Roman Alexandria: From Augustus to Hypatia

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Roman Alexandria: From Augustus to Hypatia
Presentation 1 of 1

Roman Alexandria: From Augustus to Hypatia
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, March 12, 1983

Transcript:

I've spent the last month collecting the materials for the lecture. Calling them from various libraries and discover that it's impossible to deliver to you even a summary of the material. So, we'll have to do a series on Alexander the first thousand years. Probably around the first of next year. And in fact, Mr. Hall is working on the adepts of Alexandria for the adept series so that maybe we can have that series coincide with the publication and issue of a further volume in his series.

Alexandria is a problem for us exactly to the extent that we do not realize that we are moving in an Alexandrian dream. And that we cannot wake up from that dream until we realize that we have in fact been dreaming. So that the anxiety of our age stems almost directly from the fact that on the deepest subconscious levels, we still exist as figments of the imagination of the desert fathers contemplating the mystical hierarchies in the Egyptian deserts. Having fled Alexandria after the great fall.

And so, it behooves us in the most practical sense, for self-attainment and self-fulfillment to go back to the beginnings. Go back to the very origins of our mystical subconsciousness. And review patiently and diligently so that we can put into order what has been handed to us in a frayed mass of wrangled nerves. Which is undigestible in its present form. And as Carl Jung once observed, if a man in this time discovered the truth about himself he would consider himself crazy and immediately commit himself.

So that we will have to mature from this illusion and see that in fact, what we do continuously discover within ourselves is exactly right. And I think no better beginning for the traditions can be given and will open and close with the images of communities of the pure in the middle of the deserts, the Egyptian, the [inaudible] desert, attempting to organize their lives through reduction down to essentials. So that following the advice of Plotinus, once we have cut away everything only God will be left. And of course, the discipline required, the basic requirement of asceticism, is to do it so that one does not have an overweening sense of pride in one's accomplishment at having done it. This is the final snag, a vanity fair of the soul's journey. So that at the very beginning, there must be some sense of wisdom or gnosis about the journey of the soul, which includes for us the notion that it is not we who are performing this great task, but some aspect of ourselves which does not really belong here in the phenomenal realm of achievement. And therefore, to think nothing of it, moving universes as we do, but to proceed with all humility towards it.

The earliest formulation of this wisdom, and it was ascribed because of traditional learning to Solomon, appears about 50 B.C. in Alexandria. In a book which is sometimes called The Wisdom of Solomon or sometimes called The Book of Wisdom. This book, of course, is left out of our version of The Old Testament. In fact, all of the books which pertain to the transition from the ancient Old Testament revelation to The New Testament covenant are cut out, snipped out, by various councils. So that we have inherited not only a truncated version of our tradition, but the very heart and core of the basic transformation was left out.

The Wisdom of Solomon, coming about 50 B.C. in Alexandria, presents in the elegant, free flowing Jewish Alexandrian style of rhetoric,
Love righteousness ye that be judges of the Earth, think of the Lord with a good heart. And in simplicity of heart seek him, for he will be found of them that tempt him not, and showeth himself unto such as, do not disturb him. For forward thoughts separate from God.
That is to say, pride is that abyss that keeps us separate from God. Forward thoughts.

But love can bridge this and therefore seek with an open heart. Wisdom is said here to be a shy feminine. The anima is a shy woman who will not abide with a malicious soul. Therefore, all we need do is discover our capacity to entertain and be a receptacle for this graciousness, which she will bring of her own accord, because her nature is not made up by us, but is of herself. And so, the sacred Sophia, having a character commensurate with her own eternity, will abide with this in a companionable way, in an easy, affable way, without stress, without tension or strain. We need not get on tiptoes to reach the sky. The sky, in fact flows freely to us sitting, lying, walking in the daily life.

So that The Wisdom of Solomon, written about 50 B.C. sets the stage for a tremendous development in Alexandria. Now the city of Alexandria itself, about the time that we're talking about the beginning of the Roman aegis had a list of about 300,000 free individuals. Men. So that if you compute the numbers of children and women and slaves and traveling foreigners we're talking of a city somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million people. It was at this time second only to Rome in the world. And it was first in the world in terms of its capacities to integrate human experience.

The reason for this was that Alexandria had, through its Ptolemaic career of some 300 years, achieved a four-part form, a quaternary quadripartite form. So that it was like an image of the cosmic self in its own structure. In the first quarter was the Jewish section. Very, very large. The number of Jewish Alexandrian citizens at the time of Augustus was somewhere between 120 and 150,000, which is a very large community indeed. And this community had dated back three centuries at the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus Ptolemaic ruler the son of the founder Ptolemaic Soter. Many scholars, in fact, 72 scholars, had been sent by the high priest from Jerusalem to Alexandria to make a translation of The Old Testament. And this version, which is in Greek, is called The Septuagint. The translation of the 70 but in fact, there were 72. This is because you have a structure in 72 which is numerically exact in many mystical ways.

Alexandria, with its Jewish quarter, was the most learned center for Old Testament studies. Eclipsing even Jerusalem or any of the other communities in the Palestine area, because the erudition there in Alexandria extended to the use of allegorical commentary. So that the literal text was seen to be a jewel, a diamond, whose many facets could only be appreciated through infinite patience of examination. And this glittering cosmos would unfold if the text were opened up with a certain form almost approaching that of geometry. If you recall, Pythagoras said, this geometry is a history. Meaning that the unfoldment of form gives us the truth as a traditional duration as it folds out onto our lives. So that this allegorical variable star of Old Testament interpretation reached a pinnacle in the Jewish quarter of Alexandria.

Just opposite the Jewish quarter was the old Egyptian quarter called Rhacotis. I don't know how many of you were here for the original lecture on Ptolemaic Alexandria, but when Alexander the Great was looking for a site to place his great cosmic city. You remember he had the vision of one world, the ecumenical and the one world must have a metropolitan center. And so, from the very first, he set Alexandria in the particular location that it was because having seen a vision in Rhacotis, he had remembered a dream that he had had. He always read Homer, Homer's Iliad, before he went to bed. And in the morning he saw the God of transformation coming from the waves of the Mediterranean Sea in their breakers around the village of Rhacotis and he realized that this was the image in the dream. That this was the mystical divinatory site of the future center of the one world, the ecumenical. And so, he had the soldiers lay out the borders of Alexandria with the wonderful cornmeal that they carried. Of course, the flocks of crows from the desert came immediately and ate up the cornmeal. And Alexander shocked for a moment, looking around, until one of the seers said master, this is a great sign because it means that Alexandria will feed the world. And Alexander smiled and said, yes, and we will make it so.

