Sibylline Oracles (Part 2)

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 29 of 54

Sibylline Oracles (Part 2)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, July 2, 1985

Transcript:

The date is July 2nd, 1985. This is the Tuesday night lecture at the Whirling Rainbow School by Roger Weir on the subject of the Sibylline Oracles. The Sibylline Oracles, as we are seeing.

As we are learning are really a case in point. And the overwhelming strategic realization to keep in mind, to keep coming back to in some critical personal review of this material and the implications of it for their vast and profound is all wrapped up in the traditional wisdom caution. That spirit and nature are one. They are indivisible. That the spiritual world and the natural world are the same world. They are not distinct. They are not different. And our problems are never a discrimination. Lacunae between spirit and nature. The problems centre in the mind. Or as the Greeks would have said, the psyche. And man's problems are with psychology and history, and those are his major problems. Nature is never an enemy. And spirit is never so subtle that it cannot be experienced. But the mind, the psyche, the souquet, as the Greeks would say, this is a problem. For it comes into being through the very act of discrimination. And so it's essential. Working pattern is one of analytically addressing itself and then synthetically recollecting itself the mind, the psyche. Like a jet engine needs a lot of air to work in. A lot of ideas. A lot of images. And there are ages where the psyche, the mind becomes so. Evident in human affairs that even the wisest of human beings loses track, and man in his, uh, desperate. Longing for plain truth. Look somehow to nature for guidance, and sees in the omens of the flights of birds, the omens of the stars, the omens of the behaviour of the earth, indications for himself.

And he feels more than things. He feels that the Earth is able to tell his spirit something with these omens, these auguries, these happenings. This was in fact, the age old basis for human religious experience. That nature and spirit were indissolubly one. They were the unity, and that it was only the mind and the psyche that were polarized and capable of the discriminate tensions that eventually, if not kept in order, become confused. So that the Greek churn chaos. Refers very poignantly to the confusion of the psyche. And the confusion of the psyche is, in its structural way, confusion of the mythological substratum. The gods no longer make sense. And because this is so, man's history no longer makes sense. For there is a. Paralleling between. History. And the behavior of the gods and man's psychology. History and psychology are linked together, not in psychohistory, as a new university discipline in the 20th century, but the way in which man's mind and his historical unfolding relate together over the basic issue of the order of the gods. This arena. Is the arena of prophecy. Because prophecy concerns itself with what is going to happen in history, in terms of the present condition of man's psyche or given man's psyche as it is now, we can look for this historical unfoldment to come. But the kicker in the works was that these questions only came up in desperate moments. They were not the everyday fare.

They were not the concerns of every year. They only came up in desperate moments and desperate years. And so the oracular consultation. Of sibyls and oracles in the ancient world, in whatever culture you wish to look at. Was an extraordinary event, one which was religious in nature. And it divulged. The condition that we as. Individuals trying to live our lives have become so confused that we no longer understand what is going to happen, nor what is going on with us. Therefore, we make a religious pilgrimage to an oracle, to a sibyl, and we ask for clarification. And the replies. Come out and a differentiate mode. The oracular replies were responses to man's psyche, the nature of his mind to the psychology of man. The Sibyls, on the other hand, responded to the other aspect, to the historical aspect. They concern themselves with what is going to unfold from this condition. So the difference all encapsulated. We just need remember Socrates going to the Delphic Oracle and being told know thyself. It was a psychological, a mental. Response. Its realm was in the mind, but the Sibylline Oracles all concerned themselves with historical unfolding as the ages that we have been looking on. The age of classical Alexandria from about 300 BC and to zero BC zero AD, and there was no year zero incidentally. It went from one BC to one AD. In that time frame we have seen increasingly. The tremendous pressures to amalgamate and synthesize and bring together the structures of man's capacities.

