Simon Magus

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 46 of 54

Simon Magus
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, October 22, 1985

Transcript:

This is the lecture that was delivered by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School on October 22nd, 1985.

The title of the lecture tonight is Simon Magus, and Simon Magus is a very shadowy figure. He is usually referred to by the early Church Fathers as the first Gnostic. The. The title of the lecture tonight is Simon Magus and Simon Magus, a very shadowy figure. He is, um, usually referred to by the early Church Fathers as the first Gnostic. And Simon Magus was from Samaria. If you recall, Samaria was between Judea and Galilee. It was a province. And the Samaritans were notoriously difficult people. Hence the story of the Good Samaritan, who was unusual. In Samaria. There was a interesting population of Jews. And in order to understand some of the character of Simon Magus, we have to review a little bit of Jewish history. Ancient Jewish history. You may have heard of the Jewish exile, the Babylonian exile. They capture of the Jews, and the exportation of them to the Babylonian Empire happened in two stages. 100 years apart. In the first stage, the outcry was raised by the prophet Isaiah, and the tone of Isaiah of dire warnings, uh, is indicative of the catastrophic nature of that first seizure. People were seized by the Persian, uh, armed forces and just physically bound up and deported back to be used as slaves. Those Jews in that first seizure lost their religion. They were ground up in, assimilated into the Persian Empire mentality. A hundred years later, the Southern Jews were finally overcome.

These Jews had had 100 years, or about 4 or 5 generations, to prepare themselves, and when they were seized and carried off into captivity, they did not lose their Judaism. And the prophet who spoke out at that time was Jeremiah. And Jeremiah's lamentations are quite different from Isaiah's, uh, piercing thunderstorm. Isaiah gives us the, uh, notion and the impression that, uh, woe unto all. But Jeremiah gives us the impression, woe unto me I am willing to suffer. God will redeem me. Those Jews did not lose their religion. And it was from the second captivity that the apocryphal stories of Daniel come from Daniel, who rose to be the, um, third most powerful man in the Persian Empire, even though he was a Jewish, uh, descent. Because he was a natural visionary. It's an indication of the internal quality of the Jews in the second wave, in the exile, that they were able to endure suffering and thus could be redeemed for their suffering. When the Jewish populations were returned to the Holy Land. And in that return, one finds that most of the assimilated Persian Jews went to Samaria, and most of the Unassimilated Judean Jews are the ones who reoccupied, uh, the Jerusalem area, and some of them went up into Galilee. So the Samaritans were ex Jews, but ex Jews in a very specific way that they were persianized in their mind. Babylonian and the Babylonians, above all, were practicers of magic.

In Babylonian magic was the, uh, standard arcane wisdom for thousands of years, so that Simon Magus is a characteristic, archetypal wise man of the Samarian Persian, uh, Hellenized Jews. Not to think of him as just, uh, just somebody whose hocus pocus or just a black magician he is extraordinarily important. The place that we ran across him is in the New Testament, in the book The Acts of the apostles. And in chapter eight we read of Philip the disciple Philip's mission to Samaria. And it reads like this. This is the Anchor Bible translation made about ten years ago. Those who had been put to flight now traveled through the country preaching the word. Philip traveled down to the chief city in Samaria, and the chief city would be what we call today Nablus and Nablus. In ancient times was called Shechem. Inception was extraordinarily famous in very early Jewish history. It was the site of the deep, deep well that Jacob owned. It was also the site of a great oak tree, which was the sign of the strength of the land. And it was under that oak tree that Joshua delivered his last message to the Jewish elders, telling them that he had been the bridge between Moses and them, that he had been the source of power to bring them to be. Now they should honor the tradition for as long as they live, and a great rock was set under this oak to commemorate that.

Also, Sutum was the place that Joseph was buried when Joseph was, uh, dead in Egypt. His body was brought back to his father's well and buried nearby to consecrate the land so that Shechem, or Nablus, where Philip went, was an archetypally important city to the Jewish people at this time. And remember now what we were talking about last week, that there are two levels operating about 600 years back as a stream of consciousness imagery, but about 2200 years back is an archetypal oceanic impress. It's the archetypal significance of Jacob's well and Joseph's burying place, and Joshua's last state of address to the Jewish nation. So it makes this extremely poignant that the disciple Philip goes to that location to deliver the message. And who does he find there but Simon Magus? It's extremely important. It's just filled with archetypal crackling lightning and significance. The crowds all listened to what Philip said because they heard and saw the acts he performed. For many of those who were possessed by spirits were healed, possessed by spirits, demons, demonic. One would be talking to someone, and in a flash at a cue, their eyes would glaze and look with that inhumane stare. And snarl at you in the next moment. They'd be chewing gum, that sort of thing. Well, when Philip went there, because he had the the power to call them out given by the master, he would call them out.

