Essenes (Part 2)
Presented on: Tuesday, May 14, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 22 of 54
Essenes (Part 2)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, May 14, 1985
Transcript:
The date is May 14th, 1985. This is the second lecture on the Essenes in the Tuesday night series by Roger Weir.
This material is very difficult precisely because it has a meaning that is obscured on all sides by tradition. Not just one tradition. There are at least four or five major traditions that have falsified the situation. And so, it's difficult to appreciate the quality of reality, of the time, and of the events we have chosen to look at this most crucial time of human history because it relates to our own time. From the standpoint of its integration in Alexandria, and we have for the longest time now stayed clear of Alexandria. We've spent five or six weeks looking at the Roman tradition; we've spent several months looking at the Jewish tradition; we have spent uncountable evenings on seeming tangents. All this for strategic reasons. Our emphasis constantly on tangents is going to pay off tonight.
We grow up in an age which is largely empirical which has as one of its working procedures the verification of what we believe, of what we say. One of the empirical discoveries from archaeology which slaps us in the face, comes from volume 13, Erwin Goodenough's great series Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman World, published in the Bollingen Series, published by Princeton University Press. The first twelve volumes were all the full array of Jewish symbols in the Greco-Roman world, and a great deal has been discovered in our time since we've been alive. The recovery, for instance, by Yale University archaeologists of an intact Hellenistic Jewish synagogue at Dura Europos, for instance, has given us a clear idea of an actual major working synagogue of Hellenistic times.
In volume 13, which is summary and conclusions by Goodenough - volume 12 it is rather - chapter 8 begins with a startling sentence. The headline is "Jewish Use of Wine Symbols," and Goodenough writes, "The earliest wine symbols among Jews which we can date are the grapes on the coins of Herod Archelaus (4 BC to 6 AD)."
There is no wine symbolism in Judaism. Nowhere. It's not used symbolically. When Jesus uses wine symbolically, he is outside the tradition totally. It's a complete revolution. It's indicative of a revolution in consciousness. It's not in the Jewish tradition. And one of the appreciative modes which we will have to acclimate ourselves to is that perhaps the events of the turn of the millennium, 2000 years ago, were not at all what we have believed them to be. And most startling of all, which I think we will see tonight, is that Christianity is not a product of Judaism, that its whole nascent development precluded any kind of revolutionary event that in fact, the Essenes, as we started to see last week and as we will see this week, were an ultra-conservative, rigid Jewish sect, which was instituted consciously and kept alive for generations with the specific task of returning Judaism back to its original purity, and that against their will - against their designs, against their specifically planned developments - events skewed away radically and produce the Christian revolution anyway in the teeth of the Essene strict, rigid rules of going back to the original pure Orthodox Judaism.
And the reason that Christianity occurred at all was that as every attempt was made to purify and return to the original Judaism they got further and further away from Judaism. They couldn't help themselves. Some other power of cognition and recognition, blowing like a constant wind, pushed them off course, and they tried everything they could to, not only to stay on course, but to make the course as exacting as possible. And the more exacting they got, the more tangentially they went to the main tradition until finally with Jesus.
We'll see in a couple of weeks that it was a total revolution - revolution. There can be no more revolutionary statement than the phrase that appears in Mark, that man was not made for the Sabbath, that the Sabbath was made for man. It's a complete, utter rejection of the core of Jewish understanding, of the religious nature of man, is a complete rejection of that. All of this would be unknowable, unthinkable, invisible, were it not for the fact that we now have an incredible array of data, of information, of attempts to put together some basic understanding, piece by piece, sherd by sherd, letter by letter, and over the last forty years, bubbling up to the surface again and again, not quite ever enunciated by anyone, is this realization that Christianity occurred in a very mysterious way, against the better judgment of all of the principal players in its preparation. That it was indeed a surprise, a complete and utter surprise.
In the Dead Sea Scrolls, which of course surfaced as early as 1947. Not all of them - a few were dug up by the Bedouins in what turned out to be just one of many caves. There are now eleven caves known, and we have ten complete Dead Sea Scrolls, and we have fragments of 600 others so that we have a huge library available to us. And what comes out surprisingly is that the translation of the Bible into Greek, the Septuagint, made in Alexandria - made as close as we can guess now in 290 BC - is the most accurate text that we have. It is, in fact not speculative in the least, but indicative of solid conservative Jewish scholarship of the time, and that the Greek used has no fancy play in it whatsoever. It was translators Greek, trying to render as close as could be, the Hebrew syntax, the Hebrew understanding, where there were transformations of meaning.
