More Pre-Philo

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 34 of 54

More Pre-Philo
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, August 6, 1985

Transcript:

This lecture was taped at the Whirling Rainbow lecture of Roger. We're on August 6th, 1985. Don't forget the title. The title is More Pre-Philo. That's my baseball strike. My atomic baseball strike title.

I get to follow tonight. Just Mercury.

Now we're getting to follow right away. First thing. We have an enormous amount of filo that survived. The translated works of Philo in the old Bonds Library is four thick, huge volumes. This first volume is 540 pages in the Loeb Classical Library. It runs to ten volumes plus two supplemental volumes, so we have 12 volumes of Plato with Greek and English facing. The first conspicuous thing about Philo is that he wrote in Greek. He couldn't read Hebrew. After being in Alexandria for 300 years, the Jewish population thought in Greek. They thought in the Greek language. They dreamed in the Greek language. This is significant, but which is just as significant. They were still Jews. And they were very good Jews. They had a very strong community. In fact, the Jewish community in Alexandria, as we have observed, was numerically the Jewish community in the world. The Jewish community in Alexandria also was economically very, very powerful. It's just like today. The Jews in Israel are not economically very powerful without the Jewish communities of New York and Los Angeles. Israel is a rubber sponge ready to soak up all the misery. Alexandria was the only place in the world that had a wealthy, educated, Greek thinking Jewish population, and it was large enough to be at least a half to a third of the entire city of Alexandria, so that the Jewish character of Alexandria is paramount. And it matures exactly at this time in history. By 50 A.D., the Jewish community in Alexandria had matured to the point that it was ready for spiritual transformation in the environs of Judea and Galilee.

The communities that wanted to transform took themselves out of the towns, out of the cities, and went out into the wildernesses. But in Alexandria, it is the very opposite case. Or rather than opposite, we should use the logical terme which is really desert designated Lee. Correct? It was contrapositive. It was the logical complement because the transformative centers were esoteric groups within the city. And where the esoteric groups that went to the countryside, into the wildernesses, into the deserts, whereafter purity, purity, that was it. The Alexandrian esoteric groups were after completion, they were after fullness. Fullness. This is not a polarity. Purity and fullness, but on its deepest level is a complementarity. And Christianity will be a blending together, the only effective blending together of the metropolitan completeness of Alexandria with a sane purity of the Judean Desert, is the only thing that will really work, that will bring that complementation into fullness. The figure, which is so important for us to appreciate here then in Alexandria. And notice right away that there is a single figure who is known by many volumes, many thousands of pages, even 2000 years later. Philo contrast to that, the almost nameless hundreds or thousands who comprise the Asean communities. We only know the name of John the Baptist. Out of the hole is seen thousands. So also in this complementation, there is a person in Alexandria, whereas there is a community in Judea, and it is the Alexandrian complete person that will complement the purity of the community in Judea.

And in the very largest sense, Christ is that largest, most complete person who is able to complement the largest, most perfect community for the stoic idea will infuse itself through the Roman matrix within which Jerusalem and Alexandria met. It was a Roman crucible, and the stoic idea will be that the universe as a whole is the largest metropolis there is, and that man is a citizen of the ecumenical universe, seen as a single large metropolis. Remember now, metropolis means mother city and polis. Of course, meaning city in Greek also is the root of the word politicos, politicos, and the Greek terms. Politicos, of course, is what we get as politics today. But politicos actually means civil service. It means then service for the civilian population and politicos, when it's seen as a universal phenomenon, means service to mankind. And so the politicos is going to be very big in this. The Roman matrix will be to confer this stoic cosmos energy. As the setting within which the purity of the communities will meet. The large cosmopolitan persons of Alexandria, and those two elements together will produce this transformation in Philo. Almost all of his works are about the Old Testament. He's a cosmopolitan Jew who would like to not only, um, tell us about his tradition, but help us to see how his tradition is, in fact, the root source of all the great traditions that the Greek mind grew conscientiously and the Roman character grew conscientiously through sporadic contacts with the Hebrew tradition all the way back and that Homer even gets a lot of his savvy from Moses.

