Ritual 5

We come to Ritual Five and again like we did in Nature Five, we begin a four presentation square a month, a moon cycle and the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth presentations are the second square. The first square in Nature, we took the I Ching, which was a pair of male and female, FuHsi and NuGua, that underwent a change for a pair of males, King Wen and the Duke of Zhōu and then came into its third level as a composition that was united by Confucius and we paired that with Thoreau. So in Nature we began with a square of two masculine, largely masculine, examples and then the second square in Nature were two women, Jane Goodall and Mary Leakey. Following this kind of concourse, in Ritual we began with Confucius' the Analects and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which are largely masculine. And now we move in the second square, like we did in Nature, to two women. And these two women are extraordinary women because they lived at the cusp of an enormous change in history. They lived just a generation before Mary Leakey and just two generations really before Jane Goodall. But they were the grandmothers of the current generation that Jane Goodall is a part of and these two women are Ruth Benedict, one of the world's greatest anthropologists and Jessie L. Weston, who was one of the world's greatest discoverers of the way in which ancient rituals were brought into a medieval ethos about 1,000 years ago, that underwent a severe change, in that the personality of western influenced mankind again showed that the ancient Near East ritual pattern was still effective and produced a completely different kind of temperament.
What we're looking at is the way in which pairs of exemplars, matched together in a square of presentations, in that if we get three squares of these presentations, we will get a kind of rectangle of 12, which is really six times two, which is really two times three, so that you can understand that there's a geometry to what we're doing. But if we started out by pointing out the geometry we would never get to the geometry in the right way. The symbolic structure of the mind is largely geometrical, but its geometry is based upon a ritual patterning and that ritual patterning is not geometrical, but is cyclical. And so one has a very interesting kind of stability in our ability to bring things together, to integrate them, in that the basis of them is cyclical, which tends to be circular and what is built out of that tends to be geometrical, which is largely shapes, not just circle but squares, triangles as well. So that our whole sense of bringing something together has two different kinds of integral and in order to work them together it's like the old children's thing of patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. It's two different kinds of motions and actions and it becomes understandable because both the ritual cycles and the symbolic geometry have symmetry. The symmetry of the cycle is chiral, it's right-handed or left-handed in its spin, in its direction and so gains a stability by a posture which is able to go both ways equally at the same time and we call this balance. The geometry carries a different quality as we will see when we get to symbolic thought, when we get to symbols. What our learning is doing is bringing us patiently in a recalibration, a massive recalibration on almost every conceivable level and every conceivable way, to pull us through a transform that started about four generations ago. And the two women that we're taking were right at the vanguard of the way in which something so enormous was happening, that mankind has probably irrevocably begun to change his species. That what was Homo sapiens for 150, 160,000,000 years, looks like it is changing its species to Homo sapiens stellaris, to a species that lives in a whole star system and not on a world. Lives in a plurality of worlds, rather than on one world, or in one kingdom, or in one nation, or in one empire. That the oneness is severely hindering the emergence of the qualities and the insights of the new kind of species which we are evolving to rapidly. And that while evolution takes a long time on initial phases, what we saw in Nature is that evolution has moments where in a punctuated equilibria all of a sudden in one generation, or in two generations, or three at the most, you have a sea change and you have new species that emerge and they emerge with all of the qualities of wholeness. They don't emerge as chimeras, part this and part that, but they emerge whole, but it takes a while for a new species to establish itself. And we saw with The Evolution of Man from Mary Leakey going back about 7,000,000,000 years now in cognate species and we saw from Jane Goodall, going back to the origins of primates, 70,000,000 years ago. And then we saw with macro evolution that when you are able to look back, say 500,000,000 years ago and then with the discovery of the double helix of being able to look back at the origins of DNA life that go back to the RNA world of pre-bacterial elements, one goes back billions of years. And as you do this the ability to understand the cycles of nature becomes more and more like a concentric cycle within cycle within cycle and it is like a dynamic target and this dynamic target has a very peculiar quality. At certain nodes all the way through, there is a break in the equilibrium, there is a break in the balance, where nature leaps forth and has the ability to emerge a new species, a new kind of organism. All of a sudden this has speeded up and we now are in the fourth generation of what evidently is emergence of Star System Man, who is at home in a plurality of worlds. This learning, instead of being linear, instead of being a training or an instruction, follows those complex cycles within cycles, so that you're able to work with this material in a plurality of ways which open up for you aspects that would not have occurred to you in any kind of previous learning. The closest analogues to this were wisdom schools in ancient times, brought back into play by small communities of groups from time to time over the last 30, 40,000 years, but it has never been on this kind of comprehensive scale before.
