Sibylline Oracles (Part 1)

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 28 of 54

Sibylline Oracles (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, June 25, 1985

Transcript:

The date is June 25th, 1985. This is Roger Weir’s lecture on Tuesday night at the Whirling Rainbow on the Sibylline Oracles.

We’ve gotten now to an interesting episode in the development of archetypal Alexandria. One of the more interesting aspects was how feminine wisdom, Sophia, came to have such importance. And it’s interesting because the prototype of wisdom was masculine for a long time. With the turn of the millennium, wisdom becomes feminine. It is a ‘she’, definitely. And this change is epochal. In fact, the correct terms to use psychologically is a term that Carl Jung used several times in his work when he got to needing expressive terms, which meant the complete turning over of values. And the word that he used was enantiodromia, and it meant that the whole structure of valuation turns. It doesn’t go by inches it converts; it turns. This is happening in our time. One of the intuitional prophets of our time was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose favorite theme was the transevolution of all values, and that it is that tidal wave of transformation, of the very structure of valuation that produces the new man. Man not in the sexual gender sense. And that new man then, is, as Nietzsche used in German, the übermensch, the ‘superman’.

At the time of Augustus Caesar there was an enantiodromia in the classical world, and it produced all of the monumental problems that we are getting to know so well in our time. And characteristic in this was the realization that wisdom as a feminine is necessary. One of the most outstanding and almost never mentioned facts of the classical world is that the original Sibyl and her name was Sibylla, and Sibylla was a conjunct word, and it meant in the presence of God. And it connoted she who is in the presence of God. And there was an original Sibyl, a woman named Sibylla, and her place of prophecy was on the coast of Asia Minor, and it was because of the name of the place Erythrae - it was named Erythrae. And the European Sibyl was the first Sibyl. In fact, in classical antiquity there was only one Sibyl. For Plato, for Aristophanes, for Aristotle, there is only the Sibyl she who passes on her seat of prophecy. And we’ll get to some of the data later on. And there were many Sibyls then who had names, but they were always the Sibyl. The Erythraean Sibyl was the original Sibyl.

That part of Asia Minor where Erythrae is has a very curiously shaped bay. The bay is shaped as a crescent moon, and across from that crescent moon, across the water, which was interspersed by four little islands. Actually, there are five, but the fifth is like rock, just small rocks. But those four little islands were called in classical antiquity, Hippiades, meaning horses. They were the horses; they were Poseidon’s horses. Those four horses, which is the archaic chariot pulled by four horses, not by two. The Roman chariot is two horses, but the archaic chariot was four horses. So, that that crescent moon, crescent-shaped bay which held the original Sibyl. If you went across the water past the four horses, you came to the large island of Chios, and Chios was the home of Homer. That’s where Homer lived. So that Homer, who was an Apollonian minded masculine intelligence if there ever was one, situated himself on rocky Chios with the four horses of Poseidon’s chariot, so that he had a front row seat on the European Sibyl. That whole scenario of archetypal energy was repeated to a core in Italy because the famous Sibyl in Italy was the Cumaean Sibyl, the Sibyl at Cumae and Cumae is on the Bay of Naples. It’s very easy to see the shape of the crescent moon of Bay of Naples. And it was there at the Bay of Naples, that Virgil, the other great epic poet of classical antiquity, situated himself so that Homer was situated near the year three, and Sibyl and Virgil was situated near the Cumaean Sibyl. And there is an archetypal balance between the Homeric mind and the European Sibyl, and the Virgilian mind and the Cumaean Sibyl. And just as Achilleus and Odysseus are the moving protagonists of the archetypal move towards order in Homeric Greece, the movement of Aeneas in the mind of Virgil, who was a contemporary of Augustus Caesar, has for its insight this on the same archetypal level, the Sibyl, oracular sayings.

If you look at book six of the Aeneid, Virgil, who was considered the greatest magician of antiquity all through the Middle Ages. Virgil had the reputation that Merlin has today. The sixth book of the Aeneid, which we read from last week, shows Virgil extremely well informed and careful about the way in which a woman is inhabited by the god. That there is something about this god who is Apollo, who, when he inhabits a human body, one has to be almost like a woman in birth travail in order to stand the presence of the divine. The Virgin Mary is a Christian Sibyl who is able to hold the Word of God, but transposes it not into an oracle, but into the God-man who is the oracle of all oracles. And this transformation, this understanding, was made in Alexandria. And we’ll have to get to that. And we will get to that in just a couple of weeks.

