Book of Enoch (Part 5)
Presented on: Tuesday, March 19, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 14 of 54
Book of Enoch (Part 5)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, March 19, 1985
Transcript:
We're attempting strategically to understand Alexandria. And we have chosen Alexandria because it is a convenient center, or by this time, you must surely appreciate the fact that it is not so much a center, but a matrix we're in. The major transitions of classical civilization took place and were intelligible. We have also apprised ourselves of the possibility, at least from your standpoint, from the desirability, from my standpoint of considering this period, which is designated as Hellenistic times, as an important psychological event for us, in that the minds that we work with today, the consciousness which we are so habitually assuming is ours today, has evidently several layers, several levels, which are not immediately ascertainable in terms of recall and imagination. They have been stored unconscious, and the unconscious has been given a convenient twofold aspect, that of the personal unconscious, and further that of the collective unconscious. These designations were given early in the 20th century, about the time of the First World War. We have come a long way since then - that is, some have come a long way.
Since then, it has become apparent from hermeneutical studies carried on since the Second World War, phenomenological ontology, primarily general semantics in some regard, that man's psyche is a historical phenomenon. That what he considers conscious is in fact a historical sequencing. It's only a slight jump from that insight to realize then, that the unconscious is also of historical nature. But the early 20th century designation of it was still in 19th century terms. And so, it was given a kind of a naturalness, a primitiveness, as it were, which is little far advanced beyond the terms still used at that time of instinct. But we have been encouraged to consider at least, that the deeper level of the unconscious is a historical phenomenon that, in fact, the images which are conveniently designated as archetypes or archetypal, come from a delimited historical horizon. They come from Hellenistic times. They do not come from the Periclean Age. They do not come from pyramid Egypt. They come from the Hellenistic synthesis, which occurred between 300 BC and 300 AD and was focused on the city of Alexandria. And so, if we wish to avail ourselves of a good, firm, logical look at the underpinnings which we use without thinking every day, in every way, we need to go back and re-inform ourselves on the simplest level - what happened?
Herodotus [has a] great description of history. It's what happened. But we know that there are many ways, quite different in themselves, to view what has happened. And not only that, when we have a variety of historical methodologies, we then have a philosophic problem of integrating the various modes. But this problem at the integration stage, at the integrating of differentiate information systems into a coherent whole, or at least a pattern which has a fabric of meaning which can be extended in terms of its integration, we run into a deeper problem than philosophy can deal with. We run into a problem which traditionally has been characterized as religious. The difference is the difference between a psychology and a religion. A psychology deals with the psyche, but religion deals with reality which may include the psyche, but from actual experience it may exclude the psyche just as well.
This problem was the central problem in Hellenistic times, and the two waves of clashing interests that seem to formulate the gist, or the pattern of contention, at the time were the Greek and the Roman. And we have seen that the Greek mind was an individual mind. The Greek mind was based upon an individual who was able to lead a daring existence, who was able to be mobile and adventuresome in the world. As a matter of fact, of establishing himself or herself in terms of action within the world. The Roman was distinctly different from this. The Roman mind was a group mind. It was a mind of committees. It was a mind that loved to externalize the rules and the rationale. To put them down so that they could be consulted by future members of the group. And so instead of having a lineage of the individual, one had a continuity of the external forms.
The Greek mind is opposed on many levels by the Roman state, and it is the Roman state that eventually becomes the overriding matrix. It eventually swallows even Alexandria. And so, the clash, the opposition, almost an opposition at times mentally between the Greek mind and the Roman state, needed to have a glue to hold the two together. And at the same time a glue that was a medium that allowed for differentiation, or at least a kind of affiliation that allowed for individual differences to arise. There had to be some in between.
The Hellenistic kingdoms, which were Greek in origin, vied with each other for several hundred years, reaching absolutely no final issue. There never was a Hellenistic state that was able to maintain itself for very long. The longest run, of course, was in Egypt, in Alexandria, for Ptolemy Soter, and the next 2 or 3 generations of Ptolemies were probably the longest running show. But even this was not a flash in the pan compared to the monolithic stability of the Roman state. Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second Ptolemy, the son of the general, the son of Ptolemy Soter, was the first one to consciously face the problem of blending together cultural styles, as we used to say in university thought. His problem, he thought, was blending the Egyptian and the Greek together. And we will have to, in April, attend to the massive problems in this blending, for the Egyptian religious mind is quite distinctly different, notably different from the pastiche that is presented in most textbooks. He set an example, though, which was followed later on in Hellenistic times. He sought to use the Jewish populations centered on Jerusalem, centered on the Jewish religious experience, to form a blending third element to bring Greek and Egyptian ideas together. This pattern was taken up later on in the second and early first centuries BC by those who were struggling with the problem of the Roman and the Greek mind, and again, the Jewish religion was used as the go-between - the way to relate the individual to the state, the way to relate Greek civilization to Roman power. And so, there was a force-fed development of Jewish religion, starting from Philadelphus and lasting through to Augustus.
