Myth 12

This is myth 12 and the title today is Magical Origin of Kings. Once upon a time, George Sir James George Frazer had a book entitled Magical Origin of Kings. He was the man who did The Golden Bough in 13 volumes, and in fact, the first set of books in The Golden Bough is called The Magical Art, and it's about how the sovereignty of um is won over chaos. And this is a constant theme in mythology, and there is a way in which to present this, and I think I want to do it by alternating by using an alternation of pairs which have a tension because they're disjunctive, you know, in ancient times when, um, when the power of thought in the West was first being brought into an integration strong enough to make ideas that were as real as things human beings, men and women at that time had a great difficulty with stability of their experience, because the mind became so uncharacteristically powerful that it had a tendency to run away with them and to dominate them. And The focus where all of this happened was in classical Greece, um, about 600 BC. And the focus in classical Greece was the city of Athens. And in Athens about 600 BC, there was a tremendous pressure on the men and women, because they had come out of a culture, out of a society that was largely agrarian and rural. And yet the very success economically of their agrarian and rural culture was based on the fact that they were masters of taking over sailing routes.

They were shipbuilders because Athens and Attica doesn't have a lot of farmland. It's mostly rock and mountains and so forth. So their prosperity was based upon disparate colonies that were linked together by ships, so that the navigable command of the Aegean Sea, linking together all of these colonies, made Athens a Gestalt city, long before it was large enough to even be called a city in its own right. But by 600 BC it had become a city in its own right, and it was at that time that one of the great lawgivers in the classical world, Solon, made up a constitution for the city of Athens. The Laws of Solon collected the society together and made of the Athenian life a symbol centered life rather than a mythic, centered life. And when they made a symbol centered life, it meant that the power rested in thought and not an experience. And so men and women had to learn to make judgments that sometimes went counter to experience. So Athenian law by 600 BC became a very powerful ideational pressure, and it slowly squeezed the natural rural confidence out of the men and women. And so they became more and more suspicious on the basis of Intellectual doubt of their capacities of natural experience, to convey to them the truths of life. And within a couple of generations, it became apparent that this was a crisis in their society.

And so a form was developed to carry the population of people through that crisis. And the form was Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy took mythological themes in classical ritual comportments and juxtaposed them in an impossible symbol destruct mode. Some floor situation was introduced into a classic mythological figuration, and the classical mythological figuration was run through its ritual expression and shown to be a death dealing rather than life giving. And so Greek tragedy was always a dramatic presentation of the crisis of consciousness, because the mythological experience could no longer trust the old ritual ways to be accurate and true. That you would run into a problem because there was a symbolic flaw buried in the mythic and ritual process that always showed a tragic end. And the point of Greek tragedy was not to show the tragic end so much, but to disclose to the population of men and women that they could behold a tragic end and survive it. That they could see what happens when there is a buried Intellectual flaw in the mythology enacted by the ritual, and how to behold that and survive that, so that you could go back then and correct that and not do it again. So that Greek tragedy was a social form of high art, to correct a crisis of consciousness where the mythology could not be trusted anymore. The rituals led to death rather than life because of symbolic flaws, because of a symbolic flaw.

Each Greek tragedy had a single flaw that was introduced. There is a deep example to the entire planet of the experience of those Greek men and women of the 500 BC. Because for all of their genius. They completely failed, and in the 400 seconds BC there was a sense of desperation that they were losing it as a people, and they turned to incessant warfare as a solution for the problems. And the city of Athens went into a long war with a league of other Greek cities centered around Sparta, and this was called the Peloponnesian War. And it went on for decade after decade, and finally bankrupted the Greek people economically and physically, so that they were simply sitting ducks and patsies for the next strong leader to come in. Who, of course was Alexander the Great, who never had to fight any concerted battles. He was from the Macedonian North, and he never had to fight any great battles in Greece, because they didn't have the strength or the economic wherewithal to even stand up to him. He just simply swept it aside by co-opting it, by saying, if you're nice, I won't destroy your lives. It's a great parallel to the Cold War. In the 20th century, the United States and Russia fought the Peloponnesian War all over again for much the same reasons. The Cold War was an enactment of a Greek tragic situation that occurred before the Cold War that occurred in the early part of the 20th century, and the Greek tragic crisis of consciousness came because of the discovery that the mythological foundations of experience were completely irrelevant to the problems that had come up to the character of the world that was there.

