History 8
Presented on: Saturday, August 21, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History Eight and we're now two thirds of the way through History with today's presentation. If you have a spear to throw that spear optimally, you hold it about two thirds of the way back. The hyper optimal throwing is from the end of the spear but men were not strong enough to hold the end of the spear and throw it that way until they learned to make spear throwers that cup the end of the spear and then they held it in such a way they could throw it. But the classic way, the javelin throw is about two thirds of the way back. So that in the twelve lectures of History, it's true that History Six is in the middle and in an mental way, the mental symbolism is that History Six is the middle of the History section. That's the way the mind understands and that's a geometricity. But in terms of existence, the existential understanding is that if you hold the spear in the middle, even though it balances it and is the geometric center, you cannot throw it very well. So that the existential center is different from the mental center. The Symbol center is different from the Ritual center; the Ritual center for a spear is two thirds of the way back.
This is a poignant object lesson in the way in which the mind, without being untruthful, deceives us automatically by a misplaced geometry. And one of the great flaws and errors of the classical mind was that the Greeks became addicted to geometry. You never find that addiction in China; you never find it in India. And consequently the European mentality that is a descendant of the Greek geometricity used to suspect that the Asians were rather primitive, or rather wishy washy, and we know that that's not true at all, it never was true. That that kind of judgement is based on a false identity that has a lot to do with arrogance and that judgement, that identity was built into an ideology and that ideology, that identity, that judgement walked on the two legs of a process known as dialectic which was the perfect idiocy. It was incorporating the necessary and sufficient structure of polarity into the way in which human life was then judged and the way in which identity was formulated and all of this became an ideological combine that almost sank us in the twentieth century. We came very close to being Xed out. Not by aliens who's spaceships are fifteen miles in diameter but by ourselves out of stupidity. We barely escaped the twentieth century because of massive stupidity.
And so this education is the cure for that. The cure. And we are at History Eight, we're closing out the pair of Hannah Arendt and Tacitus and we're going to still consider them today. Consider them as we have been, not as text books but as a provisional focus within which and around which and bridging both those aspects, the within and the around of having a more or less moveable feast focus to the presentation. Giving the language, not a stage but a theater within which to work. We don't trust stages anymore for very good reasons. We've seen that both sides of the stage, both sides of the Victorian stage model are actually disguised psychological firing squads and we've been killed too many times by that kind of crap and it's over, it's finished. And the twenty-first century will have nothing to do with it.
So that we have a theater of ideas. We have a play of understanding. We have a whole cast of meaning, but the production is one that is not finished and so we're enjoying rehearsals, and that's where we are. We're not at any place to talk about Truths with capital T's, but we're certainly in the theater of ideas to consider what we might understand outside of identity, outside of judgement, outside of ideologies and especially outside of that kind of dialectic nonsense of making polarity move and thereby thinking that you go somewhere. It's a Cartesian geometry flaw. It makes very good sense to the geometric mind, it doesn't work in life at all. And two of the great culminating men thinkers/philosophers in the European tradition came to reject it completely, about a hundred years ago, more than a hundred years ago, starting about a hundred-fifty years ago. We know now that the history of an idea takes about a hundred-fifty years for it to germinate in the personal secret individual mind of someone far out, and it takes about a hundred-fifty years for it to become the palaver on the street so that the man or woman on the street talks that way. It takes about that time.
A hundred-fifty years ago, the individual who began the existential questioning of the entire mental scenario was a Danish man named Soren Kierkegaard. And he questioned in such a poignant way it infected the (he was Danish), it infected the whole Southern quality of thinkers centered in Germany. And the other figure was Friedrich Nietszche. And when the German mind was turning to fascism, turning into a Nazi ideological juggernaut, one of the most distinguished of all the philosophers at the time, took Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and made public lectures in Germany, at the intellectual center of Germany, at the University of Heidelberg and publicly went on record said that all of this is ridiculous to the nth degree. That was in 1935 and the man's name was Carl Jaspers and he was the lifelong friend of Hannah Arendt. Their letters together are many many hundreds of pages. Hannah Arendt and Carl Jaspers, they were friends for a whole lifetime. Began in the mid 1920's and lasted until she died, 1975. She always looked to Jaspers as the humane intellectual father of her work.
Paired, often paired with Jaspers, in terms of German high intellectual existential phenomenological thought is another man who's name is Heidegger, Martin Heidegger who was also a life long acquaintance of Hannah Arendt. In fact when she was a student, young beautiful student under Heidegger, she became his lover. He was the married Heir Professor, big man on campus, she studied under him and all of her life, Heidegger became for her the increasing example of someone who has betrayed the intellectual qualities that are necessary for a civilization.
