Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Part 1)
Presented on: Tuesday, April 16, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 18 of 54
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, April 16, 1985
Transcript:
This will be the first of two lectures on the book, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and I will jump ahead on the third lecture and take us up to what is called in Greek, the Didache, meaning the twelve, where the twelve patriarchs were transformed into the twelve Apostles, and the pattern of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs became the earliest pattern for the Christian church in its basic ritual. So, we're dealing here now with a taproot suddenly emerging about 108 BC.
We need to have a little bit of background. And so, I'll give you a description from Josephus to bring us back to the Jewish heritage. There were three fragments of the Jewish community that occurred because of a powerful insight that had generated itself about 180 BC. The beginnings of the Book of Enoch and its beginnings of the 19th century, Germans would say, was in a document called the Book of Noah. But there was a tremendous opening, that is to say, there was a contact in two complementary ways. There was an outgoing from man, and there was an inflow to man. I think the best description that I can offer you comes from Erich Neumann, who did an article on Mystical Man in the Jung Annual called Spring. And he did this in 1961. And I haven't seen it reprinted anywhere. So, I borrowed this copy from Doctor [Stephan] Hoeller just to give you this short quotation.
Neumann writes, "The mystical encounter between the ego and the non-ego is signalized by the irruption of the pleromatic uroboros element into the sphere of human life." This description begs our understanding somewhat. I'm sure that you're familiar with the uroboros as a symbol of the snake swallowing its tail, and the pleroma as a designated image of undifferentiated cosmic reality. And Neumann is saying then that there is a condition where the realization of this continuous unity breaks in upon our human sphere, our human life.
"Or, in the reverse formulation, whenever a mystical phenomenon occurs, the ego penetrates the archetypal heaven and attains the pleromatic uroboros sphere of being. As periphery and center are interchangeable in every mandala, here too the pleromatic uroboros element may be regarded as the surrounding celestial ocean of the godhead, the encompassing sphere, or else as the creative nucleus of nothingness at the center of man."
So, it's a great surprise. It's a great shock to find that the life that we have been living is not continuous. That it is unreal in the sense that it doesn't hold together of its own nature. That what holds it together is of a totally and distinctly different otherness. And that the center of ourselves is unoccupied by our designs, by our life. That it has never been touched by it at all. And further, that the contact, the sudden contact of the center, opens up a feeling tone that at first is experienced as anxiety, or chaos, or threatening. And what it is, more or less, not merely, but more or less is the articulation of our discontinuity in terms of the material world, that the material world is discontinuous, that that is the basic fact. It's the data. And if we have forgotten that it comes as a rude surprise that this is so. So that the center of one's awareness suddenly is contacted, energized. And as that is energized, it naturally emanates out along radial structural patterns of openness and suddenly discloses that human life is not at all what it seemed. It's very episodic. It seems suddenly to be an aggregate of vignettes; a collection buckshot-like of elements that would seem to not be related to each other all of a sudden.
It's this quality of development, of realization, that hit the Hebrew mind about 180 BC. Not all of the people, just a few, a handful. And as the decades advance from 180 BC, more and more people were hit by this. And it was ironic because in the external situation, the Jewish population seemed to have a sudden comeback of worldly power. There were Jewish kings again. There were Jewish armies that were victorious in the field. They rebuilt the temple. It was known in rabbinical designation as the period of the Second Temple. Solomon's sacred temple was refurbished, brought back into being so that externally it seemed that Jewish material power was flourishing again, just at the time when the inner confidence that that might be real or workable was beginning to dissemble in an increasing population of people.
This kind of an impact, which we are experiencing today in our own time, produces a tripartite arm splitting of the society, of the population, for the Jewish population. Two factions; two warring parties. It eventually solidified and became parties, almost like political parties developed the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and the basic distinction is that the Sadducees were based themselves on aristocratic book learning. They're very literate. They're usually very rich. The Pharisees were usually those who dealt by word of mouth. The vast populous who would take their income from what we would call today evangelists.