And Alexander's body, of course, had been snatched by Ptolemy I Soter, snatched from the Generals in Babylon and carried to Alexandria and was kept there in a great mausoleum. Because where the four quarters of Alexandria met divided by two great avenues, one of them was a hundred yards wide. If you can imagine a football field running through the entire length of the city. And the other one coming and crossing it, and where they met in the center was a great huge square covered with trees, and the body in a golden casket of Alexander was kept there for all to see, even into the Roman periods.

So that there was the Jewish quarter, and then the old Egyptian quarter of Rhacotis, where the Serapeum was. And there was also a mole, a wharf, that was put out from the shore right where the Jewish and the Egyptian quarters came together, and it came out to an island called Pharos. Later on, of course, this all silted in, and this has become a major part of modern Alexandria, as we'll see on the slide later on.

So, these two quarters were separated by this wild canopic boulevard that ran the entire length of the city. The saying was, is that it took all day for a healthy person to walk the length of Alexandria. And on the far side were two more quarters, and in those quarters were the populations from the entirety of the world. Alexandria had been situated on a limestone spur. Most of the deltaic coast of Egypt is impossible for a harbor. It's swampy. It's filled with sandbars. But the one branch of the Nile, the Canopic branch, which fed in by this limestone spur, made a natural lake, a very large lake called Mareotis. And Alexandria was a limestone spur between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Marianas. And because the Canopic branch of the Nile came into Mareotis, Alexandria had an inland port where they could send ships from the wharfs on Lake Mareotis, up the Nile, and all the way to the first cataract and then across about a mile or two of land. They had a double harbor because of the mole out to Pharos. A great harbor on the east side and on the west side a lesser harbor. And in this lesser harbor they had carved a small harbor called the box. The [inaudible]. The box.

So that Alexandria was poised on Three Harbors that service the entirety of the world. And through the Nile context ships could go down the Nile, and there were several points on the Nile where overland caravans from the Red Sea brought goods from India. The spices, the herbs, the Buddhists, the Brahmins. So that Alexandria became a focus of the entire world within years of its founding. So that when we talk about Roman Alexander, we talk now about a city which had simmered for 300 years in this privileged position.

And of course, as this wonderful destiny had unfolded itself in great grandeur and then had come back down to the days at the end of the Ptolemaic dynasties, the very last representative of the glory of that ecumenical vision, the ecumenical, the one world, rested in the position of the most infamous woman of her time, Cleopatra. Cleopatra realized finally she tried twice to choose a world conqueror as her husband to reinstate and revitalize this one world tradition with Alexandria at its head. She had tried with Julius Caesar. And one of the ironical results of that union was that when Caesar's fleet burnt in the harbor of Alexandria the fire spread and burnt the great library in the [inaudible], and a million scrolls went up in smoke. Her next choice was Marc Antony. And Marc Antony, trying very hard with his overweening masculine pride to be that world conqueror for her, gave her the library of Pergamum some 200,000 scrolls to replace it. But the pressures of the relentless movements of Augustus, Octavian Caesar who became Augustus, the nephew of Julius Caesar, finally at the Battle of Actium broke the power and the spirit of Mark Antony. And when he landed in Egypt all of his troops went over to Augustus. And along with just his guard, he entered into Alexandria a broken man. And Cleopatra realized that their dreams were coming to an end.

And in fact, Mark Antony, in his anguish, built a small retreat hut in the middle of the great harbor of Alexandria, and had a little wharf connecting the Royal Palace of the [inaudible] with his little meditator's hut called the Timonium, named after Timotheus, the famous anchorite in Greece. And what Mark Antony was doing was displaying for all the fact that he too had retired to the desert, but that he wanted the world to see what had happened to the expectations for a cosmic emperor. That he was in fact reduced to the hut in the middle of the great harbor of the world.

But Augustus relentless, absolutely masterful, realized that all of his plans depended upon the treasure which the Ptolemies had collected through their 300 years. And Cleopatra, the most wealthy woman of all time, held this great treasure, and she realized it was her last bargaining card available. So, she had hastily constructed an enormous vault right in the center of the Royal quarter, the [inaudible] of Alexandria, and had all the treasury, the gold, the jewels, the precious spices and silks piled into this enormous vault. And there was a room constructed on the top of it, some 25-35 feet above ground. And she and her two faithful serving women, the most famous of them, of course, is Charmian, locked themselves into this upper room above the vault of the treasure. And there was just one window through which they would have commerce with the world. And it was through this window that later they lifted the dying body, bloodied and bruised, of Mark Antony. And Cleopatra trying to take care of her man to the very end.

And it was through this very window that one of Augustus most clever lieutenants climbed through and got the treasure, and captured Cleopatra, who was afraid that she was going to be dragged through the streets of Rome. Why was she to be dragged through the streets of Rome? Because to the Romans there were only two human beings that they had ever feared. Their chronicles tell us that they never feared any nation. They were always willing to go to war with whatever nation they came in contact with. But there were two individuals who struck fear to Rome because they displayed a more cosmic sense of power than any Roman. One of them was Hannibal at the time of Scipio Africanus, and the other was Cleopatra, because she represented the epitome of the subconscious soul of the Roman people. That even they did not understand the mysterious workings of this. And later on, the transformation of this image of Cleopatra would become a very secret symbol for the Sophic angelic guardian of the treasure of the world. Through whose portals, through whose window, he who would be the emperor of himself would have to pass.

Augustus, of course, was able to hold on to this treasure, pay off his debts, and to give you some indication of the enormity of the treasure. The interest rate in Rome fell from 12 to 4%, the year that Augustus distributed the treasure to his armies.

In the midst of this. This happened August 1st, 30 B.C. This is why the month is called August because it happened that first day. Before that, it had a different name. After that it had the name August. So, August 1st of every year this great drama happens. In the midst of this was born an individual who is known as Philo Judaeus. Philo was born in Alexandria, about the same time that all of this was happening with Augustus and Cleopatra.

And Philo, whose works have come down to us. We have about 12 or 14 volumes of his work are almost unread at this day. I went to universities for nine years, I never once had one single assignment of reading a single page of Philo. And yet the writings of Philo are, for us, a paradigm of that transformational generation, because he was born in 30 B.C., and he died in 45 B.C. So, he saw in his lifetime the shift, the change, the transformation. The Greek word genesis really means transformation. Not so much beginning, but the way in which what was changed into what is that sort of thing. It's, it's like a [inaudible]. It's like [inaudible] really means in the beginning its ongoing. And in that ongoing is the transformation. And in the transformation is the resolution of what was and to what now is.

So that Philo's writings are a key. And in his writings he describes a very interesting character named Flaccus. But I want to give you just two sentences out of here, because he characterizes the Alexandrian mind for us about the time of Jesus. He says that this Flaccus had miraculously understood many of the Alexandrian ways. And he says
Accordingly, in a short time he became perfectly acquainted with the affairs in Egypt, and they are a very various and diversified character. So that they are not easily comprehended even by those who from their earliest infancy, have made them their study.
In other words, Alexandria was a labyrinth of human possibilities, and even those born there, he says, have a difficult time in understanding.