So for Philo, the archetypal great man is Moses. And when we come to Philo in the very first volume of Philo, or the third volume in this, uh, translation, but the very first one that usually one turns to a treatise on the life of Moses. That is to say, on the theology and prophetic office of Moses. And he's using office here in Cicero's sense de offices, meaning that in the universal politicos there is an office of an archetypal great man. And Moses filled that office, and no one else has filled that office since he begins in his life of Moses. And remember now he couldn't read Hebrew. He thought he dreamed in Greek. And so this is translated from the Greek. I have conceived the idea of writing the life of Moses, who, according to the account of some persons, was the lawgiver of the Jews. But according to others only an interpreter of the sacred laws. Now these groups we have recognized now the Sadducees and the Pharisees. To the Sadducees. He was the giver of the laws. To the Pharisees he was the interpreter of the laws. Different. To the Acenes, which were an offshoot from the Pharisees.

He was an interpreter of the laws, and the interpretation. Demands for a fullness tends toward a fulfillment, which is the culmination of the meaning of the interpretation. And in this way John the Baptist will be the last Jew. In Christian terms, he is the last Jew. He is the. He is the point at which the whole Mosaic Law comes together and manifests in what Jesus says the best man. But that in the kingdom of heaven even the best man is less than the least in the kingdom of heaven. So we're looking here. We're looking at a threshold that's building up. Okay. Philo says there are some who say he's a lawgiver, others an interpreter of sacred laws. The greatest and most perfect man that ever lived. So now Philo is seeing Moses as a perfect man, having a desire to make his character fully known to those who ought not to remain in ignorance, respecting him for the glory of the laws which he left behind him, has reached over the whole world, and has penetrated to the very furthest limits of the universe. Notice these cosmological terms that Philo uses about Moses. He's not just saying. Now some of the Jews say he gave the laws. Some of the Jews say he interpreted the laws. He's saying I'm saying that his teachings have penetrated the entire world and have penetrated to the farthest limits of the universe, so that the mosaic now law is raised to a cosmological perspective by by Philo writing in Greek.

He's writing this around, um, 20 AD Jesus is a lion, and those who do really and truly understand him are not many, perhaps partly out of envy, or else from the disposition so common to many persons of resisting the commands which are delivered by lawgivers in different states. Since the historians who have flourished among the Greeks have not chosen to think of him worthy of mention, the greater part of whom have both in their poems and also in their prose writings, disparaged or defaced the powers which they have received through education, composing comedies and works full of Sybaritic profligacy. Sybaris was a city like Las Vegas, and licentiousness to their everlasting shame. While they ought rather to have employed their natural endowments and abilities in preserving a record of virtuous men and praiseworthy lives, so that honorable actions, whether ancient or modern, might not be buried in silence. The emphasis here on virtuous lives, virtuous lives, virtuous men, and praiseworthy lives is the stoic conception of the summum bonum, the highest good. It is also the presentation of what was called the Middle Academy, Middle Platonism. Philo is not reading Plato's dialogues. He is thinking in terms of Middle Platonism, which is ecumenical, which has a stoic skeleton, and not at all the skeleton that Socrates character does give the platonic dialogues. So we have to be aware now Philo is thinking of Jewish content in Greek language in a Stoic Roman form.

In one individual, he is already. What Alexandria would become as a city. He is already an ecumenical man, not from putting ideas together. This is the wrong emphasis. This is to misunderstand history completely. This is to misunderstand the whole nature of the transformation completely. It's not a juxtaposition of ideas. He would. Philo would be loathed to have someone say that he is watering down his Jewish heritage. He is not going to water down his Jewish heritage, but he's using Greek language, and he's putting Greek language into Roman vocabularies and Roman syntaxes. And we'll see, because Cicero is the first one to realize that the Roman mind had completely transformed itself with the Greek language, and that the Greek language that the Romans now spoke was not the Greek language that the classical Greeks spoke. It was Roman minded Greek. Philo is speaking Roman minded Greek about Jewish subjects. So now he says. Moses is not only the greatest man who ever lived, he is a perfect man. He is a cosmological perfect man. This is a mystical conception. And we can see how mystical Philo is when we skip over to the very end of his treatise on Moses, skip over to page 135. And follows talking about the death of Moses. And here's how he writes. It's very mystical. And a little after this, thunderbolts fell on a sudden from heaven and slew 200 men. The leaders of this sedition and destroyed them all together, not leaving any portions of their bodies to receive burial, and the rapid and intermittent character of the punishment and the magnitude of each infliction rendered.