So, it was like the scholars and the evangelists, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. But there was a third community that did not politicize itself. And this third community were the Essenes. And the Essenes were the operative interface between the polarities that condense themselves in the parties of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The best description that we have in length and in depth is from Philo, but we haven't gotten to Philo yet. So, in order to save Philo for the appropriate time, because when we get back to Alexandria in about another month, Philo will be the only resource that we have to get our bearings, because by the time of Philo's writing this spiritual terror, the spiritual enlightenment had become contagious for millions of people. Not just a handful - millions of them - and almost all of them were unable to write about it or to conceive what had happened.
I think I've quoted to you several times before, perhaps a paraphrase it just briefly. One of the greatest Roman historians named Livy, Titus Livy, wrote a monumental, bulky history of the world from the Roman view [The History of Rome]. Dozens and dozens and dozens of volumes. Bulky, living in such a fluid, beautiful syntax. He was also called Milky Livy. But Livy in 19 BC said, "we can neither stand the lives that we are forced to live, nor bear the cure that we know is necessary." And so, all of us are haunted throughout all of our lives about everything. The first indications, the first barometers on the edge of man's thinking, awareness of this situation, of this problem, of this development of mystical man, were the Jewish religious seers who experienced this and wrote this down in the Book of Enoch, which is, of course, a literature. It's not just a single book. There are at least five or six different stages to it. It was written over a hundred-year period, roughly, but at the end of this period, the tremendous integrity of the Jewish nature. And you have to understand here that the fineness of the Jewish spirit is its Job-like integrity to survive, even the dissipation and shredding of oneself.
This produced the book that we're going to take a look at, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, about 108 BC. It was the first glimpse of a large structure of redemption, civilization-wide history, long redemption that would apply to individuals. And there was an element in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs that we'll see that it applied to all individuals, it applied to mankind. And so, the twelve patriarchs, who are of the Jewish tradition, were to be transformed and eventually were transformed into the twelve apostles who radiated out from a universal center. And Jesus became the Christ, who was a center of vision that radiated out through the twelve apostles and articulated the world in a new way. This is why it was called a new covenant, a new covenant, not a revision of the old, not even a continuation of the old, but a radical restructuring of reality. This is how it was seen. And the cycle of the twelve apostles, the cycle of the literature, and the ritual and the symbolism became, as it's known in Greek, the Didache - the twelve - became the template for the early Christian church's ritual. It's healing form became the efficacy of emanating this healing form through its practice. And the only reason that the Christian church flourished and survived and displaced all the other religions of the time was that it worked. It worked again and again and again for millions of people. And that's why the church triumphed.
The triumphal success, the worldly success of the church brought in all kinds of unstable elements. Persons who never went through these problems, organizers and the corporate mind took over the church and progressively, through councils, set aside all of the basic data that would be needed to form a unified view. And the books like the Book of Enoch and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, were conveniently lost or set aside or thrown out. Later on, when the councils became more aggressive and more heavily politicized and power plays, they would literally weed out materials. This will go, this will go, this will go. And it was the emasculation of the Christian religion that produced the Dark Ages. It was not the fall of Rome that produced the Dark Ages. It was the emasculation of the New Covenant. And one couldn't go back to an old covenant. One couldn't go back to the classical world because that had been totally dissolved in an ocean of anxiety and terror. The old gods were dead. The ontological basis of credibility, which they had had at one time, was no longer there. There were only phantoms and ghosts. And so, the emasculation of the New Covenant threw people back upon barbarism.
So, we're understanding here something that is large, important, meaningful to us because we live again in one of those times where the old world is going to be totally dissolved. The old orders are no longer operative at all. And it is fool's play and suicide to cling to the old orders because not only are they impaired now and questionable and problematic, but all of their underpinnings are literally vanishing - vanishing from the face of history, vanishing from the geography of the spirit. And we're impelled, as people were at this time, to go forward, to learn to live with the new situation.