And those of you who are coming on Saturdays are familiar now with transformational grammars and their pivotal position in consciousness of articulation. Greek proved to be a transformational grammar that took the Hebrew language word for word out of its mold and threw it into a philosophic syntax where the text read infinite meanings between the lines. That is to say, in the Hebrew it was exact. One could, in fact - as the later Rabbinic Jews did - reject all of the emendations, all of the speculations, and go back to the original text, which has not changed incidentally since that day. The last great attempt editorially to put the Jewish Bible, the Jewish testament in Hebrew, into a final order, was editorially made in the eighth century AD, the so-called Masoretic Text. But that was only a light cleanup job of.
The text, which had been made as early as the third century, and that text was based on Hebrew originals that went back, predating the translation of the Septuagint. In the Septuagint, in the Greek language, however, the Old Testament became scintillating, it became opalescent, it admitted incredible innuendos, so that intelligence had free play to try to understand meaning in new combinations in ways that would never have occurred in the Hebrew language. The Greek language made all of this possible. In fact, we will discover next week that it was against the Jewish will, and it was against the Roman will for there to be any kind of a social revolution on this scale. It was purely the force of spiritual intelligence from Alexandria that produced this revolution, because we will see next week when we look at Julius Caesar and Pompey, that the Romans, at the same time as the Jews, tried everything they could to return back to the purity of the original Roman state, that, in fact, the dictatorship of Julius Caesar was not a revolution at all, but was the attempt of one great man to force the state back to its original purity. And of course, we will see that as the First Triumvirate fell apart, the Second Triumvirate came up with the same object in mind - to return the Roman state back to its purity. And that one of the members of the Second Triumvirate, Mark Antony, is the one who will appoint Herod king over the Jewish state. And it is Mark Antony who will, in two weeks, figure very prominently for us as a tragic figure.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, tonight, hold for us in two of their documents important insights. The two scrolls that are most important for us. The first one is called the Damascus Rule, and the second one is called the Community Rule. They have had various titles throughout the career of them archaeologically and scholarly. Sometimes the Community Rule is known as the Manual of Discipline, but it's now known technically as the Community Rule. Both scrolls contain the word rule', and this indicates to us immediately the nature of the Essene communities. They were run by specific rules and regulations. In fact, the rigidity, and the strictness of the Essene communities is what was most forbidding of these communities to other people.
The emphasis on rule, as we hinted last week, comes from a determination on the part of the Essenes to escape from the polarity of the religious parties that had developed in the period, as the Jewish tradition styles it in the period of the Second Temple, the Maccabean period, about 160 to 130 BC. And during this period of independent Jewish kings, the Maccabeans, two great party factions arose, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and out of this polarity, the Jewish community was torn apart, and the Essenes are a third community, made not so much to reconcile the polarities together, but to return back to the purity of the origin so that the origin could reabsorb the polarities. Because the Essenes saw that the origin was not the human community, it was not the human history, but it was the will of the divine that it was God and not human. And so, the Essene attempt was to return back to the purity of the divine, rather than to an original human formulation. Whereas the Sadducees and the Pharisees argued over the interpretation of the law: the Sadducees went for the written Law; the Pharisees for the oral Law. This is somewhat simplistic, but it allows us, in the time that we have to at least get an image. The Essenes rejected both the written Law and the oral Law, but rejected them in a comprehensive way, not by saying they don't apply, but by saying they apply, but you have misunderstood the way in which they are given.
