The Mysteries of the State and Individual in Archaic Rome
Presented on: Tuesday, December 11, 1984
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 2 of 54
The Mysteries of the State and the Individual in Archaic Rome
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 11, 1984
Transcript:
The date is December the 12th, 1984. This is the Tuesday night lecture by Roger Weir. He introduces himself.
We're going to call this the mysteries of the state and the individual in archaic Rome. We have to recap. To bring ourselves to a focus here with something that was mentioned, uh, further back three, four lectures ago. The Greek mind is peculiar to us. It's extraordinarily individual. Perhaps not every Greek individual was first of all to that existential level, but those who left traces of themselves, the writers. The military persons, the politicians were extremely rare birds. And the rarest of them all is Homer, of course, who is the granddaddy of that whole outlook. I'm sure that Odysseus was not anywhere near as interesting as Homer makes him to be. And I'm sure Socrates was not anywhere near as profound as Plato makes him to be. Just as a historical account of Hamlet and Saxo is not anywhere near what Shakespeare makes it to be. So those individuals that have left traces of themselves were extraordinary. They were orchids. They were rare birds.
And for those greats who have left traces of themselves, after a while, one gets a basic understanding that what concerns them were those experiences that pushed you outside of yourself because they discovered that there were experiences where you left yourself, and there were experiences that were so powerful in evoking that they drew you out of yourself. And because they were energized and directed and powered largely on the basis of their dynamic individuality. Homeric man is mobile in the world, is not self-centered as an ecstatic being who is a target for others, but he is mobile. And so, these experiences of being outside yourself were of great interest to you. What is happening? Is there any way to predict this? Is there any way to type this? And in the Greek mind as early as Homer, and of course, delineated with great accuracy later on, the experiences of being outside of yourself were grouped in three extraordinary mythological figures. Three different ways; three different figures. The first way was that of ecstasy, ecstasis. And the mythological figure that personified that mode was Aphrodite. Aphrodite. It would be common and misappropriate for us to think of Aphrodite as lust, sexual lust. She is ecstasy; she is the experience of being completely outside yourself, in passion. Now this has a religious tone also, obviously, as well as the physical experience. And Aphrodite was paired because the experience of ecstasy actually has a polar direction that's commensurate with it. And the compliment to Aphrodite was Ares.
In the Renaissance, in the famous painting by Botticelli, using the Roman names, there's Venus and Mars, and Mars is asleep very nicely, and Venus is lying there supine, looking at him. Their polarity is a tension between ecstasy and terror because Ares is a monstrous figure - he is the God of war, and in Rome Mars was one of the major gods because terror was the most familiar experience to the Roman mind, to being outside yourself. Maybe not for all the population, all the time, but for those who have traces of themselves, for those who control the situation, for those who made the history. The most common experience of being outside themselves was terror, war, battle, fighting face to face with death. A flash of iron, a glint of bronze. A yell might be the last evocative image for you. In order to live as a human being, with that imminent possibility, one has to collect together those sparks that could ignite you into oblivion and put them into some image that controls those feelings, that brings them together. And then to protect yourself, to defend yourself against that imperative possibility of suddenly being ejected from life. One has to devise that image. And so, Mars for the Romans, very powerful.
In the Greek mind, different from the Roman mind. Aphrodite and Ares are related. But because the polarity of ecstasy and terror is extremely unstable, and because they convert from one to another with almost sudden rapidity, and this essentially is the experience in tragedy, the tragic denouement is to suddenly recognize that when one is building up towards an order, towards a passionately desired order, an ecstasy is of great significance to you, that all of a sudden the insight comes that it is terror that you're experiencing and not ecstasy. And this was the point that broke minds. This is the feeling that broke human beings.
And if you had a failure of nerve in the ancient world, you were as good as dead. There were no counselors. There was no cushy society to hold you in. You were like an injured wolf, and you were out of the pack. So, the guarantee of the safety of the individual, of the person in grace was to be able to face these moments or that moment. And that's why the performance of tragedy, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, was a public event. And you had to go. They rounded you up. You had to go. It was like being forced to vote and you had to pay a nominal sum, some pittance, but you had to pay something. And they had people, soldiers, public soldiers, who were on the payroll who handled large ropes and they went down all the streets of whatever city you happened to be in, in Greece. And if it was a festival day and there was a tragedy, you had to go and see this because you had to be prepared all your life from little child on to be able to survive. That being outside yourself whenever it would occur. The peculiarity for us is that the Romans experienced this as a collective and not as individuals, that the Romans had a state way, a state institutional way of experiencing ecstasy and terror and largely terror. Now for the Greeks. Go back to them for just a moment.