Later on, he'll go on to say that the Alexandrian temper was to be litigious and to engage in debate and dispute on any point to which the mind could affix a differentiation. And so that the nature of the Alexandrian was a city of a million people who love to nitpick. Did we say that Los Angeles is the new Alexandria? It's interesting.

In his writings, in Philo’s writings, we have presented the exquisite juxtaposition of learning which only an Alexandrian Jew of that time could have held within his character. And the emphasis that all times is on this sort of line. This is from Philo's On the Incorruptibility of The World [A Treatise on the Incorruptibility of the World]. And he tells us in here that there are wonderful ways to describe the world. And that we know for a fact when we read Plato's Timaeus, for instance, that there is a structure which can be learned and differentiated and so forth. And then he goes on to say that, of course, it seems to him that Plato had models, and that one of his models was from the Theogony of Hesiod. And he goes into Hesiod, and he talks about how the structure of cosmic history is related in Hesiod.

But then he says, all of this we see was done 600-700 B.C. at the most. But we know for a fact that the giver of all these traditions, Moses, lived some 14 or 1500 B.C. So that we find in Philo the juxtaposition of the idea that all of the great Greek learning was really a [inaudible] on the esoteric tradition of the ancient Hebrews and that for true learning we must go back to Moses. Not Moses in the literal sense, but Moses in the Pythagorean sense. And that using the Pythagorean allegorical unfoldment as a method and using The Old Testament Pentateuch as a text, we may then read out for ourselves in the unfolding geometry of understanding the true history, the Chronologica Mystica of man. And he says, when we do this we see that our time, meaning about the turn of the millennium then, is of a most peculiar character. And that in fact it is a time when he says, “We see in the deserts surrounding all the great cities, especially our own city, communities of those persons whose practices in enlightenment are scarcely believable to those who have no experience with them.”

And he speaks, and he's the only redactor in classical antiquity who speaks at length of the Essenes. And he goes into a great description about the Essenes. But in a treatise On The Contemplative Life, another treatise, On The Contemplative Life, he goes even further than the Essenes. He says that here, just outside of Alexandria, in the desert, hard onto the south coast of Lake Mareotis is a most particularly holy community of individuals. And he calls them the Therapeutae, the healers. And these healers are men and women, and the key to their capacities at the religious life is that they are able to heal not just the physical body. Although, he says,
We now understand that they heal the physical body of all manner of diseases. But that they also affect that most difficult healing, the healing of the soul of man. For even those cases which are beyond any hope brought to them, they are able to go into the person and cast out,
as he says, “the demons that are in those people and restore them to health and wholesomeness.”

And Philo says,
Having mentioned this the Essenes, who in all respects selected for their admiration and for their especial adoption the practical courses of life, and who excel in all or perhaps may be a less unpopular and invidious thing to say in most of its parts. I will now proceed, in regular order of my subject, to speak of those who have embraced the speculative life. And I will say what appears to me to be desirable to be said on the subject. Not drawing any fictitious statements from my own head for the sake of improving the appearance of my text.

And he gives this foreword because what he is about to say then, about the Therapeutae seems almost impossible. That they sometimes go for three days and eat just one meal. And that those in the inner circle go for six days with just one meal. And that they spend their time, as he says, “on the speculative life.” That is not daydreaming, not studying in the universities of Alexandria, but the speculative life of unfolding that sacred geometry in the mystical experience of man, which leads as a ladder to that supercelestial realm.

So that Philo gives us right at the beginning of Roman Alexandria, the notion that there is learning, there is wisdom, there are philosophers. But that beyond philosophers to an infinite degree removed and better are instead of the philosopher, the Philaletheis, the lovers of truth. And that as wisdom is grand and glorious and deserving of pride of achievement in this world.
“The lovers of truth, the Philaletheis, study the beyond which is not of this world. Which is not subject to anyone's pridefulness. And is not achievable by any regular curriculum of study. No matter how wide its synthesis. No matter how refined its syncretism.” That there is a gap, a jump, as Kierkegaard would say centuries and centuries later. I would like very much to be a Christian, but I find it very difficult indeed, because it requires for me a leap of faith into the unknown. And my mind balks at that. And of course, Pascal and his Pensées said, “I see and fear those frightening abysses of infinity.”

It was exactly to this wavering capacity that the early Philo wrote, and towards the end of his life, about 45 B.C. A very, very strong, practical individual who was an expert translator moved to Alexandria. And that man was Saint Mark. Now Saint Mark had been the interpreter for Peter in Rome. And in fact, he had accompanied Paul on many of his journeys. But Mark, who was called in Greek [inaudible] fingered not so that his fingers are short, but that his style of exposition and living was sort of a telescoped geometrical history. So that each thing in Mark's way of living and expression was enwrapped by another. Not so much the onion, but the telescope.
And so, [inaudible] fingered Mark moved to Alexandria about 46 A.D. And there, during the next 16 years, he administered to the growing community in Alexandria, in particular to this community of Therapeutae that was described by Philo. So that if we are able to take ourselves inside of The Gospel According To Mark and able to bring in the context of Philo, we may see within the first ten years of its development in Genesis, the way in which Christianity moved from 30 A.D. and the resurrection to about 50 A.D. and the first gospels coming into being.

And just to give you some idea of this, in actual fact, turn in the King James version to The Gospel According To Saint Mark, and we do not find the cosmic histories of the Hebraic lineages, but rather we find an epic in progress. And Saint Mark puts his finger right in the center and he says,
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in the prophets, behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare the way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight. John did baptize in the wilderness and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.
So, the first four chapters of The Gospel of Mark set off a whole tone telescoped by saying, we begin with those that we know of in the desert, and they are crying out. And what is it they are crying out? Prepare a way. A straight highway.

And of course, as Mark goes on, the very first thing that he has Jesus do after Jesus goes into the desert himself, into the wilderness, he comes back into the play of the phenomenal world and goes straight to the synagogue to preach. That is, Mark telescopes the entirety of the preface to that cosmological happening all within one page. This telescoping capacity of Saint Mark and the expositional exfoliation of the allegorical method of Philo are the two marks of Alexandrian mysticism. One of them is a movement towards ultra simplicity, cutting away everything so that all that remains left is the presence of the spirit of the divine. And the other way at the same time is to exfoliate it and differentiate it so that every conceivable pattern, every conceivable structure, is enunciated. So that with one motion the mind is kept occupied and the sense of vitality is kept flowing. And yet at the same time the spirit is made pure and purified. So that both motions happen at the same time.
And of course, this is why there are two intertwining serpents on the caduceus of Hermes staff coming together at that sphere of wholeness. And that sphere of wholeness is very important because although the ancient Athenians and those in Solomon's time had projected out the sacred science of geometry. Geometry did not give way to the birth of the more refined trigonometry until they both came together in Alexandria. And it was the discovery of the geometry of the sphere, which is what trigonometry is, in Alexandria, that allowed, for the first time a metaphorical perception of the way in which mathematical truth leads directly to the threshold of the ineffable. And that by the development of trigonometric methods in Alexandria, the mind of man was able finally to make that Jacob's ladder through all the angelic orders to the very threshold of the ineffable.

