Penelope and Guinevere

Transcript (PDF)

The King and the Queen in the Quest
Presentation 2 of 12

Penelope and Guinevere: Paradigms of Queens in the Quest
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, January 15, 1981

Transcript:

This is January 15th, 1981. The second lecture in the series by Roger Weir entitled The King and Queen in the Quest. Tonight's lecture is entitled Penelope and Guinevere: Paradigms of Queens in the Quest.

At the P.R.S. [Philosophical Research Society] for tomorrow tonight I'm scheduled to give a lecture on shamanism at the Sophia Gnostic Society on Hollywood Boulevard - 4516 Hollywood Boulevard - and it's an interesting lecture. I'll be doing it in conjunction with Stephan Hoeller, who also lectures here on Wednesday nights. And he and I got together and we're tossing around the idea that many people in our time, ourselves included in other times in our lives, have been somewhat misled by the images of maguses or magicians or medicine men so forth. So, we're doing a comparative lecture tomorrow night. He's taking Aleister Crowley and I'm taking Black Elk. And we're going to do a comparison of two 20th century magicians, I guess you would call them - shamans. And at the end of the month, I'll be doing a guest lecture for him and I'll have to be out of town, called Cosmic Images of the Shaman. And I found a genuine shaman's robe which we made a few slides of. That's what I was just looking at.

This series as you can tell by looking at it, will begin to get involved and complicated. And that's just fine. We should do that. And again, the type of process that we have is an old Hermetic pattern of questing. And that is to make a broad sachet in some area of life and time and space. Some image-base. And to set ourselves to explore and come back to a familiar focus. And then to make a sachet in another direction, usually opposite direction. And again, return back to some point of warm regard as a poet once wrote. This process as it goes on links up in time and as we go on becomes the great chain of being. And we begin to exemplify in our own lives, in our own personal styles the integration and the organization of material and impressions and implications in a universal form. And the longer that we engage in this type of process, the more familiar become to us those treasures of the past or the present, or in some cases the visionary future, of like-minded and like process persons. I guess I should use this the Mahayana phrase sentient beings because they may well in the future entail intelligent beings other than the human race. But at any rate one sense that begins to occur to the person engaged in this process that you're dancing, to use that term. Is that more and more those high-water marks of human endeavor whatever field they occur in begin to reverberate with meaning for you. And you begin to notice that the companionship that you have from day to day begins to resemble very much that kind of a fellowship that Tolkien was writing about in The Fellowship of the Ring. All kinds of strange people but somehow having it gel together and it makes sense. And you begin to recognize that there is such a thing as a spiritual family. And we fund those family members who are kin to us. Primordial man who is no fool at all universally believed in totemic families. That we are related not by blood but by spirit. That man is descended by spirit. And blood is just the external beginning circumstance but in transformation its spirit that makes the difference. And we find those people who are members of our family. In a very real sense this late in the 20th century we're having to at last learn that there are such things as tribes of the spirit. And we are hunters after wisdom, and we're companions together in that quest. And the more that this process goes along, the more these great figures of endeavor occur to us as valuable. There comes a time when you can sit down and we'll later on this evening see some paintings by Rembrandt as example. There comes a time when Rembrandt is just simply a friend. And his style of painting is not dated to the 17th century Dutch at all. He's simply Frank a companion along the way whose work sings because every bit of it is meaningful. And at the same time and in almost the same time-space the work of it an artist quite different from Rembrandt, Marc Chagall, likewise becomes recognizable as something of great value. And we have some Marc Chagall slides tonight. We have some Henry Moore slides. We have some Max Ernst. We go very far afield finally in this course. We'll be bringing in materials that on first glance seem so very far away from any kind of a thematic list that we might make with the ordinary associative mind. But as we get into this material, and we extend this linking together process more and more of the world's great treasure of human achievement becomes relevant. And that's a sign that we're growing and we're on the right scheme.