Let's come to our two women for just a moment. They were both poignant and one of the aspects of Ruth Benedict was that she was thrown into a very peculiar kind of a life. She was born in New York City in 1887 and about a year and a half later her sister Marjorie was born and then the father died, so that she grew up in a house where her mother was trying to take care of the two little girls and constantly grieving over the unfairness of the loss of her husband, of his untimely death. And so she grew up in a household that not only just had her mother, but very often had grandparents or had sisters of her mother, she had her own sister. And so Ruth Benedict grew up in an atmosphere of constant negativity that was only mitigated because it was distributed among a number of women living together, working together. That there was no balance, there was only a distribution of the anxiety among a number of women and this produced in her a response where she deadened the connections that normally would develop in the social world and she lived largely in her own world. Not just a world of imagination but a world of endeavour herself and as if to underscore this she began to lose her hearing. So she was cocooned into an intolerable world where the masculine was either missing or if a masculine came in, was like an interloper coming in to see what he could get and then go. Whereas the women were left constantly of having to work it out together and keep life going and keep a sense of ability to do things. And by the time that it was discovered that Ruth Benedict - her maiden name was Fulton - that her basic quality was that of a reclusive poet and all her life she wrote poetry. One of the poignant poems that she wrote, just to give you an example of...I think it is...this comes from one of her diaries and this was written in 1923. 'We'll have no crumb in common in all our days. We shall not make a dream come true by naming it together, nor go full-fortified from the touch of lips. These are sweet things to us. They are as words rhymed in proud cadence by a jesting fool. We have but this: an hour when the life-long aimless stepping of our feet fell into time and measure each to the other's tune.' This highly sensitive woman, because of her evident intelligence and because of family connections, was put with her sister into special prep schools and then they were put into Vassar College. And they were put into Vassar College right about the time that the women's suffrage movement in the United States was beginning to gain steam, where women were going to be able vote. The states were still referendums on whether women should vote or not. Three women stood out for the young poetess Ruth Fulton, who became Ruth Benedict. One was an African plantation farm owner who wrote a book about it, Olive Schreiner, who was determined not to let herself be mulched into a false family world. And the protagonist of her Story of an African Farm is a woman who refuses to marry the man who got her pregnant, because she would lose her individuality through being farmed out. And one of the points that Olive Schreiner makes, a married woman under these circumstances is no different from a woman having to work her way on the street. The second figure was Margaret Fuller, who was a transcendentalist, who was a friend of Emerson, a friend of Thoreau, who died in a shipwreck off Fire Island in a storm coming back from Europe and she was only 40 years old. The Portable Margaret Fuller is put out by Viking Penguin Portable Library and Margaret Fuller, this Life by Carolyn Balducci is quite a wonderful life. The third woman was Mary Wollstonecraft, who's famous for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and for Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, written in revolutionary times, the times of the American and French Revolutions and who died when she also was not very old. And her daughter became Mary Shelley. Her husband, her second husband, was William Godwin, who was one of the great political philosophers of personal freedom. And so these became Ruth Benedict's mentors and when she was graduating from Vassar, her sister Marjorie was singled out as being the perfect Vassar graduate, who was prepared to take an honourable place leading society intelligently and graciously in a modern world. And very soon she was married to a man, Robert Freeman and settled down to a very nice, comfortable life. Whereas Ruth, though she was very, very intelligent, was increasingly unhappy and so it was arranged by one of the patrons of Vassar to invite her to go to Europe for a year with two California Vassar graduates. And so the three of them went to Europe for a year. They went to Germany, they lived for three months there. They went to Italy, lived for a couple of months there. They went to Switzerland, lived there for a while, to France, to England. And by the time that she came back, she came back having experienced at least a year and several months of finding that there's a gorgeousness in the world and that though she hardly had anything to do with the two young women travelling with her, when she came back, she went back to a home where there was the familiar depressive stuff. By this time the mother was living and working in Buffalo, New York and in constrained circumstances and Ruth more and more felt like she was just crumbling again back from a little bit of a glimpse of openness and that the only ways out were unacceptable, artificial ways. I'm going to leap ahead to the book we're using by her. Patterns of Culture has sold millions of copies and it's been constantly in print since it was published in 1934. This is her conclusion in Patterns of Culture:
In our own generation, extreme forms of ego gratification are culturally supported. In a similar fashion, arrogant and unbridled egotists as family men, as officers of the law and in business, have been again and again portrayed by novelists and dramatists and they are familiar in every community. Like the behaviour of Puritan Divines, their courses of action are often more asocial than those of inmates in penitentiaries. In terms of the suffering and frustration that they spread about them, there is probably no comparison. There is very possibly at least as great a degree of mental warping, yet they are trusted with positions of great influence and importance and are as a rule fathers of families. They impress both upon their own children and upon the structure of society and it is indelible. They are not described in our manuals of psychiatry because they are supported by every tenet of our civilisation. They are sure of themselves in real life in a way that is possible only to those who are oriented to the points of the compass laid down by their own culture. Nevertheless, a future psychiatry may well ransack our novels and letters and public records for illumination upon a type of abnormality, to which it would not otherwise give credence. In every society it is among this very group of the culturally encouraged and fortified, that some of the most extreme types of human behaviour are fostered.