But while that was happening. And many times, in retrospect, we have to go on to redactors. This is Eusebius, who was the head of the councils of Constantine when Christianity was made the state religion about 330-340 A.D. Eusebius wrote the great History of the Church. And in this there are many examples that I've marked out. We're not going to have time to go into it. But I think I will just summarize for you some of this.

The, The Gospel of John had had as a basis for its method of exposition, the Jewish festival cycle. If we read The Gospel of John as if it were to be presented through the Jewish festival year, many of the anomalies of Saint John's Gospel fall into an order. And we can see that that gospel, though it was written in Greek, and we usually take it to be a mystical Greek version of the gospel, was actually an application of Alexandrian Philonic interpretive allegorical ways to the consistency of the ancient Jewish law as unfolded in the festival year. So that the tradition and the law were together and understandable. And that Jesus was in this cycle understandable to the nth degree.

But we've seen that in Mark there was this emphasis that there was not only in this traditional way, a motion which is intelligible, but that there was this capacity to leap forward, to transcend, to go to another realm. And that this going to another realm did not invalidate the old but confirmed the old capacity to give birth to the new. And very often the simile that Jesus used was that you don't put new wine in old bottles. It ruins the wine, and it ruins the bottles. And the same thing with the cloth. You don't sew new cloth onto an old garment. Those were the similes that he used.

But in developing this in Alexandria, the effect was such that the Romans who came in contact. And of course, most of the important Romans of the time who came in contact with Alexandria, were mesmerized by this incredible mystical and religious and philosophic activity. So that when they began to be enormous rumblings and earthquakes in Roman civilization, there were all kinds of portents. Augustus himself had conceived that he was to be the final incarnation of the world ruler, that he was in fact, Alexander come back again. And Augustus had had all of the mystical keys of wisdom brought together in Rome. And he had built, for instance, a great mystical temple of integration called the Ara Pacis Augustae, which is still there in Rome, underneath one of these [inaudible]. On the sacred friezes around the Ara Pacis Augustae Augustus had put, Augustus had put the journey of the soul as it is in making this world an empire of the divine. And that man understanding it had transformed all this. And to make sure that this was done right, Augustus commissioned his great friend Virgil to write a mystical epic, The Aeneid, to encase this. And I've given lectures on Virgil and on Augustus, and they're available on cassette. And you can hear this written out loud.

So that The Aeneid gave in mystical poetry the reformulation of the Homeric world, which had obtained for a thousand years into a new form and shape. And not only that, but Augustus had collected all of the Sibylline prophecies, the scrolls and the fragments of prophetic utterances of all the Sibyls of the ancient world. Especially that Sibyl at Qumran down on the Bay of Naples and had made it a state law forbidding anyone or any temple or any oracular site in the world to keep for themselves any pages or fragments thereof of oracular statements.

So that the oracles of the world were collected together in Rome under Augustus, and put together mystically by Virgil in The Aeneid, and architecturally expressed by the great dome of comprehension of the Ara Pacis Augustae. And having done those great titanic cosmic tasks of Augustus for the first time in several hundred years, had the doors of the Temple of Janus closed, which meant that the entire world was at peace and the Pax Romana then prevailed.
But of course, this had been an ineffective gathering of lightning, because some of the most potent spiritual forces in the world were still at motion and at play. And not only that, the way in which this gathering had been done had left scars and wounds. What was the old saying? Violent deaths leave ghosts. And there were metaphysical ghosts of great powers loose in the world.

And increasingly, after the death of Augustus, the world began to show a wobble, topsy turvy tendency in the Roman psyche. Not just in the [inaudible], but in the populace itself, so that we notice in the Roman world, almost like the emergence of a mass psychosis coming upon the populations. And of course, the great image of this are the royal state debacles under Nero, which the great image is the burning of Rome for the sake of the some. That sort of thing.

But a more clear focus of all this is upon a Roman general whose name in history is Vespasian, who had been one of the highest commanders under Nero. When he went to Alexandria with his armies. And he was there about 65-66 A.D., shortly after Saint Mark had died. Right in the midst of all of this mystical, speculative controversy, Vespasian was taken into some secret initiations in Alexandria. And he was told that the astrologers, the Hermeticists, the Therapeutae communities, had signaled that Vespasian was a particularly singled out individual and that it was he who would restore the world to wholeness. And within four years of that revelation to him, Vespasian had become the emperor of the Roman Empire, and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, were also to be emperors. And the whole Flavian dynasty came up. And this was the first motion of Alexandrian mysticism affecting the entire Roman world.

And the same thing would happen again later on with Constantine, when the Alexandrian mysticism would have condensed and become early Christianity before the councils diced it up and made of it simply a political doctrine. Early Christianity would then send out Constantine and the emperors following him and literally refashioned the world.

At this time one of those who counseled Vespasian was Apollonius of Tyana and gave him many indications of material that he was to use.

I guess we’re…Are we running low on time? [inaudible] had just begun. You can't leave any of this out [inaudible].

The development, next in Alexandria was that this mystical revelation had come to a point where attempts to express it were at hand. You get the idea that there was a mystical apperception of the ineffable. It could not be said but could be experienced. And yet the other side of the Alexandrian personality was to try to express it. To try to make some language symbolic enough so that in its symbolic unfolding, the reader, the hearer, would have a chance to intuit that this was the drift, this was the flow. So that it's like a scientist who, a technologist, who gives you all the data and material. And as you integrate it in your understanding and you make a sine wave of the motion of how that material goes together, you suddenly intuit that this is energy making this. And that energy has to have a source. And one goes to the heart of the issue then very, very rapidly. Plotinus says at that stage, the soul, sensing the divine home to which it always had belonged, becomes absolutely disenchanted with the world. It could care less. It wants to go home. It wants to fly.

So that Basilides who was born about the time that Saint Mark came to Alexandria, who had studied under a man who was the interpreter of Peter. And who had learned from him this most esoteric of inner doctrines. Because the Basilides of Alexandria, who was the founder of what we come to know today as Gnosticism, said that these are secret messages given after the resurrection to just a few of the heroes of the inner mysteries, and that he had learned them himself from the interpreter of Peter Saint Mark. So that he said, I've been given this background and privy to this secret whispered information. And so, the motions of the Basilides were to create some way of knowing, some method of gnosis, whereby human beings could approximate ever closer in a geometrical understanding, a way of understanding the ineffable.

