History 3

We're here at History 3 and our excursion is one that is much deeper than would be apparent to the unsophisticated mind. History is a dynamis of the highest possible order so that the saying, for many thousands of years, is that the Creator is the Lord of history. What he creates, what is created, is a tuning fork, is a tandem of heaven and earth. But as we have seen, in a music, which is a sequence of tones in a resonant set called a scale, and that scalar not only discloses the tones but that all tones have an overtone that is always companion to the tone and adds the richness to the tone. A guitar player who knows the scale can play a note, in our example of a couple of weeks ago, when a Segovia plays the note, he resonates it so that the overtone enriches it. There are many cello players but if one was able to have the rare artistic treat of seeing someone like a Rostropovich play - I saw Rostropovich play in Calgary, Alberta - he was more hearable, he was more poignant than the other hundred instruments in the orchestra. Because the overtones, when they are not blended in but when they are drawn in from their overtone echo into the tone, the tone now has a richness to it.
But there is a second overtone. That second overtone is not hearable. It's not physiologically hearable, it's not neurologically perceptible. Nevertheless, that second overtone, which really should be called an undertone, has a subconscious richness to it. That subconscious richness intuits that tremendous extra, not value, but that extra dimension that is now dynamically operative, not as the flow of experience, otherwise it would register in the mind, like a first overtone would. Eventually one can learn to hear it through the art of hearing. But that deeper subconscious overtone is not in the flow of experience, but is in the field of visionary consciousness and as such is not amenable to perception and not amenable to conception either. So that the flow, now, is not of experience, the flow, now, is of a huge complexity, which we call history, but we call it history glibly. History is actually the flow of a kaleidoscopic consciousness that is able to bring the overtones of experience, the overtone that can be added to experience, that increases its richness is experiment.
And so, an experiment is always a historical dynamis but there is an even deeper, by now not just a subconscious second overtone like an undertone, but it has now a distribution that is from the complementarity of the field of nature and the field of consciousness. So that its undertone richness is precisely and exactly the cosmos, which is larger than everything, which is more precise than one, which has an infinity which does not have to be renormalised in order to be dealt with in computation. What gets in the way of understanding this is the understanding based upon mentality as a completion. And so, the warning is always: 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.' What comes out of a closed mind is notoriously the quality of the mind being a mirror. What comes out of the wisdom transformation is that there is no mirror, that the images are not a reflection of the world but they're further dimensions beyond the world, they're heaven sent, heavenly.
Our presentation today is the third in History and we've been taking Cycles of the Phoenix, 500 year cycles. There is a periodicity to the dynamis of history and one of the ways in which one can enrich and deepen the quality of appreciating what a historical period is, what a historical set on a scalar might be, and all calendars are testimonies to this ability, to this capacity, to this experiment. So the experiments are historical but who tenders those? If the individual in a mentality thinks, 'I tender those' you get a skewed regressiveness, you don't get the actuality, you don't get reality. You get a mirrored imagery that reflects back the source of your integral which is always existence, the existential things, the existential actions, their sequences. And so, what you get is an ordering of those things, of those activities. Whereas there is a very deep penetration that comes out of theory, comes out of theoria, which is contemplation, the visionary consciousness field.
Out of that, now, instead of getting images that integrate to an imagination, you get an imagination that is transformed to a creative imagining. An image base in the imagination will take whatever order is given it in the mental symbolic structure. But ,if you make those symbols transparent, what occurs then is that the structure is able to be ambidextrous: it can not only order the integral ritual reference - existence, existential things, karmic actions, ritual comportments - but can also form a template, that is malleable, that can take images that do not come from existential. They come from complementarities, do not have something which is karmic in its integral implications of action, but which is free.
The person who really focused this most, historically, was Pythagoras and so, our presentation is the third, the third in Cycles of the Phoenix of 500 years. And we're taking from Pythagoras to Jesus as a 500 year period that was presaged by a previous 500 year period, which we took in History 2 - last week's presentation: Homer to Pythagoras - but pointing out that a contemporary of Homer was Solomon. Now, when you have two Cycles of the Phoenix that are in tandem, that now, not just link, but they interface that pair, that tuneable pair of Cycles of the Phoenix now make a millennium, a thousand years. So that from Solomon to Jesus is a thousand years, almost exactly and precisely. Also true, it's a thousand years, it's a millennium from Homer. Now if you take another Cycle of the Phoenix back from Homer and Solomon you go back to the 1400s BC and the figure that we took there to give us a sense of positioning of scale, the figure there was Akanaten.
