Myth 10
Presented on: Saturday, September 9, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to myth 10 and we're putting into a ratio a very famous book by Susanne K Langer called Philosophy in a New Key and probably one of the most famous of all Plato's dialogues: The Phaedrus. We'll talk more about Plato in a moment but I would like to characterize for you of Susanne K Langer: Susanne K Langer, as we talked about last week, had the advantage of two of the most powerful philosophic minds of the early 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead and Ernst Cassirer. And she received the focus of them at the heights of their powers in the 1930s and her first book that was published is The Practice of Philosophy with a preparatory note by Alfred North Whitehead and it was published in 1930. Her maiden name was Knauth and she was quite an extraordinary woman and she married a professor of History at Harvard, William Langer, who was the head of the department.
One of the qualities of Susanne K Langer was that the older that she got the more that she became primordial. She wrote Philosophy in a New Key in 1941, in the early days of the Second World War, ten years later she did a second edition and then in 1956 a third edition and after that she realised that she could not refine this book any further and she wrote a sequel to called Feeling and Form. And she said Philosophy in a New Key is just a theory of art developed from Philosophy in a New Key and the Philosophy in a New Key was the way in which the ritual, myth and symbol qualities of human nature go through enormous cycles and that a new cycle requires a new key, a new calibration. And that in the era in which she was schooled and raised and began her writing, that obviously the old era had played itself out completely and something new had to come in. She says in Philosophy in a New Key that 'This new epoch has a mighty and revolutionary generative idea: the dichotomy of all reality into inner experience and outer world.' This is an extraordinary way to put it, it seems old hat to us now by 2006 but when this was written, 50 years ago, words like that meant a psychological take and she meant not a psychological take at all. She meant that there was a human nature that had come into play that had been split between inner and outer before and that the outer world had become scientific and technical and the inner world had become really philosophical more than psychological. And she says 'Subject and object, private and public truth, the very language of what is now traditional epistemology betrays the basic notion; when we speak of the given, of sense data, the phenomenon and other selves, we take for granted the immediacy of an internal experience and the continuity of the external world.'
What was difficult for them in the 30s and the 40s became exasperated in the 1950s and finally crashed in the 1960s. The entire realm of what had been held for several hundred years, in a very confident mode increasingly through several centuries, had come to a complete impasse by the end of the 19th century. And at the beginning of the 20th century all of the major works that came out were major works showing that there was no way to go back to the beliefs of just the generation before. And that the 19th century was obviously something that was now not just old fashioned it was hopelessly wrong about everything. And we talked last week and we've talked in previous presentations. The overwhelming sense was that what had been considered real before showed itself to dissolve into further mysteries. The atom was no longer something that could not be split and had many different qualities to it: electrons, all of a sudden it had a nucleus, it had protons and by 1932 the discovery that there were things like neutrons and pretty soon the cascade in the middle 1940s that there were many particles, the chaons, all the masons that were discovered. And all of a sudden there were not just alpha rays and x-rays and gamma rays but there were increasing cascades of radioactive decay everywhere in nature and no one was sure where the end was going to be in sight.
She says the New Key means that there must be some symbolic way of putting a centre back into the split between an outer world and an inner experience and that the inner experience has a mythic quality to it whereas the outer world, while it really does finally get to science, its impress on us first of all is a social world. So that the symbolic way of living means that you master a social world whereas the mythic way was that you fit into a culture and in the 20th century we found again and again, after the 1930s - beginning about 1917 in Russia with the communist revolution, exacerbated in 1933 with the Nazis in Germany - increasingly there was an attempt to tighten the symbolic social world's control over people who still lived within a culture and to supplant their myths, their mythology, by a mythology of the state. One of Ernst Cassirer's most powerful books was in fact entitled The Myth of the State. His little book Language and Myth was translated by Susanne K Langer at a time where it was very difficult because people like Cassirer came from the sophisticated world of cultivated Germany and they were literally thrown out by the Nazis. And finally Cassirer made his way to Yale where he was given a professorship and he wrote a famous little book called An Essay on Man in English.
All this time his search to try to find some way to try to show that the language quality of mythic culture, in a very natural way, was integrated into symbols but that the symbols were not just knots that tied things together but that they were transformative centres that could be energised not only from below, from the outer world into an inner experience, into the mind but that the mind could receive transforms from beyond itself, beyond the social world. And that those realms beyond the social world literally belong to what classically is called vision, we would it consciousness now, in ancient times it was called the spiritual realm. That focus from 1930 to about 1960 was almost an exact replay of what had happened to the ancient Greeks in Athens 2,400 years ago and in fact right at the beginning of Cassirer's language and myth he says the opening passage of the platonic dialogue Phaedrus - which we're pairing with it - it describes how Socrates lets Phaedrus whom he encounters, lure him beyond the gates of the city to the banks of a beautiful river, the Ilisus. And this is the only time in all of Plato's dialogues that Socrates ever goes outside the city.