And he wrote, in fact, 24 books of commentary on The Old Testament and The New Testament. And they're called The Exegetica. And of course, they were burned in classical antiquity, and they were railed against and all the great documents of the early church. Irenaeus in Against Heresies of 177 A.D., just rips Basilides apart. He calls him a madman but gives a lot of quotations. And in fact, we can see from the quotations some understanding that this early Christian gnosis in Alexandria around 70 A.D., around the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, began to reflect the very curious tone. Basilides, and this is G.R.S. Mead's wonderful translation of this passage. What does he say? He says,
In the church father’s reputation, they try to muddle up Basilides glosses, and criticisms with mutilated quotations. Imperfectly summarizing important passages which treat of conceptions requiring the greatest subtlety and nicety of language.
Because he was an Alexandrian, you see.
And in other respects, does scant justice to a thinker whose faith in Christianity was so great that far from confining it to the narrow limits of a dogmatic theology, he would have it that the gospel was also a universal philosophy. An ecumenicos fellow [inaudible] explanatory of the whole world drama. Let us then,
says Mead, “raise our thoughts to those sublime heights to which the genius of Basilides soared so many centuries ago.” That at that time the faith was that the glad tidings were really living, and they were living of some universal possibility that transcends being itself.

And he gives them a quotation from Basilides of Alexandria. This is about 70 to 90 A.D. about in that time period.
There was when not was. Nay even that not was not there of things that are. But nakedly conjecture and mental quibbling apart, there was absolutely not even the one. And when I used the term was, I do not mean to say that it was, but merely to give some suggestion of what I wish to indicate. I used the expression there was absolutely not. For that not is not simply the so-called ineffable. It is beyond that. For that which is really ineffable, is not named ineffable, but is superior to every name that is ever used. The Names
And he means names with a capital N. “The names are not sufficient even for the manifested universe. So diversified is it they fall short. How much further short they fall from that beyond the ineffable?” So, this is the way that Basilides formulated for himself.

And of course, the generation that was raised on Basilides went even further. Because in the next Alexandrian Gnostic wave came Valentinus with his great Gospel of Truth. And we in fact found The Gospel of Truth [inaudible]. And it's available in this volume The Secret of Books of the Egyptian Gnostics and in the Hammadi [Nag Hammadi] manuscripts.

Are we to a stopping place? No [inaudible]. Let me finish on Valentinus.

The Gospel of Truth is one of those incredible discoveries. The fact that in our time after having heard of it by way of criticism for such a long time, to have it suddenly turn up in our hands, is just one of the most incredible stories of all time. And summarizing what The Gospel of Truth was about, an early writer, a Frenchman named Jean Doresse, says,
The Gospel of Truth pretends to be a good news that will be a joy to those for whom the father through the word has vouchsafed the gnosis. Whoever has this gnosis, it is affirmed, takes what is his and restores it to himself. By gnosis a man knows whence he has come and whither he is going.
And that the Christ is referred to as the revealer of the living book of the living. And it's like an exponential expression of life. The living book of the living. And of course, this is a sense of the geometry which was concurrent with it.

At the same time that Valentinus was delivering The Gospel of Truth Ptolemy Claudius was writing The Great Syntaxis and the Tetrabiblos, giving a structure to the astrological and an astronomical understanding of how this sacred geometry actually does unfold in the universe. So that when you put Ptolemy Claudius together with Valentinus, you get some enormous idea of the energy pulsating from Alexandria.

And in the center of that double motion of Ptolemaic exposition and Valentinian [inaudible] comes that generation which produced Clement of Alexandria. And in the writings of Clement of Alexandria he no longer even gives names to his essays. He no longer takes the idea of a treatise and this or that as a credible possibility. He simply calls his book Miscellaneous.

Let's stop there.

Saturday is of course, the Sabbath, the seventh day. And we need to remind ourselves that the early Christians were Jews. They had the earliest formulation of Christian mysticism, and the idea of the Christian history was all ecumenical Judaism. And it wasn't until the late second century that there was any notion that there were Christians as opposed to Jews. And further, that if we take a look at the earliest Christian material as continuing and developing the Jewish tradition, we find there a sense of order and intelligence which was hidden from us before.

One great example is the way in which The Fourth Gospel follows the cycle of the Jewish festival year. And in fact, in late antiquity, the Jewish yearly cycle was really a triennial cycle, three years. And that there were ways of portioning out the five books of Moses, The Pentateuch, by a three-year system. And this is all well known in certain circles. It's been a part of rabbinical learning from the beginning. And there are libraries of books on this. So that if anyone is inspecting this, one of the easiest ways to get in to this Oxford University Press, about 20 years ago published The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship [The Fourth Gospel and Jewish worship: A Study of the Relation of St. John's Gospel to the Ancient Jewish Lectionary System]. And as usual, it's a woman who has gotten fed up with all the men philosophers speaking out of turn and has come in to clear up the situation. Thank God for that.

So that we have a motion of imminence, of making imminent in the world, the order of God's intelligibility. And at the same time, we have a motion of transcendence, of taking us spiral like through the whirlwind of this phenomenal existence and returning us home. And that the same process, which allows for the movement emanating down to man allows for man to aspire up. So that Jacob's ladder is a two-way double helix, the very structure of DNA itself. What better model could we have than the actuality of the way in which the phenomenal realm is arranged? The truth is, as the mystics say, everywhere. And there was never a time when it was not.

So that, along with the method of showing us the transcendence, we must have a wisdom tradition which shows us the way in which it is also immanent and intelligible and understandable. So that then Claudius Ptolemy Tetrabiblos at the beginning of the fourth book, tetra means four books. The four books on the world order. The way in which astrology and astronomy express the intelligibility of the divine order. In the chrome of book, the fourth, Ptolemy Claudius says,
All those circumstances have now been set forth, which occur previously to the birth. As well as at the actual birth and after it. And which it seemed necessary to mention as conducing to a knowledge of the general quality of the contemporary produce. And of the other points now remaining by which extrinsic events are contemplated. Those regarding the several fortunes of wealth and of rank claimed to be taken first in a consideration. Each of these fortunes has a distinct relationship. For instance, that of wealth relates to the body and that of rank to the mind.

So that when they mean a world order, they mean everything that is included has its intelligibility. So that the esotericism of Ptolemy being an eminence, showing how it infuses this realm, carries on even to the most practical of daily events, money and position. So, when we said before that we're talking about practical things, we are indeed. There are no things more practical than that which we are now discussing.