And this was a healing. It wasn't band aid, first aid. It was surgery. Pneumatic surgery on a chronic, uh, possession. So when these spirits shrieked with a loud voice and left them, and many who were crippled and paralyzed were cured, so that there was great joy in that city. But a man named Simon had earlier been in the city and practiced magical arts. He had fascinated the people of Samaria and asserted that he was some great person, and all great and small had followed him, saying, he is the so called great power of God. This phrase. In fact, great power of God in the original has in the original, uh uh, Greek has an affinity to an Aramaic, uh, statement or phrasing, which doesn't really mean great power of God so much, but great power of the highest angelic being. Not of God, the ultimate, but of the first emanation. That first powerful angel who then creates all the other angels who then, in their turn create the world. So what Simon Magus was saying is that he was personifying the highest hierarchical power in an angel ology. So he had fascinated. Notice the word. He had fascinated the people. He is a great power. And they had followed him because he had long awed them with his magic. But since they had faith in Philip. See, now Philip comes on the scene with his preaching of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ.

They were baptized both men and women. Simon himself also came to believe, and after his baptism he was with Philip continually. It's interesting. And when he saw great signs and acts of power take place, he was overwhelmed. So when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God. Because this was a very big happening. They sent the two most powerful of the apostles, both Peter and John. Both were sent. So now you have Philip, you have Peter, and you have John, and you have Simon Magus. You have a quaternary of four of the most powerful individuals alive at that time in the world, all at this mystical, archetypally charged city of of Nablus. And when these arrived, they prayed for them that they might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, which had not yet come upon any of them. Now the the baptisms that had been going on were in the name of Jesus Christ, but that there was an esoteric baptism which brought on the Holy Spirit, which was an additional thing, something else. So John and Peter and Philip, when they were together, they brought then this more esoteric baptism and of course, who's looking over their shoulder, already impressed and now absolutely stunned, because the the magic is even much more profound than he had ever even dreamed of.

They laid their hands upon them, and they received then the Holy Spirit. And when Simon saw that the spirit was granted them through the apostles laying on of hands. He brought them money and said, give me this power also, that I may lay hands and have them receive the Holy Spirit. But Peter said to him, May your silver perish with you. For you have thought to buy the gift of God with money. Is extraordinary, important thing. Money is not just cash or money. It's materiality. It's the essence. It's the quintessence of materiality. It's money is the spirit, Mercurius, of the material world. It's what makes it mobile and work. Simon is mistaking that this is a material happening. He is used to thinking that the material world is manipulated by powers, and that the powers are arranged in hierarchies, and that people who have access to the powers then can manipulate the world. Such people are inspired. They're prophets. They're those who are, uh, listened to as being enthused. And if one doesn't like what they say, one says that they are possessed. It's a very fine line between being possessed and being prophetic or being religiously enthused. But what the apostles were doing had nothing to do with any of those, because the apostles were what in Greek is called the pneumatici. They worked purely through the spirit. There was no intermediary whatsoever. That the Spirit of God has no intermediary with the world.

It's flush with it. Which is why the world becomes purified and becomes sacred. But Simon cannot understand this. He is the archetypal figure who believes that there must be steps, there must be techniques, there must be knacks, tricks which one can learn. And of course, one can buy this instruction. Can you not? You cannot. You cannot. Peter says you have no part, much less right in this matter, for your heart is not true with God. Remember about 2 or 3 weeks ago in the book, the apocryphal book of the Acts of John, how John raised a woman from the dead, and her husband was so terrified that there wasn't going to work that he had died of a heart attack, and the woman, when she was raised from the dead, John told her then to go and raise her husband from the dead, and she was able to do that, and he counseled her. He said, the only thing you have to do is keep your inner mind quiet and keep your belief firm that with that coordinate in place. With faith, which was called in Greek pistis with pistius and equanimity. One has the right coordinates to bring the power of God directly there. And so Peter is saying, your heart is not trued with God. You're not there. Turn away from this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that the ambition of your heart may be forgiven.

