Greece and Egypt Interacting
Presented on: Tuesday, April 9, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 17 of 54
Greece and Egypt Interacting
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, April 9, 1985
Transcript:
One of the really great difficulties is that Alexandria has completely disappeared. Classical Alexandria is not there. It hasn't been there. My friend Stephan Schwartz, who went to Alexandria four years ago with a team of psychics and archaeologists, kept running into problems with the Egyptian government every time they turned around. And the more successful they became, the more problems. And Egypt has always been inhospitable in terms of finding Alexandria in its background. There are many vested interests in the world who are very comfortably ensconced and would be very uncomfortable with the complete picture of classical Alexandria to be portrayed, and thus it is that the only really complete work on Alexandria to date was written in 1972 by P. M. Fraser, [Ptolemaic Alexandria,] Oxford University, which promptly went out of print and was issued in three huge volumes that were so expensive that almost nobody got copies. We presented copies to Mr. [Manly P.] Hall on his 80th birthday, so PRS [Philosophical Research Society] has a set and Whirling Rainbow Library has a set. I bought it when it first came out in 1972, but it only takes care of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Nobody has yet taken a comprehensive view of Roman Alexandria. Or we might call it Christian Alexandria. And no one has completely surveyed the entire phenomenon. This Tuesday night series is, to a large extent exploratory, because no one has done this before. No one has gone into it. Nobody with tenacity has just stayed there week after week, bringing in the various strands as patiently as possible.
And we have gotten, by now, four or five strands within our Ken, and we haven't begun weaving yet. We will probably by the end of this month we'll start to weave. Last week we introduced another strand, which is so complex and so difficult that we tended, in all honesty, to let it lay fallow with only a cursory approach introductory glossing over much and simply stylizing some major characteristics. That's all we can do for now. A thorough discussion of Egypt will have to be deferred until we have more of the materials available. But tonight, we carry on from last week and attempt to see the colossal impact that Greece and Egypt had in their confrontation. We say confrontation, and I think it's best to characterize this.
In early times, the Greeks would go to Egypt to learn. Like anybody else in the classical world, Egypt was the learned place. We have great testimony that all of the formative Greek minds Solon, who was the writer of the great laws for the Athenians, went to school in Egypt, learned there. Thales, who started the Ionian philosophic critical tradition, was schooled in Egypt. You, of course, recall that Pythagoras was quite learned in Egyptian matters. Plato went to Egypt, Eudoxus, Herodotus, and the list goes on. The Greeks always went to Egypt to learn for hundreds of years, if not for thousands of years.
We recall in the Odyssey when Telemachus is interviewing in the great halls of Menelaus, and Menelaus tells him of their adventures in Egypt and how they escape barely with their lives. All this is not a confrontation. But when Alexander the Great went to Egypt, he went with the intent to radically change and recast the world. And Egypt for him was the crucible. It was the effective spiritual point in his geometry of meaning in his unfolding world order. And we have to understand here that Alexander's vision was that of a world order. The Greek term for that was ecumenical, one world, mankind as a single ordered entity. That all human beings would be brought into focus and that that focus would manifest the Godhead, which had been attempting in haphazard ways since the world had begun to manifest a human order that was pure and capable of presenting the divine intact. This was his vision, and as a confirmation of that, pushed his way, mythically, as it were, all the way out into the Libyan desert, to Siwa, to the oasis there to determine whether or not he was a god. And on the basis of that determination, the priesthood of Amun-Ra - Amun, meaning hidden; Ra meaning sun - the hidden sun, the invisible sun, the sun that we see brings life and gives order. It has a complement which is a hidden sun, which illumines by its invisible light the nether world.
The other side, the obverse of life, which we in our ignorance call death, and we in our speculation observe as fading, but which has at least equally as great a claim to reality. Amun-Ra he is together, then the sun and the hidden sun. The completeness, the completeness of a movement, of a cycle of this vision. And it was this parentage that Alexander wished to secure for himself. He was raised, of course, by Olympia's world vision and her mystical background, and as a priestess of the rites on the island of Samos, gave her the necessary ceremonial background to instruct the young Alexander when he went to Egypt. Therefore, it was in a confrontational mode the classical Egypt, archaic Egypt, that we would recognize as Egypt today: the pyramids, the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom. All of that had been long gone. Saint Augustine is as far from us as Akhnaton was from Alexander. And in the meantime, the Persians had taken over Egypt several times, and when Alexander went, they had for almost 300 years run roughshod over the country. So, Alexander went to recast the world, and Egypt was to be the crucible. And in Egypt the vision of the ecumenical was to be promulgated by the manifestation of the divine form of the polis, the city, the polis that each human being then would become a citizen in a cosmopolitan world.