So, you can see that the subject tonight and the Sibylline Oracles is extremely potent. It is high energy. It is collective dynamite because this image base still is operative in us, still is formative to the extent that we can hardly believe it. And so, we pay due respect to the materials and try to do our best. But still, in all, we circumambulate a little bit so that we don’t go directly into the subject matter. During the Roman civil wars, we have seen that the emergent figure was Julius Caesar, and that what made him emerge was that he was able to take unto himself this power of divinity.

The cue for him was finally his relationship with Cleopatra. It was Cleopatra who personified who was in herself, a kind of a sibylline figure who held all of the Hellenistic development of Egypt in herself. Remember now that Cleopatra was not a high-priced call girl at all. She was one of the most intelligent women of all time. She spoke fluently every language of her age - if you can imagine - including Hebrew and Egyptian and Greek and Latin, all of them. She was a prodigy. An intellectual prodigy. After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony tried to step in and fill his shoes. And he was short circuited by the experience of trying to become divine. That even with Cleopatra’s help, but especially with Cleopatra’s help, he made the mistake of being mortal. He did not relate to Cleopatra like Homer had related to the Erythraean Sibyl or Virgil to the Cumaean Sibyl. He loved her sensually. And he broke under the divine pressure. He was electrocuted, frazzled by these archetypal energies.

He was a much better general than anybody else around. He was incredibly adept. He couldn’t win the major battle. He fell apart. And that’s why when he went back to Alexandria, he built that humble hut, the Timonium, out in the harbor of Alexandria. It was just a single pier that ran out. And he lived in this mud hut like a naked sadhu, because he was trying to get rid of it, and he couldn’t. And in his final death scene, he rode out in his Roman armor to all the Roman troops gathered in the sands outside of Alexandria, asking for a soldier’s death. Let me die at least like a Roman. I’ve tried to live like a Greek-Asian god, and I haven’t made it. At least let me die like a Roman man. And no one would offer him battle. Augustus, having seen Julius Caesar and having seen Mark Antony, was better prepared and understood because he was really somebody understood that one should not have these relationships. One does not live with the prophetess. She is a divine figure. She belongs to divine, that is to say, almost demonic energy. And she is a helper when she is there in this archetypal relationship. But if it is profaned, then one is lost. And this was the important realization. This is why Augustus could not kill Cleopatra. He had to force the situation so that she took her own life, and she died an archetypal death. She died holding the sacred asps and died from the bite.

The Sibylline Oracles, as the story goes, came to Rome because the original Cumaean Sibyl had migrated from Erythrae in Asia Major to Italy. So that again we see this archetypal movement of the context of meaning, of all meaning, moving from Greece. And Asia minor at that time was called Ionia, the Ionian Greeks moving from Ionia to southern Italy. And that area of southern Italy at that time was filled with Greek experimental communities. About 100 years after the Cumaean Sibyl was there, Pythagoras was there, and these were utopian communities. Communities of Perfecti.

According to the ancient mysteries, the Cumaean Sibyl, according to the mythology that the Romans believed, came to Italy and realized the tremendous power of Rome, nascent Rome. And this was the time of King Tarquin. This is early, around 650 BC, and the Cumaean Sibyl wrote down her prophetic utterances and collected them into nine books. Nine is symbolic here. Three threes. And she went to Tarquin, made the pilgrimage up to young Rome, nascent Rome, and offered to sell these books to Tarquin, and he refused, called her a phony. We have this from Livy, which we talked about six months ago. Just refreshing some of you. She came again for a second time and offered him six books. She had destroyed three of the books, and he again refused her and turned her down. The third time she came, she had only three books, and Tarquin realized that this was it. Three strikes and you’re out. And so Tarquin bought from her the prophetic books. And these were the first Sibylline Oracle writings.