It was one of the strongest statements since Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It hit, in the United States, right at the depths of the Great Depression and it illuminated something which had come to the fore in a very peculiar, strong way and that way is this, the peculiarity is this: Ruth [25:26 Fuller / Fulton] tried to leave home again and this time she went to California, came to California. She came to Los Angeles and taught at the Westlake School for Girls for a year and she went to Pasadena and taught in Pasadena at the Orton School for Girls for a year, ostensibly because her sister's husband lived in Pasadena, lived out here. And each time she did, she saw the girls under her care being massively mulched to fit the patterns that the successful sister had exemplified and that she herself could not live by and finally dared not even try to teach. And as if there were some kind of eerie, odd, paradoxical lure, she was pursued by a man named Stanley Benedict, who was in his own right a very nice man, but extremely recognisable as a type. Stanley Benedict's father was a Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati and Benedict himself got interested in Chemistry and he became one of the really early researchers in Physical Chemistry, now called Biochemistry, dealing with cancer. And his personality was all geared beautifully to taking over the management of people's health because they have cancer and working with them to try to find cures and this gave him the largesse of controlling their lives for the betterment of themselves, which he himself then was the controller. He convinced Ruth Benedict that she had not done very well for herself in managing her life, but she had plenty of talent and they had a lot of intellectual things to share and if she would give her life over to his control, she would do rather well and would move back to New York City, which she did. And when she was there it occurred to her more and more that she had ostensibly a life that was now worthwhile and increasingly she felt empty and vacuous inside. And so on a whim, to just try to find something to do, she took an anthropology course at Barnard College, Columbia and she took it from Elsie Clews Parsons.
Elsie Clews Parson was an extraordinary kind of anthropologist because before she was an anthropologist, she was one of the most outspoken feminists of her day on the sociological level. In 1913 she brought out a book called The Old-Fashioned Woman, sub-entitled, Primitive Fancies about the Sex. And the following year she brought out a book, in 1914, Fear and Conventionality, right at the beginning of World War One. And then the following year she brought out a book called Social Freedom: A Study of the Conflict between Social Classifications and Personality. And to top it off, the very next year she brought out a book called Social Rule: A Study of the Will to Power, which is a Nietzschean phrase, 'The will to power.' Then Elsie Clews Parsons discovered the leading, new cultural anthropology, that for about two generations already had accrued some of the most penetrating studies of human nature ever done and that most of the great practitioners in this were women associated with a man that they all called Papa Franz, Franz Boas. And Franz Boas had originally - born in Germany 1856 - had somehow, when he was a mature young man gotten involved in an expedition to the Eskimos in the far Arctic north Baffin Island. And when he got there he realised that nobody knew anything about the Eskimos and so he began finding out, he began having questions and researches and his book on The Central Eskimo was one of the first cultural anthropological monographs ever done. And then he realised that the New World, North America, was really the place to be to study the primordial nature of man, not primitive people, but primordial peoples. And so he became ensconced at Columbia in New York City, but his area of speciality was the Kwakiutl Indians on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, on the other side of the continent. And the Kwakiutl are extraordinary, outgoing kinds of people, but their outgoingness is a deep, paranoiac competitiveness with each other and one of the qualities that comes out is, the potlatch where one can give away more than anyone else, but to expect that somebody else would try to outdo you, so you'll get it all back anyway, but it's under the aegis of this explosive, extrovertive competitiveness. And the Kwakiutl would become one of three cultures that are brought together, not just compared, but put into a three pronged, three part propeller, where Ruth Benedict is showing that there is no culture that is real at all by themselves. That any culture taken by itself will be a source increasingly of a kind of a skew, because the patterns of that isolated culture will implode and will eventually stylise the emotional temperament of one's expectations for experience, of the images and the feelings and show up in the language. And that the ritual patterns upon which this is built lay the groundwork for the kind of mind that will symbolise all this and what happens is that isolated cultures, no matter what, will have this kind of implosion to a certain kind of style and that to her, the style that was developed by the modern, western, European-American culture. She writes: 'Social thinking at the present time has no more important task before it than that of taking adequate account of cultural relativity. In the fields of both sociology and psychology, the implications are fundamental and modern thought about contexts of peoples and about our changing standards is greatly in need of staying in scientific direction. The sophisticated modern temper has made of social relativity, even in the small area which it has recognised, a doctrine of despair. It has pointed out its incongruity with the orthodox dreams of permanence and ideality with the individuals' illusions of autonomy. It is argued that if human experience must give up these, the nutshell of existence is empty. But to interpret our dilemma in these terms is to be guilty of an anachronism. It is only the inevitable cultural lag that makes us insist that the old must be discovered again and the new. That there is no solution but to find the old certainty and stability in a new plasticity.' In other words, one has this cultural veering towards wanting everything new all the time. So that everything is jettisoned because it's old, it's been done. Been there, done that, throw it away constantly. That the arrogance of this cultural style is actually leading towards death.
