Pistis Sophia

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 52 of 54

Pistis Sophia
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 3, 1985

Transcript:

This is a tape of the lecture that was delivered by Roger Weir at the Whirling Rainbow School on December 3rd, 1985.

Pistis Sophia. You know, eventually we'll get tired of waiting for the machines and we'll walk away. That's about 600 years down the line. We'll eventually walk away. You got to have long vision in this business. Last week we looked at Clement of Alexandria, and we saw what a tremendous jump there was in shift and change from the gospel according to John, or the gospel according to Thomas or of Philip to Clement seemed like a millennium. It was only 100 years. Tonight we need to look at the real psychological split that happened, and the fact that the split opened what was called the mythological image of it is the Pandora's box. Everything came out. Everything came out at the end of the two hundreds A.D.. At the beginning of the third century AD, the consciousness and the classical world suffered a sea change, a crisis from which it never recovered, never recovered. The stun was so profound in the third century that by the end of the third century, there was already a catastrophic drift in progress, as if the keel and the rudder and the mast of the ship of the conception of human life had been shattered, and the boat was still intact, and one could drift with the current, but one couldn't navigate, one couldn't steer anywhere, and slowly, almost like a glacial nightmare. The period that has become known as the Dark Ages settled in upon the European mind and spirit. Help! Elizabeth come in.

I think there's a seat over there. Elizabeth. The dark ages. We like to think that the Dark Ages couldn't have been that bad, that somehow it was a period of the triumph of the church. The Dark Ages were every bit as bad as you can imagine. People that did scissors and paste jobs on old classics, they would snip out a paragraph they liked or a sentence they liked, and they'd paste these together in columns and they would make encyclopedias out of this. And this passed for a person of learning. They didn't have any idea where the stuff came from, or what the context was, or what it meant, or that there had been a tradition for 15, 1600 years. It just didn't mean a thing because the consciousness. Of the Greco-Roman civilization suffered a numbing smash in the third century. No one could think clearly with the matrix of the European mind until a thousand years later. And we call that period the Renaissance, the rebirth. The rebirth of what? The rebirth of learning. Of what kind of learning? Of being able to think about things again. Of being able to understand that one did not live in a demon haunted world that needed to have an oppressive hierarchy, ostensibly of church, but really of feudal power just to make life livable. That just to know that someone would beat you if you didn't work in the fields, is the kind of secure security you had to have.

This is a horrible thing to realize. The way to highlight this collision, and it was a collision, is to take an excerpt from something that we've already talked about, the Wisdom of Solomon, written in Alexandria, 50 A.D., when the classical world was intact, when human beings were still what we would call cosmopolitan, elegant, individual and jump from here 250 years to the middle of the first book of Pistis Sophia. And you will see right away that there is a crisis, there is a trauma of civilization. And the only way to account for it is that something drastic has happened in human consciousness. Okay, here are two little excerpts from The Wisdom of Solomon. The Wisdom of Solomon, of course, is about Sophia. Wisdom is always feminine, not personified as feminine, but wisdom is feminine. The feminine vision of life is wise. The masculine envisioning of the meaning of life is necessary to complement it. But without life as a context, as a matrix, that kind of envisioning is an aberration. And it is exactly this that happens to the classical world. The appreciation of the feminine is shattered, and all of the masculine power pokes through life, every place that it touches, until it shreds it. And all that's left are the tattered remnants of empire. Here's how Sophia was talked about in Alexandria in writing in 50 AD. For In Wisdom there is a spirit, intelligent and holy, unique in its kind, yet made up of many parts subtle, free moving, lucid, spotless, clear, invulnerable, loving what is good, eager, unhindered, beneficent, kindly towards men, steadfast, unerring, untouched by care, all powerful, all surveying and permeating, all intelligent, pure and delicate spirits.

She is beautiful and further the King's desire for wisdom as his bride, the kingly man. The masculine matured the king as the image of the masculine matured, and he desires Sophia as his bride. This way the kingdom is established and is secure. It reads wisdom I loved. I sought her out when I was young. I longed to win her for my bride, and I fell in love with her beauty. She adds lustre to her noble birth because it has given her to live with God, and the Lord of all things has accepted her. She is initiated into the knowledge that belongs to God, and she decides for him. For the King what he shall do. If riches are apprised to be desired in life, what is richer than wisdom? The act of cause of all things. If prudence shows itself in action, who more than wisdom is the artificer of all? That is, if virtue is the object of a man's affections, the fruits of wisdom's labor are the virtues temperance and prudence, justice and fortitude. These are her teaching and then the life of men. There is nothing more valuable than these. Same city, 250 years later. Very same city, same subject. This is what it reads now.