For the Greeks there was in fact a third way of being outside yourself, which was a handle upon the unstable polarity of ecstasy and terror. And that third way was personified by the goddess Athena Wisdom - because wisdom also takes you outside yourself. And this is why Athena is a woman like Aphrodite, but she is armed like Ares. The armed woman is the balance between ecstasy and terror, and being outside of yourself in that balanced way was what wisdom was all about for the Greeks. But there was something further because they were not children, they were very sophisticated; they were every bit as complex as we are. Those extra personal experiences had a transcendental focus. The three of them together came together: Aphrodite, Ares, and Athena came together; Ecstasy, terror, and wisdom came together. And where they came together the Greek image for that experience was Apollo. And because that focus could happen transcendentally and also eminently the auxiliary focus. The eminent focus was Dionysius and so Apollo and Dionysius are related, and they are transcendental images. Whereas Aphrodite, Ares, and Athena are what we would call psychic images - they occur on the psychic level. Whereas Apollo and Dionysius occur on a more refined, integrated level, not psychic, but what the Greeks would call pneumatic spiritual. So that one would inure oneself to experience psychic terror by coming to understand and participate in the initiations and mysteries of Ares. Or when we move to Rome, as we are now doing. The Roman experience was a collective instead of an individual experience.
And the three gods in Rome, the three psychic manifestations in Rome are a little bit different. Ares carries over and becomes Mars, and Mars is very much like the Roman... Mars is very much like the Greek Ares, but Aphrodite, oddly enough, doesn't carry over conspicuously. The complement to Mars in the archaic Roman religion was a figure that we hardly hear of anymore, called Quirinus, Quirinus, Quirinus. And Quirinus presents the feminine but is not a female. We have to hone ourselves a little fine here. The feminine is not always present in the female is not necessarily grounded to that embodiment. Words can be feminine. A statue could be feminine. An animal or a person could have a feminine trait and not be female. So, the feminine is not necessarily synonymous with female. Quirinus was male, but represented the feminine and represented this ecstasis of being outside oneself, but rather in a collective way than an individual way.
And so Quirinus becomes really the psychic figure of stability in a religious sense. And many of the early works on Roman religion - by early work I mean early 20th century, because very few people thought about this at all. Very few people took this seriously, that there was anything to know until the 20th century, and it's only in the last 10 or 15 years that really some recognition has been finally given to the situation that we are in fact faced to understand that some very great, significant episode in human history has passed unnoticed by us, and that we are living very often in prototypes and cultural types that are projected from the Roman rather than the Greek, and that especially when we get into large collective actions, it's the Roman mind rather than the Greek mind that structures the situation.
Archetypal energies are not just some, any, old eternal character. They have historical structural styles. This is why we need to find out, why we need to know. Because we want to have something to say about whether or not we're going to dance to that tune or not. And Quirinus is right in the blind spot. Along with Mars and Quirinus, the third element in that psychic triad for the Romans was Jupiter. So that Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus become the stable triad. Called in scholarly journals the Capitoline Triad for the Capitoline Hill, where the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was finally finished. And we'll get to that tonight, I hope. All three psychic gods for the Romans were male then all three were state religious personages. So that the Roman mind from the beginnings was a collective experience rather than an individual, personal experience. And we notice again and again in Roman history that the motivating factor is for the collective rather than the individual. And this is why it was such a complete and utter travesty to the Roman mind to have someone like Julius Caesar say I am wrong. That's why they killed him.
No man is wrong. Rome is all of us. All through time together as a collective. And the integrity of our psychic manifestation is that that should be guarded. And even he who would be a benefactor to us if he transgresses that limitation must be done away with. And one of the great mysteries of history is that the nephew of Julius Caesar, Augustus Octavian, who became Augustus [Caesar]. Simply overpowered the Roman state by dimensions of the personal that Julius Caesar was only dreaming of and set the stage for the whole inundation of the psychic field by the occurrence of the Messiah. And we have to understand that while there was a Jewish spark, it was a Roman tinder that burned. It was the Roman mind that exfoliated and became the Christian religion. So, we have to understand this. And that's why we're going we're going back in this.