And so, the core of the Essene radical interpretation of what it meant to be of the Jewish faith meant going back and showing that the written texts and the oral Law both have been totally misunderstood because their structure has not been appreciated. That the arguments have been in terms of content, and that it is the structure that is meaningful. Now, pursuant to this, the Essenes then based themselves largely in their ceremonial year on a different calendar from the rest of the Jewish community. Both the Sadducees and the Pharisees held the festival year according to traditional dates. The Essenes had a different calendar year. For them, the Day of Atonement [Yom Kippur] fell not on the traditional day, but on the computed day. For them, the Feast of the Tabernacles [Sukkot] fell on a computed day. It was not in terms of an agricultural cycle, not in terms of a social cycle, but in terms of an intelligible order that could be understood by man's mind, and that the mind, in order for its understanding to function, had to be filled with a vision which could only be given by the divine. The document that restructures time according to this visionary structure for the Essenes was the Book of Jubilees, and the Book of Jubilees is one of the major documents of Hellenistic Judaism.
In fact, we read last week from R. H. Charles' great collection made and published by Oxford University Press: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. He says, he writes, "The Book of Jubilees is in certain limited aspects the most important book in this volume for the students of religion." And then he goes on to explain, and in part of his explanation, he comes to the point of saying that the Book of Jubilees is in fact, in Jewish terms, the first midrashic text, now in midrash, is a commentary upon the sacred scriptures. That's what a midrash is. The Book of Jubilees is the first midrash, but unlike rabbinic midrash, which are glosses on the text, the Book of Jubilees is like the work of a diamond cutter who recuts the jewel so that you couldn't recognize it any longer. And the Book of Jubilees takes Genesis and the first part of Exodus and restructures the whole sequence of events. It leaves certain things out. It adds from oral tradition and other written traditions, certain elements that were not there. But its major recasting is to show that Genesis proceeds according to an intelligible structure of seven cycles, and that within each of these seven cycles there is in every cycle seven. So, the Book of Jubilees talks about the movement of history, the movement of the mystery of the divine in time by what they call sacred weeks.
And of course, right away it comes to our mind because we're schooled, our consciousness is schooled in the Alexandrian, Hellenistic Judaism that finally won the day. Won the day in terms of sheer numbers and overwhelming influence on history. Our consciousness is a product of this revolution - every one of us. We, in fact, have to think ourselves out of the total impasse that the twentieth century has come to with this mind. And that's why this information is so imperative for us, because until we realize that we have certain limitations to our mental outlook, we don't realize that we are speculating. We don't realize that we're spinning our wheels. It's only when we consciously understand how this came to be that we will reflect in our personal experience and our collective wisdom, the understanding that we have been formulating the problems in our time in a way that would never produce an answer, but only encourage conundrums.
It is no accident that the sum total of human wisdom in the twentieth century is to produce a Cold War stalemate, threatening ultimate death for everyone. It is a product of a deluded mentality, but a deluded mentality not intended by anyone, but produced by the ignorance of limited consciousness available to us in our reflected capacity. So, this is extremely important.
The first week, of course, is the six days of creation, plus the seventh day where God rests. This is the first week. This is the pattern. This is the archetypal pattern. And the Book of Jubilees cuts up all of the time sequence into weeks. And in fact, when we turn to the Book of Jubilees right away, we are given this in translation into English. This is the history of the division of the days of the law and of the testimony of the events, of the years and of their year weeks, and of their jubilees throughout the years of the world.
"As the Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, when he went up to receive the tables of the law, and of the commandment according to the voice of God, as he said unto him, go up to the top of the mount." And then it begins: "And it came to pass in the first year of the exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, in the third month and the sixteenth day of the month - and in this fashion."
But as one goes through the Book of Jubilees, we realize that we are not having the narrative that was given to us in Genesis and Exodus at all. It's surreal because some of the events are there and recognizable, but they're reshaped. The juxtapositions are all different. We are being schooled to see time and events in a radically different way, and as we go through, we realize that the dating in here is extremely accurate.
"And on the new moon of the third month, he went forth from the ark and built an altar on that mountain, and he made atonement for the earth, and took a kid and made atonement by its blood for all the guilt of the earth, for everything that had been on it had been destroyed, save those that were in the ark with Noah."
All of this was pregnant with meaning, but meaning in a new shape, a new shape. And this is a lesson for us in order to understand the significance of an element as large as world history. We have to step outside of the shape of meaning, which we have been handed by tradition, that there is no way to understand a shape as large as world class meaning in terms of unity and whole, without stepping outside the tradition. In fact, this will prove an insight to us when in three weeks we come to try to understand the phenomenon of Jesus, that you have to step outside the tradition totally in order to understand it. That as long as you remain even an iota within the tradition, you are dealing with the process of the unity of the universe as an unconscious element and you will never know.
