History 4
Presented on: Saturday, July 28, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to History 04 and we're looking at a photograph of a classic Greek sculpture of Thucydides. Portraits of the classic Greeks were collected together in three big volumes by Gisela Richter, a very great classic scholar, American woman. We're taking a look at a 500-year period which is a cycle. It was given the name, in antiquity, of the Phoenix Cycle. It wasn't the only cycle but it was rule of thumb by which one could make the kind of long-term computations that were necessary to try to understand the structure of the mind that had changed from a tribal mentality, from a natural mentality, to something that increasingly was tyrannical, so that it sought to dominate nature and sought to dominate the tribal cultures, to the extent of first of all wiping them out and second of all of corrupting them so that they would not work naturally, and would be dependent upon power that doled out permission to them so that they could continue to live on a cultural level with the portioned out nature that the power of the empire allowed for them.
Up until the time of Thucydides, the stretch of empires had increased their capacity to dominate, so that the emphasis had shifted over about a 2,000 year period from an emphasis on the divine king, who was given the temporary powers to rule by the gods, so that it was a mythological designation of rule. In that 2000-year period, from about 2500 BC to about 500 BC, in that 2000-year period the shift went from a mythological divine king, increasingly to a powerful human king who engineered the service and the worship to the gods.' If the gods want our worship, they'd better cooperate with me.' And so you begin to get, about this time, a very curious quality and the first place that it shows up in power en masse is in classical Greece, which is why everyone keeps talking about it over and over again.
The most brash presentation of this conundrum, of this change, is in Aristophanes' comedy The Birds, where the power groups seeks not just to dominate men, but to understand that if they dominate the contact between men and the gods, because the sacrifices of men, the incense, the sacrifices, must go up through the air and the birds control the air, so if they control the birds ... they control the gods and men. And so the ridiculousness of that situation is one of the greatest comedies ever written, by Aristophanes. About the time that Thucydides is writing the Peloponnesian War. The saying in antiquity is that the secret or wisdom was put in a place where man would never look; in the centre of his own mind, but it could not be seen unless he had a clear mind, a transparent mind. Otherwise, what he would see is what men themselves had put in there, and only that. So that the mind became, in symbol, a labyrinth. And the labyrinth was constructed in an ingenious way in which all tyrannies are constructed. If you, as an individual, have the courage and have the technique and have the endurance to be able to go through that labyrinth and find the centre, you will not be able to get out from that labyrinth by yourself. In order to come out from that labyrinth, you will have to retrace the way in which you came in exactly. And the thread of the way in which you went in, which is the thread by which you can go out, was in Greek called a clue. And so as a masterful detective story that had an overwhelming clue, even if you could masterfully get into the centre, you had to be able to get out and in order to be able to follow the clue, you had to have somebody on the outside of the labyrinth holding the other end of that clue, holding that other thread, otherwise as you would try to get out you would pull on the thread and you would just pull it into yourself, lost at the centre of the labyrinth. And at the centre of the labyrinth was a create that ate man, the minotaur. It had a taste for human sacrifice which was insatiable. The perfect tyranny was to convince people that even if you have a special hero, one of you who is raised to the nth degree of capacity, even if he got into the centre he would not be able to get out of his own accord, he would have to have somebody willing to be patient, to hold the clue, the thread, outside of the labyrinth so he could follow it back out, and it would unravel by being pulled in. And to ensure that that would not happen, they psychologically granulated human beings so that they would never trust another human being deep enough, long enough to have a companion to hold that thread to come back out.
All of this came to a classic head with Thucydides, and he points out in the Peloponnesian War that this has become, by his time, such an ingrained pattern that it embosses, it indelibly impresses, it curves into the rut of human affairs, a patterning which is labyrinthine which cannot be avoided at all, and that there is no way for anyone to deal with whoever holds the powers of making that labyrinth. One of the great classics of the early 20th century about this is Franz Kafka. His novel The Castle. The rulers live in that castle and you can see it everywhere in the city where Kafka lived, Prague ,yes you can see the castle, you know that they're in there, but if you try to get to the castle it's fraught with all kinds of perils, but those perils are nothing compared to the perils that if you get into the castle, inside. And those perils, in turn, are dwarfed if you ever try to get out by trusting somebody else. So it's a perfect nightmare. Even if you had super-human capacity, you would have to have someone that you could trust to help you when your super-human capacity no longer availed you, and the built-in suspiciousness of granulated human beings would not permit this. So that by the time of Thucydides, not just was there a shift from the divine king to men in a theological way, but the political, architectural shift was tied into a permanent knot by building the Parthenon on top of the Acropolis in Athens so that it was the castle ostensibly of Athena, but the Parthenon was built in a special way that it had two compartments; it had the temple to Athena in the first compartment that was kind of a long hall, and behind the wall was the other compartment where all the money was kept, all of the gold. The route of the power of the political economy of the tyranny, you people can worship Athena because we back her by the money. And so the money always carries the mark of the control of not the divine king but the ruling oligarchy with their designated head. Not just backroom politics but backroom Parthenon politics.
