Hermetic Jesus

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Hermetic Jesus Presentation 1 of 1 Hermetic Jesus Presented by Roger Weir Friday, October 7, 1994 Given at The Gnostic Society, Hollywood, California Transcript: I haven't lectured here in awhile, so I don't know too many of you. Dr. Hoeller is not here as you know, and usually he'll tell some jokes and give you a nice introduction. I would like to take the material today and just begin it very slowly and then raise it off the horizon of a Friday evening into a deeper concern; into more of a timeless consideration. It's very difficult in Los Angeles to hear wisdom. It's always difficult but in Los Angeles now it's more difficult than ever. Showing wisdom is largely a matter of silence; of appreciation. But to use language, to use words - especially at this time, in this city, in this age; all of the words have been used so many times inappropriately that they sound like huckster speeches. The New Age patois has ruined a great vast vocabulary of expression. This seems to be a condition that reoccurs. 2,000 years ago in the time of Jesus, language was also ruined. There was a great movement in the 2nd Century BC and this movement was initiated in what is today Israel. The central city in that development of ruination was Jerusalem. By a confluence of Historical circumstances, Jerusalem became a battleground of power. And the temporary victor, about 169 BC, was a man named Antiochus IV. He was a greedy powerful bullying man, a Hellenistic King. He had taken over the empire that had been founded by Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals. After Alexander had taken it away from Dorias, who had inherited it from the lineage of Cyrus the Great, who had taken it away from the Neo-Babylonian Empire that was there before him. This land today is called Iran. Iran, 2,200 years ago, was concerned with Jerusalem because it was an interface of power with Egypt. Jerusalem lay on the borders of power and Egypt was a competing Hellenistic kingdom, and it's capital was Alexandria. In a way, the Hellenistic Kingdom of Antiochus IV wanted to convert Jerusalem into its capital city. So that their designs on adding the rest of Alexander's empire to their kingdom would reestablish this great world empire that had once belonged to Persia. But there were peculiar religious difficulties in all of this. One of the religious difficulties is that both ancient Iran and ancient Egypt laid competing claims to a religious vision of salvation. The third lineage of the archaic world – which could have laid claim to this – India, did not lay a claim to salvation as such. That came later with the Historical Buddha. In ancient Iran, Zarathustra was the voice of the Prophet of a new way of using language to bring the salvation of the individual soul to its fruition, so that this world could no longer contain it by its power and its constraints. And the Gathas of Zarathustra date, traditionally in Iran, from about 1776 BC; and I recently translated them and have found that Zarathustra lived many hundreds of years before that. That he lived at a time, about 2,300 BC, in one of the great early attempts at making a power kingdom stretch from one sea to another; from sea to shining sea. From the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. And that initial empire – because it arched up over a desert center – was called, and is called today, the Fertile Crescent. It was established by Sargon of Akkad. Sargon of Akkad was one of the world's great visionary kings. His daughter is the great compiler and author of all the Inanna epics. And later, his use of royal patronage to bring spiritual language into power, developed a whole literature out of which we get, not only the Inanna Epic, but the Epic of Gilgamesh, and many other great literary documents. This literary religious vision stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. It ended roughly where Canaan, the ancient Canonites had their capital cities. And so the Canonite religion, after the period of 2300 BC, embodied a watered down second hand version of what had been a great pure vision. And that great pure vision was centered upon a use of language. When someone speaks to you in an everyday mode, you use your ears to hear, and you can choose to hear or not to hear. You can be bored and you can tune out, or you can be temporarily interested and listen for awhile. But there is a way of using language so that it goes to the mind directly. Zarathustra in the Gathas calls this language "mantra" and the Sanskrit version of that word is "mantra". It means a sacred language that goes transparently through the ear direct to the mind. In ancient Egypt, this kind of language was called Hieroglyphic. It was not a language that was there to register on the ear, but a language that would register deep enough in the mind that its focus would come to manifestation after death. Its fruition were magic spells taught by Thoth that would be there when the body dissolved, when the ear was gone. When your worldly care of whether you listened or not, whether you understood or not was completely dissolved. Because when all of that world had melted away, that language, that sacred language, those magical sayings that had been tied in a certain way; words that instead of being strung out in lines of meaning, were curved and curved