Ritual 6

We come to ritual six and we are appreciating that our movement and our learning is developing steps that are a sequence that have a number of different orders of co-ordination. The cardinal sequence needs to be established initially so that one can take the steps and, in taking the steps, understand that they amount to a finite, limited sequence that finishes. So that existential objectivity anywhere in the Universe involved a limitation for the objectivity to synch and take hold, but the ancient word that is used for that in Greek is Horizōn, pronounced Horizon with an aspirant and they get it from the Ancient Egyptians. The horizon originally in Greek meant the limit, the finiteness and its quality was not that the horizon was the end, but that the horizon was the meeting of the earth and the sky at the vanishing of being able to determine anything further, so the horizon was the limit of that perspective of the world, but establishing that limitation, the horizon, one had to literally create the bound of the horizon and the boundary was created like boundaries have always been created since Neolithic times, in Palaeolithic times the liminality was somewhat different, but since Neolithic times, the last 10,000 years, boundaries are made by pacing them off. By taking the steps and marking them off and that this is this plot. This is the extent of this village, here this kingdom ends and a different kingdom begins. Here the earth has its finite limit. So that a boundary is established ritually by taking all of the steps necessary to complete the circuit, to complete the shape of it, to complete where the horizon has come full round again.
In antiquity the initial largest horizon that could be discerned was the horizon of the sun's movement, taking it's steps, it's paces through the constellations of the stars and while it was recognised that the heavens were two hemispheres that made a sphere of 360° it is only a sinuous band of 12° running through the centre, the equatorial centre in a sinuous way that gave them in that zodiac the horizon of the sun and the earth's place then in the system of the stars mediated by the sun and the moon that also moves within that, not just 12° classically it was characterised as two 6° together. A pair of 6s together and that 12° within the 360° circle within the sphere was able to be seen as going through 12 constellations and so a 12 fold ritual shape filtered down through many orders of human life. That this was extraordinary and you found everywhere that the 12 fold ritual set held in the deepest possible ways and one of the deepest ways that we know of in the last 2,000 years is the 12 apostles who then took a different tack from the 12 zodiacal signs. There was a difference that had occurred in the entire ordering whereas the Universe in terms of the sun and the moon, the five planets, the stars, the earth's horizons that even if you and by the turn of the millennia, 2,000 years ago, it was very, very common knowledge that the equatorial diameter of the earth extended out through all of the stars, all of the constellations would then produce this 12 fold sinuous quality of the sun's horizon giving us night and day, giving us light, but it had two esoteric qualities that introduced other orders into this ancient ritual set, transposed and integrated into an idea of the Universe.
The most powerful figure of that time ostensibly was Augustus Caesar who brought the entire civilised world together into what we call today the Roman Empire. He called it the Principate, which meant that it was the first of the world becoming collected together into a single place, thus achieving what had been essayed by Alexander the Great about 300 years before when Alexander the Great said that his entire purpose was to establish the Ecumene, in Greek spelled Oikoumene in Latin Ecu, from which we get Ecumenical.
That establishment by Augustus Caesar was brought together in many different ways and one of the most powerful ways was written by a man named Manilius who wrote the Astronomica which was the astrology and astronomy of the entire world brought together in a single epic poem. And he says at the beginning:
By the magic of song, to draw down from heaven god given skills and fate's confidence, the stars, which by the operation of divine reason diversify the chequered fortunes of mankind, and to be the first to stir with these new strains the nodding leaf-capped woods of Helicon, I bring strange law untold by any before me, this is my aim. You Caesar, first citizen and father of your country, who rule a world obedient to your august laws and merit the heaven granted to your sire, yourself a god, are the one who inspires my design and gives me strength for such lofty themes. Now heaven the readier to favour those who search out its secrets, eager to display through a poet's song the riches of the sky. It is my delight to traverse the very air and sped my life touring the boundless skies of the constellations and the contrary motions of the planets.