You thought you could trust things, and atomic theory showed that things were subatomic and even lower and even more mysterious. You trusted the pattern of the stars and the sky that forever had been there. And astronomy showed that there were patterns unknown beyond them. You can, with the human eye, see 6000 stars. Naturally, if you have perfect vision, you can see about 6000 stars. If you were able to see all the stars in the sky. Planet round. It seems like more, but that's about it. There are 200 million stars that form a little island. Of which there are more than a trillion islands like that so far. So that the scales of nature were so stretched that the confident raft of mythological experience early in the 20th century was just simply demolished and crashed. And the First World War was simply symptomatic of that situation. The Second World War was a nightmare, and the Cold War was a horror movie for real. So we have come through several generations of this kind of a crisis, and we are now at a position roughly at that kind of level where if there is an Alexander the Great, there won't be any opposition whatsoever.

There are no there is no strength of mythological experience. There is no confidence in the rituals of tradition that could withstand someone who presents that kind of a concerted effort. Fortunately, there is no one like that, and there won't be the conditions that made an Alexander the Great have been transformed. And they were transformed several hundred years ago already by men and women like ourselves, who foresaw this possibility and already made transforms in consciousness that would affect history. And history is yet a process to be directed, still to be dealt with. So we're still at myth. We're still in our our discussion of myth. But we're at myth 12, and we're trying to appreciate that myth contacts not only ritual, but symbols. And our next concern is going to be weighted towards the symbols. And symbols are the objects that found thought. Thinking and thought is extremely powerful. All of this pattern, from nature to ritual to myth to symbols, is an increasing integral. It is taking the sense of what is and compacting it until it becomes so dense that symbols are like neutron stars. Really powerful symbols are like nuclear matter without any of the electron spaces in between. A really powerful idea. So indexes the entire integral cycle that it can command the entire natural ecology. Fortunately, our kind, our species, has evolved in such a way that we reach beyond the mind.

We reach beyond the power of thought. We reach beyond symbols before we get to the symbols, because there are realms of resonance beyond symbols that dwarf the symbolic indexing realm. And the first resonance. The first level. The first phase, beyond symbols is vision, so that our kind have always contacted vision before they came into the reach of the mind to hold things and compact things, to integrate things. Before there are great ideas, there are already visions that come through so that visions are already contacted in the mythic level. And in ancient times, vision was sometimes called magic. That figure, who first goes into the visionary realm and brings back its special differential energies to the experience of the tribe, of the society on the mythic level. That figure who does that is the hero. And so the hero is not properly a mythic figure, but that the hero is a magical figure who returns to the mythic and operates there. The hero is very often, when returned to the mythic level, not able to be sustained as simply a hero, and so takes on the costume, the ceremony of the king. And this king is one of the great figures in mythology. Mythology runs. It's a narrative that runs on image wheels. And those image wheels collect together into these great wheels, these great mandalas of mythic figures. And the king is one of those great mythic figures.

And of course, always the pairing occurs. So when there is a king, there's also the possibility of a queen. And these these qualities, Kings and queens not only inhabit our life, but they inhabit the entire mythic horizon, so that the gods also have kings and queens. For the Greeks, the king of gods was Zeus. But he wasn't always king of the gods. There was a Uranus before him, and before Uranus there was another king. So that in the mythic horizon, there's this sense that for some kind of a duration, Some kind of a natural season. There is a king, and that king is only king for that season. And that as the cycle, as the wheel turns and a new phase, a new season comes in, there must be a new king. And of course, the same holds for a queen. There must be a new queen focusing on the king, focusing on the quality that allows for the king as a mythic image to be the hero who has brought back a vision, has brought the magic back. And one would need that magic because you're facing a situation which is very, very difficult to deal with on the basis of what has been available up to that point, what has been available up to that point? What's been available is largely the ritual comportment of traditional ways of doing things and the mythic experience, the feeling toned quality of being familiar with those patterns of ritual, those patterns of tradition, and the way in which mythic language makes the traditional into narratives which can be bundled together and cycled together, and all of that founded on nature, that the ritual year follows the natural year, and the mythological cycle embellishes the ritual year following the natural year.

And yet, even as that form, that complex form, that triple circle form becomes manifest. What begins to occur is that as that circle forms itself, the more it forms itself, the more it's apparent that there's an inside. The more it becomes apparent that there's a center, there's an interior, there's an interior ization possible from the very fact that that circularity is being formed and buttressed and embellished. And the more that it does so, the more that an interior space becomes available. And the last embellishment of this is language with its feeling toned images, which serve as like an ointment which carries through the skin, into the interior, into the body and language is the vehicle by which the interior space becomes illuminated and as it becomes illuminated, beings like ourselves acquire an interior world so that we begin to have an inside, which, though it's related to nature, is something distinct and different. It has a different quality. The interior realm seated by words, carrying. What do words carry? They carry a quality of imagery which we call when an interior rises, meaning, meaning.