again and brought together and tied. And tied in a very specific way. For someone who did not know how to tie correctly, the ties became knots and could not be undone and after death you were lost. All that you heard then was gibberish and you ran into the very first gate in the Netherworld like a wall. And you were heard of no more. But for someone who had the power of spirit, who could speak the word; the Living Word, they were able to tie that sacred language into bows. So that after death when the body dissolved and the ear was no more, your struggling spirit could untie those bows one by one, twelve of them, for each of the twelve gates of the Netherworld. And having that language as a key to open the passage for your spirit through each of twelve gates, you were able finally to join the rising of Ra into resurrection for a new life. And you were born again. The Egyptian language wisdom pre-dates that of Zarathustra. But by so far that we have no idea. The most beautiful and comprehensive presentation of it comes from the traditional date of Zarathustra in Iran; it comes from about 1800 BC, it comes in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. We call it the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The three words in Hieroglyphic that say what that book is actually translate as Coming forth by Day. It's very difficult because the date of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is much more ancient than just 1800 BC; 18th or 19th Dynasty. We know from ancient Egyptian History, that at the time of the 18th Dynasty when the Book of Coming Forth by Day was being entered into some of the tombs that have come down until our own time, tombs that the French under Napoleon discovered, tombs that the British and some of the early American expeditions, some of the German expeditions discovered in the 19th Century – the largest version, the Papyrus of Ani, translated by Wallace Budge out of the British Museum in 1897. We know that the people at that time, 3800 years ago had found two different versions: one of which came in a short form that was said to have been copied in the time of Mycerinus who was the Pharaoh of the Third Pyramid, after the great Pyramid of Cheops, the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre, the third pyramid there Gaza across form Cairo is that of Mycerinus, Fourth Dynasty. And what he copied actually is the 64th chapter of The Egyptian book of the Dead. But we know also that in the 18th Dynasty a longer version of this had been found from one of the first dynasty Pharaohs. Long before Memphis, long before Heliopolis when Abydos was the mystical spiritual center of archaic Egypt. And even in the 1st Dynasty, 3000 BC, 5,000 years ago, the 64th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead was already in complete existence. And it talked about the salvation of one who comes through resurrection whose name is I Am. And then when you pass through each of the 12 gates, when you go through the cycle of the 12, you come to the presence of the Lord of the Word, who exchanges with you his I Am for your I Am and you live in Trinity. And at that time, 5,000 years ago, it was already ancient in Egypt. We have no time and there's actually no capacity on earth anymore to go through the Iranian development. It was scrambled and lost by greedy magi 4,000 years before any of us were born. But the Egyptian tradition remains and it's that Egyptian tradition that is the Hermetic tradition. Now this wonderful chapel is a chapel of the Gnostic tradition and it comes from Egypt; but it comes from Egypt from the 2nd Century AD. It comes into play, into being, and has its day more than 3,000 years after the Hermetic tradition already is written down completely. How old the Hermetic tradition is, no one knows. But one of its great symbols that is there in the 64th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the sacred star; five pointed star that registers in one's spirit and is that guiding light, that guiding presence for one, even after death. And even in life. The evening star, the morning star – those two stars are the same star. We know it's the planet Venus today. The wonderful lithograph that Stephan has had here for the 15 or 16 years that he's been in this place shows the naked woman, the soul, the anima. And coming out of the vaginal symbol is the dove of peace. But on the horizon is the five pointed star, the morning star, heralding the resurrection; the rising of the soul. In the 64th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, there is always the sense there; there is always the implicit understanding that there is a twin, there is a pair, there is a resonant pair like a tuning fork. That our level of humanity comes in pairedness and even the illustration - Budge's translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead; the Book of Coming Forth By Day, when he put the illustrations in, in 1901, the very first illustration in the very first Hymn to Ra, the introduction shows a man and a woman worshipping together. It was always that way. And in the Hermetic Tradition, one of the qualities that's always a hallmark is the shared presence nature of the priest. And that they do not command some kind of ecclesiastical hierarchy so much as a presence beyond life in eternity. Who knows what kind of hierarchy there is in eternity. It's