Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends
Presented on: Saturday, April 9, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends
The similarities in the inner teachings of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonary. He will discuss the writings of John Dee and Sir Francis Bacon, bringing these most interesting concepts down to the present. There is a Fascinating parallel in the membership of these great organizations which also include famous men and Presidents of this countryInterconnections of the Secret Societies
Presentation 1 of 2
Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, April 9, 1983
Transcript:
This lecture was given by Roger Weir before the Besant Lodge of the Theosophical Society in Los Angeles. The title of the lecture is, Interconnections of the Secret Societies. This is part one of a two-part lecture series. The second part will be entitled Early Pennsylvania Rosicrucians, Pietists, and Friends, and will be given before the Philosophical Research Society on Saturday, May 21st in the morning.
[Introduction by member of the Theosophical Lodge]
Good afternoon friends and welcome to Hollywood Theosophical Center. Since some of you are new to our center, I should say that we are an autonomous group, but we are affiliated with the Theosophical Society, whose international headquarters are in Adyar, Madras, India, and the National Theosophical Society, whose headquarters are in Wheaton, Illinois.
We have three primary objectives: to promote brotherhood without distinction of race, color, sex, caste or creed; to study comparative religion, science and philosophy; and to investigate the so-called hidden laws of nature, such as reincarnation and karma, and the powers latent in mankind. But in connection with our second object, we are very privileged to have Mr. Roger Weir speak for us this afternoon on the interconnections of the secret societies, primarily the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. I've been looking forward to hearing from Roger Weir for a long time, since most of my friends have heard him, and by reputation he is an excellent speaker and he's going to introduce himself, which is a little unique this afternoon. And then we will have our talk. So, with great pleasure, may I present Mr. Roger Weir.
[Roger Weir]
Thank you very much. I don't know what to say about myself, except that I'm busy working to bring consistently what was known in antiquity as the chronologica mystica. And it's been 500 years since the good Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim presented the last complete chronologica mystica. And it's been 500 years, and it still isn't translated into English. So many of the reconstructions are needed to be made again, afresh and new, and in going over the material it becomes increasingly apparent that for a very long time there has been an inadequate integrating core, so that most of the material that I will present will have been familiar to you, but the integration of it most probably will not have.
The basic key document that surfaced about the turn of the 1500s was a manuscript which was known as the Steganographia, and it was compiled in order to furnish for a unified group that were in motion across the face of Europe, so that their membership, although unified in spirit and unified in purpose, were disparate in locations, and the Steganographia was ostensibly on the first level, a cipher manual which allowed for the members to communicate with each other in code from any place at any time, throughout the length and breadth of Europe. The compiler of this was the good Abbot Johannes Trithemius, who had discovered his inner capacities through a mysterious adept in Wurzburg, and at the age of 20 was talked into becoming a monk at the abbot of Sponheim in the Rhine Valley, somewhat south of the Frankfurt area, and one year later, at the age of 21 by unanimous consent, became the abbot of that monastery. He was one of the great intellectual giants of all time, and his works really form the integrating core of the Hermetic movement of its time. I don't have time to go into all of the details and the full explication, but cassettes are available that go into the other individuals that I will mention.
Trithemius was associated with three other individuals initially. One of them was a mysterious traveling alchemist named Solomon Trismosin. And Trismosin, who is the wonderful author of two volumes that are still in print and available. One of them is called Splendor Solis, and Splendor Solis gives us the alchemical process of the red lion. And this is available from the Yogi Publication Society. It was originally discovered in the British Museum. A copy dating from about 1598. A second volume by him in French, called La Toyson d'Or [The Golden Fleece], also presents, as does the Splendor Solis in a series of pictures, much like the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, there are 21 in the Splendor Solis, but in the La Toison d'Or the number is much greater and the explication in greater depth. Solomon Trismosin, with his pictographic arcana, was translating back into the Renaissance society of the time.
The material which had been preserved at the tail end of the integration and antiquity, in a volume known as the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, Horapollo of the Nile, Horapollo Nilous, as he is referred to in Latin. Horapollo, had been a priest in Alexandria and had fled Alexandria when Theodosius's troops had destroyed the Serapeum in 365 AD. He fled into the Libyan desert with what manuscripts he could save and as the centuries wore on, the epitome of those works, the major clues of the steps of a process were recorded in pictures, since they were dealing with individuals, by and large, who were coming from all over the world at the time, speaking differing languages, but understanding the symbolic figures through an inner process of recognition, so that these picture books were really the record of an interpenetrate of wisdoms. Now, this technique of presenting stages or strata, of a spiritual process for a brotherhood which was ecumenical, persists to our own day. In fact, the great volume by Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, contains within it at the head of each of the chapters, each of the degrees illustrations, much like the pictographs. In fact, if we turn in Pike's Morals and Dogma to the conclusion of the process as it was able to be explicated, we find the 32nd degree of masonry, not the 33rd, which was of another and unconditioned order, requiring no real expressive emblematic symbol.
But the 32nd degree was the last one by which pictorial expression would pertain. And we find on page 839 of Morals and Dogma a hieroglyph, and the outer shape is of an egg. The philosophic egg, an Orphic egg. And inside we find a figure that has two heads, one masculine and one feminine, and above the masculine side is the sun, and above the feminine the moon and five stars, so that the seven planetary spheres are presented here above, a globe which has its wings and over the globe is a dragon or a serpent with a curling tail and fire coming out of its mouth and on the chest of this figure just the Latin [turm rebus?]. This illustration. Rebus, rebus, Rebus, rebus. This illustration occurs in an occult document published in Frankfurt in 1613, and Mr. [Manly P.] Hall gives the designation of the anonymous author as Basil Valentine, and in fact we have at the Philosophical Research Society vault the volume simply called Occulta Philosophia, and this same rebus is an image of the materia prima, the primal material. The very same illustration in 1613. This particular hermetic rebus is of great significance because it shows two individuals, one representing a masculine and one a feminine personage, which are combined together, intertwined together into one being, and this particular illustration occurs in many areas of the world throughout history. But one of the most startling areas is from an archaeological dig from the middle of the Turfan Basin in the Gobi Desert, and it was discovered around 1908 by Sir Aurel Stein.