The piety of the prophet Moses conspicuous and universally celebrated, as he thus brought God forward as a witness of the truth of his oracular denunciations. Now Philo is packing it in here. Moses is not just giving laws, he is giving, and Philo's Terme is the truth of his oracular denunciations. It's paltry to think that the Decalogue is a list of ten major don'ts. It's really cosmically penetrating to realize that these are oracular denunciations delimiting a sacred area, the sacred area within which the virtuous life can be lived by an individual, and that the virtuous community can come into being within that sacred space, and that that person and that community, when writ large, are a universal family of man. This is Philo's mind. Philo is now talking about a universal community of man founded upon an archetypal. And Philo is really the originator of this firm, the archetypal perfect man who is the foundation of the community, the pure community which can then flower into a complete humanity. This is about 20 AD that he's writing this. And remember now, Philo is very famous in Alexandria. When the Jewish community in Alexandria, some million people were suddenly having trouble under Caligula. Under Gaius Caesar, they were having trouble with the Roman governor Flaccus. The community got together and they said, we have to send a deputation to Rome.

Philo and his brother and his nephew were the three out of the million person community that they sent to Rome to speak for them. So Philo is a very conspicuous human being. At 20 AD, Jesus was about 24 years old. It could be that he was in Alexandria. Here's how he writes about Moses. Then. Lightning coming down. Rain of a novel kind. He says a most novel, kind of rain. And the end was the same, both to those who were swallowed up by the earth and to those that were destroyed by the thunderbolts, for neither of them were seen anymore. This is an archetypal picture. Not only is heaven giving thunderbolts, but the earthquakes open up the earth, heaven and earth. The two halves of the world. Heaven, according to Philo, is mind. Earth is the senses. It was the senses that were cracking and opening up. Man's sensate world was falling apart. The mind was getting intuitions on the scale of lightning bolts, and people were not able to handle this. Because what Moses had brought in was a powerful energizer. And we have to use the firm energy, because this is the way Philo taught that Moses energized the whole concept of man. This is a complete Hellenistic ecumenical schism that never was mature. Any other place except Alexandria at this time in history that a mystical man, Archetypally, can energize the whole Pleroma, and it finds its expression in the politicos.

In the empire so that everything becomes super attenuated. Things that used to just bother you now terrorize you. Things that used to bring a smile now bring ecstatic joy. Everything becomes magnified. Everything becomes magnetized. And the whole situation becomes fraught with peril and joy at the same time. All of the opposites are brought into play. Philo in 20 A.D. is writing this of Moses okay? He says then. And sometimes afterward, when he was about to depart from hence to heaven to take up his abode there. And leaving this mortal life to become immortal, having been summoned by the father who now changed him. Having previously been a double being composed of soul and body into the nature of a single body, transforming him wholly and entirely into a most son like mind. Wow. Because Philo is talking here, he's talking stoic cosmology, which is a tripartite, a trinity, soul, mind and body. The soul is heaven like. The body is earth like the interface were soul and body come together is mind. The royal capacity of mind to energize itself into perfection. And Farlow says this of Moses in retrospect at this most crucial fulcrum in world history. He says that a man born of woman can do this, has in fact done this has in fact done this for the last 1200 years, so that now we have the civilization, the cosmic civilization that you see around us. Because this is the proof, this is the fruit of the fact that it did happen.

All this cannot be accident. All this is designed and we have now, he says, a world empire, because there was such a thing as a perfect being. Now the Christians will see this, and they will seize upon this, and they will say, well, it didn't happen then, but it is happening now. And the gospel according to John is almost a complete understanding of Philo's mosaic energized perfection because Philo is the one who brings in the doctrine of the logos, because it is the logos which is the seed of the sun like mind that comes into perfection. The father is in heaven, the spirit, the Holy Spirit is of the earth, but in between is the Christ, which is the mind. But Philo says, Moses, Moses is that mind. This is right at the end of his life of Moses. And some time afterwards, when he was about to depart from hence to heaven, taking up his abode there, and leaving this mortal life to become immortal, having been summoned by the father who now changed him, having previously been a double being composed of soul and body into the nature of a single body, transforming him wholly and entirely into a most son like mind. He then, being wholly possessed by inspiration, does not seem any longer to have prophesized comprehensive plea to the whole nation altogether, but to have predicted to each tribe separately what would happen to each of them and to their future generations, some of which things have already come to pass, and some are still expected, because the accomplishment of these predictions which have been fulfilled, is the clearest testimony to the future.