never been counted. There are no diagrams. Jesus and Mary Magdalene present, in the turn of their aeon, that pair, that Hermetic pair, long before it was ever called Christianity. They present that pristine understanding and rising again of the way in which a word becomes a light at the very center of life that death has no possibility of erasing. And this world has no way of understanding until it learns to listen with the mind. That listening of the mind was described by a book that was written in the year 25 AD by a Jewish Scholar, gentleman, living in Alexandria. His name was Philo. He was called in antiquity sometimes Philo Judaeus, he was a Jew. He is called today Philo of Alexandria. His works were not read for more than 1000 years either by Jews or Christians. And we have a number of them today. And in one of them called On The Contemplative Life, he describes a first hand hearing of a spiritual word in such a way that it's unmistakably that of Jesus. First hand report of Jesus teaching, 25 AD in the outskirts of Alexandria. He says of this book on the contemplative life that it is a pair; it goes with another book which was on the active life which was about the Essenes. And that the Essenes and the active life were a certain mode of facing the evening of this Earth; but that the contemplative life was the other face of that mode, facing the morning of a new life. That this community headed by this president who could speak this spiritual language direct to the mind was concerned with the therapea, the therapy, the healing, the cure of death, the cure of the soul. In that book on the contemplative life, Philo says, that in the malaise of Alexandria, which was more than 2,000,000 people at a time when only two cities in the world were that large; Rome and Alexandria. Athens was 200,000 people; a tenth the size. Jerusalem a little bit larger. Alexandria was so spread out, that even 300 years before Jesus, one of the great poets, Theocratus, has one of his ladies in one of his poems complain about it being so far out in the suburbs of Alexandria that it takes all morning to ride in on a chariot. But on the southern suburbs of Alexandria, on a ridge, in between the Mediterranean Sea about 4 miles off; and large Lake Mariotis, which was about 3 or 4 miles off the other way, this ridge of land which rises in between these two great bodies of water, that there was a community and this community was the fatherland of the great contemplatives of that age; had been there for hundreds of years. And then there in fact as a Neo-Pythagorean community that was founded at a time just a few generations after Alexander the Great. So that for more than 300 years before Jesus came there, before he came there as a young budding adolescent to study, to progress, to work, to practice, to contemplate, to be at one with that eternal dance. Before he rose in the ten years that he was there to become the president of that community. For Philo says that the president is not necessarily the eldest but the one who is deepest in understanding those ways of God. Who when he spoke, created a double silence in the presence where he was. Philo said: it is hard to even write of such a peculiarity. He said: because this a community where silence, spiritual silence and inner silence was the norm. And yet when this man spoke, there was a silence, as it were, Philo says: within that silence. And that his language came out in such a way that it engraved itself upon the souls of the hearers. So that when this body should die, that language would be alive as the form of the soul. And that's where the Living Word comes from. But what that president told that community, some years later, was what the ancient Osiran religion finally understood; at the time that the Egyptian book of the Dead came forth by day itself. It was an ancient spiritual truth. It was a lesson in practicality. For when the Egyptian Hermetic tradition first was given to writing, the sacred language was put on the inside of the tombs of the earliest pyramids. The earliest one that we have is the Pyramid of Unis, dates from about 2700 BC; 4700 years ago. And that Hieroglyphic language was put on the inside of the tomb, for the tomb, the pyramid itself, was the surrogate body after death of the Ca. That was the place where it would go through those gates. And those texts, those Hieroglyphics from inside the pyramids, we have. A great many of them, not all but a great many. They're called The Pyramid Texts. That's what they're called: The Pyramid Texts. Then there was a change of key. Many hundreds of years after The Pyramid Texts, the new key, the radical new key, was the understanding that the focus, the crucible at which the transformation between life and death happened, was not so much the pyramid; that was like the general locus. But the actual fount was the coffin, was the sarcophagus. And so the sacred Hieroglyphics were taken off the walls of the pyramid, off the inside walls of the pyramid and put on the sarcophagus, put on the coffin. We have those. And they're different from The Pyramid Texts, these are called coffin texts because the language was more directed, it was more powerfully integrated, it was put exactly on the place where one either ties a knot of eternal death or a bow of resurrection to eternal life. The language was put on the sarcophagus. The Greek term