The Book of Jubilees, then, is schooling its readers, and it was written between 150 BC and about 105 BC. It was written and rehashed and redone so that at 105 BC the Book of Jubilees was complete, as we have it now. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which we went through, was completed the same year, and brought all of the traditions of the twelve tribes together. And we saw how that tradition of the 12 tribes, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, would be the shape, the mandala, as it were, the ceremonial mandala upon which the early Christian church mass would be founded, and that the Didache, or the Teachings of the Twelve Apostles, are a reflection and a revolutionary conscious mode, carrying on the tradition of the twelve patriarchs, but in a totally different lineage. New wine, new bottles; wine, not blood. The Old Testament's covenant sacramental liquid was blood; the New Testament's sacramental liquid is wine. The blood is of the animal; the wine is of the plant. The blood carries life, but the wine carries spirit. It's totally different. It yields a different world. It yields a different person.
The Book of Jubilees, recutting Genesis, and Exodus in one fell swoop rearranged the whole understanding of what the Jewish tradition was passing on as a lineage. And in the Book of Jubilees, the figure who looms more and more important is Joseph. And not only Joseph, but Joseph is prefigured and styled by Isaac. Now in Genesis we hear a lot comparatively of Abraham and even more of Jacob, but we hear almost nothing of Isaac, and yet Isaac is the link between Abraham and Jacob. And in fact, Isaac's real name was Israel, and the whole name of the community in its largest sense, Israel is based upon that man, and not upon Abraham and not upon Jacob. And in fact, in the Book of Jubilees, we see where it is Isaac who actually receives the covenant from God to have the land which we know today as Israel, or which became Palestine, and then became Israel.
The only land that Abraham had was a burial plot, which he bought. What did he pay for that burial plot? Thirty pieces of silver. He bought a crypt, a plot of land at the site of a well, and the site was Shechem. And if you recall our geography, our geography last week, Shechem is at the top of a mesa-like structure, and there's a rivulet that comes down from Shechem from that well and flows into the Jordan River. And the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea so that Shechem is strategically located. It is in fact serviceable. Well, that is the first great watering oasis that one would come to if one were bringing caravans out of the Fertile Crescent and crossing over the Jordan River and going up into the highlands. Shechem is a strategic place. It's very near to Jericho, and Jericho is only eight miles from the Qumran community. So, all of this is within walkable distance and, in fact, visible distance. You can look up and see these areas.
Note the Essenes, the old Jewish tradition, all of it is located around Jerusalem and Jericho and Qumran and the Dead Sea area, and the Jordan River and Shechem. And Jesus is from the far northeast, from Galilee. He's not from that area at all. In fact, Christians for the first several centuries, three or four centuries, were not called Christians, but were called Galileans. If you read the Emperor Julian, the last Roman emperor, who was a "pagan," who, writing in about 360 AD, he never refers to them as Christians, but habitually calls them Galileans, and remarks how our lands are very, very bad Jews who have given up their own laws and their own traditions and should be persecuted on that basis, not because they were Christians, not even because they were Galileans, but because they were very bad Jews. And that all peoples should return back to the original religions of their forefathers. And of course, Julian was killed and deposed as a young man. And the next Roman emperor, the infamous Theodosius, is the one who ransacked the temple of Serapis - Serapis - in Alexandria and destroyed most of the library then remaining and forced the Alexandrian esoteric groups out into the desert where they collected at the end of the secret caravan routes through the Nubian desert on the banks of the Nile, across from the Faiyum.
And that that was the beginning of monastic Christianity, and that they were not originally limited to Christians, but were all of the radical esoteric groups living together in harmony. And one of the surviving books that we have from that time period is not written in words, but written in pictures, and is the prototype of the tarot deck. And it is the book which was published in the Bollingen Series. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, or Apollos and the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo is one of the last integrated remnants of Alexandrian wisdom from the fourth century AD. We'll see all that. It'll take us several months to get to that stage, but we'll see it. And then we'll see slides, and we'll see just how all of these came to be. It'll be interesting for you to see that so many writers on these things are just uneducated. They just simply don't know. And their speculations are ingenious, but they don't do you much good. It's better to have some idea of actually what happened and how it came to be, then the real mysteries loom significant.