Akanaten and Nephertiti. The one god who is not the sun god but that the sun's disc, its disc is transparent to a super time space dimension and it is not a source of god but is a lens for divine dimensions beyond just being, beyond just seeing, beyond just conceiving. In Los Angeles, because of the deep understanding of this particular thing, one can go to Los Feliz Boulevard and Griffith Park Boulevard and at the Philosophical Research Society - because it's not been sold off yet - there is still a statue of an ancient Egyptian sage priest from Heliopolis, kneeling towards the San Gabriel Mountains. And it says in English on the back of the disc - because Manley Hall had it engraved and put there - praising 'Thou who comes through the radiance of our sun, gifting us with light which with each re.' The re is ray, for Ra, who is not the sun God but is the invisible presencing on a very high dimension that shines through not only this sun but all stars.
The saying used to be, colloquially, 'The stars are the windows of the soul'. There are stars, literally, almost beyond numeration, quadrillions of trillions. Each ray, each ray of re, presents an ankh. That ankh is a key and it fits into a djed pillar which is a condenser. That djed pillar with its four discs on the top to calibrate the condensation and the ankh as a key fits in on top of that. The djed pillar will energise the ankh so that later on one can take it out and touch, it's like an electromagnetic medicine instrument that delivers and magneto electric cueing that brings all existential organic living physiology into its full dimensiality. So it's not just a symbol of life, it is a technology of eternity.
Pythagoras, in a very, very deep way, brought in from 22 years of study - not only at Heliopolis but going down to Thebes, to Luxor, going out to Taposiris because of its relation to ancient Abydos - having understood, after 22 years, how that choreography works, realised that the Egypt of his time was taken over by the Persian empire. And so, as one of those very early wise persons, he was taken to Persia and spent eleven years there, at a time when the Achaemenian Dynasty, founded by Cyrus the Great, was bringing back the ancient wisdom of the Northern Irani people, which was Zarathustra, Zoroaster. In Greek it means stargazer, not someone who gazes to look at the stars but one who gazes in a theoria, in a deep contemplation, to tune oneself to the various energies that now constellate through those stars, in this pattern, in this gestalt.
And that, in this particular planet, in this particular star system there is a plane of the ecliptic where all the planets and moons, asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, all take place within an extension that, going out into the immediate star field - one can see stars several thousand light years away, if they are large enough; if you look at Orion, Betelgeuse is 900 light years away - the constellations of stars now become a zodiac of twelve. Because this is, now, the basis upon which one has the initial understanding of how a divine energy can come through the various stars, be jumped in capacity because of the synergy of the constellations of stars. How are those stars constellated? They are constellated from not just the observer on this planet but from the conscious dimensioning in a theoria; through the lens of the spiritual person, it now has a historical energetic applicability. Now you have an astrology that's not occult, it's simply extremely sophisticated.
What comes out of that is the ability, then, to take that historical kaleidoscopic conscious dynamic and to precipitate out of it actualities, analytical actualities of the cosmos in reality. Those analytic actualities are now a transparency of the symbolic order that doesn't have a world content but just has the mathematic structure. And so, a pure mathematics is developed, for the first time on this planet, by Pythagoras about 500BC. The deepest mystery illuminated in this beautiful book from Cambridge University Press, 1948, J.E. Raven who was at Kings College Cambridge. Raven and his fellow professor Kirk did a textbook a long time ago, 60 - 70 years ago called The Presocratics, which was used for three or four generations around the world. Of anybody in the university who took any philosophy courses in English, Kirk and Raven's Pre-Socratics was the book, the text. This was a prelude to his participation in that, this is called Pythagoreans and Eleatics: an Account of the interaction between the two opposed schools during the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.
Elea was a city and the Eliatics were the deep philosophers of that city and the poignant philosopher of Elea was named Parmenides. So that, when one comes to trying to understand Pythagoras and Pythagoreans and then what would occur in the 500 year cycle all the way to Jesus, one has to understand that there is a gate of paradox through which one must be able to pass. The posts of that gate, which would be a gate that would stop you if you couldn't go through it, just like a gate in the ancient Egyptian Book of Caverns, the book of being rebirthed, one has to go through this twelve part journey under the earth, not just what is available during the day. But the Greek word for it was the Nekyia, the night journey, the night journey of the spirit, that is generally only taken after death but can be taken if one is in a wisdom transform that works as a death and a rebirth, all in a recognisable time period, quite short, actually.