sarcophagus means 'body eater'; because the sarcophagus was made out of limestone. When you put this in a limestone container, the limestone will dissolve the flesh, the bones, everything biological will be absorbed into the sarcophagus. And the proof of it is that after awhile the sarcophagus is empty. It's a radical difference. In a pyramid you preserve the body as a mummy. The whole purpose of a pyramid is to preserve the mummy so that the body is there. But the whole purpose of the radical change in the sarcophagus is that the body is not there and you know the transformation has been made because the body is not there. When you go to look for it, it's empty and that means it worked. But there was a third transformation. A Third, a second radical change that happened in the Hermetic tradition. The Pyramid Texts were on the inside of the pyramid and they were for the mummy. The Coffin Texts were on the sarcophagus and they were for the body that had transcendentally gone elsewhere and gone beyond. But the third level of the Hermetic tradition was reached when they realized that the language should be put into a book, because the focus was not upon a dead body so much in a sarcophagus, but upon a living body and the words were to be for the mind. And so The Egyptian Book of The Dead, 1800 years before Jesus, was already for the mind. Words to be written out of the inside of the mind. And because there were pyramid, coffin, book – three levels, by that time it was called Hermes Trismegistus. The book is Hermes Trismegistus. That's what's going on here. And that book belongs in your mind. Those words, if they're alive in you mind, will be alive when your body is gone. Jesus took it one radical step even further. He took it beyond the book. We have to remember that the crisis in Jerusalem was a crisis about 200 years before Jesus. It was a crisis of the book really; it was a crisis of the Torah. The Torah in 169 BC was the exact point of contention between Antiochus IV and a man whose known to History as the Teacher of Righteousness. And the great temple of Jerusalem was made the fount, the focal point, the fulcrum upon which this great power struggle between the Hellenistic Kingdom that was the Iran of that time, and the Hellenistic Kingdom that was the Egypt of that time. Jerusalem right on the dividing line, and the temple in Jerusalem was the exact handle on the true significance of that place. And in 169 BC the temple was converted to a Hellenistic temple of Zeus. And all of the trappings of Yahweh were thrown out and anyone who claimed to be of Jewish worshiping tradition was threatened with death; under penalty of death. And so the high priest took the presence of the power of the Holy of Holies and carried it within a vision. He knew that he could do this. He carried it within a vision of his heart and his mind. And he knew that he could do this, because there had been a prophet who had set the tone for this. The Prophet's name was Jeremiah. Because Jeremiah had lived in a precursor of this catastrophe of 169 BC. He'd lived about 430 years before, he lived at a time when the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom, under Nebuchadnezzar, was looking for young men and women who were talented, to run his empire. And he found that the most international minded people that he could find were the young Jewish men and women of about 600 BC, out of Jerusalem. They were international enough, they knew how to run things. And so he forcibly conscripted them, not to put them into prison, but to put them to work for his designs of power. And there was a small remnant of the Jewish community of Jerusalem of 600 BC that preempted this exile. The Exile, it's called, The Exile. Taken and put into bondage in the Neo-Babylonian Empire, into ancient Iran. But a small group preempted that and said we're going to go into exile ourselves into Egypt and we're going to take the number one prophet with us, even though it was against his will. And so the Jewish people bound Jeremiah and took him to Egypt and made him a captive. The only person who was in prison during The Exile was Jeremiah. Why Jeremiah? You have to know a little bit about what's what in this world. Jeremiah's father's name was Hilkiah. And it is Hilkiah who re-wrote the Torah so that it read beautifully. He's the one who made Genesis flow beautifully; who made the story of Exodus flow beautifully. It was Hilkiah who brought the vision of Moses. What Moses had written, that Torah, when that was written about 1300 BC, that vision was very esoteric; it was very difficult to understand, very difficult to hear. It was Hilkiah who brought it into a smoother more literary form, but passed the esoteric understanding of it onto his son; onto Jeremiah. Jeremiah was the only man at the time. One man, the only man at the time, who understood what the real terms of the covenant were. And when he was taken captive by his own people into Egypt, he said, it's there in The Book of Jeremiah, it's there in I think the 44th chapter of Jeremiah, he said the covenant of our fathers is broken forever. It's gone, it is abnegated. The covenant of Abraham is gone. There will have to be a new covenant made and that new covenant will no longer be written on stone, on tablets that can be put into an arch and kept in the temple and kept there in Jerusalem. That covenant is gone. And