Vision 7

We come to Vision Seven and we're in the second half of a phase of 12 and we consistently flow through a phase of 12 presentations and then give it an interval and then the next 12 constitute a further phase. The interval allows for us to have a very special gestalt that otherwise could not be expressed, the interval allows us to have a music. By having a structure - in this case, of 12 presentations, it gives us a symbolic plan, a symbolic form, a way for thought to organise itself and in this way we would have clear ideas. By putting an interval there the ideas now become motifs in a composition which is musical and is different. We're constantly taking pairs of books, pairs of exquisite seed documents of our planetary humanity to unfold for ourselves progressively in these phases, in this ongoing music, a way of learning which reveals consistently to us, like an auger going deeper and deeper in and like a spiral going farther and farther out in this deep complementation, revealing our nature and our context, both of which are mysterious.
We're currently in the middle of taking a pair of books which are extraordinary in terms of the planetary heritage. We're taking the greatest of all of Shakespeare's plays The Tempest, his last great play and we're taking the document that was written in the 30's AD, I believe by Mary Magdalene, celebrating the special vision of transformation that she experienced being a very special companion to Jesus. And we're taking these two documents, one which has become world famous and been in print ever since it was first published, in fact since it was first performed in 1611. Its first publication was in the First Folio, 1623, to commemorate Shakespeare by all of his friends and The Tempest was the crown of the First Folio Shakespeare. Whereas The Odes to Solomon were extraordinarily esoteric, even when they were written, even when they were first circulated around an esoteric group of persons who did not think of Jesus as the founder of a Christianity, of a religion, but who was the guarantor of a new way of being real. And consistently in the earliest records, in the earliest documents, it's not referred to as Christianity, but as, 'The Way.' And in fact, 'The Way' translates very, very deeply in a resonant kind of activity, as we will see, from Britain to India. 'The Way' was accepted as how one talks about what this does and when one is doing it, what it is you are journeying on 'The Way.' In India it will become, 'The Great Yana,' the Mahāyāna, a complete transformation of Buddhism. In the west, in Britain, it will become the foundation of an esoteric resurrection Hermeticism that eventually influences the whole esoteric British tradition, especially the Arthurian tradition and its, not its methos, but its vision. We need to understand and we've been going into this in Visions Five and Six and now in Vision Seven deeper, that at the time of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, there was an epical sea change in the way in which a human being could address eternity. Before then there was a mythology, or a theology of gods or doctrines, of temples, of churches, of cults and these were mediators that allowed for human beings who attended those temples, who believed in those doctrines, who accepted the context of those mythologies, they were able through that interface, as if it were a dividing between the gods, the divine realm and man in his human world...the change that came with the Crucifixion and Resurrection is that this veil became a membrane which was permeable to be gone through both ways, that the Divine can come directly, instantly, to anyone, not needing a priesthood, not needing a mythology, not needing the gods, not needing angels or demons, or any midway that would require of man then to be subservient to the middlemen, obedient to the exchange artists, authoritarian obedience, empire-building fodder. Not only could the Divine come directly to someone personally, but the person could penetrate the other way osmotically through that membrane and achieve a personal acceptance so that one achieved what I have called, 'Shared presence.' The Resurrection was an extraordinary event that showed that this was true because it had happened and since it had actually happened and been introduced into the universe it was now available, had been pioneered and was now the way in which one could actually achieve this and do this. So that the Resurrection personages surrounding Jesus were extraordinarily charged with a charisma, with a visionary quality and that's why we're taking it here in Vision to understand that it was sent out, it was broadcast, to five different regions of the then known world, in terms of a very broad swathe. The farthest east that it went was southern India, all the way over to Madras and the farthest west it went was the Cornish coast of the west of Britain, just across the Bristol Channel from Wales. The farthest south it went was Ethiopia and southern Arabia, called at the