The planets move the same way as the stars do but slower and so they appear to be struggling to keep up with the stars and one has a sense that there is some kind of an interference here. Manilius began his Astronomica about 10AD and got about half way through it, its five books when in 14AD Augustus Caesar died after having ruled for 44 years and his adopted son Tiberius came in, and one notices in the Astronomica in the first half of it, that the birth constellation of Augustus Caesar which was Capricorn is featured because it is the axis upon which everything is constellated and in the constellations it would be that Capricorn founds the base and Cancer founds the crown and so your axis runs in this direction. When Tiberius came in the Astronomica changes this axis because the birth constellation of Tiberius was Libra and Libra is then put into a set with its opposite Aries, and so you have two different axes that characterise the Astronomica, which was finished somewhere around 18AD.
It's exactly in this time period when the Astronomica was being written, pulled together after years of research, that Jesus lived and taught and out of his establishment of a new order for the earth, a new order for the heavens, the twelvefold quality was taken away from the zodiac and put into a different ordinal. The impress that this twelvefold was extremely powerful is most evident to us 2,000 years later because it was the original configuration of Glastonbury Cathedral in the Somerset area of England, which went through three different transformations. The first was its establishment and tradition says the establishment was by Joseph of Arimathea in 37BC, taking a vial containing the blood from the crucifixion and also esoterically the linen that was used to wrap him later on, this became, in medieval esoterica, the shroud. But that shroud is actually of King Arthur and not of Jesus. The establishment at Glastonbury was in an open area that had a particular quality along a river that flows out into an estuary at the top of which you would finally come to Gloucester and if you went up the Vale of Evesham to Stratford upon Avon and across the way would be Wales with Cardiff and around the Welsh great peninsula one would go across the Irish Sea to Ireland about the place north of Dublin where one of the most ancient monuments in the world, Newgrange, is built about 3200BC. We talked about last week how at Newgrange 3200BC the summer solstice sunrise would send a shaft of light all the way through a passage particularly angled so that only on the summer solstice sunrise would the sun's rays have a clear shot all the way through a long corridor and illuminate the altar at the back with a rosy light.
The place at the original Glastonbury was that there was a wattle-roofed central hall, the doorways of which were tall enough, the roof slanted enough so that the top of the doorway came very close to the eaves of the slanted wattled roof, and arranged around this central hall were twelve cells for monastic contemplation and those cells were about seven feet in diameter across. They were rediscovered by a psychic architect named Frederick Bligh Bond just after the First World War and established in such a way that when, even though he was enormously capable as an architect, had been appointed to come in at a very powerful date, 1909, to do an architectural survey of Glastonbury when he found that this was the configuration and the authorities found how he found it out through psychic psychometric means they dismissed him and filled in his sites and all was left as it is and no one has gone back archeologically, architecturally sense. But what Bond found was that these twelve were arranged around the centre as if they were like the twelve signs of the zodiac but were actually a different order, they were the twelve apostles of a complete redoing of the Universe. That more esoteric quality was lost and it was the twelve zodiacal signs that came into use in the Roman Empire and later on were transferred to Christian church architecture, and you will find in the floors in the decor of most Christian churches you will find the zodiacal reference and that the rituals inside will be rituals in a set that have the limit of the zodiacal astrological horizon, which is definitely as you are beginning to understand a misleading, totally misleading set, which had been transformed 2,000 years ago to something completely different.
In the southward path leading up to the central wattled roofed hall, which was where all the contemplatives on each seventh day, each Sabbath would come together to hear a contemplative sermon to, in Latin it's Sermon, Sermioni, in Greek the preferred word would be hermeneia and hermeneia is not a lecture or a sermon but it is an interpretation, it is a hermeneutic of something which everyone would have been familiar with in a more ordinary way, in the old world's zodiacal way which is now shifted from its polarisation in that particular ritual to another, a different polarisation perpendicular to it, which would open up a completely new radical 90° different orientation and structure. We find a clue in Manilius when he is talking about the universe and he is talking about how it is not just that the sun moving through the zodiacal circle gives the largest horizon than to make an order or all of the ritual sets for man on every single level, but that there is a different perpendicular that cuts the zodiacal horizon, it's limiting, it's ritual set making, that is the Milky Way, because the Milky Way cuts perpendicular to the constellations of the zodiac and moves in a different quality of its own orbit and two of the most conspicuous signs in that are the Great Bear or the Big Dipper and the Cassiopeia, the Big W constellation which is upside down to the way in which one would expect it. That this Milky Way then, as Manilius points out, is a very peculiar quality and that the ancient Greek mythos of how this came to be, how does the Milky Way get to be so conspicuous cutting cross grain to the way in which the sun, the horizon of the planets, the horizon of the universe and the stars by which the destinies of men on earth are all computed, there is something else here then. There is a perpendicular different scalar for the universe.
