Archetypal Achievement of Augustus Caesar

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 27 of 54

Archetypal Achievement of Augustus Caesar
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, June 18, 1985

Transcript:

The date is June 18th, 1985. This lecture was delivered on Tuesday night at the Whirling Rainbow by Roger Weir. Tonight's lecture is, The Archetypal Achievement of Augustus Caesar.

Octavian Caesar, who became Augustus, for whom the month of August is named, just like the month of July is named for Julius Caesar. So, their presence is still with us to that extent. The things that they did, the shapes that they put down, are still with us. The minds that we have are conditioned by these people and their events. It's as serious as that. The whole avalanche of the past that we inherit now as problems were once organized and arranged. They were arrangements. The chaos that we experienced now was a cosmos at one time. You have to keep in mind that a chaos is not nothingness. It's a past cosmos that's now mixed up. And because of this chaotic condition in our time, it is absolutely essential to go back and unravel, untangle the scheme. The only other alternative is to take a different cultural archetype, like the Chinese or the Buddhist or the Taoist, and proceed along those lines. But there isn't anybody in Christianity or Judaism or Islam, or who lives in societies affected by Western history, who can choose any other way than that. And because of the complications that 2000 years of history have made, there are particular ruts now so deep that one has almost to achieve a very high level samadhi before the disentanglement can proceed.

Augustus makes what was called classically the Principate, and the Principate was a cultural form so comprehensive that it literally refashioned the life and mind of all classical antiquity. Anywhere that was, that the Roman Empire influenced, is influenced by the Augustan Principate. Augustus is a character, is extraordinarily complex, and all of this is blurred and glossed over. There are almost no references to what everybody in antiquity knew is that Augustus was a mystical giant. We are used to thinking of the Caesars as if they were like Chicago political bosses. But Julius Caesar and Octavian Caesar were extraordinary individuals, and Augustus himself was a mystical giant. He had on his chest and belly seven birthmarks that were exactly in the shape of the great bear, Ursus Major, the Big Dipper. He was born in the most unusual kinds of circumstances, and even objective writers like Suetonius, when they come to that aspect of his biography, usually ends up a long [inaudible word] of paragraphs that seem unbelievable by the simple statement everybody knows this to be true. Nobody is making this up that it was not just a consensus, but it was a unanimous understanding in antiquity. In Augustus' own perception of himself, he was directly related to Alexander the Great. And in fact, when he broke the power of the Ptolemaic dynasty in the person of Cleopatra and her plans, when he took over the city of Alexandria, he went into the mausoleum of Alexander the Great.

The body had been preserved perfectly, and it was set in a very large, what we call sarcophagus. But it was not a sarcophagus. A sarcophagus means a coffin made out of limestone. And a sarcophagus eats the flesh and the bones. The limestone absorbs the whole physical body into itself. So, we call it a sarcophagus. But instead of being limestone that absorbs the body, the flesh, the bones, and everything - 'eater of flesh' is what sarcophagus means - it was made out of gold so that the body would be preserved, the physical body preserved, mummified. And Augustus went into the mausoleum (which was on the main street in Alexandria, which was about 150 feet wide; it was half as wide as a football field, and all the major buildings were on this) and let himself in and stared silently for many hours at the body of Alexander the Great. And he shared with Alexander the very peculiar characteristics of having had a divine, portent reaffirmed to himself throughout his life. Suetonius tells us near the end of his biography of Augustus. If I can find it in here, I can't find it right off. Suetonius tells us about how at his, at the time when he was born - he was born in 63 BC - and it was exactly on the day that the Catiline conspiracy was revealed in the Roman Senate. And just after the conspiracy was revealed and everybody was up in arms - remember now Cicero was there commanding.