He goes outside the city and Cassirer says it's one of the most classically beautiful descriptions of nature, this beautiful clear water, tall trees, grassy banks. And Phaedrus and Socrates have just come together after being together the previous day - reported in Plato's dialogue the symposium - where they talked about love and why it was that human beings - Aristophanes in the dialogue says human beings were originally spherical beings and they were pulled apart and so each one is looking for their other half and that when they find each other they now form a real human being for the first time - and many other theories of love are put into play in the symposium. But one of the things that comes through is that Socrates, as we talked about last week, says 'I know all the arguments about love, but I was taught love by one of the most esoteric sage-women of our age' and her name was Diotima. She was from Mantinea in the southern part of the Peloponnese of Greece and she was a Pythagorean and that she learned that love was a very special quality of both madness and super clarity at the same time and that only when someone is in a love relationality is it possible to actually learn. That otherwise all you do is rearrange elements of belief into some new kind of structure whereas learning is not the rearrangement of elements that you know already into a different structure, like rearranging furniture in a room, but that a love is actually an encounter at the very same time of a madness that exceeds the mind's ability to keep control of it and a clarity that is so clear that it penetrates through the mind's attempt to make rearrangements that don't include something new.
So that learning is actually a function of going into a state of love and that if one is then a lover of learning about wisdom you become a philosopher, a philosophia, one who loves wisdom, loves her quality of discovering and disclosing more and more of what you didn't know. And that this makes people uncomfortable because then the range of what you were confident about begins to shrink because more and more you realise that there is much more that you don't know than that you do know. And Socrates then becomes the ace protagonist of someone who says 'I only know one thing and I don't know anything else: I know that I do not know.' And so this Socratic ignorance becomes his trademark where he is not teaching other people about what he knows but his investigation is to tease out of them 'Well, what do you know? How do you know that? How can you be sure about that?' And he got so good at teasing this out from people that every time he did this the other parties involved were shown that they didn't really know what they were talking about. And that Socrates' ignorance was really the only valid, viable stance that one could take. So disturbing was this, not only to the young people of the day but to the city political masters that they had Socrates put to death. He taught that no one could believe in the mythic gods of the state and no one could believe that they were masters of their own selves, of their own minds, of their own knowledge and that everything was up in the air, exactly the situation that the world found itself in the late 1930s to the late 1950s.
In that generation, especially from about 1936 until about 1956, in that 20 years it was apparent that no none really understood any more what was actually real, what was actually actual or how to find out. In those years, for instance, it became apparent here in Los Angeles, just about Pasadena at mount Wilson Observatory, the first atlas of galaxies was made by Edwin Hubble - for whom the Hubble telescope is made - and he is the first one to piece together that all of the stars that we see in the sky belong to a very small wedge of what is an enormous Milky Way galactic structure and that beyond it there are millions of other galaxies like this so incredibly far away as to dwarf our sense of distance. They used a simile in the 1930s that if our sun were the size of a grapefruit the nearest star to it would be in Denver. So that there are already just enormous distances on just close-by stars and that those close stars are dwarfed by the size of our galaxy and that the galaxies beyond it go exponentially into unbelievable, unfathomable areas. Just as that external world was thrown into an infinity, the internal world was thrown into an infinity as well, not just the sub atomic particles but the discovery - as Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead pointed out and Wittgenstein and other philosophers that influenced Susanne K Langer - there was no way that one could be sure of one's experience because one's experience was a belief that made culture possible, that linked together what we do in the external world with what we think in our minds. And if our minds and the world do not have this mythic link, the language of experience, the feelings, the images of experience there is no way that we can bridge between the two: they don't have contact.
What was startling for people to realise in the early 20th century is that this particular quality of problem that was there in the classical greek's appeared at the very same time in classical India and the place that you will find the same kind of myths in the Phaedrus you will find them in the Katha Upanishad un India. There are several editions of the Katha Upanishads, the best one is by S Radhakrishnan in The Principle Upanishads. There are curious similarities between the way that the Upanishads like the Katha and Plato's dialogues - which actually found themselves not only on Socrates but further back to Pythagoras - the interplay between the classical Indian wisdom and the classical Pythagorean wisdom links both Egypt and Greece, Mesopotamia and its Persian version about the time of Plato with India and the reason for this goes back to about 2,400BC, 2,000 years before Plato. In 2,400BC was the first time that there was a civilisation large enough to transcend its geographic river origins. Before 2400BC almost all of the great civilisations of the world were limited to their river course: the Nile river or the Euphrates Tigris river, the Indus river, in Europe even the Danube river. All of them had very high cultures for thousands of years in central Europe along the Danube there were communities that were highly cultured up to about 7,000BC, about 9,000 years ago. The Archaeological ruins have been found and not only were there Homo Sapiens there 40,000 years ago but already by about 7 or 8,000BC there were large enough communities who were linked together that there were real cultural ties over hundreds of miles.
