Early Pennsylvania Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends
Presented on: Saturday, May 21, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Early Pennsylvania Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends
"The Holy Experiement, The Message to the World from Pennsylvania"So reads the title of a huge folio book of hand printed sheaves and full color plates in the PRS collection. The mystic background of Philadelphia, and especially Germantown, will be shown as perpetuating the utopian ideals of such great figures as Pico della Mirandola, John Dee, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, Christoph Schlegel, Duke August of Brunswick, Jakob Spener, Jakob Boehme, William Penn, Johannes Kelpius, and Benjamin Franklin. Slides will be shown commemorating the 300th anniversary of Germantown, Pennsylvania.
Interconnections of the Secret Societies
Presentation 2 of 2
Early Pennsylvania Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, May 21, 1983
Transcript:
[Pre-lecture remarks]
Homer's recommendation was not to worship unless one was in the open, which is why the early sanctuaries of divinity were always like groves of trees or tops of mountains. That man should place himself in the midst of the world to worship, and not to go inside. And suppose that that was the cave. So, it's interesting.
[Lecture start]
This lecture today is a follow-up and the concluding part to several other trains of thought. In fact, it's a focus for about a year's worth of work and activity. The first part of this lecture exists on tape and they're available, and it was given about a month or six weeks ago at the Besant Lodge of Theosophy up on Beachwood. So, I'm assuming that that material is already available and hopefully has been heard. The second train of thought or line of development. This particular lecture is the culmination of a year's worth of work writing a book called Hermetic Roots of America, which should come out sometime this year. It is also the fulcrum, the culminating apex of meaning, upon which an understanding of history is balanced from a course that is just finishing up at the Gnostic Society over on Hollywood Boulevard, which took the developments of hermetic science. So, in many ways, this particular lecture today is a culmination. It also occupies, I might add, for those who have been coming for about three years now, a major transition in the whole development that I've been working on for three years for you, which is reestablishing the chronologica mystica, which hasn't been done in the West for some time, which seeks to establish that chain of being from the earliest origins of man through to our own present, so that instead of having a history which is unshaped by meaning, we have a chronologica mystica, one which is shaped by the overall vision of unity and in fact, the alchemy of history is exactly what we're dealing with today.
We're dealing with individuals for whom the perception of the unity of time produced a quality of eternal presence, and with that vision, they sought to then re inform and reform the capacities of man to style his life, his politics, his sense of government, his sense of religion, and to literally reform himself and his institutions in consonance with that vision of unity which they had come to appreciate not only in its scintillating vastness, but in the quality of resistance to its inception, which ignorance and ignorant people had manifested all through time, especially in the period where this was happening. The ostensible physical start for the book for the lecture series at the Gnostic Society for this lecture here was due to the extreme patience of a man whose name is Russell Slagle, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, who over 60 years ago, when he was a young man, was looking at his family history and realized that an ancestor 300 years ago had been termed a Rosicrucian, and he didn't know what a Rosicrucian was.
And in a very open, curious way, he asked his friends at the around Baltimore. And no one knew and no one seemed to care. And so, for 62 or 63 years, Mr. Slagle patiently has been collecting material on his family background, and on information on the individuals connected with his family, and slowly had put together a rather large sheaf of materials. And over the years he felt that somehow all this should fit together and should produce a story. And he had asked Mr. [Manly] Hall for many years to try to write this story for him. Well, last year Mr. Hall asked me to try my hand at writing this story to see how far I could go. And of course, the story turns out to be one worth telling, as they used to say.
We have two traditions to look at today. We have the Western Hermetic tradition, and we have its complementary motion, the American Indian tradition. And the two of them come together. And I'm sorry I could not find a reproduction of Benjamin West's great mythic painting, The Great Treaty [aka, Penn's Treaty with the Indians], where the American Indians and William Penn met together. But I will try to find that at some later date and produce a slide for us. We don't have time to go into both traditions extensively, and with the Hermetic tradition I've covered it already very well, except for the culminating parts, which I'll give you today.
So, if you find yourself curious on this material, refer to the other lectures via the cassettes. The focus of what I'm presenting to you today exists in a very large tome, a very large book. This is the box in which it is kept. And a woman did this in 1922, in Washington, D.C., and her name was Violet Oakley. And the name of the book is The Holy Experiment. And it was to be a presentation explaining all of the painting murals that she was doing for the State House of Pennsylvania. But it also happened to be done and written at the time that the International Armaments Council was taking place in Washington, D.C., after the First World War. And as she worked on the religious writings of William Penn and the political writings of George Washington, she realized that surrounding her in the newspapers of the day were the same issues coming up to again and in consonance with what she was working on, and of some of the quotations that I give you later on seem to be out of today's headlines, it's simply because we are forced to run on a treadmill until we have completed a sense of unity of purpose for that stage of development, because only then may we proceed with another transformation. As Carl Jung put it, it is incumbent upon consciousness to realize a shape of understanding, not a final shape, but a shape sufficient to the extent of its applicability, and that the purpose of realizing a shape of understanding in consciousness is to then translate it into ethical action.
Because ethical responsibility is the life core of meaning of a shape of understanding. And once we are then conscious and have put that into meaningful life, Mother Nature allows us then to go on to the next stage, the next phase, and we move rather than by point by point of a line of development. We move phase by phase in a transformational grammar of historical meaning, of which we are the authors and divinity is the resource. Now this particular volume, the Holy Experiment. Presents to us initially the conditions that obtained in the English-speaking world about 450 years ago, and she focuses as an interesting beginning upon William Tyndale. Now William Tyndale, who lived roughly from 1492, the discovery of America to 1536 - had a very short life. He lived about 44 years. Tyndale was of the same generation as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus. So those five names are actually a generation of genius whose purposes were to translate into the world of institutions and practical action, into the world of learning, into the world of making translations of the Bible especially, or translations of the Hermetic tradition into works of actual practice like medicine. And they had been preceded and taught by the generation of genius that formed the basic core of recovery, of understanding from the ancient world.
That is to say, using the time that Jacob Burckhardt used a century ago at the University of Basel. They produced a renaissance. The individuals in that Renaissance generation were based mainly at the root core on Marsilio Ficino and the Florentine Academy, set up under the aegis of Cosimo de Medici and furthered and sustained by Lorenzo il Magnifico, also a Medici, under Ficino. He had gathered together in increasing waves. The genius of Europe had sent them back out again into their respective countries, not so much indoctrinated by a view which he sustained, but infected by the contagion of a vision that man could understand if he set aside his habitual prejudices and went back to the root core of experience in himself and the root core of historical heritage in the originals, which meant in that phase, learning to read Greek, learning to read Hebrew, just as one would speak Latin, or one would speak English or Italian or German. This, going back to the root languages, produced an awareness of the fact that the continuity of history had been interrupted, and that the living, driving, dynamic force of the classical world was still alive and could be put back into motion again, and in fact was being put back into motion again by individuals who found themselves consonant with the qualities of consciousness and having similar ethical responsibilities to those figures of the 3rd century AD.