I will give you just a brief quotation of Stein, so that you can see this was also his conclusion. They went into a chamber. This was a large cemetery called Astana, in archaeological designation, the Astana Cemetery in the Turfan Basin. In this cemetery there were large rectangular grave sites. The rectangular constructs were rather like platforms and were not very high. Embedded in this platform like a matrix, were tombs that were like truncated pyramids, so that you had a whole area of many rectangular platforms and many truncated pyramid graves. Throughout the long history of the cemetery, they had been plundered many times, most recently by a great Islamic Mohammedan revolt in the early 19th century, so that most of the material had been destroyed, most of the iconography had been simply removed. In this area of the world the wind blows a fine sand dust, and within a few years it simply fills almost any depression. In this cemetery, in one of the tombs, they found three coffins, and one of the coffins there had been untampered with, and Sir Aurel and his assistant, when prying open the coffin, raised up the lid, and a delicate piece of silk fabric floated down from the top of the lid, and settled into the cobwebs and dust and the mummified skeleton within the coffin.
Sir Aurel, in his report Innermost Asia, published by Oxford University Press in 1928, gives us in plate 109 the silk fabric that fell into that coffin covering that preserved mummy. And it, of course, is quite startling to recognize that we have two figures intertwined together, and one of them is holding up the square, and the other is holding up the calipers so that we have Masonic emblems from a tomb of the seventh century AD in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Now, these figures are described by Aurel Stein as representing the two primordial figures of Chinese civilization. One of them was Fu Xi. And Fu Xi represented the heavens, the constellation of the masculine, formative and penetrative capacity of Fu Xi. The second one is a new boy who represents the receptive, the earth, the welcoming capacity to receive form, receive penetration, and allow for the spatiality that permits shape to come about. So that these two figures, heaven and earth, together at the very basis of Chinese civilization, holding up masonic emblems. And of course, there are constellations around them, but the one of interest is in between the two. It is a circle with 12 spheres rotating around it, linked together, and the spokes of the sphere are 16 in number, so that you have the 12 satellites and the 16 spoke wheel, and the Masonic emblems in the hands of two individuals that are intertwined, like the Hermetic serpents on the caduceus.
And in fact, not far from this discovery, in the area of Loulan, one of the fabrics brought up shows very clearly the hermetic caduceus, with a very Greek looking physique next to it. This, again from burials dating back to the seventh century AD in the Turfan area of the Gobi Desert. They had been undisturbed for some 1300 years. Sir Aurel records in his book Innermost Asia. When this coffin was being opened, the silk hanging previously mentioned fell down from the rough wooden pegs by which it was fashioned, and merely through the movement of the air, caused that operation. It fortunately fell on the calm cover of the coffin, and hence suffered damage only at the bottom portion. The two figures of Fu Xi and his consort, shown in embrace and with intertwined serpentine bodies below, are fully described in our list following. And he goes on, he says here, it may suffice to draw attention to the Masons emblems in the hands of the two figures and the constellations marked around them, so that we have a very early Chinese origin so far for our hermetic rebus, which is at the 32nd level of the Masonic development, so that we might make some statement on this order. The rebus for the 32nd Masonic degree is similar, with the illustration of the materia prima from the Occulta Philosophia, Frankfurt, 1613, attributed in the PRS catalog to Basil Valentine. The hermetic rebus by which is shown the birth of the adept within the philosophic egg.
The illustration is one of a series showing an alchemical process to produce the philosopher's stone. The Masonic instruments there portrayed represent the heavens and the earth. This was the description that Albert Pike seemed to favor best. These same instruments appear in silk coffin coverings from the Chinese Turfan Basin at the Astana Cemetery, found by Sir Aurel Stein in 1908. There the instruments are in the hands of Fu Xi and Nüwa. Fu Xi is the founder of the I Ching structure of divination, having invented or at least discovered the principles of the bagua, the Eight Trigrams. The traditional Chinese Daoist portrayal of Fu Xi is of an individual seated in a rather royal way upon a large stone type throne with leopard skin dress, long hair, long fingernails, long wispy beard, so that the dragon imagery and the tiger imagery are interpenetrated in the man, and he is traditionally looking down upon a tortoise, which is upon the ground and in the sand around the ground are drawn the eight trigrams. The nuclear trigrams called in Chinese the bagua, which form the basic material for building the hexagrams of the I Ching. So that we may see that there seem to be eastern origins indeed for the Masonic order. In fact, in a document which was attributed to King Henry the Sixth, who reigned in the late 1400s, he lived 1421 to 1471.
Mr. Hall, in his book Masonic Orders of Fraternity, gives the following quotation. Supposedly in all good faith, written by King Henry the Sixth, who was a masonic initiate. In fact, Mr. Hall points him out as being an accepted mason at least a century and a half or two before Elias Ashmole supposedly became the first accepted Mason. For those that don't understand the terms accepted Masons originally were in fact stonemason builders. But very soon a metaphysical symbolical order was laid upon montage upon that guild order, and those who were welcomed in on that basis were called accepted, as opposed to those who were working stone masons. King Henry the Sixth was given a question: where did masonry begin? And King Henry the Sixth replied in print, "It began with the first men of the East, who existed before the first men of the West, and going westward masonry brought all comforts to the ignorant savages who were not awake to these things." And you will find this on page 31 of Mr. Hall's Masonic Orders of Fraternity, so that we have a very peculiar situation before us. We have images separated by a thousand years and separated by the enormity of the land block of Europe and Eurasia and Asia.
How do they come together? One of our clues in this is the notion that in antiquity, when the world was being brought together into an imperial order, there were many attempts and the individual who finally made it stick was young Octavian Caesar, who became known in history as Augustus and Augustus Caesar when he took over the last holdout of power in the immediate known world. That is, he took over the Ptolemaic Kingdom from the defeat of Cleopatra in Alexandria in 30 AD, August 1st, 30 AD, from which we get the terms of the month August. Augustus was determined to impose upon the world what he termed the Pax Romana, and what he meant by that was not simply a military peace, nor simply an economic umbrella, but he meant to make this stay in terms of a religious and metaphysical reality. One of the acts that Augustus decreed was that all prophetic books and leaves and fragments should be brought together to Rome. And in fact, Augustus built there the Ara Pacis Augustae, a great huge, um, commemorative religious monument, which still exists under a palazzo in Rome. And there all of the prophetic utterances of the ancient world were collated together and brought together and preserved there. And a law promulgated by the Senate in Rome that it was unlawful for any oracular site to withhold prophetic leaves.