And in this 250-year period, 300-year period, the Jewish religious mind suffered an almost catastrophic sea change. It was, in fact so catastrophic that in 70 AD, the Jewish state, being completely effaced physically by Roman power, sought in a traumatic move to go back all the way to the beginning and consecrate the old Torah, the Pentateuch, in rabbinical theology, forbidding any tampering, saying, this is what got us into trouble. While, on the other hand, those individuals in the Jewish community who had made that leap, that jump of faith which was required for the new religion, became irrevocably Christian and no longer Jewish at all. And so Hellenistic Judaism dies violently in 70 AD. That leaves Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism in its stead.
This violent death of Hellenistic Judaism left a ghost. Shakespeare says violent deaths leave ghosts. It is the ghost of Hellenistic Judaism that eventually re-haunts the world in the form known as Islam. And Islam is the first Renaissance. It is the Renaissance of Hellenistic Judaism, but this takes us far afield and is only an indication of the kinds of forms which become visible with this approach, with this methodology. They are not given to you in a finished form. I'm not particularly fond of any of these constructs as mental children or as, ideational pets. They're literally thrown out into the arena to fend for themselves, and you're quite free to peck away at them or change them as you will but we have gotten now for the last two months or two and a half months, we have gotten ourselves, after looking at Alexandria for several months, after looking at Rome for five weeks or six weeks, we have looked at the development of the Jewish religious mind. And we have taken it from the period of the Babylonian exile.
If you recall the Jewish state after David was established as the king, the first king. The idea of a man being a king of a Jewish state. A completely new idea, completely phenomenal in its development, necessitated the approval of the great prophet Samuel. Samuel, who makes David king, who allows for the confirmation to have a veracity. It is time for the people to have a king. And David passing the kingship on to Solomon and the kingship deepening into wisdom. David, the great writer of devotion, the Psalms. But his son Solomon not so much a writer of devotion, but a writer of analytical penetration of subtlety. It is not so much devotion, but passionate understanding which characterizes Solomon. It is Solomon, then, who builds the temple, the temple distinct from the tents that were used previously. The tabernacle was set up and taken down, set up and taken down. It was a nomadic structure. Its ornamentation was portable. But Solomon built the temple and changes forever the structure of Judaism. Judaism becomes no longer a nomadic way of life, but becomes a centralized, rooted, land-based phenomenon.
What had been claimed before as the Holy Land becomes the Holy Land at that time. And forever after will be the center. This is where we put the center pole of the whole structure of our faith. In 1948 there was a tremendous push to get Jerusalem back just so the remaining wall could be had in terms of access. The Wailing Wall that all misery brought to that spot has its integration into history, that whatever we existentially suffer is transmuted and mitigated and purified by our individually, bringing it to this vast integration center. The kingship fell into troubled hands after that. In fact, the kingdom split into two. There was an Israel, and there was a Judea. There were two kingdoms, and the march of Persian power came in around 720 BC and took over Israel. Judea was able to fend them off. The writings of Isaiah are prophetic outcry of the complete destruction and desecration of the State of Israel. It is a warning cry. This happened to you because you were untrue to your God, and 100 years later, the same power under Babylonian description, but still essentially a Persian power came in and took over Judea.
But in those 100 years, we saw that there was a tremendous change in Judaism, that the difference is the difference between Isaiah and Jeremiah. And in Jeremiah we do not have the crackling lightning warnings of Isaiah. We have the subtle, mature lamentations of Jeremiah. We have a considered, mature internalization of suffering. For Isaiah, one is still holding the electric cobras of ill fate at arm's length. And in Jeremiah they have entered into our very basic self, and we must deal with it there, so that those Jews who were taken into exile in Jeremiah's time kept their faith. Those who had been taken into exile in Isaiah's time lost their faith. Not all, not exclusively, but by and large. And it added to the sufferings. It added to the exile of those who were taken 100 years later to see the assimilation of their kids into Persian ways, into Babylonian ways. And so instead of Jerusalem, there was a Babylon, the civilization of Jerusalem, of that city which had been so filled with integrity. And here Babylon is the whore - it leads men astray. It teaches them to prostitute themselves to many gods. This is shameful.
But those who were taken in Jeremiah's time - this is a mooted, long-term suffering which needs to be understood. There must be a meaning to this. It is not for nothing that this happens. And so, it is with this second wave of Jewish exiles that comes the urge for the development of what is known as the wisdom literature, the refining of the old mythic story. And I use mythic here in a very respectful sense. The old Ugaritic mythic story of Job, the man from the land of Uz who suffered, who suffered justly or was it unjustly? Was there a mystery? So, the wisdom literature comes up the Book of Job, the Proverbs, and finally, the wisdom literature matures in Hellenistic times, around between 200 BC and 100 BC in that second century BC. And we saw progressively the tremendous development in the Book of Daniel from the Old Testament, the so-called Torah, the wisdom literature had developed itself into a sharp, cutting edge of visionary capacity.