Thucydides was exiled by that oligarchic structure for losing a battle to the great Spartan general Basilites [Bracidas?], where the deck was stacked against him, and so he spent the rest of his life in exile and in ridicule and in shame, writing The Peloponnesian War to show how this pattern happens and why it is the labyrinth that it is, and why given the nature of man now it will happen again and again and again until someone solves it, until someone solves not just the getting through the labyrinth to the centre of it, but solves the additional problem of how to get back outside of that labyrinth where the clue does not unravel as fast as you try to use it.
The origin of the Phoenix Cycle was not in Thucydides' time, but it was before him, about a generation before him, the death of the greatest philosopher of that whole era, Pythagoras. And Pythagoras died in 471BC aged 99. He lived almost 100 years. And he perfected a technique by which human beings, men and women, women with women, men with men, human beings could tune themselves so that they were able to relate to each other as ratios of a single whole, and that this ratioability, this rationality of man, could be extended to a whole community of special people so that the community would be a ratioing of everyone in that community to the whole of the community, so that the community would be a harmonic set of the resonances of everyone in it, who were not individuals but who were persons that had a wave resonance that could be collected together in a scalar grouping set capable of a harmonic extension and expansion, and eventually after about 200 years, through a series of lovers of wisdom, Pythagoreans called himself a philosopher, he was the first one, I love of wisdom because wisdom is like a feminine quality to the masculinity of the adventurousness of the human being, and these two aspects go together, so if one is a lover of wisdom it means that wisdom cares for you in such a special way that she blesses you with insight and with shareabiltiy and with trustabiltiy so that now it is possible not only for somebody to get to the centre of the labyrinth and come back out through the clue that will not unravel, but that a whole community can do this. The whole community, questing together, can do this, can get to the centre of the labyrinth together, and can follow the clue out together and in this way one can expand so that the hero is expanded to the community, and eventually, through refinement, the communities will extend to larger and larger communities and eventually mankind as a whole. The family of man as a whole, called the ecumene, will be able to, en masse, get to the centre of the labyrinth which was constructed to confuse them and get back out together, and that for ever that labyrinth will have no more hold on mankind. It would become an irrelevant, fossilised throwaway and man will enter a new age; an age where community is not based on power of political economy but is based upon the harmonic of shareable wisdom and community. This was such a threat to the powers that be in Thucydides' time that they found an exemplar of the teacher of this in Socrates and the state, the Tyranny of 30, forced him to commit suicide. But he left a student named Plato who could have been one of the power people, his family was as famous and powerful as any family in Athens, but he chose instead to pay attention that Socrates had had a teacher, a woman named Diotima, and she had had a teacher, Pythagoras, and that in order for him to follow Socrates through Diotima, he had to acquaint himself with Pythagoras, and so there are books like the Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself, E. G. McClain, published Stoneybrook, New York, published in 1978. In antiquity it was well understood that Plato was influenced by Pythagoras because the most powerful wisdom Pythagorean teacher of the time was named Archytas, he lived in Southern Italy, and he's the one that convinced Plato that he had to not only follow back to Pythagoras's origins in Egypt, but that he would then need to find a way to set up a more refined kind of a Pythagorean community. Plato's more refined community was setting up the Academy, the original Academy in Athens, in 387 BC. Plato's Academy lasted until about 540 AD, almost 1000 years, and it was closed subtly not by the powers that closed it down but because there were no more students. No one enrolled in the Academy anymore and so it literally withered from lack of care. And it's about that time that it used to be called, before it was distorted again, Western civilisation said of that period it was the 'dark ages'. Lasted 1000 years. It lasted a millennium. Where there were things that were happening but they had no traction whatsoever of dealing with labyrinths that had been reconstructed, or the possibility of rare individuals who could brave their way through and have a tuned, shareable friend who would hold the other end of the clue for them, so that they could come back out again. And there were very few who ever tried community size, and there was no thought whatsoever that mankind as a whole could do this.
