Hellenistic Alchemy and the Character of Jesus

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 45 of 54

Hellenistic Alchemy and the Character of Jesus
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, October 15, 1985

Transcript:

This lecture was delivered at the Whirling Rainbow School by Roger Weir on October the 15th, 1985. You got a title for tonight? Uh, yeah. Uh.

Hellenistic alchemy in the character of Jesus.

Jesus. Hellenistic alchemy.

Hellenistic alchemy in the character of Jesus. Oh. Maybe we can begin. As usual, we're trying to pioneer. And ground uncovered like this is very rough terrain and there are no trails at all. So we're making our own footpath here. So if it seems a little incongruous at times, it's simply because it is new and is very difficult for us to hear something new. Recognition is always the basis of knowledge and cognition, as pure perception is very difficult to relate to. We have to come back 2 or 3 times until the cognition is repeated a couple of times, and then we recognize it and then we can understand. So tonight may just be a listening vacuum for a great deal of it, but please don't discount it on that score. Um, try to come back to it in your memory, or come and listen to a cassette of it, or pick up a cassette of it and try and work it in. This lecture is a complement to the one last week, and the one last week was also trail breaking. There is no literature on it whatsoever. No one has ever talked this way, and I suppose that no one just had occasion really to talk this way. Our subject tonight is alchemy, and the way in which alchemy was a major constituent of the personality of Jesus. It's strange to think in these terms, but when you think now that the transformation, the transformation of matter.

Not only from one form to another, but that in order to transform matter from one form to another, it has to, at some time in that transformation, go back to its primordial nature. That it can't just jump from lead to gold. Let the whole nak in transformation, as in transmutation of metals, is that the lead ness dissolves and is no longer there. And what is there is a primordial quality, and it is out of that primordiality that is precipitated the new form, the gold. And that's the central realization in this process, put in psychological terms, in order to change yourself, not just modify it, not just adjust it to this condition or that condition, but to change yourself. Transform yourself. One has to go back to the basic primordial character that was there before any individuals occurred. The basic primordial humanness and only out of that can be precipitated the new person, so that when one is free born, one is reborn out of this primordial womb, out of this basic universality. But in order to get to that basic universality, one has to give oneself up. And this is the most difficult of all procedures, because the self that we have has no inclination whatsoever to give itself up. In fact, its entire structure, its entire career, all of its purposes, its very basic nature, its everyday tactic, and its lifelong strategy is to maintain itself. So it goes contrary to common sense.

It's absolutely the most absurd thing in the world to give oneself up. And yet the phrase is no one can have universal life unless. He lose himself first. The peculiar aspect that has been lacking for us in the Western tradition of not understanding this really specifically in all of its ramifications, is that we have been living in a very flat, provincial kind of a history. We have assumed that the stereotypes that are given to us in grade school are true, and that everything has progressed, and only this age is complicated, and it is a great difficulty for us to appreciate that other ages have been equally complex and difficult. It's nothing new to be human and in trouble. It just simply isn't. And the period that we're looking at was one of the most crucial periods in world history. In fact, just referring to it in terms of time, you have to talk about it as zero BC or zero A.D. and those very phrases give you some sense of the alchemical nature of the moment. It was a time specifically when all previous time had to give itself up, not just a person having to give itself up, but all time before that had to give its nature up, had to relinquish the order which it had been comfortable with, and the order that it had been comfortable with was the Order of Empire. And under that order of empire, the kind of people who existed were the kind of people that we today would call egotistical.

Because they were the only ones who could effectively survive in that kind of a milieu, that kind of a background. And so the high powered person under the order of Empire was the culmination of histories until zero BC. And all of that had to be given up. And it was the same kind of a crisis that any individual faces when they have to give themselves up. And the same lesson had to be learned that the only way that you can do that is in a state of love. You can't do it indifferently, and you can't do it with any other motive other than pure love. Only then is selflessness at all achievable, and you have to give yourself away, not indifferently, but to another. You have to commit yourself that that other is more important than you is more worthwhile supporting than yourself. That whatever you can do, you are dedicated and dedicate that life which you have to that other. The same thing in terms of the vast civilization structure, it had to learn that it had to give itself up in love. And civilizations, just like people balk at that. No, we have the power. And the people who balked most were the Romans. The Romans had the most power. They had the most to lose. And the Romans never gave up their civilization.