Daniel is someone who not only can analyze dreams, he uses dream analysis as a springboard to go deeper, deeper in his capacity of interpretation so that he could where at first interpret dreams. He became proficient at interpreting visions. And from interpreting visions, he went one step further, right onto the edge of consciousness at that time, and was able to see an image of the real, not something from a dream, not something from a vision, but a luminous phenomenon which was the edge of the real of that time. And in the Book of Daniel that image was, it is called in scholarly works the anthropos, the anthropos. The image of the divine is a man, God-looking man, mysteriously, fiercely mystical looking man. The Book of Daniel says he had white woolly hair and red fiery eyes, and he had dark bronze skin and white raiment, and he walked gracefully in the flames. And as long as that figure was there, the three Jewish companions of Daniel who were thrown into this furnace were unharmed. They are largely known today by their Babylonian names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Those are the Babylonian names.
Daniel was not thrown into the furnace. Was it Daniel who was the fourth? No, he was not thrown in there. But something from Daniel was in there. That fourth figure, the answer post was from Daniel. Having developed the capacity to see into dreams and to see into visions, and to detect the cutting edge of consciousness at the threshold of the real. Something had changed in man's capacity to be able to know something brings it into the realm of possibility. And in Daniel, the Book of Daniel, written about 146 BC, the divine man broaches consciousness, broaches the expressive medium of mythic imagery.
And we will run into that same figure, the very same figure in the apocalypse. The apocalypse that usually is called the Book of Revelations and usually ascribed to Saint John. It is not by Saint John. It is not even a Christian work. It is an apocalyptic late Jewish work, as we will see, of even greater integrity, because it is self - because these images of the real at the edges of consciousness extended beyond the visionary, occur in terms of historical time twice. That is to say, their real occurrence in time is an eternal event. It has no time-space quality to itself. And so, when a numinous thing' like this occurs in time-space, it's like a pebble thrown into a pond, and there are ripples fore and aft. And the reverberations, the ripples of that image, occur before the event and after the event. And this is one way that we are able to check for ourselves, navigate for ourselves in terms of the real, that we can see the paralleling of deep occurrences within history and can focus from this coordination, triangulate to the event itself.
Whether or not it happens physically is a poultry issue compared to the fact that it happened consciously. That is to say, the psychic pool of reflective consciousness recorded the event. And so, the Book of Daniel and the apocalypse attributed to John record the same individual, and that individual we're moving closer to. And we will see that it occurs as the Christ, as the Christos.
The problem was not so attenuated for the Greeks, although they suffered also. It was not a problem that the Romans really ever appreciated. It was an annoyance to them. It was a problem that the ancient Egyptian religion was able to take within itself, almost without blinking. And we'll see the peculiarities of the Egyptian religion allowed for the incorporation of all these events very easily. This is what made the Hermetic tradition distinct from the Gnostics. The Hermetic tradition had no catastrophic problem with the Hellenistic age because it was Egyptian-based. But the people who suffered most were the Jews. That is to say, the Jewish consciousness suffered horribly from being required by all sides to do service to all sides, and to rapidly change and evolve and mature themselves and distort themselves in order to satisfy this, produce this colossal trauma, almost like a psychic indigestion. And it was that traumatic indigestion, literally, that produced this tremendous node in time-space. The events leading up to this then become accessible to an intelligent appraisal.
If we first look at the external history, as it were, and then look at selected documents of visionary quality embedded within that history, and we have come this far, we have taken the history up to 135 BC, the Maccabean times. And we have been focusing on the Book of Enoch, a collection of five different documents that were collected together all during the second century BC, roughly from 180 to about 95 BC. So, we need, tonight, to look at two more items to bring us current to the tremendous change that would happen around 100 BC. We need to finish up with the Book of Enoch, and we need to go to the history between 135 BC and 100 BC.
What happened to the Jewish state? Remember that with the Maccabees they had reestablished the temple. It is known in Jewish history as the period of the Second Temple. With all that, that meant we have reestablished Solomon's Temple. We have reestablished the center pole, the axis of stability for the Jewish state, which is not so much a political entity as a psychological religious occurrence by this time. And the defense of the Second Temple becomes a matter of prime importance, and for the Maccabees, the recapturing of military prowess and military power is something we can understand very well, because it's happened in our own time.
The Israeli armed forces today pride themselves under tremendous military elán and efficiency as well. They might remember the tremendous daring exploit of the Ugandan airport, where they went in and saved all those people in a flash. It was in terms of coordination and daring, an incredible adventure. This was characteristic in the Maccabean times. Except at that time, it was apparent more and more to the various Maccabees - Judas Maccabee, then Jonathan, then Simon - that they were in a losing show as long as they had only themselves to count upon that the tremendous shifting alliances of all the Hellenistic kingdoms that surrounded them perpetually put them at a disadvantage. And so, Judas Maccabeus was the first one to send an envoy in 165 BC to Rome and sent a tremendous present of a great gold shield, and had the declaration read out to the Roman Senate that the State of Israel requested an alliance with the Roman people, that the Roman people had never been like all the other Hellenistic kingdoms, grabbing to try and take control of various places. But they had always stood for the basic home values, the agrarian home values. The great Roman families, very much like the Jewish tribes. There's a great affinity between the Jews and the Romans in 165 BC.
