The Book of the Dead: Unas Continued
Presented on: Tuesday, January 21, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 3 of 52
The Book of the Dead: Unas Continued
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 21, 1986
Transcript:
It is January 21st 1985. This is a third lecture in this series of lectures at The Whirling Rainbow School by Roger Weir on the subject, Egypt to America, Osiris to Benjamin Franklin.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Sorry to be so casual about my precision. We're trying to understand the Hermetic tradition. We're trying to understand the major spiritual tradition of the Western world. I know that we've been told that it's Christianity. Christianity is an exoteric presentation as it comes down to us. If you look at Western history. If you look at what was there century by century, decade by decade, there are sporadic times where a Christian Church or the Christian tradition are dominant. But there are almost no times except at the very beginning and various revivals throughout several later centuries that there is a Christian tradition which we can relate to as a major spiritual phenomenon and happening.
The modern age, the presentation of Christianity is due to European colonialism. The British Empire. The French Empire etc. the major spiritual tradition is the Hermetic tradition. And as you will see and as we are seeing it is the continuous line of insightful wisdom that starts before recorded history and moves right up to the present day in forms which are very difficult to appreciate.
My function as an educator is very Hermetic. And what I do could never be understood, could never be seen, outside of the Hermetic tradition. It is also Daoist. It is also in the Mahayana. and all of these traditions would have to be seen. But Tuesday nights were looking at the Hermetic tradition.
We pick up a book. This one is very famous book by Patrick Boylan called Thoth the Hermes of Egypt: A Study of Some Aspects of Theological Thought in Ancient Egypt. He was professor of Eastern languages University College Dublin. Written in 1922 and is the standard book on Thoth. It's reprinted here. And its reprinted because nobody's done a better work. And we look at it and it's filled with Egyptian hieroglyphics, with Aramaic, with Coptic. It's a professional scholarly work.
When we turn to his line of argument on Thoth, he tells us here that in order to understand Thoth that we have to go back to the Pyramid Texts. And that's where we've started. He also tells us that it's difficult to formulate an understanding of the Pyramid Texts because they're so enormously spread out. So complicated. So ingrown and convoluted. That the only way that we can really make some sense out of them is to understand the Osiris myth. And that fortunate for us that we have Plutarch. Which we started with two weeks ago. He writes in here, "The Osirian religion appears as well established in the oldest religious literature of Europe of the Egypt, the Pyramid Texts. It is indeed the dominant religion of that literature. That the Osirian cult had passed through a long period of development before it appears in a stereotyped form in the pyramid period must be assumed. But even in the oldest texts the primitive form of the myth, the nucleus out of which a Osiris religion has grown is almost forgotten. Even in the oldest text we can see that a large mass of heterogeneous detail has already been built up about and above the primitive myth."
What are we saying? We're saying that we go back to the origins of writing 5000 years ago. And when writing comes out, when it is first developed in Egypt, the earliest hieroglyphs that the religion is already ancient. How ancient? Who knows. If you want to speculate on it the Saharan desert was fertile grassland about 9,000 B.C. It was a flourishing pasture land. The desiccation set in about 6,000 B.C. and has progressed right up until the present day. There are some scholars, some investigators who say that the original mythologies, both of the Greeks and of the Egyptians, came from the central Sahara. some 10-12,000 years ago. We just don't know. There are paintings, strange weird paintings. Especially around Tibesti Mountains right in the middle of the Sahara. And we have some books by some Belgian archaeologists. And they're made famous because von Daniken saw the spaceman. The, the, the one-eyed creature that had the bubble over it. Looked like a spaceman. That's where these are in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Nobody except the, the wandering yourings have been in those areas for thousands of years.
All that we do know is that when writing appears in Egypt it appears because the Egyptian civilization takes hold. North and South are brought together into a unified Kingdom by someone named Menes or Narmer. About 3000 B.C. and contemporaneous with that which would be the first dynasty. Contemporaneous with that is the rise of writing. And already in the writing the religion is sophisticated. The position of Thoth is already a major. And the Osirian religion is already complex. So all that we can say is that we have to begin with Osiris.