The figure of Quirinus is peculiar because it had to be understood by the Roman block mentality in terms of a polarity to Mars. And the only way that they could understand that polarity was to say that Mars was for offense and Quirinus was for defense. There was the only way that they could figure that out, experience that. We're talking about Roman people around 700 BC who were fighters and brawlers and farmers, and that was all they were called by the great Augustan historian Livy - a bunch of sheepherders. Common terms. They were not at all the glorious, bronze, arrogant egotists of Homer. The origins of Greece. They were the truck drivers of their day. And the peculiar thing is that it is their collective structure that proves strongest in the ancient world. And it is a great mystery that of all the sophisticated plans and subtle constructs of the Greek mind, that it should have been the Roman. That won the day and carried the whole integration, the whole ecumenical.
And what Alexander could never have done, Augustus, when he did it, did it with such a firmness that it still retains its impression to this day. Only instead of being the bow that Augustus had hoped to tie, it has become a knot strangling people century after century, until in our present day, we have got to get away from it. And so, it's largely misunderstood because the origins of it are just simply not recognized at all. For Quirinus, the symbol for defense was the shield. Just ask for Mars. The sword was a symbol of offense. The shield, the symbol of defense. But the archaic Roman shield was a peculiar image. It was shaped like the figure eight. That is, it was an eight when you held it up. It was like an infinity side when you held it on the side. When you held it up for battle, it was an eight. And when you held it at parade rest, it was an infinity sign. It was the epitome of the image of eternal peace.
There were 12 priests who were called Salii, Salii, the Salian priests. 12 Salii, as they are called, six from Mars and six for Quirinus. They were called leaping priests because their parade, their religious procession, included them leaping along together to a three-beat line, sort of. Which is a military staccato rhythm rather than a sonorous, syncopated rhythm. Six of them held their shields at rest, and this was the symbol of Quirinus. But of these 12 Salian priests, one of these shields was different from all the rest. In the center, where the two circles come together and make the figure eight, was inset a stone, and one of those stones was real, and 11 were imitations, and the one real one was a meteorite. What we would call today in meteorology, a tektite - a black, iron, rocky mass. So that there was a celestial focus of the two circles brought together Mars and Quirinus, terror and ecstasy, held together in a celestial navel, visible on the ceremonial shields of the ceiling.
And in early Archaic Rome, there was instituted by the first great religious reformer of the Roman people, Numa Pompilius, this Procession of Quirinus and ultimately the Procession of Mars. And in order to express this ambivalence, this related ambivalence - which we can probably understand better as a polarity - Numa Pompilius had built in the Roman Forum area the Temple of Janus. Janus is the two-faced god. He is looking both ways. Very often, mythographers of the 19th century and early 20th century would say, well, Janus is looking to past and future. But I think you can understand that this is a little naive. The Janus is two-faced because he holds together in a single personality, war and peace, what we would call terror and ecstasy. From what we've been delving into the great polarity, that dynamic axis that not only drives man in this world but can take him out of it either way. And there has to be some way to hold that together, an integrating image. The meteorite is a totem of Jupiter, the sky god. Instead of throwing a lightning bolt though, because he is not Zeus, he is Jupiter. The Romans are a warlike people - people instead of lightning, it is a meteorite. Iron weapons. We've been talking about the achievement of iron on Saturdays in the Saturday classes, of how the great religious cycle built on the alchemy of bronze was gorgeous and beautiful, and along came iron, which was not a beautiful thing, but iron could pierce bronze. And the discovery that dirty old iron pierces those arrogant bronze breastplates collapsed the whole Mycenaean Minoan religious worldview.
And there was a great dark age in Greece for several hundred years. And we saw that on Saturday, last Saturday, how the Chinese experienced the same thing, the whole Shang Dynasty, based on a bronze technology, a bronze alchemical metallurgy completely collapsed in face of them though. So, this meteorite from Jupiter held together that polarity so that Jupiter became a very powerful god, the most powerful god for the Romans, because he had the function of holding together war and peace.