That the city as a cosmos, bringing together, integrating together, all of the strands of life, all of the traditions of the world into one fabric. And Alexandria was to be that place. It was to be the seat, the royal throne, the place of intercultural yoga, if you will, so that all men born and raised in Alexandria would have the entire world and all human history as their provenance. They would be able to claim descent equally from any tradition that was extant.
Now, this is confrontational because the Egyptians who were there, whether under Persian masters or not, had been there for many thousands of years. The first integrator of Upper and Lower Egypt, Menas, traditionally began about 3200 BC. So, Egypt had had over 3000 years of integrated history and uncounted thousands of years of cultivation before then. In fact, if we look at the sophistication of the Sahara Desert, it's apparent that sometime after the last ice age was the most significant and propitious time. For those civilizations to move in off the Sahara, off the encroaching Sahel, which we see in our own time again, spreading. When they came in from the desert, they carried with them this sparsity, this purity of the sense of the divine. And in Egypt, unlike any other place in the world, the priests did not have long hair, but were shaved bald. They did not wear rough robes, but wore linen, white linen robes. They bathed four times a day, twice in the day, and twice in the evening. Almost what we would call an obsession with cleanliness, personal physical cleanliness. Their diet was picked towards having the least amount of waste material coming out of the body, the least amount of feces, the least amount of urine. Everything was geared towards this desert like sparsity.
Someone asked T. E. Lawrence once why he liked the desert and he replied, "it's clean." It's this quality that impacted with the Greeks. And strange enough, the Egyptian inner purity, inner simplicity was protected by a labyrinth of oblique approaches by the proliferation of gods and goddesses without end, so that no outsider would ever come into the inner sanctorium, that the inner presence of the divine was forever secured by a proliferation of entrances, and the combination of men and animals without end protected the invisible, hidden God from the profane. And now the Greeks wanted to manifest that Godhead in a man a God-man. It wasn't whispered, it was debated whether or not Alexander was that God-man, and in his own estimation, he was at his death, which happens significantly symbolically in Babylon. His body was prepared and put into this beautiful gold carved sarcophagus that looked rather like a temple. And on its way to the Royal Burying Grounds, some hundreds of miles distant from Babylon in Syria the leader of the expedition, Ptolemy, his general who would become the first Ptolemy - Ptolemy Soter - veered off and took the body to the site of Alexandria and consecrated Alexandria, and then had the body moved to Memphis, Egyptian Memphis, the center of a very powerful cult.
And while Alexander was being built, the body of Alexander anchored down the claim of the Ptolemies, the first Ptolemy to having a divine mission, hence his name Ptolemy I Soter, which is Greek for savior'. He is saving the vision. We no longer have the man. We do not have the God-man, but we have his divine city, his divine imperial city, which will manifest his vision. The God is gone, but his city will rise in his place. And with this divine city, all human religious traditions will be brought into harmony, into one grand symphony. So, the first son, the first successor to Ptolemy Soter Philadelphus, who was born on the holy island of Kos in the Aegean. When Ptolemy II Philadelphus came in, it was incumbent upon him to carry forth this universalizing of man's mind. And it is Philadelphus who brings in from all corners of the earth representatives of the world's great religions. It is he who brings in the Jewish scholars from the High Temple in Jerusalem. It is he who brings in Buddhists from India, from the court of the Mauryas. His father had known personally the elements in Chandragupta Maurya's court, and by the time of Philadelphus, when Ashoka was king in India, Buddhist monks were brought to Alexandria. Representatives of all the great traditions were brought together in Philadelphus' time, and the place of their meeting was called the Museum.