time, Saba and the farthest north that it went was into Armenia and the Caucasian Mountain ranges. The centre of it was a tandem across the Mediterranean Sea, having one point in Alexandria and having the second point in Ephesus on the Aegean Sea, what is today the Turkish coast. The group that went to Ephesus we haven't talked about, but included the mother of Jesus, because the house that she was domiciled in...she was at the time 63 years old and she lived just for a few more years after that. The house that she was domiciled in was so well known even to today, that its reconstructed site, the house is still there, rebuilt as it was 2,000 years ago. And when Pope Benedict travelled ecumenically to Constantinople, to Turkey, he went down to the house that Mary the mother of Jesus lived in and made a worship there. That house was originally built by five men who accompanied her and the entire ensemble was watched over by Mary Magdalene, who was, as we will see and understand, magisterial. The five men were the young St. John, he was about 13 years old and had been assigned as being the spirit son to be raised by Mary Magdalene. Two of the other Apostles went with him, Philip and Nathaniel. Now, Nathaniel's father was named Tôlmay and so Nathaniel's full name was Nathaniel bar, 'Son of' - Tôlmay, but later on, because people did not read or speak in the Hebraic way, bar-Tôlmay became eventually reduced to Bartholomew, so the Apostle Bartholomew is actually Nathaniel and he was a very close friend of Philip's. You can read this in the Gospel According to John. In fact, Nathaniel was from Cana and it was Nathaniel's wedding, attended by all of the family of Jesus, including his mother and all of his Disciples and it's at that wedding that the water was turned into wine. The wedding was the wedding of Nathaniel bar-Tôlmay, who was a very close friend of Jesus' family because they were extraordinarily well known, because the father of Jesus, Joseph, was one of the greatest visionary writers of that entire age and one of the documents that he wrote was the parable section of the Book of Enoch. And that parable section has three parables all dealing with the Son of Man and so Jesus was raised literally by someone who was the visionary author, the great dream master, at that time in the esoteric, Hebraic community. And one finds in the Dead Sea Scrolls four of the five sections of the Book of Enoch, but you do not find the Similitudes, the Book of Parables because it hadn't been written at the time when the whole Essene community of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were from, it had been destroyed by a massive earthquake in 31 BC and was abandoned for many decades. And when he was born, John the Baptist, because he was the son of one of the high priests, Zacharias and his mother Elizabeth was a very well known, very prominent, an older woman who was supposed to be beyond childbirth, when the order came from Herod in his later madness to kill all of the male boys born within two years of the date that was established so that some future king would not supplant his Dynasty, John the Baptist was taken as a baby by his mother into the wilderness of Judea, into the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were buried and he was raised literally outside of Qumran in the desert and that's where he spent all of his life in that area, where the Jordan River runs into the Dead Sea and just a little bit on either side of the Jordan he always positioned himself there and maintained himself for quite...his entire life there. The quality of the Resurrection was so earth shaking to the power structures, not only to the Roman power structure and the Jewish power structure of the time, both the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Essenes...there were many Essenes who did not believe in marriage, did not believe in participating in the world at all. Joseph was not one of those. He was one of those, not the Essenes of the ascetic type, but he was one of those dream masters like Daniel in the Old Testament who is able to understand how dreams flow together and make, not a symbolic structure in the mind, but make a visionary field wherein the movement of experience now flows, not only in the field of nature, generating the mind, but it flows in the field of differential conscious vision and creates the spiritual person. And so Joseph was like Daniel not only a dream master, but able to step up dreams from individual dreams, to really profound individual dreams, to extraordinary the great dream of a lifetime to a fourth level, where instead of dreams, one now had a world vision of the future and how it would unfold and one could then move in such a way that one's experience flowing in that vision would give you a calibration and a calendar by which you could re-establish your values, your livingness, your participation, your prismatic, personal qualities of spirit, to be able to contribute to the flow that would emerge into a new world, a new realm.