For the Romans, who were involved in between the Second and Third Punic Wars it was an easy gesture to say, yes, we are friends and to send a message back: "We are your friends." And that's about as far as it went. In 65 BC, when Jonathan Maccabee came in, he again made sure when he came into power that another message was sent to Rome, and again it was read out to the Roman people. We wish to renew with this change of power, renew this covenant which we have with you. And so, in 135 BC, the leader of the Jewish state became a man named John Hyrcanus. And he too sent a message to the Roman people. But by 135 BC, Rome had finally dispatched the Carthaginian power, for all time had come into conflict with the Greek kingdoms, which had rallied themselves to try and preempt the rise of Roman power in the east by invading southern Italy, which was a complete fiasco. And the Romans in military reaction move themselves into Greece, and it surprised everyone how easily Roman legions cut through the Greek armies. It was a revelation to the Roman people. It had never occurred to them. They had been fighting to preserve themselves since the earliest days.
We went into the beginnings of the Roman state. How the earliest Romans were a band of pirates and brigands under Romulus, and that it took 40 years after Romulus just to settle the Romans down to halfway civilized people. Numa Pompilius spent 40 years just trying to civilize them. But the Romans had always fought. In fact, the great temple of Janus, the two-faced God who looks to the past and to the future so that his temple is in the present and that the present could only be securely addressed with confidence if the Roman people were at peace. And so, the only time that the temple of Janus was made whole was at a time of peace, and then the great doors that symbolized past and future were closed, and the temple space was quiet and sacred. And when the Roman people were at war, they opened the gates of the Janus temple, and that from Numa Pompilius they were never closed until the time of Augustus Caesar. Some 700 years later they were open, so continuous that it was no longer called the Temple of Janus, but the Janus Gate. A supreme irony that the Temple of Peace had become a gate, a thoroughfare through which the sacred defending armies of Rome would march out. And so, with this characteristic background, the Romans had never fully conceived of themselves consciously as empire builders, even though in fact they had been consistently building a large empire, especially since the days of Scipio Africanus.
Scipio the great conqueror, finally of Spain, and of Carthage, and all Numidia, the whole face of Africa. And his brother, who conquered some of the Asian armies. But quickly Rome retreated from that. They had only fought in reaction to events, and now, in 130 BC, realizing that they were unbeatable, that wherever they cast their glance, Roman power could hold its sway.
And the great study that Arnold Toynbee made of the effect of the Hannibalic wars upon the Roman minds. One of the conclusions that he came to was that it brutalized the Roman people. But they began to think of silencing problems before they arose. And so, in order to protect what they held in front of them, they would have to take care of the flanks beforehand and so on and so on. And from the 130 BC on the Roman minds strategically, purposely set out to extend the Roman peace, the Pax Romana, to the entire world. And for the next three generations it was like the thought of John Wayne beating the bad guys in some final Armageddon. It was that kind of compulsive image in the Roman mind, and general after general saw himself edging closer and closer to being the hero who would deliver world peace to the Roman people, that that would be an event of eternal glory, of great renown. And the reason for this was that the idea of the Greek individual had finally penetrated through the Roman mind.
The first instance of it was Scipio Africanus, as we saw, always turning down the chance to make any of his conquests a personal aggrandizement. And finally, towards the end of his life. [Some plot] was dreamed up to say that he had embezzled some funds, or perhaps his brother had embezzled some funds. And Scipio went before the Roman Senate alone, and took the charges, and tore them up before them and threw them on the floor. He said, "I've been offered kingdoms all my life. Why would I take a few sesterces saying, I spit on you?" This kind of mentality was so outrageous it was seen as a mystical outburst. About a hundred years later in the hands of grasping generals - like Sulla or Crassus or Pompey or Julius Caesar - it was quite a different story. They meant what they said. They intended to take over and deliver this great prize, the Pax Romana, to the Roman people. And the Roman state had extended itself further and further by extending citizenship to selected persons and by increasing those selected crowds, until finally it was to be a world citizenship in the Roman state. We will have peace because we are all going to be together.
The key to Asia, militarily, has always been Israel. If you look at the map today, it is Israel. If you look at the map in Crusaders times, the Kingdom of Acre is exactly the same dimensions of Israel. If you look at it in late Hellenistic times, it is again exactly the same. It is only with nuclear weapons that military strategy has changed. But when you are fighting with mobile armed forces that need to be based, you need a base of operations which can be defended, a central base which can extend itself in many directions - one that can be protected in several different ways. Israel is the key, militarily, to the peace and stability of Asia. He who controls Israel militarily controls the whole piece of the of the area of the region.
And in fact, we saw, I think, about three months ago that the first great empire in the Western world, set up by Sargon in 23 BC, had for the first time the extension of power across the whole Fertile Crescent, that it moved from the Gulf of Persia to the Mediterranean coast there where Lebanon and Israel come together. And that was the first time that someone realized that this was a stable bar of power, that if you were able to control that and hold that region, that Fertile Crescent, you had an unassailable position. But the problem was always internal dissolution. Sargon could hold it because of his tremendous personality. And then it fell apart after him. And various other individuals tried to put it back together from time to time. None of this was lost on Alexander the Great, and none of it was lost on the grasping late Hellenistic Roman generals. And the wisest of those generals, actually, in terms of strategy, was not Julius Caesar, but Pompey.