We think today, and this is just an indication of the kind of paradoxical oddness of our time - we think of a museum as a place to display dead things. Dead things that are valuable, but nobody can use anymore. Put them in a museum. The Museum, the original museum was a place of all live traditions. It was the home of all the muses. All nine muses together are a nine-stringed lyre. And if one could play the whole lyre, the composition would be the talent of mankind in one grand song, one hymn of the ecumenical, as it was there that the problem of religious interpenetration was first mooted in the world. There had never been any conception of religious interpenetration before that. There had been confrontations, there had been wars between religious conceptions, but there had never been this concerted, directed, intelligent effort at bringing them together. Not only one or two, but all of them. It was rather like in our time, the plan to put a man on the moon, to say, this is our objective and to garner the technology, the time, the personnel, the money, the determination over one long decade and do it.
And this is what the Ptolemy set for themselves in Alexandria about 285 BC. Now, the first attempt by Philadelphus' father, Ptolemy I Soter. The first attempt to find some way to bring the Greek and Egyptian religious interpenetration, which was to be the first basic step in this, was to introduce a new god. Egypt could tolerate new gods like ducks can tolerate raindrops. Let's have a new god. And so, Serapis, the cult of Serapis, was made - it was born. And in order to do this right, Ptolemy sent out and brought in the best people that he could. He brought in an Egyptian priest named Manetho. A very powerful intellect, very erudite and learned Egyptian priest, the man who had in fact written for Soter a complete chronology of Egyptian sacred history [The History of Egypt]. We need to know what we're working with. All right, what is this sacred history of Egypt? And Manetho prepared this, and we have a great deal of it today. The Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard, has all the fragments of Manetho that we have. He brought in people from Greece who were of the sacred family, who held the right to conduct all the sacred ceremonies at Eleusis. And then, on top of it, Soter himself opened himself up to the divine avenue of having a dream. One would go into the sacred precincts of a temple, prepare oneself ritually, go through various libations and illustrations and incubations, and at the appointed hour commit oneself to sleep. And the dream came. And in this dream, he saw an image of the God. For the nature of the divine is to respond to man's call. The divine is there waiting for our call. If we call in the right way with open commitment, we are answered by the divine. And in this dream, he saw an image of the God standing manifested as a statue. But the statue was nowhere to be found in all of Greece and all of Egypt and any of the Hellenistic kingdoms. And so, for months, Soter had individuals interviewing all travelers, all sailors, all wise men, and finally the statue was located. It existed in a port on the Black Sea called Sinope. Sinope is that part on the southern Black Sea, where the coast juts a little bit by a bulge into the Black Sea, and Sinope is an important point because one can cross the Black Sea by sail in one day, and one night one goes out of sight of the shore in the evening and sails all night, and in the morning the northern shore, the Crimea, Sebastopol, comes into view. And so, this Black Sea, the Euxine Sea, is named because one can navigate it in a night, in a darkness, and Sinope being, the Sinope being the kickoff point of reaching - this was a very prosperous port.
The statue was found to be quite valuable when Ptolemy sent Greeks to buy it and the citizens would not sell. And of course, being Greeks, they realized that they would have to create a little mythos around the statue, around its disappearance, that is. And so, they made false feet about the size of the statue. And the next morning, when the statue was found to be missing, there were footprints leading down to the docks, and there was a sum of money tied in great Greek cloth bundles to the piers, and a note saying the God decided he was going to leave and there was nothing we could do. We obeyed him and set sail. Kind regards to the coffers of the city. The statue was brought to Alexandria and the Serapeum. The temple of Serapis was put up. Now it's interesting. All this, incidentally, is recounted in Tacitus in The Histories. One has to find one's way all over classical literature. There's no coordination anymore. In the Serapeum, in the Temple of Serapis, the god was a weeping god. He wept for the tragedy of the living that they do not know. But he faced across the Serapeum, across the precincts of the temple, a wall which was a living wall. That is to say, it was filled, it was a menagerie of various animals brought from all over the empire, and various plants brought from all over the empire.
And so, the wall that Serapis faced was a wall of life, of the incredible variety and vitality of life. And in order to supply this wall in the Serapeum, which was the true altar, the city of Alexandria developed the world's first zoo and the first botanical gardens, and this zoo and these botanical gardens were adjuncts to the cult of Serapis. So, one had the museum, one had the, uh Serapeum, one had the zoo, one had the botanical gardens, one had the royal palace. Alexandria was beginning to fill up with very powerful ritual centers, but the cult of Serapis did not really take. It was practiced in Alexandria by the Greek speaking foreign population, who were there, and occasionally in other parts of Greece Major. There would be temples of Serapis, but there wasn't much of a response from the people. And this is the problem that faced Philadelphus. You cannot integrate a world from the top. You have to have a penetration down to the people. And so it was that Philadelphus began to adopt Egyptian manners in himself.