All this news came in that the niece of Julius Caesar had given birth to a boy at such and such an hour. And one of the great astrologers of antiquity, who was also a senator, who was present there, shouted out that the emperor of the world has been born. And this was known and verified by the entire Roman Senate, including Cicero and so forth. Later on, about 4 or 5 years after that, Cicero himself had a dream of the Apollonian divine wisdom incarnating itself in a little boy. And the next day, Julius Caesar brought his grandnephew into the Senate, who was at that time about four years old. And Cicero was shocked to find that the little boy, Augustus, was the boy in his dream. And so, he told this to Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar, according to Suetonius, then told Cicero that many people, many high-level Romans - equestrians, senators, consuls - had been having these dreams and had all seen this figure in their dreams, and none of them had seen the little boy. And that's why he was taking him around Rome. It's four years old.

So, Julius Caesar himself, who was, as we have said, extraordinarily alert to what we now call archetypal energies, went to the mother of Augustus - her name was Atia - and he asked her about the circumstances of Augustus' birth. And that's when she revealed the story that she had never told before, that as a young married woman, she had gone to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill in Rome with several other young married women, and they'd gone for a cure. One, went to the temple and then slept there and had a dream. And in the dream, she dreamt that she was visited by a serpent - the Pythian Apollo. And of course, the Pythian Apollo is the Apollo of prophecy. And this serpent had impregnated her. And when she woke up, according to Suetonius, who bases himself on Julius Caesar, who went to the woman herself, she went through all the motions of cleaning herself up, as if she had been intimate with her husband, and that it was in a time of natural gestation. About nine months after that Augustus was born. And there were all kinds of portents, and some of the portents were lightning, so that Augustus, all during his life was extremely attentive to the portent and omen value of lightning. The day that he died, the hour that he died in Rome, lightning struck his name on the bottom of the statue on the Palatine Hill, erasing the see from Caesar.

And the see, of course, is the Roman figure for 100. But C-A-E-S-A-R is the old Etruscan name for God. And these were the kinds of events that were always around Augustus, so that when he was 16, and was accompanying Julius Caesar in Spain, and there was a tough military campaign, Caesar himself had dreams that the god Apollo was bringing a savior for the world, and that it was his grandnephew, Augustus. And this convinced Caesar to take Augustus out of the normal channels of life, and to put him in an accelerated pace, and to help him. He chose a series of companions, three companions for Augustus, so that there were four young men. This is a quaternary. This is a stable pattern. Somebody like Julius Caesar could think very effectively in these terms. So, he chose a young military man who was exactly the same age as Augustus, 16 or both, born in 63 BC, whose name was Marcus Agrippa, who would become the most famous naval commander in Roman history. He is the one that won all the major naval combats, including the Battle of Actium. So, Marcus Agrippa was chosen. And the second person was named Maecenas, and Maecenas was from an old Etruscan family, very wealthy, very cultivated, and enormously learned in terms of the mystical tradition, the mystical history of what had become the Roman people, but in particular of the sacred geography of Italy, of the Italian peninsula.

Because this is always something that needs to be taken into account whenever there's comprehensive in the geography, gives the cues for the way in which the archetypal patterns unfold. We have to take our cues from them. Augury, omens, portents are like little flashes of insight, but the geography, when it's understood mystically, is like a textbook, and one can read it just as one reads a regular book. Mystical vision is able to read that. So, Maecenas and Agrippa bringing these capacities, and also another young military genius named Rufus, who later on would become a very famous general. These were the chosen companions. They were chosen by Julius Caesar, who then wrote a letter to his mother, who was his niece. And he said, I am taking charge of the boy. As you know, he is an extraordinary figure and he has become my chosen successor, even though he is just a young boy. And so, he is being sent to a special place. Its name was Apollonia. And the reason that he was sent to Apollonia was that there was a very famous school there, university, but that the school and the university not only had intellectual excellence, but it was located at one of the oracular shrines of Apollo, because the god Apollo was now taking a hand in human affairs.