For I can see you are headed for bitterness and the chains of sin. But Simon answered and said, pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said will happen to me. Notice the craftiness. Notice the use of somebody dealing with curses to invert them and turn them back. Still not understanding that it was not a curse that was given. That the admonition was not in the form of a curse, hoping to bring powers to bear against the material world, but was an exhortation to the individual to transform. And that's the difference. Between the religious and the metaphysical person. The metaphysical person. Person thinks that one context powers and then works on the material world, whereas the religious person sees that the material world is just a turn away from being spiritual in and of itself. This is why the metanoia of the human mind is not a mental phenomenon, but a pneumatic phenomenon. And one becomes pure, one becomes purified not because some intermediary bestows it in the form of power by manipulation, but because the person becomes directly in contact with the divine. And that this was the esoteric message of Jesus. There are no intermediaries. There is no time lapse. There is no spatial problem with distance. It is instantaneous whenever it occurs. All one need do is turn genuinely there, that the only knack there is is to believe that that is so, and to do it with integrity.

Now that doubling quality produced an extraordinary confusion in those who could not experience it. Because the mind is boggled by the simplicity of this, but the ambitiousness of the human heart. Unrefined, is absolutely covetous, lustful for the miraculous transformations that happen. How do you do it? I want to do it. Give me that power. Who do I contact? Who do I manipulate? So Simon Magus is that figure who has the archetypal presentation of that, that he is, in his own mind, a great power of God, not of God so much, but of a hierarchy. That God allows some hierarchy. And of course, this is exactly what in the Book of Enoch was called the watchers. The watchers are the fallen angels who then come to terrorize men because they mate with the daughters of men, and their offspring are part fallen angel and part men, and their souls do not go to heaven when they die, nor do they leave the earth and go to shale, but they remain on the earth as demonic figures. And because it's like a radiation that never goes away, it accumulates century by century. And so in the time that we're speaking of, the overwhelming belief was that the whole world was haunted by demonic forces and the only protection that one had against this was to have ends with angelic levels that controlled those demonic forces by power.

And so a very subtle covetousness of power was engendered in the mind of clever individuals in the world at that time. Our time is very much like that. Incidentally, we are besieged with phonies today who look for the power. One of the most interesting little books on this question is called Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety by E.R. Dodds, a classical scholar. And he writes in here, uh, right at the beginning, many surveys have been made of why the Roman Empire fell and the surveys looking at the economic, the social, all of the various causes turn up. No. The one item that seems to have been pervasive, though, was that there was a loss of nerve, a loss of nerve in regard to one specific quality the inability of human beings to lead a normal life, a normal natural life that everything was skewed towards trying to get in on the best manipulation possible for one's protection. The only way I'm going to be safe is if I got the right amulets made by the right people. That's very reductionistic, but it's that kind of thought. Therefore, those who confer this power one better keep in good with them. And so this morass comes up in the mind of the time. And this was the cause of the dismemberment of the Roman Empire in Rome. In other words, what seemed to possess people at the time was a sense of the unreality of the world, that the natural world was unreal and that the real world was this hierarchical world of power.

So that human personalities were shaped not on the natural world, not in terms of human beings, but shaped increasingly in terms of invisible hierarchies, invisible beings, and in fact, um, magical illusion then becomes almost synonymous with nature. That nature itself is some magical illusion and is not real. Therefore, one need not pay any attention to nature. Don't look at what's going on. But try to learn about the magic, the powers, the beings, and so forth. This created a demonic world. This was a demonic world. It was like a super charged fog that had just surrounded the world. And very much in this regard. Jesus comes like a lightning rod and grounds the sparks. Grounds that energy shoots it back into the earth so that the naturality of the earth becomes divine. This is the, uh, central, uh, change that happens so that the Christian communities begin to exemplify a very, very strange kind of quality. They begin to understand themselves as not isolated individuals who are targets of angelic powers, demonic powers, but they begin to conceive of themselves as interrelated. That all human beings in the community are interrelated. And it's this interrelation of the members of the community that then produces the chance for the mystical face of God to manifest. Remember the old Jewish idea that God shows his face to no person.