The prime figure of that time, of course, was Plotinus, the great founder, in a way codifier of the Neoplatonic school and Plotinus Enneads, when they were translated from the Greek into the Modern Latin by Ficino in about 1490 1491, was as great an explosion of possibility as Columbus's voyage to America. The generation that came out of Ficino that was the parent generation to Moore and Erasmus. Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Tyndale consisted of a number of individuals. Many of them were great artists like Albrecht Dürer or Alberto Mantegna, but the four main individuals who should be cited include three Germans and one Englishman. The Englishman was John Colet. And John Colet, whose father had been the Lord Mayor of London several times, became the founder of Saint Paul's Cathedral School in London, and it was he who rescued Sir Thomas More from almost destroying himself with ultra-asceticism. Thomas More at one time ended up living in a raw hair shirt on a bare floor, thinking that anything was going to contaminate him, and the wonderful, kindly, intelligent Colet rescued him from this, saying that this was just as bad as any kind of sin of excess that you might indulge in and brought him back. Colet also was the great mentor for Erasmus, and in letters, Erasmus always speaks of him as the beloved teacher, the one who taught him how to handle a certain equanimity of character, which is essential to developing an insightful mind because the old image of the insightful mind as a double-edged sword is true, and only the equanimity of character allows the just use of an insightful mind.
We find the same imagery in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna, who is the prototypical man of great action in the world because he can shoot the arrows and ride the chariot, is fearful not because of fear of death, but fearful because of the enormity of his own capacity, and is restored to a sense of wholeness by Krishna because he teaches him yoga, evenness of mind, and with that evenness of mind, Arjuna need no longer fear his tremendous capacity to do, because he can do with ethical responsibility what he will. Thus, the order of the world is established and founded on the metaphysical equanimity of character, so that with character developed to its fullness, its sense of unity, consciousness may then proceed to the next phase, the next stage in its hermetic helix spiral towards achievement.
So, Colet was the single Englishman, and incidentally, when his father died and left him an enormous fortune, this was about 1506. It was 50,000 English pounds in 1506. He devoted all of it to funding students to come and study, to setting up orphanages in London, making a marvelous school. Colet was really somebody. The three Germans who were very close to Colet, one of them was Johannes Reuchlin, who was the great translator from Hebrew into Latin, and he was the one who brought Kabbalah into Western thought and made of it a real metaphysical lineage.
The second German figure was a man named Trithemius, a great, wonderful Abbot Trithemius, who set up a system of education in central Germany at Sponheim, and later on at Würzburg; which founded the great orders that permitted Luther's Reformation to proceed at its rapid fire pace because Trithemius set up the community of spirits, of souls, of informed people who knew each other and were able to communicate through their understanding, both as an internal sense of kinship, having learnt the inner yoga and having learnt the outer ethical responsibility. One of his great students, of course, was Agrippa, who wrote many letters to Trithemius, and before he published his great volume De Occulta Philosophia, he sent the manuscript to Trithemius to see whether it was truthful and accurate, and Trithemius, of course, said this is quite excellent work, and now that you have done this you are ready to proceed and learn more. Go to London and go and meet John Colet and develop your character. And so, Agrippa put off publishing De Occulta Philosophia until near the end of his life. He needed more seasoning. Another great student of Trithemius was Paracelsus. And Paracelsus, such an enormously capable individual, rather, in the Hermetic tradition, like the figure of Alexander the Great, able to contain all the learning that could be given to him at the time.
And so not only Trithemius, but the third German of that generation was a master of Paracelsus, a mysterious man. I think in the 19th century they would have called such an individual an adept. His name was Salomon Trismosin, as parallel to, but distinct from Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes thrice greatest, and this man Solomon thrice Moses. And if you recall, or if you've been following my chronologica mystica, you realize that there was the Moses of the Pentateuch, and then there was Maimonides in the 12th century, who was a second Moses, and who made the Mishnah Torah, the great commentary on the law, and open up the possibilities. And with Solomon thrice Moses, Trismosin, that was then translated into a hermetic doctrine of transformative processing, done by balancing of inner event and outer circumstance. And Solomon Trismosin, of course, along with Trithemius, Colet, and Johannes Reuchlin, were the parent generation and were later stylized in mythological occult thought as the founders of the Rosicrucian Order. And their generation, which would have influenced the world tremendously, all came to a close by death and circumstance by 1541. William Tyndale, who was found to be making his own translation of the New Testament from the Greek and the Pentateuch from the Hebrew. And in England, was brought before a magistrate for heresy, if you can believe it. Fled to the continent and visited Luther and Wittenberg, 1524.
And Luther encouraged him to continue his work, provided some contacts whereby he could finish the New Testament and the Pentateuch, and they were finished in 1525, 1526. And they actually had to be smuggled into England. You had to smuggle the Bible into England. And of course, they were confiscated when they were found. They were burnt. Copies were bought up by the order of Henry the Eighth and the services and good offices, if we can use that firm of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Copies on the continent were bought up and then burnt.
Why should the Bible not be translated into English from the original Greek and Hebrew? Why indeed? Because putting the sword of discrimination into the hands of individuals, whereby they would engender a sense of ethical responsibility based on individuality, would make them unmanageable to the orders of hierarchical power that obtained in the world. In other words, the big companies did not want to have competition, especially a competition so broadly based as to include a democratic population of individuals whose unity was based on a massive understanding of truth, rather than some narrow, doctrinaire, temporary truth which could be argued with polemic. Tyndale, after ten years, was seized. He was tied to a stake. He was strangled at the stake, and then he was burnt as a heretic. His translation had proceeded as far as the Chronicles.
Paracelsus died in 1541. Sir Thomas More, I think most of you realize that Henry the Eighth had him put to death. Erasmus in the 1530s; Erasmus died 1535. So that there was a hiatus in European history in the 1540s, and it is one of those peculiar quirks in Western history which does not occur in histories like Chinese history. There are vicissitudes and massive tragedies, but there is not this massive cutoff, this pause, this gap, so that the generation coming into maturity and into understanding and capacity in the 1550s had to reconstruct from books and learning and from each other the tradition. They did not have that wonderful advantage, the tone of having the lineage passed on by a master, someone whose integration of the material is in the spiritual sense of the person, through that person, so that there is a definite lineage. And I think I've used the example of the Tibetan Lamas having their lineage. And one Lama characterized for me. He said that the style of the lineage can be different in the Vajrayana, like the Gelugpas are like candles being lit one from another, and the flame is continuous, but continuous in a paralleling way. Whereas the tradition of some of the more mystical sects and the Kadampa lineage is like a waterfall, that there is no way to tell the difference between one drop or another. But at any rate, the quality of a lineage in the Hermetic tradition in the West was interrupted in the 1540s.