The last act of Moses has a perfected man, as someone who has already transformed into a son like mind, is to counsel each tribe, each of the 12 tribes, separately so that they can exfoliate and develop a pattern throughout history, and that the only way that comprehension can come, the only way that cosmology can come, is for the 12 tribes to come back into a unity together. And remember, it was 106 BC that the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs brought the 12 tribes mystically back together, pooled. Their understanding of life from 12 different kinds of perspectives, so that the testaments of the 12 patriarchs prepared the way for the Asean communities, which came in right after the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs. Because now we have the full circle. Now we have the complete perspective of all the 12 major archetypal ways of being human. And now we can have a community of the perfected and work it out. Follow is our best. Almost our only source on the assassins also. In fact, when we turn to, um, Philo and we want to read about the assassins, it's called a treatise on the Contemplative life or on the virtues of Suppliants. And it starts off having mentioned the assassins, who in all respects selected for their admiration and for their special adoption, the practical course of life.

Spiritual integration is the practical course of life. And who excel in all, or what perhaps may be a less unpopular and invidious thing to say in most of its parts. I will now proceed in the regular order of my subject, to speak of those who have embraced the speculative life. Speculative. Speculative. The word here in Greek has connotations that we have lost. Speculative means mental agility. That the mind now is mobile, able to move and have its fullness in its agility. Speculative, not in daydreaming, but speculative in being able to take in all the theses and make a unified, uh, ecumenical out of it so that the assassins are doing this. And I will say what appears to me to be desirable, to be said on the subject, not drawing any fictitious statements from my own head for the sake of improving the appearance of that side of the question, which nearly all poets and essayists are much accustomed to do in the scarcity of good actions to extol, but with the greatest simplicity, adhering strictly to the truth itself, to which I know well that even the most eloquent men do not keep close in their speeches. Nevertheless, we must make the endeavor and labor to attain to this virtue. Virtue. The word virtue here is a stoic word for the highest good. It is the end purpose of man to acquire virtue. And the way that virtue is required is to understand the truth, the truth of truths.

For, writes Philo, it is not right that the greatness of the virtue of the men should be a cause of silence to those who do not think it right, that anything which is credible should be suppressed in silence. But the deliberate intention of the philosopher is at once displayed from the appellation given to them. For with strict regard to etymology they are called therapeutae. They weren't called to scenes in Alexandria. In Greek they were called therapeutae and therapeutic bodies. From the Greek Terme Therapia, which means to heal, to heal. And of course, the platonic theology. The platonic theology was always emphasizing therapia that the external benefit which man as a species receives is paideia, is education and cultivation to very high and higher and higher levels. But for the individual human being it's therapia. The platonic theology has a double motion. One is paideia for all, the other is therapy for the individual healing to heal. These scenes were called by the Alexandrians in Greek Therapeutae from Therapia because they were, after the transformation of the individual, the only way that we can understand this is just to be graphic about it. The Roman idea of transformation was an external explosion of power. The Athenian idea was an internal implosion of power to the one. The implosion of the power to the one has a mystical final stage to it. And I have to use an analogy from contemporary cosmology.

Now it implodes not only to the one, but the one implodes himself to what we would call today a black hole. So that the energizing that's going on here that Philo was talking about mystically, is packed with dynamite. And he's saying that the external conditions, this explosion of power in the Roman world, the Augustan Principate, is but an external sensate indicator that the internal implosion has reached perfection. Now, for Philo, it was that the mosaic man was becoming available for other men to participate in. This is exactly Paul's understanding of Christianity, that we are Christians because we participate in Christ, not because we are Christians. We only are Christians by virtue of our participation in the Mystical Body of Christ. Whereas John Mark's Christianity was a complete rejection of this. We are Christians in and of ourselves. And that the gnosis belongs to me. And this is different. It is different. But all of this takes place within a Roman matrix. And whether you're John, Mark or your Paul, you still have to operate in a Roman world. In Philo's writings give us the most accurate indication of how all this was usurped and transformed. It didn't matter whether you were speaking of Jewish traditions in Greek terms, you were still doing that in a Roman context, and it was the Roman Stoic context that was sort of the middle ground, the middle skeletal structure of the mind, which took over eventually the historical shape of the events.