The other Sibylline Oracle writings did not exist at that time, and in print there was nothing in print, there was nothing written down. There were oracular responses given to people who should hear them. And that was it. They were secret. In the Greek mind, such oracular responses are always secret. They are meant for the individual. But don’t you see that the Roman idea is that they are meant to be a basis of esoteric lore. They must be written down. They must occur in books, in texts. It’s the Roman idea of collective building on engineering principles, a structure of law, a structure of civilization. It’s based on the book. Those Sibylline Oracles that Tarquin bought and came into possession of were kept in the center of Rome in the Forum, and they were inviolate until 82 BC, when they were burned in the massive upheaval of Sulla, who we talked about a month ago. One of the things that happened accidentally was the burning of the Sibylline Books, and about seven years later, in 75 BC, it had become such a trauma to the Roman psyche. We don’t have our feminine bearing that they sent three aristocrats, three highly chosen individuals, to go to the original Sibyl in Erythrae and collect there and write down all the verses that they could find. That is all that they could hear. And they wrote down, and they brought about a thousand verses back to Rome in 75 BC, and these were sanctified by the Roman state, and they were put into the Roman Forum. And these are the first Sibylline Oracles that we have any kind of an indication of.

There was a tremendous development in prophetic powers from about that time forward, so that all of the oracles and there were now about several Sibyls around Pausanias, Roman lists for. By the time we get to Clement of Alexandria, there are nine, and eventually there came to be ten. But really, if one totals up all of the names in classical antiquity, one comes up with 12. But there was a sudden outpouring. And this outpouring of prophecy, especially among Hellenistic Jews who were trying to appeal to the Roman mind, realizing that the Roman mind is not paying any attention to the classical Old Testament prophets, couched these prophetic visions in terms of Sibylline oracular responses. And of course, because of the sacred nature, because of the archetypal response, the Roman state took them to its heart.

And this burgeoned to such an extent that when Augustus came into power about 31 BC, but he formalized it in 29 BC. He dates the era of Augustus from 29 BC. One of the first things that he did was to appoint a committee of his closest advisors to review and read through all of the Sibylline Oracles, and to destroy all of the phony oracles, and to edit and preserve only those which were really sacred utterances.

The head of this committee was the great epic poet Virgil. He was the best poet seer of the age, by far. Horace is a very great poet; Virgil is like a mountain compared to the rolling hills of Horace. He is really somebody from Virgil. Then comes the only indication of what was going on in their minds when they edited the Sibylline Oracles. And these edited Sibylline Oracles were placed into gold casks, and these gold casks were taken to the temple of the Palatine Apollo and placed at the feet of the Palatine Apollo. Two casks, because there are two feet. So, at the very structure of the archetypal image of the divine energy that was incarnating itself in Augustus had a ground in the Palatine Apollo and the Sibylline Oracles. The essence of feminine wisdom was there at the base. And if we look at all the classical writers, the Sibylline Oracle utterances were all about history. They were all about politics. They were all about the state and the careers of man on earth on a grand scale. They were not like the Delphic Oracle, esoteric utterances about primal nature. They talked about the rise and fall of kingdoms, about the surge and seethe of civilizations, about the large patterns that Man - with a capital M - was subject to. And all the way through this the indication was again and again that Rome had a thousand years of greatness, and that in Augustus time, in Virgil’s time, 700 years of that had gone by, and there was only another 300 years left.

Augustus Caesar died in 14 AD, 300 years after that is 314 AD. It’s very close to the founding of Constantinople. These things were said three centuries before the event happened in Virgil. One does not go to the Aeneid to find out the vision, the controlling visionary expression of that time from the editing of the Sibylline Oracles. One instead goes to his earliest poetic writings, which were called the Eclogues. And it was while writing the Eclogues that Virgil moved to be close to the Cumaean Sibyl. And in the Eclogues, the Fourth Eclogue has always been referred to since early Christian times as the Messianic Eclogue. And I want to give you Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the Messianic Eclogue, because the early Christian writers took this to be a gospel truth, that it did not refer to Augustus as Virgil had supposed, but that it referred to Christ. And so, the early Christian writers up through the late Middle Ages always considered Virgil as a proto-Christian, as someone who - he died in 19 BC - had he have lived long enough, he would have been one of the Christian saints. He died before the Lord was born, but that in his vision he saw the Lord.

And this is why Virgil was taken by Dante to be his guide out of hell, out of the hell of this world, and even through the limbo, the purgatory of the psychic realms, right up to the entering of the Pleroma of the Paradiso. And the basis for all of that is the Fourth Ecologue, which is extremely powerful. Here’s what it is in translation.