Last week we began with Odysseus and King Arthur. And in the second half of the lecture, I put a distinction before you. One between authority and aspiration. Authority keeps control in the beautiful manifestations in which control is thought and said and so forth is power. Aspiration, on the other hand, seeks meaning, different from control. And it is unlike authority in the sense that we cannot bracket aspiration like we can authority. Aspiration always has concomitate with it the appearance of inspiration. So that to aspiration and inspiration work as a complimentary energy. And there's an interchange in the time-honored way in which this is expressed is the act of breathing. Whether you're in Egyptian talking about Ka. Or you're an Indian talking about karma. Whatever it is breathing is inspiring and aspiring. Breathing in and out. And they go together. And the two motions make a whole. And you can't have one without the other. And part of the motion of the whole of this kingly process is that always in between inspiration and aspiration is a moment of equilibrium and repose of balance. And that balance, that continuous re-manifesting of that balance, allows us to live physically in the cosmic and allows us to live meaningfully in reality. So that the interchange and the focus and so forth occurring all along the way. Aspiration and inspiration interpenetrates and complements, allows us to see the purpose in questing for meaning and not to bring power into play. This is a very difficult thing. And as we should see tonight the results of making a tiny error in degree lead to catastrophe - personal and historic.

I think I would like to begin tonight with Penelope. It's hard to find any information whatsoever on Penelope. Except in The Odyssey. I have about seventy books of criticism on Homer. I've seen libraries of upwards of several hundred. I have never seen a book on Penelope. I've occasionally seen a chapter. It is as if this paradigm of the great cosmic feminine is invisible. Or assumed to be understood so that it is not even worth considering enlarged. Or that the time in the last 200 years when most of these books have been written is a time in which the feminine has just been cast aside as something that eventually we'll write about and understand.

Now in Homer, and I think maybe I should mention this that Homer is a great resource of civilization all the way through Western history. There was a classical Greece in the age of Pericles because Homer was the basic curriculum. And it was expressed time and time again throughout history. The classic case is that Alexander when he had learned about life and aspiration from his teacher Aristotle carried The Iliad in a jeweled case wherever he went. And it was literally his Bible, his textbook and his bible. Homer can do this. In the last several hundred years of criticism on Homer has moved from the initial starting point by a scholar named Wolf who said there never was a Homer. All the way through the gamut to where today 1980, 81, I think just about all the critics finally, reluctantly in some cases agree that there must have been someone. That The Iliad and The Odyssey contain too much unity for a committee. No matter how sophisticated. And The Iliad of course where Odysseus plays a role but not the major role, is the epic of the wrath of Achilles. What happens when the greatest warrior loses his temper? And he loses his temper and expresses his great cosmic wrath because his friend Patroclus is killed. And Patroclus is killed because Achilles is sitting in a tent that day's sulking. And because he was sulking his friend was killed. The entire Iliad is like a geometric scale balanced. 24 books of it and right in the very center of the epic is the incident of the death of Patroclus. This great geometric balance. This measuring-rod of human madness and wrath, of course, one of the three classic forms of neurotic madness I guess we would call it today. Everyone who participated in that measuring-rod, that war, that Trojan War, was affected by it. And had to be cleansed and purified of their participation in it. And Odysseus is one of the few who makes it back home. He has, in Homer's words, a homecoming. And the reason that he has a homecoming, aside from almost anyone else in a classical world, is that he has a Penelope to return to. And her name, is the kind of symmetry which she exemplifies in a Homeric epithet describing her. All characters in Homer have, have little stock phrases that characterize them again and again. Odysseus is always resourceful. Resourceful Odysseus. Penelope is circumspect. Circumspect Penelope. She has the capacity to rotate her attention 360 degrees. She can make a complete circuit of feeling and intelligence around her and see the entirety of the world as it is. And this allows her to be, I guess in our terms, free. In Homeric terms, mobile. She is against the backdrop of her life and her time mobile. She is able to decide; to initiate action; to dream up plans and so forth.