As a mental horizon of triumph and achievement and the historical, cultural, civilized amplification of that mind, so that like a huge funnel, as we come down to the time of Jesus. The functions of the mind and of history. Press together until they come to a convergence point. This pressure was felt by all peoples extant at this time. The record is very clear that it was not something that a sensitive few out in the desert felt. It was the tone of the age. Men and women like ourselves, the children. Even if we are to believe the record, the the animals. Responded to this tremendous pressure. It was a pressure for realization. It was seen by those for whom life is full of trepidation as a time of final judgment. It was seen by those for whom life is an opening adventure as a time for a new beginning, a new golden age. But from whatever angle psyche and history were coming together, they were coming to a focal point, and the oracles and the Sibyls were coming together. The Sibylline oracles, as we have seen. Were largely derived from one location. The name of it in Greek was Arici, and it was on the Asia minor coast. What is today Turkey? And just across from the Bay area, I was on a bay shaped like a moon, like a crescent moon. And just across from that bay was the island of Chios. And that island of Chios is where Homer lived and wrote.

And the relationship between Homer, his Iliad and Odyssey, which we talked about last week and is on the tape from last week. Was a careful integration of the wisdom of the European civil. That Sybil moved and that Sybil moved, as far as we can tell, around the year 1050 BC, 1050 BC. And that Sybil moved from Europe to southern Italy to the spot that became known as Kumai. So that the Cumaean Sibyl. Is the same as the original Sybil, but in a new location in a new mode. This was a time around 1000 BC where the Ionian Greeks, who were on that Asia minor coast, who were tremendous navigators. They had not only the techniques of the of the Phoenicians in shipbuilding and in sail design. But they had the tremendous curiosity that Greeks have. And so colonies of early Greeks around the year 1000 were founded at Kumai in southern Italy, and at what became Marseille in southern France. And then the Phoenicians came along the southern part and founded in Libya a port and a port that became Carthage. So that around 1000 BC is when the Sibyl moved from Ureshii to Kumai. Now there's still carried on Sibylline prophecies at Ulithi, but they now began to happen at Kumai. Virgil, in his Aeneid, in his great epic for the Roman people seeking to do for the Roman people what Homer had done for the Greek people. Realize that Homer had consulted the European Sibyl.

And so Virgil consults through the protagonist of Aeneas, the Cumaean Sibyl. And in the sixth book of the Aeneid, which we looked at last week, we find the tremendous realization on Aeneas part that he is taking place in some great dramatic pattern, where the inner psyche of man, on its largest amplification, is playing out a historical process, a historical role. And for a moment in the Aeneid, through the great integrity of Virgil, we have the same realization that Homer has Odysseus realize that the mythologies of his mind play out in history and create the tapestry of history, so that the large scale career of man in this world is the same the underside, as it were, of the large scale tapestry of divinity in his own mind. And so Aeneas, like Odysseus, must learn from the sibyls, for they have a condition where spirit and nature are undifferentiated. And so they see psyche and history as undifferentiated, and are able to deliver this. And it is up to man then, through interpretation, to understand the ordering. We talked about last week how the books of the Cumaean Sibyl. Were taken to early Rome to Tarquin, one of the earliest kings of Rome. Around 650 BC, and how Tarquin dismissed the old woman and would have nothing to do with her. And she destroyed three of the of the nine books that she had brought, and the next day came with only six, and again was rejected. The next day came with only three, and Tarquin being an Etruscan king, being one of those early mysterious Etruscans who realized finally that some mystery was being played out for him.

Took the books. Bought them for gold and placed them then in a position of protection and safety. And throughout the next 600 years of Rome's history, these oracular responses from the Cumaean Sibyl were the archetypal route holding the integrity of Rome together. In 83 BC, which we have seen in a lecture or two about two months ago. The Roman general Sulla, during what is known in the textbooks as the Social War, became dictator over the city of Rome, putting to death many aristocratic enemies and nobles, but accidentally setting fire to the building in the Roman Forum that housed the Sibylline Oracles, and they were burnt. They were lost in 83 BC. This was the most devastating of all the psychological blows of the time of Sulla. It was a condition where the Roman people felt that they had somehow been cut adrift in history and cut adrift in their own psychological capacities. This bothered them so much that when order was restored temporarily to the Roman state several years later, three of the most important Roman senators from aristocratic families were sent on a special mission back to the original Sibyl, back to Asia minor, to Ulithi to recollect what fragments of Sibylline oracle responses they could get and bring them back to Rome. When they got there in 76 BC, they were astounded to find out that the Sibylline Oracles had become a vehicle, a medium for prophecy.