One of the most poignant influences at this time was the coming out of the poetry of Amy Lowell, who was of the patrician Lowell families from Massachusetts. Her family home which she inherited, Seven Oaks, is one of the great mansions of aristocratic Boston Brahmin families. Two of her brothers, one Abbott Lowell, became the president of Harvard and another, Percival Lowell, became the great founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona and was the mastermind for the discovery that Mars probably has life. One of her poems is called 'Patterns.' 'I walked down the garden paths and all the daffodils are blowing and the bright blue squills. I walk down the patterned garden paths in my stiff, brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, I too am a rare pattern. As I wander down the garden paths my dress is richly figured and the train makes a pink and silver stain on the gravel and the thrift of the borders, just a plate of current fashion, tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. Not a softness anywhere about me, only whalebone and brocade. And I sink on a seat in the shade of a lime tree for my passion wars against the stiff brocade. The daffodils and squills flutter in the breeze as they please. And I weep for the lime-tree is in blossom and one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.' And the poem ends...it's one of the most poignant poetic passages in world poetry: 'I shall go up and down, in my gown. Gorgeously arrayed, boned and stayed and the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace by each button, hook, and lace. For the man who should loose me is dead, fighting with the Duke in Flanders, in a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?' Let's take a break.
Let's come back to Ruth Benedict for just a moment in a poetic mode. She published a volume of poems in 1941, she was 54. It's called But the Son of Man with an ellipse, But the Son of Man... It runs like this: 'Foxes have holes and in the wintry weather save themselves warm at price of breath and bone. Playing to shortened strength a shortened tether, taking to breast a stone. Their light feet tranced, their earth become as earthy, their sodden marshes when the flood has gone. They sleep not knowing bereavement, content, worthy, the ecstasy withdrawn.' So at the winter of the blood, we straighten out our limbs to quiet, crying flesh, to find oblivion, as foxes, sun-forsaken, deaf and dumb and blind. The volume, which was published in 1959, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict was edited by the beautiful friend, Margaret Mead. And Margaret Mead was a younger version of Ruth Benedict and they met in the Anthropology Department at Barnard, at Columbia, under Franz Boas. And Margaret Mead had made a mistake in marrying a minister named Luther Cresswell, it didn't work out at all. She was just too deep and too enormous and too experimentive. So her second husband was named Reo Fortune and Reo Fortune took his bride, Margaret Mead, to the Western Pacific, the South Pacific and wrote a classic book in anthropology called Sorcerers of Dobu. In the Patterns of Culture she takes the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, she takes the Dobu of the Western Pacific and for a third, she takes the Zuni Indians in the American Southwest, in New Mexico. Patterns of Culture was published in 1934 and the following year, in 1935, Margaret Mead published Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. So you have three in the cultures of Patterns of Culture, three in Sex and Temperament. It is the pattern of ritual that gives rise to the temperament; a great deal of the chirality of the temperament is the sexuality. There isn't just men and women but there is a feminine and a masculine and it is chiral, meaning that it generates in opposite swirls that can be balanced, but not balanced all the time. In fact, one has to have a way of going back into a natural cycle, in order to have those moments of balance and a chirality that very often, if it is artificially encased, there will be no balance possible whatsoever. About the same time that Ruth Benedict was studying the great Zuni tribe, her monograph was also published by Columbia University Press, two big blue volumes, in 1935, but the work was done in 1922, 1923. She had gone, as we were saying earlier, she had gone to Columbia just to take a course in anthropology. She took it from Elsie Clews Parsons and one of Parsons' most famous studies is of the Pueblo Indian religion, published in two volumes by the University of Chicago Press. So Ruth Benedict fits into the Elsie Clews Parsons way of understanding what Papa Franz was all about. That one has to go and live with those people in their way so that you tune yourself to how they are. It's like an ancient wisdom way of raising babies: if you make a spirit resonance contact with a baby so that that baby is literally enfolded into the natural resonance that you have, as your life works out, the experience of that child will be in tune with your experience, the way that you do experience. They will not be the same, but they'll be in tune with it. One of the reasons that Ruth Benedict went to the Zuni was that Elsie Clews Parsons was understanding that the great Pueblo cultural achievement was massive and one of the most sophisticated in the world. But the Zuni were just one part of the Pueblos. They included the Hopi, the Keres, the Tewa, several other tribes, so that the work of Elsie Clews Parsons was for this enormity of the Pueblo nation and Ruth Benedict focused on the Zuni because she said, 'What is interesting