These writings that were brought together by Augustus are called the Sibylline Oracles. These Sibylline Oracles, then under the imperium of the principate of Augustus, were turned over to the great visionary epic poet Virgil, who had been commissioned personally by Augustus to write the great spiritual epic, bringing all the wisdoms of mankind together into one unity, to redo in a conscious way what had been done in a rather primordial, semi-unconscious way by Homer. That is to say, classical Greek and Roman civilization had for almost a thousand years been based upon the integrated vision capacity exemplified by Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. Augustus wished to change this integration by making it fully conscious, fully intentional, where all the purposes were understood by man and not simply half buried in oracular hopefulness or mystical expectation. So that Virgil's Aeneid was that document meant to be the ultimate integration of all knowledge, especially in its esoteric mode in antiquity. When the Roman Empire, some three centuries later, began to suffer its final blows, and that most powerful mystical integration, which had suffered several ups and downs, began actually to waver, it was the early Christian church that stepped in to take over that universal integration of all knowledge and wisdom. And it was in Constantine's time that Constantine sought to take over the position that Augustus had enjoyed, and it was near the end of his life that he held the Great Council of Nicaea. And it is there that Eusebius wrote the first Christian chronologica mystica in terms of the document which we now have, and it is translated into English, the history of the early Christian Church. And his Ecclesia Historia [Historia Ecclesiastica or Historia Ecclesiae] is really an attempt to take the Aeneid one step further to Christianity, and to show that they were the legitimate inheritors of all the wisdom of the known world at that time.
This, of course, was in an age of great titanic power struggles. Constantine was not the figure that Augustus was, and very soon after him, even within the early church itself, there were moves to oust him from the main developing power core. Any integrations that might be competitive with the one that was developing. And so, the heretical movements, which were extremely powerful at that time, became outlawed. And one of the most powerful movements of that time was one that we know today as Nestorian Christianity. And Nestorius, who had been the archbishop in Constantinople in a position to effect for himself, because he was, besides being a very able administrator, he was a mystic of the first order, and those individuals who saw him as a jeopardizing influence. A competitor forced Nestorius to flee, and Nestorius and his followers, who were considerable in number and influence, fled from Constantinople, finally into Central Asia, and this was about the fifth century AD, so that Nestorian Christianity, with its legacy of hoping to bring the old Augustine integration to their vision, entered into Central Asia at a very peculiar time in history. This area of China in the early 400s was undergoing an enormous transformation. Already, the movement of Indian Buddhism, which had become Mahayana, had been proceeding apace since the early part of the first century AD.
In fact, the writings that we have, from about the year 100 AD, in the Mahayana tradition show already a peculiar type of an Alexandrian Gnostic Christian influence. Anyone who reads through Asvaghosa's Awakening of Faith will notice that the document nearest to it, in tone and mystical import, is the Gospel of Saint John. And of course, there are parallels all along the line. This development, however, became attenuated because within a hundred years of Asvaghosa, that is, by 200 A.D., already the genius of Nagarjuna had developed a doctrine of the ultimate unknowability of the divine, of the fact that the ultimate divine has no conditioned shape whatsoever, and that this unconditioned and ultimate only is observable. If man makes a receptive pattern to display the effects of the divine, so that codes of honor rules of living became absolutely indispensable to create a network or a pattern of action, or a style of life that would record in its operation the effects of the unconditioned, unknowable, divine. So that from about 200 A.D. until about 400 A.D., we find a whole literature springing up in Mahayana Buddhism known as the Prajnaparamita literature. And it is concerned, over and over again, with how do we style a pattern of life fine enough, consistent enough, to be able to record the ever more subtle nuances of the divine entering into human life? And so we get the proliferation of an activity which later on in our society will be followed almost to a tee by the development of science, that is, to produce instruments increasingly finer in order to detect energy forces and interpenetration increasingly finer because of the ultimate supposition, quite correctly based that if we have only the right receptivity, we will be able to complement the divine penetration coming to us.
So that man's purpose became one of delineating processes and making clear symbolic integrations and stages along the way. And the Prajnaparamita literature is full of this sort of information. It is also a highly noticeable truth that Buddhism at this time changed this whole iconographic capacity. We find at this time the development not just of the figure of the Buddha as a person, and the earliest Buddhist statues show Greek clothing, the folds, and so forth. The faces, the Gandhara Bodhisattva's look for all the world, just like the Apollos that we find in Athens. But there were parallels that were picked out of the early Buddhist texts the various Nikayas, the Digha Nikaya, the Majjhima Nikaya, and these were put together in certain orders to tell a newly emphasized emerging symbolic story. And just to give two indications here of the parallels, there are many, and it's almost an incredible realization to find at this time that Buddhism looks very, very much like a gospel. And of course, the fact that the Gospel of Thomas extends from India at this time is just a further proof of the process having a legitimacy in the Buddha's life.
At the end of his days, it was said at this time that he in fact had a last supper with his monks, with his disciples, and that at this time was when he ate the material which was poison to his system, and he consequently would die because of it. And at his death, which came from that last supper, he died between two trees and his, mahanirvana, parinirvana - was lying down between these two trees so that his death takes place within the matrix of two trees. Of course, if the trees are crossed this way, one has a cross. If they are presented this way, one has the two pillars, which are forever noticeable in Masonic imagery. There are many more, but I won't belabor the point.