Neither Philo's mosaic man nor John Mark's Christian man really obtained both of those groups had to become esoteric minorities, and by and large, like a glacial movement, the Roman Stoic world ground through and carved out the shapes of history. And the transformative Jewish groups in the transformative. Christian groups were both esoteric minorities and have continued up to this day unbroken so that it no longer mattered. And we'll see. But the third century AD, it no longer mattered. Whether you were Jewish or Christian or your Mithraic, it didn't matter what you were in your mind, in your mental structure and your mental habits and your cultural orientation. Roman and the Roman mind was built upon a stoic cosmology. The idea of a hierarchy of matter leading up to an interface with the mind which was heavenly. And that virtue was only visible intellectually. Now, both the Jewish and the Christian emphasis was that virtue was not perceptual to the mind at all, but was a quality of the spirit which transcended even the mind, and that one had to live the good life in order to demonstrate what one would have called virtue. Whereas to the Roman mind one only had to understand it. And if you understand it, that was enough. And the Christian church and Rabbinic Judaism both fell into this kind of a trap of thinking that as long as you understood it, that was enough. But both the Jewish esoteric groups and the Christian esoteric groups constantly said, this is not it at all.

One has to live this life, and if that's mystical, then so be it. It is the living of the life that is the doctrine received, not anything understood in the mind, not anything owned in the material world. And so this revolution of the spirit. Was so caustic that it tended to dissolve through not only the sensate structures of the materialistic world, but the ideational structures of the classical world as well. And those people fell right through the nets, and people got to arguing whether people were trapped in the nets of the material world and weren't they safe then in the intellect? Whereas the Therapeutae, both Jewish and Christian, were saying, you're trapped in mental nets just as well. There's no difference. To be trapped in mental nets is just like being trapped in material nets. It's the same thing you're coveting, understanding you're coveting, thinking that just because now you understand it, that that's it. That's all that there is. There ain't any more. And these esoteric groups developed all kinds of splinter, esoteric groups, and this formed the occult basis of Western history. And anyone who has moved in that occult flow knows that the Jewish and Christian esoteric, transformative traditions. Are not only parallel, but sometimes they're exactly the same thing. There's no difference between them at all and many of the esoteric groups that came out of these later on, like out of Christianity in the fourth century AD, Nestorian Christianity, they were thrown out of the Western world and they went to Central Asia, they went to China.

And when they went to China, they, of course went to some of the major immigrant cities, and one of them was Kaifeng, and Kaifeng was a place where the Nestorian Christians and esoteric Jewish groups got together, and they built a church, which both of them used together because there was no difference between them. None whatsoever. And they welcomed Daoists and Mahayanists in, because there was there was no difference worth shaking a finger at. But on the exfoliate power structure, all of them were outlawed, and we use the terms outlawed because they were dissolving aqua regia. You can't let people like this loose in the structure because they will dissolve the structure. We don't have any handles to hold them with. They don't intimidate. They don't habituate. They're not filled with the proper terror and respect. They don't buy the carrots that we put out for them. We don't have any way to handle them. We got to get rid of them. So Philo is very, very important in this. I want to show you a picture, and I wish I had a slide of it. I want to show you a picture of the man in his prime at age 30, who put together the exoteric power structure, Augustus Caesar. And when you see this statue portrait of him, you can see what I'm talking about when I say that people at that time were seized by archetypal energy.

You don't need any comment at all. You see somebody that like that on the street, you're going to get out of his way. The bugging eyes. This was Augustus Caesar, at age 30, two years before he established the Augustan Principate. Now. Look at the difference in Julius Caesar. We can use the phrase calm, conniving. Julius Caesar is not bothered at all by the pressures, right? Julius Caesar was the first Roman to coin to declare himself a god. Divine. Julius. Why? Because he could cut it. And he was crucified by the Roman Senate. Because they understood that he could cut it. Did I say crucified? Yeah. Yeah. The steps leading up to the Roman Senate were the cross on which the god was killed. Because they began to believe that he was a god. And there's no room to connive among men when there's a God among you. You can't play with him. He outdistances you on every aspect, especially on those terrible oceanic archetypal energies which he handles so well. What are you going to deal with them? So they killed him. Now Augustus. Declared himself a god on the pattern of his uncle Julius, and he was always wise enough to say, it's not me. I'm being good, Roman. I'm carrying on family tradition. You notice the politician in Augustus. So they let him live, and he. He ran the Roman Empire for 45 years.