Sophia cried out very much. She cried out to the light of lights which she had seen from the beginning, in which she had believed, and she said this repentance, speaking thus, O light of lights, in whom I have believed from the beginning, hear my repentance now at this time, O light, save me, O light, for wicked thoughts have entered me. I looked O light, to the parts below. I saw a light in that place, and I thought, I will go to that place to receive that light. And I went, and I came to be in the darkness where the chaos is below. And I was not able to proceed out, to go to my place, because I was oppressed among all the emanations of the triple power Dotards and the lion faced power took away my inner light, and I cried out for help, and my voice did not penetrate the darkness. And I looked at the height, so that the light in which I believed might help me. And when I looked at the height, I saw all of the archons of the aeons that were numerous, and they looked down upon me rejoicing. They hated me without cause. They would not help me. They were encouraged at my oppression and they took from me the light. What has happened? What has happened, what has happened? The holding matrix of the feminine value of life has been shattered. Who can rescue Sophia from that chaos? It's not a simple case where a hero can come in.

It's not a case of a dragon. It's not a case of something human that is entrapped her. This is structural. It's divine. Something in the universe is out of order. Only the divine himself can rescue Sophia. And the Pistis Sophia is about Jesus explaining to his disciples why it is that he is as he is. And that his mission is to restructure the universe so that Sophia can be saved for as long as the universe maintains the structure, which it has evolved to glacially ground to. She is forever trapped in chaos and will never be free. At the beginning of Sophia, in order to contrast this book with the Gospels, with the letters of Paul, which had been in circulation complete probably for at least a hundred years, the New Testament had been collected together. The first four Gospels were collected together by Marcion in Rome around 140 A.D., and they Marcionite Gnostic church began to spread itself, so that the nascent Christian churches had to run them competition, and they too collected together gospels, and in order to make their additions seem better, they put the letters of Paul in with it and some of the other things, some of the acts, and there were other items that were in it. And so the New Testament was born in this tussle in the last decades of the second century AD, but at the opening decades of the third century, the Pistis Sophia starts out saying, the disciples have known nothing.

What they what they were told is child's play. They were. They were told that there was a mystery, and they thought just understanding that there was a mystery, was it? But the mystery is an enormously complex. Series of hierarchies and emanations and mysteries within mysteries of which the disciples knew nothing of until Jesus taught them. And while he's teaching him, the first person who will be responsive will be Mary Magdalene, because the hero of Pistis Sophia is Mary Magdalene. She is the first feminine to come back into understanding, to come back into wisdom. And it is through her lead that the disciples slowly gain courage and insight to be able to follow her lead, to ask the right questions of the master. But now we just start and Pistis Sophia begins. I suppose I should tell you about the book first. The Pistis Sophia is a legitimate document that has never been edited out by any church councils. We don't know how the manuscript got to London, but it was in London in 1772. Some very wealthy British antiquarian bought the copy, written in Coptic, very educated Coptic, with a lot of Greek words in it. And through the kind of razzle dazzle that happens in the academic worlds and the worlds of museums and of scholars and so forth, the Pista Sophia was not translated for almost 100 years.

And then it was translated into Latin, and then it was translated a little bit into German. And it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that there was a fairly good edition brought out by the great Theosophist, the secretary to Madame Blavatsky, G.r.s Mead, in 1896, and near the end of his life, the great G.r.s Mead in 1921 brought out a second edition, and it was this edition of Pistis Sophia that set the stage for a Renaissance and religious Envisioning, 1921. We have finally published in 1978, in Leiden, Holland, a new edition of Pistis Sophia that has all of the scholarly genius of the late 20th century brought to bear upon it. The text is emended and made quite accurate. The manuscript itself has a pages. I think there are 178 leaves of pages written on both sides, so there are 354 pages, and there are two columns, um, on each page in Coptic. So one has quite a large manuscript. It is also a manuscript, which is a codex and not a scroll. Remember we talked one time about how the the the codex as a book form was a revolution in thought. It's one thing to have your information on roles which the classical world always had, and into the fourth century the roles were the the way that one bought books or preserved books, except for the esoteric Christian and Gnostic documents were on codexes. They were on leaved books like this.