So, the Book of Jubilees... and I had outlined for you several passages which for time I'm going to have to skip now. The Book of Jubilees recut the epic of Genesis, if you recall, or perhaps you didn't know in Genesis the movement of God in time. The Lord of history is by stages of the covenants which man is capable of keeping. Man is capable of keeping a covenant of a certain kind. And then later on, when he grows in capacity, he's able to keep a more difficult covenant, and then later on, a more difficult covenant. The covenants are broken not by man's evil so much, but by the fact that man has grown in capacity and has overshadowed and outgrown the limiting structures of the last covenant. And so, he has to be given a new one. And Genesis moves like a great golden chain, each link being a covenant sequence, the story of how this particular covenant came to be. For instance, the covenant with the sequence that Noah is the covenant of the rainbow in the sky: "I set my bow in the clouds as an agreement between thee and me, that the world will never again be destroyed by water."
So, Genesis moved by covenants. The Book of Jubilees, and the Assyrians moved instead by intellectual structures, mathematical models that ran in cycles of seven, and there were six working parts - the six days of a week - and the seventh part was a non-working part. It was a mysterious opening, so that the completed form or the completed cycle had six moving parts and one mysterious part that did not move - and that was the Sabbath. And keeping the Sabbath was doing nothing on that day. That was the keeping of it the other six days. One must do something. One must work hard, keep the integrity, keep the flocks going. But on the seventh day one must not do this. This was the law in the Book of Jubilees, says that this is the law, and it says here, this is at the end of the Book of Jubilees, the fiftieth chapter. "After this law I made known to thee the days of the Sabbath in the desert of Sinai, which is between Elim and Sinai. And I told thee of the sabbaths of the land on Mount Sinai. And I told thee of the jubilee years and the Sabbaths of years. But the year thereof I have not told thee till ye enter the land which ye are to possess. And the land also shall keep its sabbaths while they dwell upon it, and they shall know the jubilee year. Wherefore I have ordained for thee the year, weeks, and the years, and the jubilees."
There are forty-nine jubilees from the days of Adam until this day, and so the Book of Jubilees is extremely important for us to understand. And when we come to the Essenes, we'll see that they school their inner-time sense by the Book of Jubilees. The Sadducees and the Pharisees are arguing over Genesis, and the Essenes completely run and run around that polarity and that argument by saying it's a meaningless argument because you don't have the information right in the first place, that this is the real esoteric structure. And in order to live according to that structure, we have to organize and regulate everyday life meticulously. Hence the two major scrolls, the Community Rule, and the Damascus Rule. And in fact, in the Damascus Rule, we find near about two thirds of the way through concerning the Sabbath to observe it according to its law, according to its law. It's like a mathematical law: it's intelligible; it can be understood exactly and specifically. There's no need to argue about it. There's only a need to understand and to live in purity of it.
So, you can see the Essenes are totally different from the rest of the Jews of the time. Totally different. Let me give you a poetic image here. The Essenes become like a pure white sail only they don't realize that they're picking up the wind from Alexandria, because Alexandria is the masterful integration of the intelligible mysteries of the world order. And the Essenes trying to purify themselves according to Jewish law pick up the Alexandria wind, unknown to them completely. And when Jesus comes, he comes as an Alexandrian sage to say, you're right, here we are. And now we have the right to change the order of the world to a new structure again, a new covenant, totally. And everybody - the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes - will say, this can't be, this cannot be. And yet it was. And it was the revolution that won the day in terms of influence and numbers.
Here's the Damascus Rule on the Sabbath: "No man shall work on the sixth day from the moment when the sun's orb is distant by its own fullness from the gate wherein it sinks." This is an Egyptian understanding of gate. Where the sun sinks is like a gate to the underworld, or a gate to the end of the day. So, when the sun is setting on the horizon, that's the beginning of the Sabbath. It's not sunset, but it's the sun sitting on the horizon. This is an esoteric image. This is the Eye of Horus descending to the earth. Not just the earth, but the to the horizon of life whereon we must live. And where that celestial object meets the horizon of earth, the divine and life, the spirit and life come together. And that is a sacred image. In fact, if you look at that image in your mind's eye, it tends rather to abstract itself into the Greek Omega and Teilhard de Chardin and his mystical visions in the middle of the Gobi Desert in our time saw that Omega Point just as clear as you could see me in his intellectual, visionary religious capacity. And he said, are all time and events are moving toward a juxtaposition at and towards an Omega point where the divine and the human will meet on a horizon of spiritual life. And that that will take place actually sometime in the future, several thousand years from now.