At the Crucifixion and Resurrection there was a consternation deeper than there was before the Crucifixion. None of the authoritative Jewish sects wanted to have a resurrected capacity beyond the Torah, beyond the prophets, beyond even the ascetic Essene qualities, because it would take away the justification for their remaining in existence, of remaining in power, of remaining...because they would have been fulfilled and something new now has come out. 'We must not regress and keep those old structures going.' But the deepest was the affinity of the Jewish power structure to the Roman imperium, the Roman Empire power structure, which at that time was extraordinarily powerful and yet not cemented permanently. It had been constructed by Augustus Caesar and when he died in 14 AD he passed it on to his adopted son. Tiberius was one of the sons of his second wife, Livia, not his own son. And Tiberius Caesar, like Herod, was not a legitimate ruler, not a legitimate king, he had to keep the manufactured artificiality of his power alive and not have it challenged by something which was esoterically more authentic than his authority. And so one found the danger was so high... Jesus was crucified and resurrected in 36 AD, right at the end of Tiberius' reign, right at the end of Pontius Pilate's procuratorship of Judea and of all of Palestine, at the time as they called the Roman Province and his centre was in Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast. It was not possible to remain in Jerusalem, it was not possible to remain in Galilee, or in Transjordan Perea, or even Sumeria, where Caesarea was, one had to leave and just leave a remnant behind and the remnant that was left behind was clustered, was a small group of people and you can read about that group of people in the Acts. The Book of Acts in the New Testament is by St. Luke and it is the follow-up to the Gospel of Luke. It was written in the 60's, mid 60's and was largely written in Rome and in his exile there with Paul, who was imprisoned there and finally murdered along with St. Peter, they were murdered at the same time...and in fact there is a catacomb structure and next week I'll bring in an engraving from a book of 150 years ago that has an engraving of the catacomb with the tombs of Peter and Paul together there. The Roman Church always has the two keys, the Keys to the Kingdom, Peter's and Paul's crossed, because the original sign was not a cross like this, but was an, 'X' cross with a, 'P' written in it, so that you had six lines, the top had a curve like a, 'P' and that was the original chi-rho of the symbol for, 'The Way.' The cross is a symbol of the Church's authority based on the Crucifixion, whereas the chi-rho was a transparent symbol of the vision of the Resurrection, a completely different outlook. Not an, '-Ism' at all, not an, 'Anity' at all, but a new way. So anyone associated with the Resurrection split. St. Thomas went to India and all the way to Britain went a group of 12 individuals who were at the closest family relationship to Jesus outside of his mother, Mary Magdalene and the young adopted spirit son St. John. Those three, plus Philip and Nathaniel, plus two other sons of Mary the mother of Jesus, went to Ephesus and founded their small community, beginning about 37 AD. Philip and Nathaniel were extraordinarily capable men, the two younger sons of Mary the mother of Jesus were young men, quite vigorous and viable and they helped build the houses where Mary Magdalene lived, where Mary the mother of Jesus lived and young St. John was raised in Mary Magdalene's house and she's the one that taught him the elegance of the kind of language that he uses in his Gospel and the Book of Revelation and in his Letters. One of the world's greatest, most refined languages, New Testament Greek is largely John's Greek and the crown of it. He was the Shakespeare of his day very much. Who went to Britain? What were the 12? Jesus had four brothers, two of them went to Ephesus, the younger ones and two of the older ones stayed in Jerusalem and the oldest of them, James, who became the James who wrote the Epistle of James in the New Testament, he was the next oldest boy, the brother of Jesus and when the other James, the brother of St. John, was killed in 44 AD...he was killed in Jerusalem, he was murdered there, the other James, the brother of Jesus, James the Just, became the first bishop of Jerusalem. Before that, the Apostle James followed, 'The Way,' whereas the brother of Jesus, James the Just, who didn't believe in his brother until after the Resurrection, now founded and found his way in a growing community structure that was disparate, like a diaspora and had to be linked together by letters, by travelling missionaries and it became the seed out of which the Church arose, both the Church in the east and the Church in the west, the Roman Catholic Church, centred in the Rome and the Greek Orthodox Church, which was originally centred in Antioch. Whereas in Alexandria and Ephesus you had, 'The Way' and not the Church and in India you had, 'The Way' and not the Church, in Ethiopia you had, 'The Way' and not the Church, in Armenia you had, 'The Way' and not the Church and in Britain the place that was chosen was chosen because the man who headed that group, Joseph of Arimathea, was one of the great shipping magnates of the day. He owned the shipping lines that traded from the eastern Mediterranean coast, all the way to Spain, France, Britain and one of the elements that he dealt with was tin. And in Cornwall was one of the few places in the known world where there were enough deposits of tin that could be mined, because tin was necessary to make bronze. You cannot make bronze out of copper without tin. And so it was one of these elements that was absolutely essential and if you cornered the market on tin you were very wealthy