An interesting comparison many people today draw a comparison that goes something like that. The Homeric person, on the other hand, is a mobile figure almost like a man's figure. And this kind of ability to think with the mind of plans of action and to physically, in a large sense, carry them out is primarily what distinguishes Odysseus from all other men. He is the man of many minds. Polytropos - that's the word that Homer uses - polytropos. It means many-minded and at the same time much-wandering. It's a double entendre. And in fact, the Greek word for mind, nous, is from [nos so]. And it is a verbal construction which literally means returning back to the source. So that mind in Greek is a word that is derived, literally derived, from returning back. The mind, the thinking intelligent part of mind. The mind that can't think of mathematical formula anywhere in the universe. That part of the mind of thinking intelligence is related to this Homeric capacity to return back again, to have in a sense the capacity to build up from nothing from just the motion of being a coordination and a set of ordinance, with which pure chaos at anytime, anywhere can be transformed into an order. You simply make the motion and through that process the mind can create through its own motion and rhythm and articulation of a sense of coordination and order. And this is of course the great discovery of towards the end of the second millennium BC. It happened in Greece with Homer. It happened in China with the Duke of Chongqing Wen when they compiled the classic I-Ching. And it happened about the same time in India when the earliest Upanishads were written. It was a discovery, the discovery of the mind. That the mind has this fantastic capacity to order anything including pure chaos if need be. And incidentally the classic opinion was that chaos is the previous order mixed up. That we come on the scene, the play has been in operation and the thing for us to do is to find out what stage the process is at. And then to participate and order it.

Now in The Odyssey half of the book of course is Odysseus' wandering and the other half is his homecoming. And in book 19 - there are 24 books in The Odyssey - in book 19, Odysseus after 20 years is alone with his wife, but he of course, being a great questing figure knows that he cannot just return flat-out. He has to earn his way back. He has to of course face the suitors. He has to face a lot of them now, so he comes in in disguise. And so, the first conversation in 20 years between the archetypal full king and the archetypal full queen. The one in disguise the other so used to gaming with people after her and after her wealth, she is in a kind of a disguise also. And they have a conversation. And the conversation begins, after the maid, who's been giving Odysseus a hard time because he looks like a beggar. And Odysseus reminds her that isn't she is in the service of the royal palace. And isn't this a king's home. And isn't there a sort of an etiquette that people follow. And the maid is making some wisecracks about this beggar talking to her about royalty. When Penelope overhears this and coming in and using some rather coarse language - I think that the translated phrase is shameless bitch. Penelope lashes into this woman and she says this house will be royal. We will have order. We will have an etiquette here. Even to unknown strangers who are beggars. We're still going to have this universal order which Odysseus and she had made manifest.

Then she turns to the beggar and they talk. She says she asked for a charity brought in and they lay a fleet of skin, sheepskin over the chair. And Odysseus sits down and he's in disguise. And their discourse was begun by Penelope. By circumspect Penelope.

Stranger I myself first have a question to ask you. What man are you? And whence? Where is your city? Your parents? Then resourceful Odysseus spoke in turn and answered her. Lady no mortal man on the endless earth could have cause to find fault with you. Your fame goes up into the wise heaven. As of some king who as a blameless man, a god-fearing. And ruling his lord over many powerful people upholds the way of good government. And the blackers yields him barley and wheat. His trees are heavy with fruit. His sheep flock continues to bear young. The sea gives him fish because of his good leadership. And his people prospered under him. Question me now here in your house about all of the matters. But do not ask Who I am. The name of my country. For fear you may increase in my heart its burden of sorrow as I think back.

That's the very first thing that the king says to the queen. He displayed the fact that he knows what kingliness is. And what kind of order there is. And Penelope right away, in the sense of the conversation, begins to think of him as an exiled king from some far-off land. And maybe he has heard of Odysseus. She is able to recognize right away something which is very hard for us to perceive. I guess today we would call it an ability. But there's a kind of a universal dignity to the sort of king which Odysseus exemplified. And Penelope is that compliment. Almost the inspiration to the aspiration to Odysseus. And she is able to pick this up. The quality of Penelope of being able to balance this is also expressed time and time again in her weaving of a shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes. And of course, as she weaves the shroud in the daytime, she unweaves it during the night. So, they have this day and night. This making of the form and the undoing it. She has that capacity. And that typifies her style of strategy of keeping the world at bay. Out of her orders until the king can return. Because when the king is back as if the fire is in the hearth.