In his life, in his living, he began to dress himself as an Egyptian pharaoh. His father, on ceremonial days as the administrator for all of Egypt, would have put on costumes but Philadelphus now began the practice of not putting on a costume, but of wearing the robes of office for real. He also adopted the ancient kingly practice of marrying one's sister, and Philadelphus married his older sister Arsinoe, who was a very formidable lady. You must not imagine now some young thing being taken advantage of. She was every inch an intellectual giant and a queen. She had been married off as a youngster to a great general of Alexander, and after about 15 years had told him that she didn't want to have any more of this kind of a life. And she left him. She had her own money. She had her own position, her own intelligence. She understood the purposes, sacred and public, that Philadelphus was attempting to manage. And so, it was in this office of becoming an Egyptian pharaoh in his personal life, that Philadelphus had the vision of shifting the focus of the interpenetration of Greek and Egyptian religion from Serapis, a god, to Isis, a goddess. And Isis became the success story of the Hellenistic age. Isis became the vehicle by which the Greek and Egyptian minds finally were able to harmonize.
In fact, we read in Plutarch in the Moralia of Plutarch, in Book 5, his account of "Isis and Osiris," he recounts in here that the important element for the Greek and the Egyptian mind is that Isis is a part of a royal set, a royal family, five figures rather like the hand. These five figures have their birthdays one day after another for five successive days and their birthdays - those five days - are outside of the calendar year. Their birthdays occur all at once in a sequence which are extra-calendar the first God on the first day to come out of these five of this set is Osiris, the second god, and the second day is Horus, the third god, and the third day is Typhon, and it's on the fourth day that Isis is born. And on the fifth day comes Nephthys, the finality, so that Isis and Nephthys are sisters. And in a way Osiris is related to Typhon, but rather in a polarized sense. Typhon is chaos and Osiris is order. But Horus is not a brother to Osiris or Typhon. He is in fact a son, and it was stated in religious secret metaphor that in the womb, Isis and Osiris had conceived Horus, and so when they were born, he was born also from their conception. Now this is the Greek version, if you recall last week, the Egyptian version is that Horus is born after Osiris' death, that Osiris, after he has died, Isis, with her wingedness, is able to bring the essence from Osiris and impregnate herself so that this is not the movement of a physical penetration, but of a metaphysical penetration. That the birth of Horus is not physical at all but is metaphysical. In the Greek version, it also is metaphysical in the sense that time is irrelevant, that his conception, his maturation, his birth is an eternal event has no time within it whatsoever.
Now, Plutarch, in writing of "Isis and Osiris" ... and Plutarch is born about 50 AD, so he comes within this movement, attempted to equate, or identify - perhaps that's a better word - Horus with the god Apollo. And if you recall now, about three or four months ago, we were talking a lot about Apollo, about his transcendental character. And I think if we take five minutes here, it might be well, for those who weren't here at that time, to the archaic Greek religious mind, to the religious mind, which was present and purified through Orphic involvement with spiritual transcendence, there were three primary avenues of leaving oneself, leaving oneself behind, going out from oneself. The first way was called ekstasis - ecstasy. And the divine image of ecstasy was the goddess Aphrodite. A different way of leaving oneself was through terror, not revulsion, not even being horrified, but terror. And the divine figure that was there for terror was Aries (Mars). So that Aphrodite and Aries, or Venus and Mars, are two of the important god-like images, manifestations of ways in which we leave ourselves. There was a third way in which man may leave himself other than through terror or ecstasy, and that is through wisdom. And the goddess Athena became the image of that way to leave oneself.
Athena, who is feminine like Aphrodite, but who is armed like Aries - and she is the one. And Homer, he often says that Athena, Athena is she who guards you in the heat of battle and sees you on your way home, sees that you survive and are able to come home. Sees you off when you go and sees you come back. So, wisdom is armed, or we should use the Victorian pronunciation here, armed. She's an armed God figure, a protectress. And of course, Athena was important historically, because she was the goddess of prime goddess of Attica and all of the Ionian colonies. The twelve cities of Asia Minor were largely colonized from Athens. Not so much that they were all Athenian people, but it was the Plymouth rock of this colonization. It was the point from which everybody left, and everybody eventually called home when they came back. So, Athena was this image.