And so that interior realm of symbols, of thought, of thinking begins to occur, and to occur in the way in which the mythic language interiorized. And as that interior quality, that interior space becomes more apparent and begins to have its effect. Its effect is not just to participate in the circles, not to further embellish the circles of the ritual year, the circles of the mythology, but to develop an interior sense of abstraction, of distance from. It's not a part of the rim, not a part of the edge, not a part of the circle. But it becomes more interior. And this, by its own nature, by its own structure. Begins to do two things at once. It takes you away from the natural cycle into something abstracted. And that abstracted quality, because it has the power to do so, seeks to reorganize. And so, as one symbolic capacity is one thought, capacity comes into play. Thought seeks to redo the myths, redo the rituals, and even redo nature to make it over in its idea. And so ideas become extremely powerful. And there are such things as ideas of ideas called ideals. And when an ideal takes root and power, it wants to redo all of nature, all of ritual and all of myth and in fact, all of the mind. And you get a totalitarian state. So there is such a thing. Ernst Cassirer, whose book on myth that we're using, wrote this beautiful book, The Myth of the state.

He wrote it at the apex when Nazi Germany was trying to do the very same thing in his own time that people like the Caesars tried to do 2000 years ago. Only where the the Nazis failed. The Caesars were successful. When Alexander the Great, who we started today with, took over classical Greece. Classical Greece was unchanged because Alexander had an ideal that was based on the Greek experience that came out of Greek tragedy and its further resonances, because the dialogue log form of Greek tragedy, which was there early on in the four 70s already. It was begun, but by the time of a century later, by the time of the three 70s, Greek tragedy in that hundred years had sophisticated itself and had shifted from its concern with the beginnings of symbols, fracturing the mythological level to a more deeper concern of symbol fractures, sabotaging the thought level, where fractures in the symbols now jeopardize the whole symbolic process, so that the dialogues of Greek tragedy of the four 70s became the dialogues of Plato in the three 70s. And so the Philosophic Dialogue is an interiorized Greek tragedy. Each platonic dialogue has a theme which is flawed, and that the Sherlock Holmes who brings out the flaw in the theme is Socrates, who shows not by arguing with the flawed person, but by drawing them out in a symbolized way, more and more so that it becomes apparent to them that if you continue to think this way, not knowing the naive flaw that's embedded in it, you will come to believe in an absurdity which cannot possibly be.

And so the Greek tragedy denouement in a platonic dialogue becomes the realization that you didn't know what you were believing before. You didn't know what you were thinking before, that it was flawed. And in dialogue after dialogue, Plato shows the Greek tragic form of mythological drama, transposed to the symbolic drama of flawed thought, discovering its own limitations. In both cases, though, what is shared is that someone with vision brings back the magic of consciousness to hold a place of presence which is suspended, not a part of the rim, not a part of the circle, not a part of the ritual cycle, and not a part of the Mythological Cycle, but is suspended in that interior, in that center. But is also not a part of that center is suspended as if it were a beacon from beyond. That somehow is still here. And so the hero is the one who brings that, who brings that flame, that sacred fire, that vision brings it back into life, brings it back into nature. And the one who sustains that fire is the king. He transforms the tribe into a kingdom. He makes of that tribe that were necessarily dependent on the subsistence of ritual working of the land.

He transforms the land into a landscape. He transforms the subsistence into a planned Economy. A planned ecology of cooperation so that a kingdom is no longer just a tribe. But it can be. A whole number of tribes brought together rewoven into a kingdom, a new quality, and one of the earliest great kings, because there came to be a very quickly, within about 500 years of the development of of kingship, there came to be very quickly the phenomenon of a king of kings, just like there was a symbol of symbols. There came to be a king of kings. And we know that as soon as that level was arrived at, as soon as there was a king of kings, the kingdom transformed and became a civilization. Just as the tribe had further integrated into a rewoven larger structure called the Kingdom. The kingdom is transformed into something even larger called a civilization, so that while there were kings who made kingdoms, there were kings of kings who made civilization. One of the original kings of kings was a man known now in history as Narmer, and Narmer brought 28 kingdoms together and wove them together and made out of it Egyptian civilization about 5000 years ago. Another great king of kings was Sargon of Akkad, who took all of the kingdoms from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea and made out of that the Fertile Crescent civilization. In China, you had a very early on in a realm that is still called half phantasmal.