Odysseus on the other hand, all through The Iliad and all through The Odyssey, again and again is shown to have innumerable plans, innumerable disguises. He's the one who builds the Trojan horse, and he comes to his own palace as a beggar. He has every opportunity to lose track of basic natural reality. If he were not the true kingly person having a spiritual time, he above all other people in the world would lose his mind, would lose his sense of orientation because he has the facile capacity to transform almost instantly. And in fact, later on, the first story that he tells Penelope is a fabrication which he makes up totally - that he was in Crete and he was an Egypt, was shipwrecked and so forth. She never lets him go. That is to say her hold on Odysseus is not one through power but one through meaning. And as long as she maintains herself Odysseus has a clue out of the labyrinth of his own invention. Out of the labyrinth of his own questing life. Out of the welter of mythological images. He has a clue, a way to return home. And it's Penelope's reflection of meaning for him that he comes back to. It is so valuable that he turns down a chance to become immortal with Calypso. He turns down the chance to live with Circe on her magical Island. He in fact rejects the whole spectrum of possibilities that could be offered to a living man. And he chooses what to many minds would be the simplest of things. Why would it be so valuable? Well, it is exactly valuable because it is the most basic primordial fundamental line between a man and a woman. Especially someone like Odysseus who is a king. And his woman who is a queen. That there be that complementary interplay because that, and that alone, ensures that the cosmos have meaning. Without that center the entirety of reality would be but a cacophony of would bes and maybes and dreams and possibilities, endlessly. And would thus be a chaos. So that later on in times of human life when this was in fact the situation - that daily life was a mess. The old archetypal stirring, the old desire to make something out of this chaos becomes reflected again and again. And these kinds of prototypes like Odysseus and Penelope. But sometimes they don't work as in King Arthur and Guinevere.

Now I think we mentioned last time a little bit about the development of the Arthurian story but most modern works, the last five hundred years or so, on King Arthur stem from Malory, Thomas Malory. A real ruffian. Not gorgeously erupt like Marlowe writing plays in the barn that sort of thing. But Marlowe writing in prison. A real rough character. And his style of writing is very blocky. But we owe to Malory, the condensation of the Arthurian stories. Likely known at that time as the matter of Britain. There was a matter of France which concerned Charlemagne and Roland. There's a matter of Rome of course. And then there was a matter of Britain. The matter being big basic concern of the people.

Prior to Malory there was Geoffrey of Monmouth whose History of the Kings of Britain was written about 1150 or so. Geoffrey of Monmouth. So that between Geoffrey and Malory was close to 400 years. And then between Malory and Tennyson was about the same length of time. And Alfred Tennyson who was the poet laureate of the British Kingdom in the 19th century worked on The Idylls of the King. Largely started I think with this because of his friendship with Albert. And later on, after he became poet laureate, many people at court, Victoria and so forth found great favor with this style of writing. Tennyson has not been in fashion in this country for about 50 years, but that's because no one reads out loud. The way to get Tennyson is to have some person over 70 recite it for you. And it's incredible. You go way thinking, my god such great writing. How could I have missed it? Whereas if you sit down and read it after trying to watch the evening news it's terrible. You just, it's gross as my daughter would say.

There have been many, many other treatments of the Arthurian theme. The curious thing is that the place of Guinevere in all of these treatments is very, very small, minuscule. Almost swept aside. And as if this is the tragedy which should be saved for last and let's not talk about it too much. But the fact is that Guinevere is like Penelope, the reason for being for the entire epic, the entire cycle. And the reason that her final failure is so tragic is Arthur says when he comes into her, she's in, she's in a nunnery. And dares not even show her face. she's laying on the floor. All she hears is the male foot movements of the king. And he comes in and he tells her that she's just shredded the entire cosmos. That it isn't just their marriage. It isn't just their kingdom. But it's an entire chance for the cosmos to have its manifestation. Has been torn up by her disregard. And he says even I cannot hold you accountable. Even the King. Even he who exemplifies the order. He'll leave that to heaven. That her crime of carrying on with Lancelot and that this is just intolerable to him on a cosmic level. But it's not quite as simple. As Tennyson would have us be or Mallory. And as I mentioned before Geoffrey of Monmouth simply mentioned the fact that Arthur married Guinevere in a four-line paragraph at the very end. He just mentioned, oh incidentally, he was married to Guinevere.