That's really something. Now, when Augustus came into power, he was wise enough to transfer all of this archetypal energy off himself. It's like having too much of a static charge, right? So he put it on to the Roman Empire. He put it onto the things of power in the Roman Empire. Now look at Augustus. This is the statue that was put up in his villa. Totally different presentation of him. He didn't look like that at all. But look at the presentation of him with the armor, the breastplate that has all of the mythological designs. And he's pointing to his troops, and he's carrying the scepter and the boy and the dolphin. Do you remember Arion, the boy on the dolphin? One of Shakespeare's earliest childhood memories was when his dad took him to a country fair, and he was about 12 years old. And in the middle of this, uh, uh, man made lake and all this, uh, the festive things going around on the outside. And there was this, um, floating sculpture of Arion, the boy and the dolphin, and Arion was the one who made the first poetic syntax out of the Greek language and invented the new forms to express things. And when his dad told him this, Shakespeare was just, uh, overjoyed at the fact that, uh, this was really great, uh, to have an image like that. And he never forgot that Augustus, in trying to put out this energy to get it off himself and express it in the Roman world, made images of archetypal significance.

And, of course, the largest image that he made was the Roman Empire, that the Roman Empire was a universal, God given form through Augustus. This was the natural purpose, the ultimate, uh, form that mankind should have taken and now does take. He also commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid to give us a sacred epic, as he said, which will be the basis of this ecumenical civilization. The difference between Homer and Virgil is the difference between a poet who is writing an epic about spiritual individual, the spiritual individual, and Virgil, who is writing about spiritual civilization. It's a different emphasis. Homer's emphasis is upon that individual who will transform himself. Virgil's is upon that individual who will make himself a part of this holy civilization. A different emphasis. So that the Aeneid and the Roman Empire are two of the highly charged instruments that Augustus made. In the third one was a temple of universal peace called the Ara Pacis Augustae Ara Pacis Augusta, and it was on the Via Flaminia, out away from the forum, about, uh, probably about two miles in modern English miles. Augustus own villa, where that statue was the. The porta was out on the Via Flaminia, which then ran north out of Rome, but just, uh, half a mile or so from his villa within sight. In other words, he built the Ara Pacis Augustae, which, unbelievably, has survived all this time.

Of course, it's not above ground now. It's underneath a sort of a forum area where they have museum, um, and souvenir things. But underneath there, the Ara Pacis Augustae is intact. And what's intact there are the fantastic mythological archetypal frescoes which Augustus had put together. And on the frescoes they are surrounding a large, um, area that looks like a gigantic sarcophagus, maybe 12 to 15ft high, and maybe like 25 to 30ft long on each side, and about 10 to 15ft on the shorter sides. And the frescoes on the Ara Pacis Augustae are the Roman Empire equivalent of the energies that were expressed on the frescoes of the Parthenon and the frescoes of the Parthenon, where the great procession in the spring of carrying the great mythological robe of Athena, the peplos up to the Parthenon, and putting it on the goddess in her temple. The frescoes were about what the temple was about. The frescoes enunciated the structure, the archetypal structure of the realization of the purpose of the temple in the Ara Pacis Augustae. The frescoes are the family of Augustus everybody. Aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody. The kids. Everybody. So Augustus was saying, this is the divine Caesar family. We are the gods. We are the gods. And this is no sarcophagus. This is a temple of Pax Romana of universal peace that all mankind will now have from here on out, because we have thought this thing through in our minds and have understood it in our minds.

And this is how it is and will ever be from here on. And in stoic Roman terms, they did a fantastic job, and they must have been absolutely appalled, appalled to realise that just because you think it through isn't enough, it doesn't make it really happen. In fact, the mind is more facile than the materialistic world. Psychic things are much more of a trap than materialistic things. Right in the center of the Ara Pacis Augustae that is, in the front where all these frescoes of the family lead up to is a whole panel that's reproduced here. In sitting right in the middle of this is a woman Tellus mater, Mother Nature. Mother Nature. Because it is the wise family archetypal woman who holds together the family of man. She is sometimes called Tellus. Uh, mater. Or sometimes called Mater Italia. Or Mater Romana? Yeah. The Italian mama. In a cosmic scale. You see, this is the mental Roman equivalent of Sophia, the mental Roman equivalent of the Virgin Mary. The mental Roman equivalent of Athena. Of ISIS. She had absolutely no place in history because all this fell apart within 50 years. All of it. Lucretius begins his stoic epic The Way Things Are. De rerum natura, with an invocation to Venus, and he calls her Creatress, mother of the Roman line. Dear Venus, joy of earth and joy of heaven, you see Tellus. Mater. Venus brought into the Roman family of the Caesars. All things that lived below that heraldry of star and planet.