But the parchment of the early codex, in order to maintain that shape of the codex, had to be treated in a very special way, because one had to pull it and stretch it and change its nature almost alchemically in order for it to stay in a codex form. We have some very good books on this here at the library. So the Pistis Sophia itself as a book has a very weird and chequered career, but it comes down to us intact. This is how it begins. But. It happened that after Jesus had risen from the dead, he spent 11 years speaking with his disciples, and he taught them only as far as the places of the first ordinance, and as far as the places of the first mystery, which is within the veil, which is within the first ordinance, which is the 24th mystery, outside and below these which are in the second space of the first mystery, which is before all mysteries. The father in the form of a dove. Of course, the universal symbol of the Holy Spirit. Um, usually, um, brought as a white dove, descending, head first, wings outspread. The descent of the dove. Then it says, Jesus said to his disciples, I have come forth from that first mystery, which is the last mystery, namely the 24th. And the disciples did not know and understand that there was anything within that mystery. But they thought that that mystery was the head of all.

It's just that. And the head of all the things that exist, the Pleroma. It's just fullness, isn't it? No, it's enormously dynamic and complex. And it is because of the naiveté. Of thinking that the pleroma, that the unitas is a simple, undifferentiated blob, that tampering with it led to the puncturing of its sealed integrity. And one almost has to conjure up an image from Homer where Odysseus has this huge, uh, bladder filled with all the four winds. And someone doesn't believe that the four winds could fit in such a small place. And they take a knife and they cut the four winds, blast the ship to pieces. This is what happened to the flatted out male curiosity about divinity, thinking that merely using the mind is enough to explore the reality of the spirit, and using the knife of insight of the masculine mind alone, cut the sealing bladder of divinity, and all of the images in it came out and dazzled them. Blew the ship of state apart. It actually happened. So the Pistis Sophia says now they don't know anything at all, because Jesus had not told his disciples of the whole extent of the emanations of the treasury, nor the ranks how they extend. Nor had he told them of their saviors according to the rank of each one how they are. Nor had he told them what, uh, which each watcher is over the doors, or the gates of the treasury of light.

Nor had they told them of the place of the twin Savior who was the child of the child. Nor had he told them of the place of the three amens in which place they extend. And he had not told them in which places the five trees are spread, nor of the seven other amens, the seven voices. And it goes on like this page after page after page. And what it is saying is that the early revelation of the disciples is naive. It is true. It is legitimate. And it was all that could be done then. But because of that naiveté, because of later generations not living that life and opening up the mystery that had been given to them in terms of life, that it had progressively become staled by the mind and the feminine aspect of the livingness of the message had been taken out. It had become a question of belief rather than a question of life. Individuals had taken the words the commandment to love one another and had made a doctrine out of it instead of living it. And this had flatted it out. And so man, alienated from the feminine qualities of life, wisdom alienated into his mind in compensation the anima of the man, the female image of his soul was projected out into the world, which was chaotic because it was untended. And this is what the Pista Sophia is about. It's about the loss of the soul of man into worldliness, into matter, because he forgot that you have to live the spirit with your own body, your own life.

What you do has to have the spirit in it. If you make the spirit something metaphysical, something mental, you sap life of its light. And by drawing it out, life becomes wizened and brittle. And it'll break. It'll snap. This is the choreography of madness. And this is what the Pista Sophia tells us happened to the whole civilization in the third century. Because of this. They thought now of that mystery that was the completion of all completions, and that it was the head of all, and that it was the whole Pleroma. Since Jesus had said to his disciples that mystery surrounds the totalities of which I have told you all from the day in which I met you until today. Because of this, the disciples thought now that there was nothing existing within that mystery. It happened as the disciples were sitting with one another upon the Mount of Olives. As they spoke these words, they rejoice with great joy. And they were very jubilant. And they said to one another, we are blessed beyond all men on earth, because the Savior has revealed things to us, and we have received the Pleroma and the whole completion. They thought, all you have to do is just receive it and understand it, and that's it. This kind of naiveté gets us all killed.