The first world-civilisation was about 2,400BC and it founded itself initially fro Mesopotamia and the 'king of kings' at that time, the first time that that phrase was ever used was Sargon the Great and it was his daughter Enheduanna who become the high priestess of Inanna and Ur and we took the myths of Inanna to begin our mythic presentation series. She's the one who went to 42 different temple areas of Mesopotamia and took the myths of each one of those temples and wove them together into a pattern of 42 hymns and then this was called, as an ensemble, The Temple Hymns. In addition to her Inanna myths her temple hymns made a pattern which stamped itself deeper than the cultures, deeper than the social world, it stamped itself in what used to called an archetypal way: that whenever any human populations got to this super social world status of linking a polyglot series of cultures into a higher civilisation, the same kind of a form would appear. The centre of the transform was that there was always needed to be a small community of people who could excerpt themselves from the cultural world and from the social world long enough that they could get used to letting the old fade away and begin to investigate the new which was always unknown. And that investigating the unknown meant that they had to be open inside as well as experimental in the external world and that this combination then could not be a form, it had to be a process. And that the form of the structures of cultures and of civilisations, whenever they would begin to become petrified and not useful, not useable anymore, it was always on the outside of those civilisations, on the margins, that there were communities of people, men and women, largely men except for the Pythagorean. The Pythagorean always had a balance of men and women and you could always tell a Pythagorean community: the audience, the population of the community, was pretty even between men and women.
The earliest Pythagorean communities were in southern Italy, the first one was called Croton. But very quickly, because Pythagoras had studied in Egypt for 22 years, a Pythagorean community was founded at a site not far from where the Nile delta in its farthest western reach, the Rosetta branch of the Nile where it touches the Mediterranean sea. And that ancient place was called Taposiris. It was called Taposiris because of the myth of Osiris, the myth of Isis and Osiris, that when Osiris was killed and dismembered, Isis brought all of his parts back together and he was brought back to life, he was resurrected. So Osiris is the ancient Egyptian resurrection myth and the place where he re-emerged from the netherworld was at Taposiris. Later on when Alexander the Great founded the great city, the world city of Alexandria, one of the reasons of founding it there was that it was at one end of this long lake Mareotis at the other end was the Pythagorean community at Taposiris. And that was always the gate into the Sahara desert beyond it, or Libya beyond it, where there were only scattered oases; it was the edge of the world as it were. That Pythagorean community there is where Plato received a lot of his training after Socrates had been put to death in 399BC. Plato spent several years there, not at the [Heliopolin 28.32]centre where Pythagoras was for 22 years but at the site of Taposiris.
And those people in that community specialized in resurrection on every level and so they were called in later classical times Therapeutae or Therapeutes which meant that they were healers, that they could heal not only the body, they could also heal the mind. And in the healing, in their therapy, they re-juiced experience so that experience, now, was able not only to link the body and the mind but it was able to flow back with the way in nature flowed and it was able to also flow in the way in which consciousness flowed, conscious vision. So that now experience was ambidextrous: it could work both ways: it could unite the forms of body and mind but it could also flow, calibrating the way in which nature and visionary consciousness flow. And in doing so it shifted the place of the form of the mind from being the top of the natural pecking order to being in the middle of a larger transform that was like a mandala for the first time. So that the mind, instead of being at the top of a pyramid, was now at the centre of a mandala and that this mandala stretched out not just into the outer world but stretched beyond the world into the world of the stars, into the world of other worlds, not just an afterlife realm or an underworld or an above world but a plurality of other worlds, a celestial array, a realm.
The way in which the Pythagoreans worked this transform of taking the mind from the top of a pyramid - and you can see that it's not only that the Greeks had this the ancient Egyptians also had this, the pyramid of the different sheaths leading up to Om at the top, the Atman, the inner self at the top of the pyramid - but the difficulty was that with the Katha Upanishad about the time of the historical Buddha, it lead to a realisation that this was not the end-all, that being at the top of the natural pyramid of sophistication was only half of the story. The other half was like an hourglass that reaches out and so you had two pyramids: one that goes up to a point and the other that begins at that point and then fans out at the top. The base of the one pyramid was in the earth, the base of the other was in the stars. But that the stars had to have a constellation in order to be dealt with in terms of the mind and so the constellation of the stars that was extremely potent was the three stars of the belt of Orion. And the great pyramids in Egypt form those three stars of the belt of Orion.