The archetype that manifests itself in Augustus Caesar is Apollo. Apollo two of the major works of architecture that Augustus built as soon as he consolidated what became the Roman Empire was the Temple of Jupiter, the Thunderer, and a new temple to the Palatine Apollo, and he built them both flanking his palace on the Palatine Hill, so that he made this a triumvirate for himself. And the Palatine Hill was looking down on what had been the traditional center of Rome, the forum. And so, Augustus refashioned and rebuilt the Roman Forum. And in the Roman Forum he placed the Iris Pacis Augustae, as it's known in Latin - The Temple of the Pax Romana.

This is typical of Augustus' mind, and it's typical of the way an archetype manifests itself. Not only is there the event, but there's the entire context that makes the event come locked into a manifestation, into a pattern which then radiates energy out. It's just like making something radioactive. And once it's made, it then works in effects thereafter. And that effect, as Plotinus is shown quite adequately, is by a process that we call emanation - emanation. Once made, it emanates not power so much, but the configurations of meaning that have been put together, so that Augustus was truly one of the major figures in world history. He is easily as great as Alexander the Great, and he is more important to us because he brings, finally, the legacy that Alexander had left the Hellenistic warring kingdoms, that for three centuries struggled among themselves to try and find a successor to Alexander. Augustus was the successor. He is the one that brought it together and made it happen all over again. Refashioned it, in fact, in the Greek-Hellenistic mind. The scale of human achievement went very smoothly off the context of normal human achievement into the heroic, and through the heroic, into the divine.

For the Greek religious mind, there was no problem of having a divine man, a man made divine. This was the natural normal development of the Greek intelligence. Julius Caesar was the first Roman to try to become this divine figure, and he is the first Roman to be Divinized. And he was murdered for this; one could almost say that Julius Caesar was murdered for the contrapositive reason that Socrates was murdered. Socrates had taught young men not to believe in gods of the state, and Julius Caesar had taught them to believe that he was the god of the state.

Well, Augustus Caesar brought that through and made that stick, that he was in fact the God of the state. But he would never let them talk that way. It was only after being beseeched by the Roman people for years on end. And finally, the entire Roman Senate unanimously - unanimously - sent a delegate to Augustus' home on the Palatine, and they ask him to at least accept the title of father of the country. And the consensus of the statement that we still have in a fragment from the Roman Senate and people at the time - the Senate and the people together, Senatus Populusque Romanum - was that Augustus was the re-founder of the Roman people, that Romulus had founded the Roman people, and now Augustus had re-founded the Roman people and re-founded them on the basis of having knit into the Roman psyche, Roman history. This Greek lightning of man became being capable of becoming divine, that he was a God man, and this was the first time in Roman history that this happened and stuck. Remember now that Augustus would rule Rome as one of the triumvirs for 12 years with Mark Antony and Lepidus, but he would rule as sole emperor for 44 more years. He was in power for 56 years. Most people didn't live that long in the Roman Empire, so he was in the power seat, refashioning the entire structure of the Roman experience. He refashioned the government, the religion, the history, the people, the vision, everything totally so that when you look at classical history before Augustus and after him, what one notices is that the modern mind, the mind that we have, comes into being at that time.

There is a peculiar flavor after Augustus that is contemporaneous, so that when we read somebody like Tacitus, we feel that Tacitus is somebody that we could learn from. If we read somebody like Lucretius, we feel that he's old fashioned, that he belongs to the ancient world. There's just that difference, and it's an emphasis for Lucretius. There's still a cosmology in which one can speculate in terms of nature. For Tacitus, there's no chance, even for a cosmology, until man gets man straight. And we've been saddled with that problem ever since. And this is a legacy of Augustus. That man's real problem is with himself, and that his problem is that when human energies are called forth to make structures more complex than just simple tribes, man has to call upon other levels of capacity than just his own, that he can't go by native intelligence anymore, and that when man begins to organize on a scale worldwide, he has to call forth divine powers. He cannot do it with anything less. But it's exactly these divine powers that are usually beyond man's scope of handling. Man is not a very good container for divine power. If it doesn't short circuit him out into a, what we would call a psychosis today, it frazzles them with the delusions of grandeur or all kinds of madnesses. And so, the problem was fashioning a human personality that could handle divine power.