And Guinevere was the daughter of the king of Cameliard. Leodegrance was his name. I know some people like to take notes. I don't myself. L-E-O-D-E-G-R-A-N-C-E, Leodegrance and he was the King of Cameliard. Not Camelot but Cameliard. Leodegrance had received from Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, the round table. The table round as they say. And it was from King Leodegrance as a wedding present at the wedding of Arthur and Guinevere that the table round was given back into the family of Arthur. It was as if this entire template for the world, for a civilization in the world, had been in safekeeping in this man's kingdom all the while. That Guinevere was born and raised so that when Arthur was ready to receive it, he received the daughter and the table at the same time.

And we have a lecture later on, on the round table. The Homeric return and the round table as world order and we'll go into it at that time. But the important thing to see at this time is that Arthur, filled with mystic vision. I don't know how to characterize this to you but I'm sure that all of you have had your mystical moments. In a point in one of the Arthurian epics the daughter of one of the knights is relaying her father's description of his going to the coronation of Arthur. And he rides along the seacoast - part of what is today, Devon, Devonshire - and as he rides along the seacoast every headland going off into the misty distance to the west has huge bonfires lit at the top and the front. And there are crowds of people forming rings, chanting blessings. And she paints this picture that her father says that the entire world was becoming organized in sort of a fairy hermetic way because the king was coming into being again. Arthur was imbued with this fantastic vision. And he saw himself personified as to this, this tone of an early…it wasn't just a Christian setting. But Arthur was also at the same time, it was just the beginning of the impress of the Christian setting in England. It was also the tail end of the old Celtic impress in that part. Arthur exemplifies both of these world orders and his estimation of himself then and the king was all wrapped up in it. So that at his wedding when he was given a bride and a round table, they were blurred, montaged in his spiritual vision into one. He married the round table. And what it came to signify at the same time that he married a woman. And that in itself was perceived by Guinevere. She saw it the day of the wedding. In fact, she saw it because she was a real queen. She's rather like, let's see an image you can get to. The Empress card of the Tarot deck is like Guinevere. She is a gorgeous, open kind of a woman. Worldly, not sinful, but worldly and open. And her first impression of Arthur are that of a stern, stayed to prim and proper man. And she sees Arthur in contrast to Sir Lancelot, who had come first, had come with the title. And Lancelot of course at that time already had a grown son, Galahad. But he exemplified the colorful knight, the finest knight in the world. The man who has seen 25 years of hard battles - very much like Odysseus. That kind of a character. A man about 45 just completely capable of confidence. Whatever comes up, handling it. Here's a time when Lancelot is wounded by a lance and he tells his squire to pull the lance out. And the squire says no you will die. And Lancelot laughs at him and says I'll die if it's left in. Pull it out, let's take our chance. He's that kind of a character. And he's the one who brings the message.

And she is the one, he is the one, that Guinevere loves. Because for her this is exactly the complement that she should have. That she should manifest forth. Only unbelievably Lancelot is not the king. It's a complete and utter quandary for her. And she does the only thing that she can do. And I suppose it would happen any time in human history the same way. She married the king and loved a man.

Well, this betrayal of Arthur is also a betrayal of the round table, of the fullness of that round table. And there are two kinds of motions that are in play and this age in this epic and this cycle. One is the motion towards completeness on a sort of an earthly level. That everything be complete. That the proverbial 150 knights sit at the round table and fill every seat. Even the siege perilous which is occupied by Lancelot's son, Galahad. The other motion is one towards perfection. And that not only be there completeness on the horizon of human intelligibility but there be perfection. So that heaven and earth and all the orders be together. So that there's sort of a sense of a sphere, a divine sphere, that comes into play at the moment where man completes a center cross-section of that sphere with his completion.