They in fact co-opted the new religion which taught giving up one's self, giving up one's civilization. They co-opted that civilization, and they made, instead of a Christian church, a Roman Empire church which has survived down to this day. Now, this is not unusual. This has been observed plenty of times before. But the difficulty is that the world was polarized at this time. It was bifurcated. And the Roman Empire was only one of two empires going in the world at that time. Exactly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire was the Chinese Empire. The Han dynasty. And they were every bit as tough as the Romans. And the extent of their empire was every bit as vast as the Roman Empire. And between these two prizefighters, much like the United States and the Soviet Union today, they divided the world among themselves. That is to say, they divided power and control among themselves. Now, two prizefighters don't move around in the same ring and not know about each other. Two huge power structures like the Han dynasty and the Roman Empire don't exist on the same continental mass and not know about each other. And they did. But the interchange point between the Chinese and the Romans was in an area of the world that was devastated by their interchange. And even till today, we consider it wild and barbaric. Northern Persia, Afghanistan, parts of Tibet, the Gobi Desert in Central Asia, all these areas we think nobody ever could have lived there because it's ruined.

It's devastated. Will, it got ruined. And it got devastated because these two power structures met there with their gloves on. We talked last week about how the original idea of the helper knight, the knight errant, was a Chinese ideal, not a Western ideal. There were no knights errant in ancient Greece. There were heroes, but there were no knights errant. The heroes were princes coming back for the kingdom, or they were heroes coming back to save the people or to save one specific person. But the idea and the ideal of a helper, of the impoverished, of someone to help the impoverished strangers in face of the kingdom, in face of authority, in face of even giving up themselves. This was a Chinese ideal. And we talked about how it came up just before the Han dynasty was established, those couple hundred years when the Zhou dynasty fell and before the Han came up, those couple hundred years were called the period of warring States in Chinese history because it was one war after another, much like the Middle East today, one spot after another, one power group after another for 200 years, and in this incessant instability was born the ideal that there need to be helpers of the downtrodden. It is not their fault that these power structures are fighting. They're hungry. They're dispossessed through conditions which are not of their own making.

It is not natural. It is a man made catastrophe, and the sense of balance in certain strong individuals was that they need help, that somebody has to come in and do battle against those power groups so as to ease the pressure on the impoverished. Somebody has to come in and provide for them. And if you can't provide the kind of nourishment that food and clothing and shelter provide, at least you can give them courage of heart, because that's what human beings need. First thing they need to know that there's somebody else out there other than the hopeless situation. And so the Chinese ideal of the knight errant, born in the period of warring States, was transmitted to the West. And the very first Western knight errant was Jesus. He's the very first one in Western history to help the poor, because they need to be helped, because it's an unnatural condition. They've been put in this condition not by their own making or their own doing, but by be because they are innocent bystanders in power plays. They're the children. They're the poor. They're the dispossessed. They're the good people who can't by the power structure. They'd love to if they could. They can't do it. It doesn't sit right on their conscience. Those are the people that needed to be helped. And Jesus sets up in himself the very first Western knight errant, and all the rest of the Western knights errant come out of the experience of Jesus.

The great mythological explosion of Knight Errantry chivalry. King Arthur is the development of the secret message of Jesus in the England and France of the sixth early sixth century AD. And every knight errant all the way down from Robin Hood or Don Quixote. Any of those Western figures are all descended from Jesus, who understood the veracity from the Chinese experience. Oh, yeah. Don't be surprised. Don't be surprised if somebody with the insight of Jesus, somebody who'd done a lot of traveling like he had done as a young man who had seen human nature with great perception, had seen through to the quintessence of all the civilizations. He wasn't parochial. If you want to make him parochial in your mind, then you'll have to recognize it's because of your own outlook. When we talk about somebody being universal, we talk about it being world renowned for all time. Another element that came over from the Chinese at this time was alchemy. Alchemy. And the curious thing is that alchemy doesn't really originate with the Chinese, at least not at it's very far back. Origins. Alchemy originates in the Middle East. About 2000 BC, Sumeria, the ancient king lists and treasure lists always talk about testing the gold to make sure it's real. You're not going to put this into the royal treasury until you test it to make sure it's real. The inescapable conclusion is that somebody was making unreal gold.