The Greek myth was about Phaëton, who had driven his chariot in a different way some long years before and that this was obviously some kind of previous heaven. There must have been a previous ambit encircled, different, a previous more archaic, who knows how ancient and more primordial horizon to give everyone on every level the ritual set orientation. He writes, 'It shines like a glowing path in the dark blue of the heavens as if it would suddenly open up the heavens and open up the sky and let forth the light of the day from some other realm.' This other realm in Manilius's time through the middle of the first century AD from the time the middle of Tiberius' reign until the fall of the whole line of the Caesars in 68AD increasingly was the butt of a realisation that some great curse on the house of the Caesars ',on that lineage, on the Roman Empire, on the city of Roman because of this, that it was completely going into a nightmare where all of the rituals were being scrambled.
Now Jessie L Weston, in poignant section of one of our books that we are using, and we are using pairs of books to give us the ways to establish axes of ordination, and we change them each month, each lunar cycle so that we can see that the axis that we are establishing is not due to books, it is not due even to pairs of books, it is a moveable geometric feast that keeps its pivot and its axis, no matter how we go through different phases or change to different orders and levels of scope or individuals or cultures, everywhere on the planet, anywhere including the future, we are establishing for ourselves a super, super geometry by which to understand not just zodiacal, astrological or even some kind of basic cosmic Milky Way, deeper, more ancient, more primordial, but that there was a third realm, and a very interesting little sentence in Manilius says that beyond even the Milky Way the light coming in cannot be from stars but from some one God behind even that, seeking to come through.
One of the qualities at Glastonbury is that around 400 AD one of the most powerful figures in Roman Christianity, St Augustan, or if you prefer St Augustine, sent one of his closest companions and most trusted architect theological friends names Paulinus was sent to Glastonbury to redo the structure in this new powerful City of God epic way that St Augustan had set up and Paulinus built a wooden chapel, a wooden church in a Romanesque style where the entire ended in Joseph of Arimathea's circle, the twelve cells, dozens of feet from the central large wattle chapel, all of that was incorporated in a rectangle where the large circle of all of it was within the rectangle and an altar, Romanesque style area, was added to the side so that you had now instead of a circle of twelve you had a great rectangle which enclosed that completely and extended it with an additional altar because by this time the altar was not focused on the central meeting hall of individual contemplatives coming together to sing and to hear a sermon and to share a ritual meal, each Sabbath, but now it was the power of the Roman Empire church showing that the church had absorbed all of that and had given it a different structure and that the altar of their church, their Romanesque Church is where the action happened between man and god. That it wasn't in the community of contemplatives, it was in the structure of the authority of the Empire's church because it had the keys to the kingdom. It had control of them.
This structure burnt down in the 12th century, in the 1100s, and in order to really redo, in the original deep way, what Joseph of Arimathea and his companions had established and to take back the structure from the Romanesque wooden church which had burnt down about the time of the crusades, the first crusades, about the time when the first development of the Arthurian ethos of the grail stories was coming out. The new edifice was much, much larger and went in a completely perpendicular way to the Romanesque church and the new church was enormous out of gothic stone and instead of being a Romanesque wooden structure was now one of the great gothic cathedrals of all time. The reason being is that the ground had become sacralised by the burial of some of the some significant saints in Christian history. On the grounds was buried St Joseph of Arimathea, he was buried at a strategic place to the approach of the central hall, the place where they would have their meal together, their common meal, the place where they would have their choir together, the men and women, the place that they would have their sermon or their hermeneia together, the path leading up to that from the south had a equilateral triangle, the base of which was on the two southern cells, and by using that as a dimension an equilateral triangle was made and at the point where that equilateral triangle was, about some way up the path not all the way, is the spot where Joseph of Arimathea was buried, and because he was buried there, because he was the first keeper of these ritual relics, it became the most sacred site in that part of the Roman world and later the great defender of that kind of esoteric deeply ancient pre-Roman Christianity, pre-Roman empire Christianity, King Arthur, when he died he was buried exactly in between the two cell sites which were covered by pyramids, pyramid monuments. And because Arthur was buried there on the perimeter of that great circle, several of the great saints of the time like St Patrick were also buried at Glastonbury in conspicuous places and one of the great pyramid structures over one of the cells is called David's Pillar or David's Pyramid, and it was because there was a wise prophet at the time whose name was David and he is the one that figured the way in which Arthur should be buried and that Glastonbury in its particular quality of being very close to a range of hills, but there being a lot of marshlands around in the spring after heavy rains, the Glastonbury Hill area would be like an island and its name then was Avalon.