But there was a deep transform of that about 2,000 years later and the transform was that it was not so much the constellation of Orion but that the centre of the motions of all of the stars was the pole star Polaris and that the constellation that rotated once a year around where the celestial axial centre was was the constellation of the Big Dipper, the Great Bear. And the Great Bear has a square which is at an angle so it looks like a trapezoid and the three stars of the handle are crooked in such a way that it's almost like somebody instead of pointing at something a beckoning. And that constellation of the Great Bear circles the polar star once a solar year and at the four cardinal points of that circle are the solstices and equinoxes. So that there was a way for the first time to be able to tell that there was a time that included the celestial star realms that could be applied and put in the mythology of experience on the earth and to link together the forms of the earth with the ideas in the mind that were nourished by this experience by that celestial vision.
And one of the most famous of all of the monuments in the ancient world that was built on this basis was Glastonbury in the Somerset west of England. And that particular group that made this - Joseph of Arimathea and eleven companions - it was first put in there in 37AD and it was reinstated in 63AD because in the meantime there had been a number of major events that had happened and a major event that was beginning to surface itself in such a way that they realized, the men and women of the community, they realised that they were at another end of the world which indeed happened near that time. The form of the original Glastonbury is exactly an archetypal impress of the Pythagorean community at Taposiris that was founded almost 400 years before that time. A circle of twelve huts woven out of wattle and baked mud, clay so that they were like conical structures, twelve of them, encircling a larger inner structure and the larger inner structure was a hall where the twelve would meet once at the end of every seven days and at the end of every four sets of seven days there would be a new moon and there would be a special ceremony held. The smaller ceremonies were always ceremonies where the meditation during the six days was brought together, where people would give a spontaneous prayer and all the different prayers from all the different people would be heard on that Sabbath. But on the fourth Sabbath, when that was finished, they would all share a meal together, a banquet - one of the translations of Symposium is 'the banquet' - they would share a meal together and after that meal they would sing together.
So that that area when later it became a part of the way in which cathedrals were built was always called the choir and the original choir was that early Glastonbury community that was the archetypal imprint of the Therapeutae Pythagorean community from Taposiris. And its original name was not Avalon but [Avilion 37.43], Avalon is a Saxon corruption of the ancient term. Avalon means that this area was heavily associated with apples, the isle of apples, whereas the earlier name, that still has the ancient Celtic cognate to it, means the isle of the blessed departed. The blessed departed are those that can return from death and they may come back into life, they may come back into health, back into fullness so that anyone who is a part of that community's harmony, that community's resonance, will be a part of a community that will be able to come back into life again. And the impress of that carries on just as it does in all of the areas of the world where communities like this were founded, they were almost always founded on mounts, on hills so that when you look at the gospel of Matthew, the big presentation is the sermon on the mount, the mount Avalos was a mount like that. The Glastonbury Tor is one of seven mounts that together on the landscape make the constellation of the Great Bear, like the three pyramids being the centre stars of the constellation of Orion. In India one finds in the outskirts of Madras, today, one finds St Thomas Mount because St Thomas was the disciple who went there and founded, like Joseph of Arimathea in Glastonbury, Thomas founded in India the same kinds of healer communities and one of them was on the south Indian coast in Kerala where there is a mount and another was just outside of Madras today, still called St Thomas mount. The impress is that the architecture began to show the quality, now, of buildings that were mountainous. In India the earliest Stupa at Sanchi is actually very small compared to the later sizes of Buddhist structures. Sanchi, built by Ashoka about 250BC, is hardly more than 75 feet high where as at Nalanda they had 40 storey buildings by about 300AD, Buddhist buildings. So that one had enormous differences in size, in scale: the early Glastonbury community was so small that you could put the entire construct within the choir of the church which, when it was finally built after 1190, after a huge fire, was almost 600 feet long. We'll come back after a short break.
Let's come back to a very interesting excursion that we're making: this is the cover of the Penguin Classics the dialogue The Phaedrus and it has a chariot, a charioteer. You find the myth of the chariot both in Plato and in the Upanishads. You find it in the Katha Upanishads at the same time that Plato's writing it in Phaedrus about 400BC. How is this so? It is so because at 2,400BC from the Akkadian empire that was founded by Sargon and was knit together by his genius poetic daughter Enheduanna, was like a combination of Homer and a great poet; she's the first figure in world literature whose name we know, whose works we have and whose heritage was indelible. Her works were used as text books for learning how to read and write in the ancient near east for over a thousand years, she was the Shakespeare of the ancient mid-east. But what was interesting is it that Sargon's empire, stretching its trade routes, exceeded the Euphrates-Nile area and went all the way along the southern Irani coast, all the way to India into the Indus valley civilisation, all the way over, arching as the fertile crescent, to the Mediterranean where Lebanon is today and made its first contacts across the Mediterranean to Cyprus, made its first excursions into what is today Turkey, Anatolia, and its first contacts with Egypt and the Egyptian Nile civilisation.