The Pythagorean going through that gate was to not be stopped by the Parmenian Paradox, which was simply this, 'What is, is and what isn't, isn't.' To confuse the two at any point leads to an endless metaphysical one quandary and Madame Blavatsky coined a word in English, she called it meta-fizzling: there is no resolution to it. There are endless metaphysics that spend themselves out and because it's artificial and only occurs in a mentality - does not occur in the cosmos at all, does not occur in the pure theoretical visioning - the way through is that one and zero, being the ultimate what is and what isn't, are actually a tuneable binary that, going through and bringing both together as a tuned binary, allows you to describe, to characterise, to engender, through this kind of binary mathematic, any kind of simulation, any kind of appearance, any kind of applicability and so modern mathematical theory gains a foothold and numbers now become something really extraordinary. Raven writes:
We have now seen what the early Pythagoreans must have meant when they maintained that things are numbers [and 'are' is italisised]. The other doctrine of the embodiment or imitation of number, if here again we can rest for the moment content with Cornford [ that's F.M Cornford's later view, he did three great volumes on Plato's Dialogues], his later view that it was applied to immaterial concepts only, calls as yet for little enlargement.
The mentality that talks about immaterial concepts is a delusion: a conceptualisation is literally impractical and nonsensical unless there is an existential base to it. The immateriality is not an immateriality but a higher dimension. So that consciousness, now, in the ancient understanding is a quintessential, it's the fifth aspect, it is the magical aspect that when it comes into play it transforms. Whatever occurs existentially can become, not only something else, an alchemical change of form, but that there are stages, there are phases through which that will occur, which are universal and which are mathematical. And that the series of the transforms will, themselves, be able to be characterised by a set and that all of the sets of all of the transforms possible are capable of being appreciated and analysed on terms of a harmonic: that a harmonic analysis can be applied and that this is deeper than the application of a conceptual order, supposedly even applicable to immateriality. The immateriality is simply a colloquial way of saying it's beyond the four dimensions of space time.
But, look here, what's already there as a field before space time comes into play is the field of nature. Nature is already operative but does not register in the operation, doesn't index itself by time, doesn't index itself by space. So that the field of nature, the easiest way for us in the 21st century to understand it, is a Tao, it's a Tao field that is spontaneously fruitful in that emergence can occur but characteristically emergence occurs, it's called Tê, in its unity. That unity as it occurs, occurs unified. Even the preparatory, almost invisible, almost spontaneously covered through absorption and expression, the field of nature right at its transition to existentiality, and that would be the field where the Higgs boson occurs to be able then to be brought into play as the mass of particle unity as it occurs now and begins to index time and space.
And the particle that most beautifully does this for us is the photon: it indexes the electromagnetic spectrum with almost a minimum of mass, just the slightest trace, otherwise the trillions and trillions of photons per cubic anything would bludgeon existence into a pulp and there would be no organic life possible. So that the key to it is that transparency is necessary for reality to occur at all in an existential, in a symbolic, in a living way. What is able to penetrate through, as well, is the spirit because the spirit is a carrier, like the photon is a carrier of electromagnetic energy, is the carrier of a magneto electric energy, considerably more powerful. It used to be computed at about ten billion, the current computation is maybe 20 billion times the energy. The spirit, as a differential prismatic form, would be able to move through the material universe as if it were almost a pure vacuum. The spaces not only between atoms but between nucleuses and electrons would be so vast there would be nothing to interfere with it whatsoever.
The quality of Pythagoras was able to be imparted, able to be taught, to only a very few small groups of persons in the world originally, the communities were very, very small. The largest numbering communities were in Southern Italy, Crotona, Metapontum, around the area of Brundisium, they were never more than several hundreds of people at any one time. But the first community that was founded by Pythagoras was not founded in Italy, it was not founded in the Aegean Greece, the first community that he founded was in Egypt and was founded at the site of the ancient Taposiris. When Osiris is resurrected he is brought back through a journey that begins at Abydos, goes under the Giza plateau and surfaces to the west of Alexandria, about 30 miles at Taposiris Magna. And so Pythagoras put the original community there and the word for that community was that they were Therapeutes, that is that they were healers, they were curers, they were curers of the permanent ignorance of man so that he became real in the cosmos, really real.