Also buried at Glastonbury, because of the incursions of the wild Danes and the wild Norse originally hitting the British Isles around Northumbria, and many of the places had to have their sacred treasures as usual moved, their sacred figures moved, one of the figures who was the great abbot of the monasteries there of Jarrow and Wearmouth, named St Aidan, was also his bones were put into Glastonbury's ground and over the centuries increasingly the lists of the saints that were put there grew. One of the greatest saints was buried exactly where one of the cells was located, his name was St Dunstan and he lived in the 900s and he was born just a couple of miles from Glastonbury Cathedral, was one of the great figures of his day and eventually was the advisor of three English Kings and became the Archbishop of Canterbury as well and was buried there at Glastonbury in 988. So in 1184 when the new gothic cathedral of Glastonbury was founded, its architecture completely reversed the Roman Empire Romanesque universe and established now a new kind of orientation where a new order of twelve was brought into play so that the architecture of it had in its basic structure a long double bow that comes together and is called a Vesica Piscis and some would say that this is limited to a feminine reproductive genitalia but it actually has a Milky Way shape to it and is a more primordial, a more expansive quality, so that the architecture now was temple not to the stars arranged by the zodiac but a temple in aspirate stone raised to the starry Milky Way that went in a perpendicular to the old world empire way. It wasn't the destinies of men on earth that concerned them, it was the eternal freedom of human beings in the cosmos. And what would shine through this then would be the light of the one God behind it all.
This was such a challenge to authority and power that Glastonbury Cathedral was pulled down largely in 1539 because Henry VIII and his house of Tudor wanted to establish an English church that was not beholden to Rome but also was not going to be beholden to something that they were unable to understand, and Glastonbury was left in secular ruins for 400 years. It was found to have the significance, not completely as I have disclosed it to you, but enough, by Frederick Bligh Bond, that the Royals of England pooled their funds together and bought back all of the lands and all of the structures and the ruins and Glastonbury and it was reconsecrated on June 22nd on the Summer Solstice of 1909, and it is exactly at that time on the other side of the Mediterranean world that the real grail was found after being lost for 1700 years, buried in the late 300s AD and surfaced exactly at the same time that Glastonbury was reconsecrated.
There are many other things that happened exactly at that time, and the world around 1909, 1910 received one of these great ritual folds, out of which, because it literally refolded the shape of how rituals would have their traction without a vision to transform the mind that indexed it by symbols, the lives whose experience was familiar to them and the ritual comportment of the objectivities of actually the traction of existence, the result was a catastrophic destruction of World War One, the Great War, we are still living in after quakes of that great event. Jessie L Weston, quoting E K Chambers in The Medieval Stage, remarks that when you find a lot of so called peasant beliefs and folk lore legends, it is not from nature that they have come but from the ruins of a collapsed old order. The chaos is from a collapse of something that was artificial and could not hold. We live at a time where that collapse now applies to every tradition in the world, not just to the Christian ethos, because the orientation has completely changed and the ritual basis as well has to completely change. All of the techniques of the past are invalid. So we are learning how to engender new ones again, better ones, and to go from there.
Let's take a break.