As these were saying these things to one another, Jesus was sitting at a short distance from them. It was the 15th of the moon in the month of Tobi, which is about May. So it's early May in Jerusalem. Very nice. Mount of olives is in Jerusalem, in the northern part of it. The moon was full. Notice the symbolism. It's the spring moon that's full. Everything is all set for life to come out. But instead the disciples are sitting around self-satisfied. Oh, we have received the Pleroma. Isn't it nice? This kind of nicety is a prelude to tragic trauma. It is the nicety of glossing over the spirit. And the spirit will not be glossed over. So Jesus is sitting there and he begins then to glow, and there comes a light phenomenon where there's a light from the rising sun opposite the full moon. You have to get this almost a mandala. There's the. They're on top of the Mount of Olives early in the morning. There's the full moon still up in the sky. And as the sun rises, it's there. And with this mandala, a full moon and sun on the horizons, Jesus begins to glow and light up. And suddenly a tremendous column of light goes forth from him. And the disciples can't take it. They can't stand it. They look away. They can't see him anymore. They're dazzled by it. This is a psychological, symbolic way, but also spiritually for veracity in explaining what happens to oneself.

That when you think everything is settled in, all glossed over, the reality of it out glares everything else and you are stunned by it. And when the disciples saw that light, they were in great fear and in great agitation. Oh, brother, we thought this was it. We thought we'd come to the end of the chapter, the end of the book. We'd set all of our amens. But the problem is, is that life is still going on. And what we had so nicely sealed over all of a sudden is a real big problem. Jung uses the terms enantiodromia. The I-Ching says that the extreme yang it becomes yen. The extreme yen it becomes yen. And Enantiodromia is a complete reversal of valuation, where everything that has been nice all of a sudden is terrific. Lee bad where what has been glossed over all of a sudden is completely problematical. One can barely let the smile, the pleasant smile, mediocre smile in one's face relax until it becomes a tearful blur of a tremble. Because one has misunderstood. One is in fact abused life by not living it spiritually. One has tried merely to understand, to systematize it, to make it a mental phenomenon. One is led with one's chin into the universe. Now it happened, says the Pistis Sophia. When the light power had come down upon Jesus, it gradually surrounded him completely. Then Jesus rose or ascended to the height, giving light exceedingly, and there was no measure to it.

So the disciples are sitting, and they're in fear. And they say to him, master, will you please withdraw your light into yourself so that we may see you and talk with you? Then Jesus drew to himself the glory of his light. And when this had happened, all the disciples then took courage, and they came before Jesus, and they prostrated themselves. At the same time they worshiped him, rejoicing with great joy. But you see, they're like children. They're like children. They can take the candy, but they can't grow their own healthful food. They're crippled. They're spiritual cripples. And so the Pistis Sophia is recording this saying, this is what has become of all of this. We are. We are cripples. He begins to tell them that the the Pleroma, the first mystery from which he has come, is enormously complicated. And this whole section of about 30 pages in the Pistis Sophia, Jesus takes his care to go through and say, um, there are 12 saviors of the treasury of light, according to the command of the first mystery. These now I cast into the wombs of your mothers when I came into the world. And it is these which are in your bodies today. Saying I have prepared everything. The fact that you are here. The fact that the 12 of you that are here right now together is not accidental at all. It's not a matter of me walking along and making some kind of a superficial choice.

This is designed like a master architect would design from the foundations of the world, from the foundations of reality. We have this communal structure because this has been prepared from the beginning. There is no accident anywhere here. Or rather, the only accident is, is that wisdom has fallen into chaos and you don't even know it. You do not even know that the spirit that would make life whole is completely lost in chaos, that it is already happened, and that all it is taking for some grand, tragic denouement is for you to realize what you have already done. Let the feminine has already been smashed beyond compare. So he continues to tell the disciples, when I entered the world, I came to the midst of the Archons of the sphere, the archons of the sphere, and I took the likeness of Gabriel, the angel of the aeons. And the archons of the aeons did not recognize me. He took on that form. The sphere in Pistis Sophia is the worldly sphere. There are five archons of the sphere. The first is Chronos. They're all the old Greek gods. The first is Chronos, the father of Zeus of Time. The mythological Greek image of time. Time itself. The second one is Aries, the god of war. But the God of war is actually the experience of terror. Terror. Not hate, not fear, but terror.