But the New Testament, based on Hellenistic Hellenistic Judaism, is that God shows his face to the community of the elect. It's the achievement of the interpersonal among a community of people that then allows for the manifestation of the face of God. So the early Christian communities begin to be extraordinarily outstanding for people who are unflappable. They are simple people. They are workmen. They are craftsmen. They are not sophisticated at all, but they have an enviable, noticeable quality. They're not disturbed. They're rather quiet and calm. They work together and get things done. And this becomes noticeable in the classical world. And it doesn't matter how rich you are or how intelligent you are, if you are jangled because you fear somebody is going to manipulate you, and you see people walking by every day who are at home in the world, you begin to become curious and asking them, what's the secret? They reply to you, faith. It's absolutely a conundrum. Faith. Pistis. How can faith do that? Blind faith. And so all of the, um, pagan writers of the first and second and third centuries AD castigate Christians as being stupid blockheads who are too dumb to realize this is a dangerous world. That must be why they're so calm. They just don't know all the problems that there are. But slowly, slowly, the communities grow. Slowly, slowly, it becomes apparent that this is the only workable way in the world.

This is how Christianity spread. And it took a couple of hundred years for that snowball effect to become so noticeable that no one could ignore it anymore, that the Big Magic's was not to play with magic in the first place. This demonic quality is manifested, uh, very often in, as Dodds says here. The different kinds of demonic possessions that were recognized. There were, um, prophetic spokesmen for the supernatural. There were the entity filled with God. People that we would say today are enthusiasts. Uh, religious enthusiasts. And there were also people who were demon ridden, die Daemonites. And then there were the ecstatic joy, those who are able, um, occasionally to go out and, and ecstatically receive visions. And there were some other minor ones. And then there were the pneumatici, those who spoke from the spirit and those who spoke from the spirit. Seem to have efficacy. They were the ones who could heal. They were the ones who could pull out all of these other qualities. Now, it's interesting that in the first 150 years. The Christian emphasis was on miracles and prophecy, and after about 200 AD, the emphasis slowly shifts to an understanding of the spirit that the ability to make miracles happen. The ability to prophesy becomes secondary to the ability to manifest the spirit. And this occurs because the communities become large enough to become noticed.

And the emphasis then is on the Holy Spirit who comes in. And as the emphasis shifts to the Holy Spirit, the notion of the Trinity becomes paramount. That there must be then the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. And this notion of the Trinity becomes noticeable somewhere around the early third century. So that finally, in the third century, the idea of the Trinity begins to become more and more the central conception of the efficacy of the Christian healing experience and the central structure, theologically, of the Christian community. And of course, by the time of Saint Augustine, the Trinity is the final, uh, reality in the manifestation that the Trinity is more important than the crucifixion, more important even than baptism or communion, because it is the Grand matrix strategically, that allows for the efficacy of all of these other sacraments, allows for all of these other understandings to obtain. But at the origins of this, the concern with demonic possession and personal protection is, um, uh, very, very, very noticeable. So this haunting of the world by evil spirits, uh, something which. You can notice. I guess one of the first times that I noticed I was about 12, 14 years old, and there was a photo in a life magazine of a statue of a Roman, um, farmer, and he looked tough and hard bitten, like an old Tennessee pioneer, a very strong and very sturdy, angular and bony and, uh, quite firm.

But when you looked into the eyes, the eyes were pathetic. Set in. The strength of this masculine face were terrified eyes. These are the eyes of the fearfulness that one is in mortal danger, that the boogeyman is loose in the world and can get to you. This fearfulness, this kind of psychic fearfulness, produced all of the defense mechanisms. It's the primordial torch that lights them all up. And of course, the defense must be reasoned out by the mind. And this ties into the metaphysical realms. And so the whole burgeoning of metaphysics. Indicates a spiritual problem with demons, a fearfulness on the part of individuals, and a lack of any spiritual knowledge whatsoever. A lack of gnosis. Dodds writes that. There was a security in becoming a Christian, that a Christian congregation was from the first, a community in a much more fuller sense than any corresponding group. Its members were bound together not only by common rites, but by a common way of life. And as Celsus, a doctor at that time, shrewdly perceived by their common danger, their promptitude in bringing material help to brethren in captivity and other distress, is attested to not only by Christian writers, but by Lucian, a Roman writer of of farce and romance. Love of one's neighbor is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in our period the Christians appear to have practiced it much more effectively than any other group.