So that you find writing in a literate way which originated in Mesopotamia of that time for the first time begins to surface in all of these different places. None of the Egyptian pyramids had writing in them until the pyramid of Unas and Unas is a contemporary of Sargon of Akkad who ruled for 56 years. The Indus civilisation never had a hieroglyphic language that could be written until that time and it's still an undeciphered. But the great refinement that happened, happened on the Lebanon coast because it was there after about 500 years that the Akkadian written language that had become very refined - it was the first time that there were time tenses in verbs that were specific enough that one could do a complicated historical type of composition; the first time that nouns took adjectival refinements so that you could have a whole list of nuances of qualities that could be grouped together around some kind of a noun - but 500 years later an alphabet was born on that Phoenician-Lebanese coast which permitted a huge transformation of written language. Once you have an alphabet, instead of having to learn hundreds and hundreds of different characters, different glyphs, different styles of writing them, now with an alphabet there is a limited number of symbols that one must master. You can now write almost any kind of a language to any degree of sophistication. The words that occur in ancient Sanskrit are very cognate to the words in ancient Irani, are very cognate to the words in the ancient Phoenician coast. And about that time that the alphabet is made is when the patriarch Abraham lived and Abraham was born in the very ancient city Ur that Enheduanna was the high priestess in 500 years before.
What is interesting is the way in which the Phoenician spread of the trade routes shied away from the east and went into the far west because one of the reasons that the ancient Akkadian trade routes went into Iran, went into ancient Iran, was for the tin, tin mining because you cannot make bronze unless you have tin. And when you mix tin with copper and a few other small smelting qualities, now you can not only have bronze but you can have a very thin kind of foil, we call it today tin foil. And when you bring a mould together to make that thin foil there's a little bit of the metal that exudes at the top of the mould and that's called flashing. And it's a sign, for those who do metal work, that the mould has taken and that you now have this thin foil, not thin as our tin foil but now you are able to mint coins for the first time out of that thin metal. And so instead of having lumps of raw gold with some kind of a hieroglyph of the king stamped on it, and you would carry these lumps around, for the first time you begin to have printed minted coins in the world.
But the trade routes that linked the interiors of Iran with the tin mines to some of the other interiors, like Anatolia, all of this became problematic, about the time that the Roman Empire was reaching one of its apexes under Augustus Caesar after he died, increasingly Tiberius Caesar was not able to keep the contacts that had been there for a couple thousand years. The Phoenicians had pioneered about 200BC into finding that there were tin mines available in the quadrant where Cornwall and Somerset link together on the west coast of England. The ancient international trade routes were always run by Semitic speaking traders because they would literally master 10, 20 languages and had done it for thousands of years. And Joseph of Arimathea was in the tin business running a trading route from the Cornwall-Somerset west coast of England, linking it with some mines in the north-west part of what was called Gaul, France, Belgium today or Brittany, and the north coast of Spain, Galicia. And so all of these mining areas were linked together by a trading company run by Joseph of Arimathea, was very wealthy as you can imagine and brought all of this material back to the coast, the coast where the big new city called Caesarea was built. They took an ancient port, there are not many ports along the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon and Israel and they literally carved out a huge port called Caesarea.
The people who financed that port were the richest Jewish family in Alexandria and they got to be very wealthy because their grandfather is one of the people in Alexandria who saved Julius Caesar during a short war that took place in Alexandria. Caesar wrote a history of it called The Alexandrian Wars and he was trapped physically himself and his troops because all of the ships that they based their power on had caught fire and they were about to be wiped out and it was the grandfather of two of the most famous figures in Alexandria who saved him and led him out and so they gained all of the contracts from the Caesar line then, like the Becto corporation of today. They were the builders of huge projects and the two sons in Alexandria, one of them was Philo of Alexandria, the great philosopher and his older brother Alexander and the two sons of Alexander, the nephews of Philo of Alexandria were two of the most powerful Jewish Roman generals. And the younger son whose name was Tiberius Julius Alexander was the general in charge of the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus who was the son of the new family, the Flavians, who replaced the Caesars. And it was his father Vespasian who was the founder of the Flavian dynasty of the Roman Empire.