indeed. Like later on the Medici family in the Renaissance, one of the sources of their great wealth was not just the banks that they had, but they helped corner the market on alum and alum was necessary to fix colour in fabrics. And because the Roman Catholic Church through the Medicis had a monopoly on alum they became immensely wealthy, because any fabric that would hold its colour had to use their product in order to ensure this. Tin was the element that Joseph of Arimathea's great fortune was based on and he knew from business dealings all of the ruling kings of that whole west Britain area and so they gave him a series of seven hills in a low-lying valley land that in the springtime it would flood and the hills would become islands, a group of seven islands and as the summer came along the water would dry up and the islands would then become hills in a verdant, beautiful countryside level. Those seven hills were a mystical vision complement to the Seven Hills of Rome, but whereas the Seven Hills of Rome meant an authoritarian imperial power structure, these seven hills would make a visionary new realm of the spiritual person, of the cosmic future that would come out of this. Accompanying Joseph of Arimathea was his wife and her name was Suzanne. And Suzanne was one of the four sisters of Jesus, in fact all four of his sisters went there and the site of those seven hills in west Britain are known as Glastonbury. One of the things that grew very beautifully in that area were apple trees and the origin of the name Glastonbury actually means, 'The place of the good apples.' The place where one can go back to the origins of the way in which men and women originally were thrown out of Eden, not because they were sexual, but because they were ashamed of their nudity, ashamed of their naturality together. They were made, human beings are made paired, tuned. And so one of the qualities there in the Glastonbury resurrection was that any relationality of spiritual personage transcends realms of the artificial world where shame and guilt can obtain, where blame and power of authority can be manipulated. That this was a transformation of men and women, of mankind, out of the shame and guilt artificial culture, out of the way in which human beings had been granulated into isolated individuals who were helpless without some imperial, doctrinaire, authoritarian structures to hold them together to make life work. Well, life doesn't need those structures. One of the phrases, 'Consider the lilies in the field,' they don't need Caesar's permission to grow. So the four sisters of Jesus were there, Suzanne, her husband was Joseph of Arimathea, Joanna, her husband was Chuza, you can read about it in the Gospel According to Luke and Chuza was the great financial secretary to Herod Antipas, who was the king of Perea and of Galilee. And Chuza was one of the most powerful figures at the time in the Herodian power structure. His wife was Joanna. The next oldest was named Mary, for her mother, and her husband's name was [32:34 Clophus] and she and Clophus had a very large, beautiful house in Jerusalem and among their sons was a young man - he was only about nine years old when the Crucifixion-Resurrection happened - his name was John Mark, but he's known in history as St. Mark. And he was left in the care of St. Peter to raise, just like John was left in the care of Mary Magdalene to raise, because both their mothers went to Glastonbury with their sisters and their husbands. Mary's husband was Clophus and the oldest sister was named Salome and her husband was Zebedee and among her sons were St. James and St. John. So the four sisters and their four husbands went there and also Lazarus and his sister Martha went there and St. Matthew and the great, wealthy business partner of Joseph of Arimathea, named Nicodemus, which is why in the Gospel of John you read the whole section, that's the only place that mentions Nicodemus, who is told about how you only as a human being in an artificial, superficial, authoritarian world, you only see the lighted hall, you don't understand where the wind came from, or where it goes, you only know that here there's wind, where it came from and where it goes, no one knows. Nicodemus, part of his heritage is that one of the great, Old English poems is about a bird that flies in from the night into this large hall where everyone in the power structure is feasting and making merry and the bird flies around a little while, a symbol of the spirit and then flies out the window again into the starry expanse of night, only spends a sojourning little time there. It's a direct Old English inheritance of the way in which this 12...and these 12 range themselves in the classic way of, 'The Way.' They were arranged like a spiritual zodiac of 12 around a central sun building, which was a building where they took their meals together. And it was the meals together that was not just eating together, but at each meal a special hymn would be voiced and the hymns were the spontaneous poems created in their contemplative praying by themselves and then brought together so that the meal was not only a meal, but it was a place where they would sing together. The hymn was introduced and they would then sing. So that the singing of hymns together at the conclusion of the meals together, was like the emphasis that this is a membrane of the community's transparence, not just the person, but the entire community as a gestalt is now transparent, able to be cosmic, able to receive a cosmic energy first-hand, spontaneous, no middleman, just like the person. That group of 12 eventually...it was founded in 37 AD and eventually when it began to take hold in that west Britain area, expanding to Wales, expanding contacts to Ireland, expanding contacts, beginning in the south of England. Glastonbury is very close to an Ancient British