The book that comes out of her relationship with Martin Heidegger is The Origins of Totalitarianism. And on page 461, a chapter entitled Ideology and Terror. Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, a new form of government. She writes: "Or whether on the contrary there is such a thing as the nature of totalitarian government. Whether it has it's own essence and can be compared with and defined like other forms of government such as Western thought has known and recognized since the times of ancient philosophy. If this is true then the entirely new and unprecedented forms of totalitarian organization and course of action must rest on one of the few basic experiences which men can have. Whenever they live together and are concerned with public affairs, if there is a basic experience which finds it's political expression in totalitarian domination, then in view of the novelty of the totalitarian form of government this must be an experience which for what ever reason has never before served as the foundation of a body politic and who's general mood, although it may be familiar in every other respect, never before has pervaded and directed the handling of public affairs. If we consider this in terms of the history of ideas it seems extremely unlikely that this should be true." That this totalitarian form of ideology and terror should be new on the scale in which people were having to cope with it in our time. But she writes: "For the forms of government under which men live have been very few, they were discovered early, classified by the Greeks and have proved extraordinarily long lived. If we apply these findings, who's fundamental idea despite many variations did not change in the past two and a half thousand years that separate Plato from say Kant [a German philosopher who lived in the previous century from her]. We are tempted at once to interpret totalitarianism as some modern form of tyranny that is a lawless government where power is wielded by one man. Arbitrary power unrestricted by law wielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests of the governed. On the one hand fear as the principle of action, namely fear of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people. These have been the hallmarks of tyranny throughout our tradition."
But what she is saying is that there has emerged a new radically evil development. That when we look at the arch tyranny in Western world history it's the Roman Empire, without a doubt. And successors and variations, there's always someone claiming to resuscitate it, a Charlemagne, a Napoleon. But Hitler was not a Charlemagne, he was not a Napoleon he was a radically different phenomena. Whereas they manipulated laws, Hitler ignored laws. It's not about the Roman law tradition and power being manipulated by manipulating those who hold power oligarchically, it's about one Fuhrer who was exempt from criticism forever. And actually is a development which is psychotic. It is an abstraction of one man rule that has divorced itself completely from its roots and from any kind of context and now functions psychotically as an aberrant abstracted autonomous force which is particularly inimicable of human beings. Especially human beings on an increasingly list of slovenly flaws for which they must be killed because they are not perfect. And so the twentieth century saw the development of the most curious kind of radical evil. Truly Demonic.
A quality that in past historical situations was always considered to be a demonic realm that was God's problem and not man's. the Satan, the Devil, the Demons, they exist and are bad on the level of which angels and God are good. It's out of man's hands. One prays to the gods for deliverance because they can handle this, they exist on that level. But in the twentieth century, even though the demonic still survives, the confidence in the Divine is dead. And just as one could say that the Divine was embodied in a man, now the sobering realization is that just in the same way the demonic could be embodied in a man. And of course one recognizes that this is a theological point that was held very very clearly by the Essenes. And from them to the Gnostics. But when it was with the Essenes it was particularly true of a quality of religious experience that the Greeks and the Romans did not have historical and conscious experience with, though it was mythologically and symbolically rooted in the very structure of their behavior and their minds. In other words they felt an affinity with positions that they were not familiar with intellectually, and the positions take place in the Jewish religion, in the Jewish formulation of Cosmology at a very specific and particular time in historical development; the time of the Essenes. From about the 200 BC period through to about the 70 AD. In that time frame, running a little beyond 70 AD the Bar Copa revolt is about 130 and it's still operative at that time. And there are indications of a little bit before.
But if you're looking for the parenthesis to locate where in historical experience and memory, where is the stage for this? Or to use what we're understanding today, not the stage but where is the theater of ideas for this. It begins with the book of Enoch and it ends with the Roman armies decimating Jerusalem. It goes from Enoch to the fall of Jerusalem. And in that development, what is consistent as a common denominator (the book of Enoch is about 196 BC, the fall of Jerusalem 70 AD), in that theater of ideas, the building plan, though it morphs all the time, has a common foundation all the time and that is the rise of Roman power. Before 200 BC, though the Romans had become very tough, they were not the Roman power which one would dramatically archetypally fear in prophetic revelations. Whereas after that, increasingly the Romans displaced all other considerations for the coming demise of everything good; the coming subjugation of everything that had been developed.
Arnold Toynbee, in two great thick fat volumes, says that the Roman psyche was permanently injured in the Hannibalic wars. Hannibal, the Carthaginian, brought his armies all the way along the African coast, crossed into Spain, across Spain and France over the Alps, with elephants and everything and marauded for a whole generation, 17 years up and down the Italian Peninsula. So that a whole generation of Romans grew up at that time, fearing the pillage, the rape, the murder, the unstoppable violence, the sudden nightmare appearance of Hannibal's forces. And in that time period, the Roman psyche became not only injured, not only bruised by all of this, but Toynbee says, became ultimately vindictive. So that while they built up their power, their power was not to be strong but their power was to conquer their enemies in a way that they would never appear again. That the Roman Legions were built during that time, not just to beat an enemy on an honorable field of battle, but to decimate them farther (decimate means kill every tenth man), to obliterate them. So that by the time of the writing of the book of Enoch, Roman power had committed itself, not consciously, but on a gut level, on a ritual level, to build a force of obliteration. So that eventually the saying would be "all roads lead to Rome". And in the center of Rome, at the gateway to the Roman Forum where all the buildings of power were was a milestone marker and every distance in the Roman Empire was measured from that milestone marker. So that if you took the Appian Way, you knew how far you were from that marker at that threshold.