It's there, at Taposiris Magna, about 520 BC, that the original Pythagorean community was founded, founded in such a way that it was able not only to occur but it was able to occur constantly through a historical evolvement. Its greatest transform came about 150 BC and the transformer who came there was the teacher of righteousness, the founded of the Qumran community transformed the therapeutae community about 150BC. The vehicle that was used for the transform were a series of writings that he did that very quickly changed the entire way in which the process of transform was undergone. One of the earliest books that he wrote about 200 BC was The Book of Job. The intermediate volume that he wrote was unknown until the Dead Sea Scrolls and it is called the Hodayot, The Thanksgiving Hymns, The Psalms from Qumran. This is an early edition of it from the Danes, printed in Denmark in 1960. The earliest translation in the Netherlands in Leiden, The Thanksgiving Hymns, the Hodayot being the Hebrew term for it, the Thanksgiving Hymns being the way in which English would be stylised.
His last work was the Book of Daniel and this is why we find the earliest impress of the Book of Daniel is in Alexandria. And in fact the oldest of the Christian churches which are now Muslim mosques which previously were Jewish synagogues are there in Alexandria and the whole street has been called, since ancient times, Nebi Daniel, the prophet Daniel. The synagogue was called Nebi Daniel, the Christian church was called Nebi Daniel, the Muslim mosque is called Nebi Daniel but there are two of them divided by Nebi Daniel. One of the main streets of classic Alexandria, streets is not the word, they were boulevards wide enough to have ten chariots each way, 20 chariots. There were two great boulevards that crossed: one boulevard was the sun moon gates that ran the whole length, enormous length of Alexandria, the other was the linking of the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mareotis. And that boulevard was called Nebi Daniel because right at the juncture on the South West corner of it was the tomb of Alexander the Great, called the Sema, where the body of Alexander was kept in a mummified glass case with the gold base, and kept on public display.
Behind it was a hill called the Paneum, named for the god Pan, that was pineapple shaped, that you could go up to the top through various layers like a Ziggurat and you could see the layout of the whole city of Alexandria was the layout of a cape, which an Alexander the Great period warrior would wear. And it was shaped just like that cape so that this was the cape of the eventual victory of a one mankind world that was able to see by the light of the invisible divinity coming through the sun and all its rays and all of our lives and lifetimes which are all vibratory resonances of this. The most poignant line that one can draw, through this Phoenix Cycle from Pythagoras to Jesus, is to follow the resonances of the collections of sacred hymns because the deepest of all the Pythagorean things that survive are The Golden Verses of Pythagoras. The gospel according to Thomas has the hymns of Jesus put in this particular version and, in between, one finds the Thanksgiving hymns from the founder of Qumran from about 160-170BC. As proof of it, the resonance right after, almost contemporaneous with the gospel of Thomas, are the Odes of Solomon. The Odes of Solomon, as we have looked at, are almost certainly by Mary Magdalene, so that one has a very interesting thing.
Scholarship has come to a very interesting thing, we'll take a break and come back to this, the Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Hymns, published in New York and London, published in 1988. The largest early section, in fact all of section two, is the Odes of Solomon. Section one has hymns that are selected out of especially St John, the Book of Revelation has about half of them, the prologue to the Gospel of John is there and then there's just a handful of other hymns that are brought out, which are clearly much later than Thomas or Mary Magdalene or even John. The earliest Christian hymnal is the way in which a constellation of spirit persons, like the stars, now make a constellation whose locations throughout an ecliptic of the world will make the zodiac of the possibilities of future transforms. That spread, that zodiac of those communities, spread from Ireland, the earliest one there is Newgrange, 3200BC; the farthest was in Indonesia, Borobudur. And so the great swath of the earth in ancient times was this plane of the spiritual ecliptic and all of the communities there were resonances that had a pivot which, when put into operation, became a spindle that generated a magnetic wave that activated everything in a harmonic. That central place was Alexandria. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to a very profound historical well. One of the difficulties is that in our time, because it is the end not only of a Cycle of the Phoenix that began with the Renaissance in Northern Italy and an end of a millennium that began with the Crusades, but an end of an aion, which is a double millennium, which is four Cycles of the Phoenix. But there is an even deeper quality here because it's the end of a great year. The great year being the nearly 26,000 years that it takes for this planet, around our star, to go through the entire plane of the ecliptic and return back to its previous entrance into it. One of the most profound ways to express this, in the time of Jesus, was by the great epic poet Ovid. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the changes, the changes of all the gods, all the goddesses, all the mythologies, all of the symbols, and at the close of the Metamorphoses, you find one of the greatest presentations in classical times of Pythagoras. So that if you turn to book 15 of 15 books, the beginning of Book 15 by Ovid is about Numa, King Numa, the wisest of the early Roman kings, about 700BC, Numa and the foundations of Crotona, in Southern Italy. So that when Pythagoras comes to Southern Italy, to Crotona, he was almost 60 years old, to found his Pythagorean community there, because it couldn't take hold in the Aegean Greek ethos at that time.