Guinevere is seen always in the Arthurian epics as the fatal flaw, the one part of the round table that doesn't gel and therefore the whole thing comes unraveled. But because of this, because it's not of Arthur's doing, he is described on his tombstone as - they use the Latin quondam, Once King, Future King. He will return. He will come again. It was not his fault. Fate gave him the wrong situation, the wrong queen. But on the continent, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, where all of these stories became archetypally effective, Lancelot was the one around who the great legendary cycles grew. And he became the prototypical knight heir that is the knight who must go off by himself. He has capacity to quest is one which has no castle. No real home. He must go off and stay off. Almost as if you take Odysseus and turn it upside down. Lancelot is an Odysseus who starts at home and has to constantly leave, can never come back. Can never return.

And this produced for several hundred years throughout the literate western world an enormous literature. It was literally the subject of discussion through every generation for centuries. And at the very tail end of that tremendous wave of interest was the great figure of Cervantes, of course with Don Quixote the final ultimate Knight era. That Lancelot in life divested through several hundred years of incredible system of value became Don Quixote. And Don Quixote of course has his wonderful vision of his Dulcinea, the lady. And she doesn't even recognize him. She's just another one of the ladies. But Don Quixote has by that time exemplified this visionary capacity to transform the world, whether or not it will transform. That development between Guinevere and Penelope is one of the key features of Western civilization. And the difference in the queen is, I think, really, as we go on in the lecture series will stand out more and more. This, tone at the end of The Idylls of the King is the book on Guinevere. And it begins with this image. And Tennyson of portrays very aptly the feeling tone of Guinevere, there was this kind of a set about ten lines, eight lines.

Queen Guinevere had fled the court, and sat
There in the holy house at Almesbury
Weeping, none with her save a little maid,
A novice: one low light betwixt them burn'd.
Blurr'd by the creeping mist, for all abroad,
Beneath a moon unseen albeit at full,
The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face,
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still.

And of course, this type of imagery in the next generation from Tennyson gave birth to many images like T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and so forth. And so on into our own time where the concerns have become so surreal and blurred by the late 1970's or the 1980's that it takes a real trick of the imagination. Today we'll see why things are the way that they are today. And we'll go into that later on in this series.

I have a few things up here like you to look at during the break. One is a modern child portrait of a queen. And the other is a frontispiece to a history of chivalry printed in 1825 in London. And this image in here is worthy of your attention. The knight kneeling to the lady and the wise old man, who is either a priest or a magician next to them. And of course, the background. These are primordial images. And they're worth looking at. And then after a break we'll have some slides to exemplify some of the things that have been brought out. And hopefully at the end of the slides if you like we can have five or so minutes of discussion.

Let's take a break now.

I think often times when we see photographs of "primitive people". And we see their bodies tattooed, or we see their clothing showing all kinds of universal symbols and signs and so forth, that we think isn't that quaint, or isn't that primitive or something. I rather think that today our lives, our cars, our houses and so forth bear those marks. And the blandness of our dress betrays a certain psychological imbalance.

This person here is Moses as sketched by Marc Chagall. I think were allowed to turn some lights out there. And this of course is the king. And Chagall has communion with the cosmic images of opposites. And one of the images of a king of course is the scepter. And the scepter is that implement by which he displays his capacity to rule. This is a sketch and I think that you can see the work of something like this. And you can see down in the lower part of the room is the sketch has become a crescent moon. And in the full spirit of the crescent moon the movement of a man and a face. And up in the sky the crescent is mimicked by the artists hand and arms holding this [inaudible] floating in the sky. And parts of his head, magicians' hat, [inaudible] the magician's hat.

This is another old painting by Chagall. In this case it's the birth of the king. Here the circle of the neck is almost like Da Vinci's cosmic man being presented here.

And then this is a sculpture by Henry Moore. Again, the circle of arm. That primordial space wherein new life is made manifest, in the space, in the distance between material [inaudible].