You had the development not of kingdoms, but of a whole civilization of dynastic China and the Shah dynasty, about 2250 B.C., is the first time that China experienced this visionary tapestry of a civilization. Because a civilization is different from a kingdom and different from a time. A civilization is bringing a whole people through that threshold so that they enter into a visionary life, so that instead of living on the mythic level, they live on the visionary level, so that a king of kings brings the people through out of nature, delivers them out of just pure natural experience into a supernatural quality of living in a visionary world. And this is a great achievement and a great task in our kind. Have been doing this for only about 5 or 6000 years. So we're at that cusp now where we're trying to understand. We're trying to appreciate how mythology, when it distills further into integration, becomes thought. But it is so recent to be able to look at the way in which this phase transition actually happens, that very few people up until now have been able to look at it with the distributed equanimity of being able to understand not only the whole Circuit of what that ecology is. But to understand that there's actually a double circuit, a double ecology, and that the second ecology runs in a different way from the first, and that if you carry over the principles that lead you to clear thought into differential consciousness, you will never understand it.

Because you will always misinterpret and fling yourself back regressively into a mythological experience rather than a visionary quality of experience. And that because of that regressive move, you will look for the objectification in the ritual body. Instead of looking for the objectification. Where differential consciousness and civilization looks for it. It doesn't look to rituals, it looks to art. For a civilization to be healthy, it has to look for its objectivized way of living to art. And so art is not just a decorative function of the wealthy and the weird. It has a great, great task and a great purpose. But art is not like ritual. Ritual is an objectification that's like the body and the body. To be healthy has to be collected, has to be integral, whereas art to be healthy needs to be differential. And a work of art which is integral is a tool which the myth of the state uses to keep people in line. The perfect example was an esthetician that the Soviet Union had in the 1930s named Plekhanov. He said all art is great to the extent that it serves the state. And if your art is not doing any social good, then get the hell out of the way. And by that they meant either Siberia or the netherworld.

One of my good friends was a guest of that archipelago of fear. He found out that the Second World War was over in 1947, and he was stunned. He said, you mean they lost? He was so far up in Siberia that they didn't hear. He couldn't believe that those guys would lose. Whereas we're pretty good at civilization now. And differential consciousness has its scale of heroes. And for them, something like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are a tussle for a while. But they have no way to win. And future tyrannies have no way to win either, because by now they distributed sense of how to deal with the double cycle is advanced enough that there will be a population of free spirits already grown up and ready by the time the next Caesar comes along, and he will make it to the shock shows. And that'll be it. Let's come back. Let's come back to one of the crucial moments in the 20th century. One of the worst years In Western civilization was 1942, verging onto 1943, and it was a time of great darkness. And in the midst of that great darkness, one of the great differential consciousnesses of the time, an American poet named Wallace Stevens published a book called parts of a world. It was published in New York in 1942. And believe me, the New York of 1942 is not like today. The New York of 1942 was really great.

It was the kingdom where differential conscious people, having fled tyrannies all over the world, didn't huddle together but worked together to build those bonfires of light high enough so that everyone in the world could see them. It was a great place. Wallace Stevens at the end of his parts of the world. His collection of poems wrote this page. It's untitled, and in it he reads the immense poetry of war, and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination and consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war is a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic. This is a very beautiful, condensed, poetic way in prose of saying what I was saying earlier this morning. The hero does not bring back something which he alone or she alone can practice, but brings it back in a form so that all the people can participate in it. If some hero or heroine was to have something which only they could participate in, the classical Greeks had a word for that kind of hero. That kind of hero was called a celestial hero, and that kind of hero doesn't come back.

They go on because it's only for them. Whereas the other kind of hero in the classical Greek is called a terrestrial hero. They come back to Earth. They come back to the tribe. They bring that Promethean gift, that spark of creative insight, hidden like a spiritual fire in the fennel stalk. And they light the fires in every house and the entire land. Turning that land into a landscape of vision, of enlightenment. Then the king can return. Because it's only when there is a kingdom and a population who need a king. It's only then that a king appears in the same way, but on a higher scale. It's only when the kingdoms learn to weave together and form a larger tapestry that they can call forth a king of kings. And as Krishna says in his dialogue, his philosophical dialogue with Arjuna and the Bhagavad Gita, God never not hears man's call for help. Let's take a break. Let's come back to Ernst Cassirer for a moment. When Ernst Cassirer was dealing with symbols and thought, I talked to three weeks ago about how his original concern was with the effect of Einstein and Einstein's theory of relativity upon philosophy. And this was a great impingement, because the the general theory of relativity was followed up by the specific theory of relativity, and it was like A12 punch. It was a real blow, because the philosophic stance for 150 years had been patiently put together in a very firm way, and Ernst Cassirer had grown up and matured in a European world, where Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy was still intact and was able to fend off the attacks of the Hegelian, uh, processed world.