All of that was cracked and changed by the beginning of the Renaissance in Florence, cracked in 1439 by young Cosmo di Medici, who decided to steal a convention from Venice, to hold it in Florence, and having all the different shards of Christianity brought together to try and find out what is it that it is really about, and not Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, all these odd, weird sects like Free Spirit Thinkers and [Begeens 20:46] and who knows what, and to try to find what was the real centre structure, the prism that made it real when it was new, when it was fresh, before it was co-opted by the Roman Empire. This was a huge undertaking and it was largely successful for a very, very long time. In our time, the Renaissance has become a laughable non-issue and the pride of power is that we can now make labyrinths that no one will be able to solve. We can manipulate your genes and your DNA, your RNA, your proteins. Do you think that you have a chance against our power? And we can nuke any competition. The difficulty is that there are plenty of star systems that have tyrannies just like this, who would love to take over and not just have a piece of the action. So it becomes a rather cosmic issue again.
The interesting thing is that at the end of the 500 year period from Thucydides is Tacitus, and we're taking Tacitus' Annuls of Imperial Rome because while the Athenian tyranny thought that they were big stuff, the Roman Empire swallowed them as if they were just a pill, and by Tacitus' time, the Roman Empire was stretching itself from the incursions in the British Isles all the way to expeditions that were going into what is today Iran, going down into Central Africa and sending out feelers all the way to India, Ceylon and even what is today Indonesia. There were pre-emptive Roman excursion fortresses as far away as that and also following the contacts through the Silk Road back so that there were contacts between Rome and the Chinese Romans, the Han Dynasty. They were looking to embrace the world. All roads lead to Rome.
All roads are a part of our labyrinth. And where they lead to is a zero milestone put in the Roman forum that said, 'From here all the distances in the civilised earth are measured' from here. We control that labyrinth. Whatever roads you go by to do your business in your lives, in whatever military power you think you have, it leads to us and we will always be here because Rome is the eternal city now. We're impressing it in such a way that it will never be able to be effaced and as soon as the Roman Empire had that, as Tacitus shows, they ran up against a mystery. Something else had impressed the spirit of man stronger than what the Roman Empire could impress it, and it was always in Tacitus' time, right on the edge of Roman Empire. One of the edges was in India, one of the edges was in Ethiopia, one of the edges was in Central Asia, in southern Siberia, and the other edge was in the western part of the island of Britain, and the north of the island of Britain, and the island of Ireland, in a section between the west of Britain that included Somerset and Cornwall, the section containing Wales.
There seemed to be what was called in Greek, and used in the Roman Empire even in Latin in the Greek phrase, and we still use it, the genius loci, the genius of the place. There's a spirit of a place that once a human being has achieved a special prismatic power of presence, or shared that with another, or expanded that to a community, their spirit would impress the land of that place, and it would become special ever after. It would not be asymilable into any other structure: economic, political, tyrannical. And that there were such places, becoming more and more rare in Tacitus's time, and the defence of those places was ensured those who participated in it that eventually in terms of if not of this year, of this century, but in terms of the cycles of return, eventually the cycles of return would come back and the opportunity would be there again and the refined remembering of the community of human beings at that time would be able to then have a victory.
500 years after the competitor to the Roman Empire, Jesus, who lived exactly at the time when the Roman Empire was made, he passed away in 36 AD and came back three years later in 36 AD. What is peculiar is that in 37 AD all four of his sisters and their husbands and Lazarus and his sister Martha, and a good friend of the leader of that expedition named Nicodemus, and the young daughter of the leader of that expedition and his wife, who was the youngest of Jesus' sisters, named Susanna, their daughter's name was Anna, and they went to the west of England and there were twelve of them, and they received what was equivalent to land grants at the time, they were hides and they received twelve hides, one for each of them. And these twelve hides were tax exempt and no longer capable of being ruled by any kings or any powers, and these twelve hides guaranteed them enough land that was very fruitful for growing all kinds of fruits and vegetables, but what really grew most profusely there were apples, apple trees. And so because of the ancient British word for apple, the central area among a number of hills, the most conspicuous hill was called The Isle of Apples, and its name in English today is Avalon, the Isle of Avalon. Because in the spring the low lands would flood and it would leave the hills like islands amid these flooded fields, and when the flooded fields would subside in the summer, they were extremely fertile, almost like the Nile river valley, and it was interesting because the community was shaped like an Egyptian model from very, very ancient times, and the shape was to have a central structure where everyone belonged together, a community hall, where the food would be served together, a banquet hall, and the individual