And my task is to get us from Osiris to the character of Benjamin Franklin. Because if we can get that far. If we can get the continuity that far then we've got it. Because we're direct inheritors of Benjamin Franklin's Hermetic genius. If we can get to him we're ok. Then we're home free.
We cannot start with a Hermetic literature of the 2nd century or 1st century A.D. We cannot start there. we're going to get there soon enough. We're going to get there in about two weeks. And from there on it's going to be interesting to see how all of this actually takes hold. Goes underground. Becomes very arcane. Very occult. Comes back on the end the Renaissance and is just a dazzling phenomenon. We're gonna go through all of that.
But in order to get some traction, which Boylan did not have. Which nobody has had. We've had to go to the Pyramid Texts. And the reason that we have the Pyramid Texts is that the translations have all been made now. We have the material but nobody has gone over it.
Let's talk about the Egyptian Book of the Dead for just a moment. There's no such thing as a Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Every tomb, every pyramid had a selection that if you put all the selections together it's an enormous literature. The popular Egyptian Book of the Dead translated by E.A. Wallis Budge that everyone says is the Egyptian Book of the Dead is just a selection. And it's a selection from only the middle of three major recensions of the funerary material. This Budge volume is only the Theban recension. It's only the way in which a selection of funerary texts was made in the 18th to the 22nd dynasty. When Thebes was the major place in Egypt.
After the Theban recension there was another ascension called the Caeot(sp?) recension which was used up until 200 A.D. And I have an old ancient translation of a Egyptian Book of the Dead that has some of the Caeot material in it that no other place can you find it.
But before the Theban recension the oldest recension that we know of was the Heliopolian recension. The Greeks called the city Heliopolis, the city of the sun. The place where Ra was the important God.
So we have to ask several interesting questions. First of all we have to ask what's the relationship between Osiris and Ra? Osiris is the king of the Dead. But Ra is that to which Osiris owes allegiance. Not competition. Ra is the context within which Osiris can function as king of the underworld. So that man, a man, a human being who affiniatizes as himself to Osiris does so not to just participate in Osiris's cycle. But ultimately and more strategically to relate himself to Ra. But we can see in the earliest material that is not called Ra. It's called Atum. Which the Greeks later call Atom. And it be an irreducible, the irreducible. But for the Greeks irreducible the atomic irreducibility was very small. But to the ancient Egyptians the irreducibility was the oneness. But a oneness which did not have a characteristic of objectivity. So it's a oneness in a zero sense. So that Atum was like the background against which anything could occur or happen.
But you can't just say zero because that's a very sophisticated thing. In fact the notion of zero takes a tremendous consciousness to even entertain. And when consciousness is mature it can understand zero. Zero becomes functional in our mathematics about the 3rd century A.D. It took all that time to conceive of. And the first place it was understood was India. And it came out of Asia Mahayana thinker named Nagarjuna.
In man's natural mythic level what stands for the all is infinity. At least we would call it infinity but they couldn't call it infinity because infinity is also a mathematical oriented understanding. They called it instead everlastingness. Which we think is synonymous with eternity but has a little bit different flavor. Because eternity, eternity takes a consciousness to understand also. But the Egyptians originally would call it everlastingness. Osiris is able to reoccur because of the ultimate context of everlastingness being real. If everlastings were not real the dismemberment of Osiris would be final. What allows him to be put back together again is that everlastingness is the real condition. Let's add the face of the universe. And the proof of that is that Osiris can be put back together again by Isis. By his consort. By what we would colloquially call his woman. He's able to be put back together.
We have to understand here that this masculine feminine relationship between Osiris and Isis is very exact and very precise. That the feminine quality of Isis is that she can organize the articulation of Osiris. That his dismemberment is not so much that his limbs have been cut off but that he is chaotic. That he no longer has articulation. So he's fragmented in that sense of being chaotic. Primitively one thinks of him being cut up into 14 pieces and those being scattered geographically around Europe..of Egypt. Been making that Freudian slip tonight. But the phenomenological insight into Osiris is that his nature is inarticulate. This is why he is fragmented. He is fragmented in whatever he expresses whatever he does because he isn't together. He has all the elements but they're in the wrong order. And what the feminine does is come in with articulate spacing. And the feminine adding articulate spacing to the masculine elements allows for them to be mobile and move around in a transformation of eternal reoccurrence and come back out whole again. Man, a man finds his wholeness with the articulation that the feminine provides. And her articulation, which is a speciality would have nothing to work with without the masculine. So there's a complementation that happens in there.
