesting complication with a lot of questions and with a sense of not knowing, not because we're ignorant or inexperienced, but because no one knows. We're taking Hannah Arendt as an example of someone in our time who asked very poignant questions. And in fact she asked the right questions and did the best that she could with the material that was available to her, which was the cream of European philosophic thought at the time. Her personal involvement, over a life time, with thinkers like Heidegger and Jaspers gave her credentials that make her a major figure in herself in Western philosophic history, in the late twentieth century we've come to appreciate. She's like one of those figures that we took earlier, Suzanne Langer, who studied with Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead and who's work came to rest in three great volumes at the end of her life, all bearing the title "Mind"; a trilogy about mind but the subtitle of the trilogy is Mind An Essay On Feeling. That a woman as a philosophic consciousness becomes aware that the mind as a form has its discipline, has its integral, culminates and indexes, in fact, the entire path integral of nature.
But it becomes apparent that the mind is not the be all and end all. Consciousness so transcends the mind that the mind becomes a bead on a piece of estate jewelry. It becomes dwarfed by the real to an extent that the usual wisdom saying is that a little humility goes a long way in this universe. That could you develop your mind to its ultimate, you might be surprised at what limitations you are necessarily embracing to do so. That traditional mode of going outside of the limitations of our body applies also to going outside the limitations of our mind. We call it Vision.
In archaic Greek antiquity, they said there were three modes of doing that; three modes of going outside of your body, outside of your mind. A Greek classicist around the middle of the Twentieth Century, E. R. Dodds wrote a book, a classic book, it was the Saether classical lectures at U.C. Berkeley, the end of the forties beginning of the fifties, the volume is I think still in print, The Greeks And The Irrational. The Greeks are famous for logic, they're famous for form, but they are also famous for mysteries that go outside of forms. And not just the Eleusinian mysteries, but those for a starter. Anyone who would have talked about the Eleusinian Mysteries in a formed mental written document would have been killed. It was not done. You can search the literature and you would not find anyone who divulges. The mysteries were really mysteries. What are those mysteries of? Those are mysteries of the 0 in nature which already in some way is in play before the 1s of existence come into registry.
So that the three ways of going outside of the body, and consequently outside of the mind, the first was ecstasy, which is the purview of Aphrodite, which is the realm of Venus who's spokesperson was Julius Caesar. He was Divinized, he was called Divine Julius in the Roman Empire. Divine Julius because he was the bearer of the energy of ecstasy, of Venus, of Aphrodite. He was able to go outside of himself and to operate there on those visionary levels. He was the number one first choice of Cleopatra to be a new kind of ruler with her that the world had never seen, in a proper way, since the ancient Pharaohs. Cleopatra and Caesar are the tandem before Antony and Cleopatra. Antony and Cleopatra is a rerun of Caesar and Cleopatra. And he was able to carry out his part in that pair because he was the carrier of that energy. Not saying that he was a dirty old man; saying he was the carrier of ecstatic avenues of vision. He was the Pontifex Maximus of the Roman religion. People leave that out. But he also was the greatest military mind, the greatest military general of a period that encompasses maybe a thousand years or more.
Another, a second mode of going outside the body, outside the mind, other than ecstasy was its masculine counterpart which is terror. You can be scared out of your wits. You can be scared out of your body. So that terror takes you outside just like ecstasy takes you outside. Ecstasy is the feminine, terror as the masculine; Aries. Aries, who in Roman religion is called Mars and Mars is one of the three great gods of Roman religion. Mars, in fact he's probably the central active figure in Roman religion, Mars, the god of war. Not only the god of war. Against who? Against the enemies of. . . . . . The initials were always used on the standards of the legions, every legion had standard bearers. They didn't carry flags, but they carried standards, they carried clumps of the kind of wands that ancient scepters, that ancient kings used to wear, but because there were so many kings that had been brought together under the king of kings, that the scepters were bunched together in things called fastis, but the fastis were behind the standards which bore the initials SPQR. The Senate and the Roman People; SPQR. Senatus Publicus Quarum Romanum, the Senate and the Roman People. That the Roman people were the kingdom and the kings of Rome had evolved into the Senate. So that the Roman Republic was run by the Senate. And SPQR was completely enclosed into a parenthesis by Julius Caesar. He said the Senate and the Roman People are who I look after.