“Muses to whom Sicilian shepherds sang
Teach me a loftier strain. The hazel copse
And lowly tamarisk will not always please.
If still the wild, free woodland note be heard,
Our woodland song must suit a consuls ear.
Lo, the last age of Cumae’s seer has come!
Again the great millennial aeon dawns.
Once more the hallowed Maid appears, once more
Kind Saturn reigns, and from high heaven descends
The firstborn child of promise. Do but thou
Pure Goddess, by whose grace on infant eyes
Daylight first breaks, smile softly on this babe;
The age of iron in his time shall cease
And golden generations fill the world.
Even now thy brother, Lord of Light and Healing,
Apollo, rules and ends the older day.
Thy office, Pollio, thine, shall mark the year
Wherein this star begins his glorious course.
Under thy banner all the strains of ill,
That shame us yet, shall melt away and break
The long, long night of universal dread.
For the child’s birthright is the life of gods,
Heroes and gods together he shall know,
And rule a world his sire has blessed with peace,
For thee, fair Child, the lavish Earth shall spread
Thy earliest playthings, trailing ivy wreaths
And foxgloves red and cups of water-lilies,
and wild acanthus leaves with sunshine stored.
The goats shall come uncalled, weighed down with milk,
Nor lion’s roar affright the laboring kine
Thy very cradle, blossoming for joy,
Shall with soft buds caress thy baby face;
The treacherous snake and deadly herb shall die,
And Syrian spikenard blow on every bank.
But when thy boyish eyes begin to read
Rome’s ancient prowess and thy sires great story,
Gaining the power to know what manhood is,
Then, league by league, the plain without a sower
Shall ripen into waves of yellow corn;
On every wild-thorn purple grapes shall cluster,
And stubborn oaks yield honey clear as dew.
[But in men’s hearts some lingering seed of ill]
Even yet shall bid them launch adventurous keels,
And brave the inviolate sea, and while their towns,
And cut earth’s face with furrows. Then behold
Another Tiphys take the helm and steer
Another Argo, manned by chosen souls
Seeking the golden, undiscovered East.
New wars shall rise, and Troy renewed shall see
Another great Achilles leap to land.
At last, when stronger years have made thee man,
The voyager will cease to vex the sea.
Nor ships of pinewood longer serve in traffic,
For every fruit shall grow in every land.
[The field shall thrive unharrowed, vines unpruned,
And stalwart ploughmen leave their oxen free.
Wool shall not learn the dyer’s cozening art,
But in the meadow, on the ram’s own back,]
Nature shall give new colors to the fleece,
Soft blushing grow of crimson, gold of crocus,
And lambs be clothed in scarlet as they feed.
“Run, run, ye spindles! On to this fulfilment
Speed the world’s fortune, draw the living thread.”
So heaven’s unshaking ordinance declaring
The Sister Fates enthroned together sang.

And you can hear in this the tremendous energy and great language, again and again, the colors that come to mind, the colors that emerge in Virgil are the crimson red and gold. These are the suns colors. These are the emblems of a sun god. We talked one time about the crest of Sir Gawain in the Arthurian cycle. And Sir Gawain’s emblem was a gold hermetic star on a crimson background. Crimson is the color of blood and the sunlight, and the gold is the holy metal of a renewed cycle because the Cumaean Sibyl made it clear, even though they couldn’t make popular the detailed Sibylline Oracles, the overall jest was well known and very public that there were four ages of man, and they were personified by metals, and that in the nature of the metals man changes. And as the new cycle comes in, man changes and a new metal takes over its symbolism. There is a decline from the Golden Age to the Silver Age, and then there is decline from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age. And then there is a decline to the Age of Iron. And when the Age of Iron runs down and has exhausted its valuation, there is a sudden turning over again.

And the beginning of a new Age of Gold starts immediately. The lowest point of the Age of Iron heralds the highest renewal of the Age of Gold. And this was the basic structure of historical prophecy which the Roman people not only imbibed but hallowed in the greatest possible way and enshrined in the temple of the Palatine Apollo.