There is also a development of the similarity of iconographical purpose between Buddhism and Christianity in the 1st and 2nd centuries, 3rd century, even AD. But especially the 1st and 2nd centuries, so that in searching to try and find some way to express this parallelism or this similarity, I stumbled upon the works of a man named Arthur Lillie. L-I-L-L-I-E. Now, Lillie had been a colonel in the British Army in India, in Lucknow, but he had also been a very intelligent man. He had been trained as an archaeologist. He had also been trained as an artist. And he had a very interesting mind. And in one of his books, he has about six books that are all out of print, all unavailable. But he has a very interesting plate, plate number two, in one of his books called Buddha and Early Buddhism. And on this plate, he gives us a very interesting, development of what was in Buddha, Mahayana Buddhism, the Triratna, the three jewels. The three jewels - Tri-Ratna. Ratna is jewel. And of course, the original formulation of it verbally would be the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, the three jewels, but symbolically presented the Triratna also at Sanchi, which was one of the earliest of the Buddhist tombs for the relics of the Buddha. Constructed about 250 or 260 BC by Ashoka. We find the Hermetic caduceus on the Sanchi emblems, and we find a further expression of it in simplified form as the circle with the loop below and the three um parts up above. And this looks for all the world like a bird with its wings up and its head in the center. And of course, we find in the catacombs of Rome and of Alexandria the descent of the dove to the halo, which is circular, round, and the shoulders of Jesus coming down at the bottom later on. Of course, this symbolism is repeated throughout history throughout the world, and we find, for instance, in the figure of Joachim de Fiore in the 12th century in southern Italy, that the figure here in the center, the bottom part is the alpha, and the top part is an omega. So, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.
We could go on and on. We could. I personally could go on for several hours giving other instances. And then below we have, of course, another symbolic formulation of this similar pattern in the divinatory tortoise of China. This particular emphasis showed that there was an interpenetration of two enormous classes or types of symbols at this time, which came together in this Triratna image. One of them is the imagery surrounding the figure of the serpent, and the other is the imagery surrounding the figure of the tree, so that the serpent and the tree coming together form that. Hermetic caduceus in an abstract, symbolic way. And the serpent is, of course, the dragon, or the old constellation of Draco, and the tree is associated with the constellation of Virgo. So that there is the receptivity of the world tree and the penetration into the ground, and the ability to come up of the serpent. And this central tree, this rod, which also can be a serpent, is in fact a center pole, an axis of the cosmos. And this cosmic axis goes through a supposed visionary mountain in Buddhism known as Mount Meru. And of course, it has its parallels in the West.
All of this imagery that Lillie was working with at the time came to a head later on in his book Buddha and Early Buddhism, when he was describing what seemed to be parallels in the ritual formation of the early Christian church, the way in which Masses were done, the way in which the daily life and the monasteries were done, the way in which the early church performed all of its various rituals. And he kept coming across the fact that these seem to be mirrored almost exactly in Buddhist rituals, and that they seem to interpenetrate so that finally we have this from Lillie that the.
Here is Justin Martyr's account of Christian initiation. Quoting Justin Martyr, who was about 140 AD, but we, after all, "we have thus watched him who has been convinced and assented to our teaching, bring him to the place where those who are called brethren are assembled, in order that we may offer hearty prayers in common for ourselves and the illuminated person. Having ended our prayers, we salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren, bread and a cup of wine mixed with water. When the president has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their assent, those that are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water." And well, it goes on to say, that the strongest proof of the connection between the mystic societies of the West and the sepulchral cave of the old Rishis and the inner crypt of the Buddhist Topes, is that the main rite of masonry is the introduction of the novice into a crypt and confronting him with a tomb.
This is called the tomb of Hiram, the historical Hiram, the Jewish architect who, according to Masonic legends, was murdered by three apprentices because he would not give up his great secret. His bones were hid away under a mound of stones, and they were found eventually by his fellow workmen. This legend has given rise to an important rite, and we find the Prefect of France has to make three journeys, mimicking the three efforts of escape of poor Hiram from the temple. The first voyage is from east to west, and he goes on and he talks about the fact that the first entrance is through the eastern gate, and then concludes some other curious points of contact between Buddhism and the mystic societies of the West remain to be noticed. The cup of sweetness and the cup of bitterness are plainly Buddha's first taste of the hateful alms bowl, and the delicious milk and rice of Sujata, and at one stage two of the proceedings, the modern mason has his shirt, boots and stockings pulled off, and his trousers are tucked up to his knees. This seems plainly an echo of Buddha's edict, that they shall conceal the body from the navel to the knee, and that the jewel involved is plainly the money.
And he goes on with other connections between Masonic rituals and the fact that the early Christian and Buddhist matrix seems to have been brought together what he did not realize. Because the archeological finds of Sir Aurel Stein were after Arthur Lillie wrote, was that, in fact, this interpenetration seems to have taken place in an area of the world where natural conditions have simply effaced. For the record, for over a thousand years, the connections and the traces.
How did this information, this integration, come from the East to the West? If you recall, the time of the 7th century was a period of great darkness in European history, but it was a period of movement across Central Asia of those inheritors of the Nestorian Mahayana synthesis known as the Manichaeans. And it is the Manichaeans in their rituals who brought these rites and this information back into the European cultural matrix. And in fact, we find that at the beginnings of the 12th century, about the time of the First Crusade, is also a time when the great cathedrals were being erected all over Europe, and the Masonic builders who were in control of these great monuments always kept themselves apart from the society of the time. They would build large encampments, a longhouse for meetings, and their own homes outside of the village or outside of the town, next to the construct that would be going up.
And we must bear in mind that these architectural constructs took place over generations of time, so that those Masonic guilds coming together under the master Mason, who would be the president, elected by themselves for the duration of that particular project, would make a commitment not just for themselves, but for their ancestors, so that sometimes it might require a century or two for a project to be brought to its completion. And sometimes, in the case of short cathedral, as soon as it was finished, an enormous fire burnt most of it, and the project had to be entirely redone, which it was, because the commitment was of such a nature that as long as it took, this group of human beings would stay at the site and keep the integrity of their tradition together to see that that project was finished and in working order for those around.
Now, I think that I have enough material. Would you like to take a break at this moment, or shall I just go on? Let's take a break, then for about ten minutes.
Do you remember that image of Edward White, the first EVA [Extravehicular activity]. And he had that golden umbilical cord going back, and he was trying to undo it. NASA cautioned him to leave it on. He wanted to get born; he wanted to see if he could do it without it. He was getting bored was one thing, but messing around in a three dimensional. He was my favorite astronaut. He was just really great. He and Pete Conrad. Conrad was - NASA cut him off. He started to discuss - He said, you know, this silence out here really penetrates. And the boys in Houston cut him off. They didn't want him to say anymore. He's the one with Gordon Cooper. When they came back, they had beards on and sunglasses, and they said, the first thing we want to announce is our marriage. And NASA was very unhappy that all these astronauts should be playing around with billions of dollars at stake, but they were courageous, really. You have to have a sense of humor in order to step out into infinity. Someday we'll get the unspoiled trails in space. Yes. Indeed. That's right.