So, we come to a description in Josephus of the three different fragments that the Jewish community was put in, and were interested in this, because this was the first prototype of the way in which the classical world was going to Fractionate. It was going to fractionate into polarity with a little thin fragment that wasn't polarized. That was the only living tissue left. Homer has a wonderful image of this in the Odyssey. There is a point in the Odyssey where Odysseus's ship is completely destroyed. It's fractured and fragmented, and all of his men drowned. Everybody dies. Except Odysseus, who is able to cling to two parts of the ship that didn't sink in the wreckage. One of the parts was the keel, and the other part was the main mast. And Odysseus, with his own body, held the keel and the mast together. He was the glue. He had nothing else but himself to hold the two polarized parts of the ship together. And so, this man, with a keel and a main mast drifted day after day, as Homer says, all the way back to the origin of the problem. All the way back to the traumatic separation. Of life and death, Scylla and Charybdis. And just as the keel and the mast were being sucked down to the black sands at the bottom of the ocean, as Homer says, Odysseus had to let go of them, and he jumped into midair and hung onto an olive tree that was hanging over this whirlpool nightmare, this maelstrom of Charybdis, because he knew that eventually, in the cycle of things, it would reverse itself and cough back up the keel and the mast. But what he didn't know, and Homer says that he clung there all day and a long day it was. He said, it was as long a day as if you were watching young barristers at court nitpick. And long after the courts were over, that's how long it took before Charybdis threw up again, vomited up the fragments of life. And Odysseus, exhausted, dropped like a dead bat. Homer says onto the wood and eventually was fished out by Calypso.
This is an archetypal description by a great poet-seer of what one must endure. One is reduced down to the nibs, and then they take the nibs away. And there's nothing you can say or do, as John Wayne would say. There just isn't anything you can say or do. Nothing helps. And it's of no consolation for someone later, in retrospect, to say, well, it's not supposed to have any help. It's supposed to be that way. I described it one time as discovering that your psycho physical body fills up completely one hundred percent. It's like it goes right to the feet, right to the Saurashtra chakra before it stops, because it just can't go any further. The hairs try to convey it up and little electricity, but it just doesn't go any further. And you have to hover above yourself like some metaphysical bird that has no land, no place to be at all. An orphan, as Melville says. Cast up by the ocean of life. And it's a miracle that the waters recede.
Finally, land is found again. But it's a new world. This is what happened. And the fragmentation of the Jewish community in the second century BC is the best prototype in the world that we have. Because these people were honest enough to record in as exacting a language as they could manage what was going on. Now Josephus is writing many years later, he's writing after the fall of Jerusalem after 70 AD, but he tells us here about the three different parties and I think we have to hear it. So, here's three paragraphs from Josephus. He says now for, "The Pharisees, [they] live simply and despise delicacies," in diet, and they follow the conduct of reason and what that prescribes to them as good for them. They do, and "They think they ought earnestly to strive to observe" reason's dictates for practice. They also pay a respect to such as are in years. Nor are they so bold as to contradict them in anything which they have introduced. And when they determine that all things are done by faith, they do not take away the freedom from men of acting as they see fit, since their notion is that it hath pleased God to make a temperament whereby he wills what is to be done, but so that the will of men can act virtuously or viciously.
They also believe that souls have an immortal vigor in them, and that under the earth there will be rewards or punishments according as they have lived. And the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison called Gehenna, but that the former shall have power to revive and live again, on account of which doctrines they are able greatly to persuade the body of the people. And whatsoever they do about divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction, insomuch that the cities have great attestations to them on account of their entire virtuous conduct, both in the actions of their lives and their discourses also.
So, the Pharisees are credible. There's nothing like choosing sides in a polarity. In fact, the trick is to not choose sides in a polarity. The temptation is to think good and bad. One of these are the good guys and one of them are the bad guys. But the clue is that neither are good, neither are bad, that they're part of a structure which, as Jung says, has become hypostatized in a syzygy, that they cannot help in their polarity of being contrary and in conflict. And it's exactly that polarity, it's exactly that conflict, that provides the dynamic. And one has to learn to move with that dynamic in order to spin free.