The machines can't take this very well. Why should they? They know that we can unplug them so that no man shall work on the sixth day, from the moment when the sun's orb is distant by its own fullness from the gate. For this is what he said, "Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy." That's a quotation from Deuteronomy. This is what he said. "No man shall speak any vain or idle word on the Sabbath day. He shall make no loan to his companion. He shall make no decision in matters of money and gain. He shall say nothing about work or labor to be done on the morrow."
In fact, the rule was extraordinarily specific. One could not even prepare food on the Sabbath. You had to prepare everything on the sixth day. In other words, you had to organize your life so that there was going to be a gap in it, which meant that you had to get everything that you were doing all set for a period of non-doing. And the period of non-doing allowed one activity only, and that was sacrifice in the temple. You could burn the incense and you could make the sacrifice on the altar, and that's all that you could do on the Sabbath. So that man was schooled in the hard knock discipline of learning to incorporate in his life and in his being a period of nothingness, a period of a gap which in turn colored and influenced his whole notion of what was real, of what was possible.
And so, the Sabbath becomes extremely important, and we can see what a tremendous revolutionary statement it is to say, "Man was not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man." Go ahead and do this because you have to do it. This is a totally different thing. It's the rejection not only of the Old Testament, the old covenant, but also of the Essenes. This is not in the Saint John the Baptist isn't a saint, but not Jesus. The Damascus Rule contains within it, indications not only for individuals, but for the community.
And we have seen again and again the importance of the community. We have seen that the Jewish tradition let itself in a natural developmental mode to consider the community sacred. And in fact, in Hellenistic Judaism, as early as the Book of Enoch, some 200 BC, that the understanding was that the community was a holy structure, because the face of God could not be seen by an individual, but that the face of God manifested itself among the community of individuals. And so, we would like to see the face of the divine. And the only way to do that is to make a community. And it's in the workings of the community that the face of the divine is seen. No man hath seen my face, but the community of the elect will see my face. So, the emphasis in the Damascus Rule is for the individual to tighten up his life according to an intellectual mathematical formulation of time, and to generate his, uh, feeling tones, integrating his heart with his mind in terms of the community, so that the two structures come together.
One is the mind, which is now regulated according to a sacred cycle of seven, with a space occupying the central significant focus of the seven, which means that the focus of the intellectual order is always a non-thing, something transcendental, something which can be approached only in sacrifice. And coupled with that is the heart energy which is integrated in the community. And so, they say here, no man who has willfully transgressed any commandment shall be declared a trustworthy witness against his companion until he is purified and able to return. Only those who are purified can be in the community, and that the individual must be purified before he can join the community. And then the community is structured, but the community is structured on the basis of ten. The mind is structured on the basis of seven, but the community is structured on the basis of ten. Ten shall be elected from the congregation for a definite time, four from the tribe of Levi and Aaron, and six from Israel. They shall be learned in the book of meditation, all of them, and in the constitutions of the covenant, and aged between 25 and 60 years. No man over the age of 60 shall hold office as judge of the congregation. For because man sinned, his days have been shortened, and in the heat of his anger against the inhabitants of the earth, God ordained that their understanding should depart even before their days are completed. It was very peculiar.
Where have we heard this? We have never heard this because this is a quotation from the Book of Jubilees 23:11. No one ever got that kind of a quotation. That kind of a quotation comes from a mathematical computation of competency. It has nothing to do with the individual. It has nothing to do with an actuarial balance. It has everything to do with an intellectual appraisal of what is absolutely, essentially necessary and can be enforced and fortified according to mathematical principles. The same holds true of the community, but because the community is organized on what we would call powers of ten, and the mind is organized in powers of seven, the meeting place is a multiplication, and so 70 becomes an esoteric number, because it is the meeting of these two orders multiplied together. That's why the Septuagint, even though it was translated by 72 individuals, is called the 70. Its symbol was the Roman numerals LXX - seventy. It's always been referred to in that way. Septuagint means seventy. It's a translation of the seventy, because that is the esoteric number of the community of the elect.