Now we have to understand something in this mythic tapestry. And we’ve talked about it before. We’ve talked about the three transcendental modes of human being. We’ve talked about the way in which we leave ourselves in three differing modes. We can leave ourselves through ecstasy, we can leave ourselves through fright, through terror, and we can leave ourselves through transcendental wisdom. And we’ve talked about the way in which, in Greek religious mysticism, those three come together. That’s the trinity, the triad, and the focus. Where that is the focus of those transcendental modes of human nature, from the mortal to the immortal was Apollo. And Apollo as the god was the image of the focus. And those three modes were symbolized in Greek mystery religions as Aphrodite for ecstasy, Aries or Mars for terror, and Athena for wisdom. So, the Apollo as a focus is not on the same level as these other gods, he is the focus. But as Apollo is the immortal focus of these transcendental energies because of the balance, in reality there is a mortal focus and the mortal focus of what Apollo was the immortal focus of was Dionysius, so that Dionysius is the focus of ways of leaving ourselves, but still in a mortal mode.

And it’s Dionysius, who is also able to possess us. It is he who, when his spirit enters into women, they become a buckeye, and they seek to express themselves in a life sense. Augustus Caesar was the embodiment of Apollo in the Roman eyes. And Augustus in his edicts - and we have a lot of them - always identifies himself as the son of the god named Julius. Always. When he refers to himself in a formal way, he says, I am the son of god, and that god being Julius Caesar, even though he was his great nephew, physically he was archetypally his son, he was his heir, the one who came in, who was appointed as his successor by Caesar, if you remember, when he was still only 16. You remember the odd circumstances surrounding his birth, how his mother, Atia, who was a niece of Julius Caesar, went to the temple of Apollo and dreamed that a serpent had entered her. And she found that she was pregnant then and felt that the god had entered her, and that when Augustus was born, he had birthmarks on his stomach and lower chest that were seven patches of skin which were discolored. And these birth marks were in the shape of the constellation Ursa Major, the Big Dipper. This is the archetypal mythological theme of the bear’s son, and this is a very potent archetype. Beowulf is, in the early English mythology, is the bear’s son. Odysseus is related to the bear’s son. It’s this kind of impress that the constellation of Ursa Major has a prelude because it’s handle, the handle of the Big Dipper points to the pole. It points to that star which does not move, and all the other stars move in the heaven. And if you remember, in Shakespeare, in his speech that he puts into the mouth of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, who understood these things extraordinarily well, he was not naive at all. The ceiling of the Globe Theater had the zodiac in a perfect halo and circle over the head of the stage. Caesar says, in an age where all wander in this sky of life, I am the only unmoving star, the only stable person that you can count on. And this is why I am become divine. And Augustus, displacing him, he says, in here, in making a new calendar for the province of Asia, 9 BC, an edict from the governor of Asia in Greek, from our ancestors we have received goodwill of the gods. And whether more pleasant or more beneficial is the most divine Caesar’s birthday, which we might justly consider equal to the beginning of all things.

He’s writing about they’re going to institute a celebration of Augustus’ birthday, because it is truly the beginning of all things, if not exact, from the point of view of the natural order of things, at least from the point of view of the useful. This is the origin of the classical difference between the sweet and the useful. By useful, he means what we would call now conscious that there was a beginning of natural time, but that the arrival of Augustus Caesar, who brings together one whole cycle, one whole eon, and starts another one. That this is the beginning of this consciousness of the new era. If there is nothing which has fallen to pieces and to an unfortunate condition has been changed, which he has not restored, he has given the whole world a different appearance, a world which would have met its ruin with the greatest pleasure. If, as the common good fortune of everyone, Caesar had not been born. Therefore, perhaps each person would justly consider that this event has been for himself the beginning of life and of living, which is the limit and end of regret at having been born. And since from no day, both for public and for private advantage, could each person receive luckier beginnings than from one which has been lucky for everyone. And since, roughly speaking, it happens that the cities in Asia have the same time for the entrance of magistrates into public office, an arrangement clearly thus preordained according to some divine well, in order that it should be a beginning of honor for Augustus.