And so the God/Man becomes, not the shepherd of the flock, that's an agricultural kind of a metaphor. He becomes the dictator for life for the Empire which protects the Senate and the Roman People. Not just protects the people, but also the Senate and the Roman People. And that protection extends to the laws, so that Roman law becomes the armor of Roman religion. And it becomes the purview of one man. It's not only that the buck stops there but the valuation of anything stops there. So that Julius Caesar set this kind of a precedent and it was a hot seat. When Mark Antony tried to occupy that seat, he became electrocuted by Divine Fire. He literally was psychically burned to a frazzle. Cleopatra enthused him way beyond his capacities. Mark Antony was a hell of a man, but in the challenges of Apocalyptic History a hell of a man doesn't go very far at all; about like a meteor in the universe, it's nothing actually. It doesn't matter how tough you are, it doesn't matter what kind of weapons you have, you're a heroic figure in a mythologic integral facing a seven dimensional acid that just dissolves you like that, it's nothing. Only a God/Man has any chance at all to swim in those waters. And Julius Caesar had made that position, had formulated it, had brought everything together. And when he was finally ready, after a generation of holding the power, Augustus Caesar assumed it, he also became Pontifex Maximus as well as - he didn't like to call himself Emperor, he called what he had established, not so much the Roman Empire, he called it the Principate. And it's known officially as the Augustan Principate. Principate from Prince, but not prince as like young king, but prince as in Principle, like first. Which is why Napoleon referred to himself when he was younger as First Council. First Council; you can say whatever you want to say after you hear me first. And because I'm in authority, you better think about what you're going to say after you hear me.
So that the masculine energy that holds the defense of those forms is not based on love: Venus, Aphrodite, ecstasy, but is based on terror, fear. And that's exactly what Hannah Arendt says that totalitarian states hold themselves together by the energy of fear. Not just fearfulness, but fear raised to an ultimate of terror. The Roman Empire, the Augustan Principate, the Roman Empire maintained itself by terror and constellated this kind of a form in History. So that it became a Historical happening, a Historical energy. And once it was loosed, there's no way that you can put that back into the box. It's like a masculine form of Pandora's Box. It's like once you split the atom with making an atomic bomb, then you have to worry about nuclear war. And it was exactly that on a psychic level that happened at the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. And it's exactly what Tacitus took as his challenge that the only chance that we have to deal with this, taking a clue from Thucydides, that once something like this goes into play, it's in play. And knowing human nature to repeat, to be caught in the integral cycles of annual happenings, we're going to relive these situations again and again and again. And Thucydides says in his History, knowing now what I know about mankind and History, all of these things will happen again, and so I write my History to alert you, you in the future, to keep your eyes open and your ears sharp. What did Jefferson say? Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty. That human beings have mobility in the dimensions of History only by learning and paying attention to what's going on, on all of those levels. And the biggest co-op in anesthetizing people is to assume that others in authority have it in hand. That the laws will protect you and the laws are maintained by the army, the military might who can inflict terror. But behind the laws, behind the army, is the religious vision.
And so it's the Roman religion that one needs to look at and Tacitus could well look at it. He understood Divine Julius because Tacitus was one of sixteen men in Rome who were in one of the oldest religious forms in Rome. The Latin, a phrase for them is long and convoluted, the phrase that is used actually means the order of the fourteen sacred men or fifteen sacred men. Actually there were sixteen. In ancient Rome there were first ten, and they were called the Ten Men and by Tacitus' time after many hundreds of years, it had raised up and there were sixteen. Those men were a secret society at the center of Roman religion and what they looked after were the prophetic Sibylline documents, the prophetic books of the Roman religion. So that whenever there were really serious deep questions which couldn't be handled by the Senate and the Roman People or the Roman Legions or the Roman Laws then you went to the Divinatory prophetic books which these sixteen men, not only protected and kept, but they were the only people who could interpret them. So that the interpretation of high religious prophecy was due to a small coterie of men and Tacitus was one of them.