places where they lived would surround this central hall. So you'd have a circle of places and that to ensure that they kept their tuning in each of their places was a small, cylindrical point-domed, blunt little domicile, little area, that was called in Greek a monasterium. The King James Bible, in order to not give any hints out because they were trying to conserve the power at the time, the translated it as closet. So why would anybody just go into a closet to meditate? But the shape was a special shape, it was a special shape that came from 2000 BC and it was the shape of a royal tomb. They were called beehive tombs, and archaeologically we recovered, at the beginning of the 20th Century, one of the largest of all the beehive structures, which was there in ancient Mycenaean Greece, about 1600-1700 BC. That architecture, it's like a yurt, that architecture has come down constantly, repeating itself again and again. And especially in the West of England and the little islands off it and in Ireland, and you can find in remote places where men and women would take themselves to do their contemplation, to do their prayer, to do their meditation, to tune themselves together, they would have these rock-built beehive structures that were no longer tombs of death but they were monasteria of transformation. The transform was like a very special kind of communal yoga, where they would tune themselves all together to each other and in this way they would be able to test it out, because once a week, once every seven days when they would come together for their communal meal, for their community banquet, the banquet would end with a choir of them singing together, and if their voices harmonised together, and what would they sing to be a choir, to prove and proof out the harmony? They would sing a hymn that somebody had made spontaneously during the previous six days and would sing the hymn themselves at the beginning of the meal, then they would have the meal, they would get themselves tuned up by a presentation of the head of the community, temporarily, to just make sure like a conductor of an orchestra they were ready, and then they would, as a community, sing that hymn together, and this was a way every week of testing and proving that their community was real. That their individual insight achievements were shareable and that it was transmissible not only to the community, but that the land naturally accepted it and bore the impress of it so that ever after that land would have the shape of that bell of the community and if someone came along able to ring that bell, the land itself would recreate exactly the harmonic structure. We live in a time where this is going to be done, in the next couple of years, big time, planet wide, star-system wide time. One of the qualities that Tacitus is in position of is that he was married to a beautiful woman who was the daughter of the third great governor of the province of Britain. His name was Agricola and Tacitus wrote a book called The Agricola. It's always presented either by itself or in tandem with another short book by him called The Germania because the province of Germany was related intimately with the province of Britain; the reason being the province of Germany was the pet project of Augustus Caesar to really take over everything in Germany from the Rhine to the Elbe, and he force-fed the situation such that the people unbeknownst to the power structures in Rome, they made a coalition among the German tribes that simply overwhelmed seemingly invincible power. Roman legions were an invincible power. They were the most professional killers, trained, equipped, legions were passed down from generation to generation , and three Roman legions were massacred, they were killed in a series of very close battles, and it shocked the Roman Empire that this could happen. How can the Roman Empire marines, on this scale, be beaten? Obviously one has to go through and dice up the population so that there are no coalitions of tribes possible. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to amass the hundreds of thousands of men that it took to do this. Catastrophic. The province of England was for the Roman emperor who followed the son of Augustus, Tiberius Caesar, Gaius Caligula, Caligula Gaius Caesar, but he was massacred by his own people, murdered, because he literally was going insane too quickly. After about less than four years. So the follow-up emperor, Claudius, was the one who took over making sure that the mistakes in Germany were not made in England and that they were progressively conquer tribe by tribe in the British Isles and replace them with colonists, especially from places like Germany, the Saxons, and bring them in and the Angles also from that area, so that they would begin to replace people who had already been Roman Empire-orised, so that the colonists would outstrip the numbers and populations of the native Britains, until finally Claudius and his number one general in this, named Vespasian, the future emperor of Rome, the future founder of the new dynasty the Flavians, Claudius fighting in the north and Vespasian fighting in the south and west, came up against an implacable force that would not allow them to complete their conquest, so that Agricola was finally sent by Vespasian to, at the end of his career, to try to find some way to go through the barriers that were there. They were not able to in the north and so the emperor Hadrian, about 78 years later, built a huge wall, Hadrian's Wall, so that the north, which became Scotland, would be exiled. 'You guys don't get to enjoy our power.' And in the west they found a way to finally make a special kind of a peace that they would not disturb the lands that had this special power and they left those in control of a special little lineage of people that eventually they worked in as a client kingdom.
Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back and let's jump into the centre of significance in our own time of what we're talking about. One of the world's greatest architects was Le Corbusier, his atelier was in Paris and he built buildings all over the world, and was perhaps the only planetary competition to Frank Lloyd-Wright. He had an idea called the radiant city that came out in the 1920s and eventually a great deal of it was built in Marseille in southern France, metropolis on the Mediterranean where the Rhone river runs into the Mediterranean. The key here is the sun, space and the earth. The heavens and the earth, mediated by space, but in the earth in the radiant city, in the little publication that the City of Marseille put out at one time, there's the sun, there's space and then where you would have verdure, the vegetation, the earth, instead there are a split of two aspects to the earth: one is the circulations, traffic, roads, people; and the other is the modular, le modular. And the modular was based on a golden mean on a harmonic of the human form with the hand raised, and the proportions of the human form with the hand raised is a golden mean of all measurements in terms of the harmonic on earth that man is not only a microcosm but is in fact a very important confirmation that his own proportions, his own ratios, when expanded out, will give us a correct proportioning ratio of how to build on the earth in terms of the above and in a resonance that carries through the space between. And of the human form, the hand especially is an archetypal modular of the proportions.
What is interesting is that Marseille is the place alluded to again and again for the last 2000 years of where refugees after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, refugees from Jerusalem fled across the Mediterranean Sea to try to get outside of the power of the Roman Empire and outside of the power also of a cooperative tyrannical element in Judaism, to go beyond the reaches of this kind of labyrinthine complication that had become almost intolerable. The dispersal of the Apostles was such that it fit in with the dispersal of the personal family of Jesus himself. His father Joseph had died some years before, but left four sons and four daughters in addition to Jesus and his mother, who at the time of the crucifixion/resurrection was in her early 60s. She was about 63. So she had to be cared for. The average life of people in those days was between 60 and 65. If you lived over 65 you lived to be old. If you lived into your 70s you were very, very old and it was rare; as rare to find somebody over 80 as you would be to find somebody over 100 in our time.
In Marseille the refugee group that was travelling followed an ancient trade route because it was known very well to the leader of that group. His name was Joseph of Arimathea, and Joseph of Arimathea was the head of a shipping company, a trading company, that specialised in mines and mining and metals. They specialised in lead, which went to make pewter; they specialised in tin, which went to make bronze, and eventually brass. The tin mines were in the West of England in the coastal areas of Cornwall and Somerset. In Somerset there's a little range of hills called the Mendip hills and from there, extending down several dozens of miles, one would find the tin and lead mining areas of England. And these metals were taken by ship all the way along the Cornwall coast, down across the widest beginnings of what is the English Channel, to an estuary where Nantes, France is today, on the Loire River where it runs into the Atlantic Ocean. They would go on the Loire all the way along as it curved and went south in the centre of France, and at a very special point it came within a mile or two of a tributary stream that rose in that area from a mountain; the mountain's name is Mount Pilate. Mont Pilat in France, en Français, Mount Pilate as in Pontius Pilate. That stream fed not into the Loire but fed into the Rhone River through an area, a narrow valley area that had a great deal of working with metals, smelting and so forth, but also was a passage, because that little stream, that little river, that little tributary, flowed into the Rhone which is a huge river. South of Lyon, which was called Lugdunum in those days in the Roman maps is today Lyon, France. Down the Rhone would go all the way to where Marseille is today and along the French coast in between the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, along the southern Italian coast, all the way along the Greek coast, along the Anatolian, Turkey coast, all the way to the big trade cities of Tyre and of Sidon and of Antioch. And Escalon. And these cities were the places where the tin trade from Britain was controlled by the family headed by Joseph of Arimathea and his business partner was a man named Nicodemus, and they were extremely powerful and potent. They were also very discreet. They kept their contacts and were not pushed out of shape too much by the powers of the various communities: Jewish, Roman, Hellenistic or anything else, because they were very effective merchants with rare materials that were needed and necessary. Joseph of Arimathea married the youngest sister of Jesus: her name was Susanna. Later on, some 1500 years later when Shakespeare, who was quite conscious, learned more or less the story and understood it, his youngest daughter was named Susanna, and his first twins Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet of course died as a boy, and Judith survived by Susanna became married and she's the one that inherited Shakespeare's estates because she was a very special child to him, and she was very much a resonance of that Susanna some 1500 years before.