His quality was to bring men and women together in a community, a wisdom community, and this was unheard of at the time. All deep wisdom communities were masculine. If there were deep wisdom communities that were feminine they were completely outside of the consideration of almost all wisdom traditions. The first teachers of Pythagoras were his adopted brothers, his father Mnesarchus being a Phoenician from the city of Tyre, who owned trading fleets - which was why he met his wife on the Aegean island of Samos and they were married at Delphi - because he was used to travelling all over the ancient Mediterranean. The Phoenicians inherited the trade routes of Sargon the Great, the Fertile Crescent founder, who made that first tandem of the Fertile Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and that was accomplished by 20,000 BC. So, Pythagoras' father, around 600BC, inherits and enormous tradition of trading and the Phoenician sailors and traders went as far as Marseille in their trading sea colonies. Marseille because it's at the head waters of the Roman river that drains what is today France, end of the Mediterranean, and the Pillars of Hercules through which a few trading communities were set up, one in Cadiz, Spain and one in northern Spain because that's where one of the few sources of tin was in ancient times, ancient times being more than 4,000 years ago.
It wasn't until the Ptolemaic period in Alexandria that Hellenistic sailors were able to discover that a source of tin further in Spain, called Galicia where the Basque people are from, and a further peninsula in France, Brittany, also a source of tin, and a further source on the west of the British isle in what is today Somerset and Cornwall. Those became the permanent sources of tin. The trading combines that Pythagoras' father owned were passed on through centuries and generations of morphing and a very rich merchant of Tyre, some 500 years later, became the inheritor of the massive tin trade going from the west of Britain all the way to, by that time, it is Canaan, Canaanite and Palestinian and that figure was Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea is famous forever of being the one who made the tomb for Jesus, who wrapped the body of Jesus with his business associate Nicodemus and who, later on, was able to make sure that the body was not only out of Roman hands - Pontius Pilate was just the governor of the province, Roman province of Palestine and it was a legal thing - you had to have some, not only clout to do this, but you had to have family reason and the reason being that Joseph of Arimathea was married to the youngest daughter of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
His wife's name was Susanna and she was the youngest sister of four of Jesus. When they moved, after the resurrection, to the west of England, to Somerset, to the Seven Isles, they were like the Pleiades gestalt community; the largest of those hills is now called Glastonbury Tor. And over a millennia it was reshaped and reshaped until it became a heart labyrinth which means that you can only get to the centre of it if you traverse the entire space. You have to go through the entire maze in order to get to the centre. That heart labyrinth is also placed in the very centre of Chartres Cathedral in the floor, where the nave and the transept meet exactly there. That labyrinth has always been a transparent symbol that if you will traverse the entirety of the square of attention, that this is, by that time when you reach the centre, you, being at the centre, will be the pivot of the labyrinth. And that when you turn, contemplatively, within yourself, you will set in motion a spindle of spiritual energy; it's called putting the Dharmachakra into action.
The Chinese source of that is always Pon Ku who takes a Tai Chi at the Manipura chakra area and turns it. When he does it's the beginning of that spirit resonance out of which FuHsi and NuGua make the trigrams that make the I Ching that make Chinese civilisation. The quality in Ovid is that he sets up the four ages, the four Cycles of the Phoenix: that the first cycle is that of gold, the second that of silver, the third that of bronze and the fourth of iron. And that at the close of a cycle of iron there is total degradation and only a penetrating pivot of a spiritual teacher can turn the Dharmachakra under those conditions because everything has been co-opted, all authority, all power, all money, all fame. Everything has been co-opted. What cannot be co-opted is the pivot of the great invisible spirit who, without any effort whatsoever, turns a new age.