This information very hard to keep control of, as you can tell. Very hard to shape. But one of the primordial symbols is the Hermetic caduceus. The staff with the intertwined serpents coming up, meeting together, and very often you'll see the wings on top of the staff. And of course, the wings around a sphere takes us back to the Egyptian imagery of Horus. The eye of the divine and the serpent's also take us back to Egypt, because, in fact, the very first hieroglyph in The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo shows us that the serpent is a symbol of eternity, timelessness, and in particular the serpent, which is intertwined upon itself, so that its natural body shape is no longer visible.
And what is visible is the infinity sign in the shape of the serpent's body, curled up upon itself, made into an eternal knot. In Tibetan Buddhism, in the Vajrayana, it's called the eternal knot and has a special diamond like, vajra-like pattern. The vajra is the diamond in vajra imagery. In deep meditation, it comes out as a right-angled, jagged line. In fact, in the Kabbalah, one of the ways in which the ten Sefirot were sometimes united mystically was in a pattern known as the lightning flash, where one comes, one, two, three down like this instead of in the normal form. These are high energy, meditative, symbolic images, and they incidentally arise quite naturally from the psyche of man. Well, there's no need to hire animators from Hanna-Barbera to make these images. The very first hieroglyph in The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo is the denoting of eternity by them coiled in the Hermetic way, the infinity sign way, the coiled serpent. This also is the Uraeus, which is on the crown of the Pharaoh, and this denoting of eternity can also be expressed by having the sun and the moon together and brought together, so it can go either way. It may have it either way in the pharaonic iconology, if one is wearing the crown with the Uraeus, the coiled serpent is inside, is the two halves of your brain, your mind brought together in a synchronicity.
The second hieroglyphic of Horapollo. And it works in this kind of hermetic order. Once we have designated eternity, which is an unconditioned, formless whole, then we have the first presentation of a whole which can be designated, and that is always the cosmos. It is always, as they say in Corey's translation of The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo about 150 years ago, how was the universe designated? They designate it as a serpent, but this time the serpent is spread out and is brought into a single kind of a circle. Then the next hieroglyphs form a part of a sacred order. But the one that I think is useful for us is number 18. How did the ancient Egyptians denote strength? And they use, of course, a lion, not just so much of strength of like power to maul or to do as Dionysius the Areopagite says in The Celestial Hierarchies [De Coelesti Hierarchia], the lion covers his own tracks with his tail. So that the lion is very powerful in many ways he can do, but he can conceal what he is doing while he is doing it. Therein is a mystical power, much more subtle and much more effective, so that the image of the lion is not just simply in a one for one static referential horizon of meaning, but is in a multi-dimensional, hermetic horizon of meaning. If we combine the image of such hermetic strength with eternity. We get the lion body and the head of the Pharaoh, which is the Sphinx, so that we have this ancient Egyptian figure of the interpenetration of strength and subtlety, of process within the understanding of eternity. Now, this ancient integration, which dates back at least 4000 to 5000 years, was also brought up into currency in the third century BC in Alexandria by Ptolemy Philadelphus, the son of the founder Ptolemy I Soter, and Ptolemy Philadelphus was the master at the time, about 280 BC, who brought all of the Egyptian symbolism and the processes to go with it, and the understanding of those processes in depth brought them up to a new level of integration. And this was the time when the Old Testament Hebrew wisdom was brought in and integrated with this ancient Egyptian, Greco-Egyptian design, and in fact, at this time was made the first translation into Greek of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, meaning the translation of the 70. There were actually 72 translators. There were six from each of the 12 tribes. They were brought into Alexandria. They were brought in fact, to an area of the [Requiem?] which was set aside for them. They were allowed to work individually and dine communally, and each of their individual translations were compared so that a perfect text, at least as perfect as could be had at that time, was made.
Each of these 72 were under the personal authorization of Ezra, who was the high priest in Jerusalem at the time, so that Ptolemy Philadelphus was responsible for this translation of a great esoteric tradition into another language and the most complete way possible. This type of undertaking, this style of cosmic transposition of processes and integrations and doctrines, was exactly what Augustus tried to do later on, so that the Aeneid by Virgil, as we've said in the earlier part of the lecture, was an attempt to literally write a New Testament. But this particular process we've seen underwent vicissitudes and literally fell apart when the Roman Empire did. And when the Roman Church took over the Roman Empire, it no longer relied upon Virgil, or upon the Aeneid or the Sibylline books, and sought to bring the New Testament into the place of what the Aeneid had held in the Roman world. This great prototype of material then had its career over the next thousand years through many vicissitudes, until we find that fateful generation of individuals, most of them born around 1460, most of them dying about 1520, who sought to redo an integration which had been lost. That is, they sought to redo what Homer once had done, what Ptolemy Philadelphus once had done, what Augustus, what the New Testament. They sought to bring back an integration of all the sacred traditions of man into one unity and this was the generation of Ficino at the Platonic Academy in Florence, of John Colet in London at Saint Paul's Cathedral and School of Salomon Trismosin with his alchemical processes.
And the Abbot Trithemius with his great chronologica mystica and his feel that integration was so powerful that we look upon that generation of individuals with or even today, and what we call either the Renaissance or the Reformation. Both those phenomena come out of the same matrix, but it was very soon apparent that the integration that was made at that time had not really taken. It had been ingenious. It had been almost fantastic in its mystical capacities, but had not penetrated down to, what we would today call the average person, is not affected. The daily life of the multitudes, the way in which the past great integrations had so that we did not have a hermetic civilization. We had hermetic masters and adepts and secret traditions. But we did not have a world, a society, a culture which in its normal daily workings, reflected the wisdom of the divinity, so that 100 years later, individuals who had inherited this fine line of excellence realized that it was insufficient. They could not in all conscience simply pass it on to a handful of ingenious persons. They simply couldn't do this. They couldn't stomach the thought that divine wisdom was simply the prerogative of a privileged few, and that the world should increasingly languish at large out of ignorance, so that the tone of this next generation, a century later, was that this information was not the private preserve of the few, but was in provenance from God to man in general, and that nothing would suffice except a reformation of the entire world, a general and universal reformation, so complete and so penetrating that every human being would have the possibility of enjoying the fruits of this wisdom.