Let's come back to exactly where we were and take a moment to understand that our species has been around long enough that countless times very wonderful orders have been crumbled and crunched together and sometimes for centuries there has been no one to bring it back and no population of people because it takes a very deep, consistent teaching and a guiding and a learning that as the complexities and the different layers and sediments have accumulated over tens of thousands of years it has become more and more difficult to do that so that it does re-emerge in a way that will not just work, because it is possible now to have something where the techniques will work for a while, but techniques are not real. A civilisation must be real to endure and what we are doing here is the yoga of civilisation. No one has ever done yoga on this scale before because the civilisation that is emerging is the first one that is going to be off world. Not just this planet but the entire star system for openers, all the way out ten billion miles to the Kuiper Belt and the complete diameter so that you have something where the stars, the Zodiac, the constellations are going to be completely dissolved as a referent forever; how many constellations are there?
Jessie L Weston was an interesting character and when she was writing From Ritual to Romance she kept bringing in some of the most powerful persons of the day to try to understand deeper and deeper what was happening, and what occurred was a watershed between the kind of savant who could sit at his desk in a huge library and piece together learning, or on the other hand the explorer who was able to go out and archeologically or anthropologically or in an antiquarian exploring style find more and more things. In the 19th Century the most famous of that latter kind was Alexander von Humboldt, who lived to be almost 90 and whose book of travels and explorations was so fantastic, he had lived from the age of Goethe into the age of Hegal and the Industrial Revolution, and his book of travels was extraordinarily important to people around the middle of the 19th century and he wrote a four volume huge tome called Cosmos to show that there was a completely new scale of understanding. The equivalent to Cosmos later in the 19th Century was Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, its first edition in 1890 was an extraordinary event and when he brought out the second edition it was even more extraordinary, and when he brought out the third edition in thirteen huge volumes, almost a million and a half words, it was like the largest encyclopaedia of esoteric things, of arcane gatherings, of bits of things that anyone had done in the world at that time. This edition of The Golden Bough is published by Penguin Books and came out in 1996 with an introduction by George W Stocking Jr., who has a whole series, I think it runs to about 11 or 12 volumes, The History of Anthropology, where he takes groups of people that have established over the last 150 years this enormous explosion of perspective that anthropology is and one of the most devastating qualities that comes out of anthropology is that the cultural relatives are really onto an insight and we are using Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture and part of the thing about the three societies, the three cultures that she takes in Patterns of Culture we mention it came out right at the time when the Nazis took over Germany, it was published in 1934 in a direct criticism of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Her three groups the Kwakiutls of Vancouver Island, the Zuni of the American South West and the wonderful Dobus of the South Pacific who live in a volcanic island and their ethos is that they are suspicious of everyone all the time and this is good because everyone all the time is suspicious of them and so you have the sorcery of the star book and this was called Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific by R F Fortune, that is Reo Fortune who was the husband of Margaret Mead at the time who was with him on Dobu at the time.
The introduction is by B Malinowski, Bronislaw Malinowski and its interesting because Malinowski was a aficionado of Sir James George Frazer and was doing anthropological work in the Trobriand islands just off the coast of New Guinea and Melanesia, not Polynesia but in the Black South Pacific, when the First World War broke out, and because he was trapped there he couldn't get off the Island, he had to live there for four years, for the whole duration of World War I, and he came to understand by daily participation deeper and deeper because he is quite an extraordinary figure and what came out of it was a two large volume set called Coral Gardens and their Magic. Because the main staple of food there were yams and the yam gardens were the place that were the source of nutrition and life and were more important than money could ever be because you couldn't ever live without your yams and other people were trying to curse your garden so that you would starve and trying to protect their garden so that you couldn't curse their garden, and finally one of the most interesting volumes when Malinowski came back into civilisation, his essay s were collected together in the midst of the Second World War, ten years after Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict, because by 1943 it was apparent that the apex of something hugely, radioactively evil had been loosened upon a world that could never go back again. Whilst the First World War smashed the world, the second world war eradiated it so that it would be death to go back to it. The volume was published, University of North Caroline Press 1944, A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays, because it was apparent by this time as he says:
In order to construct such a list it might be best to consider the junctural principles which bind human beings together and integrate them into permanent groups. We have of course first and foremost the fact of reproduction, in all human societies, reproduction, that is the relationship between husband and wife and parents and children, leads to the formation of small yet exceedingly important groups. We can therefore speak about the kinship; that is relationship by blood and relationship by marriage. Under this heading we would have to list such institutions as the family including the contract of marriage, rules of descent, laws of domestic organisation, the bonds of parenthood, that is the reciprocal relationship between parents and children are always extended and they lead to the formation of extended kindred groups. These either consisted of agglomerations of individual families under the authority of a patriarch or matriarch, or else in the formation of so-called classifatory kinship groups, usually designed by such terms as clan, sib, gens.