So, you don't want to get rid of... you don't want to anesthetize one of the polarities or both of the polarities. If you could, you want to keep in contact with them. And this is the hardest thing to do, is to convince yourself to come into contact with that electrocuting otherness and find some way to convince yourself to stay close enough to it, and finally to embrace it. And this is the whole art of living in a transformation because every instinct says, get away from there. This is not what to do. And yet the insight is that this has to be done. And those are the polarities. And that energizes the whole thing. And that's why it takes a spiritual community, usually of people helping each other to touch the fire, to get in contact with that electrocuting otherness and stay there and realize you're not going to die. Joseph Campbell in the first Esalen [Institute] lecture years and years ago [1965], told the story of the young shaman boy who was left out with four days' supply of food and left there for a month. A boy, 12 years old, sick, sick with a spiritual illness. The sickness unto death. He said he died a thousand million times. Until finally, out of despair and nothingness, the gentle voice of Mother Nature came wafting up to him, out of the darkness, out of the incomprehensibility, and said, "Do not be afraid. I am related to you."
And this is the mysterious quality. And it's the source of religious ethics, because it takes all the courage there is to stay there, to build familiarity with it, because the old world, which is no longer there, hangs on in a phantasmal way and tries to dupe us into going back and re-believing in it and trying to make it work again. And nothing happens. It becomes more and more absurd. And the intuition of the absurdity of being driven to the necessary safety of absurdity is what finally produces the neurotic reaction. Because the inside is accurate, you can't go back.
So, the Pharisees and now the Sadducees, which are the polarity. Josephus. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is this, that souls die with the bodies, nor do they regard the observation of anything besides what the Law enjoins them. For they think at an instance of virtue, to dispute with those teachers of philosophy whom they frequent. They're the nitpickers. But this doctrine is received but by a few. Yet those still of the greatest dignity. But they are able to do almost nothing of themselves. For when they become magistrates, as they are unwillingly and by force, sometimes obliged to be, they addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise hear them. There's a little bit of hypercriticalness. The doctrine of the essence is this that all things are best ascribed to God. They teach the immortality of souls and esteem, that the rewards of righteousness are to be earned and earnestly striven for. And when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not offer sacrifices, because they have more pure illustrations of their own. Now the ancient sacrifice, of course, was the offering up of an animal generally. The front parts were offered first in a sequence going up the front to the head and then the body and then the rear. And at each point, this heaping up of the dismembered body of the sacrificial victim and anointing with fat and blood. The layering of this was a primitive expression of what happens to a person, as we would say today, psychologically, that one becomes dismembered, disjointed, and that all of that has to be brought together on the altar of transformation, making sacred sacrifice.
So, it wasn't a stupid, primitive thing killing an animal and cutting it up, butchering it and putting it on the altar, having blood on the altar. It wasn't stupid. It was the only way that could be done, given a limited consciousness horizon, and it was efficacious. One understood that this somehow was right. This must be what God wants because it cures, it absolves. Now for the Jewish tradition, the first person in this whole tradition to become self-conscious about the arrangement of the sacrifice was Abraham. And that's why Abraham is the root of the Jewish tradition - because he has the insight that he must sacrifice his son. He jumped up in consciousness.
An animal is not going to do is going to have to take his first-born son. My God, my God. But Yahweh is exacting. If this is what is required, will you do it? And Abraham, paying the price of his increased consciousness, prepares to offer his son, and then is told, one need not offer the son. You were ready to do it, and that is all that is necessary. The openness and the commitment that one would go this far. Knowing that you would rather sacrifice yourself than your son. So, this goes even a step beyond self-sacrifice. Therefore, this is the tradition that one must hand down father to son. This is the bloodless covenant of spirit with God the Father, and that this bloodless covenant is the continuity from now on of your people. But it must be protected. Like a castle is protected by a moat. It must be protected by a surrogate blood covenant that is no longer at the altar but is protecting it on the outside. And the surrogate blood covenant is circumcision. The cutting of the foreskin. The willingness to sacrifice that so that the altar may now be bloodless. Usually in spiritual matters there is a jump over a generation. Usually, it's an arc so that the grandparent generation, or the grandson or granddaughter generation, are the really meaningful elements. Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, and he is the father of the twelve patriarchs. And his father was Isaac, the son who would have been sacrificed.
Abraham, who lived about 1900 BC, ran caravans. He in fact ran caravans all the way to India. He ran caravans from India through Afghanistan and Persia and Arabia into Egypt, and it made him very wealthy, because usually that route was a shipping route, and ships in those days could only hug the coast. And the shipping route ran from the island of Bahrain, which in ancient times was called Dilmun and Bahrain is right off the coast where Kuwait, Qatar and the ships would go along the Persian Gulf and go down through the Strait of Hormuz and hug the shore and go all the way over to the Indus River. And then traffic would go from the Harappan civilizations Mohenjo-Daro and so forth, all the way around and into the Fertile Crescent and then touching Egypt.