The situation was exceedingly complicated because that collection of Sibylline Prophecies had been kept in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the center of Rome. Capitoline, one of the most conspicuous and powerful hills in Rome and at the very crest of it was the temple of Jupiter. That palace had been burned in a previous civil war in 83 BC all the Sibylline Books were burned. So they painstakingly had to be collected again from disparate parts of the Empire and when they brought them together they were amazed at how many variants had come up in various parts of the Empire, but the main clutch of these came from the center, the intellectual center of the ancient world. Probably 95% of them came from Alexandria. Copies were found in the great library of Alexandria and they were brought back to Rome and put in charge of this sacred fraternity of men, one of whom was Tacitus.
But those Sibylline Prophecies that were brought from the great library in Alexandria had a particular developmental addition, an additional dimension to them which was Jewish, and not simply for the most obvious reason. The most obvious reason is that the great library in Alexandria established by the immediate successor of Alexander The Great, under the aegis of Alexander himself saying that the center of the new city of the new world should be developed from a confluence of all the documents of wisdom from the entire planet. All mankind is our family. He called it the Ecumene, you get ecumenical from that. All, every human being in the world is a part of a universal family and this library will be the wisdom of the universal family, everything.
And so when they were collected together, in the 290's BC, it was pretty much completed, and then when old Ptolemy Soter died, one of the generals of Alexander the Great, his son Philadelphus, Ptolemy II, who was raised in luxury and trained to be a universal genius in these religious roles, found that there were major missing documents. That the documents of the Hebrews were not included in the library and so he specifically requested that these, that copies of the Jewish ancient wisdom be brought to the library and translated into Greek. And because he was Ptolemy II, he had that power and so the counsel of the learned in Jerusalem, in the temple, sent not only the documents, but they sent their own translators. They picked out a number of men from each of the twelve tribes, so that they sent 72 translators to make sure that the translation was a perfect rendition of what they had and that book exists still today; it's called the Septuagint. It's a Greek translation of the old testament and you can buy it, it's huge. For about a hundred bucks you can still buy it because it's still in print after twenty-three hundred years. While they were translating it, all of these Greek language ecumenical universal wise men are looking over their shoulders and saying oh we recognize this, this is like our stuff, this is interesting. And so esoteric Old Testament wisdom put a creative tincture into post Alexander the Great Greek Wisdom that went into especially prophetic books like the Sibylline documents. And when they were brought to Rome, the Roman registry of prophetic destiny in terms of historical unfolding of Divine power had a distinctly Jewish ring to it.
So that when the Caesar lineage fell with Nero and the Flavian Dynasty was coming into power, coming into play in the figure of the new Emperor Vespasian, exactly in the place that one would expect, it was in Alexandria. And Vespasian was sitting in the temple of Serapis on the thrown of the Alexandrian God and his people realized that he needed to have this esoteric power and the Roman Historian Suetonius, contemporary our Tacitus records this: "Vespasian, still rather bewildered in his new role of Emperor felt a certain lack of authority and of what might be called the Divine Spark. Yet both these attributes were granted him. As he sat on the tribunal two laborers, one blind, the other lame approached together begging to be healed. Apparently the God Serapis had promised them in a dream that if Vespasian would consent to spit in the blind man's eyes and touch the lame man's leg with his heal, both would be made well". Not talking about Jesus, talking about Vespasian. We're talking about a time of around 67 AD. These things were all transferred later by Roman writers for Roman purposes. "Vespasian had so little faith in his curative powers that he showed great reluctance in doing as he was asked, but his friends persuaded him to try, in the presence of a large audience too, and the charm worked. At the same time certain soothsayers were inspired to excavate a sacred site at Tegea in Arcadia where a hoard of very ancient vases were discovered, all painted with a striking likeness of Vespasian". Party politics in the age of Caesar.