By many different peoples, not just the Sibyl. And that, in fact. One of the populations that was now 100 years into using the Sibylline oracle genre for their prophecies were the Hellenistic Jews. And so there were dozens and dozens of Sibylline oracular books. They brought what fragments they could back to Rome. They were again consecrated by the Pontifex Maximus. And when Julius Caesar became Pontifex Maximus, he realized that the situation was hopelessly lost because these were not legitimate Sibylline oracles, there was no way to tell which ones were legitimate and which ones were, um, made up, as it were, by other peoples, or it began to occur to the Roman mind at this time. Perhaps these other sibling oracles are true, and the ones that we're thinking we're looking for are false. There was a tremendous psychological confusion on the collective, archetypal level. And we have seen that when Augustus Caesar brought the Roman Empire into being. Patterning himself, is the son of the god Julius. One of the first things that Augustus did was to send out dozens of expeditions to bring back all of the Sibylline oracles extant in whatever language they were and whatever country they were, making it a state crime to withhold these. And when they were all brought to Rome in 12 BC and 29 BC, is when they first started to bring them. And from that time on till 12 BC. Augustus had a.

Panel of the most.

Insightful and intelligent persons in the Roman Empire at that time, editing the Sibylline Oracles. There were more than 2000 manuscripts, so it was a library. And the problem was to find out some way of telling what is legitimate. Oracle response for us and what is not. And on that committee where Virgil and the great Roman poet Horace and the great Etruscan literature, Maecenas and Augustus himself, and a number of others who were tremendously talented. And in fact the quality of Roman literature jumps asymptotically in this generation. If you look at Roman literature before that time, there are only a couple of Roman authors who are even worth reading and remembering Plautus and Terence because they imitated the late Greek comedy, but almost nobody else. Cicero was a magisterial style because his legal cases were in such beautiful Latin. But all of a sudden, in the generation of Horace and Virgil, you find the Latin language raised to a universal level of quality because of the necessary religious insight that was necessary. This condition, we have seen is paralleled again later on in history several times. Once in Italy, the time of the Renaissance, once again in England, and the time of the Elizabethan age. And it seems that there's a correlation that whenever man has to find ways of finding out about his divinity and his relationship to divinity, to order his psyche, to order the amplification of his history, to put his civilization back together again in radiant wholeness.

That language jumps in capacity and what we call great philosophy and world literature and art spring into being from this motive. And so it happened in Augustan Rome. The Sibylline Oracles, when we look at the collections that were saved, are now hopelessly beyond recollection. Those oracles that were selected by 12 BC, and they filled two large books, and they were put in gold cases and taken to the temple of the Palatine Apollo, and put at the feet of the statue of Apollo. For Apollo was the god of prophecy. And we've talked about how Apollo is a meta god. He is not just a a divine image, but he's the focus of several divine images. He's the focus of Athena and Aphrodite and Ares, and his counterpart is Dionysus and Apollo. Phoebus Apollo is the focus in this capacity as a triune god. He is the god of medicine, of music, and of prophecy. All three functions are there in Apollo. You can see that it's very naive to think that Apollo is just the the, the sun going across the sky. This is a a pedestrian outlook. No one in classical antiquity ever entertain such simplicity. It's foolish. But to think that there is a focus, a metaphysical focus, which actually does occur where medicine and healing and music and the organization of feeling and prophecy and the coherence of psychology and history all meet together in one focus.

This is primordial, and it is that figure who would be expressive of that focus, who indeed is like the driver of the sun that makes life possible for man, because it organizes his health of body, it organizes the health of his spirit in music. So that spirit and nature come together. And the third, by prophecy, it organizes his mind and his history. And only when there's a correlation here, when these align themselves, is there a possibility of a unified core of universal experience, where all realms are lined up together and man becomes capable of being a universal being at home, in nature, at home in spirit, and at home in the mind and in his history. And it is this balance that the Augustan age desperately wanted to achieve. The Roman Empire, the classical experience, the the whole history of man is not understandable. Without realizing that this actually took place on a world civilization scale about 2000 years ago. Augustus felt that he had achieved this balance, and in order to express for everyone the tens of millions of citizens of this now one world government, he invented the terms Pax Romana, the Roman peace, which is the peace of the world, which becomes later on in religious language, the peace that passes understanding is the peace of history, brought to the final consummation, and of the mind brought to its final consummation, at the same time of spirit and nature coming back together and sealed, as it were, by the mind and history coming together.