And further, because there are fictions made up by what we would call now the ego. Or by what the ancient Alexandrians would have called demons. And by demons they meant mindless elementals who arrange delusory patterns that net us and have us. We don't have them, they have us. Those mindless elementals. So, that the way to escape all that is by this way of purity, which makes us so transparent that we fall through these nets of delusions. And we are not catchable. We're no longer catchable. And only then having purified, then may we ascend and go.

So that in this period, after Basilides and after Valentinus and after Ptolemy Claudius, we find the rise of the great Hermetic literature in Alexandria. And The Corpus Hermeticum of course, the great repository of the way in which this learning was in fact, the tradition of the then ancient past. What we would call now the archaic past. That it had existed thousands upon thousands of years before Roman Alexandria. And of course, tracing it back so that we have the ancient Egyptian Thoth. And we find at this time, very early on in the Roman Alexandrian times, when Cleopatra wanted to present some image of the cosmos that was indicative of the then archaic learning, we could find no better example than the ceiling at Dandara of the Royal Little Chapel. And we've got a slide of that in the outside of it.

And this had permeated again and again into the learner, so that the Alexandrians, who had seen that Greek learning, went back to Moses, then asked the logical question, where does his learning come from? Yes, it comes from a revelation, but it came into a tradition which was ongoing even then. And that's when the ancient Egyptians were brought in. And that's where Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice greatest, was brought in. That he was the image of the most archaic tradition going back thousands and thousands of years.

And in The Corpus Hermeticum, it's an enormous thing. It runs into four volumes like this. And translation A Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes is speaking, and he says,
We have now to speak, my son of soul and body. I must explain in what way the soul is immortal. And by the working of what sort of force of the composition and dissolution of the body. For death has nothing to do with any of them. The word death is a mere name without any corresponding fact. For death means destruction and nothing in the cosmos is destroyed. For seeing that the cosmos is the second God and an immortal being, it is impossible that a part of that immortal being should die. And all things in the cosmos are parts of the cosmos. First of all, things, and in the very truth, eternal and without beginning is God. That he is the maker of the universe. And second is the cosmos, which has been made by God in his image and is kept in being and sustained by the other.

So that in The Corpus Hermeticum we continually see this kind of very high wisdom presented. And the joining together of the various braids of tradition have reached not only the whole spectrum horizontally of the contemporary world at that time but have also vertically gone back in a deep shaft of mystical tradition to the very origins of the human race. So that those two were brought together and that's where we find the cross symbolism.

In this learning and understanding that was formulated by The Corpus Hermeticum, there were at that time individuals who, in their own experience, were able to synthesize in a penetrating way, a focus of understanding of how this had been generated by this cosmic event of the incarnation. And one of those in Alexandria was Clement. And Clement is the first theologian of Christianity. He's the first individual to begin to use the, the terms. And all the way through Clement's writings there are two indications showing the two motions. That there is a world of Pistis, faith, and there is a world of gnosis, knowing, and that the two move together. And that what faith prepares, knowing carries through. And there is then the designation that these two together form the pillars upon which the bridge of understanding arcs over. Not in a objective construction, but in a understanding of the deepest spirit. So that the two pillars are the traditions, and the bridge is our understanding of how they relate. And Clement calls this the Royal road. Because it was the same royal road that connected the Palace of the Ptolemies with the library of the [inaudible].

So that the one was the repository of worldly learning, and the other was the repository of worldly royalty. So that the king and the wizard are related in a very special way. So that the individuals in their realm and under their tutelage may see that both are necessary, and that their participation in the relationality of the two is a royal road to one's divinity.

These senses in Clement are various. I'm going to have to skip because of time over many things. But Clement tells us this. He says, In Clement's conception of gnosis, “It is possible to distinguish two different stages. Gnosis can already be attained by man to some extent during his stay on Earth. While we're here, we can to some extent achieve a gnosis”.

Clement, being a very refined Alexandrian, goes further. He says
There is another kind. And this other kind reaches the climax after the death of the body. When the soul of the [inaudible] is allowed to fly back to its original place, where after becoming a God it can enjoy in a complete and perpetual rest the contemplation of the highest divinity face to face, together with the other Theoi.

And by this time the Therapeutes had become the Theoi. And we see here that the preparation in the phenomenal realm is for that leap of faith, which is also, at the moment of death. Death, a leap of knowing. So that the message that was given by Clement became extraordinarily scintillating. That's the only word I can use. It began to appeal so much to the unconscious subconscious spirit of the time that there very, very quickly, within about 10 to 15 years of Clement's books coming out, there was a joining together, in a sense, in Alexandria, that there was such a thing as a community of believers who were preparing a receptacle for the future community of knowers. And this ecumenical, eschatological tandem was reflected most highly in The Apocalypse attributed to John. But as Eusebius writes in his Church History, he says, “If you can't take the ascription of The Apocalypse to John who wrote the Gospels, then it must be the other John who is buried next to him in Ephesus.” Because he says, this is in 320 A.D. we know there were two John's, and that the apocalypse belongs to one or the other.

And if you look at modern translations, like The Anchor Bible translation of The Apocalypse made just 15 years ago, you can see that the character of the language is millennial Judaism rather than Christian, and that The Apocalypse of John is a way of expressing an Alexandrian refinement. The parallel message given in the old prophecies of Ezekiel. Because in The Old Testament sandwiching in David the king and Solomon the Wise were true prophets that made the receptacle possible so that this transmission could be given to humankind. The first prophet was the teacher of David, the king, who was Samuel. And the second prophet was the one who took The Wisdom of Solomon and exfoliated it into a cosmic vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. And that was Ezekiel. And the two cities, that of Ezekiel's vision and that of The Apocalypse of John, are the two parallel poles by which visionary millennialism have always had their dynamic from the beginning.

All of this, of course, was being put together in Alexandria. And in fact, Clement, who was a very energetic individual, set up the first catechetical school in Alexandria, ostensibly to teach children. But very, very quickly what happened was is that the school became the first real Christian university. And the next director after Clement was the great Origen. And Origen spelled o-r-i-g-e-n. Origen very, very famous for the fact that in his lifetime he wrote many, many works. He was the first great architect of the Christian church. He's the one who made by his arguments the basic outlines of the doctrines which came down to us today as Christianity. Many of the councils later on in Byzantine times hushed Origen and put him aside again, doing the disservice of burying the transition points so that then centuries later people who were not given these connections would have thought that all this came in one fell swoop. And was indeed so miraculous and complicated that it must have been divine. Well, it was divine, but it was not divine in the sense of just instantly appearing. It was divine in the sense that the Alexandrians patiently, through centuries of genius, put together the ways in which this immanence and transcendence actually create a dynamic of reality.