It was a very international cosmopolitan age, which was closing. It was closing. It was beginning to become very difficult to travel. That happens occasionally. We're entering a period like that now. It won't manifest for a while, but it'll be very difficult to travel after a while. It won't be much traveling ironically in the 21st century. But Abraham's great experience in the world made him aware of strategic places, strategic centers, and his strategic place in what was to become Israel and what was to become the Holy Land was not in Jerusalem. There was no Jerusalem. There was nothing around. There were settlements, Canaanite settlements. But his strategic place was a pass in the mountains. One of the major tributaries of the Jordan River angles up into the mountains.
Jerusalem would be down here and up in some, what became Samaria, not in Judea, but up in Samaria. At the top of this pass, about 3000 feet above sea level, there was a fresh water well. It's known now as Jacob's Well. And this was the place that Abraham had a vision of the fruitfulness of his line of the Jewish people. What became the Jewish people, the line of Abraham, which also incidentally includes the Muslim people and by transformation includes the Christians. But it wasn't until his grandson Jacob that the land was actually bought. Actually, deeded to him. This area was known in times after that as Shechem - Shechem. It's near the modern Israeli city now of Nablus. If one envisions an equilateral triangle, Jerusalem is at one vortex, Tel Aviv at another, and Nablus at the third. It's like that. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Amman make a big isosceles triangle, which, if you vector a little off center to the left, will take you through Nablus, or anciently Shechem.
Now, sometime in the past there was a fresh water well, having access down one way to the Jordan Valley, and beyond, having access on the other side of the slopes, all the way down to the coast there became one of those centers, one of those spiritual centers where the Jewish people came together, where the self-consciousness of themselves as a historical line of spiritual direction began unfolding. And this was never lost. So that when later, hundreds of years later, five hundred years later, when Moses brought the people not out of Egypt, but out of Sinai, out of forty years of wandering out of Sinai, back to the Promised Land, the Promised Lands, only center of recognition was Shechem, Jacob's Well.
We're going to come back to the route of the twelve tribes. The patriarch who first articulated, not fragmented, but articulated the twelve tribes and the twelve tribes become an articulation of reality, and Shechem becomes a holy place. And the first Israeli Jew to go back and occupy Shechem was Joshua. Moses could not enter the Promised Land. That's an old story, and we don't need to tell that now. But Joshua took over. Joshua, who had spent 40 years learning from Moses how to take care of a people, how to take care of a people by founding it on spiritual vision, how to transfer that spiritual vision back out to the lives of the people so that they can live as human beings. They can live well enough as human beings that they can teach their children how to live as human beings. And thus, life has a continuity. And the place that Joshua chose for himself, for his citadel was Shechem, Jacob's Well.
Shechem would be the first place to be totally destroyed and effaced from the earth by the Jews of the Second Temple period in their great prideful ignorance, and they would do what the Romans did to Carthage. They would crowbar every stone and poison the water, and completely destroy it, so that it would never be recognizable again. And the man, the Jewish king, the Jewish priest, the Jewish prophet who did this, thought that he was the Messiah, and his name was John Hyrcanus. And he was born about 175 BC, and he died about 104 BC. And it's during his lifetime. But this spiritual lightning hit and began penetrating increasingly the Jewish religious mind, producing the Enochian literature, and culminating in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Because the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are all the children, the articulation of reality of Jacob, who was founded and rooted at Shechem.
And it was the souring, the bitter, tragical discovery that Hyrcanus was not the Messiah that produced the ironical, dynamical tone that was necessary for the Athenians to penetrate through to a vision of the real Messiah. It was a necessary tragedy on a colossal scale, because the Jewish people had to learn that material power is not the answer, that kingdoms of this world are not the answer in this move.