Now, this enormous realization, revolution came at a time when the motion of the ancient doctrine had moved from the Central Asian material through the various Manichaean and Cathar modes, and had come to a great crossroad about the year 1100 during the First Crusade, when those Crusaders who first went to the Holy Land came into contact with the exquisitely refined Islamic mystical brotherhoods, and by the time of the First Crusade, there was an order of knighthood among the Saracens set up who were in fact called in European history by the odd name of the assassins. They were not assassins at all, but the word assassins really comes from a mispronunciation of the Arabic name of the sect. Now, the leader of this group, designated as the captain of the mountain or the chief of the mountain [Old Man of the Mountain], the Shaykh al-Jabal was the individual who held that order together, and the Christian knights who went through this experience of the First Crusade found themselves working among themselves, making an order of knights among themselves, that when they came into a protracted collision of warfare over many years, they realized that their organizations were mirror images of each other, and the inescapable conclusion was that they shared a mystical doctrine in common at some point back in the distant past.
How was this so? This was so because in the great sweep of the Islamic conquest, they not only moved into Egypt and across the face of Africa, North Africa, but they also moved across Persia and India and into Central Asia. And in fact, it was the Muslim intrusion into Central Asia that came just at the last tail end of the time, when those documents there were still accessible, when individuals who were still of the living traditions, of those integrations were still accessible, and the great integration of Islamic wisdom in the 10th century came at a time when their civilization literally spread from India to Spain, and we find there where we expect a great flowering of mysticism and not so much Islamic mysticism based on the Koran, although they wouldn't say that. But it was an Islamic mysticism that was distinctly Neoplatonic in tone, and that's the word they use, is Neoplatonic instead of Hermetic. And we find there the most fabulous speaker, Avicenna, Ibn Sina, and incidentally, for those who wish, I'm doing a lecture next Thursday at the Philosophic Research Society on Avicenna. But in this meeting point, we find that the assassins and that Christian knight order known as the Templars, discovered with each other, and in each other, that there was a shared tradition between the two of them, and in fact, this seemed to them to be an indication that, perhaps on some almost ineffable level, that God was working in mysterious ways.
Now the Templars, of course, used the red cross, but it also was in the early crusading period, an eight pointed, cross, this eightfold path cross. And if you double the eight, of course, then you get the 16 spoke star, which is on that document from Central Asia that I showed you earlier, this, document with Fu Xi and Nüwa. I think you recall it. This one here, this particular time period was an extremely formative one, because the recognition on the part of the Templars and on the part of the so-called assassins orders indicated to them that they could, in some secret way, have a cross fertilization and perhaps discover for themselves the legitimacy of their own traditions. What they shared in common would be clues, and at the same time recognizing that if this were so leading back into the past, that it would be eminently more so leading into the future. And so, plans were laid to progressively create conditions whereby, at least in secret, the various orders that had parallel motions in their development, in their initiation, similar purposes and similar goals, would have a chance to communicate with each other and establish some point at some future time when they could come together.
And this point, this future time was called in the West, the New Jerusalem. This particular style of development meant taking facilities that existed in the natural world and the historical world, which would allow for such a long-term preparation. And those groups who were most capable of undertaking such long-term building were the guilds, the stone masons, whose orders then began to receive these metaphysical and hermetic individuals coming into the order and becoming metaphorical Masons - accepted Masons. They weren't there so much to build with stones, but they were to build a world order at some time in the future, and they didn't know how long it would take, so that the plans had to be open, so that the building that was being undertaken needed to be shaped in such a way that it could be passed on for generations, almost indefinitely, as far as they knew. This, of course, came to a head around the year 1604. All of these great movements of history, all of these great traditions, seem to come into a crunch about that period of time. And it's no small wonder because at that time in England was being undertaken one of those characteristic integrating patterned experiences, one which was similar to the Homeric epics, one which was similar to the Virgilian Aeneid, one eminently similar to the translation of the Old Testament under Ptolemy Philadelphus.
They were making in England the King James Bible, and in order to do this task, they were bringing all of the basic documents and information that could be had from wherever it was in the world, together in one place, for one body of individuals to work with and make a translation from the old languages into the new. And in that transformation, we can see, for instance, the best writing in English fifty years before the King James Bible is tremendously archaic, and five years after the King James Bible, we have people writing English with such beauty and exquisiteness of syntax that the prose almost reads like poetry. Today we have the occurrence of so many individuals knowing multilingual capacities. One man had four daughters in the late Elizabethan, early Jamesian, Jacobean period. All four daughters could read and write fluently in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, besides the European languages. It was simply in the air for a large population. Some thousands of individuals in England mainly centered around London at this time. Now the person who was selected and chosen to be the master architect of this undertaking was Sir Francis Bacon. He had the capacities to be like one of those master Masons who would make sure that all the projects were out in such a way that they would all dovetail and come together so that this thing could be done and done on time and polished and finished.
In fact, in one of the volumes of Bacon's late writings [Resuscitatio], edited by his secretary, William Rawley, we find about 20 pages of his own translations from the Psalms of David. And on that title page, who are they dedicated to? They're dedicated to George Herbert, one of the greatest English poets of all time, who was alive then in that age. And this George Herbert, incidentally, was very close in his Welsh relations with the Vaughan family - Thomas Vaughan, the great alchemist, and Henry Vaughan, the great poet. There are dozens of individuals that could be cited, but I think at this time perhaps the major individual, besides Bacon, who should be looked at because he was involved from the beginning of this, was Sir Walter Raleigh. And with Sir Walter Raleigh we have an interesting individual. His great work in great huge tomes is The History of the World. It's an attempt to give us a chronologica mystica. And if we look at Raleigh's History of the World, it is absolutely ingenious with its handling of Old Testament history. We read through Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World, and it seems to us that he simply had lived in those times. It's almost like somebody reincarnated from those times, until we realize that he was part and parcel of this group that were poring over these manuscripts with fine-tooth combs, because they were having to translate them.