Fear of something personal. Terror is something a spiritual or psychic. We should say. Psychic fear is terror. The third one is Hermes, who's the messenger. But now he's not just a messenger, now he's an Archon. The fourth one is Aphrodite. Aphrodite. Lustfulness, and the fifth one is Zeus. So the archons of the sphere of this world. But Jesus is saying, I pass through them that didn't even know I passed through them. And I presented myself then to the Archons of the 12 hierarchies, the aeons, which are large periods of of of psychic development, and at the apex of the period, periods of psychic development. There's a 13th Aeon, and it is from this 13th Aeon that Sophia was enshrined. That was her place. And as long as she was there, all of the aeons of development of man made sense. But when something happened and she fell from there, the whole structure of reality was completely impaired and in fact turned upside down so that instead of all of the aeons working towards helping man to mature towards the spirit of wisdom, suddenly everything is turned around and all of the powers work the other way to keep him down, to keep him repressed. It's like sharks teeth. You can go very easily one way, but you can't come back out the other way. And Jesus is telling the disciples he's not giving them nice little parables. Now, in the Pistis Sophia, he's telling them, boys, you're going to have to grow up now, because all of this has really happened and you don't even realize that you are trapped in a nightmare, and it's going to take some doing to get out of this, if it can be done at all.

So he goes on and he tells them. I found Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, before she had conceived him. And I cast into her a power which I had received from the good who was in the midst, so that he should be able to preach before me and prepare my way, and baptize with water of forgiveness. Now that power was in the body of John. Jesus is always saying in the material that wasn't edited out by the councils, he's always saying the physical body is holy. It is not the mind that is holy. It is not the psyche that is holy. It is the physical body that is holy. Because the physical body and the spirit are a unity. This is why the communion is here is my body, and here is my spirit, which is the blood of the body. The communion is not a cannibalism. It's a statement that the physicality of the world when it is spiritualized is the real. But the mind, the psyche, when it is deluded, thinks that the physical world is something despicable that has to be gotten away from, oh, we can't touch it. And it's just this that then alienates the psyche and the mind from the spirit, because the spirit is nothing else but right there with the physicality, with the body.

That kind of asceticism drives us all mad. And again, in the place of the soul of the Archons, which he was due to receive, in other words, the Archons, those powers of the aeons, because they have built up over incredible periods of time, incredible periods of development. The responsibilities and the capacities of giving like genetic information. A baby comes into the world and has all kinds of of genetic makeup and so forth. Jesus is saying, I stopped that genetic passing that would normally come for John the Baptist, and instead I brought something else in. I interceded. What did he put in? He said, instead of this, in place of the soul of the Archons, which he was due to receive, I found the soul of the prophet Elijah in the aeons of the sphere. And I took it in, and I took his soul again, and I brought it to the Virgin of the light. And she gave it to her receivers, and they brought it to the sphere of the Archons, and they cast it into the womb of Elizabeth, so that none of them understood what had happened. None of the powers of the world, none of the structure of the foundation of the world, or the hierarchies or powers. Nobody understood what had happened. Now Jesus said, put a joker into the deck, a wild card.

Because John the Baptist was not part of the game plan, of the system of tyranny that had built up, that was responsive more and more to demonic powers. He was a free spirit in the sense that he was uncontaminated. That his soul had been taken from a time when there were still individuals who were wholesome like Elijah, and that that was what was brought in. So the Pistis Sophia is saying, we are dealing with such an extraordinary situation that there has had to be intercession on incredibly arcane levels, just to make it possible for us to move again, because not only has life been sapped of its energies and the spirit spirit thereby alienated, but that the systematizing demonization of the psyche has proceeded to such an extent that we are all trapped and frozen in a kind of a metaphysical nightmare. Then the Pista Sophia. Tells us. Jesus continued again speaking and said, now it happened after this through the command of the first mystery. I looked down again upon the world of mankind. I found Mary, who is called my mother according to the material body. I spoke to her in the type of Gabriel, the type, the Greek word typos. Um, like, uh, you know, the word archetype that we use or hear used a lot. A a type, it means that he's not only changing person, but he's changing form. And the type now is Gabriel, the announcing angel.