Now, Athena, Aphrodite, and Ares are transcendental figures of human capacity raised up to ultimate levels because there are three of them. They needed to have some common focus. Apollo is that common focus. So, he is the integration of the transcendental capacities of man. That's why Apollo is always in this kind of a glorious, calm mode. Zeus may have escapades with all forms of life, but Apollo never does. And Apollo has three primary functions. He is the god of medicine, he is the god of music, and he is the god of prophecy. He brings order in all of these ways in which man restores himself to wholeness: medicine, music, and prophecy.
So, Horus, being identified with Apollo, has this character, has this quality. He is not just a transcendental figure, but he is an ultimate focus of all transcendental powers. Thus, he is able to bring back together and integrate back together something which has been pulled asunder not just in the physical world, but in the psychic world as well. He is a healer of the psychic realms. His mother is Isis. And so, Isis becomes the devoted wife of Osiris, the compassionate antagonist of Typhon, the sister of Nephthys, the mother of Horus. It is she that forms the organizing synthesizing background for the whole Memphite theology.
And Philadelphus in about 275 BC, finally understood that this was going to be the winning combination. And so Greek temples were built on the Nile River at various opportune spots. They built Dendera. They built Philae. And in Alexandria itself, they changed the nature of the city so that the royal palace itself had a religious function, and this would carry all the way down to the last inheritor of the Ptolemies, who was Cleopatra the seventh - the historical Cleopatra. She considered herself, as we will see, an incarnation of Isis with great claim. And in fact, her advice to Marc Antony [Marcus Antonius] at one time was to purify himself of his mortal elements so that he could join her on a higher level.
And that's when the Timonium was built, this little hermitage hut out at the end of this pier, or this mole that was sent out into the great harbor, and there was a little hut built out there for Marc Antony at the end, and that was where he was trying to purify himself. Because Isis is the tutor for man in purification. She is the one who teaches us how to burn off the mortality that we are saddled with. The mythic image that was given both by the Greeks and by the Egyptians exactly the same, only for the Greeks - we're speaking now of the Homeric Greeks - it was Demeter and not Isis who went through this ritual. Whereas for the Hellenistic Greeks it was Isis who went through this ritual. And the Egyptians recognized it. After Osiris is duped to going into a coffin, Typhon built this coffin that was exactly the right size for Osiris and then he challenged everyone at a meeting to see who would fit in this coffin. And as soon as Osiris lay in the coffin, the lid was slammed down. It was nailed and leaded and sealed and sent down the river to the through the passage of the Nile, which is still cursed to this day by Egyptians.
And Isis went looking for him. And as she went looking for him, she realized that it was almost a hopeless task unless she could assume a disguise and go among men, because that's the only way she could find a telltale path. The clues were for man to divulge to her. There was no divinity that could divulge this. And in this disguise, she came to become a nurse for a family. And this young boy that she became nurse for a while, she took a liking to. And because he had slept in her arms and she had cradled him because he had been with the care of a goddess, she began to prepare him for immortality. And each night she would place him in a fire, and she would be burning off his mortal parts. Of course, she was discovered at this, and the mother shrieked, and the boy was taken away from the flames. And then the goddess reveals herself and says, because of this, now your son will have an illustrious life, but he will die like anyone else. Well, the story is told of Demeter by the Greeks - it's in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter - only what Demeter is looking for is not her husband, but her daughter, Persephone. And Persephone is very much related to Osiris. Both of them have encounters with the underworld, which take them away from life. The one is lost, the other is dismembered. One advisedly uses the terms dismembered because in the Greek version of the Isis and Osiris legend, all the pieces of Osiris were found except his phallus. And so, a clay phallus had to be made. Persephone is found in the underworld and is brought up for two-thirds of the year. Two-thirds of the time she can be above ground and one-third she has to be below because she ate a pomegranate seed.
So, Demeter and Isis have this wonderful capacity between them, which is the capacity of life itself. Unlike these machines which shut off, life can weave, knit together that which has become disparate. This is a force. This is a power. It is the force. The power. In fact, we might say that today we recognize a continuity between the ability of inorganic materials, elements to come together and form mineral compounds as the very first step of life. The ability of fungi and spores and so forth to process minerals into organic tissue. All of this is commensurate with life, and one literally can, as [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin pointed out in his books, that paleontology is not a science of dead rocks, but of pre-life structures, that the whole universe is alive, and thus the synthesizing capacities of life is the primal force, the primal force that creates reality.