Joseph of Arimathea and Susanna had a daughter named Anna, because the next sister to Susanna was name Joanna, and the reason for this is that their mother, Mary, her mother's name was Hanna or Anna, and so they passed on names. One of the sons was named Joseph because his father was Joseph; one of the daughters was named Mary because the mother was Mary. So that names were passed on and kept in the family. Anna who went with this group, making 12, who received the 12 hides from the Isle of Avalon, from where Glastonbury was founded in 37 AD, Anna went on to marry a king. His name was Belemoir, and Belemoir is extremely famous in esoteric history because he was not from that area, he was from the north of Britain, not England, this is Britain; actually from what is today the edge of southern Scotland. Belemoir also is known in various histories by the name of Belegragus. His name actually means The Shining One, and The Shining One is extremely accurate for this. He and Anna had a daughter whose name was, in Welsh it would be pronounced Penryn, and it's good to remember Penryn because her name in Cornish is Penardunn, so that in Somerset and in Cornwall she would be known as Penarddun, in Wales, which was the intermediate land between the west of Britain and the north of Britain, one would go through the territory of Wales, and so the outside of the power of the Roman Empire for quite some long time was the west of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and they were outside of the reach of Roman power, they were outside of the reach of complications with anything to do with Judaism, with the kind of Judaism that came into play increasingly with a freezing of the tradition in one of the coastal cities along the Mediterranean named Jumnia, which in 90 AD had a council and rabbinic Judaism was born, the Masoretic text of the Bible was settled up and has not changed one iota since 90 AD (90 CE, Common Era, it's exactly the same.) You may not change the text, you may not change the structure of Judaism, you can argue and negotiate and comment on it, but that's all that they are: arguments, negotiations and comments. The basic structure is frozen. It does not change.
What actually occurred in this is that Penarddun, the granddaughter of Joseph of Arimathea and the youngest sister of Jesus, married a king, because her father, King Belemoir, she married a king from southern Scotland and his name was King Leir. One of Shakespeare's greatest plays, maybe the greatest, is called King Lear, written towards the end of his life at the height of his powers and one of the most devastating works of art that the human race has ever produced. It's on a par with Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. It's one of the greatest achievements of all time anywhere.
King Leir and Penarddun had two sons, one of them was named Brand and he's always remembered as Brand the Blessed, because he went in search of the happy isles of the western paradise, where time does not exist and human beings are resurrected into eternity and do not die. The other son was named Manannan MacLir, L-I-R instead of L-E-I-R. The ancient Scottish tradition is that the I-R ending, L-E-I-R, like my name, Weir, W-E-I-R, the I-R ending is significant of ancient heritage. When the E-A-R comes into play it means that it's been somewhat Romanised and interfered with by English or Roman influence, but the ancient Scottish, Irish, Welsh, British form is the I-R ending because it comes from a time that predates all of the mixturing of language that took place after about 12000 BC. You will find the IR ending in places like ancient Iran and in India as well.
The place where the Loire River almost meets the tributary of the Rhone is today called Firminy and one of the most famous un-built buildings in the world was La Corbusier's last great church, last great architectural commission, the Firminy Church. And it's built on the site where not only the ancient tin trade went, but the holy family going to its far western retreat to make a permanent impress n the landscape which would resonate out to the world from there. And Firminy Church was designed first by La Corbusier when he was an old man. He drowned at age 78 in 1965. When he was 73 he began to sketch Firminy Church and he sketched Firminy Church in this very peculiar cone, geometrically truncated cone, because the cone shape had come to play an extremely important part in one of the great commissions of the Corbusier, and that was he built a city, an entire city, designed an entire city in the 1950s in India, in the Punjab, named Chandigarh and the great monograph on Chandigarh is published by the University of California Press a number of years ago, and Chandigarh was to be the capital of the Punjab, but also an exemplary of how the modular is expanded to an entire enormous modern city. Chandigarh was laid out so that it's still functioning in the 21st century with beautiful ratios of traffic because Le Corbusier planned it to be a very huge place. The radiant city of 1922 was already scheduled to be a city for 3 million people. In the early 1920s there were no cities of 3 million people but Le Corbusier realised that we're going to have huge cities in the future very quickly. So Chandigarh is laid out in such a way that there is a huge lake, man-made lake, and the government buildings that hold the exercise of power and control, not only for Chandigarh but for the whole Punjab, for as an exemplar the whole of India, one of the buildings is called the Secretariat, which is based upon a style of apartment house modification called by Le Corbusier a unite d'habitation, a place where everyone lives harmonically together. And so the Secretariat was in the modified form for everyone who works together there. We work together to benefit the people. The original unity habitation was in Marseilles in France and then they were built all over the world. In Berlin, in Algiers, in Brazil, especially in India. But next to the Secretariat, which was a habitat of unity, is the Assembly building, where everyone who governs meets together to carry the community of being together into the unity of application together, and that's called the Assembly Building, and that Assembly Building has this structure right at the top and in the centre of it. So he took the crown of the Assembly Building of Chandigarh and he put it into the landscape of Firminy, France, right at the point where the holy family left the Rhone and its tributary and first entered the Loire, so that they were able, through that short portage, to go all the way from Tyre on the edge of Palestine to Glastonbury on the edge of the west of England, with only one portage. All of this was done in such a way that it comes out in our own time, because Firminy Church was supposed to be financed by the Archdiocese of Lyon, France, because Lyon was where the three Gauls met. Remember Julius Caesar, 'All Gaul is divided into three parts'. And the three different sections of Gaul met every year in an assembly council at Lyon, which is on the Rhone river. Sort of about a third of the way up from the Mediterranean in France, right in the centre of it.