Julius Caesar was the prototype, Mark Antony was the abject failure, and Augustus Caesar was the working model. He spent over half a century handling it extremely well. Now, he was not a huge individual. He was five feet seven. He was very handsome. He had yellowish hair. His body, as I said, had the seven marks, birth marks on his stomach and chest exactly in the shape of the Big Dipper, Ursus major. And he had patches on his skin that were sort of like, almost like nascent psoriasis, as if they had been rubbed too much. These are the kinds of marks that come up when individuals suffer what was called in the Middle Ages, Saint's Disease. In our time, two individuals had this: Wilhelm Reich and Nikos Kazantzakis. It's a psychic, psychosomatic eczema that breaks out. But for Augustus, he was able to control it. He is almost - I'm going to use a metaphor now - he is like a diabetic who has learned to handle his diet so that he doesn't need medication. Augustus was able to handle divine power, archetypal collective energy, so that he would not be short circuited. He realized that this was peculiar, and yet he realized that he had to be an interface for people who needed this kind of guidance, who needed this kind of a power to organize lives which have become too complex situations that were no longer within the realm of human control to organize.

And it's in Suetonius we find this statement, "Among his larger public works three must be singled out for mention: the Forum dominated by the Temple of Avenging Mars." Now, the Forum has The Peace Temple (the Ara Paxis Augustae), and it also has the Temple of Avenging Mars. The two of them balance each other out. The Temple of Avenging Mars was made because he was avenging the assassination of Julius Caesar. And remember now, Caesar is not just his great uncle, but Caesar is the prototype of the divine man. Augustus realized that he had an advantage that Julius Caesar didn't have. He had somebody to pattern himself after up to the moment of achieving power. He knew he was going to achieve power. His mystical insight of himself led him to understand, as early as the day after the death of Julius Caesar, that he was going to be successful. He was camped at the fourth milepost outside of Rome, and an eagle swooped down and took the food out of Augustus' hand, swooped up into the sky and came back down gently and brought the food back to his hand. This is how Suetonius relates it.

This is the way the ancient Roman mind would report such an event by using an augury metaphor. It would be Jupiter doing that. It's Jupiter who does this, but in a different mode. It is Jupiter in the Apollonian mode. And now we have to retrace back for just a moment. We have to fix in our minds what the image of Apollo was for the Greeks, and then see how Augustus makes this. The other temples, the Temple of Avenging Mars, the Palatine Temple of Apollo, and the Temple of Jupiter the Thunderer, on the Capitoline Hill. Apollo was the focus of three other gods - gods or goddesses. The gods were images in the shape of human beings, of powers. It's just like you can imagine to yourself that we are aware now that the Earth has magnetic fields. If we wanted to conceive to ourselves a mental image of those magnetic fields, we could think of it as a powerful individual. Let's call them the god magnetos and a shape of a human being, but all sizzling and crackling and so forth. Mars was the human image of terror, and Athena was the human image of wisdom, and Aphrodite was the human image of the life force. We can call Mars terror. We can call Aphrodite ecstasy, and call Athena enlightenment. If you will make it more outstanding in our language than wisdom, call it enlightenment - terror, ecstasy, and enlightenment. The three ways of transcendence from the human condition. But Apollo is not on the same level. Great as Mars is great as Aphrodite or Athena is. Apollo is on a meta transcendental level. He is the focus of these three powers together, so that Apollo has a triumvirate of powers in himself.

He is the god of music, which structures, and controls ecstasy, is able to give a shape to ecstasy. He controls medicine, and he controls prophecy. Prophecy gives a shape to the wisdom, and medicine gives a shape to terror. This is why the serpent, the Pythian Apollo, is related to Asclepius, the healer, and also to the Hermetic Caduceus. So that Apollo, for the Greeks, is a focus of all that is transcendental to man's condition. To have an image of that, then one has to go to the sun. It's not that the sun represents Apollo, it's that in order to have an expressive form to relate to you as a human being. What is transcendental of the whole earth and the focus of all the transcendental currents? The sun. It's the focus of light, the focus of magnetism, the focus of gravity, the focus of movement, etc., so that Apollo is like the sun in that way. The sun or Apollo then moves in a context which is the sky. Jupiter is the god of the sky. Zeus is the sky god. Apollo is the moving focus that is in the context of Zeus the father, Jupiter the father. When Jupiter the father sends his contact to man directly, he does it with a thunderbolt, a lightning thunderbolt. This is why Augustus was always paying attention to lightning, because these were the cues from the direct father.