And so, Isis is that divine image who guards life, guards the capacity for life. Isis becomes, thereby, an extremely important figure. She is often portrayed carrying in her raised hand a sistrum. I'll read you a little description here of a sistrum. This is from the Standard Dictionary of Folklore. A sistrum is, "A form of dance rattle" - it's almost like a shaman's drum - "A dance rattle made of a metal or wooden frame with perforations through which are strung thin metal rods. These rods jingle by jarring against the frame, or else by loosely holding a series of metal disks." Usually, it's shaped rather like the base of a violin, and there are strands, maybe five or six, of thin metal wire, and then metal disks like little castanets or little cymbals are placed on them. So, when it is held and it is shaken like this, it gives a very strange ringing.
I have a Vajrayana sistrum in the drawer which I didn't bring out, but that sound is a dispelling sound. The first step in integration is to dispel the disorder. That is to say, there is always an order - we are never without order. It is generally a mis-order. And so, the dispelling of the mis-order is like dispelling the clouds of doubt, dispelling the clouds of ignorance. And so, the movement of the system like that, that Isis brings, is like a rattlesnake warning those who would trespass on [Sacred Trey?] clear out now, for the real power is here.
So, a sistrum has this. "Both the handle and the frame are frequently ornamented and at times surmounted by an animal figure." Sometimes on the top there would be various animal figures made. The dog was extremely important to Isis. The dog star was her star - Sirius. One time, Osiris, in the dark, mistook Nephthys for Isis and conceived a son, and Nephthys in order to hide the son from Typhon and everyone else, put him into the reeds in a basket, hoping that he would be exposed to the elements and be eaten by the crocodiles. And Isis learned of this and went searching for the child and found the child in a little basket among the bulrushes of the Nile, and had that child raised. And that child was called Anubis - Anubis, the dog-headed one, because the dog is the watch being who awakens man up to danger. Not that he had a dog's head, but he was of that nature. We recognize, of course some elements of the mosaicness in this. So, the sistrum sometimes would have dog heads and Anubis heads on top of it.
This instrument was also transferred to one of the aspects of Isis because she is the goddess of life. One of her aspects is Hathor, who was the goddess of sexuality and fertility. Isis is able to come out in many different ways. And Hathor was one of these figures. So, this is a sistrum and we might mention here that in the rites of Isis, which, of course, were the inner part, were part of the mysteries and were never divulged in antiquity and are not going to be divulged anywhere here tonight. But one of the aspects which was important was that there was always to be a cistern, not sistrum, but cistern of water, of Nile water. And any temple of Isis would have this cistern of Nile water up on a dais. And after the sistrum had purified the ambiance of the temple, the individuals would be brought up and would be anointed with this Nile water.
We recognize that today as baptism. And Isis would confer then the Nile water in this religious mode, and this is a regathering of the individual to the powers of life, bringing them into a whole for the waters of the Nile where Osiris' body mystically the Nile River. If you have to think of it metaphorically, it was his semen, the Nile, which fertilizes the land. And Isis, as a goddess in geographical metaphor, was that land of Egypt that was fertilized by the Nile. The ancient name for Egypt would be signified by the consonants KMT. In historical times called Kem. But there is a t there kmt. The t is rather silent, and if you recall, we ran across that t in the sacred name of the invisible God, who's initial designation in language was NTR. The sounds ntr, and the difference is, is that the tongue is at the roof of the mouth with the n, then it is brought away with a sound and then the same motion of the throat. And the voice makes an N or an R, depending on where the tongue is. And the t is the balance between the tongue being on the roof of the mouth or being free in the mouth, rather arched to make the R. This is very much like in yoga, where after one's breathed in, there's a slight pause before one breathes out, and after one breathes out, there's a slight pause before you breathe in again. This punctuation of the cycle of breath is a natural yoga, a natural equanimity where there is no breath coming in or going out. And as this balance that kmt and the ntr. And this occurs at the end of the name for Egypt because it was a holy land. It was in fact a black earth land. That's the sacred nature of Isis. She is the goddess who is the black earth land. She is fertile. She is able to generate. And so, Isis and Osiris, the river and the land together, are the fertility that make life possible.