John Hyrcanus had been brought up with the Maccabees. He was a son of Simon Maccabee. He fought with Judas Maccabee, fought with Jonathan, fought with Simon, and around 137 BC he became the king, the king of the Jews. But he also became the first king who was at the same time the head priest. So, he was the secular power and the religious power, but at the same time he was the chief prophet, so he held all three offices in one person. He's the only Jew to ever hold that. And Hyrcanus was extremely successful in playing one Hellenistic kingdom off against another. And the key to this was that he opened up ties to Rome, that there was always in the background, at least in his mind, the confidence that if things go too far wrong, the Romans will come in and save me and this tremendous community drive that the Roman mind had perfected by this time.
Remember all that time that we spent going through the development of the Roman mind, how it was not individual, but was communal, and how military formations and engineering constructions and political formulations are all very natural to the Roman mind. The Roman mind had a very difficult time in thinking in individual terms. They thought in terms of we, that if you affront me, you have affronted the Roman people. The motto was the Senate and the Roman People - SPQR - Senatus Populusque Romanus. That was the code, the key of the Roman mind.
John Hyrcanus began inculcating the Roman mind, the tendencies to Roman military genius and Roman political structure into the Jewish community. Just like a century before, the Jews had tended to become Hellenized and become Greek-minded. So, in the time of the 200 BC century, the Jews tended to become Hellenized, and in the 100 BCE they tended to become Romanized. So that the response finally became that we have to become Judaized again. We have to find our own tradition, we have to find out who we are, and we must be that. And that's the tremendous shrinking that produces this white-hot center of transformation that comes into play about 30 BC, almost like a clock on the wall.
Remember we talked about that a couple of months ago where the Essene communities had become very good at cycles of manifestation and history, the way in which the spirit has its pattern and one can identify, one can compute mystically, when it's going to happen, and you can move by sevens or by tens, and you can get a coordination. And when they found that nothing was happening around 50 BC, they knew then that it was going to be another 50 years down the line, that this would be the time. And it was refined enough so that they could tell this will be the place, this will be the event, so that the coming of the Messiah was a foreseen specific event. Everything was specified because man had put his painstaking petition of his existential travail on the altar of reality, because he knew that if he called in this way at this comprehensive gut-level long enough, that God would hear him and respond, that he never had not responded, that if man calls out in an informed, committed, total way to his God, there is a response.
Hyrcanus, John Hyrcanus, tried to make a Roman, a little Rome out of the Jewish state. But he did not fulfill the basic messianic pattern. He was a Levite, and the Messiah was to be from the tribe of Judah. He tried to overlook this, to say, well, some of the prophecies were wrong. They just, they weren't as good as we are. We've got a better show. And look what we're doing. Our armies are successful.
John Hyrcanus, in order to buy the kind of armaments that he wanted, went into David's tomb, brought out three thousand [talents?] of gold from the tomb, and bought all kinds of armament and all kinds of protection, paid off one of the Hellenistic kings and said, why don't, why don't you do some of the fighting with us and we'll supply you with men and money and instead of us fighting among ourselves. So, while he lived, he made it work on the surface and when he was dying, because he was a prophet, he saw that he was leaving a tangled skein, a complete mess. He has two older sons who cared for each other, who loved each other. Got completely mixed up in a prideful situation. Aristobulus was sick and dying, and the people close to him whispered, your brother is going to try to take over the throne. He's going to, he's going to come fully armed to finish you off. Let us kill him for you. And Aristobulus said, well, send for him. If he comes armed, then we'll know if he comes unarmed, which I think he will. He's just my brother.
So, the messengers went and said, your brother wants to see your new armor. He just decked himself out with gold breastplates, and he wanted to show his brother. And on the way there, he was murdered in a dark corridor. And the news of it shocked the brothers so much that he died. Expired all within one year of the death of John Hyrcanus. So, the whole thing began immediately to be a part of intrigue. And that was just the beginning of it. Everything started to go wrong. This is when the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs came out, right at this time, right at this moment. And it was a restatement in the largest, most comprehensive terms. This is our history. This is what we were articulated as originally in the original vision. And whatever comes out now, whatever the denouement of this time is for us, it must be in terms of this vision. So, let's hear it again. Let's hear the whole thing complete in all of its integrity. Let's live it fully.