But the patterning of his life, the patterning of what he had to do, came from an understanding of Apollo. Two different but complementary features. So, he built these major temples, one to avenging Mars, one the temple of Apollo, the other the Temple of Jupiter the Thunderer. And he built his Forum because the two already in existence could not deal with the recent great increase of the number of lawsuits caused by corresponding increase in population. And the Temple of Apollo was erected in the part of his palace, to which the soothsayer said the god had drawn attention by having struck it with lightning, so that the temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill was physically and architecturally a part of where Augustus lived.

He lived in the same place for over 40 years. He used to get up during the night 3 or 4 times. He generally slept for about seven, seven hours at a time, but he would get up during the night and he always kept storytellers on hand not to entertain him, but to, as we would say in a literate sense, to edify him. Remember now he is the divine man. He's not just a normal person. He is awake for some reason, which belongs to the realm of the Apollonian overall unity. Something needs to come out from him, be evoked from him. And so, the storytellers basically would tell him Homeric segments. And that's when Augustus began to realize that Homer was the basis of the Greek ethos, the whole Greek civilization, the whole Greek mind, and that what was needed to consolidate his archetypal achievement was another Homer, another epic.

And that's when he personally commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid, that this would. And we'll go into that extensively. I'll show you exactly how it was done. This is something that I understand extremely well. And later in his life, Augustus had Virgil read to him instead of Homer, he made the shift in his own lifetime. He shifted from the Homeric ethos to the Virgilian ethos, from the Greek to the Roman. And in fact, he would often make quotations from Virgil when situations would come up that were archetypal in nature and in order to alert people as to the full scope of the meaning. He would then quote Virgil to them apropos a person or a situation, meaning if you don't know this whole pattern in this context, you don't know what's going on. You think you see so and so doing such and such but that's not it at all. This is the true shape of events.

So, Augustus found himself increasingly a man surrounded by a brain trust, who were self-elected by the avalanche of events in history to refashion the very basis upon which the human mind and the human life are able to work. And they did it. They reshaped it totally. We have not lost that shape even today through all the vicissitudes. Suetonius tells us then, that after the victory at Actium, Augustus set himself up to review every day the entire population of the Roman aristocracy. They were brought to him personally, and he would listen to them, listen to their life histories. And he began meting out positions, rewards, punishments on the basis of these extensive personal interviews. They went on year after year. He was literally piece by piece, rearranging the blocks of Roman society and going through a re-education process. He would take away the estates of certain individuals. He would give public monies to other individuals. He would train them to work together. He would say, for instance, when he reinstated the corn dole, they gave away free food, basic food, sort of like what we would call today rice and butter, bread and butter. And he had tried withholding this dole for a while, and then he realized that this was a potential time bomb that some future ambitious individual could use the dole to get an edge on power in Rome. And so, he reinstituted the corn dole.

But when there was a wine shortage in Rome one season, he criticized the Romans by saying, my friend Marcus Agrippa has provided two beautiful aqueducts bringing fresh water to the whole city. What do we have need of wine? And in fact, Augustus himself - remember now, wine was the regular drink that people had - limited himself to one pint of wine and water and if he found that he had taken more than that he would purposely make himself vomit. He always kept himself on an even par. His diet, for instance, was extraordinarily simple. He ate the coarse bread that the peasants would use, the thick brown bread, and he ate what were called thick skinned grapes. At that time, they were not good for pressing wine or what were called table grapes left to ripen on the vine, which is why they'd be a thick skin. And his eating schedule was whenever he was hungry. So consequently, when he had to appear for dinners, stayed occasions, or personal entertaining, he almost always never ate. He had eaten before or he was going to eat later. He wasn't hungry at the moment. He was showing them that he was living a different life. He was not living a social life. He was not living an individual personal life. He's not living a family life in the normal sense. He was living a cosmic life that only he was in contact with the rhythms and structures that made it intelligible.