But when the Romans were first taking over Britain, because Julius Caesar was the first to go to Britain and find out that it was a huge profitable land, it would make a great province but they could do nothing during Augustus' time, he would do not countenance any kind of move to try and add Britain, Britannia, to the Roman Empire and he impressed his adopted son Tiberius also not to do this. But the Caesar that came that decided he was going to annex Britain was Claudius Caesar, from I Claudius fame. And Claudius went to fight in Britain and in the north his master general was named Agricola and we a book called The Agricola by Tacitus because Tacitus married the daughter of Agricola so he's writing about his father in law. But the general in the south of England was Vespasian and it was Vespasian who found out in the 50s AD about the early Joseph of Arimathea community in the primordial Glastonbury and found out that there were special healing powers that were loosed and available but that somehow it had ties all the way back to Alexandria.
And so in 68AD when the madness of the Caesar line finally destroyed the whole Caesar lineage, Nero and his madness literally burnt Rome down, he said 'I'm going to build a whole new Rome, a whole new city.' And he laid blame for the conflagration on a new sect he had just heard about called Christians that somehow they were like special Jews who had become even more - they still had Jewish fanatical insular qualities but they had these super new kinds of power healer qualities - and all of the Caesars feared this from Nero all the way back down to Claudius, he was the first one to have this quality extended to the Christians. His predecessor was Caligula and it was Caligula in his madness who decided that the Jewish wealth should belong to him especially in Egypt because Egypt was not a Roman province that belonged to the senate and the Roman people it was the personal property of the emperor. All of this linked together in such a way that you had a convoluted aspect that in 69AD there were four different Roman emperors, one after another they could not have any stability to stay in power, to stay alive. And the fourth one was Vespasian and he's the one that he felt himself theta he had found the secret of co-opting the Christian power in Alexandria. And he performed all of the miracles that are attributed to Jesus are attributed to Vespasian as well: he could take his spittle and mix it with dust and put it on the eyes if the blind and they will see, he could lay hands on the lame and they could get up and carry their cots away and they could walk. And all of this was co-opted by Vespasian in Alexandria in 69AD.
It is a very interesting way to see that a mythos - that's why myth is such a powerful phase in our maturation: we must have it - it's actually the way in which experience sends its roots out, makes its trunk of stability and sends its branches out then to fruit and reseed itself. The roots that go out into it become the ritual actions, the trunk becomes the culture and the branches with the fruits and everything become the symbolic ideas and also the images that collect together in the mind in the structure of the imagination. So that ideas and images, ideas that integrate and bring together meaning, images that integrate and bring together feeling so that feeling and meaning are brought together in two great functions: one is symbolic thought, the other is the imagination. And symbolic thought gains its power because of a written language that's formulated because of a quality, that the mind had just very little before, and now it has a great quality, a great structure and it's called the memory. So that the mind now has the imagination, it has the memory, it has symbolic integration of ideas which are the forms, the structures of things - the word for those forms in Plato is idea - and the imagination which brings not just images together but makes an image base which you can then configure and make a structure so that the imagination can hold a structure of images that correlates together with the rituals that are done and the ideas bring the experience of the feelings of the language of the images into an expressive play that is made permanently by written language, by print.
All of this comes together in such a powerful way, extremely suddenly so that when it happens, and it's happened over and over again - half a dozen times in world history in different parts of the world - every single time it has happened the same way. We live in a time where since the 1980s with computers coming into play by the early 20th century we now have computer computational power that is just doubling every couple of years and the personal computing power in an individual's den today is greater than the capacity that NASA had when they sent men to the moon. All of this, though, is forcing a different kind, a different aspect of written language, a different integral of ideas, changing the memory again, changing the imagination again and making the symbolic mind, as it always does under these pressures, instead of it being open to the unknown it wants to close itself off because it is over loaded. And when it closes itself off it seeks to limit access to inquiry, to exploring the unknown and more and more it looks to conglomerate and to consolidate and to tighten its hold and by excluding the larger resonances of exploration and inquiry they seek to do what the old wisdom ways always did but did it in a spiritual way.
There were always men and women who took themselves out temporarily into small communities, small groups, retreats, to let the old fall away and let the enquiry of the new occur from its natural flow. Whereas the mind does not, in its symbolic consolidation, ever access nature, it extracts more and more away from nature and it seeks not to have some kind of ritual existence that emerges out of nature but rather a projected rituality that comes from the mind's own forms of what things should be like, how things should be done. And so you get a sense of tyrannies, very powerful tyrannies who can be with other tyrannies to try and find some master tyranny that finally can consolidate them all and take over. The Roman Empire in its day was the master tyranny, its only competition was in China where the Han Chinese were a Han Roman Empire and between them they handled almost all of the Eurasian-African continents together. We talked a couple of weeks ago about there being Roman colonies in Southeast Asia, fortresses. There were Jewish trading colonies on the south of India for centuries, Philo's family in Alexandria ran a lot of the trading routes, not only did they build places like Caesarea but they had the trading routes that began on the red sea coast of Egypt and went down along the south Arabian coast picking up frankincense and myrrh and other spices along the way and going all the way to south India.