And since it is difficult to return for his many great benefactions, thanks in equal measure, unless for each of them we think of some manner of repayment. Or more joyfully, would men celebrate a birthday common to everyone so that Augustus birthday is to be celebrated because it is a birthday in common to everyone. It is the beginning of the reintegration of consciousness nine BC. So this tremendous prototype is already set up, already operating. And remember, now this is operating on the scale of the of the Roman Empire. We’ve now moved from the Republic. We’re now 20 years into the Roman Empire, and this has been set up so that everything from Britain to Persia, everything from Germany to Ethiopia, has this imprint. It has this impress. This is the not only the archetypal, but the common intelligence of the day. The whole Roman world was polarized and unified in this way. Nine BC. Behind this, behind this masculine power structure was the crying need for the feminine wisdom, because the masculine power structure was empty. It was empty of valuation. And this is why the early image of Sophia, as someone who is wandering, lost in the worldliness, has to be rescued, and her rescuing becomes the search for the real gold.

And it is this search that is the beginnings of alchemy in the material world. There is a quest, an archetypal quest, which, looking for that, uh, real spark of divinity, will lead to the gold. I have to put an aside in here for just a minute, and then we’ll we’ll come back to this. The earliest alchemists for whom we have any writing was named Zosimus. He was an Egyptian. He was, in fact an Alexandrian, but he lived in an age where it was precarious to speak of these things too openly. And so Zosimus moved, as most of the intelligent, sensitive spiritual Alexandrians moved to the Nile River valley, way down the Nile. In fact, he is known as Zosimos of Panopolis, and Panopolis is way down by Edfu uh 5 or 600 miles from. The Mediterranean Sea, and he is known all through then the Hermetic tradition as Zosimos of Panopolis. Notice the name of the city. Panopolis. Panopolis. Pan. The city of Pan. Pan is a nature spirit and Pan is the son of Dionysius. Pan is the embodiment for man of that Dionysian energy. He is the son of that God, just like Augustus considered himself being the son of Apollo. Pan is that Mythologic figure who is the son of Dionysius. But it’s interesting because Pan, if you look at um, Panopoulos Pan is related to an Egyptian god named min m I n is how it was, um, spelled in English, and min was also known as chem k h e m chem.

And the origins of the word chemistry do come from chem. Not all of Egypt is the land of chem, but the land of chem refers specifically to this aspect of the god, this aspect of min or of Pan, so that Zosimus is from the the city of chem chemistry. And alchemy is born as a spiritual quest in Egypt around the first to second century AD, and in fact, the first of the alchemical explorers, as we’ll see in greater detail later on, were Jews and the first great alchemist that we hear of, although we have no writings of her, was a woman. In fact, her name was Mary the Jewess, Mary the Jewess, and the Alchemist. Uh, basic uh uh, transformational vehicle still called, uh, in French. Born Mary, named for Mary the Jewish. She was. She gave her name to the apparatus. And this is very hermetic because the the old Hermetic Rosicrucian doctrine was that the the life lived was the doctrine received. It is it is what you do that is intelligent, not what you know. This knowing, this epistemological knowing, episteme is the apex of man’s wisdom, but that beyond episteme, episteme is, um, truth. And so one lives according to the truth. And this is different. This is the highest.

This is then bringing the divine energy into human life. The first influential alchemist, a Jewish woman, is a resonant revelation of world history. Sophia of transformation in the Sibylline Oracles. All of the Sibylline Oracles are from women. There are no masculine Sibylline. And if we turn to the Sibylline Oracles, we find in the fragments the very first fragment that we have reads something like this oh, ye mortal men of flesh who are not, why do ye so quickly exalt yourselves, having no eye unto life’s end? In other words, you’re making a big thing out of everything, and you don’t have any idea where it’s going. How do you know what’s going on? Because you don’t know where it’s going. If you knew where it’s going, you might know what’s going on now, because what is going on now has come from before and is going to go on. And it has a convergence. History has a shape, it has a purpose. The very first fragment, the next fragment, do ye not tremble at nor fear God who overlooks you the Most High? Who knows who looks on, who witnesses all? Who nourishes all? The creator who has planted his sweet spirit in all and made him a guide to all mortals. There is one God, sole, sovereign, excellent, and power unbegotten Almighty, invisible, yet seeing all himself. And you can notice now the the emphasis here on unity. The emphasis is that there is no, uh, discrimination in the divine.