And out of that fulsomeness will come a wholesome response. That was the intent for it. Now we need a little emendation here to calm things down for a minute. When the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was exed out of the church, of course it was thrown out by the rabbinical councils as well as by the Christian councils, nobody wanted to remember that we had got here in an intelligible way. The first person to recognize in the West what this was all about was in the thirteenth century: the great English Bishop, Robert Grosseteste, the tutor of Roger Bacon. And Grosseteste believed that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was legitimate. And in fact, Grosseteste at this time was attempting to make a differentiation which had not been realized by the Western mind for almost a thousand years at his time, that one could investigate nature. And it had an order which was based on science, on scientia, and that the order was guaranteed by another order of reality called sapientia, wisdom, and that they were distinct. They were different, but they were interrelated so that one could investigate the natural world in terms of science, and not at all impair the spiritual world whose current was wisdom. And Grosseteste was attempting to do this, and a lot of his vision of man's place in the cosmos comes from having had the renewed contact with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
There is a centralization of power in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Remember, it's a gathering of all twelve together. But the centralization of power is done in an articulate way, because the twelve remain twelve, and yet they are united because of their father. But what unites them is not particularly so much Jacob, although in a scientia vision it is Jacob, but in a sapientia way it's the legacy of Jacob, the covenant, which he was able to give to them, to pass on to them. It is this flow of the integrity of Jacob that unites the twelve patriarchs together. And it was that insight that was to be the important transformation for Christ, that the centralization didn't mean that all power comes to that one, but that the flow of the integrity of the one guarantees that there will be a unity, even though the power is articulated into movable mobility in terms of the world. This was the insight. It sounds esoteric to us. It was just the best cutting edge of consciousness in the universe at that time. It was the very finest presentation that could be done.
So, this became very important in the revival of the other Renaissance, the early Renaissance in the thirteenth century. Then other people came along and said, no, this has been thrown out before by the church, and it can't possibly be so. And all of this is a forgery. And so, for another four or five hundred years, the thing was put back on the burner and no one believed in it. And it wasn't until 1908 that the great English master, R. H. Charles, patiently collated over about twenty years all the different versions, the Greek versions, the Armenian versions, Hebrew fragments, and put them all together. And through his great insight was able to understand that it was legitimate, that it didn't go back to Jacob's time, but it went to a more poignant time and went to the time of John Hyrcanus, and that a lot of the emendations that had become almost integral into the text so that it could almost not be seen as emendations were Christian, because this was the most fruitful core of the transformation of that new vision of how to centralize without smearing, how to unite without blurring, how to keep the articulation of the world intact with a unity. And the cycle of the Testaments was the important mandala. The matrix out of which that integrity could be understood, could be experienced, could be believed in, could be taught, and a whole new society, a whole new way of life, a whole new personality could be differentiated upon this basis with great confidence. But the peculiarity in the transformation was that while the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was definitely a Jewish tradition, the Didache would become a universal tradition. It was good for all men, no matter what their background was. They didn't have to be Jewish at all.
Now, in John Hyrcanus' time, for the first time in Jewish history, another territory was conquered. And the people, the men of that territory, it was called Edom in the Old Testament. But the Greek term for it was Idumea, Edom, Idumea. And they, the Jewish armies of John Hyrcanus, conquered Idumea, and they forced the men to accept death or circumcision. So, the dominions became the first false Jews, the first who were circumcised and obeyed the traditions, but who did not have the lineage intact. But they were Jews, they were circumcised, they were obeying the letter of the Law from a force of arms, from a conquered origin, rather than from a visionary origin. And eventually, in the great ironies of an enantiodromia where everything completely changes around any dominion Jew would become king, and his name was Herod, and he would secretly hate the tradition that he wasn't a real Jew, that there was some spiritual visionary essence that was going to manifest in some king that was going to displace him. Well, they will all die before that happened, said Herod.