When Titus Flavius destroyed Jerusalem, he took from the temple the great menorah, the great candelabra. And it was so huge and so heavy it had to be packed on elephants, just like the elephants that Hannibal had used to terrorize the Roman people; a Hannibalic symbol. And the menorah, being transported from decimated destroyed obliterated Jerusalem, was taken in Titus' triumph ceremony to the city of Rome. And they built on the spot where the mile 1 marker was, a great triumphal arch, the Arch of Titus. And in the keystone of that huge monumental arch. . . . . . . . you're more familiar perhaps with the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which is a French version of that kind of triumphal arch. In a sculptural frieze on the keystone of the Arch of Titus is the sculpture representation of the menorah from the temple in Jerusalem being brought into Rome and placed over that place where all roads in the world lead. It was the conclusion, not of Roman power of dominating, that's to misunderstand it, it was the conclusion of the Roman power to obliterate all competition. And that sewed the seeds of the psychosis that occurred in the twentieth century. Strong as and mad as and visionarily regressive as any of the Roman Emperors were, and that was a murderous row, none of them ever succeeded in completely psychotically abstracting themselves from the power base until Adolph Hitler did. Abstracted himself from the power base so that it only existed in his willfulness. The only thing that mattered was the will of the Fuhrer. There was nothing else available as a countermand and there was nothing else to be expected.
Hannah Arendt is the thinker in the twentieth century who took this nightmare to task most poignantly. She pinned it not only to the wall and to the ground, she pinned it for all time, flayed it open and put the skeleton out to dry and pointed at it saying, if you want to understand why we must understand, this is it. We were lucky this time because this one was inexperienced and rather stupid. But given the history that human beings have had and given the technological developments coming some superman will come in the future who will know exactly how to do that right. And so we are in a very curious position. It's time for us to dismantle the mind and the stage setting that together drive visitors out the door. Because when you walk out on this, it's giggle time for teenagers, it's a very serious vacuum, because the coming psychotic superman will not wait. He doesn't give a shit. So it is incumbent upon our generation to dismantle that mind and to dismantle that historical civilization to take the trigger and the ammunition out of the gun. The gun is going to be there. But if it doesn't have the trigger and if it doesn't have the ammunition then it won't work. And that's the only thing that we can do because the future is locked in. Somebody, sometime will do that. There's no question about that.
What's interesting is that the mind and the historical form, the civilization, have to link together, they have to work together. But if you just take one of those elements out, if you just modify one of those elements either of those two can reconstitute the other. And so you have to, not just reeducate a mind so that it's humane or civilized but you have to teach it in a way that everyone understands how to learn how to learn to do this. Not just how to do this and not just how to learn to do this but more poignantly how to learn how to learn how to do this. That's why our species is called Homo sapiens sapiens; the wisdom is repeated. Because we are that spiritual reality that is capable of not giggling ourselves into oblivion but to understand that by taking our capacities and putting them all into play, we can not only live, we can blossom. And not only blossom we can become bouquets of possibility in a Cosmos that is endlessly delightful; unbelievably so. And to perish on a little closet planet because of drifting like teenagers giggling onto the street is truly stupid.
In the Roman basis, in those basement crypts of the twentieth century totalitarian dark lord palace, the spit that held those stones together was the spit of prophetic language. Prophecy, especially apocalyptic prophecy which encapsulated future took all of the futures and piled it up like big thunder clouds, big cumulus storm front who's direction of application could be called out by the prophet. A prophet who could use that Divine magical language, that prophetic language to call it forth and direct it. And even the most cursory acquaintance with that kind of language identifies that the first great prophet in history was Isaiah, a Jewish prophet. Isaiah coming about 700 BC.
When you look at Greek literature in 700 BC, his contemporary, Isaiah's contemporary is Hesiod. Hesiod is still, his works and days are about the Gods, about mythology. Isaiah, his language is not about mythology, his language is prophetic about future history and the very center of Isaiah's prophecy is the city of Jerusalem and its future. That its destruction in his time was the root cause, it was the throwing fulcrum of historical consciousness understanding what was going on and what was happening and why is this happening here, and why is this happening to us. And it takes awhile to read through someone like Isaiah, because there are actually three Isaiahs. There's the Isaiah from the 700 BC, the original Isaiah. There's Isaiah II known in theological scholastic history as the author of the suffering servant; the one who predicted that someone will come to save us, because God does not let us suffer this. And later emendations that collectively together make a third level.
When you look at Rome, Rome as a city is founded very close to the time of Isaiah. Rome is founded about 753 BC. The early history of Rome was always encapsulated in mythological Hesiod type language. The beginnings of Rome, Romulus and Remus fed by a she wolf. Why are the Romans so veracious, descended of wolves, they're wolf children. It's all mythological talk and language. You don't find any mythological language in Isaiah. You find an apocalyptic prophetic historical searching language and the language is centered around the person of the prophet. So that the personal, it becomes a nexus out of which like a prism, the possibilities of future are a spectrum which projects out. And likewise that prophetic person is a prism which positions, is positioned, positions herself, positions himself. Not just himself, Isaiah. In Judaism prophets were masculine. But we'll see that the Roman Isaiah was feminine, was always a woman. A very very big, interesting complementarity.