The person upon whose shoulders fell, the recollecting of that tradition was John Dee in England, and John Dee was, of course, also the great Elizabethan magus of his time, important not only in England but on the continent. In fact, he spent the 1580s on the continent, trying to develop and perfect the hermetic techniques of transformation by actual contact with the godhood. They were trying to engender a direct line power source to the creator of the universe, so that they could reestablish the mode and the method by which the Hermetic tradition had been recovered, and by which the ancients had proceeded to express the divinity in the phenomenal time space world in which they found themselves. At the same time that John Dee was working on the continent for this end, with a medium named Edward Kelley, another man of his circle and a very close friend of his, Sir Walter Raleigh, was spending vast sums of money to try to develop the colony of Virginia in the New World, and both Dee's hermetic experiments on the continent and Raleigh's Virginia in America were related to that Elizabethan occult center that was working secretly with the approval and under the aegis of Queen Elizabeth, but with the understanding that she, being a monarch of the Tudor line, was not going to publicize this, and if they failed, she would be their worst enemy. And of course, the situation with Essex was a case in point.
If you failed a monarch like Elizabeth, you were not only out of graces, you were out of this life. This group in England under John Dee, and he taught two generations of Elizabethans, had its flowering of intelligence also cut off by early death. One of the great figures of that time, who was being primed and given the lead was Sir Philip Sidney, the great Elizabethan poet and one of three individuals who actually made the revolution in language which permitted them the development of English into a spiritual language. And the first examples of that language were the King James Version of the Bible [King James Bible], the plays of Shakespeare. In fact, the whole Elizabethan theatre, and along with Sir Philip Sidney was Gabriel Harvey and Sir Edmund Spenser, the author of The Faerie Queene. So, if one wishes to inform oneself in this area, go to the works of Spenser and Sidney and some of the works of Gabriel Harvey, and you will find there the development of the spiritual language.
The inheritor who took that language and took it out of the realm of poetry and put it into prose was Sir Francis Bacon, who was very close to John Dee as a youngster. But after the failure of John Dee, he was publicized as a sorcerer and as a wizard of slightly disreputable coloring. After the failure in Europe in the 1580s, he was brought back to England, slightly rehabilitated by being put in charge of a college up at Manchester, but never really recovered his position as the teacher. The inheritor of the tradition, and Bacon and his group, then developed off by themselves increasingly along with Bacon, and his expression came into the public domain in 1605 with the concluding second part of the Advancement of Learning. The first part had been done about a year or so before the Advancement of Learning. The advancement and proficiency of learning of 1605 brought the Elizabethan English language in prose form to a fine point. It was able from then on to express the complicated multi-dimensionality of mind that a worldwide scope of vision had engendered. And this is why, in Bacon's works after 1605, the entire world is his province for his writing subject. And the entirety of human history is the background in depth of what he would say about the entire world. If one wishes to get an insight into Bacon's later works after the Advancement of Learning. One of the best works to look at, aside from the King James Version of the Bible, which came out in 1611, is Sir Walter Raleigh's great History of the World. And in fact, if you look at that enormous tome of Raleigh's History of the World, you find there in the Elizabethan prose, a parallel vision of man's purpose through history, which is presented in the King James Bible Version of 1611, which is the poetic statement of it.
And then, along with those two great works, of course, the developing plays of Shakespeare round out in dramatic ceremonial religious ritual the development of man's character, beginning from Midsummer Night's Dream, where there's an equanimity due to natural process all the way through to The Tempest, where there is the learning process that man may transgress and have enormous power, but that he should give up his capacity to have enormous power and not to transgress, and thus put the world aright again consciously. So, from Midsummer Night's Dream to The Tempest, the plays of Shakespeare develop the capacities of man to understand that he must have this equanimity of character to go along with his insightful conscientiousness or he will indeed shred the fabric of the universe. At this time, the European tradition had developed itself from the days of Luther, and they chose to follow Luther rather than Trithemius and Trismosin because they had put their confidence in Paracelsus, who had died too young, to really make the full circle from Luther and from the German mystics of the 14th century, like Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart. The tradition had developed to the personage of a man named Johann Arndt, one of the greatest men of his time, and actually the German counterpart to Sir Francis Bacon, in the sense that Johann Arndt published in 1605 a classic entitled True Christianity. It was a Christianity of the individual heart, and this enormous work, published the same year as the Advancement of Learning, set up a parallel resonance, a tandem action in the now fragmented Hermetic tradition, but the two works brought the communication between the English and the German communities very much alive.
Johann Arndt, with his True Christianity, pointed towards the fact that the individual must have an interior sense of religious structure. Bacon's work- that, that- sense of interior structure must fully explicate the outer world, and so the two together form the merging spheres of the material world of natural philosophy or science, and the interior world of spirituality or religious transformation. And so, science and religious transformation were brought together, and where they were brought together symbolically emerged expressions of the complete man, the perfect man, that is, the individual who was developing inwardly and expressing that outwardly. Bacon, of course, had his influence largely after his death in 1626. All through the 1620s and 1630s 1640s, Bacon's influence multiplied. The same with Johann Arndt and Arndt's great friend Johann Gerhard of the Lutheran doctrine seemed to bring to a focus the idea that there needed to be increasingly a way to bring spiritually realized, or at least spiritually, on the path people together into a community, and that that community needed to be founded upon an understanding of nature and its unity, so that the development of science and the development of political utopias went hand in hand through the 17th century.
And in this regard, the generation that came after Bacon and Arndt, that generation that included John Amos Comenius as a major figure, tried to bring those spheres together and to increase the symbolic expression of the two in tandem. And I lectured last week on Comenius, and that's available on tape. I can't go too much into it today, except that one of the earliest works of Comenius was entitled The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart - the two frames brought together. And of course, Comenius, who became the head bishop of the Moravian Church, The Brethren in Czechoslovakia and Poland, was invited to England in 1641 to bring together Bacon's idea of a university of the world and the idea of the true Christian of the tradition from Johann Arndt. Comenius then wrote a number of tractates, in England, in 1641 and 1642, about the Pansophic all wisdom, tradition and school. And Comenius also wrote a complete program whereby this Pansophic university, with its attendant community, could be placed either on the continent, or in England, or in Virginia, and consonant to that Comenius drew up many educational plans to interface the European Hermetic understanding with the American Indians, and so we find his plans to set up branches of Harvard University, which had been founded about that time, 1636, specifically to form colleges whereby the American Indians and the Europeans of this descent, the spiritual path, could come together and learn from each other.