So that when Vespasian starts the new Roman Emperor dynasty, the Flavian Dynasty, the very first thing that he realized is that he needs to fulfil the Jewish Messianic criteria. But being an urban boy, Vespasian realized there was competition to Rome and not from Alexandria, Alexandria was supine under his feet, but the competition was from Jerusalem. Not militarily, the Jewish army couldn't even stand up to one legion, and he wasn't talking about love, he wasn't talking about ecstasy. The issue was the Divine spark of religious mystery which Jerusalem had in the temple as a competition to the Capitoline Temple of Zeus, now held by Vespasian, so he instructed his son, his son to take the Roman armies and find some excuse and to dismantle the temple, which he did and he got carried away and he dismantled the entire city. In other words Jerusalem was totally destroyed along with the temple. And you have to understand that this happened just three years and a few days after Nero had destroyed Rome by fire. So that in the space of a thousand days you have the complete destruction of Rome and Jerusalem because they're by now a Historical bookend. Jerusalem had everything to do with the Sibylline Documents.
How do we know this? Augustus Caesar, in order to cement his power, to make to sure because he was the sort of man that he will like the ultimate Mafia boss he's going to make sure on every level that is conceivable. For instance, he sent out emissaries everywhere in the Roman world to take up any scraps or any fragments of the Sibylline Books that were left anywhere. And if anyone kept even a fragment they were put to death. And all of these scraps all of these fragments were brought to Rome and they were put into a sacred space that Augustus himself built specifically for them. It's called the Ara Pacis Augustae; the Temple of the Augustan Peace and it still exists and it's still there. It was found in the twentieth century under the ruins right in the center of the Roman Forum where Augustus had placed it. And when you look at the building there's an entrance, the outside of the building has a sculptural frieze and what the frieze has is figures, it's Augustus and his family and his power men going on a pilgrimage to enter this temple. So the outside of the temple is the actual consecration of the temple for all time in a sculptural frieze of exactly what happened when it was built, to hold all the scraps of prophecy. That there would be no written piece of prophecy anywhere in the world except there in that building controlled by Augustus. And on the inside against the back wall, as sort of the navel of ultimate power, you do not find a warrior like Mars; you don't find terror, and you don't find Aphrodite; you don't find ecstasy, but you find the Augustan version of the third way beyond your body and your mind. And the third way beyond, traditionally in Greek wisdom, was always Athena; that high wisdom is transcendental. High consciousness goes beyond the body and the mind.
But the Augustan version of it is that high consciousness embodies itself in the ultimate which is birth and rebirth. So that instead of Athena, the Augustan Principate version of that transcendence of the body, that transcendence of the mind is Mother Earth, Terra Mater, our mother, our mother who births us forever, who rebirths us forever. And so the image of the Mother, the archetypal transcendent mother who reoccurs in pristine accuracy when all of the star constellations come back around to the beginning in Virgo, so she's the Virgin Mother, because of that astrological correlation. She not only makes life come back every year in the spring, she helps life to come back at the end of every age. But she especially, esoterically helps all life to renew itself on a higher level after an entire great age, a Platonic great year, where all the twelve constellations have made a full circuit. And Augustus was certain that this was happening in his time. So that he commissioned his number one visionary, the epic poet Virgil. He commissioned him to write the Aeneid to solidify by a work of art in Historical process with visionary energy so that the Roman Empire would be eternal. In fact Rome is known as the eternal city because of that. The Eternal City.