One of the difficulties that immediately surfaces to someone intelligent with a background is that we have seen a catastrophic reordering of kinship 2,000 years ago already. Kinship had always been by blood whereas the reordering 2,000 years ago was that the kinship was by spirit... and that's deeper than blood. It goes back to a resonance of lightness of spirit tone that registers first of all in the body, that there are bodies that are affined to each other. They resonate the same way to similar circumstances and one of the qualities that Frazer brought out in his little way in The Golden Bough and it was a huge thing at the time, is a chapter, in fact it was a whole book on magic and the art of kings, but it was called Sympathetic Magic and in Sympathetic Magic he said there are two laws that apparently are different but work together. One is the law of homeopathic magic, laws of similarity ,the other is contagious magic, law of contact, but rightly Stocking, George W Stocking Jr., in his introduction points out that these are categories that Frazer got from his reading of the origin of these are his reading of a great Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and one of the great surprised and difficulties in this is that Hume goes back in his own Scottish neo-atheistic way to a transform from blood to spirit himself. His classic book is a treatise of Human Understanding. That there is no way that perception of actualities empirically can be gestalted into the mind objectively and not have some kind of different order to them that cannot be limited, cannot be bunched together, cannot be made just empirical, something else is possible and occurs and the easiest way to understand this is to take a look at what happens when a previous order is established and what happens when it is destroyed.
The image is that of a target, the centre of the target is the individual, one's mental idea of oneself, the individuality, the 'I', I-ness, I am, and the proof that I am is that the world has been arranged so that its objectivities in action, in ritual in all the existential things has formed a referential ring of which is this the centre. That circle has this, has me, has all of us whose eyes share this, we are the centre, we know the techniques to dominate that circle and so that circle is under our control and because that circle is under that control and the centre is us ourselves, the space in between, the space of experience, is also constrained and will be a circle, and will be a circle very much relating to the outer circle of the rituals and the techniques of maintaining them, exactly the way they should be in terms of the centre, exactly the way in which we are, and that if we do this powerfully enough, nature will bend itself and become a further outer circle and so you will have the circle of nature, the circle of ritual things and the way things are done, the circle of experience, the way one feels and the images, and the centre which is us, our mental understanding. We are right; the difficulty is that nature does not bend herself in a circle that stays in that target, but that nature has a way of bleeding off the nice little page where those circles are drawn and extends out so that more and more it becomes unlimited. It becomes open and open to an extent to where it goes off into an openness not only without limit of space, but of having no limit it time. Timeless and without a spatial referentiality and when it does so, it takes with it the nice little controlled circle of experience and experience culture, then starts to become aware that it was constrained in limitations that were ritually faults and symbolically, mentally, manipulative and so the experience of culture and tradition follows nature because it is more affine sympathetically. It has a similarity to nature because nature and culture, as we are learning here in our phases, are both processes. They are phases of process. Not that they are phases and then phases of process, but that they are flows experienced in nature flow whereas rituals and symbols polarise in order to establish objectivity. Things and our thought about things. So what is left is that the rituals implode upon the centre and damage it and so ones sense of I-ness becomes under siege, literally from an implosion of these rituals that no longer than a context within which to have their circles.