Comenius lived until 1671, and he lived long enough to see these two great traditions, which he temporarily had brought together, separate again, and the separation was along a very interesting line. Two great mammoth intellects represented the English and the German. Developments on the English side was Sir Isaac Newton, and on the German side was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Both men realized that the crux of the matter was in developing a universal language which was neither Greek, neither Hebrew, nor Latin, nor any, nor Reformed English, nor a spiritualized German, but was a universal language to express the newfound dimensionality of mind that had come into being. Both Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus as a universal language. Unfortunately, there was no attendant process developed by which individuals could be gradually taught this language en masse. Calculus was so difficult at that time - it was rather like Einstein's special theory of relativity in our time. Many people would pay obeisance to the greatness of the ideas. Almost no one could tell you what they are or how to learn them, much less how to think in them and how to apply them. So, the great achievement at the end of this tradition of intellectual development, so out shown the general populace of the time that they produced monolithic idealizations rather than a continuance of the tradition.
So, in the 1720s. Newton died in 1727; Leibniz about 1716. In the 1720s there was a gap again, a hiatus again in European thought, and individuals fell back to levels that almost preceded the Renaissance. They fell back into what we today derisively and erroneously would call a medieval frame of mind. But they fell into that medieval frame of mind with the increased comforts of society. And we find in the 18th century the effect individuals who are putting snuff on their little handkerchiefs and talking banalities in the ballrooms of Europe. While most of the rest of the population are suffering in the dirty streets of the increasingly large metropolitan areas, this experience of the wisdom tradition, without the ethical responsibility to permit bridges to the people so that it could become a part of the civilization of the time, rather than outstripping it by arrogant genius of consciousness, produce a quality of spinning the wheels which we still experience in Western civilization. We are still in the disease of the 1720s and 1730s. With all that, there was a clue, as it were, a thread of meaning, as it were, which was left intact, which has come down to our own time, which allows us to go back before that split happened, and to re-experience again the living unity with consciousness and character consonant with each other in the living Hermetic tradition before it suffered from this blowout of the genius of Newton. And this man who exemplifies that period is William Penn. And William Penn, born in 1644, about the time that Comenius was really bringing his material together and matured in that age.
By the time he was a young student at Oxford in 1660, was already having the religious visionary experiences he would literally see in the shimmering light of his mental and spiritual presence, the quality of unity speaking to him and enjoining him to live accordingly. And thus William Penn, as a teenager, caught, as Carl Jung would say, the archetype of the time. It was in the air. It was there in Penn, and he was one of those talented individuals who caught it, who understood it. And of course, he began immediately to investigate. And he found in his time people who were living examples of what he was, uh, trying to discover. Penn found that there were individuals who called themselves friends. But because of a quality of a court case where the judge and the jury and people arguing were found quaking at the revelations, coming out, not wanting to hear it, the people, instead of being called friends, were called Quakers rather derisively at first. But the friends, under the great visions of George Fox, finally impressed upon William Penn that there was a possibility of having an individual religion of the inner light,' which still permitted the collecting of a community of like-minded and like-envisioned individuals together, and was free to move as the Franciscans had in the 13th century anywhere in the world, because they understood the key of human nature and they were free to be with humanity in any manifestation.
And eventually William Penn, after having been imprisoned several times for his speaking out and his writing having been threatened to be dispossessed by his father, the great admiral. William Penn found himself re-established back into his father's good graces about the time his father died in 1670 and left him an enormous fortune, and in that portfolio of riches was a debt from the Crown of England for £16,000, and in order to acquit that debt the Crown of England was willing to give to William Penn the province which became Pennsylvania. And Penn, with his religious unitary envisioning, realized that his prayers had been answered, not that he'd been given something, but that some visionary possibility had been made manifest to him.
Pennsylvania was not a thing to him, but it was God's true vision, the clue that his movement in history was about to have its ethical responsibility rewarded immediately began to collect individuals under the principle of religious toleration, to go to the New World. He also addressed the King of England and told him that since he now had legal title to the lands from the Crown, he was going to proceed to go to the colony and to buy it from the Indians. And the King said, "this is stupid. You've already paid me for it." And Penn said, "yes, but in actuality, the land is not yours to sell. It belongs to those who are living there. And I will go and establish relationships with the Indians." And the King commented on the fact that Penn did not have an army to back up his negotiating status. And Penn replied that he would go, in fact, unarmed, and would have no militia. There would be no forts, and the King called him crazy. He said, "we have a lot of experience with these natives - they're killers." And Penn said, "the only experience you have is with the reaction which you have engendered by your desecration of those people and their lands. I go as a person with the light of inner vision and the openness of God. They will see that because from what I can understand, they have that capacity also."
And so, Penn arrived, and the hallmark of the William Penn spiritual pilgrims, no matter what sect they came from or whether even they had ever heard of William Penn later on, the hallmark of those Americans from the Hermetic tradition were to have no need of armaments. And one of the tales the friends tell is that the American Indians, even during great wars and uprisings and rebellions, would test the doors of the cabins, and if they were unlocked, they would leave the people alone because they knew they were friends. And if the doors were locked, they knew then that there was a resistance, and they would be part of the embroilment.
The unlatched door was the symbol of the unity of man in the light of divine vision. And the Indians understood that. And in fact, when the meeting of the American Indians and William Penn's early Quaker friends, colonists got together, the Indian peoples in constant with their own tradition, translated the understanding of unity into an expression, a symbol, which was the wampum belt. And the wampum belt being a beaded symbolic language based on a mutual vision of the unity of the situation and how ethically that had been transformed into a statement of value.
So, the wampum belt was not a money belt to buy things with but was a value symbol to express the agreed upon manifestation of the unity of the Great Spirit. And that as long as that wampum belt was held in honor, the individual thus holding it was freed of worldly entanglements and could travel anywhere in the Americas with it on display, usually around the shoulders like a mantle, and one was accepted without question anywhere. This idea of a wampum belt to symbolize a vision also passed on to General George Washington, and when Washington made a great peace treaty also with the Indian populations later on, another wampum belt like that given to William Penn was given to Washington. The belt was about 6 foot 3 [inches], about the height that Washington was with his boots on, and it had 13 individuals for the 13 colonies holding hands, and in the center of it was the structure of a house with eaves coming out from it. And there were two Indians expressing that the house of vision was open, and therefore the unity of the Americas was assured from their side and from the European side.
Now, this wampum belt, this peace belt of Washington is sold in 1893, along with some other items, for $500 by people who didn't understand religious values, who did not understand vision. But at least it got into a museum where Mr. Hall was able to see it one time, and he made his own version of the middle part, the Royal Arch of that wampum belt because when it's worn like this, it is like the Royal Arch of Masonry. And this is the keystone, and there's the house. And this Mr. Hall made this about 40 years ago. He also did the crocheting himself. He said, "So this is on display here. This was a sign to Penn and to Washington that there was a concordance of vision between the Indian populations and the incoming immigrant populations, whoever they might be.