In fact, it was so common that you had to test it. That gold was not gold. Untested, and that one of the criteria for royal gold was that it had been tested 100 times. That's always the phrase that's used. This gold has been tested 100 times. It's real. And the very metaphor of the real person is that they have been tested, quote, 100 times. They're going to be the same tomorrow that they were today because that's what they are. And next year or ten years or other conditions, they're not going to change them. That's what they are, because they have been tested. But they didn't get that way purely growing up. Naturally, they have been transformed. Very few people are naturally gold like that and real. Almost everybody has to be remade. Transformed has to go through that experience of having to give oneself up in love and experience a new self coming out. But the Chinese developed alchemy to a point that was more sophisticated than the West in Hellenistic times. They developed processes of making transmutations, which were in advance of those in the West. And one of the advances that they made was to deepen the metaphorical mystical recognition of the midpoint that had to be reached. The Western alchemy always and forever has been preoccupied with the process. Step by step. And that's what everybody just wants to know step by step. Just tell me the steps.

But the Chinese were interested in that midpoint, that zero point. What is that? How come that's so indispensable? It's not just another step. It's a quality that has no particular quality. What is it? The Chinese call it the Dao. And because of the Dao philosophy in China, they stewed over this and wouldn't let go of it like a dog worrying a bone just wouldn't let go of it. And around the second century BC, the Chinese mystical philosophers began to understand that this, in fact, is the working fulcrum. This eternal non thingness state is the fulcrum of the transmutation. It's what makes it work that without that one gets false gold. Oh, it looks good. The appearance is for all appearances, just right. It's yellow, it shines. You can even make it so that if you scratch it, it'll come out like a deep scratch. But one thing that was never lost, East or West was the knowledge of the crucial test called cupellation. Cupellation is where the so-called gold, to see if it's real is put into an ashen pot. And subjected to a refining fire, and that refining fire over a long, slow period of time builds and transmutes. Oxidizes, makes chlorides depending on what you add. Sometimes we'll make oxides, and almost everything will be leached away into the ash bowl itself, or into these oxides or chlorides or sulfides, sometimes along the edge of the bowl.

And the only thing that will still remain in the center on the surface, not absorbed, not changed as real goal. The bowl. The Ash bowl will become red hot, and right in the center of it will be a little button, a liquid button of pure gold. And that's the only thing that will not go so that the essence of transmutation to make real gold was to find out what doesn't go, what isn't phony, what isn't just appearance, what is real. And that drop of gold can be put through that cupellation process a hundred times. It's still there. It doesn't go away. There's no way to reduce it. So that the goal was seen to be the presentation side of the invisible Dao. This is what in this realm corresponds visibly to what invisibly is the Dao, the unchanging, the fulcrum. And so it was just a little hitch, a little step in the understanding to think that there must be some way to take portions of that gold and add it to a human being, and progressively immortalize the human body. There must be some way to do that. And there's plenty of Chinese emperors who died prematurely of poisoning, because not always with the gold pure. And it doesn't hurt you to have like I have gold teeth. You can live with that. But it doesn't do too good to be swallowing bits of gold because it just stays in the system, especially when it's mixed with things like mercury, uh, residues.

You get mercury poisoning, and you can see in Chinese dynastic histories where a lot of this covetousness for immortality came up. All the lives are short. It's almost like in direct proportion, grasping for immortality and ending up poisoned. It was the perfect metaphor for what was wrong with human nature, and it was also the perfect metaphor to see that it's not the material side of eternity that conveys immortality, it's the immaterial side that conveys immortality. But the difficulty always with man's mind, always conniving. Where is that? Is that under the earth? Is that up in the skies? And the question became one of where do you go when you die? That reluctance to think that you just disappear, where do you go? Do you go up to the heavens? Do you go underneath the earth to some place, or do you go to some other place on the earth, some western land, some eastern land? Or is it that, like in Egypt, that your body needs to be preserved because it's just part of you that goes away, just your breath, your car, and it'll come back after a while. It has to have some home to be in. These were real problems and they were always associated with alchemy, always there, especially after the second century BC. It was like something that just wouldn't go away. Keep nagging at people in Alexandria.