What allows for that complementation to happen at all is that there is a backdrop of everlastingness that allows that to occur. That is Atum. And that will become Ra or Re. Sometimes it's so spelled in the New Kingdom Re, R-E.
So associated with this is what is called the wandering of the soul. The journey of...to the real. And whatever shape that journey takes the ultimate realization is that there is a context of everlastingness that allows for this to happen in the first place. Otherwise it couldn't happen. It's like Jung says if there were not a built-in healing capacity in the psyche, the first time were fragmented we're would never come back together. If we were as fragile as an egg we would bear all the dents and eventually the breaks. But there's a built-in healing that goes along with the psychic. The reconstruction of Osiris in the mythology guarantees his being put back together. But the place that Hermes, Thoth, takes is that he is the guaranteer of this. Because there has to be a connection between the everlastingness and those protagonists who are working within, who are acting within, that context. Hermes, Thoth is the go-between. He's the messenger of the Gods that he's no errand boy. He's the way in which the everlastingness comes into play to guarantee that the Gods are going to be put back together.
And later on we will see that when the Gods are understood to happen in man's mind then Thoth will become Hermes. Thoth is there as long as we think that they're God's out there that this is happening to. But when those gods are seen to be aspects of our mind then Thoth will become Hermes. But the Hermetic tradition will never lose this flavor, this peculiar flavor, that what heals in the ultimate sense of curing is contacting everlastingness. And that only in the Hermetic mode can this be done.
I used to have an emblem about 25 years ago that thought I had. Little engraving, classical engraving. It showed Hermes with his caduceus raised up almost like a torch. But instead of of a torch showing fire light it was, the it was the insight of the caduceus. And he was reaching down with the other hand pulling a man out of a hole. And then it was coming up out of the hole. This is the Hermetic function. To help man out of his hole by the light of what the caduceus will symbolize. So Hermes, Thoth is a helper to man. What kind of help does man need? He doesn't need an extra five bucks. He doesn't need another meal. What he really needs is contact with everlastingness. That when he has that all of the built-in juices come into play. All of the built-in balances in himself come into play and he heals himself. So we're going to see that the true medicine. The true doctor of the soul is he who awakens the healing powers within the person. So the Hermetic tradition will always be arcane medicine. always be the most occult doctoring that you can have.
But not only does the individual have problems but the Gods themselves have problems. Which means that the functions of the mind have problems. So the mind needs to be healed. Quite often. In fact it's almost a a given situation. The exceptions of people that didn't need their mind healed it to come into maturity are very rare. Not only our individuals in need of healing. And minds in need of healing. But the amplification of minds produces civilizations, they need healing also. There are Hermetic doctors of civilization. Our civilization right now needs healing. So there are Hermetic doctors who are, who are healing that. C.G. Jung is really a Hermetic doctor. That's what he is. Is a helper to, to heal. Not just individuals but the civilization. Because it needs. It's sick. Why is it sick? It's sick ultimately because it has lost contact with everlastingness. Doesn't believe anymore that there's any real contact. As soon as human beings understand that they're not abandoned. Nothing is really broken. Nothing is really wrong then their own healing capacities come into play and they put things right. They get very active, very quickly.
The oldest recension of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Heliopolis version, is from the Pyramid of Unas. There are other places that it appears but in the pyramid of Unas is the most complete earliest record that we have. It's the earliest written religious text in the world. This is it. This is the basic level. This is ground zero for religious texts in the world. There's nothing before this. This is more than a thousand years before the Rigveda. And what we found in here was that the text itself was written on the inside of the tomb. So that the architectural shape of the tomb mirrored, symbolically the progression of the text. So that when you walked into the entrance you began with the text. And you read it as you walked along. And as you got into it you went through cycles of the text right down to the very the chamber.