That focus, where the prophetic persona is not a persona like a mask but is a person; a person who receives the white light of vision and sees the spectrum of future possibilities and points that this is the possibility that leads to life. All these others lead to death. That's the way. And in Isaiah forward, the way to life is bound up with the whole phenomenon. Not of being killed but of being taken away. Because the travail in Isaiah's time was that the men and women who were taken were not taken to be killed, they were taken to run the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar II. He's the one that came in, he didn't come in to destroy Jerusalem, he came in to cream the crop. Why? Because the talented Jewish, the Jewish talent par excellence was dealing with many different cultures, many different civilizations. The archetypal line of descent was all from Abraham who's the one who ran the great caravan route that linked the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean Sea. What's this so special about Abraham? Because he's the one that owned and ran the caravan route that was the spinal column of commerce for the Fertile Crescent. So they had to deal in all the different moneys, all the different languages, all the different customs, so they were the only postal road of commerce going across the who swath of the ancient world. And so when Nebuchadnezzar had a huge empire, he had to have people who understood how to run such a wide structure and the young Jews were the only ones who knew how to do this. So he simply kidnapped them and put them to work and that was the exile.
For Isaiah the issue was exile. But it was like for openers kind of exile, it wasn't really the exile, it was just a few were taken. The best, the youngest brightest, the best were taken and this was a terrible thing. Whereas a hundred years later, the prophet Jeremiah lives at a time where all the talented people were taken leaving only people who could till the crops and tend the animals. Anyone with talent was taken in Jeremiah's time. So it was a deeper exile, a more comprehensive exile. Whereas maybe 2%, the top 2% were taken in Isaiah's time, the top 1/3 were taken in Jeremiah's time.
And curiously Jeremiah himself was kidnapped into exile but not by the Neo-Babylonians but by his own congregation. They say we need you and rather than let them kidnap you, we're going to kidnap you and we're going to take you with us to Egypt. So that their solution of protecting themselves was to one up those who were tyrannizing them by doing the same thing but doing it first. And so Jeremiah did what anyone would do, he said that tears it. The covenant for you is over. And he made a call, not to the people, Jeremiah's prophecy is not like Isaiah's which is a call to the people to open themselves to their God. Jeremiah's call was to God to open up the possibilities of a new people, a new kind of people who's covenant is not written in commandments on stones but written in the minds and hearts of the people; a completely different form of covenant. Not based on laws, the Decalog, the Mosaic foundation, the Torah, not based on the Torah, but based on prophecy. Jeremiah makes a revolutionary change in the historical quality of how Judaism viewed consciousness and person. And it was a radical difference. And it was a difference that called out for a response in history. Jeremiah wrote that about 600 BC.
The contemporary in Greece was Solon, the great law giver for the city of Athens. The answer to Jeremiah came about thirty years after the book of Enoch was written. The answer came in the form of a book called the Book of Daniel. And the Book of Daniel, written about 160 BC, sets itself back in the times of the generation just after Jeremiah. It sets itself recursively back there to catch up this solution from the future and take it back and rewrite the past, because the author of the Book of Daniel understood that the future and the new past are always a tandem in high Dharma consciousness. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
BREAK
Let's come back to a poignant fulcrum. Not the center but the balance whereby we can move forward. Hannah Arendt is paired with Tacitus partly because Tacitus is the great historian of Roman power when it had achieved its triumphal quality and Tacitus, when he was born in 55 AD came to maturity, not so much maturity but came into the kind of social consciousness that you get as an older child. He was just entering into his adolescence when Nero burned Rome to the ground. You have to understand, it's more poignant than anyone can imagine that the Romans burned Rome to the ground before they burned Jerusalem to the ground and that both those things happened within a handful of years. They're linked. It's a curious kind of a link though. It's a kind of a link that would not have been known in antiquity. That kind of link was not known until Isaac Newton. What kind of link is that? That's a link of inverse proportion.
When Tacitus writes about the Jews in The Histories he says: "To insure his future hold over the people, Moses introduced a new cult which was the opposite of all other religions. All that we hold sacred they hold profane and they allow practices which we abominate. They dedicated in the inner most part of the temple an image of the animal who's guidance had put an end to their wandering and thirst after first killing a ram apparently as an insult to Amon. They also sacrifice bulls because the Egyptians worshiped the bull Apis. Pigs are subject to leprosy, the foul plague with which they too were once infected, so they abstain from pork in memory of their misfortune. Their frequent fasts bear witness to the long famine they once endured and in token of their rushed meal, Jewish bread is made without leaven. They are said to have devoted the seventh day to rest because that day brought an end to their toils, later finding idleness alluring, they gave up the seventh year as well to sloth. Others maintain that they do this in honor of Saturn, either because their religious principles are derived from the Idaea who are supposed to have been driven out with Saturn and become the ancestors to the Jewish people, or else because of the seven stars which govern the lives of men, the star of Saturn moves in the top most orbit and exercises the mightiest influence and also because most of the heavenly bodies move round their courses in multiples of seven. Whatever their origin these rites are sanctioned by their antiquity. Their other customs are perverted and abominable and owe their prevalence to their depravity. All the most worthless rascals renouncing their national cults started showering them with offerings and tribute. This is one cause of Jewish prosperity. Another is that they are obstinately loyal to each other and always ready to show compassion whereas they feel nothing but hatred and enmity for the rest of the world. They separate themselves from others in meals and in bed" and he goes on in this way.