The cornerstone of Augustus achievement was the Sibylline Oracles. It is not Roman law. It is not Roman military power that is the essential seal of the age. It is the technique and content and belief structure in the Sibylline Oracles, and in fact. As we will see in the next couple of lectures, it is this quality of the Sibylline Oracles that allows for Christianity to become victorious in the Roman Empire, because the technique of the Sibylline Oracles becomes changed and radically transformed in the first century AD, and we will see that the apocalypse attributed to John, the Book of Revelation, is the ultimate Sibylline oracle. It is, in fact, what the Bhagavad Gita is. To the Upanishad. The Bhagavad Gita is like the Upanishad of Upanishads. It is the culmination of a literary genre that lasted hundreds and hundreds of years, and was finally brought to ultimate perfection. Language and form indicative of the mind, brought into perfect amplification so that it works universally in history. It becomes an eternal value which can be consulted at any time, anywhere. One could read the Bhagavad Gita in any age, and it has veracity just so. The Book of Revelation will be like the Bhagavad Gita. It will be the oracle of oracles.

It will be the final word on the shape of history and the capacities of man's mind to understand that history. The Sibylline Oracles were considered as sacred right up until the time of Augustine, that is, up until the fourth century AD, all of the early Christian fathers implicitly and explicitly refer to the Sibylline Oracles as legitimate prophecy on an equal par with the Old Testament, on an equal par with the New Testament. It is only in the time of Augustine, because of the tremendous trauma that happened under the Emperor Julian and his successor, the Emperor Theodosius, that there was a concerted effort to discredit the Sibylline Oracles, to cut loose, as it were, institutionalized Christianity from this connection with the Old World. And they had to do this at the at that time, because the pagan revival under Julian was threatening the very structure of the church. And of course, it was Theodosius who had the Serapeum destroyed in Alexandria, and it was Theodosius who had all of the oracular sites destroyed. And when they destroyed the European Sibyl's Cave around 365 A.D., they found engraved there on the stone seat of the Sibyl, the original Sibyl. That same symbol, which we know as the swastika. But our pronunciation is incorrect because in Sanskrit the w is pronounced as the v and is pronounced svastika and sva is the Sanskrit terms for victory, victory wheel.

And of course, when the Theodosian soldiers destroyed the Serapeum, they found underneath the statue of Serapis in Alexandria a Greek cross which was a self symbol just like the swastika is a self symbol. Wherever the institutionalized Christian soldiers under the tyrant Theodosius went, they found self symbols at the very center of the ancient world. All of its coherence was based upon the integrity of man's mind and his history coming together, showing again that spirit and nature are inseparable, and man's mind and his history are inseparable. And that with this quaternity coming in two pairs together, one has a chance to find that ultimate balance. Because the presence between these two pairs was the divine inner sanctum, and it was that that they were seeking. So the Sibylline oracles are extremely important because they allow us to see there are only trustworthy bridge to see the movement from about 180 to 200 BC, all the way to about 350 AD for about 500 years, an unbroken usage of this genre. The prophecy genre. The prophecy in history genre which coordinates the characteristics archetypally of man's mind with the way in which historical patterns are going to work their way out. And we have in that time period of those 500 years, a consistently trustworthy record. All of the writers in that time frame, which goes from the classical world through the Roman world into the early Christian world, which includes the Hermetic, includes the Gnostic, and includes the Essenes.

All of this is brought together and unified because the Sibylline Oracles are intact all that time. In the time of Theodosius, the Sibylline Oracles were scattered and they were patiently found and recovered. Fragment by fragment, and put back together. In the fifth century AD we don't have any clear idea of who did this. It was around the time when the great souls of that age were trying to leave some time capsule for Future man, some beacon that the generations unborn, centuries or even millennia from them, would be able to trust. It was around the time that the writer, who styled himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, wrote The Mystical Theology and the Celestial Hierarchy, bringing Plotinian spiritual insight into a Christian form, so that that energy and that comprehension could make fruitful the ages to come. And the Sibylline oracles were reassembled. At that time, only about 4000 lines survived. That was all the fragments that could be found. Those fragments were put into a form at a time when all of the dogmatic battles had been won. The institutional church was in power, and there was no longer any kind of jeopardy from such so-called superstitions. And so the books of the Sibylline Oracles were kept, much like one would keep children's literature. And for more than a thousand years, the Sibylline oracles languished as just interesting antiquarian items in the Byzantine Empire.