road from Stonehenge times called the Fosse Way and it goes from the Devon coast, all the way up past Glastonbury, through Bath - named for the Roman Baths that were there - all the way into the northlands of Britain. On the other side of the Fosse Way you found Stonehenge and just above that, not too far away, Avebury. And when we come back from the break we'll see that one of the most profound resonances some 1500 years later, is that when they were first trying to get together to have a new translation of the Bible into English, that eventually became the King James Version, the first great really poetic translation of the Psalms was by Sir Philip Sidney, who died in a battle against the Spanish Hapsburgs in the Netherlands and so his sister Mary completed the Psalms. She completed Psalms 44 to 150 and she did her translations largely in the country house where her husband, the second Earl of Pembroke lived in Wilton, just outside of Salisbury within sight of Stonehenge and the Salisbury Plain. The 43 hymns of David, translated by Sir Philip Sidney in 1586 are exactly about the time that Shakespeare begins to seriously use a poetic language for the first time. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to the second part of Vision Seven and notice that we're always pairing: we're pairing parts, we're pairing books, not texts, we're pairing people and we're pairing pairs to make squares, to make quaternaries, we're putting centres into them to make fives. This photograph is of a model that was made of an architectural psychic genius, Frederick Bligh Bond and he was a man put in touch of the archaeology of Glastonbury and when he began to unearth, extraordinarily, the background in history of what it was and it became known to authorities, the Church, the political structure, all the power structures, they immediately got rid of him and he spent the rest of his life in anonymity and poverty. Bligh Bond...this is in a book by John Mitchell, New Light on the Ancient Mystery of Glastonbury and Mitchell has been involved for 50 years with this sort of thing and has written a number of books, not only on ancient archaeoastrology, but on UFO's and a number of other aspects, because they all weave together. When you have a transparency through the membrane of your person to the cosmos and the cosmos has that to you, it means that the community is larger than the planet, larger than the star system, intergalactic. So we're looking at not something that's a little transformation so that you're a better person, so that you're gooder than you were, it's that you have matured to reality and the scale and scope of something infinite. This is a different calibration and this education, this theory, is a recalibration, stronger than a revolution, more clear than a reformation, definitely more vibrant even than a renaissance. And the coming recalibration of man is upon us right here in 2007.
400 years ago, in 1607, almost about this time, the translation committees that had been appointed by King James I of England were finished largely with their translations which became the King James Bible. There were three pairs of translating committees: one pair was at Cambridge University, one pair at Oxford University and one pair was at Westminster in London, so that you had six translation committees and they were charged by James I, by the King, who was rather a severe king, they were charged to make sure that the translation was as close as possible to the Bishops' Bible of 1568, because many people had grown up by 1607 - that's a 40 year...and when the lifespan was only 50, 60 years, most people were familiar with the Bible in English as the Bishops' Bible. So the six translation committees, two in Cambridge, two in Oxford, two at Westminster, headed by Lancelot Andrewes, A-n-d-r-e-w-e-s...and you'll find T.S. Eliot wrote a beautiful essay on Lancelot Andrewes and the use of a very strong prose that translates easily into a poetic, it's strong as a rhetorical prose and it's fluid as a hymnal poetic. And so the King James Version of the Bible - also called the Authorised Version, because it's the King who authorised this - it was supposed to stick close to the Bishops' Bible, but one of the things that got in the way was that when the committees were working on this, they were charged in 1604 to do the translation promptly and to have it finished in a rigorous amount of time and from 1604 to 1607 was the time where they were making their translations and in 1608 to bring their translations together in the sense that the different committees would exchange their translations and check each other's work and put it all together by 1609 so that it could then be put into the hands of printers and typesetters and be published in time for 1611, which it was. When a tyrannical king demands this you do your best to obey, hence it's called the Authorised Version sometimes. What happens is that this was exactly the technique used to translate the Old Testament into Greek in ancient Alexandria, 2300 years ago, or 1900 years before the King James Version. There, 72 different scholars were brought from Jerusalem to Alexandria, they were housed in a special place on the island of Pharos, just off the coast of Alexandria by the great lighthouse and they were divided. There were six men from each of the 12 tribes, making 72 and their work was done and then checked by each other to make sure that the Ancient Hebrew that was used was put into a living Greek. And so the translation of the Old Testament into Greek is called the Septuagint. It's called because colloquial phrase was not 72, but, 'The 70,' those 70 some men did this. And so the Septuagint became the Old Testament that was read throughout the world because Hebrew was only spoken by a few cultivated people in one little area, or a couple little communities scattered. The