Whose processional moves ever slow and solemn over us. All things conceived. All things that face the light in their bright visit. The grain bearing fields, the Mariner oceans. Where the wind and cloud are quiet in your presence. All proclaim your gift. Without which they are nothingness. It's absurd just to designate this as Great Mother or eternal feminine. This is the root source of what holds all things together. This is where the energy comes from. This is the source of the power Creatress all proclaim your gift without which they are nothingness. For you that sweet artificer, the earth submits her flowers, and for you the deep of ocean smiles and the calm heaven shines with shoreless light. Our goddess, when the spring makes clear. Its daytime. And a warmer wind stirs from the west a procreative air high in the sky. The happy hearted birds responsive to your coming call and cry. The cattle tame. No longer swim across the rush of river torrents, or skip. And bound and joyous meadows. Where your brightness leads. You see the energy. Since you alone control the way things are. Since without you no thing has come into the radiant boundaries of light. Since without you nothing is ever glad and nothing ever lovable I need, I need you with me. Goddess. In the poem I try to write here on the way things are. And then he skips over. When human life, all too conspicuous, lay foully grovelling on earth, weighed down by grim religion, looming from the skies, horribly threatening mortal men.

A man, a Greek, first raised his mortal eyes bravely against this menace. No report of gods, no lightning flash. Remember, Philo? No lightning flash. No thunder peal made this man cower, but drove him all the more with passionate manliness of mind and will to be the first to spring the tight Baird gates of nature's hold asunder. So his force, his vital force of mind, a conqueror beyond the flaming ramparts of the world. Explored the vast immensities of space with wit and wisdom, and came back to us triumphant, bringing news of what can be and what cannot. Limits and boundaries. The borderline. The benchmark. Set forever. Religion so is trampled underfoot. And by his victory we reach the stars. This was written in 55 BC, and it was written of Epicurus, the great stoic master. You can see what kind of power is operating now. Written the very same year in Alexandria. Lucretius was writing that in Rome someone is writing the Wisdom of Solomon in Alexandria and the Jewish community. Wow. Put this next to Lucretius. Put this in the context of Philo. The wisdom of Solomon love righteousness ye that be judges of the earth. Think of the Lord with a good heart, and in simplicity of heart seek him, for he will be found of them that tempt him not, and showeth himself unto such as.

Do not distrust him for forward thoughts separate from God and His power, when it is tried reproves the unwise. For into a malicious soul wisdom shall not enter, nor dwell in the body that is subject unto sin. For the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee deceit, and remove from thoughts that are without understanding, and will not abide when unrighteousness cometh in. For wisdom is a loving spirit, and will not acquit a blasphemer of his words. For God is witness of his reigns, and a true beholder of his heart, and a hearer of his tongue. For the spirit of the Lord filleth the world, that which containeth all things hath knowledge of the voice, voice, language, word. The words are the seeds of the mind. The sun blossoming mind has that mantric sacred work. Therefore he that speaketh unrighteous things cannot be hid. Neither shall vengeance, when it punishes passed by him. For inquisition shall be made into the counsels of the ungodly. And the sound of his words shall come unto the Lord. For the manifestation of his wicked deeds. For the ear of jealousy heareth all things, and the noise of murmurings is not hid. Therefore beware of murmuring which is unprofitable, and refrain your tongue from backbiting. For there is no word so secret that shall go. For not in the mouth that be lieth slayeth the soul. Notice the interchange. The mouth that believeth slayeth the soul. The mind is the slayer of the real, in the sense that it mistakes what it says for reality.