And so, if that is a state God. Then the state must provide for this whole exfoliation of the mythological imagery for the people. And so, the Temple of Janus was built, and it consisted of an inner facing set of doors, two large doors, probably somewhere on the order of about 12 feet high. And the notion was that when the state, when the Roman people - and we're going to have to talk about the Roman people. Now, when the Roman people were at peace the doors were closed, and when they were at war the doors were opened. And Livy, writing in 26 BC, said that Numa Pompilius, probably around 710 BC, when he built the Temple of Janus, he closed the doors for 40 years. After 37 years of Romulus, constant wars, constant battles, one battle after another. After an interregnum year, Numa Pompilius came in and reigned for 43 years. And the last 40 of them were complete total peace for the Roman people. He's the one who instituted all of the early religious reforms. He's the one who built the Temple of Janus. And he closed those doors. And Livy says in 26 BC that since Numa Pompilius, around 710 BC, they've only been closed twice in the whole history of the Roman people. Once by an upstart council named [Manilius?], who wanted to promote himself as being somewhat divine. And he fudged, and he closed the doors, and the next day or so they were opened. And the only time they were legitimately closed was by Augustus Caesar after the Battle of Actium, when he had beaten Mark Antony and had taken over Ptolemaic Egypt, he closed the doors. They were closed for about two weeks. A war broke out, and he simply sent so many legions that overpowered it, and they closed the doors again. And the next year something else broke out. And Augustus, an almost frenetic tenacity to bring peace to the world because it was a metaphysical responsibility for him for a third time, closed the doors of Janus within one year, and they stayed closed for a little while. At that point, it was the only time in Rome's history that they were at peace for 700 years.
Numa Pompilius and his name Pompi - pompi meant a five. Now in Latin, quinque is five. So, pompi is from a different language. It's from a language of which the Sabine people spoke. And the Sabines were very old, ancient people in central Italy. They're concomitantly with the Etruscans to the north. And so, Numa Pompilius is a Sabine. That's why they gave him the name Pompilius. So, he is the first king of Rome who brings peace. He's the first king of Rome who is really from some other group who controls the situation. And he takes over from Romulus, who had, we talked about last week, had set up the city of Rome.
Now, Numa Pompilius also founded the institution of priestly colleges. Livy says in his early History of Rome that he realized that the Roman people were of such a constitution that they had to be kept busy in peace. They had to be taught to structure peace because they didn't know how to live. They didn't know what to do with themselves. Their only social cohesion was war. And so, he instituted a lot of religious reforms, as we would call them, actually, instead of being reforms, they were the initial structures. There had been nothing there before. So, the priestly colleges were founded by Numa Pompilius. And he also founded the Roman calendar. Before Numa, the Roman calendar was a ten-month calendar. We think that anybody would have had a calendar for the whole year, but it's not so very often in antiquity it just wasn't so. And so, everything was sloppy, carried over. The continuous calendar is quite a religious institution. The continuity of psychological time, the comfort of knowing what time it is and having a referent world for that is a real religious function.
Human beings are very disembodied when they have no sense of time. And you have to have a lot of meditation under the robe to handle timelessness on a daily basis. So, Numa instituted the continuous calendar, and he made it a 12-month lunar cycle, which left over an extra month. And so, there was an intercalary month, so that the whole cycle of the Roman cognition of time was in a 20-year cycle, that everything came back just as it was in a 20-year cycle. Actually, the 19-year cycle, the 20th year would be like the first year. The lunar cycle is a 19-year cycle, as was recognized as early as Stonehenge, 5000 years ago.
So, Numa instituted the priestly colleges, the continuous Roman calendar, which began incidentally on the 1st of March - that was the Roman New Year. And Numa made apparent to the Roman people, he realized that they were not just going to take his word for it, so he made apparent to them that he was receiving inspiration from a woman, a divine woman, whose name was Egeria, and she was what he called a nymph. We would call it a psychic manifestation, an anima image. She was a nymph from a sacred spring near the temple of Diana the Huntress there in the Rome area. And he would go and sit and receive these messages, these psychic messages, these inspirations from Egeria. And then he would bring them back before the Roman people, and he taught them how to portion out their psychic lives, their mental space, their daily routine in such a way that for 40 years the Roman people prospered and became the envy of all their neighbors.