Lyon was the place in which Herod Antipas, who was one of the most powerful rulers at the time of Jesus, got into trouble after the crucifixion/resurrection, got into trouble with the Roman Empire. It's his wife, Herodias, who asked for the head of John the Baptist. It's their daughter, Salome, who did the Dance of the Seven Vales to entice a promise out of her stepfather, Herod Antipas, to be able to get the head of John the Baptist. And a couple of years later when he ran into problems, the Romans said, 'You have done good work for us, so you will not have to commit suicide, but you're going to be exiled, you're going to be banished to the edge of an unfamiliar part of the Roman Empire; you're going to be banished to Lyon in Gaul.' And so he was deposited there with Herodias, not with the head of John the Baptist in toe, and they were exiled there for the rest of their lives.
His nephew, Herod Agrippa, who was a playboy ne'er-do-well, raised in Rome, raised by the daughter of Mark Anthony, her name was Antonia, one of the most beautiful, honest women of all time, and her big villa, big house, she raised many people, many sons, some of them became Roman Emperors, and one of them became Herod Agrippa, who after many vicissitudes he was helped out of trouble when he owed 3 million cysterici for parties and bribes that he couldn't handle, and in order to get money he went to Alexandria, to the richest Jew in the world. His name was Alexander Llysimachus, he was the brother of Philo of Alexandria. He was the richest Jewish merchant in the world because their grandfather had saved Julius Caesar's bacon. During the Alexandrian war he came close to being killed and to being defeated and it was that Jewish family that saved him, physically, financed and helped him and helped Julius Caesar become what he became. After the Alexandrian war he became not only the Roman dictator for life, the prototype of the Roman Emperor, he became the Postfix Maximus, the head of religion. So he became the Emperor and the head of religion and wedded these together so that he was then called Divine Julius, and he was murdered by his friends because he'd become a man-god. Not just a god-like man, and not just a god-designated man, but he became a man who assumed for himself god's stature.
That family was so important that they began to finance big construction outfits. When Herod the Great, the King Herod of the Bible, wanted to build a new seaport called Caesarea, named for the Caesars, it was financed by the Alexander family out of Alexandria. It's like Becto building Dubai. And their family financed the whole thing. They were that wealthy. How did they become that wealthy? Because they controlled all of the trade routes from Egypt all the way to India, and all the Jewish colonies in Southern India were colonies very much like the colonies in the west of Britain. Whereas the west of Britain were metals, in southern India they were spices: Pepper, cinnamon, things like that, that were collected from all over Indonesia and Ceylon, Indochina and India itself, and they were shipped from what is today Kerala state in southern India, all the way through vicissitudes, all the way along the coast of what is today Pakistan and Iran. All along the coast of southern Arabia, up the Red Sea to various ports along the Red Sea, and up at the top of the Red Sea, and so Philo's family controlled the shipping routes from India to Alexandria and Joseph of Arimathea controlled the shipping routes from Britain to Palestine, and those two families together controlled shipping for the largest swathe in the world until the British Empire.