But Einstein's theories of relativity almost dealt the Kantian structure of critical philosophy. A mortal blow. This was because Kant had made a revolution in philosophy, had shown that the medieval structure of thought that had gone on until his own day was actually a very brittle house of cards, and had no capacity to be real in a world that included transformation, especially transformation of thought. And Einstein showed that that brittle world included the limited transforms that Kant knew about. And it went radically, much further, even to levels that were unbelieved. And Einstein was only the opening shot. There were a whole succession of great mathematicians in Germany. There was a man named David Hilbert that came up with what is called in math now, Hilbert space, that one can't just assume that space is space. There's a whole different mathematical quality to Hilbert space, which doesn't obtain at all. There are different geometries. There's the Riemann geometry of spherical. And all of these Hilbert space or Riemann geometry take transforms naturally, and they belong to a realm of differential consciousness which doesn't index the natural world. But Fractally explodes it into such a huge array of possibilities that the natural world is only maybe one speck floating around independently in a snowstorm of possibilities.

So that the traditional qualities of civilization were literally, to use the 1960s phrase, blown away. And in that welter of unknowing and uncertainty, there were certain individuals who found techniques to bring that differential spectrum into play in such a way as it would displace the classical realm, the traditional realm. But one person in that whole welter of new thought, New Age people, saw that this was, in fact, a flaw. The very kind of flaw that Greek tragedy disclosed, the very kind of flaw that Plato's dialogues disclose happen in the mind. And that individual was Niels Bohr. And Bohr saw that the differential conscious realm complemented the integral natural realm, and that they belong together in a larger realm called the real. And so Bohr came up with the notion of complementarity, which was very powerful and out of the notion of complementarity, a whole new development called quantum physics. And very quickly a genius like Linus Pauling took quantum physics and applied it to chemistry so that by 1935 he published a textbook already. Linus Pauling on quantum chemistry. If you can imagine the brilliance of someone like Linus Pauling, absolutely astounding. Someone who had like an IQ of 300. This left the 20th century in a very peculiar situation. There were fewer and fewer people who were able to creatively deal with the reality that was really there.

And more and more people settled into a kind of a sediment of giving up, of not knowing and of reaching back to try to find some kind of basis upon which they could live. And more and more of it was a regression back into medieval forms. And of course, as the world grew more and more medieval, the feudal empires reconstituted themselves, and by the end of the 20th century it was a hopeless mass of feudal corporations, owning 90% of everything and 90% of everyone being in debt. It was an unstable, untenable situation. And it's that kind of a situation that this kind of education challenges. And so you're participating in something that is new and extremely capable. There is a great difference between a warrior and a king. In Casseurs beginning grasp of what Einstein had done in and his challenge to philosophy in the 1920s. He wrote a series of books called The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. There were three classic volumes, and they published a fourth out of his notes. Just recently, the first two volumes, volume one, was called language, and volume two was called Mythical Thought. And as sort of like a precis of these two volumes, his little book, Language and Myth that we're using as a text was like excerpted from these two volumes. But as he matured beyond the 1920s, as Europeans began to see the kinds of distortions and threats not just to two individuals or groups of individuals, but to the very structure and nature of civilization itself.

That crisis and that challenge evoked a deeper and deeper and more profound response, until finally, in the depths of the Second World War, in exile from his Europe, which had been completely taken over and eclipsed, Ernst Cassirer at Yale University decided that he had not done an adequate job, even in the great three volume set of philosophy of symbolic forms, and he wrote a little tiny 200 page book called An Essay on Man, and he wrote it in English. Because he could see that writing in German for the immediate future, maybe a century or more, was not going to be viable for a population of seekers in the world, so he wrote it in English. And sitting there in Hartford, Connecticut, at Yale, writing this in his summary and conclusion, one of the most poignant little paragraphs contains these sentences. In all human activities, we find a fundamental polarity which may be described in various ways. We may speak of a tension between stabilization and evolution. Between a tendency that leads to fixed and stable forms of life, and another tendency to break up this rigid scheme. Man is torn between these two tendencies, one of which seeks to preserve old forms, whereas the other strives to produce new ones. There is a ceaseless struggle between tradition and innovation, between reproductive and creative forces.

Now, here at this point, we have to commend. This was written in 1944 by someone who was trained in the 19th century and was a Kantian to the end of his life. This is deeply flawed, even though it is so honorable in its intention. But it is deeply flawed, and it is flawed in a classic way, which was there at The Origins of Civilization. It was flawed 5000 years ago. And my particular forebears critiqued it and cured it at that time. And it has to be Addressed again in the same way. There are such people as doctors of civilization. They don't hold PhDs, but they can give out PhDs to millions if they need to. To get something done. The flaw here, when it was originally expressed in this way, in its archetypal classic form, was the misinterpretation of Zarathustra in Iran. But 4300 years ago. That there is a polarity between light and dark, between the good and the bad, between two spirits. And you find in that misinterpretation of Zarathustra, you find it entering into the classic mythological Society of Magi and the Magi. Of Magi and Iran, and going all the way through the history and turning up again on one of the edges of the Iranian world, it turns up in the Dead Sea Scrolls of Messianic Judaism. Why would it turn up there? Because the Jewish tradition comes out of the Iranian world civilization.