is that most of the other tribes in North America have had their traditions truncated, whereas the Zuni are still active. They're still pacing themselves in a way in which the pattern of their culture is still viable.' And that there is a difference, that when you go to Acoma, the City of the Sky, in Zuni Land, there on that particular plateau, one finds, as she found, that the quality of the mythic experience, rooted in the accuracy of a living ritual pattern that is still going on in a very special way. They are strict about keeping the ritual liniments but they are open to letting a new kind of relationality happen. Whereas the Dobu have a completely opposite tack to the Kwakiutl and one finds this immediately in the architecture of those two cultures. When you go to the Kwakiutl houses on Vancouver Island, they're largely squares, post and beam squares and they might be immense, like 30 feet, 35 feet square. And inside the square there will be in the centre a square dug out and that earth piled up and this might be carried over several times so that inside of a Kwakiutl house one will have squares within squares, like terraces going deeper and deeper, so that the centre of the house may be sometimes as much as ten levels below where you would come in off the ground. And in this beautiful arrangement there is constantly that the centre of the house is deeper and deeper and more confidentially protective. Whereas the Dobu live in huts clustered around the central part of the village, which is the graveyard. And the Dobu are infamous due to the Patterns of Culture volume, because they are the most suspicious tribe in the world. They know that everyone else knows that everyone is out to get everyone else and has made a whole life based on being able to have rituals of curse and rituals of protection and rituals of confirming the suspicions that everyone has about everyone else and this, on this volcanic island in the Pacific, is the perfect little prison for this nightmare culture of the Dobu.
Jessie Weston, Jessie L. Weston, her middle name was Laidlaw, she always used 'L.' She was born in 1850. She was the daughter of a father who had married before and that wife had died, leaving a couple of children. So he married again and Jessie had a couple of sisters and those three girls by that second wife, that second wife died and so the father married again and had five children by a third wife. So she grew up in this large Victorian household where there were ten children and a father and the third wife, mother and servants and so forth and she was the only one who never married. She was the only one whose special qualities showed up very early and this is in the height of Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, nineteen century England. They realised that there wasn't any place for her in the normal schooling, so she was sent, as one would do at the time, she was sent to Europe to have one of the best educations you could have. She was sent to a private college at Germany for a while, then she was sent to Paris and in Paris she discovered that she shared a passion for Wagner's music with a publisher and...Alfred Nutt, N-u-t-t. And that she was studying under a very famous man in Paris, named Gaston Paris and between Alfred Nutt and Gaston Paris, she acquired the kind of refined and learned individuality, the ability to read many languages, to write exquisitely. And yet the world knew nothing of her, because when she published her first book she was over 40 years old, but as someone once said of Jessie L. Weston, 'She burst like Athena full grown from the mind of Zeus.' And when she came on the scene her book concerned the magnificent, esoteric structure and quality of Wagner's musical genius, that was able to go back and produce not just great music, or great lyrics, or this wonderful, dramatic presentation, but that there were primordial, universal patterns to the Wagner operas that were timeless. And that the musical motifs - they were called then Wagnerian music leitmotifs - these leitmotifs are the expression in musical notes and tones of the exact sequence of the way in which the feelings will universally emerge if you do these things, if you do these actions, if you play these notes, if you go through this sequence exactly in this way, this will happen universally. And so the Wagnerian opera was constantly seeded by these special motifs and there began a Wagner craze, not just for great music and not just for the fantastic mythologies that were being brought back in together, but the most poignant of all of the Wagner operas, the last one was 'Parsifal.' And 'Parsifal' is one of these immense works of genius, like Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony,' or Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion.' The 'Parsifal' by Wagner goes into some of the most primordial, mystical qualities of human feeling and images and the way in which one would speak out of this, because the opera by this time had refined itself, not just through the 'Ring Cycle' but about ten really great operas, beginning with Lohengrin, Tannhäuser. But 'Parsifal' is like the perfect opera to show how the patterns of ritual come all the way through to the blossoming of the human spirit, in not just the individuality but in the universality of our common universe. The 'Parsifal' was the great epic work of the medieval German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. And so Jessie L. Weston translated all 2400 hundred lines of Wolfram's Parzival and had it published in two volumes and it was magnificent not just because of her translation but the way in which she commented on it and what she drew out of it. One understood was here was a woman who was like the peer of Wagner in terms of understanding how ritual is brought through experience into symbols that release vision, that allow for the emergence of a splendid universal spirit. That she could do this and knew exactly how to do this and that it was once more she was convinced that the world of masculine scholarship had skewed away from the actualities of the way in which life really works. And so she set out, like a 'Parsifal' knight of feminine intelligence, to challenge all of them, especially the closed circle of masculine, German medieval scholarship and they took great umbrage. 