Now, this development on the part of the American Indians, I think, needs to have a few words about it. One of the basic religious structures in this part of the world, before the arrival of any immigrants whatsoever, was a forest priesthood. And this priesthood had an interesting set of institutions. There was a set of holy persons who were devoted to prophecy, and there was another set who were devoted to healing by spiritual means. There was an offshoot, third set, later on, called the albinos. But the first set, the prophets. The Algonquin word for it was the [Jessica?] and the suffix, which is added to it to substantiate it, to make it a person, is W-I-N so that the [Jessica? Wynn?] was a prophet and they were a tradition. And all-over North America, no matter what persons would be informed, whatever tribal background, whatever totemic situation, the prophets were honored, and their purpose was to envision the continuity, the vision of the whole of history and how it moved. Consonant with that was the other group, and the word for them is based upon a verb, which is mata, mata, mata. And if you add the suffix W-I-N to it, you get matawin, and the matawin were the ultimate healers. They were not the physicians in the sense of just applying herbs or liquid or dry medicines, much like we would call a doctor today. But they were deeper than a doctor because their healing was a healing of wholeness. And it also went back to the Great Spirit, just as the prophetic tradition would go back to the Great Spirit.
So, the matawin were those physicians of the soul, the curer of souls. Carl Jung says, is the purpose of individuation, the cure of soul. These two groups, of course, had as their basis not only the Great Spirit, which was the inner world, but the understanding of nature, which was the outer world. So that religious experience and the science of natural philosophy were also the two spheres that were brought together, so that the matawin especially and somewhat less, but also important, the [Jessica? Wynn?] were the Hermetic Magus of North America. And thus, when they understood that there were people coming in who also had this understanding, they met them as brothers and expressed it by this symbol.
Are we ready for a break?
I obviously don't have time to go into all of the aspects, but I hope when the volume The Hermetic Roots of America comes out that some of this explication in length will be available, and it addresses itself, of course, to all of the major conditions that still bother us in our time. The question of science, the question of government, the question of internal achievements, and all of it is seen, as we might have suspected all along, to be interrelated again and again throughout history and in recent history, it has come to be an almost impasse, almost like a Gordian knot, which before Alexander could have his ecumenical, his one world, that Gordian knot would have to be solved.
Hopefully this time, instead of wielding the might of the sword ingeniously, we might dissolve it in the loving kindness of understanding and thereby be permitted to move on to the next phase of history. One individual taking the cue from William Penn who contacted the aged Isaac Newton in London, but who missed the essential missing fragment of Leibniz simply because of circumstance was Benjamin Franklin. And in the personage of Benjamin Franklin, we have the closest approximation to the Hermetic tradition, continuing intact and in wholeness. In fact, Franklin and himself continued as much of it as he could. And it's interesting to note that in his collected works, which are now all available from Yale University Press. In the first volume, the very first thing that he ever wrote at the age of 19 is a dissertation on liberty and necessity. And when he returned from England after having contacted Newton and several other persons and positioned himself in Penn's "City of Brotherly Love." He wrote a great short treatise on Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, to give the Alpha of the individual understanding, and then to complete that document, because we must have the Omega for unity, he, at the age of 22, wrote his epitaph to close out this. Articles of Belief. The body of be Franklin printed like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, and its script of lettering and gilding lies here.
Food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost. For it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, corrected, and amended by the author. This is exactly the quality and tone of the understanding of the American Indian tradition, and one of the few individuals who had a chance to learn firsthand, in 1820, was [Henry Rowe] Schoolcraft, who, up around Lake Superior, was actually shown the secret matawin ceremonies so that someone might understand. And it was only unfortunate that Schoolcraft did not have the depth of vision and the scope of field to envision all of it and understand what he'd been shown. But he records in volume one, 1853, of his massive Indians of America [aka Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States], that they assured him that the soul of man is a vital spark passing from one to another. That it was not man, but it was an animated creation moving through man, and even for a time it could be in an inanimate object, but that it was this that moved and not man. And thus, of course, the hermetic understanding of sacred history and how it moves by event and not by cause, is also the clue to how the world of physics and astronomy actually obtain a unity. With the Hermetic view, Jung, with his principle of a causal connectedness synchronicity, is right on the verge of understanding that old hermetic knowledge of how physical, phenomenal reality comes into being and has its motion.
I, of course, could go on with this, but I think just one more emendation, one more part of this, and then we'll have some slides to illustrate visually some of this material. As I said at the beginning of the lecture, wonderful man, three months older than Mr. Hall in Baltimore, Mr. Slagle wondered about his ancestor and his ancestor Christopher Slagle had studied in the house of Johann Gerhard had known. Johann Arndt had in fact become involved as a tutor with the same family that Johann Valentin Andrea had become a tutor. The Duke of Brunswick and so forth had gone as a competent middle-aged individual, under invitation to the Tatra mountains, the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary, Transylvania, in the 1650s. And it was exactly there, in the same place that Comenius, under invitation, also went for 4 or 5 years, and the family issuing those invitations, of course, of the Rakoczi family later on would become quite famous. In the 18th century, the time of Franklin, Ferenc Rakoczi would become the father of the quintessential main families and their traditions. Their lineages are the best clue to retracing the Hermetic tradition, because it was through the families, in their own small ways, that they kept alive the information and what lineage they could.
And in fact, it was a grandson of Christopher Slagle who formed one of the early communities of Rosicrucian hermits who left Germany in 1694 and went to Philadelphia and got there on midsummer Eve. And they were Christian hermits devoted to the process of trying to establish a community of perfecting 40 members in the wilderness. It's now a part of Philadelphia and Fairmount Park along the Wissahickon River. But it was then part of the wilderness, and they established a monastery. And in this monastery, with its architectural shape, the roundness of totality and the square of unity, and on the top was the great Rosicrucian symbol of the circle, with the cross in it, to catch the early morning rays of the rosy light of the sun, of the dawn. And one of the members of that community was a forebear of Mr. Slagle in Baltimore, and his curiosity throughout the ages. He started in about the First World War to wonder about his family led directly to my involvement with this material. And it's interesting to note that later descendants on the European side of this Slagle family were involved in the romantic revolution. He has forbearer, uh, Auguste Slagle was the great translator of Shakespeare into German in the romantic period, the 18th, 19th century, a great traveling companion of Madame de Stael and his brother Friedrich Slagle, one of the great philosophers of the German Romantic period. So, all through Western European lineages are carried by the families. And if we can get over our prejudice of thinking as the family as an extraneous element of society - if we can look at it as a necessary ingredient of the very fabric of history, we may go back, like I have done, and re-inform ourselves as to how life is passed on.