They'd been feared as the worst gang, like a large motorcycle gang. That's how they, the early Romans, were viewed with Romulus, and under Numa they became the most stable of all the peoples in central Italy and people were jealous of them because there was always order at Rome so that later on, when the process began to occur, that when they would defeat a people in arms, they would move the whole population of the people to Rome and destroy the cities. So that the population of Rome began to grow and grow and grow. And they were glad to come after 2 or 3 days of thinking over, because Rome was well ordered, it was able to fight very well and defend itself, and it was able to structure comfortable lives for lots of people.
Rome became a very large city early on the first great census of Rome - I guess we'll get to that in a little bit - listed 80,000 men able to bear arms. You take away the women, the children, the slaves who did not bear arms, the lowest economic class which did not bear arms. You have a very large city. This is all before 500 BC. But this capacity to be fierce in war and ordered in peace. You know how they come together in the Roman mind provoked stronger neighbors to try and take them out before they got any bigger. So, the idea of the preemptive strike started to occur more and more to the larger powers in central Italy. And of course, the largest power were the Etruscans. And so, it was inevitable that eventually there was going to be some clash between.
But Numa had set up this situation. And in fact the figure of Numa was so alive psychically for the Roman people that when they had a crisis, just before the Third Punic War, there was a tremendous political and psychological crisis in Rome (180 BC) that some of the rebels of that time claimed that they had gone to one of the hills of Rome where he had been buried, the Janiculum Hill, which is across the Tiber, north of the Tiber a couple of miles from where the Vatican Hill is. They had gone to the Janiculum Hill. They had dug up Numa's tomb and had found the lost books of Numa. And they presented these to the Roman people. And the Roman state in 180 BC was so uptight over the possibilities that could come out of this, that they put to death all the conspirators and burned the books. Because this was a real threat to the stability of the whole Roman mind, which was cognate if I can use that term with the Roman state. If you broke the Roman mind, you broke the Roman state. This is the later paranoic inheritance of the Christian Church, the Roman Catholic Church. We have to be unified, or we are nothing. We have to have our doctrines in order, or we are nothing. And the basic structure upon which those are woven is history. So that the Roman mind, the Roman character, the Christian character is all woven on a thread, a spinal column of history, having your history right. What actually happened and where are we?
And thus, the great urge to know what's coming next. Hence the great propensity to be fulfilled by prophecy or to have prophecies fulfilled. It's a basic structure of the Roman mind. Whereas for the Greeks, history was not at all the integrating thread. A sense of dramatic artfulness was the integrating thread for the Greek mind. A dramatic sense of life that a life made sense, and a great dramatic artistic unity. A whole that was and still is the epitome for the Greek, but for the Roman. It was fitting into the right history. And so, it became more and more incumbent on Romans as they went along to get their history straight. To get everything cleaned up so that whatever was taught, whatever was there was all of a single piece. And we have inherited this rather like Jonah being swallowed by the whale. We have been spoon fed phony history so long and so often that we think it couldn't have been any other way. And as James Joyce once said, history is a nightmare I'm trying to wake up from.
After Numa Pompilius. The next early king of Rome, Tullius Hostilius. From which we still get our word hostile. That family, Tullius Hostilius thought that Romans had become milksops, and so he wanted to go out and have some adventures. So, they brought out the swords and went to town. But he, in order to cement his power, realized that there had to be a change in the character of the Roman way of conducting war and peace. And it is Tullius Hostilius that built the first place for the Roman Senate. In fact, up until just the generation before Livy, up until about Caesar's time, it was still called the Curia Hostilia where the Senate met. The Senate building was called the Curia Hostilia, from Tullius Hostilius, who was from about 672 to 640 BC. He also founded a priestly college specifically for the conduct of war.