It wasn't until the 1300s, the 14th century, that great mystical century, which we've done a whole lecture series on. We did about 13 lectures on the 14th century, because it was a mystical century, much like the 21st century seems to be looming up a time of great mystical genius. Those individuals in the 14th century, like John of Ruysbroeck and Johann Tauler and Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing through their own integrity, through their own experience, re-established that primordial contact with the Godhead. And when they looked at literature like the Sibylline Oracles, they recognized the validity, the excellence that was there. And in fact, the development at that time of the revival of learning just in the late, uh, uh, 14th century about, uh, 13, uh. Zero, uh, started working about 1301. Dante comes in, uh, about 20 years later or so. This is the first time that people begin to realize that other than the church structure, other than the scholastic educational model, that they had to depend upon to grow up to become human, in that there were hidden evidences that were still trustworthy, that spoke to the wider range, the universal capacity that they now recognize they had in themselves. And it was this that fueled the Renaissance. It is this that makes the Renaissance and not any other single aspect. It is the recovery of the personal experience of universal capacity, and recognizing that people in the classical age had attained to great spiritual heights so that they could recognize peers and those individuals who had lived 1000 or 1500 years ago, and the people of the immediate past.

Became like those bad parents who have been lying to their children, and they were disowned and the medieval world was rejected. They have kept us in chain. These were dark ages. We will recover the greatness of man because the spiritual integrity was true then, and it is true now. And we will bring those ages back together, because the basic intelligence was that history is intelligible only if it culminates in a golden age. And the rise of the belief in Renaissance Italy in a golden age comes directly back to the recovery of the prophetic truthfulness in the classical age. This is why Dante used as his guide Virgil. Dante felt very much, that is, Virgil had patterned himself on Homer. He would pattern himself on Virgil so that civilization would move from Homer to Virgil to Dante, and man could live again. Homer had had his European Sibyl. Virgil had had his Cumaean Sibyl. Dante's Sibyl became the figure of Beatrice. Beatrice the young girl, the young woman who died young. But Dante had kept a pure love contact with her. And even though she had died and had gone to heaven, had gone to Paradise because of the purity of his love, he was connected to her.

And it was this mystical connection that allowed him to journey with his guide, Virgil, up to Paradise, and allowed him to go into Paradise with Beatrice as his guide. The figure of the inner anima, the. The anima is the soul image kept intact by pure love, allows for man to penetrate into the divine realms while still mortal, while still a man. Because this is it is this universal quality of love that allows for him to move up, as Pico della mirandola would say, the soul's corridor. That what is dignified in man, what is hermetically scintillating in man, is his soul, which is able to move up the entire corridor of existence from plant and mineral and animal and man, to gods and angels, and up to the divine, that he has this tremendous mobility in the universe. He may be all things. And it is this capacity of human beings to be all things, coupled with the purity. Of the sibling quality of pure love that allows for the recovery of heavenly wisdom. To be brought back. To help organize history and man's mind at one and the same time. Spirit and nature are undifferentiated, but it is up to man to bring history and mind. Together so that they are undifferentiated. This is the New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem is the establishment of a coherent history.

In the frame of a coherent mind. And is this that is the Golden Age and the Sibylline oracles that were recovered speak again and again to this quality, this kind of condition. I thought I would give you an excerpt here from a couple of the Sibylline oracles, and and then we'll we'll have something cool to to drink. These are the acts of the wrath of God, which I leaving the far off walls of Assyria and Babylon impelled by frenzy and coming as a fire launched against Hellas, and proclaiming unto all mankind, so as to proclaim unto mortals the mysteries of God and mortals throughout Greece shall call me a stranger of another land, born of erythrae and shameless. Others shall call me born of my mother. Cersei, and my father Nostos the Sibyl, a crazy impostor. But when all these things come to pass, then ye shall make mention of me, and no man any more shall call me crazy, the prophetess of the mighty God. For he did not reveal to me those things which before he revealed to my parents, but all those things which happened. First of all, God hath not detailed to me, but of the later things God hath put all in my understanding, so that I may proclaim the things that shall be, and that were before, and tell them to mortal men. For when the world was being swallowed up by the waters, and one man only, who found favor, was left floating on the waters in a dwelling of hewn wood, with beasts and birds that the world might be replenished again.