Pompey was a genius militarily because he often won major battles without having to fight them. And it was Pompey who realized that if you held Jerusalem - Jerusalem and Alexandria - that you held the throat of Asia. And so, he began to later on, manifest this tremendous sense of world conquest and power in terms of these two objectives. Machines had to record this. They know that ultimately when we realize what we are, we will unplug them all. John Hyrcanus or Hyrcanus. It's interesting because if you mispronounce it hyrcania - Hyrcania is a Persian word which means wolf land'. Isn't that interesting?
John Hyrcanus, who ruled from 135 to 104 BC, just exactly the time slot that we need to look at. It's interesting because when he comes into power, the first thing he does is send an envoy to Rome. And this time Rome hears it in different ways. It is no longer a little Arabic kingdom off on the side. It is an interesting position to have an [endless?]. And Rome sends an interesting kind of a message to John Hyrcanus. He is empowered financially and with approval by the Roman people, the Senate, and the Roman people. That's how they used to say it. You're not just fighting somebody; you're fighting the Senate and the Roman people. It's like trying to fight the US government, right? They sent the message to John Hyrcanus that he could raise armies. He could outfit them, and if he didn't like someone, he could invade. And so, John Hyrcanus began to exercise his newfound friendship and source of solace and took over the neighboring province of Samaria and forced all the population, the male population, to be circumcised, and the Jewish faith. He gave them a choice of course you could die. But later development in Islam, incidentally, of the infidel. It was a tremendous amount of it. Iran in these matters, as I said, to Hellenistic Judaism and to John Hyrcanus - very interesting. But Hyrcanus was not really strong. He was not strong as a general. He was strong as a mover of men, as we would say, as a politician. He appointed himself as high priest as well as king. And so, he held both these positions at the same time. It meant that the high priestship and the kingship then were brought into one person. And this was a great psychological moment, because always in the past, from the beginning, the king was consecrated by the head of the religion. If it were not the high priest, who would it be? It would be the prophet.
In Judaism, the prophet, the great prophet always takes precedence over the high priest. Always. But great prophets are hard to come by. One always has a high priest. It is a family lineage, but a great prophet, when there, takes precedence over the high priest. It was Samuel who consecrated David. But when you get to John Hyrcanus, he takes the miter, and he takes the crown. At the same time, he's going to confirm himself. This is a particularly Roman ploy. We are in charge of all power, religious and civil. Therefore, our orders are to be obeyed under all considerations. That kind of outlook. This will later on display itself in various personages who will understand this power play like Charlemagne, who will crown himself. When Napoleon, who will crown himself, and Henry the Eighth, who will take over the church under his kingly tutelage?
The origin of this ploy actually starts with John Hyrcanus, oddly enough, and the individual who will benefit from this ploy easiest will be Augustus Caesar, because he will do what his uncle did: take for himself the high priests of the Roman religion and the position of the emperor, although they hated to call themselves emperor. Julius Caesar preferred the title dictator and Augustus, principate. Being first - I think we explained how power in the Roman Senate was based on various levels of voting, and that the first level usually was all that needed to vote in the Roman Senate. Well, Augustus put himself as the exclusive person who occupied the first level. This is the meaning of first among equals. If I say yes, all of your "Nos" will equal my "Yes." So, you'll have to give me better reasons rather than me convince you is that it's called power. See, at this rate, that's the difference between power and right.
John Hyrcanus then, is a very interesting individual. He is a minor individual in terms of normal world history, but when you understand archetypal happenings, prototype apple seeds and the way in which they develop, he becomes extraordinarily interesting. The Roman historian paid no attention to this. That is the normal Roman historian. There was one Roman historian of Jewish background who understood that this was extremely important. His name was Josephus. And the collected writings of Josephus run into many, many volumes, and many pages. Usually one finds this Penguin classic, The Jewish War, which is about the Jewish rebellion in 66 AD, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. But this little volume, Jerusalem and Rome, traces the development of that. And in fact, traces the development of why it was so important to the Romans to control the Jewish state. Why was it after the destruction of Jerusalem, that the Roman emperor of that time, Vespasian, who came in, considered himself the messiah of the Jewish religion? That's exactly what he considered himself.
This puts a new light on it that it had become that important to the Roman people. So, Josephus says, let's look into this. And so, Josephus, these are some excellent excerpts he writes here: "The Renewal of the Treaty with Rome" - "Hyrcanus also wished to renew the friendship with the Romans. Accordingly, he sent an embassy to them. The Senate received his epistle and made a pact of friendship with him as follows: Fannius, the son of Marcus the praetor, assembled the Senate to discuss with the ambassadors of the people of the Jews came to treat about, namely, the pact of friendship and mutual assistance.'"
This would be the key phrase. This is what Pompey will say gives him the right to come in and support the people that the Romans would like to see in power. And this will in 20 years become just an assumed right, and Mark Antony will be the man, the Roman general of the time, who will say, "I want Herod to be king." It's Mark Antony who makes Herod king of Israel. Not interesting.