The great doctrine, incidentally Against Celsus, called Contra Celsus [Contra Celsus], was the origin of Paracelsus name. The higher celsus. The Paracelsus. I don't have time to go into it. I’ll just alert you that these conditions obtained. These individuals exist. And in terms of Origen, he not only carried on Clement of Alexandria his tradition and became a Bishop of Alexandria, but that his mystical teacher was Ammonius Saccas. One of the greatest figures in the history of human thought. And Ammonius, the sack bearer, did not teach in any of the schools of Alexandria, but was around the wharfs and docks. He was one of those gadflies of the soul, like Socrates, who worked a daily job in a very mundane way, because he was grounding one of the most cosmic, visionary minds of all time. Very much like Jacob [inaudible] being a shoemaker in [inaudible] you need sometimes to have the opposite. This is why in very, very sophisticated meditational techniques, the monks hold the ground in the field. There are times when you're really glad to just spread clay and just sit there. Very glad to do that.

So Ammonius Saccas was the teacher of Origen, and in the same class was Plotinus. And by class, we don't mean people that signed up on a registry and paid money to people making money out of this. They went to hear him. And they went to hear him year in and year out, because the duration of learning sometimes takes ten years for it to mature. Because one is speaking about wholeness. One is speaking about a pattern of excellence. And as one speaks, one speaks in terms of wholes, in terms of a totality. And it's only after our experience for years on end that we begin to see that all of this was the same. A fabric of understanding of which our experience is a part. And when we begin to weave ourselves into the design, then we perceive that it is a unity. And it never was other than that.

The other student, among many others of Ammonius Saccas was Plotinus. And Plotinus constantly in The Aeneid stretches our very capacity at transcendent description. The Aeneid of the classic sacred mountain of philosophy. Let then who can climb.
Two sentences from Plotinus third Aeneid on time and eternity. This is an Alexandrian born 204. This was written about 260 A.D.
Now comes the question whether and all this discussion we are not merely helping to make out a case for some other order of beings. And talking of matters alien to ourselves. But how could that be? What understanding can there be failing some point of contact? And what contact could there be with the utterly alien? We must then have ourselves some part or share in eternity. Still, how is this possible to us who exist in time? The whole question turns on the distinction between being in time and being in eternity. And this will best be realized by probing to the nature of time. We must therefore descend from eternity to the investigation of time to the realm of time. Till now we have been taking the upward way. We must now take the downward. Not to the lowest levels, but within the degree in which time itself is a descendant from eternity.

And this is the way the Alexandrians were talking by the 3rd century A.D. And it was a matter of public information. It was being taught on the docks and on the wharfs. And it was being carried into every sacred mystery tradition of the time. Because they were all collecting together in Alexandria. They had done it for 500 years. And as they collected and realized, no matter what tradition they came out of in this round house of integrity in Alexandria, everyone recognized the veracity of his own vertical tradition and the ecumenical spread of this horizontal truth of the moment. And this, of course, produced again and again individuals who surprisingly went back and carried to their homelands or their home traditions the sense of fruition from Alexandria.

Along with all this, and constantly because Alexandria was the home of science. Eratosthenes had measured the circumference of the Earth to within 50 miles. Some 300 years before Philo. The Alexandrians had developed trigonometry. Had developed the sense that there was a hierarchy to the sphere which could be understood by man. And so that the line of mathematicians in Alexandria patiently through the centuries had come not only to an understanding of the science of mathematics, but that the method of investigation in mathematics was truthful. It was not just wise but was truthful. Because the order of reality does not lie.
It is dependable so that we have an individual. I'm skipping over many of them. This individual was named Pappus of Alexandria. And he was a mathematician. And he lived about 240 to 300 A.D. And in his great book, we have all of these mathematical books that were saved in antiquity. They were useful. You could build buildings with this kind of material. You could lay out city plans. You could train the mind. But it also contains the essence of the Alexandrian esoteric method.

What does he say under this mathematical school textbook, Problems and Theorems. He says,
Those who favor a more exact terminology in the subjects studied in geometry. Most excellent Pandrosion used the term problem to mean an inquiry in which it is proposed to do or to construct something. And the term theorem, an inquiry in which the consequences and necessary implications of certain hypotheses are investigated. But among the ancients some describe them all as problems, some all as theorems. Therefore, he who propounds a theorem, no matter how he has become aware of it, must set for investigation the conclusion inherent in the premises. And in no other way would he correctly propound the theorem. But he who propounds a problem, even though he may require us to construct something which is in some way impossible, is free from blame and criticism. For it is part of an investigator's task to determine the conditions under which a problem is possible and impossible. And, if possible, when, how and in how many ways it is possible. For when a man professing to know mathematics sets an investigation wrongly, he is not free from censure. But if he sets it right, the entire cosmos opens to him.
So that we have the scientific method intact. 250 A.D. in Alexandria. We have this entire mystical ecumenicos that has been put together.

And of course, the generations after 300 A.D. in Alexandria progressively became refined so that a man like Theon of Alexandria, who was the father of the great Hypatia. When he taught mathematics to his daughter, he taught her all the keys of the mysteries along with it. But in a very elegant, everyday way. So that when Hypatia became the head of the mystery schools in Alexandria, about 380-370-380 A.D., she talked about civic pride in a way that it could be understood that this was reflecting the cosmic capacities of humility. She taught mathematics in the way that Pappus would have taught that the method of inquiry leads you to a methodology of interior introspection. And so powerful was Hypatia's method that when the vicious bishop came into possession of power. He saw Hypatia as a threat. Not because of anything that she said, but that the way in which she said sacred truths naturally and affably attracted all who could hear her. And in her beautiful elegance and refined learning, she was a danger by the example of her person. And having remembered what somebody like Socrates could do to a whole generation in Athens, Hypatia was set upon and murdered.

With the murder of Hypatia in 410 A.D., we find the ancient mystery traditions realizing that they could no longer operate in public. And so, they went underground. They went off into the deserts. They went back to the same source from which they began. And if we have images of at the beginning of the scenes out into the wilderness, purifying themselves, finding their way. At the end classical Alexandria did not die nor disappear. It pulled its cloak of disguise over its true sense of interior invisibility and went into the deserts. And there it remained for nearly a thousand years before it was rediscovered in a time which when they recovered it said that man was undergoing a rebirth. Born again. Not into the pride of achievement, but into the mysteries of the purification.

Well, I've left out just about everything I thought of value. I've given you the dust wrapper and I apologize. I have about 20 slides. If you'd like to see them, we could show them now.

But I think it's not on this map. It's just below Cairo is the port where they came from, the Red Sea overland. And then they shipped up the mouth of the Nile to Alexandria. Now silted in so that one really cannot get through this way. Here's Lake Mareotis. Here's Alexandria here on the spit of land. So, you can see the classical description in Homer of the site of Alexandria, because it was an ancient oracular site, even in Homer, some 1000 B.C. He described the site as being close by Egypt. Not really in Egypt, but close by Egypt.