common people spoke Aramaic, which in its elegant written form was Syriac, but the language used throughout the Roman Empire for really cultivated people was Greek. Latin for the [Octoritas 49:15] of the imperium, but Greek because it was the most refined language at the time available to be able to understand the nuances and the niceties, the details and the large strategy of most ideas and most heritages. The language most cognate to it was Sanskrit in India and so Greek and Sanskrit, both Indo-European languages, though used just by a small percentage of the people, always carried the weight of the traditional literature, always carried the poetic of it. In Elizabethan English - and the grand master of that is Shakespeare - the attentiveness was that somehow a living poetic, English poetic, had to have the expended vivacity, not only of translating something that was ancient, but of bringing it forward in its vibrant expansiveness so that it was again a living, charismatic, poetic language, for living people. The greatest genius before Shakespeare began to write, of using the English language in this rare poetic, was Sir Philip Sidney. Now, his best friend was Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene epic and a number of other people, among them an Italian named Giordano Bruno and Giordano Bruno was the great Hermetic philosopher of the age, the great visionary of the ancient Hermetic cosmology that had been rediscovered in the Italian Renaissance and brought in to revivify the classic past with a more vibrant Renaissance present. And it was Giordano Bruno who visited England in 1583 and the people that he went to visit were Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser and a man who was Italian, but was associated with the French Embassy in London, his name was John Florio. And if you get interested, John Florio is the person who was put into this book by Frances A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England. But he was associated with the French Embassy there and Florio was a very close friend of Bruno, not just that they were Italians, but they were Renaissance Hermetic philosopher geniuses. And Florio was the Ambassador in England from France, because he was associated with the way in which the Italian Renaissance had gone into France, especially into Paris, especially into that rare creative population in Paris, who saw that though the Platonic Academy in Florence, founded by Cosimo di Medici and headed by Marsilio Ficino, though that was excellent, it was a pioneering early effort and that there were further developments that had happened. That 100 years had gone by and that all of the developments were not limited to Italy at all, but had been expanded, especially in Northern Europe, that the Northern European Renaissance was a huge expansion beyond what the Italian Renaissance had been originally. And so in Paris there were set up a series of esoteric schools called the Academies. And Frances Yates also has done a book, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. One of the Academies was run by a group of seven savants and they called their gestalt the Pleiade, 'We are the Pleiades of humanity. We are the star community leaders, delivering a message of a new future, of an expanded mankind, who will transform out of the old mankind and join the celestial flow of cosmic beings.' Florio represented therefore not only the Italian Hermetic Renaissance, but the further expansion of the French Hermetic Renaissance and carried it to Elizabethan England, to London and to Oxford. And when Bruno came he met with Florio, he met with Edmund Spenser and a number of people surrounding them, but in particular with Sir Philip Sidney. And that's why Sir Philip Sidney took upon himself to go to the core, linking the prophets with the Torah by sacred hymns, sacred poems, sacred Psalms of David and began to make his translation of the Psalms of David in such a high, beautiful, English, original poetic that it was recognised that here was maybe the harbinger, like a poetic John the Baptist, of a new visionary revelation through the English poetic of a cosmic humanity. Unfortunately Sir Philip Sidney died at 32 of a gunshot wound in the Netherlands. He lived for three weeks and never recovered and he only translated the first 43 of the Psalms of David, but his genius sister, Mary, who became the Countess of Pembroke, finished the translation and her translation was finished of all of the Psalms in 1608, right at the very time that the English Bible came out in the Authorised Version, in the King James Version. But the Psalms of the Sidney translations was a higher poetic than the Authorised Version. It was a deeper revelation of the transparency, not only of the symbols, but of the way in which human beings, when they become spiritually real and cosmically attuned, the harmonics that flow through the language give you a freshened, new presence. And here's the last Psalm that Sir Philip Sidney lived to make the corrections on the translation. This is Psalm 43:
Judge of all, judge me and protector be of my cause, oppressed by most cruel sprites. Save me from bad wights in false colours dressed. For my God, thy sight giveth me thine might. Why then hast thou left me? Why walk I in woes while prevailing foes have joys bereft me? Send thy truth and light, let them guide me right from the paths of folly, bringing me to thy tabernacles, high in thy hill most holy. To God's altars who will I boldly go shaking off all sadness, to that God that is God of all my bliss, God of all my gladnesses. Then, lo, then I will with sweet music's skill, grateful meaning show thee then God, yea, my God. I will sing abroad what great thanks I owe thee. Why art thou my soul cast down in such dole? What ails thy discomfort? Wait on God for still. Thank my God I will sure'd present comfort.