"...friendship and mutual assistance that existed between them and the Romans, and other public affairs. They request that Jaffa and its harbors, Gazara and the springs of the Jordan, and the several other cities and sites that Antiochus the Seventh had taken from them in the war against John Hyrcanus contrary to the decree of the Senate [of the Roman people] be restored to them."
This is how they write it, "that it be declared unlawful for the King's troops to pass through their country or the countries subject to them," and, "that whatever had without the consent of the Senate been decreed by Antiochus during the same war, be voided." The Senate of the Roman people is now voiding decrees made by the Hellenistic kingdom on the basis of their alliance of mutual assistance with Israel.
"...that the Romans send ambassadors to take care that restitution be made of what Antiochus had taken from them and to evaluate the worth of the country that had been laid waste in the war;" they be the Jews, be given letters of protection, and that the free cities of Israel be returned to their safety. "...decreed then to renew the pact of friendship and mutual assistance with these good men sent by a good and friendly people," etc.
It was the beginnings of an alliance with Rome would take full advantage of. This is the background. This is the doorway. This is the historical occurrence. And it was at this time that the collection of the materials that make the Book of Enoch were made. The earliest sections of the Book of Enoch were made, were written, around 180 BC, 165 BC. But they were in a different form from this. In fact, the earliest levels of the Book of Enoch were not even called the Book of Enoch but were called the Book of Noah. The Book of Noah. And it's a peculiar image that we are unappreciative of because we live in dark ages, really, in terms of accuracy of historical images. We don't have any idea of what things were or what they meant.
When we think of Noah, we think of some kindly John Houston who's building a big ship in his backyard and says, with grand diction but kind of harmless personality, "get on board, you animals." But the Hellenistic Jewish vision of Noah was quite extraordinary. He was the most remarkable creature. He was an amazing creature. In fact, if we go to the fragments that still occur - and they occur in Latin and in Greek - the fragment of the Book of Noah that's appended here at the end of [R. H.] Charles's great translation of the Book of Enoch. Enoch has a son named Methuselah, the one who lives the longest. Three, Enoch has a son named Methuselah, who lived the longest. Methuselah has a son named Lamech, and Lamech finally takes a wife, and he has a son, and when the son is born, he is shocked because the son, the baby comes out, and when he is brought forth from the woman, he is all both white and red. He is red as a rose; he is white as the snow. Those of you who have a little metaphysical or occult background here recognize red and white are the alchemical opposites. It's the red and white dragon. Merlin Thayer and Sleep, and they're the ones causing the subsidence of the castle.
But not only that, the baby, when he comes out, as soon as he is brought in and brought to life with his first breath, he calls out the name of the Lord. Lamech is absolutely petrified by this. And he says, this cannot be my son he must be one of the angelic children. The wife says, no, he is your son. He says, this is not a human baby. This is not a normal baby. So he goes to his father, old Methuselah, who is wise, and he tells Methuselah, and Methuselah is shocked. And so, Methuselah goes to his father, who is Enoch. And remember, Enoch is seventh, the seventh generation from Adam. And Enoch is the only individual who had a personal transmutation. He personally went to the heavens, personally saw the angelic orders, personally talked to the divine. Adam had had that personal contact, and seven generations later Enoch had that contact.
This mystical cycle of seven, every seven. And later on, this will be called in terms of historical eschatology, it will be called a week, a week. The creation of the world takes place in a week, seven days. Six days to make a form and the seventh day to engender its presence. The seventh engenders the presence. It doesn't so much add more to the form but energizes the form. And so, Enoch ends a cycle that begins with Adam, and Methuselah starts a new cycle.
But there's also a mystical order that cuts into the order of seven, and that is the order of ten. The order of ten is another kind of a coordinate that comes in. And so, Enoch is seven. Methuselah is eight, Lamech is nine, and Noah is ten. And so, Noah is a different kind, but still a very important individual. He is the first. He is the 10th man from Adam because Enoch is a kind of a completion of a mystical cycle. But Noah is a perfection of another mystical cycle. And so, there is a relationship between Enoch and Noah that Methuselah, for all his aged wisdom, does not know of that. Lamech, for all of his integrity as a man does not know of, because it's a knowledge and insight that is not privy to human perspective. These are arcane, transcendental understanding. And so, Enoch goes into a deep meditation. And sends his visionary capacity out, and he sees that Noah is the end of the world and the beginning of another world. And he tells me this is why he is so different. He is the end of this whole cycle. He is the last man of this cycle of perfection, and he is the first man of a new cycle. So, you know, go, and tell your son that he is in fact theirs, but that he should be raised in a special way. And so, this is the Noah of Hellenistic Judaism is a colossally mysterious figure.
So, the Book of Noah was the recording of this cycle of perfection. But because it was a perfected manual, we can use that term Manual' here - Capital M, illuminated capital M,' Manual - because it was a perfected manual, it was not available to be written down. Really, it should be delivered orally. It should not be put into print. Therefore, the Book of Noah was taken out of circulation and was recast as the Book of Enoch, because what could be told were the visions of Enoch, which were cycles of completeness which everyone should know. Everyone can know cycles of completeness. Only the inner circle can know the cycles of perfection. And so, the Book of Enoch then is a redoing, and we find various fragments in the Book of Enoch, which are always seemingly out of place. The Book of Enoch is like a collection. It's like a badly shuffled deck of cards. There are cards from other decks in it. Yes, the numbers follow in sequence, and they fit in, but on the backs of the cards they come from different times, different places. And it was noticed that a number of them came from some similar place or same place, the same deck. And when these were put together, it was realized that this had been a previous book, The Book of Noah, that had then been redone.