Now original ritual comportments did not have this quality, because they were not mental circles, there were not techniques worked out so that now everything works exactly the way that we can train and instruct, because original rituals have a woven quality and the picture, if you need a picture or an image, is that of a woven basket, because the ritual elements that are actually like threads are like the pieces of the weaving material that one weaves this basket and the basket is not at all something which is like a circle which can implode, that original ritual matrix is like a basket whose interior space can now hold the things of the world, like this basket can hold the grains of the harvest, this basket can hold the fruit of the trees, this basket can hold the presentation of this food, the presentation of these things, and the ritual basket now makes a space of experience where the symbols are not jeopardised, where they have to just stay there at the centre, they can move in and out, they can be used and useful and so the symbols of a natural mind are not constrained by a circle of ritual, they are not constrained by a constrained experience, they have a mobility and are able to go back all the way into nature in its openness and not experience a loss of control. And when a mind that has a centre that is not jeopardised by a loss of control, the ancient saying was that's a purified mind and now instead of being a point which is ultimately opaquely me, that centre is transparent and shows that there is a whole realm of open possibility beyond that is very affined to nature, that is called vision. It has a direct relationship with symbolic integral mind, but it is a differential consciousness, which is open and its openness now is not just the openness of the zero unlimitedness of nature, but it is open in a differential way and the infinity of a conscious cosmos. Now the mind suddenly finds that it is like a centre of an hour glass rather than at the top of a pyramid or the centre of a circle and that the motion is that there is as much coming into it as it going out and so the circle transforms itself into a spiral and the spiralling is that in each turn of the spiral has a transcendent quality over the ones previous and so it opens in such a way that you get a harmonic set that is not limited by one, but a harmonic set that uses as its binary zero and infinity, can open indefinitely in a measured way so that one's control is not in control of having it, but in control in the sense of navigating with it.
So that the ancient quality of a spiritual portrait was always that the features are arranged in such a way that there is a spiral of the spiritual portrait that flows through the face and radiates out the energy, the energy of a spirit form, so that a portrait is not at all just some kind of doctrinal icon, or some kind of symbolic presentation of physicality with a little bit of egotistical mind informing it, but you have a whole different quality and on the original grail you find the portraits of all of the faces, of the figures that are there spirals, chirals, this is a universal quality and you can see the quality of a Penguin Edition of The Golden Bough, the Maori chief from the 1880s a photograph of him, incidentally photographed in the 1880s because one of the most powerful novels at the time was Moby Dick and this very much looks like Queequeg and if you will look at the spiral tattooing on the face they are chiral, balanced, they swirl to the left as much as they swirl to the right, but they swirl in spirals not in circles. So that you will find a Maori double chiral face like this in some of the most advanced physics books of the 21st century, I'll bring one next week, so that you can see. Deeper than that, chirality is a magnetic field generator, it doesn't just generate the polarity of electrical magnetism but it brings in, because in electromagnetism the big energy is in the electric, the charge, positive and negative, and the magnetic complement is very little actually, it's there, but not very big, but in a double chiral energy transform the huge amount is in the magnetic and the electrical becomes a small part, so that one no longer calls it the electromagnetic spectrum, one more properly calls it the magneto electric spectrum, now that has a different energy order. It is 10 billion times the strength of the electromagnetic field. If you were made out of the stuff of the magneto electric energy you could stride through this physical universe and traverse it without touching a single atom or a single electron and you could do it almost instantly.
So now one has a completely different scale of what a technique might be, of what an order might be, of what an I might possibly be, but that it takes a while to come through again and re-establish because what has gotten in the way are the sediment of crushed ritual circles by now scores and scores deep of completely peasantised experiential, cultural layers, perhaps hundreds and hundreds deep if one could say, and of egotistical mentalities of manipulation that run into the millions. So one has an almost extraordinary inability to use anything from the past without first re-combing through the material. The first thing that gets in the way though is not just the mind, but the fact that cultural ethos is so ingrained as a custom and as a tradition that is becomes almost impossible to deal with and this is why Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture was so important. She showed three different cultures to show that our own technological scientific culture by 1934 was completely flawed; it could not produce a transparent person. It had no idea that it was as provincial as the most primitive barbaric tribe possible.