'Here is a woman in a man's world. Here is an English woman in a German man's world. She's translating our epic person in a way which is completely different in seeing and completely different from us.' But the crux of the matter was not Wolfram, but they were convinced that they had worked out that Arthurian cycles and legends were first written by Chretien de Troyes in the north east of France, about 1165 and Jessie Weston said, 'No, it goes back much, much, much before that.' That these are ritual patterns that go back not just to a deeper medieval, but they go back not even just to a classic locus, but they go back and back and back to the ancient Near East. And that if you want to look for the origins of this, the ritual origins are thousands of years back. And her last great work that she finished was published in 1920, Cambridge University Press - she was 70 years old - From Ritual to Romance and we're using that. There are several editions of From Ritual to Romance and I think the one easiest to find is the Dover paperback. It's about 6.95. She was...the Anchor edition of it you'll probably recognise when you see the film Apocalypse Now, it's based on a lot of Jessie L. Weston's scale of techniques. And you'll find that the character played by Marlon Brando has this edition of From Ritual to Romance on his bedside reading, along with Frazer's Golden Bough.
In fact, Jessie L. Weston was one of two colossally great, talented women who dominated this whole era, the other being Jane Ellen Harrison, who when we get to later on in the course, because of the parallels, you'll find that we pair Jane Ellen Harrison in the Myth section with the Inanna epic of Enheduanna. Because as a matter of fact, all of these ritual cycles first gain their comprehensive, civilised art expression in a written form in the time of Enheduanna, which is 4500 years ago. She is the first to really bring it together and when we get to the Myth phase next, you'll see how the progression of what we are doing in our phases, that each of the pairs have a relationality with the others, that keeps complexly building. And by the time we get to having done the Nature phase and we get to the Ritual phase where we are now, the parallel is not just a parallel simply but is a very complex ratioing, so that if we take the presentation notes from Nature and we read them along with the presentations in Ritual, we will be reading the notes on Mary Leakey and Jane Goodall at the same time as we're having the presentation of Jessie L. Weston and Ruth Benedict. And by the time we get to the second of the Myth presentation pairs, we'll be reading Navajo Medicine Men by Gladys Reichard and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by J.R.R. Tolkien. Because one of the things that Jessie L. Weston found was that the original Grail hero was Sir Gawain, was not Galahad, was not anyone else, but was Gawain, who goes back to the ancient Near East, because he is a solar god, not just a solar god like Chamash or Adonis figure, but goes all the way back as we have seen. Because we began the Ritual section by pairing the Egyptian Book of the Dead with the Analects of Confucius and that the original Pyramid Texts upon which the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the third transform. You had the Pyramid Texts, then you had the Coffin Texts, then you had the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Just like the I Ching was originally FuHsi and NuGua, then was the Zhōu dynasty founders, the Duke of Zhōu and King Wen, who is a very tall man by the way. He was about six ten. For a Chinese figure 3,000 years ago to be six ten, is just an unbelievable figure. But the third level was then Confucius, who did the Ten Wing Commentary, so that the I Ching and the Egyptian Book of the Dead are these ancient writings whose complete structure has been morphed at least twice over before it gets to a classic era, where after Confucius there are so many versions of the I Ching that you find that the fourth phase of that is what William James called, 'A pluralistic universe.' That once you go one, two, three, the fourth stage is infinity. In fact, George Gamow wrote a book called One, Two, Three...Infinity about the nature of modern science. It was a bestseller about the time that Patterns of Culture was brought out in paperback, was brought out in January 1946. This is the Penguin book number two, P2. It's the second paperbound that they ever published. It is a quality where you find in what we're learning and how we're learning, that you can build both the geometry and the trigonometry and the infinite calculus of differential and integral, all on the basis of which we are working. And this is why the presentation always has this kind of poetic, spontaneous mode, is so that you can come back to it again and again at different times, in different ways and still have a fertile resource that allows you to come out of this.