The origins of this understanding that surfaces here in Ovid in Jesus' time comes from the Gathas of Zarathustra about 2,000 BC. Dame Mary Boyce who died just in November of last year was the doyenne of Zoroastrian studies in the world for a couple of generations. Teaching aids for the study of Inner Asia, from Indiana University, Zoroastrianism: The rediscovery of missing chapters in man's religious history and she writes just a few sentences, to let you hear,
The Gathas themselves seem filled with a sense that the glorious restoration of the world would not be long delayed. Yet, in the end Zoroaster must have realised that he himself would not live to see that great climax and he appears to have taught that it would be finally brought about with the help of one who would come after him, the Saoshyos, or the Saviour.
And so, for the first time, about 4,000 years ago, that's two aions ago, you find this quality coming into play. At the end of the first Cycle of the Phoenix from Zarathustra is when you find the penetration of those singers who sing Gathas. In Sanskrit they're called Gitas, the Bhagavad Gita is a song of songs. Those Gathas become the Rigveda hymns 500 years later and you find that there are ten books of these hymns, collections, ten sets of these hymns, that's very much like a Pythagorean ten, a perfect ten. They are arranged in such a way that you have a number of poet seers who make a shape and the shape is not just that there is a centre point and then a pair of centre points and then three centre points and then four centre points, but that the shape of this ten is a triangle whose sides coming down to the base describe a particular ordering of dimensional reality. On one dimension that side is in squares, beginning with one, then you have a two, then you have a four, then you have an eight. The other side is a side of cubes, so that you have a one, then you have a three, then you have a nine, then you have 27.
The relationality of the squares to the cubes will always give you a unity in terms of the deepest resonance possible in a structure of existence. For instance, by the time of Herschel and several brilliant mathematicians in the 19th century, one found that the positions of the planets in the star system will always occupy unities, ones of the ratios between the squares and the cubes, the squares of their distance and the cubes of their orbital dynamic and that those ratios will always hold. And so profound was this that there were a couple of astronomer mathematicians who, in 1846, computed where there should be a planet and, by observing, Neptune was discovered, in a Pythagorean preemptiveness.
All of this is current again because the Kuiper belt demonstrates again an enormous Pythagorean quality that our star system exhibits almost as a matter of aesthetic beauty. There are four inner planets then there is an asteroid belt, there are four huge outer planets then a massive Kuiper belt. The asteroid belt only has one object that is round, Ceres. The Kuiper belt has almost all round objects and any fragments have been either spun out of the star system or have been absorbed by the larger planets. So that one has a very interesting kind of a star system: you have two sets of fours and you have a quintessential fifth set that is not a destroyed previous planet at all but is a constellation of the fact that you cannot have a planet there because the ratioing of the square and cubes of the various factors do not hold, they just simply don't hold.
Not only that but there are overtones to where the planets are and a second undertone to where the planets are so that there is a gravitational well just before Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus or Neptune and, likewise, a well behind where asteroids can collect. And so you have Jupiter in order, in its orbit order, preceded by a group of asteroids called The Trojans and followed by another group of asteroids and the same for all of the giant planets, that they have this kind of a quality. All f this comes from Pythagoras who is able to translate that into human community, as the Pythagorean community that then becomes the prism by which the higher dimensions become shareable between people and thus gain a tremendous amperage in capacity.
The key to it is for a person to undergo a period of weaning away from the old world where this is not credible and beginning to be able to hear the language of a new world calling and people going through that discipline in classical times took five years. They were called akousmatikoi: those in the yoga of learning to hear. And, as they heard, the proof of their hearing is that they would be able to hear more and more the sets of resonances, as sets, and at a certain point they would be able to hear that there is such a thing as a chord. A chord, which is like the plane of the ecliptic of all of the tones and overtones and undertones in a scalar in that set and that that chord and any other chord will have a high dharma level of concord, where all of the chords struck together will exfoliate a supercelestial form.