Nature never really leaves gaps. All the events happen. Stage by stage. The gaps are there because of the incompleteness of the understanding, the frame of reference put upon it. So, when we fill in the quantum jumps of the electromagnetic spectrum, we will find there that spiritual expressions belong exactly there, because it's in the presence of the pores that the Holy Spirit steers the star course home.
Well, I have some slides and I could go on, but let's have these slides and see. This first slide is to link us with the lecture I've done at the Besant Lodge, which was the Interconnections of the Secret Societies going from the Hellenistic period through to the Renaissance. And this, of course, is a fragment of tapestry showing a Hellenistic style physique. And a hermetic produce only. This piece of fabric was found in the middle of the Gobi Desert in 1906 and had been buried for more than 1200 years.
Next slide. This also was found there, and these were found by Sir Aurel Stein, and illustrations of these occur in his monumental four volume Innermost Asia, a record published by Oxford University Press of his discoveries in the Gobi Desert. This shows the Hermetic intertwining the double serpent. The staff is hidden, but at the top the Chinese founders of civilization, Fu Xi and Nüwa, hold Masonic implements in their hands. The calipers and the square, with the plumb bob coming down to indicate where the presence of the paws might be in the structure.
We jump now to Albrecht Dürer. This is Melancholia done in 1514, and it shows the personality type, the melancholic, that is the philosophic of puzzled to limbo, not by the dirt, but by the prolixity of historical antiques, embodying in powerful symbols all the knowledge of the world. But the inner understanding has not yet been passed on. Therefore, the student has an interesting collection, but it has not yet integrated itself through understanding to a worthwhile life.
This is one of five slides from the figure I of Joaquim de Fiora, a visionary historian, around the year 1200, who produced the hermetic view of history moving by massive stages, and that the stage of the father had been in the Old Testament and the stage of the son in the New Testament, and now the third, the age of the Holy Ghost, the spirit that will move from whence we may not know if we are just phenomenally informed to purposes where we cannot tell if we are again, simply ignorant, we must be of the spirit to move with it.
Next slide. One of Joaquim de Fiora's favorite figures was the descent of the dove as a tree of genealogy, descending from the divine to man. And there was likewise an ascending dove moving in the opposite direction of history, collecting itself by moving phases that seemingly were unrelated at an early level. But as one progressed in history, they became related more and more to an overwhelming sense of shape and form, and that finally, a point of equilibrium would come where man could see the enormous shape of his ethical responsibility, exemplified by creating a historical civilization of manifestation, would meet the descending hierarchies of God's rules, and there would be an interpenetration. And at that point the eyes of the eagles of man and God would see together.
Next slide please. This, of course, produced the vision that life was a tree. And in fact, the tree of life was that uncovered aspect of his existence that man had to find. And it was only by his eye seeing in consonance with the divine eye, that he could see that the tree of life was the life, in fact, that he lived. The hermetic codification of it was the life lived is the doctrine received. And of course, the three great stages interpenetrated as three circles gives us the interchange. And at the center the vesica piscis, the form of the birth, the threshold of birth, of vision, of entering into life. Next slide please. I'm truncating all this. We could go on. For hours in each of these, the mystical shape of history. Then as the sacred vessel wherein the alchemical transformation happens by the even application of the fire of aspiration, produced this kind of a form. And in Joaquim de Fiora, 800 years ago, it was seen as a rather far out structure. We today would see it in the eyes of advanced physics as being the kind of container that was made up of magnetic waves to hold subatomic processes.
Next please. This was symbolically presented many times over, but one of my favorites is this painting of Rembrandt. And Rembrandt was a great friend of Comenius for a long time, and one of the great portraits of Comenius by Rembrandt of favorite student. This Rembrandt painting or other engraving is of the alchemist looking up to see the Holy Spirit. And how does the Holy Spirit come? And a shimmering flash, except that to the informed vision of the alchemist, the flash contains within its brilliance the organized order, the language of transformation, which is a mathematical geometrical unity. And he who can see in the flash of insight the unity of its language, may then translate that to the world. The tradition moved by many geniuses, one of the earliest about the time of Joaquin de Fiora, was Roger Bacon.
Next please, and the time that Bacon was brought back into circulation was about the time that a secret volume was drawn up, which contains within itself the degrees from Trithemius and Trismosin to Paracelsus, plus correspondence between the three of them. This is, can we go back to that for a second? This is Solomon Trismosin, and you can see from the character of the man, it's the life lived that is the doctrine received. This man is not going to lie to you. This man, drawn in 1509 by a man named Zenker, is like a massive Rembrandt genius that we can see with our own sensitivity. The explicitness of his character and the penetration of his insight.
The next slide is the title page, done on a papyrus with color of one of his great books, The Golden Fleece La Toyson d'Or. He also had another book, Splendor Solis, which has the red line alchemical process given in 22 images, and of course in La Toyson d'Or, the process of the Golden Fleece is also given in 22 picture images. This leads to the Major Arcana, but in a way which is not quite consonant with the mechanical Arcana that has come down to our time.
Next, this is one of the pages from this secret document. Which one copy exists in all the world, and that in our vault here at PRS [Philosophical Research Society]. And this is a degree up here to the Philip Theophrastus. Paracelsus, who was the keeper of the most arcane, triple arcane, inner secret, the secret of secrets, secret and signed here the Abbot Trithemius and later on another page, which I'm not going to show today. Also, Salomon Trismosin.
Give us the next slide. And you can see here Paracelsus, along with a friend of Doctor Dee's, all on the same page. Roger Bacon was on it. The idea was to give the lineage always that the Hermetic tradition was an emphasis equally on both. It was hermetic and it was a tradition.
Next slide please. The cover. The title page of this document, which we have contains the rosy cross, and you can see that the cross is the black nigredo of the open abyss of all possibility. And what occurs within that nigredo against that universal ground is the name of Jesus carved onto the nigredo in a way that allows penetration through the form of the darkness, to disclose the light behind it, not to create a shape in itself, but by a process which William Blake liked to say by a reverse imprint process we create not objects, but openings. We move instead by creating things, by creating presences which allow us to discover the light behind things. And it is this process that moves the Hermetic tradition and the Rosicrucians, of course, the great Christian yoga mystics of that tradition. The acrostic form shows that there's an inner penetration of this discovery mode. There's a vertical mode and a horizontal mode together, and around on the outside would be the inner eye of mystical symbolic description of that personage at the center of the cross.
But the initial eye is buried in the ground. It is not seen; it is yet to be tapped. And of course, the ground is green and brown. It's fertile ground. It's going to grow. From the cross comes a sphere, and after that comes wisdom. From the cross comes light. And after that, jubilation. So, spirituality and light characterize the fullness of discovery, and wisdom, and jubilation. The ethical transformation of that discovery and its capacity to the world so that one manifests one's consciousness in the better life. Here's John Dee.