Jessie L. Weston was lionised in the London of the 1890s and almost every year she brought out a new fantastic book. And she became a founding member of one of the great women's clubs of London, the Lyceum Club. And she also became one of the star performers at the Folklore Society and at the Folklore Society you had people showing up all the time, like W.B. Yeats, or Sir James George Frazer, Gilbert Murray, Jane Ellen Harrison. You had all of a sudden this fantastic group of people that eventually expanded and you had people like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and you suddenly had this world famous coterie of people. And when From Ritual to Romance first came out in 1920, the first person to really develop it in a poetic work of art was T.S. Eliot, he wrote The Waste Land based on it. It is a most incredible thing that Jessie L. Weston should have found a way to simply dominate increasingly the...not only the area of intellectual acumen in the London which was the centre of the British Empire world, which was one of the most conspicuous of all the international cultures that have ever been, but that increasingly she took on not only the German masculine intellectualists, but she took on the British occult masters, like A.E. Waite, who became extremely jealous of her. And as long as she was alive he was careful to nit-pick and only after she was dead he came out with broadsides saying that, 'She was an impossible woman. She really didn't have any occult background and understanding and how dare she parade herself as if she was really this expert on things?' But the figure who really featured her was an occult expert who is intellectually superior to A.E. Waite and that was G.R.S Mead. And G.R.S. Mead is one of the great figures of that whole transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He was the last secretary for Madame Blavatsky, but then he broke away from Theosophy because he said, 'The Theosophical Society were all people who were wealthy and who thought that looking at occult things was like an afternoon tea sort of adventure into things,' when there was really a deep mysteriousness that was resurfacing on the basis of archaeology and on the basis of anthropology. And Jessie L. Weston was of that group that were the first to take archaeology and anthropology and bring them into a deepening so that one had not just occult doctrines, or intellectual, academic studies, but now one had a firm basis upon which to get traction, that there were things and things done. The ritual objectivity was the basis of being able to actually detail and tease out of the confusion of the past, the confusion of artificial cultures, of manipulated societies and return human beings back to a primordiality. That one could actually do this, that this was achievable now.
At the time that Jessie L. Weston died in 1928, one already found that quantum mechanics was being understood by Heisenberg and Schrödinger, by Wolfgang Pauli, Poltorak, Niels Bohr, the Einstein relativity material was being confirmed and developed from there. And so one had this enormous change on the ability of people from that particular generation, born in the later half of the nineteenth century and living into the first third of the twentieth century. That generation shifted, almost like a great watershed, from doing the rituals that you were taught to do because that's the way things are done in custom, to understanding that you can find out if you will take yourself with an open mind and go through those approaches which will deliver up for you, fresh in your own feelings, the truthfulness of what this produces. If you will do these steps, you will get the kinaesthetic quality of feeling. You will get fresh, new emergence of real images and your language will change. Instead of being a patois, it will become your own individual language. So that when you speak to someone who has this as well, now a new quality emerges, that the human community of sharing is no longer limited by stylisations of cultures, but has transcended itself deep down to the primordiality of naturalness and up to the transcendent quality of our universal spirituality, both at the same time. And what flows now is a great triple field of nature, of mythic experience and of conscious vision. A thrice greatest quality. And whereas culture will have its ability to fit into nature, the flow of experience into the flow of nature, culture only goes that far. Whereas if you bring the flow of consciousness, with the flow of culture, with the flow of nature, with those three, now for the first time art is possible. And art is the emergence then of the superior kind of new form, it is a dual form. It is not based on a pragmatic basis, but on a prismatic basis. That all of the ritual traction now has been completely transformed, so that one can have the efficacy of primordiality, of real ritual steps, but have them creatively happen for the first time. You can now have a Merce Cunningham kind of dance, which is just as primordial as the old, say sun dance ceremony of the American Indians, or the old African dances in ancient tribal Africa. That art has now the primordiality and instead of it being a primordiality that is like the basis, it is the primordiality that is the draw, so that art draws us forward, forward into, out of a universe, into a cosmos. And that art forms then are the proof that we belong in all the dimensions of an artistic life and that those dimensions now free us to participate in civilisation.