There’s no disparate ness that the unity that is there precludes any kind of polarization. And we’ve talked about this many times. That polarity that becomes a complementarity achieves the resonance of unity. It’s like the, uh, the Tai chi, if you see it in terms of dark and light or black and white, that’s a polarity. But if you see the polarity in terms of its complementarity, then the unity of the symbol occurs and is the unity that then has the resonance. The return to unity is the resonance of the new age, of the turning of the cycle. It means that seeing the old cycle less and less clear, until there were fundamental polarities everywhere, until the tensions that come out of polarity dominated the world like a jungle, so that human beings couldn’t see anything for real. All they saw increasingly were the delusive images from their own anxieties. A world gone mad. As Livy says in the introduction to his Roman history, he says, we can no longer stand the anxieties of our time, nor can we stand the cures. Needed. We are trapped in an unsolvable limbo because as long as the polarities were there and energized, it was unsolvable. The hermetic trick knack inside the esoteric kicker in the whole works was to transform the polarities into a complementarity, and what comes immediately is a sense of unity of all. And this is what the Sibylline Oracles is saying.

First off, God is one, not the one as the beginning of a number sequence, but one. Later on in, uh, when this had become expressed and refined and and developed, um, Jan Blix on the uh, Divine Mysteries about 330 AD, Jan Blix will talk about how it’s important to realize that divinity is not one among many, but is exclusive of any divisiveness whatsoever. And this was an interesting flaw in Augustus, because the whole nature of Augustus and the Roman Empire was that the emperor was the first of the whole series. In fact, it’s called the Augustan Principate. And we get our word prince from this. The prince is the first in the kingdom. Principate, and the basis of the Augustan Principate was a misunderstanding of spiritual nature and a colossal scale. Augustus said, I am the first of all the Roman citizens, and everybody follows me, and as I do, I do for my, like a father would for his family. And everybody follows my way. And out of the principle of the Augustan Principate comes the structure of the Catholic Church. That the Pope is the first. And the whole idea of papal authority is all based on this misunderstanding. It is a political structure. It is an empire building technique. It is a surrogate, but not the truth. The Sibylline Oracles go on to say. Yet he himself is beheld by no mortal flesh.

No one ever sees him. Remember we talked about the mystical idea of community in Judaism. How an individual cannot see the divine, but how the divine shows its face in the in the body of the community. It’s the body of the community that is able to reveal in its wholesomeness the face of the divine. If you want to think of it in a metaphorical terms, think of the divine as such a dynamic, scintillating relationality that only the mirror of the community can reflect the light that the individual human being would only reflect a spark, not the light. From this comes, of course, the the Hasidic, um, uh, certainty that every human being has a spark of divinity, but it’s only the collecting of the sparks of divinity that allow for the presence of the Lord of history to manifest. So the Sibylline Oracles and these were encased in the temple of a Palatine Apollo by Augustus. For what flesh can see visibly the heavenly and true, the heavenly and true God, the immortal, whose abode is the heaven, whose abode is the heaven. So that just like individuals who are may have sparks of divine light, but cannot see it also the heavens, when the stars are just scattered sparks is unintelligible, is only when the heavens are a pattern that the universe becomes intelligible and the pattern of the heavens complements. Not polarized too, but complements the pattern on earth.

The heavenly city and the earthly city are related, and this is exactly the kind of language that Augustine will use 400 years in the future. So the Sibylline oracles are very, very powerful. Now, remember, every syllable was was leaned on by people of this time. They were grasping at straws. And here was Augustus, who for 56 years ran the show. If he said, this goes, it must be worth listening to. She says, nay, even face to face with the sun’s rays. Are men able to stand, being mortals, mere veins and flesh wedded to bones. Worship him who is alone, Prince of the world, who alone exists from age to age. Self sprung unbegotten, holding all in sway through all time, giving to all men their testing time in the common light. But of your evil counsel ye shall have the fitting reward for that, forsaking the honor of the true and eternal God, and the offering to him of sacred Hecatombs ye have made your sacrifices to the deities and Hades in insolence and madness, ye walked and forsaken the straight high road. Ye turned aside and were wandering through thorns and stakes. Cease vain mortals roaming in darkness and black murky night. And leave the darkness of light. And take hold of the light. Behold, he is plain to all. And such as cannot be missed. Pursue not ever. Darkness and murkiness. Behold, the sweet eyed light of the sun shines brightly forth.