We're going to move along a little faster, a number of them. This has its origin backwards. This is the title page of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. And there's the eye. The constant eye of man meeting the eye of divinity, seeing together the entirety of the world and all the other implements here and on the bottom, of course, death and degradation are worn out. And the new day is dawning.
Next please. Raleigh. Here's what he looked like. He also was taken aside, as the power structures always do when they are threatened at the core, they take you aside and interrogate you. And if you don't cooperate, well, then they keep you for a while. And then if you're still a danger. Just as they strangled William Tyndale at the stake, they killed Sir Walter Raleigh, also from the Tower of London.
Next. This is why Bacon, incidentally, was so careful all the time. This is Heinrich Kunrath, one of the great authors at the time. His book, the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, Amphitheater of the Eternal Wisdom, came out in 1609. He was one of Dee's friends. In fact, when John Dee left Europe, one of the last visitors recorded in his diary was Heinrich Kunrath book was written about 1602.
Actually, next case on here. This is from that book, the title page, the Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom. The sun of truth, the Christian Kabbalistic divine magic, and the physical chemical. You see how it moves equally from the internal realms to the external realms, that there is a Christian Kabbalistic, but there's also a physical chemical. They're all of one flowing Mobius strip of continuity, that the illusion of an inner and outer world is due to perspective. And there are not two circles, but one infinity sign.
This is another page, and the alchemist is praying at a 10th. That's very much like Solomon's tent. And here's his laboratory with the instruments. And he has musical instruments along with his chemical material, so that the laboratory of the operator, the spiritual magician, has prayer and work together. Same instruction. This from the work of man styling himself as Theophilus Schweighardt. And here the invisible college, suspended ultimately by a hand from a cloud. That hand sometimes in the past, has held a sword. This time it holds a college, an invisible college, which is able worldwide and throughout history to teach and disseminate the discovery capacity and its ethical unification of man throughout time and space. Another page from that this done in diagram form. Again, as you can see, this is taken from the figure I of walking Fiora, but transposed to an age where it was more specific, more geometric. And these kinds of figures occurred in those early Rosicrucian Hermetic materials that made their way to Philadelphia with immigrants, like from the Slagle family under Johannes Kelpius. In 1694, Mr. Hall, in order to defend that tradition and keep its purity in the late 1930s, published the Codex Rosae Crucis, translated by his wife Marie Bauer Hall, and you'll find in there many diagrams like this taken from a Philadelphia Rosicrucian manual.
Next case we're getting to this man over here. It's a laughing matter. Sorry, sir didn't mean to shock you into humor. So many different symbols. Yes, they crawl on the page like ants. Unfortunately, sometimes we can see the column. This is a page which shows us the emergence in the European psyche at this time of the mandala form. And it's interesting to note the motions of dance on the outer edges. And of course, if we had time, we could go into this motion of dance. How the motion of natural development is the strove and man's conscious reversal around to create the Hermetic Key is the anti-stroke, and where the beginning and the end are the Alpha and the Omega leaves a space of presence called the epoch, and thus dance and poetic form create a structure not to exemplify itself, but to create the presence whereby direct communion between divinity and man may occur.
All sacred ceremonies, all real poetry, all real drama, all mandalas create this sense of presence whereby the humor of the universe may be perceived. Elias Ashmole, between Comenius and the developments of Newton. Of course, the great development of institutions in England, like the Royal Society for the advancement of learning, for the discovery of by experimentation and natural philosophy.
If some of you were here Thursday night for the Robert Grosseteste Day Lecture, it might be interesting for you to compare the development of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the 13th century with the development by Ashmole and Newton in the late 17th century of very similar traditions. That is, that spiritual science, and experimental science, being light modulated, were of a consonance which man could understand. It's interesting. Sir Isaac Newton's first great physical work was the Principia, the Principia Mathematica of natural philosophy, and. After that, he devoted himself for 4 or 5 years to try and decipher the revelations in Daniel and Ezekiel and The Apocalypse. And after that brought the two together and wrote his Great Optics, which is a treatise on light and its modulations in nature.
We have now the slides from the book The Holy Experiment. This book is here at PRS, so I'll just introduce the slides. The book exists here. You can on your own, look at it, read the symbols and so forth.
Here's William Tyndale translating his Bible. It was begun at Cologne, and then the authorities got wind of it, and they raided the place. But fortunately, he had fled with the manuscript and completed it at another location in Europe.
Here's smuggling the Bible into England. You have to sometimes smuggle the basis of life into your situation.
Here's the book burning. This doesn't happen just anywhere. It happens at Oxford University in England. That's where they burnt these books. They once in Doctor John Dee's life, were carting by the bushel barrel of books on alchemy and books of Roger Bacon out of the Oxford Library and throwing them into the dump. And Dee ran out there with his students and gathered up these manuscripts. And part of John Dee's great manuscript library were those thrown in the junk heap from Oxford's library. Fortunately, they were preserved. And where are they now? They're in the United States. They got here very early on. The first governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop Junior, was a great hermetic alchemist whose library contained many of the books of John Dee, and those now are in possession of great libraries in America. We're talking about the mainstream of history. We're not talking about an occult offshoot. We're talking about how history is made.
Here's George Fox on the mount of vision. The waterspout, of course, showing the transformative waters whipped up by the hook, the divine wind, uh, and his mouth opened and slime William Penn seeing his vision. And, of course, the artist has harkened back to Rembrandt's Alchemist looking up at the Holy Spirit. Same tradition, similar processes. When you begin to see the arcs of meaning in parallels, it's the beginning of synchronistic perception. And when the notion of unity begins to decipher itself through the context of living better, then the transformation is in fact obtained.
The same thing done in a woodcut, giving us the line 1660 of Christ Church, Oxford. Penn was thrown out for being rather unruly. He wouldn't tow the line. He doesn't say he wouldn't go along with the ground up teachings of the time. Later on, he ended up lecturing on inner light' in the fields outside of Oxford, and that's how he got arrested and thrown in prison.
Next slide. And here he is preaching. He's talking about the qualities of inner light', perfecting that equilibrium. And from that equilibrium, man's consciousness may then move freely. Inner and outer and produce an understanding of his life history and of nature. Authorities who count on us being ignorant and fragmented do not like this. This is not good for them. You can't put handles on the backs of individuals who refuse to have them. So, you end up in jail. It still happens today. We're just fortunate to be in a place and a time temporarily that we can speak openly.