Jeremiah says very specifically: the new covenant will need to be in a language which the heart and the mind of man focuses within him. And until man matures to the point where he can keep a covenant with God in his heart and in his mind and doesn't have to look up on stone or in laws or in codes or rules about how he should be with God; until he can live in such a way, that his heart and mind are presenced with God, there will be no new covenant. The Teacher of Righteousness was able to take the presence of God out of the Holy of Holies of the Temple and he looked for 20 years for a place to put it. And not finding any place, he made one. And he made it there on the shores of the Dead Sea, where the River Jordan flows into it at Qumran. And he founded Qumran. He founded the Essene community. The brotherhood, that purified brotherhood who were meant to purify man through the generations until the heart and the mind of man were able to have a language concourse with God, strong enough and exact enough so that that new covenant could be made. And so they were called the community of the covenant. Because that was their purpose; to prepare the hearts and the minds of man to make a new covenant. Through a new radical kind of language; a language that's not written on the inside of tombs, it's not written on sarcophagus, it's not written in books, it's written in the hearts and minds of the men and women who live everyday in that concourse of presence with God. And that teacher of Righteousness, in order to begin the process of purification, of education, of refinement, wrote at least three books to sustain the community that he founded. He wrote a series of hymns to God, Hodio. They're called the Thanksgiving Hymns. And if you buy a little volume, the Penguin edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls, you will find at least 30-36 Thanksgiving Hymns of the Teacher of Righteousness. And you can read for yourself. It tells of the spiritual prevail, so that one can understand who is writing this, struggled with this too, suffered with this also. But came through; the refinement happened – the heart was finally purified, the mind was finally clarified and the language was there. The second book that he wrote was a way of understanding how you take the normal blurred lower levels of the psyche – we call it today dream analysis. He wrote a book on dream analysis; how you analyze dreams. But not just dreams, not just your dreams, but other people's dreams; and how once you have learned that, you can even analyze dreams of others that they do not tell you. You can learn to see in your mind what dreams someone had and understand that. And further, that that quality of penetration and insight, that spectrum of vision finally leads beyond dream analysis, even at those esoteric depths to be able to read the visions of an end of an age. And that book is called the book of Daniel, and the teacher of righteousness wrote the Book of Daniel. It's a book of how to look at the deeper levels of the psyche and bring the health of a new person out of even that level, out of even the dream level and raise it up to the level of the conscious differential vision of an age. And an end of an age (un-hearable). . . . . . . . . . . .. He later wrote a third book, it's called the Book of Job. About how one can keep an alchemical presence of the Lord even as everything is dissolving around you. And so are left with nothing but a heap of ashes. SIDE TWO HERMETIC JESUS One of the real indignities that Job suffered, not only being on a mound of ashes, but having to listen to the sophomoric arguments of those who think that they know because they're clever, because they know about logic and they know about all this and that and even the brash young one who says, I have it – you're unconsciously guilty and that's why God did this to you, you did something you didn't even know you did. And Job tells him, in the way someone whose heart and mind are pure and clear, I don't know anything except that I am here with God. It's like the Alchemical coupilation, the gold that's left in the crucible doesn't know anything other than that it is. And that's all that Job knows. The Thanksgiving Hymns, The Book of Daniel and The Book of Job are the Teacher of Righteousness – and he died. And for about 200 years that Essene community worked on making the purified heart, the clarified mind, they were known for purity, they were known for the exactness. And part of the coordination of heat and mind is to bring these two into a common cycle. It's like trying to make a cycle out of the sun and the moon – they have different cycles, but if you're attentive you can bring the Sun and the Moon together into a single cycle. So the Essene concern with calendars, with time was to bring the cycles of the heart and the cycles of the mind together so that time began to be a form. It began to be a series of forms like gates because those gates which language, spiritual language, helps us to go through, are those thresholds of temporality. This quality came to a conclusion with John the Baptist . From the Teacher of Righteousness to the John the Baptist that we know of, is about 200 years. And as the Teacher of Righteousness founded the community, John the Baptist ended the community; that is he ended the community by handing it over to Jesus. But there were many people