An extraordinary quality of an English poetry raised to a level that was astounding at the time. We have talked earlier in our education of how when Old English came into play it was made extraordinarily powerful by the English national epic Beowulf, written about 730 AD. And in Beowulf two incommensurates, northern Germanic, European, hero epics and refined humility, Christian ethos, were brought together, as one Yogi once said of the Bhagavad Gītā, 'It's bringing fire and iron together, making a new molten quality where you can make new forms.' The German, sword-wheeling methos of the tough hero meeting the gentle humility of the interpersonal, sharing ethos, when brought together made Beowulf an extraordinary achievement and made Old English one of the great languages of what we now call the Middle Ages. But that Old English was completely transformed. In the 1300's the great genius of that was centred around Geoffrey Chaucer. He humanised the Old English into a Middle English and the Middle English genius in Chaucer, or in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight...and we took J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into contemporary English, because he was like Sir Philip Sidney in our time, capable of the highest poetic English, both in prose and in poetry. That Middle English was transformed again in Elizabethan English and the point leader was Sir Philip Sidney and after he died tragically in 1586, the figure who rushed in to fill that was Shakespeare. And Shakespeare came into play in such an extraordinary way that he was referred to by one critic as, 'An upstart crow.' Because when he went to London as a man in his early twenties, he went...he had spent time in Lancashire being a tutor in a private home, before that he'd helped his father, a glove maker in Stratford, Avon, who fell on tough times because he was married to a Catholic woman. And we talked last week about how Shakespeare as a boy, born in 1654, but raised in the early 1570's and it was a time when the English countryside had two waves of completely different thresholds of change: one, the Roman Church had sent missionaries to recapture the souls of people for the Roman Catholic Church, so there were Catholic missionaries seated all through the English countryside and at the same time from London, not from Rome, but from London, the beginnings of travelling troupes presenting secular plays. The first public playhouse in the world was in London in the 1570's. And the Burbage family that built it, their son, Richard Burbage, became the partner and best friend of William Shakespeare for most of his working life. They simply called it in London, 'The theatre' and there were a few places that were built to compete with it because people flocked to see, not just services held in a church for religious doctrine and not just the kind of services held for the general populous by travelling mystery play, minstrel show, 'Let's reduce it down to just little actions for the crowd with simplified language, little cartoon versions of it,' but the London playhouses were of the highest Elizabethan English for a secular population not to be liturgical, not to be doctrinaire, but to be freeing beyond the Old English and the Middle English to a new Elizabethan Renaissance English. And it was just at this time in growing up that Shakespeare received the impress of both...because his mother was Catholic, his father was not, so the family allegiance was always that there must be some way to have a set for both these that doesn't denigrate either. And at the same time the invitation that there was a new medium available; the public theatre was the Internet of the day, of the English Renaissance. And so when Shakespeare went to London, he began in the simplest possible way: he would park the horses of people coming to the theatre, which was just outside the gates and walls of old medieval London, in some fields and they were ride up by horseback and he was the groom for the people coming to the theatre, parking their horses, taking care of them, feeding them, couriering them. And at the same time he brought with him his budding genius and one of the first plays that was successful for Shakespeare is The Taming of the Shrew, which masterfully brings together a whole array, a whole spectrum of issues and ideas that separate in the mind, in mental structures of doctrine, in social world beliefs in the kind of prejudices from old traditions. All of a sudden everything is thrown together on the anvil of an untameable woman who is carrying rage and anger against being used manipulatively as a sexual slave. 'I will not marry. No man will rule me, will own me. I will not live in this world in this way. You cannot force me to.' The shrew, Katherine, who becomes loving Kate because the man who is brought facing her fire, is this iron will of Petruchio. 'I am Petruchio and I do what I like and I like the way I do it, see.' And so Petruchio and Kate are the fire and iron that are brought together in The Taming of the Shrew and made for the first time a Renaissance, English poetic marriage between equals who are equally recalcitrant, who come together because they are equally interested in the new aspect of an expanded them, having a special relationship with each other that was not possible individually before. Here is a shared tuning and together some new differential realm has opened up, that we never knew about before did we? Yes we did because we knew that in ancient Britain, at the very origins of this great transform, there's an esoteric tradition for these 1500 years, that those special, holy family people came to Britain and planted the seed of a resurrection into a wider humanity, by a shared presence tuning of our spiritual persons. And how did that happen? It happened this way: the head of those 12, the four sisters of Jesus and their husbands, Lazarus and his sister Martha, the Apostle Matthew and Nicodemus, the first child born to that group was a daughter to Joseph of Arimathea and his wife Susanna. By the way, Shakespeare's first daughter was named Suzanne in honour. Because by Shakespeare's time the Renaissance had really gained ground, the penetration, the understanding of what was at stake, of the context of everything that had transpired before, was getting immense and it was only because it was sabotaged later in the seventeenth century and ridiculed later in the seventeenth century and effectively removed from consideration for 200 years and was only rediscovered in the time of the Romantic revolution, by the great revolutionary Romantic poets, like Shelley and Blake and Goethe and Schiller, who we'll get to next. Because after we finish with Vision Eight next week, we shift to a new pair. We shift to Shelley and Schiller. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Schiller's Revolutionary on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Not political, not social, not religious, aesthetic, because the work of art is a prism reveals the entire spectrum. That's our style, that's our level of being a spiritual person, the complete spectrum, every colour belongs. We don't need their alum to make it a part of the fabric of our lives.