And he was there and had this kind of intimate knowledge of the text that only a scholar would have of the first order - somebody who had spent an entire lifetime with this documentation. But let us not forget that the whole purpose of this was to look to the future. There was a purpose in mind, a divine plan in mind, and now that they were at this staging center of being able to integrate this again, translate this again, into working papers, which individuals then could take out into their daily lives. The other activity that Sir Walter Raleigh was interested in was in colonizing America. And in fact, it's Sir Walter Raleigh's colonies in the 1580s that are really the first great attempts to try to found a permanent, growing, intelligent civilization from Europe to the New World. It's unfortunate when one reads through the history of those attempts to realize how ineptly those colonizing attempts were handled, because the individuals chosen to be sort of the field lieutenants, the captains of the ships, who became the governors of those colonial experiments, were men of very poor judgment in terms of human character. And again and again, they fail to realize the most important part of the translation, from one culture to another, is to not put the new form into old bottles. In other words, instead of coming and working with the Indians who were already there, they worked against them. And time and time again, in reading through the documents, I get the sense of finding between the lines, the sense that the Indians bent over backwards to welcome these great white brothers, because they had a tradition which recorded the fact that they were, in fact the long-lost brothers, because they too had traditions that went back into remote antiquity.
And in fact, the great initiatory cycle of the Algonquin natives at the time, called the Grand Medicine Lodge, shows that the great long line of totemic scales set up in the long rectangular houses of initiation, with the design on the floor beating this large pole looks very much like the Masonic instrument for measuring. And we have other indications the Indians, in fact, at that time, between the lines, seemed to be in awe of European man, particularly because as far as he could tell, there were no white women. There were only white men coming out of the infinite ocean on these great white sailed birds. And they, of course, seem to fit all the prophecies that they had of gods descending to help man change his lot and improve his lot. And in fact, they knew that this had happened in history several times before. At the end of the 1580s, the first white women were seen coming off a ship, and it was a catastrophic blow to the psychic imagination of the American Indian to realize that they were mortal.
And all of the mistakes and flaws were, in fact, the result of ignorance and not just of accident. And increasingly, the whole episode of Raleigh's colonization attempts in Virginia in the 1580s, as we would say today most graphically, went down the tubes. The failure of Raleigh to contract his end of the bargain in making a place for this new integration, to move to this new utopian base, was one of the reasons that he was put in the tower. Now, the development of the information at this time with the group in England under Bacon, had its concomitant in a group in Germany. And of course, in Germany, we find a century before with Trithemius and Trismosin, that they had produced that first generation of hermetic students who understood what they were to do, that generation that included Paracelsus and Agrippa and Johann Reuchlin. But we find that there was a slippage in the late 1500s, so that Germany had to reform itself. And this reforming expedition took part by bringing together the disparate individuals who represented fragments of the tradition that had been passed on. So that instead of a unified project, as we saw in England, we have a kind of a matrix situation in Germany where many eminent individuals are brought together in societies, in brotherhoods, to form a committee, as it were, or a table of experts, as it were, in order to discern where the project should go. How should we go about this? And one of the earliest recorded lists of this is in a letter by Johann Valentin Andrea. And Andrea, writing to his great patron, Duke of Augustus of Brunswick - Braunschweig, Lunenburg, called the Duke of Brunswick, makes a list of some 28 individuals who came together and formed a society as Christians. And the two top figures on that list are Johann Arndt and Johann Gerhard, two of the really great individuals in the Lutheran reform movement at the time. And the last person on that list was a figure, Christoph Leibnitz. Now this Christoph Leibniz is the grandfather of the great Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was to figure very prominently in the way in which the Hermetic Movement finally did move to the United States. But that's for another lecture and another time - that's complex.
The society's Christians listed Johann Arndt as the first individual, and we find that Johann Arndt was in fact a man who could straddle two worlds at the same time. He was a mystic who grounded his understanding of mysticism in a German mystic named Johannes Tauler. And with this mysticism he also had a practical mode of the man of the world at the time, and he took the two and wrote a wonderful document, a book called True Christianity, in which he said that only by developing the interior life as an individual does one ever have the capacity to join in this religious movement of purpose, and that one cannot be taken externally by any kind of manipulation, and made a living part of that tradition, so that true Christianity was a matter of the heart, and the heart was a matter of understanding the light from beyond. And so, it was creating a sense of inner openness to receive divine light and guidance, and to be able to share that with others. That was the core. This was a development not only from the mysticism of Tauler and his generation, Meister Eckhart and so forth, but they had already been worked in to that first attempted integration by Trithemius and Trismosin. And we in fact have a document in the PRS vault, a volume which has really no title, but on the title page is a black cross, and it is raised up on a little mound of earth, grass and earth. It's green and brown. And this black cross has the word Jesus written horizontally, and the word Jesus written vertically, so that the middle letter is shared by the two. And on the outside of the cross we have an N, and at the top an R, and at the side an I. And of course, the missing I. The initial I of I-N-R-I is in the ground, under the earth, in the darkness, in the nigredo in that position of initial transformation, which is unconditioned and out of sight, unconscious and unknown.
And that's where it starts, and that's where it ends, when it completes its motion. There is on the side of that black cross, those two primal trees, those two pillars brought into a focus a pink light which is seen and in fact, the words, the letters spelling Jesus both ways and the N and the R and the I are in beautiful pink, and one is allowed when one sees that pink stripe along one side of the cross to see that the solidity of it was an optical illusion. It was a trick of perception. And then, in fact, that black cross is not solid, but is hollow and is filled with a rosy light, and it is by virtue of spaces made in that black cross that allows for the rosy light to come through in the forms of the letters of the name of the Saviour. This rosy cross was in a manuscript which was never published, and there is only one autograph copy of it at the PRS's vault, and it is dated 1539, and in that manuscript there are letters from Trithemius and Trismosin to their student Paracelsus, giving him his degrees, giving him the okay, as it were, to carry on the tradition that he was in fact the trusted master to keep the purpose of this group and of this working order into contact, and his mission was to spread this throughout Europe as much as could be possible.