And when she turned to the height towards me, I cast into her the first power which I had received from the bar below, which is the body which I wore in the height. The height, uh, is above the 13th aeon. The height is the, uh, the epitome, the Empyrean heaven. The, um. You can see that the material becomes extraordinary as as soon as it's opened up. Why does not anybody know this? Because as soon as you open it up like this, everything that we believe is up for grabs. All of the major underpinnings of this civilization are up for grabs. We're just getting a skim off the top in one hour. If you go into this material, it's devastating. It's not just a question that we have been allied to. It's a question that nobody has even known that there is such a thing as truth that is really chronic. And that that state has existed for at least 1700 years, and that only few individuals and a few communities along the way here and there have refused to buy the sham and have dedicated themselves to trying to go inside and find out for themselves. And all of these people have been very nicely labeled now as mystics or ascetics. Or kooks and put on the shelf. And it's the sort of thing that you give to people when they're having their little maturation problems, when they're 19 years old or 20, and you let them read them for a year or so, and then when they mature and they come back into seeing that the way that we're doing things is the right way to do things, they'll stop reading.

They'll start to think of Saint Francis as a nice, kindly fellow. And they won't think at all about the fact that he had the stigmata. Well, we don't want to talk too much about that. What could that mean? And so we have proceeded, and we've proceeded until we have gotten into a box canyon. There is no way to continue to be nice in our time. We are all going to die if we continue just to be nice. We have to find out. That's why all this material has been discovered in our lifetimes and brought out. Because it's up to us now. We have a fighting chance to learn. So the Pistis Sophia, then. Has the first indication of the garment of light. And Jesus says, now, this garment that I have. What I wear, this garment of light, is from another way he says, all and the pleroma of the all. And I will not hide anything from you from this hour, but in completion I will complete you in every Pleroma, and in every completion, every mystery. These are the completion of all completions and the pleroma of all aromas, and the gnosis of all gnosis, which are in my garment. Now the garment which he has is rather magical.

It's it's the spiritual, energized version of Joseph's coat of many colors. But for Jesus wearing the coat of many colors, it is now energized to the umpteenth degree. It is bright, not so much with luminous light or with, you know, million candle power, but it is bright with truthfulness. And what happens is that all of the powers of the universe, the different Archons and different levels, the different angels, the, uh, all of the phenomenon and epiphenomenon when they see the garment that Jesus wears, they recognize their name in that garment. It's like it is pure truth. And when they see the pure truth, they are fascinated by how is it that their essence, the name. Remember we talked about how a name is the ultimate enfolding of a myth. They see their name in the garment. Each one of them sees that, and they are brought to an impasse because they want to worship this, but they also want to possess it. Why do they want to possess it? They would naturally worship, but because the universe is topsy turvy, because Sophia is lost in chaos. The natural order of worshiping divinity has been turned on its head, and instead of worshiping divinity, there is a ambitious greed to have it for oneself. Why should God have all this power? Why shouldn't we have this power, or at least our cut? And this is what is demonic. This is exactly what is demonic and exactly what happens to personalities.

They become covetous of power for themselves. My chi is mine. You can't have it. Just that ridiculous. So the Pista Sophia then has Jesus telling us about the garment. And he says, not only is there this garment of light. But I have two garments, he says. In the first is the glory of all the names, of all the mysteries, of all the emanations, and the ranks of the spaces of the ineffable one. The first garment has all of the names in it. As an extraordinary image, one of the one of the great Gnostic documents is the hymn of the Robe of Glory, the hymn of the Robe of Glory. I wrote a summer solstice play two years ago that presents a spiritual miracle play based on the hymn of the Robe of Glory, which some of you might have seen. We can. We can put it on sometime. Stageable. So the first robe is like that. One of the other images, one of the great basic images of this robe, was called in Greek, Classical Greek, the peplos, peplos or peplos, and the peplos was a huge cape about 45ft by about 30ft that had embroidered on it all of the classical Greek mythological cycles. All of the figures were in emblems upon it, in embroidery. And this peplos was carried in the spring of every year up to the top of the Acropolis, to the Parthenon, to the temple of Athena, and in the Temple of Athena, the 40 foot ivory and gold statue.

It was wood with ivory inlaid on it, and gold, and laid on it of Athena was clothed with the peplos, and all of the elite women of Athens every year had washed it by hand down in the Piraeus, in the harbor, and all of the, uh, men of the wealthy and royal families had all brought it in procession. The whole city turned out to bring this peplos every spring back up, and clothed the goddess of wisdom with the mythological integrity of the race. How do we know this? How do we know this? Because the sculptures around the Parthenon, the frieze on the outside and on the inside and on the pediments on the end are all about this. That's what the frieze is, is about this procession, the carrying of the people up there. What else would they put there? Because human beings, when they're real, don't just decorate. They don't just ornament their lives, they live it in a sacred way. What else is there? Anything else is is profane. So this garment, this first garment that Jesus has, has all of the names of reality, of every being in reality. It is not just a peplos for Athena. It is the royal garment of glory, of the mystery of the whole universe. Every one's name is on this. Now there's a second garment, and the Pistis Sophia reads.