And it turned out that Augustus' decisions on most things concerning the state and the people and life were, as we would say today, on the money with the assistance. Writes Suetonius of ten senators, Augustus cross-examined every night on his personal affairs. Some whose lives proved to have been scandalous, were punished, others were degraded, but in most cases, he was content to reprimand culprits with greater or less severity. The luckiest were those whom he obliged merely to take the tablets, handed them, and read his censure and silence where they stood.

Knights who had borrowed money at a low rate of interest in order to invest it at a higher earned Augustus' particular displeasure. If insufficient candidates of the required senatorial rank presented themselves for election as tribunes of the people Augustus nominated knights to fill the vacancies, but allowed them, when their terms of office had expired, either to remain members of the equestrian order or to become senators, whatever they would prefer, since many knights had lost so much money during the civil wars. Remember they went on for decades that they no longer possessed the property qualifications of their rank and therefore refrain from taking their seats in the 14 rows reserved for the order in the circus. The upshot of this is that Augustus makes a horizon of human experience for men, called knighthood, an important structure of the stability of the archetypal order of society.

Knighthood had been based upon property and tradition. Now knighthood was based upon fealty to the emperor, the divine king. The coherence of the order of Knighthood was based upon the wise king embodying this archetypal energy. There is a direct line in this regard from Augustus to Arthur. The whole notion of an unbroken fraternity of knights who are able to ensure the archetypal purity of the social order because there is a just king, and because the order of knighthoods is unbroken, so that the code of chivalry among the knights, held together by the hub of the purity of the archetypal wisdom of the king, becomes an archetype just at this moment in history. And while Augustus does it extremely well, in terms of Roman history we will see that Jesus, with his 12 disciples creates it on a cosmic level, on a more indelible level than even Augustus would have ever dreamed of. This is an archetype that manifests itself in this way.

Notice now that the King and his horizon of knighthood is a masculine manifestation for Augustus. In order to maintain this stability, this masculine form, which is then superimposed upon society from the outside, there needs to be a complement of the feminine on the inside. And for this, in order to get a clue to this, there are two things that we have to look at Augustus. We have to recognize the fact that he was married to the same woman for over 50 years - Livia [Drusilla]. He was absolutely dedicated to her. He was more shocked by the infidelities of his daughter and granddaughter than by any of the horrible crimes that were committed during his lifetime, specifically, in his will, he refused to have the remains of his daughter or his granddaughter, Julia the Elder and Julia the Younger, because they had committed adultery, to even be buried in the family mausoleum. They were absolutely banished from the shape of the family, which he was bringing in to play.

The second image that we have to look at briefly is the Temple of Peace, the Ara Pacis Augustae, and it's there, and it still survives all this while. It's one of the major mysteries of history. It is still there under what are the ruins of the Forum and that section of Rome where the tourists usually are not allowed in anymore. Underneath that, the room with its frieze is still there, and the frieze is quite interesting. On one side of the Ara Pacis Augustae is a frieze showing us all of the mythological images that Virgil brought together in the Aeneid. You have the arrival of Aeneas and Latium and all of the images supporting the fact that Roman power rose because it was able to knit the past into the present, so that the present was a moving integration of all the past. It was an accrual of power. It's what Alfred North Whitehead would call "a cumulative penetration," that the event became more and more highly charged as it went on because they threw nothing away. They kept all the powers and kept adding to them and integrating them. The idea here is of a snowball getting larger and larger. Roman history is like that. It accrues to itself. The ostensible structure holding this together is Roman law, but the real structure holding it together is the archetypal organization and arrangement, because what translates Roman law into effectiveness is the senatorial excellence.