From Ritual to Romance takes us all the way back to the ancient Near East ritual basis, that Jessie L. Weston worked a whole lifetime to show that once you get the ritual pattern in its completeness and you commit yourself for a little while to live by that pattern in doing it, the same quality of images will come out, the same kinaesthetic feeling tones will come out. You will be able, literally, to experience what those people who had experienced it originally and to recognise different variants of it all the way through thousands of years and you will feel a kinship with those people. So instead of having a tribe which is geographically limited, one now has a community of people throughout thousands and thousands of years of times, spanning the entire planet. And that what comes out of this finally, as Ruth Benedict will say in Patterns of Culture, she says right at the beginning, first paragraph: 'Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques whose conventions and values which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.' And then she goes on to say, 'Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over, against our neighbour as superstition. It was necessary to recognise that those institutions which are based on the same premises - let us say the supernatural - must be considered together our own among the rest.' That the contemporary scene that she lived in with everyone else was not a civilisation, but it was a culture. It was a culture out of tune with nature, not only out of tune with nature, but that meant that the experience of that culture had no way of participating naturally at all. And because it had no way to participate naturally at all, the rituals were all false. They were all fictitious, they were all artificial. And that the only way that they could be maintained was for a mind that was paranoiac and schizophrenic and completely mad, to dream up doctrines that would fit in those kinds of skewed patterns and keep alive the comfort of being in this cultural sinkhole. More and more it occurred, as 1934 showed, because the book was published almost a year after the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, under the aegis of the National Socialist Party. One of the works that we use in the Ritual section is Leni Riefenstahl's film of the Nazi gathering at Nuremberg in 1936, the film 'The Triumph of the Will.' It was Nuremberg that received the great trial of the Nazis after the Second World War was over. In fact, the film 'Judgment at Nuremberg' based poignantly on that. But even deeper from that, the number one music of the Third Reich enjoyed, was Richard Wagner and the most ebullient expression of it was from the Mastersingers, Die Meistersinger. That Nuremberg goes back into this very deep quality of a cultural icon and protects itself, as any kind of artificial culture will, from learning about any other cultures because they will contaminate. So that the emphasis is no longer on the natural ritual, which would be purification, it is on eliminating contamination. And the eliminating of anything that interferes is a contamination and so the purification is that they must go, they must be done away with, to get rid of all of the blemishes. So it isn't purification in the original ritual, but it is the inverse of it, a devolution. And of course the mind that supports that devolution becomes like an inverse of the stability of the way in which atomic matter maintains itself, that is, it no longer maintains its stability but it becomes radioactive. And so the modern world that we have grown up in has been for three generations, not only perverse, but increasingly radioactive. Not a civilisation at all, but a radioactive culture.
Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict and From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston, give us an ability to move from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Analects of Confucius, from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, deeper into primordial aspects of the world that go way back beyond, beyond the realms even of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and of the origins of the I Ching in China. Back to a Palaeolithic quality that was there long before there was a Neolithic, which was there long before there was a civilisation. And so our strategy here is to, by paired tuning forks, to be able to continue to tune in arrays that finely show us that the piano which we have tuned with this set of tuning forks, has more than just the 11 octaves that a piano has. If you add them up there is six in each of eight, so that we have a 48 octave instrument to play minimally. The symphony of this education is played on that kind of scale. It is an instrument that is, in terms of its time for performance, 14 times as long as the entire Ring Cycle of Wagner. So you're dealing with a composition here and a composer who is making a performance that is so complex and long, that it takes two years to perform. The participation each Saturday is not just a metronome, but it's a part of a primordial cycle of sevens. And when those sevens group together into a quaternary, you have a lunar cycle of 28. And when you pair that into a 12 part series that contains also an eight interval aspect to it, you get then a solar year. One of the most profound of all ancient monuments is in Ireland, in County Meath. It dates back to 5,200 years ago. It's called Newgrange. And the great Palaeolithic temple at Newgrange, built about 3200 BC, has a corridor that goes all the way through to the centre and at this centre, at the back, is the altar. The corridor is higher than it has to be and it is dark all of the year, only at one moment is it light. Because there is a register over the doorway of Newgrange, that the Midsummer sunrise, the solstice sunrise, will send a shaft of light all the way through and illuminate the altar in a rosy pink colour. You would have had to wait the entire year for that one short, minute's long moment, to see that you had prepared everything to receive the light exactly right. It isn't that the light is there all the time, but it is there exactly at the time it is there. And the wisdom of being ritually based in nature, is to be ready for that light when it is really there. More next week.