Following on her came a whole series of Anthropologists, one of the greatest as Victor Turner. He and his wife Edith Turner, two of most marvellous cultural anthropologists of all time, when they were first married and together they lived with Gypsy caravans just to get the sense of sophisticated, thousands of years old nomads who didn't belong to any of the cultures that they went through and carried a completely different ethos, an ethos that was pointed out by Jessie L Weston, another wise woman here, in From Ritual to Romance, the gypsies are those persons who carried the tarot with them. And as the tarot came from India and Egypt, filtered through something called the ancient Iranian civilisation and by the time it got to Western Europe something completely different had happened.
Just to finish this with Turner, Victor Turner's speciality was in Africa with a tribe called the Ndembu and he writes this, this is in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play :
I soon discovered that Ndembu married very locally, that is a woman goes after marriage to reside in her husband's village. Consequently in the long run, village continuity depends upon marital discontinuity, sense ones right to reside in a given village is primarily determined by matrilineal affiliation although one may reside in one's father's village during his life time clearly a sort of structural turbulence in built in to these normative arrangements, for a village can only persist by recruiting widows, divorcees and their children. There is a propensity for men who reside in their own matrilineal village to persuade their sisters to leave their husbands, bringing with them the children who properly belong back in that village.
So that you have an interesting thing, you have with the Ndembu two different cycles that are constantly sabotaging each other in order to exist and maintain themselves. Some of Victor Turner's great volumes, The Anthropology of Performance, The Anthropology of Experience, The Ritual Process and one of the really important ones, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors Symbolic in Action in Human Society. All of this is engendered, not just from the anthropological realm but that the archaeological realm as well at the same time was showing that there is a historical layering going back and that not only are all of these cultures different in traditions that are around today, but they were different from anything today back then and back then in one of Jessie L Weston's favourite little sayings is that you cannot understand anything until you are able to choreograph its ensemble. You have to be able to see how all of these elements not fit together, but how they swirl together in their chiral, double chiral symmetry and one of the qualities in that swirl is that physical things through contact will have a definite electrical quality, but the swirl will introduce a magnetic feel and so you have this very complex thing, there are parts of the earth's landscape that are very special, because their electromagnetic properties are extraordinary, for instance the rocks of the hill of Glastonbury have a very large crystal quartz content so that the entire hill has a very definite piezoelectric quality to it. That not only would a sensitive get the energy of the place, but that the energy of the place includes everything that would have happened there in that place and that one can go back through those layers of time like a psychic archaeology and read it out. This is scientifically proven.
So that no one is dealing with a complexity that almost baffles the ability for a technique circle to corral and for any kind of centre that thinks it is it can stay put and remain centred whatsoever. What happens is that as the centre begins to drift, in terms of the fact that the whole universe is swirling, the whole star system is swirling, the whole galaxy is swirling, the planet is swirling, it's twirling as well as swirling and you have movement upon movement upon movement that baffles time and space itself, the centre, even a split nanosecond, picosecond, femtosecond later will have shifted ever so slightly at that time ratio, but nevertheless will very quickly in any kind of time dimension that we would be aware of, a second will already have moved off centre enough so that it has to make adjustments to keep everything centred and the adjustment will not be for the centre, but that we have to have new laws, new techniques to keep that ritual circle whole, because that is our only option realistically and this leads to the cracking of that circle, the breaking of the circle.
One of the great wise women of the 20th century Marjorie Nicolson wrote a book called The Breaking of the Circle, the effect of Newton's mathematics on 1700s, 18th century thought. At the beginning of the 1700s you had a kind of a poetry that was very pristinely prissy like a baroque kind of poetry of an Alexander Pope. At the end of it, you had people like Coleridge and Blake and Wordsworth looking out into the infinite zeroness of the mysteries of nature and into the infinite gorgeousness of the spiralling of our differential consciousness. When we get to symbols we will take the greatest poem, drama of that era, we'll take Shelly's Prometheus Unbound and pair it up with Shakespeare's The Tempest, which in its time was also the greatest transforming document written, probably since ancient times, and we'll see the theatre that it was performed in was called The Globe and the Zodiac was just a decoration on the ceiling above the stage part. Shakespeare's forever famous words, the whole world is the play, not just the stage. The altar of that church, no matter what it is, is not the cosmos which is infinitely everywhere evident.
More next week.