Conceive wisdom in your hearts and have knowledge. There is one God who sends rain and winds and earthquakes, lightnings, famines, pestilence and sad cares. Why should I detail them one by one? He is the Lord, sovereign, heaven and earth in one existence, undifferentiated. And they follow with a coda to that. But if the gods have off sprung and yet remain immortal, there would have been more gods born than men, and no room would have been found for mortals to stand. And this is a psychologically profound. When the gods are psychic are interpreted psychically. They proliferate because they are eternal, and they soon displace man from his natural base. He cannot survive. So that the psychic expressions of fragmented divinity must be collected back into unity again. Because only then does man have room to live, room to breathe. God has to be a unity for man’s own safety and own protection, if nothing else. If nothing else, with divine electricity free in the world, no human being can stand. It has to be collected together again. Well, you can see the tremendous model that is operating at this time, the tremendous pull of it, even us living in a different culture thousands of years later. We can appreciate what bone trembling insights must have been penetrating the Roman mind at this time. The Greek mind at this time, the Hebrew mind at this time, all of this tremendousness coming into play.

Here is an image from a classical author named Lucan. His epic Pharsalia was about the culmination of the civil wars. Julius Caesar won the Battle of Pharsalia. Here is a description of someone being possessed by the God. And you can take this as being symbolic of the kind of psychological neck breaking that was going on at this time, en masse. It was a worldwide epidemic at this time. It’s about a woman named venom who was unwilling to go into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and she was forced to by this Roman consul. He had unblocked the gates and was forcing her to go in, forcing her to go to the the tripod, the sacred tripod, and sit. And she kept pretending that she was possessed by the God. And he kept saying to her that not even close. This is not it at all. You don’t understand. It’s not making something up. It’s not a speculation. It’s not letting yourself go and just free associating. It has nothing to do with mortality. It has nothing to do with the psychic realms at all. This is a different level. This is a spiritual level. This is the undifferentiated Pleroma. And so finally, she approached the lip of the great chasm and seated herself in the tripod. Then for the first time, she experienced the divine afflatus, still active after so many centuries, and Apollo genuinely possessed her. At last he forced his way into her heart, masterful as ever, driving out her private thoughts, draining her body of all that was mortal so that she could possess it and he could possess it wholly.

She went, blundering frantically about the shrine with the god mounted on the nape of her neck, knocking over the tripods that stood in her path. The hair rose on her scalp, and when she tossed her head, the wreaths went flying across the bare floor. Apollo’s fury was so fierce that fire seemed to boil from her mouth. He whipped her, goaded her, darted flames into her intestines, and at the same time kept her on the curb, preventing her from disclosing as much as she knew. Countless centuries crowded tremendously in her breast. Rival secrets contended with her for utterance. She understood all that was or would be, from the beginning of the world to its very end in fire, and could have rewarded and revealed the laws that govern even the ocean, or the number of sands and every shore in existence. But just as the Sibyl of Cumae dislike being made the repository of so many national destinies, and therefore haughtily chose that of Rome for her sole revelation, so she went through a distressing search among the fates of far more important men than Appius, before she finally came upon his own. As soon as. As she recognized it, her mouth foamed frenziedly. She groaned, gasped, uttered weird sounds, and made the huge cave re-echo with her dismal shrieks in the end.

Apollo forced her to use intelligible speech and she gave the response. This was utterly real, devastatingly real to the Romans, to the Greeks, to the Hebrews. The classical age was inundated by a tidal wave of this, and it is in the middle of this that the Magi, astronomers, predicted the birth of the Messiah. This incredible ocean of travail. And here the precipitate guiding star, the guiding star heralds not in terms of an unmoving pole star, but in terms of a new star that was not there before. It’s paltry for us to call it a supernova, a new star in the sky. It is archetypally an unbelievable happening that the heavens that had been there are suddenly dominated by a new star that had not been there before. This is an incredible precipitate energy. And next week we’ll come back and we’ll get into the Sibylline oracles a little bit more, and I’ll take us further so that you can see that increasingly the form of the Sibylline oracles became the form which the New Testament will base itself upon. That there is a new revelation. There’s a new quality. And the ultimate sibylline oracle will be the book of revelation, the Apocrypha. It is the ultimate sibylline oracle, and we’ll see that next week. Well, I think we we might have some food. I’m not sure, but you’re.

Well, that was a voice out of heaven. Stephen King.

The title King of Kings.

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