You know, when in Judaism there was the classic exile. The exile was that the talented men and women, Young men and women were kidnapped. They were not killed. They were kidnapped by Nebuchadnezzar to run his far flung empire, because they were very good at running international scales of things, and they were put to work. They were put to work as administrators under kidnapped circumstances to run the Neo-Babylonian Empire. They were always, when brought back to the Persian realm, they were always accepted. They were always worked in, and they were in turn always workable there, because it was always a comforting thing, because to the Jewish tradition, the Iranian world view is like a mother Who welcomes them back in whatever discipline there is, is the discipline of the mother. And so the Jewish tradition is always emotionally comfortable and at home in the Iranian world, emotionally at home. Whereas to the Jewish psyche, the Egyptian worldview is not like the welcoming mother, but like the severe father. And the Egyptian civilization to the Jewish tradition, is like dealing with the tensions of the severe father. Whereas the Iranian world is always the loving mother, which has its own special kinds of problems. She can tell you to eat and to eat and to eat and do your £500. You don't look well. You should eat some more. So when it came time for a crisis of civilization, for the Jewish psyche, in a scene times Dead Sea scroll, times you find in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you find that the image of the Messiah is always in a pair.

A good Messiah and a bad Messiah. The Messiah of the blessed New Kingdom and the Messiah of of the terrible realm. That there's always a God and Satan polarity. And this comes from the Iranian worldview, not from Zarathustra. It's not in the Gathas of Zarathustra. It's a different. In Zarathustra. You find the deep complementarity, and the complementarity is as graphically there as you could want it, because the very name of reality is a double name, a paired name. It isn't Mazda, it's Ahura Mazda. So that in Zarathustra you find the deep complementarity of reality pristine, beautiful. But there were whole priesthoods who were offended by this radicalness, and they co-opted those words and redistributed in their own way, so that you came out with a dualism and that good and bad spirit dualism, flawed all the way through Middle Eastern civilizations of the Iranian nature, all the way into the Dead Sea Scroll era. These kinds of problems are so enormous, and they are of amplitudes that are so huge that there might be a table full of people on the whole planet who are aware of them. Nevertheless, they are crucial. They are crucial because the historical situation that we now live in is so deeply layered and complex that almost no one can do anything, because on every level, it's as if the next level runs counter to what this level does.

And so you get a parfait of shifting currents, whereas you do something on one level alone. On the next development of that, it'll turn into a regression without you even knowing it or wanting it. And so there's such a parfait of subtle undertones that it seems that the wisest thing is to do nothing and let it take care of itself. If it's left to that, it will end in universal death. That will not happen because the problem is a problem that can be dealt with. We have the capacities of differential consciousness to easily deal with that, and to develop several generations of people before that crisis really comes to the point of a Caesar who would sink us all, not us, our grandchildren. It's still here, and someone as sophisticated as Ernst Cassirer in the depths of the Second World War, near the end of his life, he died about a year later. He was old, he writes. Now the one factor, the stabilizing, the traditional and now the other the new, the creative. This dualism is to be found in all the domains of cultural life. What varies is the proportion of the opposing factors. Now the one factor, now the other seems to preponderate. This preponderance to a high degree, determines the character of the single forms, and gives to each of them its particular physiognomy.

In myth and primitive religion, the tendency is to stabilization so strong that an entirely outweighs the opposite pole. This is not true. This is an error. This is a deep error, but it's an error that the mind cannot know. The mind cannot register the erroneousness of this expression. It's erroneousness does not become apparent until you're very far advanced. And differential consciousness and consciousness is not the same as thinking. It's totally different. Differential consciousness is about the capacity for contextualization. More and more context. Context within context. In differential consciousness, set theory takes the place of arithmetic. In terms of the mind counting the arithmetical functions and geometry, the image patterns are the fundamental place where you found good laws of thought. But in differential consciousness you can't begin with arithmetic and In geometry, you begin with mathematics and trigonometry, and you transform from there and you go very, very far afield until someone who is very capable in arithmetic and geometry seems like a child to you. Not that they're childish, it's just that their development is still on a grade school level, and that the problems, meantime, are problems for old experienced kings, not for schoolchildren. And so that gap is the reason why there are educational programs meant not to give the solution to a population, but to mature a population so that they are the solution is a whole different thing. And for that, kings have to transform themselves into Jeffersons.