It's very curious to find this kind of language and in Tacitus that kind of language occurs in The Histories because he embodies the classical world view to an nth degree, but especially in the way in which it was condensed into the Roman Empire. Tacitus lived until about 117AD, so when he was writing The Histories after his long and distinguished career, he's writing these about the time when the last Flavian, the first Flavian Emperor who took over from the Caesars, Nero was the last Caesar and the first of the successors that stayed was Vespasian who was the father to Titus. But Vespasian had another son whereas Titus was like a Roman general and fiercom in the way in which a Roman general could simply erase a city like Jerusalem. At the time classical Jerusalem had a population of close to two or three hundred thousand people. So it wasn't just that the Temple was destroyed, the whole city was destroyed on the model of the obliteration of Carthage by the Romans back at the time of the ends of the Second Punic War, back at the time when that generation in Palestine produced the book of Enoch.
And Enochian prophecy in the Jewish tradition is a completely radical different kind of prophecy. Not only different from Isaiah and totally different from Jeremiah, but totally different period because it is not Jewish at all. The Book of Enoch, Enoch is taken off the Earth and shown the splendors of Heaven; he's shown God's crystal thrown that has Divine fire scintillating through its structure. And he's also shown the underworld. So that the reverberation of the Book of Enoch is actually Dante, Dante's Divine Comedy. And Dante's Divine Comedy is world famous for at least eight hundred years, for being written on four different levels at the same time. You can read Dante in any one of four levels, but if you're really cultivated and sophisticated you read Dante with all four levels working at once as you get this scintillation of perspective. But never the less, Dante is still in the league of the prophecies of Enoch. It's a man who does not prophesy on the basis of the earth alone, but on the basis of the earth, the afterlife. . . . . . .Don't come in and then walk out. . . . . . .Thank you, thank you. . . . . . .no it's fine. . . . . . . . .the crassness of the age is unbelievable. The lack of etiquette to others who are struggling to balance in their spirit is a sign of being worse than animal.
This quality of prophecy where the basis is not just the Earth but Heaven and Hell as well as the Earth is the first time that you get a Cosmological foundation to Jewish prophecy that's centered on man having to understand the whole thing. You cannot leave Heaven to the angels, you cannot leave Hell to the demons, man now has to take all of it into consideration. His historical responsibility, his personal visionary consciousness now becomes Cosmological in its scope. So that what comes down in the Western historical tradition, not so much the prophecies of Enoch per se as in the Jewish Book of Enoch but what comes down is the Enochian language. And the Enochian language becomes, later on, revolutionized, symbolized, condensed into an ideology known as Cabala, which is an ideology, not a vision at all; is a symbolic ideology and has regressive quality built in.
That kind of language, that kind of visionary language is very close to the language of prophecy but with a difference . . . . . . .the interruptions are legion, you'll have to just focus on your own. It's always like this and it will be even more so. I've been lecturing like this for almost forty years, you'll just get used to it, you just factor it out. You have to learn to keep your focus, but not let your focus be so sharp that the point breaks and you start making up. It's very difficult to do but you can do it.. . . . . . . . .That prophetic language, that Enochian kind of prophetic language is different from real prophetic language. The Book of Enoch is actually made up. It's an imaginative projection of what a Cosmological prophetic language would be and it's not consciously real, it's an imitation. It's an imitation of other cultural milieus. It's an imitation, in fact, of the kind of language that you will find in Babylonia. It's like bad habits learned during the exile. Even though you come home the bad habits stay with you. You learned to try to deal with history the way the Babylonians did and now you have a neo neo Babylonian cosmology which parades itself as a prophecy. As one would expect. This is, to someone who is learned, catastrophic.
It's one thing to have the cream of your youth stolen from you, it's another thing to have the whole working population of talented men and women stolen from you. But what is catastrophic is to have your capacity for visionary language stolen from you. You can come back from exiles, you can come back from death, but there's nowhere and no way to come back when a visionary is no longer possible that is real. Only a bogus language parading itself as a prophetic language in which case what you get is not life but metaphysical structures like the Cabala. They are not life and so the choice, the decision at the time, within a generation of the Book of Enoch, you find the leader of the Jewish community founding a return to the purity, and that's where the Essenes come from. They are founded as a return to the pure, we need to get back to the purity. And the leader of that was known in history as the Teacher of Righteousness. And in order to show, to demonstrate, to give examples of a true prophetic language which is visionary, has a differential consciousness which becomes personal and thus has a chance to effect history, the Teacher of Righteousness wrote a number of books. To combat The Book of Enoch, to teach people a true visionary language which is truly magical rather than a magic language which you could spell m-i-g-i-c-k.