The mouth that believeth slayeth the soul. Seek not death in the error of your life. Pull not upon yourselves destruction with the works of your own hands. For God made not death, neither hath his pleasure hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. For he created all things that they might have, their being. And the generations of the world were healthful. And there. This is written in Greek, incidentally, not in Hebrew. A healthful in Greek is therapia. God made being. He made everything so that it has its therapia, and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon the earth, no such thing but ungodly men, with their works and words called it into them. Man has made this by his works and words. He has made death, not God. Man has made this if he changes his works, if he purifies his words. It won't obtain. It won't be. This is written the same time about 50 BC. Can you see what a tremendous contrast. Can you see where the Alexandrian Jewish wisdom speaks to the individual in terms of transformation? The Roman cosmology speaks in terms of a power structure of exfoliation. Totally different, totally different veering. And by Augustus time, this had reached the tension point where it was a question now of going one way or the other. Now, one could no longer hold this together in one world.

Hence the famous phrase.

Whose face is on the coin. Well, then it's his. Our currency has no coin, and the face of God is the only face that there is. And his face in that mode is only visible in the community of the elect. Not the church structure, but the community of the elect. However large that is, however large a population of transformed people, that is, whoever they will be, whether they're from Galilee or whether they're from Egypt, or whether they're from Spain, India, it doesn't matter. This is the crucible of the understanding of that time. And there's more, but we'll have to wait till next week because we've gone as far as we can go tonight. But I hope that you get the sense here that we really have a hold of the crossroads, and we're not going to let go. We're not going to slur it, we're not going to rush through it. And we're slowly weaving all of these ends back into this pattern, this tapestry. And next week we're going to bring in, uh, Cicero a little bit again. We're going to bring a lot more Philo in. We're going to bring a little bit of Strabo in, who lived in Alexandria for eight years at that time. We're going to bring some Josephus in, and we're just slowly going to mature and simmer this great transformation that was happening there.

Part of the difficulty that both Cicero and Philo speak to is that so many of the profound realizations of the time were un expressible in any language form that they had. Both Cicero and Philo emphasized the fact that new words had to be made up, because man was seeing things that he had never seen before, and he had no words for them in any language whatsoever. And a lot of the difficulties that came was because the words that they made up and chose, often they appropriated words from other languages, like in English, we would use a French phrase, déja vu. Only people that had no idea of that would misuse that terme. And both Philo and Cicero say this is why cultivation is absolutely essential to transformation. Nobody naive can transform. At all. This is a different emphasis. This means that the individual has got to prepare himself. He can't just be Joe Blow, a truck driver, or Jane Doe, a waitress. They have to prepare themselves to raise themselves up, energize themselves in order to transform. This takes work. This takes effort. This takes continuity. This takes application. There's no laziness. And this was to become a problem because it's just the old human thing of letting things slide that got in the way of a lot of the transformation, so that eventually the esoteric groups were very careful about who they let in.

And from this, the occult flow, the occult traditions became truly esoteric, so much so that you didn't even hear about them. They were underground currents, so much that no one even talked about it anymore. If you knew somebody for 25 years and they recognized that you had really applied yourself, you might be invited to a meeting somewhere, or you might be told a few things or a few double innuendoes might be dropped in your way. And if you respond to them, a little bit more would be given. But everything became hidden and hidden to such an extent that it seemed to be eclipsed and go out. But the traditions have never been broken. Not ever. And it's just that in this day, with the emphasis being placed upon making a even stronger Roman Empire, that the plug has to be pulled. So next week, more Philo. If you want to read ahead a little bit, I'm going to look at Cicero's dream of Scipio, which is the classic stoic cosmology. And it's at the end of De Re Publica, book six. Or sometimes you can find it in libraries. But we're going to look at that and we're going to look at some more Philo.

And in Philo, we're going to look at why certain names in the Holy Scriptures have been changed, and also the allegories of the sacred laws, because Philo is the one who introduces allegorical hermeneutics to the Old Testament reading. And by seeing everything in this allegorical sense, which is very selonian, everything can be made out of everything else, and the only way that you can find your way is to have a guide to help you find the real threads. And this was one of the esoteric beauties of allegory. There were infinite allegories that could be made, and everything was left like that so that you would end up with a swamp, kind of a mentality. If you didn't have a guide. You would eventually have so many millions of interpretations for every single event that you would lose your way. And you needed to have a guide because the very, um, essence of transformation, the very essence of transformation, was the ability to exchange selves, to give oneself up. And it was this exchange of selves that required a complete perfect trust or love. What we would mean grandly and rawly by love. Because only, uh, in an act of love can one give up one's self. So you can't do it yourself. That was the, uh, that was the import of this. Uh allegorizing.

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