You have to lose the whole idea of a kingship because it is fundamentally operative on the mythic level and doesn't work in history. Whereas someone like a Jefferson goes to work in history every damn day. And this is a fundamental difference. That transformation, though, cannot be left to a Jefferson, because without a population of people who themselves become much more capable than a genius like that, if the population isn't there, it's the solution is not going to be there. You can't have an exemplary Superman take the place of a population who have earned their liberty Because they guard it. Because they live it. And so in a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote once, in fact, I think I put it with, uh, with the outline of our program. Um, I guess I didn't bring it here. It's in the letter to Jefferson from Jefferson to Madison. It said in the common sense of an educated population, we put our trust for the guarantee of the liberties we have secured. But before there is a king who transforms and becomes a Jefferson, there is another complementarity that's operative, which we have to appreciate. And that is along with the king. There's always a magician along with an Arthur. There's always a merlin. The Merlin to Jefferson was Benjamin Franklin. And so we use another quote from Benjamin Franklin. That one is here. 1759. That's a whole generation before the Declaration of Independence.

We love to stare more than reflect, and to be intently indolently amused at our leisure, than to commit the smallest trespass on our patients by winding a painful, tedious maze which would pay us in nothing but knowledge, so that it takes a merlin to make an Arthur. It takes a Franklin to mature a Jefferson. And in this way we have an insight that there is a very peculiar. Um, what would you say the fairy tale phrase for? It comes out in a dance step called the Dosey doe. The dosey doe in this case is the dosey doe between memory and imagination. For there to be a king who can carry vision back into the mythic realm, which is an act of the imagination, there needs to be a merlin. And a merlin is a someone who has the memory capacity to develop that capacity so that a king can remember the vision to carry it back. You can't just take it from here to there because it involves a transform. And the transform is like a quantum blankness that the line doesn't go all the way through. It has a discontinuity. And that a single narrative is not sufficient to carry over that space, that quantum openness, because the line doesn't extend. It picks up again. And the sense, because memory is functioning is that this line fits with this. And therefore one goes on the basis that that vector is similar.

And because it's similar, we can still operate with it. And it turns out to be true. But there is a vast difference between sameness and similarity, and there is an impossible gulf between identity and similarity. An identity, while it is a concomitant of good integration, is absolutely a lie when it comes to differentiation. The classical Greeks of Greek tragedy times had a merlin figure named Heraclitus, and he said, you can never step into the same stream twice. It's always a little different. You are always a little different. You, having stepped into the stream, are vastly different from someone who has never stepped into a stream, and when you step into it again is a completely different experience. You have something called a memory. And it's not just a embedded gestalt in the tissue. Although the body receives memory also. Because memory comes out of the differential consciousness and functions in nature in such a way that it functions in the whole continuum of nature, it functions in the mind so that you can remember what you're thinking. It registers in feeling so that you can remember your experiences. How else would experience be able to be relived? And it goes into the body. You remember how to do the hand, remembers how to type, even though you don't consciously think of the letters all the time. The body remembers the kinesthetic balance of being able to ride a bicycle, but there were times when you had to initially have that, and then you can remember, but memory, when it is really powerfully differential, also goes back to nature.

And there's such a thing as nature recognizing you and remembering who you are. In the American Indians, that's where Hiawatha learns to talk to the trees and the plants, and they tell him what they are good for, because he needs to know that in order to go through the completed quest, there is a depth of penetration where consciousness and its memory function in the entire ecology of integration, even back to nature. There's such a thing as a landscape knowing who you are. That's why in the Chinese landscape scrolls, they're meant to be seen with a dear companion under special conditions. Between the two friends who see that landscape scroll, that landscape scroll beholds them also. The roots of Zen are in China, not in Japan. The developments in Japan, but the roots are in China. The appreciation of a landscape scroll has that magical transform quality, which is recognizable in a high dharma. So that one has wandered finally with great, great experience and consciousness. The Chinese phrase is mountains and streams without end. The codification and the Hellenistic West was world without end. And from that standpoint, one then comes to something like the Rigveda, and in the Rigveda, the king of gods is not called Zeus is called Indra, Indra, and in the Rigveda, Indra.

His heroic action which makes him king of the gods, is that he slays a dragon named Vittra, and the Rigveda records it in this way. This is in the first book of the Ten books of the Rigveda. It's the 32nd hymn, so it's very, very early on. Let me now sing the heroic deeds of Indra, the first that the thunderbolt wielder performed. In other words, his original deed. His original heroic deed. That is the original return to the integral realm, the first ritual action that he does as he slays with the thunderbolt. The dragon Vritra. Let me now sing the heroic deeds of Indra, the first that the thunderbolt wielder performed. He killed the dragon and pierced an opening for the waters. He split open the bellies of mountains. He killed the dragon who lay upon the mountain, fashioned the roaring thunderbolt, and like lowing cows, the flowing waters rushed straight down to the sea. Wildly excited like a bull. He took the Soma for himself and drank the extract from the three bowls in the three day Soma ceremony. Indra the Generous seized his thunderbolt to hurl it as a weapon. He killed that firstborn of dragons. And if you look at Greek mythology, you'll see that what made Zeus the king of gods is not that he killed the previous king of gods, but that he slayed a world serpent called Typhon. That's how he became King of Gods. Well, how does the story that he became King of gods because he slew the previous King of gods.