Which was the melting pot for all of these ideas, like the Los Angeles today, you could find anybody and everybody. Now, if you look at a survey of the United States 1985, you wouldn't find almost any mention at all of Daoists as a quantity of United States religious life, no mention at all. There might be five. Hundred thousand churches in the United States, and there's no Dallas temple. But you look around and you see that that kind of a concept is everywhere, floating around. It came here from China. It's the same thing in ancient Alexandria. The ideas were floating around and there were, from time to time, individuals. There were Chinese traders that got as far as Syria. We talked last time about how the Chinese dynastic histories talk about the King Mu, who was a contemporaneous figure with King Solomon 1000 BC, and how he journeyed all across his vast domains and the deserts, the great sandy deserts and the great mountains, and visited the royal Queen of the West, who seems very much like the Queen of Sheba. And we saw how in AD 133 BC there's a great Chinese travelogue of visiting Persia, visiting the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Greek kingdoms of Persia, and doing an exchange. We know the efficacy of the exchange, because what the Chinese brought there at that time was the peach tree, the pear tree, the apricot tree, the rose, the peony. The West had none of this before.

130. Widespread they are now. Look how quickly they took root. Will the Chinese ideas of the knight errant and of alchemy came back into the West and flooded it around that time, first century BC? There's almost no indication in the popular sense, because the power structures were not looking at this. They didn't want to hear about this helping the poor. We don't want to hear it transforming things into gold. The gold is ours. You keep away from this. You don't need to know about that. This is how power structures operate. Anybody who's lived in our time knows that all too well. But there's always someone, some perceptive person, who says to himself, this is valuable. There's something in here that could be developed. It may not be in the fullest form, but it can be put into a fuller form. All you need is the hint. All you need is the clue. And Jesus was that kind of a person who could see the quintessential understanding and realise that what made empires and egotistical people had to be cured? And there's nothing like the quiet flame of the refining fire to cure people of egotism, to cure empires, of this tyrannical aggressiveness. That quiet, refining fire. But in that quiet flame of the heart, there's a crisis that comes up. It's the crisis of transmutation. And this is why one has to keep that calm application, that continuity, all the way through.

It's like a single motion, because somewhere in that motion is this crisis. And it's a nightmare because everything that you fear comes up. Every single thing that you fear comes up all at once. There's no defence. The knack. The trick is to offer no defence. It is only by offering no defence that you can survive. Because those powers, those energies, do not come simply from a personality. It's not simply that you're creating a problem for yourself and that's all there is to it. It's that you're evoking and bringing up energies and powers which are very vastly much more powerful than any individual. And it's this that if you offer a defense, not only will the defense be broken, but you will have to identify with the defense in order to effectively offer it. And that's how people get broken. But even in that condition, they can be brought back to wholeness by being shown that nothing really ever broke about themselves. That their real essential nature was untouched by the whole process. And this was the nature of that great alchemical process known as Greek tragedy. To show you that nobody broke, but to do it in the context of the refining fire. That was alchemy. That transmutation in Egypt. And we're speaking now about Hellenistic Egypt. We're speaking about the Greeks had taken over Egypt, and they've been there for a couple of hundred years, and they've put on Egyptian robes and blend it together, the Greek and Egyptian religions as best they could.

They put an overlay of Greek cities and Greek roads on top of the map that had Egyptian cities and Egyptian roads. And in order to fortify themselves, in order to fortify their position as superior to the Egyptians, they did what the ancient Hebrews did. The ancient Hebrews brought the best of many different traditions in and made a better grand tradition. And the Greeks did the same thing in order to overshadow the indigenous Egyptian religion, which was very, very deeply entrenched, remember 3000 years old, but had degenerated into superstition by that time. How degenerate. Here's a paragraph from an Egyptian magical book from the third century AD. This is after 200 years of Christianity in Egypt. This is what the popular Egyptian mind was still thinking about in terms of transmutation, a potion. You take a little shaving of the head of a man who has died a violent death, together with seven grains of barley that have been buried in a grave of a dead man. You pound them with ten, op. Otherwise nine of apple seeds. You add blood of a worm of a black dog to them, and a little blood of your second finger that's near your heart, and so on and so on and so on. And you give this to the woman that you want to control, and she drinks it and she can't resist you.