The Taming of the Shrew was followed by A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taming of the Shrew, about 1590, Midsummer Night's Dream to celebrate a wedding, because Shakespeare by this time had gotten a patron, Lord Southampton. And when Lord Southampton married his true love, to celebrate that wedding Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is a deeper transform of The Taming of the Shrew. If The Taming of the Shrew is like the vernal equinox of the opening of a whole new way, A Midsummer Night's Dream is the summer solstice, deep mysterious evening of the way in which that has deepened to a very, very strong relationship. Not just the equinox, but the solstice, so that the sun is now directly here at its closest and it's here in a magical, fairyland quality of an expanded spirit of mankind, where the marriage now is not just a marriage of the right man with the right woman, but on every level all the qualities of the full spectrum of relationality are able to come together. This is a quality that Shakespeare by 1598 had brought into play and there is a very deep transform that happens at this time in Shakespeare's language. That the spiritual capacity of poetic expression now was able to go through every level of deception in the society, to not just reveal that it was deception, whether it was manipulated by design, or inadvertent because of carelessness, or it was surreptitious because of such a large timescale and the play that makes a pair to The Taming of the Shrew is Twelfth Night and it's like the autumnal equinox. It is a way in which the deception carries all the way through the play, on every conceivable level, so that the pair that will come together do not even know that they're men and women of each other. So that the social reality of their meeting, of their complementarity, is completely up, not just for grabs, but up for make-believe and pretence and pretending. And so one of the central figures of the pretending in Twelfth Night, a vain man named Malvolio thinks that he's going to get the royal lady because he has intercepted a letter that says that she loves him and of course the letter is a complete deception. But he parades himself like a peacock that he is going to be very attractive to her and he's going to take his dress according to the way in which her letter specifies what she likes about him and of course the letter has deceived him, it's exactly what she doesn't like. But it's the fourth movement of this new season of Shakespeare's Elizabethan pattern of unfolding the esoteric quality of an expanded life in the cosmos, that the winter solstice is The Tempest. It directly relates to A Midsummer Night's Dream as the summer solstice and just as A Midsummer Night's Dream is about his patron Lord Southampton getting married, The Tempest is about the marriage of the daughter of King James I of England, Elizabeth, with the young Prince Henry on the Continent. He was...in those Germanic kingdoms they used to call them palatinates and he was the palatine elector from southern Germany, from Heidelberg and he was a marvellous young prince and his marriage was supposed to be bring the ancient Continental tradition together with the ancient British tradition in a marriage. And so when The Tempest was first produced in 1611, it was produced to ring the maturation of the poetic outside of the translation of the King James Authorised Version of the Bible, to make sure that the poetic of the theatre, the poetic of the poems, was superior to the kind of artificial, agreed upon, false poetic of the authoritarian power structure. And so Shakespeare in The Tempest, while he brought out the first edition of The Tempest in its play form in 1611, it was redone for the marriage of Elizabeth and Prince Henry in 1613 and brought so that the first presentation of The Tempest ran a competition with the English of the Authorised Version and the second was a new revelation of an even higher quality of harmonic, in what was supposed to be the grand initiating marriage of a new Europe, a completely new world, harkening so that it would get outside of its kingdom power structures, outside of its limited traditions and open itself up to a cosmic spread of mankind. That it was larger than kingdoms, it was larger than a Europe, it was larger than a programmed, religious...of any kind of theology. It meant that we were now able to go back into an eternal mode. And at the end of The Tempest, the magician who has brought about the entire play, addresses the audience in this way. He's given up his magic cloak, he's given up his magic staff, he will no longer have access to the world of fairy energies and he addresses the audience because the actors form a community with the playwright, writer and director, but that community of actors and playwright on the stage, form a commune with the audience. And the audience is not just those in the theatre then, but the audiences for all future times to be. Even if The Tempest is performed on Mars, those Martian human beings will be a part of that larger commune, that eternal possibility. Prospero addresses this universal audience and says:
Now my dreams are all overthrown and what strength I have's mine own, which is most faint now, 'tis true. I must be here confined by you, or sent to Naples. Let me not, since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver, dwell in this bare island by your spell, but release me from my bands with the gentle help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill, or else my project fails, which was to please. Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant and my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer, which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.
And with that, Shakespeare, as William Faulkner said, 'Broke his pen and dropped it.' More next week.