And The Teacher of Righteousness, in order to countermand that Book of Enoch, wrote the Book of Daniel which is a textbook of how to develop in yourself a visionary language. How to interpret dreams and how to deepen the interpretation of dreams so that you can interpret, not just your dreams, but you can interpret other people's dreams. And not just the dreams of individuals but sometimes, once in a lifetime, one has a great dream. My Spirit Mother used to call them death dreams. Not meaning that you have them for a death, but you have them at a time of a transition which includes a death and a rebirth. Transformation dreams.
But there's something even beyond the individuals great transformation dreams and that's when a whole time form changes and there's a dream which is not a dream; it's not from the mythic level, it's not from the symbolic level, it occurs on the visionary level but it's from the future. A dream from the future is a great prophecy. Vision, which that genre is called an apocalypse. And so the Book of Daniel is a textbook of how to develop and visionary language to interpret dreams on the personal level all the way up to your great transformative dream, to the great apocalyptic vision of an age, of the turn of an age. And in order to augment that, the Book of Daniel is augmented by the Book of Job, also written by the Teacher of Righteousness, the founder of the Essenes, the maker of Qumran. Because the Book of Job is about that kind of patience; that kind of patience which endures by absorbing all of the suffering, just like a second Isaiah, absorbing all of the suffering but that the suffering comes together in such a way that the absorption of it is distributed with equanimity. Because there is a fantastic discover that suffering with equanimity transforms the suffering.
The Buddha said it very clearly: if suffering is real, then the end of suffering is also as real. And the way, that there should be a way, to put an end to suffering must equally be as real. And the fourth noble truth is that that way is learnable, and here it is. They're called the Four Noble Truths. The Book of Job is a Jewish Four Noble Truths which does an end run around the false prophecy of the Book of Enoch because the very form of the Book of Job is not written as a prophetic form, not in the Hebrew genre at all, but its genre is Greek Tragedy. The Book of Job is written just like a Greek Tragedy. The Teacher of Righteous is really somebody. He took the classical Agon transformational form of the Classical Greeks, an Aeschylus Greek Tragedy, and used that form but put into it a Jewish apocalypse and showed that that form works with this content. So the Book of Job is a Greek Tragedy about apocalyptic matters and supplements and complements the Book of Daniel. And as an interface he also wrote a whole series of thanksgiving hymns. They're called Hodio. That book, most of it was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we have today good translations of the Thanksgiving Hymns of the Teacher of Righteousness. And we can see he's extraordinary.
What happens in the most curious way is that while all of this is happening vis-à-vis Greeks, Neo Babylonians, Jews, Egyptians, Iranians, Italians, The Celts, The Teutonics, all of this - all of them were being subsumed under the Roman Empire, under Roman power. While all of this is going on, the common denominator for all of them is Roman Power. And the Romans, not developing at all with any degree of detail, anything native along these lines, simply swallowed all of these peoples and all of these developments and undigestedly swallowed it whole. So that when you find Augustus Caesar wanting to cement Roman power in the world he uses, curiously enough, Jewish literary forms and Jewish apocalyptic language in order to do it, without even knowing that.
So that his arch poet, the arch poet founding the Roman Empire is Virgil. Not only Virgil's Aeneid, he was commissioned by Augustus to write the Aeneid to found the Roman Empire forever. But he had to learn how to write that with that kind of power and so he had various stages of poetry building up to it. He had a whole series of agricultural poems, the Georgics, talking about life and the fruitfulness of life and all of this. And then he had pastoral poems called the Eclogues and it's in the Eclogues that you find the Fourth Eclogue which is universally known, has been known for nineteen hundred years, Virgil's Messianic Eclogue. And for about fifteen hundred years, Christians have assumed that Virgil was a Christian because the Fourth Eclogue is the perfect prophecy of the birth of the Messiah. Oh much more than anything in the New Testament. It's a Jewish content in a Jewish genre put into the hands of the Roman Empire's cementing poet. He's making the language that makes that Empire visionarily hold.
I made, if you recall last week, I made a translation of the first ten lines, because most of the translations don't have the, excuse me they don't have the dynamos, the umph. My translation of it, here's how the first ten lines read, he's going to address the Sicilian Muse. Who is the Sicilian Muse? The Sicilian Muse that he's going to talk about here is the founder of the pastoral form of poetry, a man named Theocritus who was born in Sicily but who was one of the most famous litterateurs of Alexandria, Theocritus. "Sicilian Muse, we a greater theme sing. Not all arbors delight in humble tamarisks. If woods we sing, woods worthy of counsels. The ultimate Cumaean age sun has come. A great sequence of century is order born. Now returns the virgin, redoing Saturn's reign, now new prodigies from high heaven's seat. You with new born boy who first the iron desists so now surge all in golden familied world. Look chaste Diana now your Apollo reigns." And it goes on from there.