The greatest example of this in world literature is at the end of Dante's Divine Comedy, in the third book the Paradiso in which Dante's guide, Virgil, cannot take him to paradise, he can't go there, so his guide becomes Beatrice and Beatrice rides in a chariot whose wheels are many eyed, many winged cascades of angelic dynamics and she rides in this chariot. William Blake has a mystical engraving coloured of this which is colossally great. But Beatrice lets him off right at the end of the Paradiso so that he journeys himself a little bit further and he sees the great eagle of St John's spirit. He notices, just like Arjuna in the Baghavad Gita, not that it's the eye of the eagle but he looks through the transparency of the symbol of the eagle through the eye as the pivot as the transparent eagle. And so he sees what the eye of the spirit eagle sees and when he sees that he hears for the first time the choirs upon choirs upon choirs in heaven singing the infinite Gathas to God. He has well up in him this enormous million petalled rose whose fragrance then perfumes eternity.
These are qualities that are there and when the akousmatikoi are able to hear on this level they now are ready to transform to mathematikoi. What mathematikoi can do is that they not only hear but they can see. They see in the higher dimensions of actuality and the proof of this is that they are able to spontaneously sing a hymn of praise from themselves in such a way that that hymn could be communicated resonantly to the community who could then sing that hymn as a choir. Every seven days they would meet to have a common meal, a banquet together and at the beginning of that common meal would be somebody from the spiritual community who would sing their spontaneous hymn. Then the president of the community, not the leader but the prism of the community as the teacher, would surround resonantly that spontaneous hymn with a spontaneous teaching. Then the meal would be shared together, then they would go outside to greet the sunrise with a choral presentation of that hymn as a community choir. And the sun rising to that choir would recognise that the ecology of consciousness had made the cosmos real through the prism of that community. So the ancient saying was, 'It is the face of the community that beholds God.'
The quality of the Pythagorean world, in our time, was truncated enormously by the rise of a Roman Empire authoritative version of Christian doctrine. The last great life of Pythagoras was [?? 1.06.43], about 330 AD and by the time that you find the Renaissance bringing Pythagoras back, just about the time that there was a rise to where there would be an appreciation of celestial music, the banquets of Ficino at the Villa Careggi up in the hills surrounding Florence: the platonic academy sponsored by Cosimo de Medici and then sponsored by his grandson Lorenzo de Medici, where young artists, like Botticelli and Michelangelo would collect with people like Pico and Pacino and dozens of others. They would celebrate a banquet once a year on Plato's birthday in late November. Actually it's very interesting because Plato's birthday in the new platonic hermetic tradition is almost exactly the same time as the Taoist celebration of the other end of the solstice. So that in the Taoist tradition the winter flowers that bloom are the chrysanthemums, so where you would have peonies for spring you would have chrysanthemums in late November because here this is life here, this is the immortal life there. So the chrysanthemum was always the expression of a transcendental spring, Plato's birthday being at that time.
And at Ficino's banquets in Florence, once a year, they would have the spontaneous presentation from everyone there of what they had theorised, what they had envisioned, what they had occur in their quintessential five dimensional field of conscious time space, they would present that as an art form at that time. One of the most profound art forms that was ever presented, at that time, was Botticelli's great painting the Primavera, the original spiritual spring, followed the next year by the Birth of Venus. And those two great paintings are a fantastic presentation; one being the Pythagorean mystical way in which this occurs, the other being the kind of platonic birthing that goes back to the ancient near East. Venus was Aphrodite, who was Ishtar, who was Innana, going all the way back to the time of Sargon the Great, the time of Enheduanna.
To be beloved by the goddess was the beginning of a new level of civilisation, that she was able to present the cornucopia of the cycling of time, indexed first by the moon and then given a scalar that's on a higher order by the sun and then given a third scalar higher that is indexed by the stars. So that by those kinds of steps, the moon, the sun, the beginning interface of the planets out to the stars; the five planets beside the sun and the moon were always that modular that led to the third level of expansion. The teachers were always those who were not only wise but could teach wisdom to others so that they became wise. So that the original Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens if they were a teacher, so they came sapiens² but the teacher, who not only taught the wise but taught the wise how to be wise about teaching others, became a thrice greatest sapien, sapien³. In our time that third level of sapiens is star wisdom, and our species already has a number of Homo sapiens stallaris, alive and well, lovely. Wondering and wondering and bringing something new, bringing that star level back into being.