Numa Pompilius had been very careful not to demonize war too much. He knew the Romans very well. He was a king of the Romans, but he was also a Sabine. They had lost their women to the Romans in mythological times. So, the priestly college for war - which was called the Fetiales, Fetiales - was founded at this time. And Tullius Hostilius provoked a war with the city of Alba. Now you remember Alba Longa, the hill outside of Rome, and that, the fabled son of Aeneas from the Aeneid. His son Ascanius had taken a group of settlers, colonists, and gone to Alba Longa and had founded the town of Alba. Well, Tullius Hostilius, in 400 years later provoked a war with them, and this was the first town that was completely destroyed. All of the population, 100%, were moved bodily to Rome, and every building except a couple of sacred temples was leveled and pulled down. And it was the beginning of the growth of Rome. Rome doubled its population within a week. And it set the whole tone that Rome literally swallows its enemies and incorporates them into the body politic.
Whatever gods they had are affinities to the Roman gods, and this constellation becomes more and more energized. Just as the city of Rome grows, the religious power grows. This is why, by the time of Augustus, and you can read it in the Aeneid, the Romans were scared to death that they had accrued a cosmic power, and they didn't want to make any mistakes about it. They didn't want to be short circuited, electrocuted by their own achievements. There's a great static electrical charge to the mentality of the turn of the millennium. We are told that this apocalyptic mentality is just the radicals, the Jewish radicals out in the desert. Not so at all.
Why do you think 5 or 6 Roman Empire emperors in a row went crazy? Nero, Caligula, and so forth, they could not take the hot seat. They were burnt out. And the first one to be able to stand it, Vespasian, fancied himself the Messiah. He thought that he was what the Jews were talking about. So, he destroyed the city of Jerusalem, just like Tullus Hostilius, destroyed the city of Alba 700 years before, and brought all of the sacred implements to Rome. The Arch of Titus in Rome - Titus was the son of Vespasian - shows the Roman soldiers under Vespasian and Titus carrying the huge menorah from the Second Temple of Jerusalem. All of the Jewish symbols of power were taken to Rome in 70 AD. That's why the Christian Church was founded there, because all the symbols of power were there. The symbols of Jewish power were in Rome after 70 AD and weren't in Jerusalem anymore.
So, we're beginning to understand that all of these momentous happenings had beginnings and that the beginning set up patterns. And because of the Roman collective mind, they were made into patterns, almost like habituation, cultural patterns. I don't like to use the terms social mores, which sociologists love to use, but it became that kind of an ingrained social commitment. It was the thing to do. In fact, it became a mentality where that was the only way to do it. Later on, in the time of the Third Punic War, when Rome would defeat Carthage, they would completely level Carthage. They would pry up the foundation stones, plow the land with salt so that nothing would ever grow again, and nothing has, because the idea was, you've got to efface your enemy and take his power and incorporate it into you.
Not you as a person, but you as a citizen of Rome, part of the body politic. And this then becomes a very strange web, as it were, so that the individual is only authentic when he is a cog in the web. That's the mix your metaphors. But I do it on purpose in this consideration. This is a Roman trait, and one of the reasons that Rome and none of the other Hellenistic kingdoms, but it was Rome that unified the ancient world, was this overbearing, stubborn trait of incorporating others into yourself until they became so polyglot that anybody could fit and be right at home. But consequently, there was no real definition for the Romans. They were nowhere. They were nobody. They were just Romans. And as Livy says in 26 BC, we are in such a state of decay that we just don't have the courage anymore. We cannot face our lives, and we don't have enough willpower to take the remedies necessary to improve them. In other words, we're at a dead end. And this is at the moment of great Roman triumph. So, the baton fell upon Tullius Hostilius after Numa. And when he died, the next king in the last of the Latin kings was Ancus Marcius. Marcius. And he is the king who extended Rome to the sea, to Ostia, the seaport. And when he did that, Rome became a competitor with the Etruscans, because the Etruscans had been very important in terms of trade, and they had unified.
Remember last week they had unified Phoenician and Greek trading elements with the indigenous peoples. The Neolithic persons who had lived in Italy for tens of thousands of years, and the Etruscan areas of north central Italy in the mountains, were one of the earliest metallurgic refining and smelting areas. So, it was a basic source of workable usable metals, and civilizations were largely built on metals. This is why the interior of a civilized person was often spoken of as gold. The most precious of metals. The psychic image of the skeleton of the interior man was gold, because the exterior structure of civilization was the control of this metallurgical capability. We still have the images with us. If you look at the power symbols in our time, it is the steel frames of the skyscrapers. It is the steel shapes of the jumbo jets. They are the most the metal monsters. Going down to the sea, to Ostia. Becoming a polyglot area.