Embodying the archetypal arrangement of the Roman people at their finest, exemplified by the equestrian order. The equestrian order, remember now, is the basic pool out of which senators come, military leaders and commanders come important posts. Everybody who did anything came out of this equestrian order, and that was reorganized so that it was centered around the emperor. There was some man at the center, someone. And so powerful was that integration. That it never occurred to the Roman people after that not to have an emperor. It comes down to us today as the Pope of the Holy Roman Church. Roman church. What is the Roman church without the Pope? The cardinals, the priests are his equestrian order. The doctrine of the church is his law, is the same shape, is exactly the same shape, because there is no broken continuity whatsoever.

So, we have the mythology that Virgil brought to consciousness. And of course, when you bring a mythology to consciousness, it becomes politics. And on the other side, complementing it is the image of the divine family. Now in the shape of Augustus and his wife Livia and their children. Prominent there is Livia's son Tiberius by a previous marriage, who becomes a successor to Augustus. But in the center, holding this family together, is not the emperor, it's not his wife, but as a goddess who can only be identified by the Latin inscription under her: tellus mater, mother earth, mother earth. She is the mystic geography now become an image who holds the Divine Family together. And as long as the Divine Family is together, then the God man has a context within which he can move as a man. Without the integrity of the divine family, the God man is powerless because he cannot translate his divine powers into human society. This is why the divine family must be kept intact. It's one of the most indispensable revelations about cosmoses that human beings can understand. If the divine family is not intact, then there's no possibility of a God-human being able to translate divine powers into human life.

So, the Ara Pacis Augustae is here. There is a pageant which is recounted in Augustus' own writings recorded in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti [The Deeds of the Divine Augustus]. And these were all inscribed on bronze tablets, those that were in Italy and Greece, and Spain and North Africa. All those were lost, but one complete set of them survived in the middle of Turkey, what became Ankara, Turkey, today. And these tablets were found. And we know the exact statement of Augustus in his own words. There was a pageant that took place coming into this Ara Pacis Augustae, and the pageant was exactly the same in terms of its symbolic function, in terms of its mythological comprehension. It was the same pageant that happened every year in Athens with the Parthenon in Athens. The population of the city every year in the spring would gather together all of the elements of power and meaning the magic of the race of the people and the central element. There was a large robe about 40ft high, and embroidered on this robe were the complete mythological cycles of the Greek mind, the wholeness of the Greek mind, the cosmos of the Greek mind. All the constellations of the sky of the Greek mind were all in their cycles, all in their patterned orders. Why? How did they know that? Because Homer had put them together. And the robe was washed together by the aristocratic women of Athens. And then the whole city went in a pageant parade up to the Acropolis, into the Parthenon, and there was a 40-foot statue of Athena by Phidias there. Actually, it was a little bit more than 40 feet, made out of gold and ivory over wood. It was a wooden statue with a golden ivory overlaid on the whole thing. And this robe was placed on her afresh every year.

And the Parthenon - the Parthenon means the Temple of the Virgin Parthenos. The Parthenon had then this main function of housing Athena with the peplos, the robe which the people had to put on her every year with comprehension. And then there was a wall behind Athena, and there was a little anteroom, which was in the Parthenon, but was cut off from this religious ceremonial place. And in this other room was the treasury of Athens. The money was kept sacred because it was kept in balance, because they understood that politics and mythology are dynamite - the nitroglycerin. You have to really keep these in order. You have to keep it differentiated for it to work. And if it doesn't, if you mix the two together, that's when they blow up. Politics and mythology together always blow up. They're unstable.