They're not called books of the Dead in Egyptian. They're called co...Coming Forth by Day. Because the first chapter of all of the funerary texts is entitled The Coming Forth by Say. But the 64th chapter is called the Coming Forth from the Nether World. And we have to understand that in the overall strategic tone of the quote Egyptian Book of the Dead, that man must emerge from both the day and the night. he has to emerge from both. Beginning in the beginning, he thinks that he just has to emerge from the day. From his life. But really he has to emerge not only from his life but from his death. Because ultimately one is going to have to realize, one is going to have to Hermetically realize, that life and death are not disparate. They're not separate worlds. so that just organizing your life in terms of life is one-sided. You have to organize your life also in terms of death. That the two go together. That you have to be able to mature the coming forth. you have to mature in terms of life. You also have to mature in terms of death. The only way that you can mature in terms of death is through consciousness. You can mature in terms of life through nature. But the only way that you can mature through death is through consciousness.
So the Hermetic tradition always is handing man not only an understanding of life but saying this is half of it. Know how to live. Know about nature. But also know about consciousness. And that consciousness concerns itself with the underside. Now we live in a very strange age because we think that consciousness is somehow above. We think in an everyday term, if you ask somebody where's your consciousnesses say well well it's right here. And they'll point to the top of their head. This is extremely spiritual and sophisticated. This is rare. Almost nobody except sages used to talk that way. This is one of the signs of maturing of man. The, the halo above the head of the Christian Saint. Spiritual pleroma. Consciousness. Symbol of consciousness. The bubble in the Buddhists drawings. The Nimbus. The cloud of consciousness. This is an inheritance which we have which has been hard won for us and brought out.
Consciousness concerns the coming forth from the nether world. And that's why Thoth with his language ensures through the language itself that man is going to be alright. Why? Because language is never just language it's always shaped in special ways. How has it shaped? It's shaped into hymns. It's shaped into spells. Shaped into incantations. Shaped into instructions. When we think of language we tend to try to be abstract and just think of language as alphabets. But that's a phenomenological reduction. That is very sophisticated and it is very much after the fact that language really is always a phrasing together of hymns and spells and incantations and instructions. this type of thing. And that's what we have here in the pyramid of Unas.
We come into the pyramid. Here's an instruction which Thoth gives to Unas of what to say. He says, "Say excitement in heaven. We see something new say the Gods of primeval times." What do they see that's new? They see the ka of Unas coming in. He hasn't been there before. He's new. The Gods of primeval times see him. He's going to upset their equilibrium because he's new. They haven't planned for him. So he has to be able to tell them that he belongs. That he fits in. Because the shape of reality is not dependent only upon them but upon everlastingness. And everlastingness is going to admit Unas into the pleroma. Because Thoth has given him the right things to say, to tell these, educate these, give incantations to these, utterances to these Gods. So they will understand that the Unas belongs. Make room for him. Re-adjust reality so that he belongs in there. So not all the Unas but anyone who comes in belongs there. And the only way that man is going to fit in is that he is able to do this. Because the Gods are trying to protect their equilibrium and say no more. You can't come in. And if you don't know what to say you're not going to get in. There's a connection here. It's like you have to have the pearly words to get through the pearly gates. And if you do then that's the pearl of great price. You have to be able to specify through the hymns, through the incantations, through the instructions to those who are occupying the expressions of the real and instruct them. or if they become very difficult to to give a an incantation to neutralize them. So that you can fit into the real. So that you belong there. You're at home in the real. Thoth provides this. Hermes provides this. The Hermetic tradition provides this for man.