That's the state of mind. After 200 years of Christianity. You can imagine what it was when there had not been anything like that whatsoever. It was abject ignorance. We don't have anything today that comes close to that. At least outside of Hollywood, maybe in Hollywood, we have it. There was an Alexandrian. Chemist who lived about the second century, who took upon himself the name of a Greek philosopher called Democritus. Democritus was the one who first envisioned atoms that the primal constituent of all things. All things are made up eventually of atoms in different arrangements and so forth. The atomic theory of Democritus. But this Democritus lived about 200 years after the Greek Democritus. And this Democritus is often referred to as bolus bolus, if you like, or in Greek, Bolos bolus. Democritus. And he lived in one of the Delta cities called Mendez. It was not an Egyptian city. It was a Greek city. Greco-egyptian, as they say. Mendez. Mendez had been the name of the first unifier of Egypt. So the Greeks, in order to make this an important center, used his name. It's like calling some city Washington because of George Washington. Well, bolus lived in Mendez in Egypt in the Delta second century BC, and he is the first one who began to write about the transmutation of matter as a medical therapy of restoring human beings back to wholesomeness by using transmuted matter. So that in Bolos, Democritus in the Alexandrian Hellenistic world was born.

The idea that there's an inner penetration of secret medicine to restore you back to health, and the transformation of material to bring it back into a new reality. And this interpenetration of ideas very, very quickly was pressed together, and it became a single powerful idea that there is a secret health to the individual, which requires transmutation. And this became one of the dominating, synthesizing ideas of late Hellenistic Alexandria. The first century BC, especially the second half of it, was dominated by this idea. One of the documents that we have from this time period, written about 50 BC in Alexandria. It's in the Bible. It's called the book of the Wisdom of Solomon. And it was written in Alexandria about 50 B.C. and it talks about wisdom. The book of Wisdom, of Solomon. Wisdom is not an abstract thing, but wisdom is personified as a woman, a holy woman. Her name is Sophia. Sophia. And Sophia is divine. She will not make her home in an individual who is profane. One must be pure. For Sophia to enter their life. And so Sophia becomes almost in Plato's definition of reality, that the eternal will occurs in time, and that time is the moving image of eternity, and that somehow the whole sense of history is to see it as an eternal event, moving in a cycle, in a rotation. And it never goes anywhere, but always points to the eternal presence that is always there.

And that Sofia is the recognition of this timeless wisdom in an individual, and only he who is born from that transmutation from that Sofia is himself eternal. And the problem is that it is so difficult to do that no one had quite done it until Jesus, born of the Mary of the Sophia, born from this timeless center, beyond the appearances, beyond the transmutation. This was extremely powerful in Alexandria, but it was not received in what we call today Israel. It was not received in Palestine. In Jerusalem, the temple and its tradition, its Torah, its laws. This was the tradition. One could only work within these perimeters. But the message in Alexandria was different, that it was exactly those perimeters that yielded empire, the tendency towards egotism, the self-aggrandizement of power. It was exactly that that was wrong. So that there had to be a transmutation not only of individuals individually, but of that whole civilization, that whole law as an ensemble. It had to be transmuted. There had to be a new law, or rather, a new condition that wasn't a law, but was a message of love, not of sentimental love, but of the most arcane transmutation of love experience. This is what had to be. That was the major central problem. It was the practical issue. Nothing further could have been done with those histories. They had run themselves dry. They had run themselves into madness.

And those individuals who tried to still live by those rules, by those laws, found themselves within 2 or 3 generations in untenable positions psychologically. The whole dynasty of the Caesars came to a crashing halt in the madness of Nero. He's the one who inherited Roman power. That's what it looked like. He finally burnt the city. The very empire that he's supposed to protect. It's supposed to be proud of even that. And it became apparent in the first century AD within just a few decades, that that was a dead end. You could mark that kind of lifestyle with skull and crossbones. That was poison. It leads only to death. There's nothing alive in that. And it was made apparent, by contrast, because the very thing that Jesus worked with was life, not with metals. He wasn't interested in metals, wasn't interested in gold. He was interested in life. He was interested in transmuting people who had lived in a death way into people who were going to be reborn and live in a life way, because that had to be done. It was the most practical issue of the day. And the primordiality of life was light. Not blood, not flesh, not bones, not even dust. Light. The primordial quality behind life was light, and so life had to be reabsorbed back into the primordial light for it to be reborn and re precipitated out as a living life that could now go on and be fruitful and fructify.