That's why the apostle Thomas and the one called Bartholomew - his real name was Nathaniel - and he was the son of Tholmai, who was a very famous powerful Essene [?1.05.22], married, so his real name was Nathaniel bar-Tholmai, Nathaniel son of Tholmai. But in the Roman days of the New Testament they didn't understand lineages and who these things are and almost no Christian preachers, teachers, have any understanding of these things. Nathaniel was from Cana in Galilee; it was at his wedding that Jesus turned the water into wine. And Nathaniel was very close to Philip - the gospel of Philip the apostle - and it was Philip who took Christianity to France, just as Joseph of Arimathea and St Matthew took it to England, Thomas and Nathaniel took it to India. Bartholomew went up to the north and Thomas did the south and went up the Bay of Bengal side of India. His earliest conversion was a teacher named Panyayassis [1.06.44] - Punya means merit in Sanskrit - the great merit teacher, and his pupil was Parshva. Parshnu [1.06.58] in ancient Akkadian is one of the translations for the Sumerian mei, not me, but the mei which is the principles of integral power. And so Panyayassis[1.07.16], the first disciple was Parshva and he's the one that was the teacher of Asvaghosa who founded the Mahayana in India. So we have the roots of the Celtic royal line in Britain from Joseph of Arimathea and the roots of the Mahayana from St Thomas exactly at the same time about 37-38AD, very, very quickly after that. The mythos carries all the time in that it didn't just carry Judaism and now Christianity but it carried the deep impress of Pythagoreanism, it carried a very deep impress of ancient Akkadian wisdom, of Mesopotamian wisdom, a deep impress of Phoenician wisdom .
Pythagoras' father Mnesarchus was a Phoenician trader, he lived in the coastal area where tier/tire is today and ran shipping routes which is why when he married he married a woman from the Greek island of Samos but they had their wedding at the oracle of Delphi because he was used to travelling great distances and this would have been about 600BC. And Pythagoras is named after the Pythian Apollo from Delphi and we talked last week about Pythagoras' adopted brother who was a very strange being who was able to look at the sun without blinking and had many other qualities, he was like an extraterrestrial. And so he had a name, Astraeus, which meant star being and Pythagoras grew up with this kind of a household so he was a spectacular figure. So that you have all of these heritages that are not mixed together they are nested into one another so that you get like a tree ring of civilisations that the latest quality to it is where the sap is running but the strength of it is because of all the concentricity that is there. And you have not just the trunk which is like the cultures but at certain eras you have a sudden strengthening of the whole capacity; instead of there being a trunk that is a culture, now you have branches that are able to go out and flower in such a way that you have a civilisation. The ancient sign of the power of the civilisation from Glastonbury Cathedral was the thorn, the thorn tree. The mythos is that Joseph of Arimathea planted his staff ain the ground to give thanks that they had arrived at this place that had been prepared for them and that the staff grew roots and flowered and became a thorn tree, it's a special kind of thorn tree that only grows in the Levantine Mountains of southern Lebanon. And that thorn has a peculiar quality, it blooms twice a year; it blooms in May and it blooms on what was old Christmas day. And the original thorn was chopped down and burned by a puritan fundamentalist in the 1500s but sprigs of it were replanted and it grows still today and blossoms in May and blossoms on old Christmas day just the same.