"Oh Aeneid, a new Horus is in the sunlight. The lords of forms serve him. The two whole Aenieds attend him as he sits on the seat of the Lord of the all. As he occupies his place in reality in everlastingness." He takes his seat. he takes his place. A new Horus. What is this Horus? Horus is the child of Isis and Osiris. Horus is every human being who is born of men and woman. But he has an opponent, Typhon or Set. Who is specifically there in the phenomenal expression of thingness, of characters, of mythic godliness to stop him. So that there's a contest between Typhon and Horus. Between Set and Horus. There's always a struggle. And what it is is a legal battle. It's a legal struggle. Does Horus have a right to exist as a divine participant? And the question is all contingent upon his being able to prove his legitimacy as a son. As a son. They could be a man or a woman to prove their legitimacy that they that they come from their parents. Not only that they come from their parents but that their parents are together. Thoth is the lawyer who wins the case for Horus in this legal battle.
In the ancient egyptian play which we have here The Triumph of Horus. Horus says, "I am Horus Great God Lord of the sky. Lord of the upper Egyptian crown. Prince of the lower Egyptian crown. I am Lord of this land. I take possession of the two lands and assuming the double diadem. I over thro the flow of my father Osiris as king of Upper and Lower Egypt forever." And Thoth then says, "I overthrow thy enemies. I protect thy bark with my potent spells." The bark is the ship. The ship of state. The ship of the soul. The, the vehicle. "With my potent spells."
Consciousness only occurs after language flames into expressivity. We say well consciousness transcends language. And the reply to that is that spirit transcends language but consciousness is of language. It's like being a beggar and trying to make a dollar spend for everything. Trying to use the word consciousness to mean everything. Spirit transcends language but consciousness does not. Consciousness occurs as language occurs. The shapes of language are the contours of consciousness. The flow of language is the stream of consciousness. And so Thoth or the Hermetic tradition concerns itself always with how to instruct you. So that you can learn, so that you can instruct yourself. Because when you can instruct yourself you can tell those powers within you that are trying to stop you from being yourself where to get off. Mainly not to squelch them but to show them their place in the ecology of the whole. That the wholeness is what is primary. And that they have to participate in the wholeness. That the negativity, the obstacles, cannot win. This would be unreal for them to win. They have every right to participate. But their participation is to halt realization long enough until realization is complete and full and then to allow realization to pass through them. So the Hermetic tradition will always emphasize this. This would be the, the to test for it. And once you get the flavor. There's a certain flavor. You can tell what's hermetic and what isn't. Hermetic is always sealed. It's always sealed with the guarantee that the real is. It never not is.
So Unas when he comes in, "Unas shines again in the east." The east where the sun rises. "The one who separates the quarelers comes toward him bowing. Serve Him ye gods. He is older than the great one. So says he. he took his seat. Unas takes who, eternity is brought to him. Sia is placed at his feet. Jubilant for Unas. He has taken the horizon." This is a reference to what John Donne will later on write in his poem the Sun Rising. That man's certainty of his spiritual nature is as sure as the Sun rising. When you're looking at the Sun rising. That he can have that certainty. It's not problematic. It's not ambiguous. It's not up for doubt or speculation. It's not a possibility. It's a certainty. It's called veracity. It can only be known through the shaping of language.
Let's skip over further into the text. "The hand of Unas is come upon thee. The powerful one. The one which has come upon thee. This hand is the Panther cat which rules the house of life. She strikes thee in thy face. She scratches thine eyes. So that thou foulest down and thy dung and glide us down into the urine. Fall, lie down, glide away. So that thy mother Nut may see thee. Then say Ra appears. His urias on his head against this serpent which comes out of the ground which is under the fingers of Unas. He cuts off thy head with this knife which was in the hand of the Panther cat. She who lives in the house of life. He draws those which are thy mouth, teeth. He saps thy seed poison with these four strings which were in the service of the sandal of Osiris. Monster lie down. Bull glide away. Say thy bread of eternity is thine. Ye too sources of the Gods who protect the Gods in the shade. Thy bread of eternity is thine. Oh Amun together with Amunet, ye two sources of the Gods who protect the Gods in their shade. Thy bread of eternity is thine. Oh Atun together with the two lions who have created themselves. Their double divinity for themselves. This is Shu and Nepit. The two who made the Gods. Begat the Gods. Established the Gods. Say to your father that Unas has given you the bread of eternity."
Turn your cassette now. Mr. Weir continues his lecture on the other side without a break in the continuity.