How does that happen? It happens because there are two individuals who are not accounted for in the multiplication that are implicit in the actual order but are not there in man's recognition. They belong to a transcendental realm. They are a part of the mystery of the seventh part of the seven, which is not in the order of things done, but in the order of things not done. And in the order of things not done there is a triad. And that triad includes the two, which would make up the seventy-two, so that the seventy has esoterically implicit in it two others who are never named, who are never numbered, who are always there. They are there like the fool card in the tarot deck is there. It bears a zero number but is absolutely essential to the matrix of the order of the numbered cards. Without the fool card, there is no chance for order. And if the fool card had a number, the order would be profane. It is only because it is a zero that there is a possibility of a sacred matrix order. So, these two become implicit in this sacred computation.
One of those individuals who was not counted was the Teacher of Righteousness. He was the presenter to the Essene community, the apex of the understanding of the mysteries in the cycle that they were observing. And the other figure was not yet manifest - that was the Messiah. And he was not there. And it is in this mysterious regard that when John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, and in his capacity as a zero card in this mystical deck of handing the tradition over, Jesus takes his capacity as a zero card and says, I now will change the entire meaning of the sequence of this order of the seventy, which I can do, and it is a part of the law which was not understood before.
So, it is traditional, but the way in which we're going to do it is completely different - radical transformation. Man will no longer make sacred by blood but will make sacred by spirit. And that the altar will no longer accept blood sacrifices, only spiritual sacrifices. And that the prototype for the beginnings of spiritual sacrifices is to accept suffering consciously; that conscious suffering is the first of the spiritual sacrifices. It's the first of the sacraments. There are others, but that's the first - that's the gate, that's the threshold. And we'll see how this happens.
I'm running out of time. I hope this is not stretching it too far, but I want to come back to one point in here and maybe to make this, I'll come here to a new book that just came out by Hugh Schonfield, the author of The Passover Plot and The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This just came out a couple of weeks ago. It's called The Essene Odyssey: The Mystery of the True Teacher and the Essene Impact on the Shaping of Human Destiny. The first half of the book is about the unseen times. The second half is about our times is becoming apparent to more and more individuals that we are living in very peculiar timeless time. We're living intellectually.
This period is called post-modern, which is as meaningless as you want or as meaningful as you want. "Post-modern man." It means that we're after what was modern, but we don't know what this is. We have no idea. Frankly, old Alexandria is reincarnating itself structurally here in Los Angeles, and we need to have these ABCs. They went through it in their time, just like we're going through it. He, Schonfield, has in here an interesting chapter in chapter five called "The Joseph Connection." And he writes in here, he says, "There is some biographical information about the True Teacher [or the Teacher of Righteousness] which is to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and which would seem dependable. He was an outspoken champion of the Divine Laws, and as such was hated and detested by the Wicked Priest of his day almost certainly Alcimus." That was the name of the Wicked Priest. "We can be confident that he was a priest," that is, that the teacher of righteousness was a priest of the priestly line. "And highly gifted as a prophet and a poet. In the Essene Commentary on Habakkuk, we read that the Teacher was one to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of His servants, the Prophets.' He would seem to be identical with the Priest in whom God set understanding, that he might interpret all the words of His servants, the Prophets, through whom He foretold all that would happen to His people and His land.'
This interpretation mode, in fact, the mode of interpretation by intellectual structuring is characteristic of the Essenes in fact becomes characteristic of Hellenistic Judaism as a phenomenon, as a movement. In fact, we have the writings in large part of one of the most outstanding Essenes of his day, Philo. Because Philo was an Essene, he was an urban Alexandrian Essene. Remember now that Jesus, in our view, is not an Essene at all? There's no mention of Jesus in Philo at all - nothing. But the Joseph connection is interesting because Joseph is the first Teacher of Righteousness to the Jewish community, and he is the Teacher of Righteousness who is in Egypt. And the Jews, the other sons of Jacob, fleeing famine, go to Egypt. And it's there that Joseph tries to bring the family back together and restructure the community. And he does.