And that light, that primordiality of light as the midpoint and the primordial fulcrum of life was enfolded and brought together in a very sacred word. And so we read in the Gospel of John, in the beginning was the word, and the word was light, and the light was the life of men. He was that word. He is that light. He is that life of men. The word was a name. It was a name. Now, a name is not just a description of an object. It's not just a label of a thing. A name is the most compressed myth. The penultimate form of a myth is a name. A name is the most potent form of a myth. And the myth is not a lie. The myth is an expressive structure of feeling. It's a feeling toned, expressive structure. And it is expressive of talking about. Of using language to talk about what we do, the rituals. And so the core of the word of a name is like the bringing together of the whole mythology of light into that seed, and that whole mythology of light is expressive of what we do, of the ritual of life, of how life actually goes on, is able to be what it is. And that's why it was such a powerful insight, capable easily of being called a revelation, that one has to get back to that primordiality so that that seed of the word can be fruitful in that primordial light and reform the nature of life again.

So it can be because life in the old way had run itself out of its cycle, couldn't go on anymore. It didn't have any nutrition anymore. People had been flatting out for a couple of hundred years. By that time, the old traditions didn't work anymore. There were there was no way that you could get nourishment from them anymore. And there was no combination that would work because you can't make something alive, no matter how ingeniously you put together dead things. There is no way in the world that these little bits of blood and bone and so forth are ever going to make real love, ever going to really have an effect in a life tradition. And so this mentality had to be left behind. But people had become inured to thinking that they were who they were in terms of this kind of magical mentality. But there had to be a new magic, a new magic, which was life giving rather than materialistically manipulative. And that was the difference. And that difference was made by Jesus and made in Alexandria, not made in Jerusalem, not even made in India. It was made there in Alexandria and was taken from Alexandria. When it was mature and taken back to the very center of the old order. In the very center of the old order was in Jerusalem, was in Judea.

It wasn't time to take it to Rome. That would happen in another 1015 years. But at first it had to be taken back to Jerusalem. And that's why when he showed up, when John the Baptist, his cousin, their mothers were sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist were sisters. The same family, John the Baptist and Jesus, were cousins. John didn't recognize them at first because he hadn't seen him since he was about 12 years old, and he was 30 now. And then he recognized him and could see and could see that the mission had been accomplished, that the alchemical transformation had happened in him was totally different from everybody else there, including John the Baptist himself, who was as purified as you could get in the old way. There just simply wasn't any more purified you could get. But as Jesus said, even the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist, who was the best of the old way, because this is a new way. This is the kingdom of God, not the old kingdom of empires paying obeisance to the divine in a specific place on specific days for specific reasons. This was now universally free. Any place, any time, for any reason the kingdom was going to be there wherever 2 or 3 gathered together in my name. That's where it is. You don't need no ticket.

You just climb on board this quality of reality. Transformation was so new, it was so startling that most people didn't hear it. The only people who really understood it were people who had to hear it over and over again until they could recognize the disciples couldn't hear it. Most of the disciples just could not in three years understand. They had to puzzle it out afterwards among themselves. They had to live and experience and find out for themselves. This is, I guess, what we're supposed to do. I guess this is the way that we do it. It's like in the Acts of John, the apocryphal book, that the Council of Chalcedon in 451 threw out of the Old Testament or the New Testament in the Acts of John. John discovers that he can not only raise the dead as Jesus had raised the dead, he not only had the power, but he could give it to others and gave it to that woman whose husband had died. And John raised the woman back from the dead. And then the husband had died of a heart attack from broken heart, because he he just didn't know whether his wife was going to make it. And then John told the woman, you go in, you raise him from the dead. But you have to keep that stillness, that dow, that zero bc purity of the divine light alive in yourself, and know that it's there.