The Sibyl at Cumae is the Roman Isaiah and the Roman Jeremiah and the Roman Daniel all rolled into one. It's the Sibyl at Cumae who is the sacred prophetic voice for the Roman people, for the Roman Empire. She held forth at a very special sacred place. This is the travel book published in Italy, the Flegrayen Fields, from Virgil's tomb to the Grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl. Down around where Naples is. Naples, just outside the city is Mount Vesuvius and Mount Vesuvius makes a very peculiar geo energy for that whole Naplean region. In fact one of the lakes that's on the side of the Vesuvius there, Lake Avernus is where Dante goes into the Inferno, into the underworld. He goes into the underworld exactly where the Cumaean Sibyl's temple was because her temple was in a cave. Because in the odd geology of the region there is a number of caves, but one very special cave where the Cumaean Sibyl delivered her prophetic language. And that cave is linked by a natural volcanic tunnel that goes all the way over by where the lake is. And along that tunnel the ancient people who were there before the Greeks who descended after about 700 BC, they became the original Italians who became the Romans. Those earlier people, those Etruscan descended people had found that the one wall of this cave like corridor, this tunnel was very thin so that they could cut windows in the rock so that the corridor would be lit by a special kind of a window. It's very similar to the Mayan keystone arch, esoteric window. There's a photograph someplace in here of the corridor. So that when you would walk to the Cumaean Sibyl, you would have this corridor lit by this unbelievable light and forms and when you would come into the Cumaean Sibyl, in the Aeneid this is how Virgil describes it. It's in Book VI. Book VI of the Aeneid is called the lower world. Book VI of the Aeneid is the Inferno. Who is Dante's guide to the Inferno? Virgil.
This is in the Humphry's translation: "Mourning for dead Palernus, Aeneas drives the fleet to Cumae's coastline. Prows are turned, anchors let down, the beach covered by the vessels. Young in their eagerness for the land of the West, they flash ashore and seek some seeds of flame hidden in veins of flint. Others spoil the woods of tinder show where water runs. Aeneas in devotion seeks the heights where stands Apollo's temple and the cave where the dread Sibyl dwells, Apollo's Priestess with great mind and heart inspired revealer of things to come. They enter sacred Diana's grove pass underneath the roof of gold." And then they go in to find the Sybil at Cumae. And it's not the sort of lady of the house that you want to find. Because she is not only wild, she is untamedly wild. She is a psychic maelstrom. She is a spiritual hurricane. She is only pure visionary fury. "But the Priestess, not yet subject to Apollo", because only the God Apollo can put a quieting form on her, like a harness of semi civilizedness. Before that she is a ranting gorgon of language. "But the Priestess, not yet subject to Apollo, went reeling through the cavern, wild and scorning to throw the God who presses like a rider with bit and bridle and weight tames her wild spirit, shapes her to his control. The doors fly open, the hundred doors of their own will fly open and through the air the answer comes. Oh Trojans, at last the dangers of the sea are over, that course is run, but graver ones are waiting." And she goes on. And the founding of the Roman Empire is on the basis of this particular vision.
So that the Cumaean Sibyl, this is a book of Sibyls in classical antiquity, so that all of the utterances of the Cumaean Sibyl collected together are called the Sibylline Oracles. The Roman Book of the Dead, we called it last week. That if you want to look at what Rome is in terms of poignant differential consciousness, you do not get deceived by the rituals masks. You don't get deceived by the mythological glint and flash. You don't get distracted by the symbolic power. You look to see what is really there, because underneath it all is something quite extraordinarily surprising and fearful.
I remember once seeing a great example of it in Chicago. There was a greened bronze figure of a Roman general who looked like the athletic fury of manhood you don't want to cross. And when you go closer, close enough to see who it was, to see the personality, to see the person in the art, you were stunned because in the eyes of this athletic muscular killer was pure pathos. He was afraid of himself, he was scared of life and you could see it. In order to cover up this fearfulness, this pathos, this lack of differential conscious personal spirit, the Romans wore the kinds of masks that Greek Tragedy only had on the stage. They wore it before the whole world all the time. Because when you took it off the only thing that was there were lonely men, frightened because they really knew there was nowhere for them to go.
The Sibylline Oracles, when somebody reads them, actually reads them, read like second rate third hand Isaiah Prophecies. They read like worn out rehashed Jeremiah type prophecies. They have in fact been accused of being Christian forgeries but the fact is that the Sibylline Oracles were collected by the Romans from the beginning, from about 700 BC. And they were collected and they were kept in a special place in the Roman Forum. They were kept on the top of the Capitoline Hill in the Temple of Jupiter, Jupiter Dis. The great God, Jupiter is Zeus, the Roman Zeus, the center of Roman mythological power. But that temple was burned in the Roman civil wars at the time of Sulla, Sulla and Cinna and so forth, those people Marius, about 80 BC, 85 BC, burned. The temple was burned, the Sibylline Oracles were all destroyed. There were special priests who alone handled the Sibylline Oracles. There were only fifteen men, originally there were ten and by the time of the Caesars there were fifteen men. And it was one of the four sacred colleges of priesthood in the Roman Empire. Tacitus was the head of that priesthood.