This is extremely important because the difference between oral Law and written Law was a political problem at this time. It became, for the first time in Jewish history, a political problem. The two parties were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees who were for oral Law. We have always been told this. We know that this is right because this is the living tradition. There is no way that they could have lied to us because it is living still today. As far back as anyone knows, we have always kept this tradition. And the Sadducees saying, no, it is written down.
This is where the firmness is in this expression.
And so, it became a tussle because these became two different parties vying for power. And so, the Book of Enoch has this kind of a political tussle behind its structure, as well as this deep psychological insight verging upon the religious revelation. Remember now, this is very difficult to have someone who has been to the upper ends of creation. You have Odysseus and you have Aeneas, who go down to the lower end, to the underworld. But almost nobody goes to the upper world. In fact, Enoch and Dante are the two great examples of going to heaven, of seeing a celestial order. So, the Book of Enoch is trying to present the celestial order, but from the cycle of completion. It's not interested in perfection. We are not supposed to tell this perfectly, but we are supposed to give it completely. And so, everything that is needed for a complete picture is put here, but jumbled together, so that we have fulfilled our duty to present the whole story. Oh yes. All here. But if you don't have the esoteric keys, you can't put that story together in the right way. It's like a portfolio that's complete in its investment regard, but you have to have some advice in order to handle it in the right way. So, the Book of Enoch is very peculiar in this form and in this regard.
And we have seen now ...how are we doing on time? We have 20, 22, 9, 22. I may have to do one more lecture on this because I'm not getting through enough of this. We have to have all this material. We'll just have to do one more next week to bring this all in.
So, what the Book of Enoch is doing is taking this tremendous time of psychological convulsion. One of the images that comes out in the Book of Enoch - Enoch falls asleep and as he is sleeping, he sees through his eyes, through his eyelids. This is a phenomenon that happens at certain stages of contemplative or as we would say today, meditative prowess. And he sees stars fall from the sky. And where the stars fall from the sky he looks and, on the earth, there is this pure white bull that comes into his vision and then disappears. And then after it comes two bulls, one black and one red. It's either white and red or black and red. It can go either way. Purity always has its obverse. The red bull began to be chased by the black bull, and the red bull finally disappears around on the other side of the earth, and Enoch is seeing this in his vision, and at that time, the stars that have fallen have become other bulls, but they have become like white bulls, and they begin taking over from the black bull, the cows mounting them. And the new bulls that are coming out are exceedingly powerful, and they are butting away the black bull, just like the red bull. And so, this primal polarity of the red and the black, which came out of the unity from the first white one, is completely scrambled. This is the vision that Enoch has of the fallen celestial beings, the fallen angel, the watchers who have come down, who have fallen in love with the daughters of men who seek to unite themselves with the daughters of men who pollute their spirit with the blood of women.
Not a casting down of women at all. Not anti-feminist. Women are made for men. Men are made for women. But the angelic spirits were not flesh and blood, they became vampiric when introduced to the blood realm because they existed before blood became a necessity. And so, it's not a necessity to them, but a luxury. So human beings become like bonbons and cream puffs - people to manipulate - because they really don't mean very much because they themselves are not human. They're not limited by that. And the problem becomes exacerbated because their children, then, are half of this angelic, fallen, angelic order and half human. And so, they become increasingly capable, very strong - they're called giants - very strong actions of taking over, of manipulating people. They are not prey to the normal debilitating effects of being human. They become like super con-men. None of it means very much to them. And because they are partly from an angelic order, because they are not purely human, when they die, their souls do not go to heaven. They do not go up. They remain on the earth. And so, they become the evil spirits. And they hang around and they multiply, and they accrue, and they still have their contacts.
And so, the world becomes completely confused. The natural order no longer obtains, cannot obtain. There is no longer a natural order. It is a supernatural order which man, because of his natural origins, does not understand, could never understand, has no way at all to understand because he has never been taught. He has never had the capacity to address himself to supernatural problems. He still thinks in terms of old-fashioned greed that you want it because you're going to use it. He doesn't understand the evil perversion to want it, not because you want it, but because with that you can destroy the happiness of others who might want it, even destroy others through leading them on through normal channels in nature would be love and become quite innocently led into deeper perversion. We're finally in a confused state. Man blasphemes against God calls out his name in horror instead of in consecration, so that the sacrificial nature of man is no longer able to be performed. That the energizing of the form of creation by man's sacrifice making sacred. What sacrifice is. That's what you do on the seventh day. You make sacred. You energize that form that is no longer able to be done. There is no longer any purity left to the consecrating process. And so, reality itself, as a form, becomes corrupted, no longer able to be manifested. And that feeds back to the Godhead.