This is another sculpture from Moore. This is the king and the queen. This was done about
20-25 years ago. And it sits outside in the English landscape [inaudible]. This is the last king and queen.

This is one by Max Ernst in Arizona, Sedona. King and queen. [inaudible] that we can bring forth.

This is something done about the same time as Ernst called the [inaudible] down here. That's fire to this alternate space in the radius. Which is somehow suspended brilliantly in emerging time-space. It is forever and always just now emerging. And its radiance penetrating down to us and calling our arms to give birth to a top. Spiritual [inaudible]

I looked around for two slides to try to illustrate how Guinevere saw Arthur and Lancelot. And I chose two portraits of Goya. This is Goya's [inaudible]. This is much the way in which Guinevere saw Arthur, and this is the way she saw Lancelot. And the difference which is apparent. Goya [inaudible] he captures both characters equally well, his wife and Isabella here [inaudible].

This is an early painting by Chagall and illustrates the relationship. Now Chagall is partly a kingly individual. He has a great understanding in an ascetic mode of this interplay. And notice here that his bride, Bella, has a bouquet of flowers while he, the artist, the creator, has a palette which is been used to paint the bouquet of flowers. And the palette itself there his bouquet. That is to say his capacity to create is his bouquet. And that which he would use as the model and that which he would actually create. Somehow are on either side of that palette. The one, the model carrying flowers. The other the painting which is obviously is working on being those flowers. It is that figure eight process. The palette as a junction.

This is done about 50 years later by Chagall about the same motif and idea. 50 years of philosophy education and it's almost pure color vibration with this instant form and we fill in everything else by our sympathy and our insight. And here of course, by this time 50 years later, the bouquet is some of that excellent nuclear speed and is fairly present. And two person hands are folded together in prayer around the base of that bouquet.

We can go on with these sort of things for hours. Just some images to give you some ideas.

And later on, of course, Chagall like all great artists opens the doors wide, the windows and everything [inaudible]. And here the circle of creation as they actually interplay. The eminences of radiation coming into the same time-space. And everywhere the colors of joy and exuberance and gladness. the forms of nature. Birds, [inaudible], trees. And this is the cosmos coming into play. It dances…there in this primal canvas. The [inaudible] dancing there and everything begins. In this realm it's the [inaudible]. In our world the perception of spiritual reality.

This is painting by Gustav Klimt. This is what Viennese royalty looks like. The Viennese socialite is painted. This is someone who is dominated by political power trying to control life. And here's another work by Klimt. Same size. Same kind of thing. This is actually a one of a pair of paintings that go together. This one is entitled expectation. But I think you can see there in the [inaudible] of feeling in the pyramids of her expectation. This would be [inaudible] because this is the other painting. And it's [inaudible] entitled Fulfillment. Fulfillment.

Just some images here and we're dealing with a wide range.

A painting by Rembrandt. In fact, this is his first wife Saskia in floral. Very often
for instance, if you look at the tarot card The Empress you will see the floral exuberance. Around an inch of flora that kind of a Guinevere type figure.

This is Saskia in flora, and this is Hendrickje. He had two women in his life. And you can see that these are [inaudible].

I would [inaudible] images for king. I'll get to those in a minute.

Part of the [inaudible] of a queen is to allow through her acceptance a world to be manifested and [inaudible]. It is because the queen's capacity, and [inaudible] to allow for [inaudible] and meaning to come into play by creating opportunities. In this case in Moore's style creating space whole if you will [inaudible] for about ten minutes and [inaudible].
And not whole with nothingness but whole where the [inaudible] center of meaning can [inaudible]

Here's [inaudible] farm [inaudible] in a different light. Why do you think these [inaudible] are hidden cues? To stimulate your insight. Eventually what you want to be able to do is walk out and [inaudible] and I'll be happy. One of the great [inaudible]. Once your insights roam freely [inaudible].

Here's the, here's the person, an outer shell and an inner being. And the inner being protrudes through the hole in the outer shell.