Tacitus, the classical historian, was in charge of the Roman Book of the Dead. Because they reconstituted the Sibylline Oracles. It was one of Augustus Caesar's prime purposes in cementing his power. It was his version of building the Arch of Titus. Because he knew, he was not dumb, he knew that you have to commandeer the visionary language because that has the ability, not only to index the empire, but it stops all of the possibilities of somebody steeling your power by making transformations to your stuff that you can't control. So collecting the Sibylline Oracles was like weather sealing the Roman Empire. And he made it under penalty of death, no one could keep even a fragment of a Sibylline Oracle. They were radioactive as far as anyone else was concerned. And they were all collected again and they were put this time, not in a Temple of Jupiter, but in a Temple of Apollo. They were put at the center of Augustus Caesar's Caesarism. The Sibylline Oracles are the prophetic language of the Roman Book of the Dead that seals everything together. And the language is completely Jewish. So that those in charge of the Roman Empire in an esoteric way have a very big thing at stake to make sure that Jewish prophecy doesn't gain currency because it really is stiff competition. Because not only is it very similar, it's also better, really poignant.
The most poignant challenge to Roman prophetic language was made in the time of the second son of Vespasian, in the time of Domitian. Titus was bad enough, Domitian was a nightmare. His reign is called The Terror. Whereas Titus destroyed Jerusalem and brought the symbol of that religious vision to be put in the arch of his triumph in the center of the entrance to where all the roads in the world come together. Domitian was very fearful because the Sibylline Oracles were challenged by one of the most powerful apocalypses ever done. It's called the Book of Revelation. It has a double author. The core of the Apocalypse, of the Book of Revelation is by John the Baptist and it's surrounded, it's encompassed by a second prophecy, a second level of that Apocalypse is by St. John. So that the Book of Revelation is by two Johns. St. John is a Hellenistic Jewish writer, considered one of the four Christian Gospels. John the Baptist was the head of the Essenes, he was the master of Qumran and he was killed because he was too much competition. And so here comes, around 90 AD, someone who brings the essence of John the Baptist's Apocalypse and brings it back renewed with even more powerful language and so Domitian brought St. John before him in Rome to efface him from the Earth. Here's someone who's apocalypse is stronger than the Roman Book of the Dead, stronger than the Sibylline Oracles. But Domitian had, what I described about that Roman statue. When you got close enough to his spirit, you could see in the eyes of his soul, the scared fearfulness, not the power. And that's where St. John looked. And so Domitian was afraid to kill him and so he did what a body would do with a foreign substance that it can't get rid of, he exiled him. He encased him in tissue and the tissue kept growing like a tumor. He encased St. John on the Isle of Patmos, which was symbolic. Domitian, like all Roman Emperors by that time, by the end of the first century AD, by Tacitus' time, they were all full of mythological symbol condemnations. And Patmos was chosen because the whole island is geologically built and shaped like a ship. But it's a stone ship that can't go anywhere. So he exiled St. John to nature's stone ship. You can see the mainland, you can never get there because it will never move. It's a Roman Empire way of not understanding what History is, not understanding what Vision is. Of thinking because you have ritually bound someone to a rock, therefore you are safe. It's exactly what Zeus did to Prometheus; Domitian did that to St. John. And the more that the Roman body politic tried to seal itself off from the book of revelation, the tumor got larger and larger until the whole empire was sick and they had to do something about it, they had to have surgery. They had to get rid of the idea that this was antithetical to them, that oh, this will be good for us if we control it and if we adopt it. And we control it, it will be the master religion then of the Roman Empire and we can rule in peace.
That's the kind of History that Tacitus and Hannah Arendt together hold. Not in the palms of any kind of hands that anyone can see but it's in those recognitive fields of History. Karl Jaspers, the great teacher of Hannah Arendt, saying that the twentieth century has come to a personal crisis, in 1935, publicly in Heidelberg, challenging the Nazi power. He said the existential crisis comes in the form of two men who will not go away, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The one, Kierkegaard, talking about, not existence as a ritual phenomenon, but exiztence with a Z as a visionary personal quality. Kierkegaard talks about the spiritual person objectively in differential consciousness and not ritually as a physical being. One of Kierkegaard's book is My Point of View as an Author. That kind of self reflexive quality. And for that exiztence, it's matched to Nietzsche's reason. That the philosophic understanding can go beyond the limitations of the mind so that philosophy can also be visionary. So that reason is not just a reason which is some kind of categorical structure of a brain, but reason can also be a ratio of the real. It can be a proportion of relationality showing the prismatic scintillation of differential consciousness looking towards, not the future, but looking towards the challenge of choosing a future. And the one who can do that is someone who goes over, who indexes the entire integral cycle including the mind. That's the superman. It's not that he flies through the air, but he flies through consciousness and is coming. More next week.
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