How does that come about? That comes about because it was not Greek mythology. That's a foundation of Roman mythology. Was it completely different tone, completely different tribe? Roman mythology is all about the collective. It's all about the good of the state. It's not about the development of the individual. Greek mythology, like Indian mythology, is all about the poignancy of each individual. Whereas Roman mythology comes down to an appreciation for the state. And in Roman mythology, one can become the king, whether it's of the gods or of men. Only by killing the previous king, only by an act of murder for the good of the kingdom can you achieve that rulership. And so this whole image in the Roman ethos of the king Needing to kill the old king to become ruler is the very center. The very first image that Sir James George Frazer writes about in his huge 13 volume set called The Golden Bough. When he says this is the most primordial image and trying to understand both what is wrong with civilization and why it got that way and where we are, because we have lived in a society not made largely by individuals, but accrued like mud settlement over eras and centuries of people redoing the Roman model, which is still around today. One doesn't have to be a Noam Chomsky to understand that those guys are still there, and they're still in the same place.

In The Golden Bough. He says that where the Apennines, which are the mountain range that go down the length of Italy and is sort of like the continental divide for the Italian peninsula, and on one side, on the western side, the last little ripple of hills is called the Alban Hills. And Rome originated from Trojan warriors fleeing Troy after long travail, landing at Ostia and going up to the Alban Hills and kidnapping their women, and by mass rape, taking them down to the valley. And that's how the Rome was founded. So in the Alban Hills, the sophisticated Romans always put their power villas in the Alban Hills, including the Caesars, right through to Caligula. Their villas were always there, because this is the place where we got the power to stay in power, and we know that, and that's how we stay in power. And Frazier, in the beginning of The Golden Bough, says that this is a very curious thing because the Alban Hills are also the remnants of a volcanic zone that includes Mount Vesuvius down by Naples, and that there are two old volcanic craters, and both of them are filled with water lakes like Crater Lake in Oregon. And the smaller one of them, the deeper one of them, is Nemi, and Lake Nemi is the place where the Roman Empire was founded in Roman mythology is held together, you can look through the Annals of Rome and the archaeological digs of Rome, and you can see the Forum Romanum, and you can see the Capitoline Hill and all the places of power, including the Vatican, including all of the things Saint Peter's down to the Forum Romanum.

But it's the Lake Nemi that is the fount where the mythological power of Rome was made, because it's there that the center of the mythological horizon, clustered around the king of the mythological horizon, is in his own time killed and displaced. Why would it be there? Because these are not foolish people. They understood mythology very well. They understood symbols very well. They just didn't understand vision or art or history or science. They didn't understand those things at all. But the myths and the symbols they did, because that Lake Nemi has a little terrace of several hundred yards. And on all other sides, it's a steep, heavily wooded volcanic thing. And that little terrace was the ancient shrine to Diana. And Diana was the goddess of wild things. She's not the queen who occupies the home. She's the goddess. Before there were homes. She's the goddess of wild things. She is the primordial energy in the world. She is Mother nature. Wild mother nature. Wild is not tameable. She gives her a scent only to that kind of courage that seizes the day. And so it's the king. The new king who comes to kill the old king.

The new king of gods. Of mythological gods. Who comes to kill the old king of mythological gods. And Frasier says the old Roman image is that the old king holding forth there always walks around with a sword, because he knows that eventually some young man will come to kill him, to take the kingship away. And so, at the very core of the mythological tapestry of the Roman ethos is that you live and die by the sword. This is the truth. This is the reality. And you find that this has somewhat of a place in Indian mythology, and yet it's transformed. It's transformed because, Indra, when you killed the firstborn of dragons and overcame by your own magic, the magic of the magicians. At that very moment you brought forth the sun, the sky and dawn. And since then you have found no enemy to conquer you. In India, the King of gods brought light, not victory by the sword. And so the ethos out of Indian mythology is to seek for enlightenment, whereas the Roman Ethos is to seek by conquest, complete rule, and to defend it by preemptively preparing for those successors who would come for you. By training them to take up where you left off, so that even though they may kill you, they'll continue in the same way that you did. This is the myth of eternal return of the same. This is a pernicious situation, and one that Western civilization has been mired in for too many millennia. Its time is over. More next week.