later, after the death of John the Baptist, after the crucifixion of Jesus who didn't believe this. And there were many Zealots who tried to keep that Essene torrential energy together. There's the Temple Scroll that talks about a war – an Armageddon, the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness. There's Masada, there's a revolt of Barkochba, even 100 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. But the true ending of that community came with the realization of a new passing on, a radical change that came with Jesus. The only thing that John the Baptist ever wrote was an Apocalypse. And his Apocalypse is torrential. His Apocalypse was so torrential that it had to be set in a parentheses of visionary language just before it and visionary language just after it. So John the Baptist's Apocalypse is set in between, sandwiched in between two sets of mystical language by another John – St. John. And that Apocalypse within a mystical vision is called The Book of Revelation. And it's not understandable if you don't understand that it has this structure; it has a mystical entrance to it, it has a torrential fiery symbolic testing and then it has a mystical exit. It is a journey through an end of an aeon of another world put into a spiritual dilemma, like Job's dilemma. You cannot get through it with cleverness, there is no way. Even with super computers you are not going to find it. Why? Because for a logic to work it has to have an integration of meaning, it has to have a symbolic vocabulary that pulls together and that ascent back to the Divine is not an integration, it's a differentiation – it's a fanning out into infinity. And there isn't a logic that works in that atmosphere. Logic is like propeller driven aircraft – it's only good where there's the air of the ordinary life of Earth around. The propellers don't work in space. You can't even get them to work as high as 80,000 feet much less some other star system or some other galaxy or outside of the universe 15 billion light years away. A differential spirit is at home anywhere and everywhere and works just as well there as here; is not stopped by death or confusion or the fact of taxes or the fact of having to go to work, of being bored, of any of that. The alive spirit is nonplussed by that. When John the Baptist saw Jesus, recognized him, hadn't seen him, had not seen him since he was 12 years old, and when he saw him he was already over 40. And when he came striding into the Jordan River; the place where the oldest ford in civilization takes place. The earliest city that we know of is Jericho, it was in business 10,000 BC; 12,000 years ago it was already a Jericho. And the main concourse of trade that Jericho had was with the coast coming inland and over the Jordan River and going out into the western parts of what is today Jordan, which was much more savanna like 12,000 years ago. There were no bridges, there was a ford across the Jordan and John the Baptist baptized there at that ford, because it was the first place that civilization tied a bow. And when he saw Jesus come into that ford, more than 28 years after he had last seen him, he recognized him. He recognized someone who is not distracted when they're hearing wisdom. Being distracted when you are being given wisdom is like being indifferent in a time of moral crisis. Dante reserved the hottest spot in Hell for those who are indifferent in a time of moral crisis. That quality of Jesus that John the Baptist saw was that star of the Word that carried eternity in a salvation way in a man whose heart and mind were able to exchange themselves with someone else. In the 64th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 5,000 years ago, it was written in lapis lazuli letters at the base of a temple at Abydos, because it was so valuable. It says "I Am and that I am I give to you and accept your I am"; that secret exchange of selves. And someone who has an eternal star who gives you that can take your temporal flame and brighten it into eternity equally and carry that for himself, you carry his self. And when Ra rises in the morning, you will rise in the sun. This is a Hermetic Jesus; this is different from the confusion of the later development of power struggles and conferences; it's much different, and a story that can be developed quite a long way. Is it true? The truth is determinable not by looking up in books or making correlations, but of testing it out in life. For truth is meaning accepted. No one can give you meaning, and references and dictionaries and encyclopedias can give you meaning, but until you accept it, it isn't true. And the only way you can accept it is to test it; test it not only in life, but test it deeper in life, test it in your heart and your mind. Because if it is true, then those structures were put there and they should be operative now, and they should be determinable to be operative now. And that's always the test in the Hermetic Tradition of whether wisdom is real or not. It's not important whether it's real or not to someone else or in a book or in a Hieroglyphic or in symbols, but whether or not you can live with it even through the dissolving of death. Then it's true in a way that's really meaningful. This was the core of the Hermetic Tradition. And it's in place today. And I think that's all that can be said tonight, by me. Thank you very much.