Here's just the shell with the inner being implied. And since it's not specifically stated, we have increased capacity to place it where we would place and not just where it would naturally fall. All these [inaudible]
Here's just the inside, showing the development of our outer self as been contiguous to the inner being. Important work. The articulation in the space becomes important. The [inaudible] becomes less natural and more meaningful. Until finally the spacial elements become [inaudible]. And we need just the merest suggestion of form.

And there's Moore. A photograph of himself. He was 77 years old there. [inaudible]. And I like this photo. And he chose to put one of the holes above his head like a halo. [inaudible] a very great artist that he is. And in some future lecture I hope to show a 25-minute film in color made by [inaudible] Moore in his studio. And it is a real insight into a [inaudible] artistic [inaudible]. And this [inaudible] of nothing is very typical of Moore's greatness and sensitivity.

Now that slides are Rembrandt. This is a classic student exercise in the Renaissance but in Rembrandt's hands it becomes and incredible [inaudible] of the perfection completion of lives [inaudible] all together. A wonderful spiral staircase that is kind of like a figure eight in between a man and woman. Their realms and [inaudible] which interpenetrate.
They live together. She with the heart light. He with the [inaudible] light. And they together a real [inaudible].

I looked for a portrait of king. and I could find nothing better than series of about seven self-portraits that Rembrandt had done through his life. And one of the greatest discoveries of someone like Rembrandt is the fact that we have a human portrayal through the entire scheme of life from youth to old age and beyond. Now of course he could not himself as a youngster so the first painting here is of his son Titus. But this is Rembrandt's way of presenting the child. The child [inaudible] the beginning king.

There it is. The young king.

And now Rembrandt's self-portrait. Here he is as a very young individual. We will incidentally in this series come back to certain slides again and again and introduce other [inaudible] in a [inaudible]. Portraits by Rembrandt become more meaningful about the 3rd or 4th time you run into them. [inaudible] context I'm trying to present for you.

Here he is with…Rembrandt was a great collector of antiques. Here he is with a yard glass. One of the few beer steins [inaudible] glass. And there in the prime of youth.

And the royal scabbard and sword is there. And all the [inaudible] of the king is there. And Rembrandt understood these things. [inaudible] And the plume on his hat and [inaudible] of the king in his court. The king always does not have money sometimes it's just the aspirating vision to create a world. And we see a few [inaudible]

Here's Rembrandt later on in life. [inaudible] difficulties. In fact, he went bankrupt and his son and his second lady Hendrickje put up a corporation and maintained that corporation so that the debtors couldn't get it. [inaudible]. And this portrait is from about that time.

And a little later on in the [inaudible] of life he had [inaudible]. And still, and we'll come back to it, the use of light, the use of volume(?) here. Everything conveys a sense of a great inner dignity. Because remember, this is a man whom he himself is in debt and [inaudible] for a long time. This is the four-way interplay of inspiration and aspiration working together. This is the world order of a, of the kingly vision. [inaudible] as they are.

Here where are [inaudible] at the end of the slides on the last [inaudible]. This great self-portrait, the masterful Rembrandt bursts out of the darkness where only the inner yellow lights of inner conviction to guide him. At last a little bit of the light swinging back. This time the [inaudible]. The great art of circumstance off to the side. The palates and the brushes fourth right before him as if an open book. And he is capable of expressing [inaudible]. And of course, he could not commit himself after death so about a year this he painted a portrait of Homer. The stance for the archetypal old King who endured beyond the [inaudible]. And of course, this great portrait of Homer is done in incredible gold all of the [inaudible]. The [inaudible] universal form taking shape of this grand masterful figure. [inaudible] this wonderful [inaudible] there with two hands together almost like a [inaudible]. And of course, the crown is all it ever needs to be is just a little bend of light around the edge and at the top.

Well we'll come back to these and other images and things. Next time I think we'll.

[inaudible]

Yeah, we'll have the lights on.

Next time we're doing mythic cycles of initiation for kingship. And I hope that will be a real key for some of you that have been coming for some time. Thanks again and good night.

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