The mythic quality, the mythos, is the consistency of the experience flowing on these images that could be integrated into symbols but in the mythos they're left to be the imagery of the flow of experience so that feeling has its own kind of a quality. And the quality that it has, when the mythic experience is both natural and visionary and not tampered with by the mind trying to form it, the saying is is that 'The soul has wings'. So the myth of the chariot is immediately followed in the Phaedrus by Socrates talking about the soul regaining its wings and that this is a part of its ability to fly to the higher realms and that when it flies to the higher realms death has no hold on it whatsoever. And you find in the Katha Upanishad that the whole aspect of the chariot mythos and the soul being able to go beyond what its natural integral would have been to a supernatural trans-death quality is here as well as in the Pythagorean Plato. In the Katha Upanishad, because of a complication, a young man Nasitias [Nachiketa?], angers his father who has given some very scrawny cows for sacrifice and was criticized by his son and the father condemns him to go to Yama the lord of death, 'You are no longer my son, you don't belong in life. 'But when Nasitias goes to the realm of death the lord of death is not there and he doesn't come for three days and so when he comes he tells Nasitias this has never happened before so I must give you three boons, three wishes. And Nasitias says, 'My first wish is that I can return to my heritage, that I may know wise actions without end,' and the third, 'I want to be able to conquer death.' And so the lord of death becomes the yogic teacher of Nasitias in the Katha Upanishad and he says, 'There are two ways for human beings: one way is pleasant, the other is good and they are very different. Different is the good and different indeed is the pleasant. These two, with different purposes bind a man of these two it is well for him who takes hold of the good but he who chooses the pleasant fails of his aim.' Then he goes on to say, 'Both the good and pleasant approach a man. The wise man pondering over them discriminates: the wise chooses the good in preference to the pleasant; the simple minded for the sake of worldly well-being prefers the pleasant. But though Nasitias has rejected after examining the desires that are pleasant and seem to be pleasing you have not taken the way of wealth where many mortals sink. Widely apart and leading to divergent ends are these: ignorance and what is known as wisdom. I know you are eager for wisdom even though there are many desires to distract. Abiding in the midst of ignorance, wise in their own esteem, thinking themselves to be learned, fools tread a torturous path and go about like blind men leading those who are also blind.'
And so the quality of wisdom is set in a divergence. The divergence amounts to this: the ignorance is like a recoil from a reflection of a closed mind so that the recoil is that the seemingly pleasant is because you live in such a way that your social world is all taken care of because it's designed especially for you and your kind and your group and people who don't fit in, well, they just are unpleasant people. Whereas the way of wisdom is to go through that gateway into the blossoming of the further branches of consciousness which have fruits that were unknown in nature, they have supernatural fruits, supernatural flowers, they're able, like the Glastonbury thorn, to bloom in the midst of the winter solstice, not just in the spring. And so one of the qualities of ancient wisdom maturation was that the levels of the world are not trustworthy as steps, as rungs of a ladder by which you can go any higher than the simple reflectiveness of what the mind finally settles for. Where it is imperative to go through, to penetrate through that quality of the self-satisfied ego-mind to go into what? Not a pleasant realm immediately but the good of exploring the as yet unknown. And what one encounters, like we do in our learning, is that the first phase that occurs after that, the quintessential aspect to, are now beyond nature capacities, is not a form but a further process that consciousness is a process, a visionary process. And it's only later that that visionary process is able to make in a new way new kinds of forms that are not existential forms that just stay where they are but that they're like jewels, they're like crystals. So that the radiance of it is not just a perception of something but it is a radiation and a magnetic rotation of the resonances of harmonics. And now one has the capacity to be a scintillating being, you have many facets of elegance and excellence so that one now says of that person that they are beautiful. The good in them at this constellation is that they have beauty and that that beauty, that form is that it is not a closed form but just as capable of being looked at perceptually or packaged conceptually or configured in just a cultural mythic way but they develop arrays of possibility of things unknown, of processes unknown. And out of this comes a magical supernatural quality of person, it's that spirit person now who is able to go and do and be on levels that nature herself endorses but does not give just to simple existence but only confers later upon the development of the spectacular. And the beauty has its relationship to the form of the real which is the cosmos.
The quality in Susanne K Langer's symbolic transformation chapter of Philosophy in a New Key she says, 'A change approach to the theory of knowledge naturally has its effect upon psychology too. As long as sense was supposed to be the chief factor in knowledge, psychologists took a prime interest in the organs that were the windows of the mind and the details of their functioning. The other things were accorded sketchier, sometimes vaguer treatment.' All true belief must be based on sense evidence but the new key is that symbols do not just tie things together but they have an ability to be transparent and when they are transparent they allow us to go through their meaning as if the meaning were not some thing but as if it were a frame of initial point of reference which can be expanded. So that the forms that come after that are forms of art and there is such a thing then as the art of person making and the spiritual person is an artist in life. They are not just a part of a reflected order of the way in which the mind considers but they are a deep harmonic of the real. And so for the first time a human being comes into life really from nature and comes into a reborn life through the scintillation of their own art of maturation having reached the jewel stage.
We're going to go back into this a little bit deeper next week and I will try to bring enough materials to show you how sometimes the portrayal of human beings has a watershed. When they are portrayed as having spirits as being spirit artists as we've talked last week about the Raphael portraits being completely different from the Fra Angelico portraits, the one is a high medieval culture the other is a spiritual civilisation. We're poised in a generation that is about to make a distillation of the transformation, a second transform to a third level quality which is cosmic. Instead of being related to a country or a culture we're going to be related to whole star systems, the frontier will be the interstellar spaces and that's what we're maturing ourselves to do, to be real on that scale. More next week.