And in the second garment is the whole glory of the name of all the mysteries, and all the emanations which are in the ranks of the two spaces of the first mystery. And in this garment which we have now sent thee, is the glory of the name, of the mystery of the informer, which is the first ordinance in the mystery of the Five Incisions and the mystery of the great Messenger of the ineffable, who was the great light in the mystery of the five leaders who are the five helpers? And furthermore, there is in that garment the glory of the name, of the mystery of all the ranks, of the emanations of the treasury of light and their saviors, and more and more and more and more. Is is extraordinarily powerful in the spiritual way. It can only be understood in a spiritual way. The mind cannot understand this paradox. The mind in its limitations. Needing to work with equivocations because it's based upon a sense of identity and a sense of identity, could only axiomatically work on equivocations? Sees where is the difference between the two garments? They seem to be the same thing. Is this a repetition? Maybe it's a maybe it's an error in transcription or something like that. Not so at all. The same garment moving one way into operation has a certain characteristic. And that garment, when it moves back the other way, is a different garment. It is talked about in the same way only because there is a unity is there a singularity, if one will.

If one thinks by the normal mental operations of equivocation, one misses the point. But if one does just a little bit of spiritual jujitsu with one's imagination and moves from the equivocation, one equals one to the ratio one over one. What is one over one one? In this way, the healing energies are annealed and brought back into workability. The loggerhead the stasis that is frozen. Life is transformed in spiritual alchemy into a workable unity. And so Jesus is trying to teach his disciples that the garment, the heavenly garment of light which he wears, which has the names of all the participants in reality, is two garments which he wears in one way. They're not understanding. They can't see this. And so he continues to tell them that there are all kinds of problems with their experience. And he says that not only are you, um, confused by the Archons of the various aeons and the Archons of the sphere, but you are also confused by the Archons of. And the Sophia uses the terms here Heimarmene Heimarmene the Heimarmene. Now the Greek terms heimarmene actually means um, what we would call destiny, but it means all of the the destiny of destinies, all destinies put together. The grand destiny itself. A little bit about Heimarmene. And how this comes about. This is from a book, Gnosticism by Benjamin Walker, published just a year or so ago.

There is a profound mystery about this primordial darkness, and the whole subject remains an enigma beyond human understanding. The Pista Sophia says that at the dissolution of the world, certain men will be given the secret concerning that mystery that knoweth why the darkness has arisen, and why the light has arisen, and that mystery that knoweth why the darkness of the darkness hath arisen, and why the light of the light hath arisen. Do you see the paradoxical thinking here? It's because one has to think in terms of a unities. The Poimandres, a hermetic treatise of about the same time, speaks of darkness tending downwards, coiled like a snake, moist and confusing, uttering an inexpressibly doleful sound, giving off smoke as if from a fire. Then they talk about the heimarmene destiny coming into being, and thus it was able to control progressively the workings of the cosmos and all things within it. Heimarmene was a concept taken over from ancient astrology. Magic. The active ingredients of Heimarmene are the heavenly bodies, including the stars, the constellations and planets and fate and destiny, and all of this dispersed through them and their archons of the planets seven in number. Report to idea. Both the representative of the Demiurge and these are supposedly referred to in the, uh, some biblical passages, and they give them here star spirits, demonic powers, the spirits of elements which control all things. And they have slowly been brought together into a system.

But the system has worked to control man, so that man is no longer himself, but he is controlled by the system that the fall of Sophia, the sucking dry of the world of spirit, and putting all meaning and significance into the psyche, has been this slow process of idea. Idealizing and the name is idea both. It's very close to that of idealizing reality in terms of a psychic mental structure. You cannot do that. Wisdom has to be lived by human beings. It's a quality of life. It is not an idea in the mind, and it is most certainly not some metaphysical system of correspondences. Which some informed, self informed elite then magically used to control other people's lives. It is most certainly not that, but that's what happened. So that man was shackled to the Heimarmene, to the wheel of destiny. And this was an exile, a self forgetfulness. Asleep in intoxication. Anxiety and ignorance of the human soul are then all bound up with this heimarmene. It's like everyone's hypnotized. Everyone's magnetized. Everyone's waiting for the universe to tell them what to do. You're completely gone when you're in that condition. Because the spirit has to have the right to say no, no, this is wrong. If the universe in toto suggests this, and I see that it is wrong, it is still wrong that there comes a time when the personality of the spiritual mature has to say.