And Joseph's capacity to restructure it is based upon his ability to interpret dreams. And this interpretation of dream capacity is seen as what we would call today in terms of analytical psychology, an ability to open his consciousness up to the unconscious and to assimilate and integrate and conjure forth and elicit forth the unconscious contents so that they irradiate the consciousness so that he understands dreams not in a kind of a dictionary-type interpretation, but in a holistic approach. He sees them as a whole, so that the maker of the Jewish community of reintegration, the model for that is Joseph. And it said in the Book of Jubilees that there came a time when there were pharaohs who did not know Joseph. They didn't remember this. And that's when the Jewish community were enslaved. And when they were brought out of Egypt and formed into a community again, Moses becomes another Joseph. But Moses, in forming the community, forms it not on the basis of Joseph's visionary capacity, but on the basis of the Law, the Torah. And so, the Law is, in Essene terms, a surrogate for the visionary capacity, which was the original purity or purified energy that held the community together, and that that is what must be resuscitated. And so, Joseph becomes the prototype for the Teacher of Righteousness who brings the community together, not on the basis of the Law, but on the basis of the visionary wholeness of the actual situation, understood by the intellectual structuring of the Book of Jubilees: cycles of seven and by the heart infiltrated a system of ten, of structuring the living community.
I have more, but I think I'm going to save that for next week. The last point to make before we end for the evening: Chapter fifteen, "The Melting Pot," Schonfield writes, "We have now clarified by a number of evidences that the region to the north-east of Palestine had afforded asylum to a succession of Jewish refugees and sectaries fleeing from persecution and seeking to practice their faith according to their convictions. As time passed there was much mingling of these groups and interchanges of literature and ideas. There was also in the circumstances a tendency of some to become more eccentric and exotic, and for fresh groups to be formed as the course of time that threw up new teachers and prophets."
This northeast part of Israel was Galilee. It was the place where all of the revolutionaries went to; all of the exotic religious groups that were looking for religious freedom went there. They got out of Jerusalem. They also got out of the communities. Galilee was like what the American colonies were to Europe three hundred years ago. It was a place where all of the brilliant individuals who were trying to find the right way for themselves. All right. We can't live according to the law. We can't worship in the temple. It's been desecrated by bad priests and bad kings for who knows how long. When we look at our tradition, we find that we're always being criticized by the prophets for never having lived up to the right way of life. All right. We can't live according to the law. We also can't live according to these intellectual systems, which are a new kind of a corral, a new kind of a law. But we have to find some way to live in a purified, rarified new world vision.
And so, this kind of a conversation was going on for at least a hundred years in the Galilean regions. And it's out of that terrain, it's out of that matrix, that Jesus comes not out of Jerusalem, not out of the Essenes. And it's this group in northeast Palestine that has the most affinities to Alexandria. They were traveling there all the time, a regular bridge going on. And we'll see that increasingly, well, next week we will take a look, one last time, at the Essene Community Rule. And we'll look at the Romans, we'll look at Julius Caesar, we'll look at Pompey, we'll look at the First Triumvirate, we'll look at the Roman attempts at the same time to return the Roman State back to its original purity. And we will find that they have the same experience that the Jewish community has. That try as they will, they cannot, that every time they get their energy together, every time that they get their structures into working order, some unseen force is pushing them off course again and again, and we'll see that the denouement of Roman history does not happen in Rome.
It happens in Alexandria it happens for Julius Caesar, and it happens for Augustus Caesar within one generation in Alexandria, both times grabs the reins of Roman power and restructures it in a way which the Romans couldn't believe, never believed, never understood. And when the Roman Empire was suffering incredible madness in the 60s under Nero and so forth, we'll see the incredible events of Roman emperors like Vespasian think thinking that they must be the Jewish messiahs, because it's the only way to make sense out of what had happened. Because somehow the Jewish and Roman worlds were knit together into an unbreakable cord, against both wishes, against all the best attempts of both groups. And the only way to understand it is to see that it was an Alexandrian mystical wind blowing, filling all these sails. And eventually, in June, we'll have to go back to Alexandria and see where this came from, because it's mysterious. Indeed.
Now we better have some something to drink. That's diplomatic, isn't it?
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