And Augustus chose Virgil because Virgil was famous in that age of being the most visionary poet about these particular Messianic visionary things. Because he had written especially a thing called the Fourth Eclogue. The Eclogues are pastoral poetry. You can find translations of them; the Eclogues in the Georgics of Virgil, The Eclogues of Virgil. It says here: "The first poetic collection by one of Rome's most esteemed poets, composed between 42 and 35 BC, the Fourth Eclogue was composed in 40 BC for a very special occasion." Augustus, who was still Octavian Caesar had made a peace with Mark Antony in a place at the Southern tip of Italy called Brindisium and there the treaty between Mark Antony and Octavian Caesar, not yet Augustus, in 40 BC, was commemorated by Virgil in the Fourth Eclogue. It's called Virgil's Messianic Eclogue because all of previous literary criticism that understood the position of Virgil in ancient poetry was completely effaced and forgotten in the Christian millennia and Virgil was always considered a forerunner because he predicted the birth of Christ. When the Fourth Eclogue was actually written, about the expected birth of the boy from Mark Antony, who was going to marry a daughter of Pompeii to make sure that everything was cemented together, Augustus, daughter of Augustus, that this was going to be the cementing of Antony and Octavian together, [Nesa, I think it was Octavia the sister of Augustus who married Mark Antony] the daughter of Octavian and Mark Antony making a new child and that new child would be this Messianic figure. They didn't see it as a Jewish Messianic figure, but they saw it as the figure which the Sibylline Prophecies had predicted. They didn't understand that it also makes perfect allegorical sense if you read it as a Jewish expectation, as an Essene expectation.
So that when the Roman Empire, under Augustus, wanted to have somebody in control of the Jewish homeland, especially of the province of Judea, they chose Herod because Herod was particularly in tune with the Essenes who were the Jewish prophetic people at the time. And they predicted that Herod would live to see the Messiah. And so the Augustus Caesar, Pontifex Maximus, Roman religious people spoke the same language with the same imagery as Herod's Jewish leadership. And so you see the tremendous complication that when the Essenes or the wise men from the East say that the Messiah has been born in Bethlehem as a little child now, it was a political threat on the highest religious transcendence to Roman power. It wasn't like little stranger in the manger time. That's a kiddy story. It was the most ultimate threat to power in the world at the time. It would have been read by those individuals in Rome, who controlled the Sibylline Prophecies, the documents, they would have heard loud and clear and would have said to Augustus, make sure that Herod kills all the little children under a certain age, we don't want any competition. The fact that that was not successful, later on became, about 75-80 years later, the reason why Titus, son of Vespasian, not only massacred the little children, he effaced the temple in the city of the Jerusalem from the earth. The Romans did there what they did to Carthage. They expected that it would never ever come back. It would never be back, that this was finished forever.
And so you can imagine why there was such a consternation in someone like Tacitus when reading Virgil's Messianic Eclogue that the prophecy that's in here speaks about something which cannot be avoided. There's going to be a development which no one can stop because it's on the archetypal historical level.
I searched to find a good translation of the Fourth Eclogue and these translations are terrible: "Sicilian muse, I would try now a somewhat grander theme, shrubberies or meek tamarisks are not for all but if it's force they sing may the force be worthy of a council" (tosses book)
So I made my own translation for you from the Latin of the first ten lines so you can get the power that Virgil put into it two thousand years ago:
"Sicilian Muse, we a greater theme sing. Not all arbors delight in humble Tamarisk. If woods we sing, woods worthy of counsels. The unlimated Cumaean Age sung has come. A great sequence of century is order born, now returns the Virgin re-doing Saturn's reign, now new prodigies from high heaven sent, you with new born boy who first the iron desists so surge all the golden familied world. Look chaste Lucina, now your Apollo reigns." That's how Virgil's Latin reads in English. It is a dramatic blunt prophetic powerful every word cascading with a punch to the midsection of the third eye. And Tacitus understanding the Virgilean power of this kind of prophetic language and the responsibilities of Thucydidean history put them together. In Thucydides great men control history by great speeches. In Tacitus, transcendental convoluted visionary language itself is the field within which men must find their persons. In Tacitus it's the language itself that is the Hero. A language which becomes convoluted not in chaos but convoluted like the form of the brain itself. Instead of having the plane geometry of the mind's logical forms, it has the infinite convolutions of the structure of the brain itself. So that Tacitus' language is a language that engenders, not logic, but transcendental consciousness. It makes six dimensional forms of a personal conscious time space and it's those forms that can play in history. More next week.
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