His daughter in law was I, and of his blood I came to whom the first things happened, and all the latter things have all been told. So let all these things be accounted true that are spoken of my mouth. You can see just by the first initial acquaintance and insight the tremendous compression. Of historical imagery, the tremendous refashioning of history. It's not a making of a pastiche. It's not making a snippet from Jewish history, and a snippet from Greek history and a snippet from Roman history, and then putting it together. It's not that way at all. It is recutting history by a multidimensional vision of unity in an organized mind. The mind of a prophetess who who does not speak from the human condition, but speaks from the divine condition, where spirit and nature are undifferentiated. Where the apparent movement of man's world is but an illusion, and that the key to waking up from the illusion is a twofold one. The key is on one hand to stop believing in the illusion. This is not really happening. This is not the way history is unfolding. This is not the way the mind works. And the other complement to that is to say, this is the way the mind works.

This is the way history really unfolds. These are the hidden patterns. This is how to make sense out of what is really happening and the confirmation of it. The proof of it is twofold. In one, a human being purified may experience it in his own mind, in the own his own integration. And this was the way of the a-scene's. This was the way of the therapeutii. This is the way of the Gnostics and the Hermetics. Or 1st May see this play itself out, because history will change. The patterns that you thought were going to hold will lose energy and coherence and power. They will fall apart. And what seemed to be a minuscule at first becomes an overwhelming tidal wave, an avalanche of veracity. And it is just this quality that the early Christian writers, Clement of Alexandria, especially as we will see, will point to and say, we know that this is so, for we have experienced it in ourselves as individuals. And we see now that history is unfolding in the way that we understand, and history is not unfolding in the way in which the emperors understand. They do not have the key to history. Therefore, we have a two fold advantage. We know the true nature of man, and we know the true final happenings in history. We can see the last day, the final day.

And because we can see the end of history is its logical culmination, which is supported by the eternal structure which we now manifest in ourselves. Our only purpose is to keep ourselves pure while living in this so-called illusion, until the illusion plays itself out and the true shape of meaning manifests itself. This, of course, was the origins, the dynamics, the basic creation of the archetype of the Second Coming. And the great Sibylline Oracle document that brings this together and masterful fashion is the Book of Revelation, which, as we will see, is not at all by John. It's written much later than than John. But this does not detract from its veracity, from its uh, uh, excellence, from its importance to world history. In fact, the differences between the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, or the Apocrypha are one of the aspects of our age. To make that discrimination, um, is a quality of maturity in our age. It it is one of those qualities of waking up from the illusion which we have to do in our time. Also, if we naively believe that history is unfolding the way that it is said to be. We are indeed duping ourselves. But if we again accept some psychic interpretation of it, we are still duping ourselves. There is, in fact, a time honored way of finding the correlation between the true nature of the mind, the perfect mind.

As the Nag Hammadi document calls it, the thunder of the perfect mind and the veracity of the true history. These are recoverable. These are in fact discernible so that mind and history become coherent at one and the same time. There is no way for history to write itself without the clear mind, and there's no way to have the clear mind without history being made intelligible. This was the the time honored path. One more quotation from the Sibylline Oracles. And then we'll have a break. This, incidentally, is from the best edition available. This is from a volume, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, edited by R.H. Charles and published by Oxford University Press, uh published in 1913, and the latest edition was 1973. And nobody's redone it because they did a wonderful job at that time. These people were literate in Greek and Hebrew and Latin and, uh, all the languages of the time. They did a good job. The cherry translation of the Sibylline Oracles is somewhat different, and we're going to have to go in that next week, because the psychic misinterpretation of oracular responses is the disease of our time. The disease of our time is that we are unable to believe that spirit and nature are undifferentiated. We are living in a cloud of illusion, thinking that the psyche is real, but that spirit and nature are subsidiary to psyche.