Then you can do this. And she went in, crying and trembling, biting her lip. But inside, in her soul she was quiet. She had that light. She called his name Tremblingly and in the right way. And he came back. Not a fairy tale. The veracity of what was going on, that the transmutation was not something arcane in the sense that you had to be esoteric and study for a lifetime and keep it all secret and everything, but that it was arcane in the natural sense that most people wouldn't believe it. That's the true arcane. Most people would not have the lovingness in themselves to give up their old conceptions, to give up their old addiction to the material world, to give up the sociological sense of recognition that I belong here and this is what's real. And I have to go to work here, and that's what's real. And I've got to feed these, and that's what's real. Not able to give all that up and find that out of that primordiality that is still there. That doesn't go away. Out of that goal that will not go away comes re precipitated a new person who then can really feed those young ones that need it, really build those buildings that need building. It's not against life. It is for life. It's just not doing life in a death like appearance. And that was the transmutation. And that's what happened in Alexandria with Jesus.

And it was to Alexandria, back to Alexandria, that the original teachings went through Saint Mark. That's where he went. He went to Alexandria after Peter died. He was a secretary in Rome. And after Peter was martyred, Mark took all the letters of Peter and his own experience. And John Mark went to Alexandria and founded the church there. He didn't found the same church that was founded by Peter in Rome, or by Paul in his mentality. He founded that church of the individual who was willing to transmute from the old self to the new so that the communion, the Eucharist, where he says, this is my body take of it, this is my blood take of it is not a ritual in some sociological sense, not a ritual in some psychological sense, but is the real efficacy of the transformation of reality from death into everlasting life. And that was what was happening, and that was different. And all during the first century AD, with this wild energy of reality possible. And people could know people who did this. There were all sorts of attempts to bottle it. We've got to get control of this. You can do a lot with this. Eventually, ancestors of those people thinking the same way took over the whole Roman Empire with what they thought was the the real stuff. The pagan Roman Empire never had a chance. But those people made the mistake of thinking that that church structure then, was the real guaranteer.

It's the same kind of magical mentality as taking bits of blood here and there and mixing it with a few things here and there that the real transmutation was the transmutation of individuals and of civilizations. But the civilization didn't transmute the one that did transmute. The civilization that did change was the Greek. The Roman civilization just adjusted to the new conditions of empire. But the Greek tradition and the ancient Egyptian tradition, they transmuted. And the Greek transmutation turned out to be what we call today. Gnosticism. And the Egyptian transformation turned out to be what we call today Hermetic. The Hermetic tradition was the Christian transmutation of the ancient Egyptian, and the Gnostic was the Christian transformation of the Greek and the Gnostic and the Hermetic, both coming out of Alexandria. Like the primordial Christian, all three of them came right out of Alexandria, and very powerfully for a while in the second century AD, irradiated the whole classical world with a mystery tradition. And it was in the third century, as we'll see in Alexandria, that that whole tradition was brought back together by Plotinus and placed into a jewel of unity, and then took that Jewel of Unity to Rome and taught there for many, many years, and almost succeeded in transmuting Roman civilization. He had the Roman emperor of the day, Aurelius, and his wife, as students, and many of the Roman senators, was almost on the verge of being able to transmute that stubborn nut that had never changed its character, only its coloring, that chameleon called the Roman Empire.

But it just didn't quite work. There was an epidemic of illness. The Emperor died, Plotinus died, and the whole tradition went underground, became something esoteric, and few people would whisper. And it remained that way until the 20th century. It has remained that way for 1700 years, but all the time the so-called esoteric traditions have been largely teaching surrogates and made up things instead of the real life giving transformation. And that's why from time to time, there have been developments only to fall back again because they've been surrogates. But we need now to have the real thing. The time for pleasing surrogates is long over, and so a lot of this kind of material is being refreshed, just for openers. This is sort of like nursery school not to put anybody down, but just to see that we can learn something if we just will. And what we can learn is extraordinarily wonderful in its veracity. Well, I had hoped to get into describing to you some of the more delightful things of Chinese alchemy, and then I was going to show how that exactly came into Alexandria, but I didn't get to it at all. So I've got the materials here and marked down. You can look at it if you want. Let's take the rest of the evening off and hope we have some food. It's coming, he says.

Happy birthday.

To you. Oh, it's my birthday. Birthday to.

You. Happy birthday, dear Archer.

Happy birthday to you. And many more.

Thank you.

Thank you. I wish I had a big cake to share with you. I've got some balloons.