They were wealthy beyond belief. Philo never married, but his brother had two sons. They were the nephews of Philo. And one of them was named Marcus Julius Alexander, and the other was named Titus Tiberius Alexander. Marcus Julius Alexander married one of the daughters of Herod Agrippa, so that that family became united. He died early because of unknown cause, probably an accident, and she married twice again, but the younger son, Titus, became masterful as a Roman general and masterful as a Roman governor. He eventually became the governor of all of Egypt. He became the governor for a while of all of Palestine, but he was the number one general under Vespasian's youngest son, Titus, who destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. So it was a Jewish general ... ostensibly, who destroyed the temple in Jerusalem: Philo's nephew. The complications get more and more entwined because it's Herod Agrippa who eight years after the crucifixion/resurrection, he's the one who killed the apostle James, the brother of John. Had him beheaded in 44 AD. He died within months of that himself. And it was because of the beheading of the apostle James that another James became the first Bishop of Jerusalem and he was the next oldest brother to Jesus, his name was James the Just. And so you went from the apostle James to the oldest of the brothers of Jesus, who was not an apostle. He became a bishop. Because the four brothers of Jesus did not believe in him while he was still alive. They came to after the resurrection. And so they were always in a special kind of arms-length regard. But the four sisters of Jesus believed in him all the time after he came back from Alexandria to do his last public mission of three years. His four sisters joined with the mother and joined with Mary Magdalene and her sister, Martha, and those seven women, like the Pleiades, were always the sustainers of Jesus and the Apostles and whoever they were in contact with, supplying places, supplying food, supplying lodging. His sister Mary owned the house in Jerusalem where the last supper took place on the second floor. Her husband's name was Clovis. Joanna, another sister, was married to a very powerful man named Chuza, who was the seneschal for Herod Antipas who ruled the provinces of Galilee and of Prerea, across the Jordan River, and the oldest sister, Salome, married Zebedee, who was quite a wealthy, not just a fisherman but he owned a whole fishing fleet. Salome and Zebedee's two sons were James and John, the Apostles, and Mary had some children, one of which was named John Mark, who became Saint Mark. And because of the peculiarity that the mothers were going to have to go, after the resurrection, right at the crucifixion it was decided that the youngest of the apostles, John, who was about 12 years old, was assigned a new mother, because Salome and her husband Zebedee were going to go with the group and go to the west of England, Britain. John was assigned to Mary Magdalene to finish his raising, because at 12 a young Jewish boy must study especially to make sure he can go through his Bar Mitzvah. He studied with Mary Magdalene who not only took care of him but took care of Jesus' mother Mary, but they moved to Ephesus on the Aegean Sea, on the Anatolian coast, and she lived for about 20-21 years longer. The mother Mary lived there as well but she only lived a few years and she lived in the house that Mary Magdalene built and owned, and two of the younger brothers of Jesus went with them to help, Simon and Joseph. And also with them went the apostle Philip and the apostle sometimes named Bartholomew but his real name was Nathanial. Philip went because Philip was the one who was married at Canna, and so the wedding feast at Canna in the Gospel of John is the marriage of Philip to his wife who is unnamed, but they had four daughters who were all psychics, they were all prophetesses. And none of them married. They were in fact very famous in antiquity as being like special Sibyls and they were buried with their father in a small city not far from Ephesus. The big sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene was put in a cave that's famous around the world as The Cave of the Seven Sleepers, and I have a photograph of the sarcophagus, massive with a curved roof-like structure on the top and swirls of geometric wave-like forms on it and one can find that one of Corbusier's church, the church at Ronchamp, has a swooped roof, they used to say it's like from the nun's hat but it's very much like the lid of Mary Magdalene's coffin from the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. The curve of the Assembly Building in Chandigarh has the same kind of massive curve. These are not always conscious, planned resonances, they are the deep stain permanently of the way in which physical reality takes the psychic impress when something is really high dharma. Our plant is impressed with a high dharma of a Buddha, of a Jesus, and there's no alien power, there's no tyrannical power, that can do anything about the reality of that resonant harmony. And we are now sending out that harmony through our whole star system. By 2015 it will have reached out to the Kuiper Belt and all of the bodies of the star system will be held in the same extension of that harmonic and that resonance, permanently.
Le Corbusier's Firminy Church was completed at this time last year, after 40 years. Here's the Herald Tribune Culture internet article and I'll leave it here so that you can get the internet. It was completed after 40 years because the Archdiocese of Lyon reneged and understood what was being built in a more esoteric way and were told 'Do not fund this' and so it was built about a third of the way and left fallow for about 30 years. A little truncated thing. And someone noticed that the truncation of the Firminy Church that was left had the same floor plan as the Telesterion at Eleusis. The mystery, the Eleusinian Mysteries were performed in the Telesterion, and so in our time, finished on July 23rd 2006, the Eleusinian Mysteries were matured to the Firminy Church and the whole crown of impress achievement of a new quality of humanity is in place exactly at the pivot where the holy family knew that they were getting free for a couple of generations because Glastonbury, 500 years, a cycle of Phoenix after Jesus, after Jesus' burial and then resurrection, exactly 500 years later, 504 years later, King Arthur died and was buried at Glastonbury with Guinevere. Right at the entrance to the circle of the ancient huts that had now been transformed into a large wooden church that had this kind of rota, this wheel, this rotunda, of meditation, and right where the community banquet hall was is where the alter was, and King Arthur an Guinevere were buried right so that you would walk over their graves to enter into that sacred enclave. So there's a Cycle of the Phoenix from Jesus to King Arthur, the Once and Future King will return. The millennium is from Pythagoras to King Arthur.
There's much more and we'll get into it next week.