Penn writes with his quill, and one of the first works of genius that came out from him was a little book, a little tractate called No Cross, No Crown, one of the real gems of world mystical literature. He promised his fellow prisoners. Most of them were friends. We would call them Quakers colloquially, that he would find a way out of all this. How would he do that? He would put it to the test of inner life to find some way to modulate the Paradise of the heart. Always has the clue to escape the labyrinth of the world. It was true for Theseus, and it was true for William Penn. He found the way Pennsylvania occurred. The ship welcome occurred. The meeting of peoples occurred. Penn sold land at the rate of 100 acres for £2, so that anyone could get there if they had the vision to go. And of course, it was like leaving for the Promised Land all over again. And there are many quotations in Penn reminiscent of Moses in reminiscent in William Tyndale's version of the Pentateuch, of the Exodus. And they saw themselves moving again in familiar arcs of meaning, consonant with the overall unity of history.
And here's Penn, almost as if he is the prow of the ship, the prow by his direct vision, because the prow of being moves by the direct vision. The unlatched door thing and the opening of it. And the savage warriors discovering the open latch. And the colonists - the pilgrims inside have their entire place decorated in American Indian fashion. All the implements of the home are native to that land, and the spirit, like the ancient Egyptian goddess [knit?] of the holy expanse of the sky, linking horizon to horizon into a unity is there linking the red man and the European together. Touch not mine anointed. And here is the beginning of the legend of peace and the bringing together then of all peoples in freedom. Penn here freeing slaves, purchasing them, and leaving them free to be in the community so that the nimbus of light around Penn now shows his dedication to the ethical living in his life of the interior vision. This is to be a city of brotherly love for all the entirety of the world. Later on, it was in Philadelphia that many of the great events of American history happened.
So just quickly go through these. Violet Oakley has put these in her book.
Here's Washington Marching to the Brandywine.
Here's Washington at the Continental Congress.
Here's Franklin and the Jeffersons down here. The man down below here, the black man below is holding the large tomes of reference of the law.
And this is the foundation that leads back up between Franklin and Jefferson to Washington, who is looking up, not at the people there, but looking up to see with the same clear-eyed vision that Penn was seeing there. Later on, of course, that same area where the early Pietists had gone was the great battlefield of the Civil War, Gettysburg, down there in southern Pennsylvania.
And this is General Meade riding through. Abraham Lincoln delivered a wonderful speech at Independence Hall in 1861, not the Gettysburg Address, but in that speech, it was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. And he was saying in that speech in Independence Hall in 1861 that were not in this experiment of the United States just for our self-aggrandizement, even though we are now getting to be a collection of all peoples, but that this is a signal beacon throughout history for all men, and therefore we should do this right.
And here's Lincoln, of course, then, delivering the Gettysburg Address two years later on the field there, not so very far from Philadelphia.
The final painting that Violet Oakley had is a very large mural about 45 feet long. And in the center is this blue woman who is unity. And I think I would like to read to you an excerpt that she gave if I can find it here on from Keats and John Keats on Unity. If I can find this. She wrote... Oh, it's from Hegel's [Lectures on the] Philosophy of History. The life of the ever-present spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments which looked at in one aspect, still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view, appear as past. Spirit is immortal. With it there is no past, no future, but an essential noun. The grades which spirit seems to have left behind, it still possesses in the depths of its present. It is science alone that can comprehend the kingdom of God and the socially moral world as one idea, and that recognizes the fact that the course of time has witnessed a process ever tending to be the realization of this unity.
Next slide is one of the details. Off to the side you see one of the hands of unity. And this is the leaves of the tree of life were for the healing of nations.
And then the next slide on the other side. The complement to the tree of life is the great city, symbolically the great city, which is the product of vision. Unity has the city and the tree of life.
Now, very quickly, I'd like to just show some images that this tradition still alive. These are American Indians, not of Penn's time, but of our time. Just 20 years ago, still passing on the sacred ceremonies to their young intact, and the men still passing on to other men. And one of them, of course, well known to us, this is Black Elk, as a young man whose books are still being read today, whose son is still alive today. The technique of making the sweat lodge the place of interior realization, the place where the nuclear core of community is forged, still understood, still known. They worship. And the use of these implements still understood since 1960. Up in Canada. The path of the self in Navajo Indian symbolism is that it is not a closed unity, but that what makes unity is that the structure has allowed for the openness to be included in its form, that the form of divine motion, either in the Hermetic tradition or in the American Indian tradition, is one of creating an actuality of presence in the life of the person, as Dylan Thomas said, "A good poem leaves some openings for the lightning and thunder to come through." And that symbol of that interior presence is the operative fulcrum of all science and all mystic religion, all rituals of understanding, and the large serpents of understanding of the four corners of the world collect themselves ceremoniously in a unity around that field established the central figure of some magic. Yeah. So that is the panorama of the actual world, man's community symbolically manifests the fulcrum of transformation, and that relates to the entirety of the cosmos.
The next line. I'm having to write this so that in the center of the community, at its ceremonial gathering of forces together, one can have for the individuals like the sweat lodge, or one can have for the entirety of the community, like the Sundance Lodge and in the sweat lodge in miniature. The focus is on the fire and in the large structure. The focus is on the collecting and gathering to the top. And it's there especially the foliage is left green. And also, in among the foliage are all the prayers and petitions and understandings of man written out in the language that he has.
Next slide and collected there so that the focus where all the parts comes together at its keystone is where all the wisdom is gathered in place. In public so that the entire community may understand. Men still know and still teach the truth, and it is for everyone's benefit. The same as the whole. The feathers and the prayer sticks combined together to carry our aspirations up, to display them not only in public, to the community, but to the cosmos that we understand, and we are here. It was true all the time.
This is from Altamira in northern Spain, some 30,000 years ago. The collecting together of the expressions of man's world, his understanding whether he is dependent upon his understanding for the natural of animals, of the world and their being to translate himself. And it's still apparent in the North American Indians and the Sundance ceremony. They still take the tongues of the buffalos, and they dry them out and cut them up. And the holy woman still distributes the tongues of the buffalos to everyone, so they may all speak that secret language of nature. It's the same thing, the collecting together. And often in this early expression, you will find the handprint of man's capacity to do also placed right on the wall.
And in Central Africa some 12,000 years ago in the Danja mountains, southern Algeria. The same kinds of understanding. And here the animals and here man, spiritual man, and the animals. Being born out of man and man, born out of the animals. The transposition of the inner and outer world. The way in which through comprehension man moves with surety and with unity.
And in our time expressed here by Max Ernst, his painting of Leonardo da Vinci, the essential unity of structure in a man's vision that he understands. And that's the face he wears. Or like Thomas Jefferson here in this wonderful portrait, the integrity of the life lived, absolute confirmation that the understanding has not only been achieved but has been lived.
So that the freedom of man is not just a freedom of choice, but of unity of motion, coordinating the inner and outer worlds so that he moves with the grace and agility of the spirit. Where will he go out? Get home? To be at home in the whole universe? Because it's not a dead object. It's alive and it glows with the light that he knows very well. Thank you.
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