Remember that Herod is appointed by Mark Antony. All the great ironies of history come together at this time. It's what Teilhard de Chardin calls a "point of convergence." All of it. Every single tradition comes together in one point, in one place, in one man. And this is what is so incredible about it, and difficult for us to see or believe in, because we live in a dissolving time where this is hardly credible. It can't possibly be. That's the least likely story, is that that might be true. But how did this happen? How did the triple king priest Prophet John Hyrcanus bequest this kingdom to two sons who were polarized and when they killed each other off? There was another son that came up because of his mother. And this son would try to hold things together and his name would be Alexander. And finally, when he was to die, a woman named Alexandria would become the real power behind the Jewish throne, unacknowledged because there was a young son too young, but there would be an Alexandria, and she would be in power until about 67 BC, when she would die, and when she died, almost as if on cue, Pompey moved into the Jewish realm, angling to fight Crassus and Julius Caesar with the First Triumvirate.
Three again. Because you see, these universal fractionating patterns just replicate themselves, almost like a crystal structure. Once you learn to read it, there it is. The whole drama is intelligible. And Pompey, would realize that there was John Hyrcanus, the second, a young, wimpy, foppish sort of a boy, and Pompey would preen him. You know, give him girls and money and wine and position and fame and statues so that Pompey could control the whole region through John Hyrcanus the second. And then when Pompey was beaten by Julius Caesar, he just moved in and took over John Hyrcanus the second and John Hyrcanus the second would last until Mark Antony came in and appointed Herod, so that the integrity of the Jewish kingship was - called in Jewish history the Hasmonean line - completely unraveled, completely became a cesspool of intrigue and dishonesty. Everything exactly what a kingship should not be, what a priesthood should not be.
And so, this tremendous polarization between the Sadducees and the Pharisees was frozen and locked in this completely destructive well, I would almost say evil social system. And the only fluid thread of continuity and meaningfulness was held by the Essenes. And it was this thread that eventually would work its way. But until the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs can be seen, because the Essene integrity comes from this book, and this book gains a lot of its permeation to visionary matters, because the Enochian literature is all resonant in here, but brought together like a shimmering mandala of vision. It's like a sketch of what could be the possible threshold of the new world. It's right there, and there is an outrigger to this canoe.
There's a book called The Book of Jubilees, which we'll go into in about three weeks. And The Book of Jubilees, a jubilee in Jewish history, is every 49 years, seven times seven. You know, the cycle of seven was a sacred cycle because the seventh part is always left open. It's an articulation of time and event. The seventh day is left open. The seventh-year Jewish army should not fight. Every seventh, seventh year is a jubilee is a special time. And at the end of the 49th year is the commemorative beginning a 50th. And this whole cycle of sevens and forty nines and a fifty gives a very strong spiritual structure. That is to say, there's a structure. It's just like a steel structure, only instead of being made out of steel, it's made out of vision that underlies the visionary unity of the new world, because the new world was not physical at all. It's what we would call metaphysical. It was a transcendental realm that was there, but you couldn't see it if you looked within material by it. And in fact, that jubilee structure is the underlying structure of the Gospel of John, Saint John. You can have any amount of exegesis on the Gospel of Saint John, and you can have any amount of speculation and come up with beautiful trillions of pages of meaning. But the operative spiritual function of it was to present the spiritual structure so that one could learn to envision and see this world, this new world, the Kingdom of heaven. It wasn't only a reform inside of a person, it was a whole new structure of reality that obtained, and it was there to be experienced, to be seen, to be lived in. If one could structure one's consciousness, to see it, to appreciate it, to understand it, to believe in it, and unless one could do that, one was not of the spirit. One was still profane. They showed the coins, he said, whose face is on the coin. If you see Caesar's face on the coin, then you're in that world. There's nothing you can do about it. But to work, to transform when you cannot see this as value anymore. This as a symbol of power. When it no longer is meaningful, then you're ready for a new vision of value. Then you're ready to see a new structure, something else.
Well, we'll see next week because we'll go right to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, what a tremendous accomplishment this was. What a gift to humanity, the great Jewish integrity of 108 BC to be able to finally express, and largely at some unknown person, emended and changed around by various people throughout the ages. But essentially the core of it is some anonymous one person who had the tremendous capacity to tell the story in a new way so that it would hold together in the material that he used, was what if we gather all the patriarchs together? What would they tell us now, each in their own way? And if we listen to them all together as a unity, what would that message be? And that's what this book was.
Well, I think we better tail off there, and we'll just come to it next week and have this document because it's one of the most important that we have.
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