Not only is man polluted, but the whole creation is polluted. And so, it takes a supernatural reinstatement to bring this back. Except as the Book of Noah says in its perfect outlook, all this was foreseen from the beginning, and in a very interesting ploy, the Elect One who would reinstate the natural order out of the supernatural jumble, had already been positioned before natural creation was even begun. And this will come out in the Book of Enoch, that the important key in the manifestation of the Elect One from eternity into the world was for certain human beings, by the purity of their lives, to call forth this manifestation. And so, the reinstatement of the vision of the new nature called in the Book of Enoch, the New Jerusalem. We're not going to have just a new temple. We're going to have a new Jerusalem. No longer is it going to be a physical Jerusalem, it's going to be a spiritual Jerusalem. This will be a new nature, but the new nature, in order to be established, needs that consecrating pilot light from man. And that's what's been lacking, that there haven't been enough pure human beings to form a community, because only in terms of the community, all the faces of the community together does the face of God manifest itself. It's like a gestalt that can't come in an individual until the community is there to support and float that individuation.
And so, I guess we'll have to go to the Book of Noah one more time next week. But the upshot of this is the development of the Essene community, the need to make communities perfected so that this incarnation can happen. And they weren't sure. Just when the speculation in the earlier parts of the Book of Enoch is that this should happen at the end of a 70-generation cycle. And they computed that, and it came out to be about 140 BC. And it didn't happen. At first, they thought John Hyrcanus must be the one because he sets the computation. But he fit the computations in terms of a cycle of completeness, but not in terms of a cycle of perfection. And so, the rallying cry in the Book of Enoch becomes, "let's base ourselves on righteousness."
Perfection occurs in the realm within the matrix, within the coordinates of righteousness. So, we've been computing in the wrong way. We've been looking at history, and history doesn't matter, evidently, or at least it's not the whole story. That the real accuracy is in terms of perfection, and that in terms of righteousness, and therefore we have to recompute. So, we can't go 70 generations from Adam. We have to go 70 generations from Noah. Which means that we're probably about 150 years off. So, we have time on our hands. Let's make these communities as well as we can. And so, Josephus, who was one of the few individuals, the Cephas, and Philo are the only writers that give us accurate portrayals of Essene community. This is a little something from the Essene, the description of the Essenes by Josephus. And we'll end with this tonight and just begin next week and finish this up.
"The Essenes are reputed to cultivate peculiar sanctity. Jews by birth, they love each other more than do the other sects." You can see it was necessary. The community purity had to be exact. It wasn't individual purity that was so important. It was the purity of the community. So, they watched out for each other all the time. "Pleasures they reject as evil; continence and control of the passions they deem a special virtue... They hold riches in contempt; the community of goods among them is to be admired. No one among them has more than another. It is their law that whoever joins the sect relinquishes his fortune to the order; there is therefore neither poverty nor excess of wealth among them. Everyone's possessions are commingled, so that all as brothers enjoy one patrimony. They regard oil as defiling; if one of them accidentally comes in contact with it, he wipes his body, for they consider a dry skin to be good, and clothe it always in white. The trustees of the common property are elected; every member is eligible for this office, and all have the right to vote. They are concentrated in no single city; there are many of them in every town. The property of the brethren is at the disposal of any member coming from another place as though it were his own; they enter the homes of people they have never seen, as though they were the most intimate of friends. They therefore carry nothing with them on a journey." The New Jerusalem will not be in any location. It will be wherever 2 or 3 gathered together in his name.
Okay, well, I think that's as far as we can go tonight. We're going to overload if we go further. We'll just come back to this next time and finish it up. Don't feel bad about going on and on with this because no one ever gets this right. So, we'll get it right this time. You know that you're not getting the full story, but the material is here. But at least you're getting enough of a precede to realize that this is extraordinarily potent material. In fact, it resides in the center of the blind spot of our archetypal unconscious. It is here where these images resolve. You can read all the books you want to about archetypal forms of Jews, and it won't do anything about yourself. But if you get into trying to resolve some of these images, they pull out of us all of this energy.
Whether one is in that realm consciously or not, regardless of whether you're Jewish or Christian. One of the proofs of this archetypal level was the fact that in the 19th century, in China, in the 1850s in China, where there were never more than a couple thousand Christians or Jews at any one time, there was a whole takeover of the Chinese empire by Christian fanatical sects called the Taiping. And all of a sudden, from nothing there were millions of fanatical Christians looking for the apocalyptic last days. It's archetypal. It's not cultural. It is not religious. We're dealing here with human phenomena, human death. And wherever man is, he takes within himself the guiding stars which have always been there. It's just that we don't realize that these cycles reoccur. Not time and again, exactly the same. But as we move, as it were, in our little solar family structures. That whole solar system moves in a galactic structure also. And the collective unconscious is like the galaxy. And the personal unconscious, like the solar system and the individual like the planet Earth. You have to have all the coordination in order to sense where you are. Where are you then? At that scale of orientation, you are in a universe and understanding that completely closes all the books of argument about where are we in the universe, because the universe occurs at that scale as a unity. We are there. That's where we are.
Well, it's in there. Have some food, I guess.
END OF RECORDING