You're giving me control of this machine? Those who know me know I have no affinity with machines. As you can see. Once they followed Plotinus too closely in my youth. I cut away everything.

There is Alexandria. And here is Lake Mareotis. And you can see that it's all silted in. There it is. That's the experience of the ancient mysteries. It's hard to get the focus just right. You know it's there somewhere.

The great lighthouse was up here. This was the great harbor. And the, the Timonium of Mark Antony was out here at this part of the harbor. This was the area of the [inaudible] Museums. And I think we have some of these things outside. [inaudible]

This is an old engraving, and it had what I thought were the feel of the old harbor of Alexandria. This, of course, is 1500 years after its demise. But you get a feel in here.

This is a modern lighthouse of Alexandria. Again, it's just here for the feeling tone of the sparseness and richness at the same time. The rich mystery and the sparse geography.

This was a reconstruction of the lighthouse at Pharos. It was built about 280 B.C., and it was 400 feet tall. 40 stories tall. It was the marvel of the ancient world. And there was a statue on top of the lighthouse. It was said that you could see the lighthouse some 35 to 40 miles out to sea. And was one of the wonders of the ancient world.

In this section of Alexandria right by the harbor was a great temple, and there were two obelisks. One of them is now in London, and one of them is in New York City, in Central Park. The one in New York City is called Cleopatra's Needle. This is the sketch of it before it was moved. And this is how it looks in New York City. This is a romantic view of Cleopatra's death. She put; she died by the bite of a snake. This is a totally inaccurate portrait of Cleopatra. This is a fantasy. And this is the way most people see her. She actually was one of the most learned women of all time. As you know, one of the charming aspects of Cleopatra was that she could speak all the languages of the world. She could speak to any man in his native tongue regardless of where he came from. Just an Index to the tremendous learning that the Ptolemaic Alexandrians had.

Ancient Alexandria looked somewhat like this sketch. Of course, it was teeming. You have to add on to this German sketch, the Egyptian confusion. And then you get a sense of what could have been.

This is Pompey's pillar. Red sort of a stone and visible from most parts of even modern Alexandria. This column was one of 400 columns like this that made up the Serapeum. So, you can imagine how big the Serapeum was, in the sometimes called [inaudible]. The Serapeum had an enormous library, and it had also inside of it an enormous statue of the God Serapis. And Serapis was the Alexandrian God.

In one of Tacitus’ Histories, he recounts the moving of the statue of Serapis, who was originally the god Pluto, who came to a dream of one of the early first Ptolemy seers. And in this dream he saw a statue, and he described it to a whole circle of, of sages and wizards and holy men that were around Ptolemy. And he just brought the body of Alexander back, so he was very up on this sort of metaphysical adventuring. And some sailors said, I have seen this statue, but it's on the Black Sea in the community of Sinope. And so, Ptolemy Soter sent a whole bunch of individuals there to go and get this statue. And of course, the king of Sinope would not sell it. Why would they sell their God? So, the Greeks, of course, made a wonderful little adventure out of it. They, in the dead of night heisted the statue and put big footprints from the temple down to the [inaudible]. And they left a message saying that the God had gotten tired of these bores and was going. The Alexandrians are like San Franciscans from the very beginning they were gambling.

Ptolemy's Pillar, and you can imagine the size of the Serapeum. The large, huge statue of Serapis that was made later on in Roman Alexandria was made of an alloy of metals alchemically bonded together. It was one of the hardest alloys probably ever made in antiquity. And its coating was jewels that were ground up into dust and then put together with various kinds of sacred glues and painted on. So that when Theodosius sent his soldiers in to use their swords to smash the idol of the pagans their swords broke and smashed. And it was several weeks before they could get them back in. And incidentally, when they finally did topple over, the great statue of Serapis, they found graved and carved in the stone, making the base a Saint Andrew's cross. It shocked Theodosius. Many of the people at that time considered the fact that they had desecrated an indeed sacred mystery.

This is an interior of a Coptic church. The Serapeum was something like this. You can see how Ptolemy's column would have gone into the architecture. And of course, this Coptic Christian architecture was taken over from the old Alexandrian mystery tradition.

This is the outside of the Dendera Temple and inside on the very top. This was the, this was the design. I think this exists in P.R.S. library. It was black and white. It was never in color. It was in embossed on sandstone. All of the astrological cosmos is presented in the top. And of course, it is held up here by the ancient Gods.

Alexandria was honeycombed with catacombs, even more so than Rome. And you get an idea here. Alexandria, being on a limestone spit could carve infinite chambers of tunnels underneath. These are carved out. They're not constructed in, but they're carved away. And because it was in a desert, there were huge cisterns to collect rainwater. But it was also the perfect image for the mysteries to go underground in and prepared themselves. It was a model metaphor for exactly what they were going to do.

This is the Goddess Demeter. The [inaudible], this basket which became the cornucopia later on. And you can see that Demeter is the Goddess of the Earth. She is fruitful. She is able to give us all in the phenomenal realm. And under the Earth is Pluto, the God from under the Earth, from the catacombs of existence who has the sacred mysteries. And so, we see Serapis also has the basket of the fruit of the world on his head. He is adorned. His crown is the cornucopia, and he has raised up here to show that one may have this. This is an elegant triumph and not one of egotistical power, but one of selfless display that such is the case.

Serapis then, as the images went on and matured, you can see the cornucopia given here. And of course, when you see this in East Asia, this becomes the flower that Guanyin is holding. All of these images were universal. It was a single world.

And here the soul is a butterfly is on this sacred hoop. And the [inaudible] on the top of his head.

And here shows Pluto with Cerberus, the three headed dog, with a Canephores as a tower, as a sort of a medieval tower with his spear.

And this one shows Serapis with the [inaudible] and Isis with the blossoming life of rebirth. And here they're in tandem. And then they were in parallel. And of course, they came together. And as they come together closer in this focus, you have the primordial hermaphrodite of wisdom. The plant which grows again in the basket is like in the Hopi cosmology of deep down in the Kiva, the basket of the clay of the Earth. That in late January early February little bean sprouts start to come out. The same mystery presented in a way in which the natives could understand in that region.

The last one is the image of the psychostasis, the weighing of the soul. And what was the weighing of the souls? The weighing of the souls was that in the balance if a feather was heavier than your soul, then you were saved. So that the whole notion was to purify, purify, purify. Get rid of everything. Because if you're carrying your gold with you, you're never going to make it. You're going to weigh down this thing. You got to give it away, get rid of it. And if you're carrying your egotism, even that's going to weigh it down. What can be lighter than a feather? The air itself.

Well, I guess we'll have to make a whole course out of this. That's it.

END OF RECORDING