Augustus in the Ara Pacis Augustae replaced the Parthenon, the temple of the Virgin, with the Pax Romana temple, the temple of the Holy Family, because his archetype was not Athena. Great as she was, it was Apollo who integrated two things that Athena herself did not have. The power of ecstatic excess kept in balance, and the power of terror kept in balance. And so, Apollo adds in his archetype ecstasy and terror to wisdom. And it was this archetype that Augustus embodied. And the other mural showed this pageant, just like the friezes around the Parthenon showed. This is how we know what it was. The friezes around the Parthenon showed what the building was for. And they're still there. We can see them. We have the Ara Pacis Augustae. We can see it. We know what it was for. But what we don't understand, what we fail to see is that this archetype only works when it's intact. If it's impaired at all then you get an explosion even greater than you had when Athena didn't work anymore in Athens.

It was good for the lifetime of Augustus. It worked kind of shakily, with his successor, Tiberius. And then it fell completely apart. And you had a succession of nightmares. Caligula, Nero, you name it. It was absolutely a nightmare because none of them were able to handle this divine power. It was only good as long as there was a God-man. And increasingly, through the first and second centuries AD, this feeling toned message, it was never very well understood intellectually, but the feeling toned understanding among the Roman Empire population was that we need a God-man to keep this thing in shape, and it would finally start to occur, as we'll see in Alexandria, around the middle of the second century AD, that we have a God-man who is always here. He is transcendentally here, and he can hold it in shape, and he will. His name is Christ. So, Augustus sets up a tremendous achievement of Roman history and sets up a trigger that would be pulled 150 years later and will make the triumph of Christianity inevitable. Couldn't have been any other way.

Well, next week I want to take up an aspect of Augustus which has to be looked at. In order to reshape the archetypal energies of history and of human capacity because he was the Pythian Apollo, because he had this understanding about the powers of prophecy, Augustus called into Rome into his palace on the Palatine Hill all of the prophecies in the world, in Greek and Latin, every book, every document, every copy. And he burned them all except for one large sheaf, which were the Sibylline Oracles. And then, with Virgil and Horace and Maecenas and Agrippa, Augustus sat down to edit and reshape the Sibylline Oracles to become the Sibylline Prophecies. He burnt those that they weren't going to use, and he put together in a new cosmos, a new peplos - the imagery - and they fit in two large gold casks.

Alexander used to carry the Iliad in such a cask. Now Augustus put the Sibylline Oracles refashioned, recut, just like a diamond cutter would recut this jewel so that the Sibylline Oracles became like what the peplos was for Athena. The Sibylline Oracles became the complete, integrated archetypal mythology of the Roman people, and the Sibylline Prophecies, unlike Greek mythology, concern history, especially future history. And as the Greek might had been schooled in its mythology to see things in terms of transcendental nature, the Roman mind was schooled from then on to see in terms of historical unfolding towards a prophetic future. And this would be just the hedge that Christianity would use in order to triumph. For the most powerful thing in Christianity is its prophetic future certainty, its eschatology. And in that eschatology - we'll get to it, it won't take us much longer - the most powerful document of all is the Book of Revelations, the Apocalypse. And we will discover, much to our dismay, that the Book of Revelations is not by Saint John at all, it's not even a Christian work. It's an apocalyptic Jewish work that goes back to the Essenes.

The scrambling of the archetype was profound, indelible at its origins. One reason that Christianity always had a problem in itself is that it was never purified. The last time it was purified was when Jesus was alive. And ever since then, it's been completely, almost hopelessly confused and misunderstood. Christianity has very little to do with what we call religion. It has everything to do with the theology of the Roman Empire. Politics and mythology do not mix. And we'll see that, and we'll see it again and again, clearer and clearer, because the prism that shows it more clearly than Rome is Alexandria. And as we get into it this summer, we'll see that Alexandria is beautiful in its way of showing us very clearly what was really there in a pristine, beautiful, pure understanding and how it was confused largely through ignorance. And then the confusions were made political hay out of by machination, but that all the time along the way there were individuals, not structures, not institutions, but there were individuals who intuited the right way, the right form. And so, we have leading up to the problems in our time, what Reinhold Niebuhr called moral man against immoral society. And it happens again and again.

Well, we're all anxious to go or eat, so I'll just quit there.

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