This volume, reprinted here in Los Angeles by the Philosophical Research Society, in 1970, and this is Stanley's Life of Pythagoras, and it's a photogenic facsimile of the 1687 edition. The reason for this is that the book came out exactly at the time that Newton's Principia Mathematica came out. Now, what's significant about this is not just that a book came out at a special time when another book came out at that same time, one has to be wise about this. This is a book published by the British Academy, Oxford University Press did the printing but it's the British Academy in London, The Birth of the Codex. There was a time when there were no books, there were only scrolls so that, for instance, if you want to look at the origins of the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, and you look at a classic Jewish edition of it, it's collected with the five scrolls, the five Megillot. There were no books, in fact in the regular world there were no books until the third century AD but right away, in the first third of the first century there are very rare codexes that occur.
One of the codexes that occurs right away is a little crib note that Cicero used to use in his complex legal cases and he would make notes for himself in the form of like a little hand held notebook, not quite yet a book but a little crib note thing. He learned this from a wise teacher named Posidonius. And Posidonius is one of the few classic Greek wisdom teachers in the Hellenistic period who journeyed as far as Ireland and he wrote a book on the ancient Celts before the kind of druidism that was observed by Julius Cesar, which was already a crimping of the ancient tradition. But when Posidonius was there, in the second century BC, it was fresh from the oak forests, it was fresh from the mistletoe mystery, it was fresh form the kind of landscape, spiritual scape that goes all the way back to Avebury, Stonehenge and Newgrange, at that time already 3,000 years old. Newgrange predates the great pyramids by 700 years.
The presentation of a book like Stanley's Pythagoras which was a section, the last section of History of Philosophy, came at a time when such material had been scrambled and forbidden for almost the whole of the 1600s. We have to remember that when Queen Elizabeth was reigning, she was extremely sharp about keeping Catholics out of England and keeping tabs on Protestants for those who would try to take her position. And her right hand killer was sir Francis Walsingham, an enormously talented man, totally dedicated to erasing any kind of competition. When King James came in from Scotland, he brought with him a very strange kind of fearfulness of witchcraft and so you have witchcraft trials for the first time becoming an endemic quality that exudes across the Atlantic to places like Salem, Massachusetts. And so you have this kind of suspiciousness like a McCarthyism of the age and ended in the English civil war and Cromwell and his cohorts simply wanted to destroy any kinds of places where the demonic could infiltrate and come in and so they destroyed the monasteries, they pulled down a great many of the structures.
And the prototype for this was Henry VIII who was the father of Queen Elizabeth. He's the one that destroyed Glastonbury because he didn't want his kingdom jeopardised. And the prototype of that goes back to Herod killing every male two years old and younger born in Jerusalem because he learned from the magi, the three magi, that the inheritor of his kingdom and of all kings was born there. The three magi, as we talked about, were from Iran, two of them from areas just south of Tehran and one from the desert region. Oddly enough, they brought gold frankincense and myrrh, which are portable wealth so you have Irani financiers making it possible for the holy family to go to Egypt so that they would be protected from Jews. Not Jews but Edominians [Edomites ?] because Herod was really from a semi-Jewish tradition which is why all the Herods, the entire family line, had a flaw like bad lightening burning through it. The last powerful Herod, Herod Agrippa is the one who followed the lead of his family and had James, the apostle James, beheaded in 44 AD in Jerusalem. It was an inheritor of his that had James the Just, the oldest brother of Jesus, killed in Jerusalem for the very same reason.
This kind of bad lightning streak is only able to work because the transform of the symbolic structures of integral order do not have intervals that participate in the higher dimensional harmonics of it so they appear as cracks in the order through which a seepage can occur of something regressive, it's like a leak in an atomic reactor will eventually cause the entire plant and ground to be radioactive. Wars, violence, insanity, aggressiveness, sociopath, all of it are all leaks of psychic energy that have no way to participate in intervalling. Without an interval, the overtones and the undertones scramble the tone so that what you get is a very peculiar occurrence; I believe that the Arabic word for madness is azeezazeez, which is the sound of insects buzzing.
This is a quality that occurs most poignantly where time forms have ended and have not yet begun. We live in an era, for the next couple of three, four or five years where, without an interval spacing by the spirit, there will be only the sound of madness, loose on every order and every level of the world. But fortunately that will not be the case, no matter what the species, no matter what the star system. Those who are here from other star systems will have to learn to appreciate the intervalling as well, the sets and the harmonic because this is the way in which the cosmos is real, not just from end to end but worlds without end. More next week.