And Nephthys is the desert land. She's the extremity, sees the defining extremity of Isis. And sometimes the Nile overflows slightly and sometimes portions of the desert get watered, but generally not. Remember now, the Egyptians are very accurate all the time. Extraordinarily accurate, much like our engineers today in spiritual matters. Every iota must be accounted for. And so, the edge of something is as important a phenomenon as the interior of the phenomenon itself. The horizon of Isis is Nephthys, and Nephthys becomes a natural go-between between the fertile land and the desert land, between life and afterlife, between the day and the night. And so, she has this kind of a character and quality. She is the wife, the consort of Typhon, of Chaos. Typhon is a rabid maniac, and he cannot stand order. And he always seeks to tear up order. And if he cannot tear up order, he likes to infiltrate and cause disruption. So, Typhon has this quality. He will either kill you by biting or kill you by suffocating, by strangling. The serpentine metaphors are very appropriate because later on these are the images that come up. Therefore, he is a prototype of what we today recognize as the devil. He has a temptation quality, and he is a destructive quality. He is virulent. He's not at all the Mephistophelean figure that would be at home on a Renaissance stage. He makes but one appearance, and that is to destroy.
In the Book of Kells, such a figure was portrayed as a cinder - stick figure. A burnt out stick figure of a man with wings, always on the outside of the cartouche of the illustrations. Never a part of the design - never. And the design always pointedly on the margins outside of the design. He is not in the tapestry of life. So, when Osiris is dismembered, Horus sets out to avenge, to bring back by redress. But the redress needs to be on a metaphysical level, on a transcendental level, and is there that his redressing capacity is stopped by the compassion of Isis. She will not let him kill Typhon. He finds him. He brings him in. He has them all tied up. He's ceremoniously ready to order the universe again and Isis, by her nature, is compassionate and will not let him kill. And so, Typhon is set free again, and so he is constantly vacillating between captivity and where he does his worst and being brought in. This is a conundrum which will be intolerable for the Jewish mind in the first century BC. It simply will be an intolerable situation. To the Egyptians, it was a part of the flow of life, which was endless. There was no beginning and there was no end. So, there is no need for a triumph, a final triumph. There's no need for an Armageddon. There's no need for a judgement day. Life is an endless ongoing cycle of events, sometimes more, sometimes less, eternally occurring without end. To the Greek sense of order, this could be possible only if there were some overriding balance. It may not come to an end, but it had to be then perfectly balanced, and the cycles then had to be concentric in order to be accepted. But for the Jewish mind, there had to be an end to this "Madness." There must be some final comeuppance. There must be a solution.
Now, we have no surviving temples of Isis other than the one that they found at Pompeii. And there are a couple of poor photographs in here that you can look at them here. And that's about the only archaeological evidence that we have, other than the Greek temples that survived at Philae and Dendera and two or three other places in Egypt. This whole ceremony of Greek and Egyptian interpenetration of religion was focused then originally by Ptolemy I Soter on Serapis. And by Philadelphus, time shifted to Isis and that seemed to take. It was impossible for the Egyptian people, though, to exclusively assent to Isis even on that basis. To them the god still was unnamed. Isis still but one manifestation, cosmic though she were, she was not the whole show. And there were other cycles, there were other possibilities. And for the Egyptian people, they always kept their spirit open. And to the Greek mind, this was an intolerable situation. And so eventually the Greek Hellenistic military ethos ate up all of the religious goodwill that was formed by the early Ptolemies. And 100 years after Philadelphus, the Greek foreigners were still foreigners, still Greeks, and were having to use military force to keep themselves in office to keep peace in the land.
The Egyptian soldiers found that when they went to fight under Greek generals, that they could do as well as the Greek soldiers, and they began taking this confidence back to their villages. And eventually the native Egyptian soldiers were refusing to fight under Greek commanders. They wanted to have their own Egyptian commanders. And so, the economic power of Egypt formed on this military. Aristocratic society was shaky and crumbling just at the time when the other Hellenistic kingdoms were attempting to come in. And the only power that could takeover that situation was Rome. And so, Rome styled itself as the rightful protector of the Ptolemies. And from about 150 BC onwards, Rome began increasingly considering itself the protector of the whole region. That is to say, they began conceiving of themselves as protectors of the state of Israel, of Egypt, of Syria, of Greece, etc., etc., until the phone book was complete. And if they were protectors of the whole area, then they should send in legions to take control and reorganize it along stable lines. And the stable lines, of course, were those lines which had worked in Italy, in Spain, in Numidia, in Gaul, in Britain, and everywhere else.