He was not to settle down. He was not to enjoy a life for himself but was in fact to seed this throughout Europe. It was this seeding. He went to England. He went to very, very many places. It was this seeding that was responsible for the coming together of these traditions around the year 1604. And in that year, there was a meeting of minds between England and Germany in particular, and Italy was highly represented at that time. Also, the figure, the central figure was a man named Tommaso Campanella, but England and Germany together had a meeting of minds, had an interpenetration of views, and that interpenetration had been made possible by the great figure of John Dee. Now John Dee had been the, uh, great Elizabethan astrologer. He'd been the confidant of Queen Elizabeth herself, and he had developed a number of the old hermetic processes and issues to a point of investigation that Queen Elizabeth herself sent him on a mission to Europe, to that area known as Czechoslovakia, today south of Prague, about 100 or 200km. And it was John Dee who had laid the archetypal structure for the English and the Germans to come together. Now Dee died in 1608, but he was still alive in 1604, 1605. And after this meeting of minds the very next year, in 1605, we find Johannes Tauler's True Christianity is published, and we find Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning is published.
And these two works were like the two pillars of the New Order. Being set up in place, the interior life, and the way to achieve it. The exterior expression of the effectiveness of that life and the ways to express it. So that between Tauler and Bacon in 1605, this tremendous series of expressions was put before the population of Europe. And 1604 had been such a spectacular year. There had in fact been two supernova activities. There was a new star in the Sagittarius constellation, and there was a new star in that of the serpent. And the Cygnus the swan... Excuse me. Cygnus the Swan and Sagittarius, these two new stars and those important constellations seemed to confirm all of the kabbalistic figuring that, in fact, this was the fulcrum of a new age. And it was sought at that time to try to publish the new translation of the Bible, the King James version. But of course, the death of Elizabeth made it necessary to postpone that temporarily. She had died in 1603 so that it wasn't published until 1611. And it's called the King James version. But for all intents and purposes it was ready at that time. Now, I won't go into the activities of the Shakespeare plays at this time. They also fit into this, and one can simply marvel at the way in which the geometry of meaning, in the geometry of character both yield the very same results.
You can follow one way or the other, but I think what's important here is to give you the last step in this jump. But on the very last step is how it came to the United States. We don't have time today to go into that, but as soon as this material was put forth in 1605, with all these astronomical and kabbalistic happenings of 1604, there was a tremendous stirring of both the psychic and the intellectual contents of the European mind. And in this welling up of universal insights, universal fragments and images in this soup, oceanic soup of potential. Within ten years of this sort of activity came a lightning bolt of the publication of the Fama Fraternitatis - the Manifesto of a group calling themselves Rosicrucians who were out to reform the entire world, and that they were a mysterious brotherhood, and they were working for the good of man. They had rules to control themselves, and they were promising nothing less than a universal reformation of all mankind. Well, within months of the publication of such a document, Europe was aflame with speculation of who they were. And of course, all the power structures in Europe at the time also wanted to know who they were, what are their names, and what are their addresses? They had business with them. So, very soon we found a situation which was almost like the Edwardian period before the First World War, where almost any occult suspicion possible was perhaps the truth of history.
And people were turning every which way. And of course, those conditions obtaining in the arena of power struggles always yield a war. And we find that Europe slowly, almost inevitably sank into one of its bloodiest wars. And from 1618 to 1648, Europe suffered the 30 Years War, which, as it went on and on and on, with its devastation, its killing, its tortures, its ripping apart of the fabric of human society, simply dissolved all the possibilities for plans whatsoever. And we find that Europe just languishes. Whole sections were devastated. There were outbursts of plague to go along with it, and it seemed that on the verge of the promise of the new world, before anything had gotten started, the world had fallen apart. But the war did not go on forever. And as soon as the 30 Years War was brought to some kind of resolution, we find again almost immediately in 1650, the beginning of the republication of all the old plans and designs, and they had not lain fallow in this 30 or 40 years' time, but in fact had become even more sophisticated and put together even better. And we find in 1650, for instance, the great book of the Son of John Dee, Arthur Dee was published, and the editor was Elias Ashmole, the Fasciculus Chemicus. And then Thomas Vaughan the next year, in 1651, published Lumen de Lumine, and in 1651 Ashmole also published the great Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, this great compilation of alchemical processes and documents, and in 1652 we find the first English translation of the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio, with a new little postscript, written originally in English by Sir Francis Bacon appended to it.
All of this coming out, and in 1656 all these within the 1650s, maybe a dozen publications, all in this one time in 1656. Ashmole's great The Way to Bliss, which was sort of the English version of True Christianity. And in 1656, the same year, the publication again of Michael Maier's Themis Aurea, The Rules of the Order of the Rosy Cross. All of this material just being immediately channeled out as soon as the 30 Years War had terminated. Robert Fludd's Mosaic of Philosophy was published in 1659, and in 1662 The Holy Guide by John Heydon, which contained as a preface Bacon's New Atlantis, which was a preface to this, and one of the sections of the Holy Guide was the Rosy Cross uncovered the wise Man's crown by Hayden, followed just a few years later. And then we have the formation of the Royal Society of London, and Thomas Sprat's great history of the formation of that Royal Society makes it clear that all along the way, from the early 1640s, that groups in England and Germany had been planning all along to try to bring to a fruition some form of universal investigation that would allow man to prepare the way for this large religious, visionary structure that he had been carrying so long in his - not so much in his backpacks - but in the lanterns under his cloak.
Well, I think that we had better round this up here. I had wished to go into Pike's Morals and Dogma and show you some of the differentiations there. I think I'll have to close with just two observations in Morals and Dogma. There are several groups of structures. The first structure, which is called the "Lodge of Perfection," is the rituals which were developed by the old stone mason Templar integration. And if you will take a look at the 18th chapter, the chapter of the Rosy Cross in the 18th stage of masonry, one finds that the Rosicrucian material was brought in, and from [chapter] 15 to 18, this Rosicrucian material is literally set up upon and over this "Lodge of Perfection" which runs in the first 14 books, the 14 chapters and degrees, and then the chapters 19 to 30 are called the "Council of Kaddish." Kaddish is the Hebrew for purification Kaddish, and this Council of Purification has a place above the Rosy Cross material. And then, of course, the final two sections are the 31st and 32nd degrees. I wish I had time to go into this, but perhaps at some future time. Thanks for your patience.
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