If the universe says this, then the universe is wrong. What would be so important when the universe says that life shall not be sacred? Who says this? Who is this that says life is not sacred? Only somebody who has lost Sofia into the chaos and doesn't understand that anymore. So the Pista Sofia then brings us along and we'll just do about five more minutes. The first movement, the first break in the pistol. Sophia of the Stodginess of the disciples, who cannot understand, is when Mary Magdalene comes into the picture and she comes up to Jesus. Now when he had said these things to his disciples, he also said to him, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. Now it happened when Mary Magdalene heard these words as the Savior was saying them, she stared for one hour into the air. And then she came to him and said, my Lord, command me that I might speak openly. Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said to Miriam, thou blessed one whom I will complete in all the mysteries of the height. Speak openly. Thou art she whose heart is more directed to the kingdom of heaven than all thy brothers. And this is the beginning of an incredible opening up, because it's only the feminine wisdom of Mary Magdalene, who is able to begin the process of inquiry to really get down to what is important, of asking Jesus exactly the right questions that open up the issues, because the disciples can't do it.

The men can't do it. Their insight is all brittle. It's all been co-opted into this static psychic of system. They can't think except in terms of those correspondences. But Mary Magdalene is unlettered, unlearned in all of that. She only knows that she wants to understand and that she has spiritual vision coming up. And here's a man who can open this up if she asks the right questions. Then she said, my Lord, the word which thou hast spoken to us, who has ears to hear, let him hear thou sayeth, so that we may understand the word which thou hast spoken here now, my Lord, for I will speak openly the word which thou has spoken. You said that you had taken a third part of the power of the archons of all the aeons. You had taken a third of their power away. And he had said that, and nobody had picked that up. And you said that you have turned their heimarmene and their sphere over which they rule, so that when the race of mankind call upon them in their mysteries, these which the transgressing angels taught them for the completion of their evil and iniquitous deeds in the mystery of their magic, that from this hour now they should not be able to complete their magic. She's saying, am I hearing you right, Lord, that the old, um, forms of magic are not going to work anymore? And he says, thou blessed one, you have heard right? Their magic doesn't work anymore.

The power of the old gods is gone. And he goes on to explain that what he did was take the whole correspondence series in the universe that had been a universal law, had been a natural law. Nature did have those correspondences. There were astrological correlations. And he rearranged everything so that half the time they go to the left and the other half the time they go to the right. So if you're trying to work out your calculations all the time, you've only got a 5,050% chance of being right, which is dead even, which negates it. He's saying that as long as the universe was purely natural alone, it could be finely manipulated by the cleverness of the psychic mind of man. And that what the universe needed was consciousness to come in and complete nature and change it around alchemically change it around so that it no longer worked in a simplistic set of correspondences that it only will work now for he who knows, and he who knows will have to be wise enough to know that he has to take his knowing and put it back into natural life for it to work. That that's the kingdom. That's the New Jerusalem, that you have to bring one's self to gnosis to understand, and then take that gnosis back to life, to bring it back to life. You have to live it.

This was the message of the Sophia. And we don't have so much time that we can go into it any deeper. There's plenty more we could go on for a year, but next week we will take the last lunge of the classical world to understand itself in the figure of Plotinus and Plotinus coming from Alexandria about the time that the Pistis Sophia was written, about the time that the Hermetic material like the Poimandres and the Asclepius was written, and Plotinus tried to bring together and did bring together the greatest synthesis of spiritual understanding of the classical world. Unfortunately, unbelievably right on the verge of success. Because of the crippled heimarmene of the classical world. What would have been a moment of triumph became a fading tragedy. And the wisdom of Plotinus is the achievement of Plotinus existed only in little esoteric sects and only in little hidden writings, and it wasn't brought back into currency until the year 1497, when Ficino finally translated Plotinus enneads out of the difficult Greek into readable Latin, and from that moment on, the rebirth of learning was there. We're going to look at Plotinus next week, and probably for two weeks, to try to see how in Alexandria, at the very end of the sanity of the classical world, it was put together one last time before it sank out of sight for a thousand years. Thanks for your patience with all this. I know it's hard.

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