The next kings of Rome were not Latins but were Etruscan. They took a very heavy hand in the situation, but the way in which they took this heavy hand is illuminating. Remember now that Rome is masculine in its psychic manifestation almost exclusively, but that the individual handling of these polarities includes a preponderance of the feminine. Aphrodite and Athena, both feminine, so that when you get to individuals, you get an opposite, a topsy turvy situation. And so, we find that the Etruscans come to Rome due to a woman, an Etruscan woman named Tanaquil, who was a rather occult lady. She knew a lot about divination. The Etruscans were very good at augury especially, which is using birds as signs for divination. And she was very good at this sort of thing. Livy says all the Etruscan women seem to have this capacity. But Tanaquil was very, very, very shrewd. And her husband was not fully Etruscan but was half Greek and half Etruscan. His father had been a man named Demetrius, who had come from Corinth and had married an Etruscan woman, and so their son became the first Etruscan king of Rome, and his name in history is one Tarquinius Priscus, the first of the Tarquin kings. But he became king because of his wife.
And now we see another element of Roman history that while the state mind, the state religion, is almost totally, exclusively masculine, the mobile figures within the power making structure are very often women behind the scenes. And Tanaquil actually is such a powerful figure. She makes the first two kings, her husband, and when he dies. Uh, many decades later, their adopted son in law. So, she's a kingmaker for a long time in Roman power. And in fact, the mythic image of her controlling the power is that on the way to Rome, an eagle swooped down and took her husband's cap off his head and swooped up into the heavens and swooped back down and put his cap back on his head. And she said, this is a sure sign that they, the gods, want us.
Now, the curious thing here is that we would expect that with the masculine psychic manifestations that the Roman mind would respond to masculine related advice and events and so forth. Why are they so prone to the women? And this is because of the Etruscan North Italian mystique of a certain goddess. Now she was called - and we didn't learn this until the 20th century from archaeology in the ancient Venetic language, which is from the northern Po Valley area - she was called Rehtia, or in Latin would be Raetia or Raetia. But in that Venetic language it was R-E-H-T-I-A, right-tia, or raksha, which means erect, straight. And I have here in this volume on ancient Italy and modern religion, a picture of some of the little charms of Raetia. In fact, I bought one which was made in Peru, and I put it on the arch here. When, when we're over with the lecture, you can see the three little figures together. Those are archetypal manifestations of Raetia in Peruvian folk art because it turns out that ratio is some kind of a very special goddess. When she was incorporated into the Roman mind, she became Juno. Jupiter's wife, Juno. But in fact, Raetia goes back in antiquity quite far. And, in ancient Greece, her name was Orthia.
And the Greek images, which come from the southern Peloponnese, Sparta, and further south actually have origins in Knossos, so that they are Minoan Cretan in origin, and the Cretan goddess, which one can find in almost any of the books on the excavations of Knossos, is actually a forerunner and a participant in this lineage of this feminine Orthia and the Minoan nature goddess. And the curious thing that identifies her is that there are straight lines, usually in the lower part, and there are spiral lines in the upper part of any image of her. So, there the upper part is a spiral, the lower part is straight lines. And it turns out in the Minoan one can see that the spiral is a serpent and at the head of the serpent goes over her head. Whereas the image is right here, dug up archaeologically from ancient Padua, shows a hat that's shaped with a prow coming over, and the spiral is in the design of her dress. This is the imagery has been assimilated, you see, in a different way. It's not as articulate as it once was. She is the goddess who heals. But she heals because she reinstates a geometric stability in the psyche in the nature of life.