The church provided the essentials of this kind of security. It cared for widows and orphans, the old, the unemployed, the disabled. It provided a burial fund for the poor and a nursing service in time of plague. But more important, I suspect that these material benefits were was the belonging, the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give. The need to belong. The need to be a part of a structure. And what energized the structure was the nomadic experience that one had been touched by the spirit. How did one know this? Because the fear of the demons was gone. Extinction. The fear was extinct. It had been there and now it was gone. One woke up in the morning. It wasn't there. One went to sleep. It wasn't there. The internal trembling, the uneasiness was gone. And one could look at another human being and a person and see if they had the spirit also. And individuals could tell. They could tell if they were Christians. They could tell if they were saved just by looking at someone. No password was needed, and so the communities thrived. There were protected by the unity, and all of the communities felt that they were a part of one large humanity. The kingdom of God, and that the kingdom of God was invisibly spreading, not in some angelic power structure, not in some metaphysical realm, but in the realm of human beings, everyday human beings, that it was proof positive that God worked directly.

And purified the material world. Simon Magus is the perfect figure of the brilliant man. Not just a clever man, the brilliant man who could not believe that. He had all of the knowledge, all of the talent to understand it, but he couldn't believe it. Piestus did not work for him. And we have to understand then something about pistas, something about faith. And usually pistas is personified as a woman. Faith is a woman. Just like the other aspect that goes with it. The, um, quality of quietness is associated with a man, but the ability to believe the heart energy. The faithfulness. This is a feminine virtue. And so the Mysterium Coniunctionis was bringing together the masculine quietness and the feminine consistently in belief that that was the secret, that was the coordinate. This is a book called from Stone Age to Christianity by the great archaeologist William Foxwell Albright. He writes, the central figure of Gnostic mythology is that of Sophia Wisdom and of course, the great Gnostic document Pistis. Sophia. Pistis Sophia. The very essence of the feminine wisdom, which the clever man by himself cannot understand. He cannot in him, in his own way, in his own self. Imagine or experience that he must receive it from without himself, from a woman. This is the root core. This is the very living thread of why the Virgin Mary became so important, and why in Gnosticism, Pistis Sophia is the central figure, and also why in the masculine world of the Roman Empire, she was enchained.

She was always trapped. She was always a prisoner and never let to be free, to be who she was, to be what she was. And this unchaining of the feminine was the very source of the whole demonic, uh, projection. We read in Grace Mead's translation of The Pistis Sophia. I may tell you all things which befell Pistis Sophia. It came to pass when I had led her unto a somewhat spacious region in the chaos, that the emanations of self-willed ceased entirely to oppress her, thinking that she would be led up out of the chaos together altogether. It came to pass, then, when the emanations of self-willed had noticed that Pistis Sophia had not been let up out of the chaos, that they turned about again altogether, oppressing her vehemently. Notice the sophistication. What is demonic self willed projections. What are these self-will projections? Where do they come from? Do they come from some angelic hierarchy? That can't be. Where do they come from? They can only come from human beings who, in their fearfulness and their unsteadiness, throw them out. That's where projections come from. Not up there or down there. The fear is in us. It's quenching is in us. Not in some realm by ascended or descended masterless or masterful beings, but by personal realization and by focusing that in faith.

Then this metanoia happens. Then the spookiness of the world vanishes. It isn't there. What was so overwhelming for so long simply isn't there anymore extinct. This is different. So as soon as the experience of the feminine faithfulness seems to be escaping, the self-willed withdraw. But when they see her caught in a limbo, not quite escaping, then they come back all the more eminently. Those who can hear, let them hear. Because of this she uttered the eighth repentance. Now this has gone on for some time. This has happened again and again. And this is Sophia. There's a sine wave that runs through. And this is the eighth repentance, because they had not ceased to oppress her and had turned about to oppress her to the utmost. She uttered this repentance, saying, on thee, O light, have I hoped, leave me not in the chaos. Deliver me, and save me according to thy gnosis. Give heed unto me, and save me. Be unto me a Savior, O light, and save me, and lead me into thy light. For thou art my Savior, and will lead me unto thee. And because of the mystery of thy name, lead me. Give me thy mystery. Faith accepts the presence, the masculine presence as a mystery. It is not understood. The masculine is not understood by the feminine. And must be accepted as a mystery. If one tries to understand it, one then falls back into the metaphysical realms, back into the mentality that the quietness of the masculine spirit is mysterious and need be.