And this, of course, is a, um, a prideful arrogance. It is. It is not so at all. This is from book five. Notice the tone. Now come, hearken unto the woeful chronicle of the sons of Latium. Verily, first of all, after the decease of the kings of Egypt, all of whom alike measure of earth bore down, and after the citizen of Pella. That's Alexander the Great, under whom the whole east had been subdued, and the west, with its stores of wealth, whom Babylon disillusioned and handed over a corpse to Philip. Famed by no true report. A son of Zeus of Ammon, and after the man of the family and blood, who came from Troy, who claimed the onrushing fire. And after many kings and warlike whites. Whites are phantom spirits. Wraiths. When the world becomes submerged in psychic confusion, these anxiety projection figures, these phantoms, become quite real. Because the confused mind operates on a level where projections operate as if they were physically real and they were called wights. That's the English terms we usually use. And after infants, children of the beast who preys and sheep, there shall be a king, first of all, who shall sum up twice ten with his initial letter, and in wars he shall conquer for long. He shall have his first initial of ten. And so after him shall reign. One who has the first of letters before him thrice shall cower.

And Sicily, and later Memphis, Memphis, hurled headlong by the wickedness of its rulers, and of an untamable woman who fell upon the wave. And he shall ordain laws for the people, and shall bring all things under his sway. And after a long time he shall hand over the empire to another, who shall have his first letter of the number of 300, and a river's own name, who shall also reign over the Persians and Babylon. Then he shall subdue the Medes with his spear. Then one shall reign, who has the letter of the number three the next king who shall reign, shall have twice ten for his first letter, and he shall go to ocean's farthest water, directing his ebb against the oxonians, and become sovereign. He who has then the letter of 50. You can see in this tone the tremendous complication in unraveling the Sibylline oracles. So the problem becomes, um, multiplied. Not only do we have the problem of the oracles themselves, what are legitimate? Which ones can we trust? Can we go this route at all? We have the further complication of interpretation. And if man relies upon his mind to make the interpretation, if he relies upon a psychic model to make the interpretation, he short circuits the entire process and falls completely into bedlam, into what we call then. Not illusion so much, but delusion. And delusion is like the boomerang effect.

Of being unable to tell appearance from reality, so that the illusion fortifies itself and in a short circuit reinforces itself. And a delusion is like making a rut out of a mistake. And it's this delusionary mind that infected the classical world to such an extent that finally, all the old mystery traditions had to be rejected. Not because they were bad, not because they were not usable, but because finally, no one could tell whether they were true or not. And Christianity became the religion above all religions because it found a way to tell what was true. And it was on that quality that Christianity won out over dozens, if not hundreds of competitive faiths, some of them much more popular than Christianity ever was until its, uh, generation of victory. The Roman army was all worshiping a mithras. But Christianity will see wins out because the experience of Christianity, not the doctrines, not the dogma, not the church, the experience of Christianity will be formulated in a place that was used to subterfuge, that was used to all kinds of illusions that had worked for hundreds of years with syncretistic combines. It will be fashioned in Alexandria, where the Alexandrians so used to wiliness, but also used to finding their way to truth at long last. And they will have models for themselves which the Romans will never have. The Alexandrian Greeks will have the pristine perception from the old Egyptian religion that the essence of God is a no thing.

That all the combinations are appearance and none of the combinations are real. They're all just appearance. That God is the, uh, non thing. And they will get this from the Egyptian religion. Plus there will be the insight from Buddhist India. And the insight is, is that there are graded ways to attain to the insight of the experience of no thing. And with those techniques. And that's why Plotinus was anxious to get to India. To see for himself, learn for himself using those yogic techniques and using that ancient Egyptian subtlety. The Hellenistic Greeks with the, um, Jewish, uh, sense of community, will be able, in Alexandria to fashion the experience of Christianity into a superior religion, the most superior religion of that age. And we will see at the end of the course somewhere around the end of the year. How that experience was jeopardizing the political military structure that the church had become and in. Conference after conference, convention after convention, the hints and clues for the common man were left out so that he will be left to queue up to the experts who will do it for him. But he will be encouraged that it is too dangerous to try and do it himself. And it is that experience that leads to the Dark Ages. Well, let's pause there and we'll we'll come back. We've got enough time to go over all this.

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