Very often the images of Raetia for women were hairpins, rather large, long metal nail-like hairpins that had the little inscriptions. Sometimes, because there was also an Egyptian connection, there were little stars, crosses, cross stars on them, and then the cross hatches, and then straight lines, and the spirals. And up at the very top they would go in these hairdos that would be piled up, stick them in, and at the very top would be little loops that would hold little tiny amulets, flat amulets that had inscriptions on them. And they were charms. They were spells. And over and over again the early word that is repeated there is the word for, uh, healing. And while that would be presented usually with each letter in a little square, it was a four-letter word, so there were four squares. Then it would be projected out so that there would be 16 squares altogether, and that would be in the center of each of these little metal tablets that would be on these hairpins that would sort of jingle very, very slightly when one would move and you'd be protected, you see, because it's like a sistrum, it destroys this spell, destroys the spell of evil. On the perimeter of these little tags was the alphabet. Which seems very strange to us, except when we realize that we still use a very curious usage. In order to use language in a written way, we have to learn to spell - cast a spell. The incredible magic of language. And we don't realize it because we're all literate. But a couple thousand years ago, literacy was a very peculiar thing. It was very big magic, and he who controlled the use of an alphabet was incredibly powerful, especially in an arcane way where you knew the roots, the hidden roots.
You knew the names, as it were. So that the feminine in the Roman mind was a wild card. Very mysterious. The Earth itself, the Earth herself, was a mysterious underflow. Of all the masculine constructs that were up above, there were Zeus. Way up above there was Mars and Quirinus and the psychic levels. There were the Roman city and the legions, and the political structure and the legal things. But all of this was founded upon the earth. And so constantly a return to the earth was necessary for Romans. And it will turn out that at the end of the Kings, the man who mystically brought an end to the kingship in Rome and established the Roman Republic, a man named Junius Brutus. Who posed as a dullard. Somebody who is just not really quite there. He played the fool, the buffoon, because the Tarquin kings, the last one called Tarquinius Superbus, Tarquin the Proud, became a real tyrant because the Roman way, the Roman masculinity, led to tyranny almost automatically. The over masculinized psyche becomes tyrannical of its own spin without the balance of the feminine. And the man who saved the Roman state, and thus the Roman mind and the Roman people from this fate, in a very curious way, reinstated the stability of Mother Earth. He posed as a dullard, as somebody who is really stupid, not quite there. And Tarquinius Superbus, when he began to fret because he was getting so much power and was so successful and he wanted to consult oracles outside of the Roman area, he could no longer trust.
Everything was going so well. Something must be wrong, that sort of feeling. So, he sent two of his sons to the greatest oracle of the ancient world at Delphi. And two of his three sons went there, and they took Junius Brutus along as sort of a somebody to kick around. Somebody to yell at. Somebody to poke fun at. Is like a pet. And when they got to Delphi and they got the answer for Tarquinius Superbus that he wanted, the two sons couldn't resist. And they asked the Delphic oracle in her trance, who will be the next king of Rome? And she said, the first one who kisses his mother. So, the two sons were trying to argue with each other. Who's going to be the first to kiss their mother when they got home? But Junius Brutus was not stupid, and he immediately fell to the earth and kissed Mother Earth. You think that he had tripped, but he understood. And he's the one that brought the whole 244-year kingship to an end and reinstated the Roman people in a healthful psyche and founded the Roman Republic. And he was one of the first of the true Roman consuls. Junius Brutus and Tarquinius Collatinus were the first two consuls in Rome, and they founded the Roman Republic. I've got so much here to give you, but I think that I'm going to just leave everything, and we'll just continue next week.
I want to give you just a paragraph from D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places, because Lawrence is one of the few individuals who was alive enough and literate enough to go to the Etruscan tombs and feel what was there. And this happened about 50 years ago. But his reportage to us is exceedingly valuable because he touches a tone that was really there, and he gives it to us. He says, "the old idea of the vitality of the universe was evolved long before history began and elaborated into a vast religion, before we get a glimpse of it. When history does begin in China or India, Egypt, Babylonia, even in the Pacific and in Aboriginal America, we see evidence of one underlying religious idea: the conception of the vitality of the cosmos and the myriad vitality in wild confusion, which still is held in some sort of array. And man, amid all the glowing welter, adventuring, struggling, striving for one thing life, vitality, more vitality to get into himself, more and more of the gleaming vitality of the cosmos. That is the treasure. The active religious idea was that man, by vivid attention and subtlety, and exerting all his strength, could draw more life into himself, more life, more and more glistening vitality. Till he became shining like the morning, blazing like a god." That's on page 84 of Etruscan Places.
Well, there's lots more, but we've got plenty of time. We'll just do more next week.
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