You know, the classic mythological image of this is the tale of Amor and Psyche from Apuleius, where psyche, the feminine, can't believe her good fortune to have such a fine man as a Cupid. And but he doesn't let her see him. He only appears to her in the darkness, and he tells her, I am only here as long as I am in the darkness. And one night her curiosity gets her. She's got the look upon him. And so she lights a candle and there's this beautiful young man, just as she had dreamed. And then she goes to sleep. In the morning, he is gone. And she's forever then roaming the world looking for him because she has broken the covenant. She has questioned his mysteriousness, which for his quietness, he must be mysterious to her. And just the way that that is Sophia must be true. The feminine must be true for the man. He must unquestioningly believe in her truthfulness. This is the only seal, the only guarantee. There are no incantations. There is no magic. There is only the doing of it with unyielding certainties. I believe in thee. I accept thee in thy mystery. Both these are needed together. And this is what comes in the pistol. Sophia. This was the essential quality of mysteriousness that could not be put into words.

It could not be put into a discursive spiel or a philosophic statement or a logical progression, because there was nothing logical there. There was nothing philosophic there. There even was nothing theological there. There was only the exact experience of the occurrence of it, and the recognition that others, like you understood and practiced that that's what it was. And joining the community of the elect, then. Was learning to be affine with those people who did it in this way, and discovering that one also did it in this way. And this is how the communities grew. This is why they were stable. This is why they survived the nightmare haunted centuries. Recall the prophetic words. Written about 75 BC by Livy the Great, Roman historian, 75 BC. Hundreds of years before this he said, we are caught interminably. We can no longer stand our vices, nor can we stand the cures that are needed to, uh, uh, affect them so that we are trapped in a limbo of uneasiness. And that did nothing but increase for those several hundred years, increased and became prolific until by the third century AD, one finds indications everywhere of people thinking that human life is a jungle is a junkyard, that there is nothing of value in human life. There is no such thing as a mother. There's no such thing as a father. There's no such thing as children.

Nothing is sacred. Nothing is sacrosanct. Everything is animalistic, brutalized, fair game for whatever is going on in the midst of that nightmare. The increasing Christian communities looked like angelic hosts descending from some other sphere. Just being ordinarily wholesome as human beings was a supernatural occurrence to those trapped in that nightmare. These were the pneumatici, not some far out attained masterfulness, but just natural human beings in their wholesomeness who, by contrast to the nightmare, looked like angels, which they do. A characteristic document of the time comes from one of the late Sibylline oracles. We did two lectures on the Sibylline oracles of the pre-Christian time. Here is just a quotation from one of the late Sibylline Oracles. God's revelations of great wrath to come in the last time upon the faithless world. I make known prophesying to all men according to their cities. From that time when the great tower fell and the tongues of men were parted into many dialects, first of the Egyptian kingdom did I speak then of the Persians, Ethiopians, Medes, also of Assyria, Babylon, then the great pride of Macedonia. Now am I in the dominion sent of celebrated, lawless Italy, and at last unto all mortals will it show manifold evils, and exhaust the toils of men on every land. And to the west will it the warrior king of the nations, lead? Give laws to people, and subdue all things late will the mills of God grind the fine flour.

Fire will then ruin all things. And to dust reduce the summits of the lofty hills and all flesh, love of gain and want of mind, of evils of beginning are to all typical. In a document which comes out of this turmoil, out of this wrath fulness is the great apocalypse, the Book of Revelations. And next week, we're going to take a look at the Book of Revelations as an indication of the incredibly unstable mental milieu of the time and the way in which the Book of Revelations gives us a complete portrait of the maelstrom, and that the esoteric understanding of it is not in the structure of this junkyard, of this maelstrom, but for the fact that it defines only one way out, that is to realize that there is a presence unaffected at the center of the maelstrom, that if you keep looking for the metaphysical understanding of the structure, you miss the entire nomadic point of it. It's not to make esoteric sense in some hierarchy, but to simply display that the only way not to be in the maelstrom is to be quietly in the center of it. Extinct from its effects. That's nomadic. That has nothing to do with theology. Nothing to do with our cult. Masterfulness. It's simply direct spiritual experience, something which we probably could use today. And I guess on those kinds of notes, we'd better stop before we turn Billy Graham into competition. I think there's food.

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