And so, Asia became a Roman province about the time of Julius Caesar. And we're working towards that. It's just at that time that the whole Ptolemaic dynasty comes to a fine point in the personality of Cleopatra the seventh. And the whole lineage, the whole notion of an ecumenical is taken from Alexander the Great, becomes pared down and refined to a single vision, capable of being picked up only by a man who could equal Alexander the Great. And we'll see that the first individual who grabs for this ring will be Julius Caesar. We'll see that in about a month. Of course, the second person who reached for it was Mark Antony, and the successful person who did grab hold of it was Augustus Caesar. It was an event that was pregnant with possibility because all of the sacred traditions were focused. All of them led into this single event, rather what Carl Jung calls in Mysterium Coniunctionis, he calls such an event an enantiodromia. It is an archetypal collective unconscious focusing of all images. All the archetypes come together in one meeting. And when that is effectively handled, the entire world changes. It becomes topsy turvy. What used to work no longer works, and what didn't work now works. It becomes what Nietzsche called insightfully a "transvaluation of all values."
And that was achieved in 30 BC in Alexandria by a Roman who tried valiantly to understand what he had done, and found the best seer that he could, Virgil, to try and put it into some cosmic form of understanding. Which he largely accomplished, but they never solved the basic problem - how to educate your successors to hold all those electric wires together and not electrocute yourself and everybody else. And within 50 years of the death of Augustus, the whole world was electrocuted by this tremendous implosion made into an explosion. And not only was Jerusalem leveled, but the city of Rome was leveled, and only Alexandria managed to survive all the while. And in Alexandria - at the time of the destruction of the city of Rome, Nero burnt it to the ground and the destruction of Jerusalem - the city of Alexandria was the place that the Gospel of Mark was written exactly in those years, and it was the first indication that this is the only way to hold all of these energies together, commensurate with the gathering of them, that there may be hundreds, even thousands, and perhaps millions of other ways. But this is the only workable way that is commensurate with the traditions thus made. And so, the Gospel of Mark is an indication. It's a cue that he who holds that enantiodromia energy is not an emperor of this world, but a king of the universe who eternally lives and has no death, and thus the tradition can never come undone again.
Well, this is what we're moving toward, and I hope that you can recognize in this that Isis becomes very, very important. She becomes the prototype, if you wish to say, of the Virgin Mary. But this is not to denigrate the Virgin or Isis. One must have respect for this. In fact, Plutarch in "Isis and Osiris," when he first begins, he's writing this book to a woman that he knew named Clea, who was a priestess, a friend of his, and he writes to her that we should be very, very careful about talking of religious matters. For the gods are awesome and deserve our respect. For he writes here that it is wisdom that is most important. I think also he writes that a source of happiness in the eternal life, which is the lot of God, is that events which come to pass do not escape his prescience. But if his knowledge and meditation on the nature of existence should be taken away, then to my mind his immortality is not living, but a mere lapse of time. Therefore, the effort to arrive at the truth, especially the truth about the gods, is a longing for the divine, for the search for truth requires for its study and investigation the consideration of sacred subjects. And it is a work more hallowed than any form of holy living or temple service, and not least of all, it is well pleasing to that goddess whom you worship.
Clea, a goddess, exceptionally wise, and a lover of wisdom, to whom, as her name at least seems to indicate knowledge and understanding, or in the highest degree appropriate. And Clea was a priestess of Isis.
Well, let's stop there. Next week we'll go back to the Jewish tradition and pick up at 100 BC and pick up the momentum. The document that we have is the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the twelve sons of Jacob who formed the twelve tribes of Israel. And in 100 BC, an almost incredible lunge to acquire comprehension, all of the figures of the twelve patriarchs are brought together to give their collective wisdom into a single form, the testament saying this is what Israel should do. This is what we stand for. This is the meaning of everything that has happened to us. And the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in 100 BC will be echoed exactly in about 100 AD and the first church ritual manual of the Christian Church will be based on that and will be called in Greek, the Didache, the twelve. And we'll see when we get to it that the first ritual order of the Christian communities was based on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in 100 BC. And we'll look at that next week.
END OF RECORDING