END OF SIDE 1
"And he has satisfied you with what is due to you. You should not hinder unas when he crosses to him toward the horizon."
What is peculiar here. What is peculiar here is that man has an indelible function in the ecology of the real. Man is the Hermes to the Gods. Hermes is the messenger of the Gods but it is the conscious man who is the messenger of the Gods. Not only from the gods but back to the Gods. Why? Why? Because the Gods are so close to everlastingness that they can't tell anything is moving or different or new or dynamic. Everything is very slow. And only man coming in like lightning says we belong. It's not only you. We belong. Otherwise the archetypal layers would swallow up the individual and the individual would not be able to occur. If there were not some built-in balance which allowed for the individual to actually occur, he would never occur. She would never occur. No one would occur. There would be no persons at all. There would only be cooker...cookie cutter stamped out replicas of aspects of the archetypes. Something has to be as strong as the archetypes and that is the person. Not the persona, the mask, but taking the mask off the real self. Who says it's not a question of power and it's not a question of primacy it's a question of reality. I'm as real as you are. Therefore in the everlastingness of the real I belong as much as you do. And it is Thoth who wins the case because he is able to say this. He is able to prove this.
So that the putery(?) text, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, the earliest Hermetic writings that we have 5000 years ago, are all about this tremendous realization. Trying to wake man up to his nature. Through having his consciousness weave back through his nature, through facility with language, so that he can work his magic. And bring his individual magic into play so that it belongs as everlastingness itself.
When we go into it. "Unas knows him. He knows his name. Everlastingness is his name. Everylastingness is his name. He with the arm ready to fight. Horus over the Milky Way of heaven who makes Ra alive every day. He will built Unas again. He will make Unus alive every day." You see how it runs. These are the translations. This is the way it runs.
"Stay great raft as opener of the ways full of thy spiritual power. Coming out of the horizon after having taken the white crown in the great and mighty fountain heads in the South of Libya."
Do you see here now as we read something 5,000 years old just translated. When was this translated? It was first translated in 1968. It makes sense. It not only makes sense but it gives us the traction that we need to understand the Hermetic tradition. Because if we just understand it as some Renaissance phenomenon. Which was a Renaissance of 2nd century A.D. spirituality we're going to miss the point. We're going to miss the central feature. That it's just not something that occurred in a synchronistic time when there was a lot of religions. Mithraism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Hermeticism. That it's just one of these Hellenistic synthesises. It isn't that at all. It is already formed three thousand years before the Hellenistic Greco-Roman synthesis. It's already intact and was already ancient then.
So that there'll be a tone. There'll be a special tone which we will see. It'll be most, most occur in the Hermetic doctrine The Poimandres. Poi in Greek of the word poeasis(sp?) means to make. Poetry comes out of that. The Poimandres will, will be a a basic making of the spirit.
And at the very beginning of The Poimandres we'll see that the Hermetic instruction is that before anything is learned one rises up to become vast spaces. That is to say one learns one's articulation. Why? Because the articulation then, like Isis coming into Osiris, allows for the mobility, the transformations, to happen. So that what was confused comes back into order. So that the self which was confused by the mask, by the persona, is able to transform that persona, that mask into the self. And we'll see that the essential motion in that transformation is not just to rearrange parts of the surface but to purify all the parts so that become transparent so the real self comes through.
But the ultimate articulation is not just physical mobility on a two-dimensional surface. The ultimate articulation is to purify the elements so that in a third dimensional way, the depth of truth shines through. And that the making of man's spirit is not so much making a spirit but making the conditions where the spirit is released. And only when the spirit is released from within does it bring with itself the amperage of everlastingness. Then man is spiritual.
And the difference between a spiritual man and a psychic man is uncountable differences. Because a psychic individual will always be limited by their mind. Always be limited by mental functioning. Whereas spiritual man, the mind is completely transparent to the point of not being a veil any more at all.
So we see that the earliest Hermetic texts are not from the 2nd century A.D. but from the Pyramid Texts. 5,000 years ago in Egypt.
"This Unas comes to thee oh Nut. This Unas comes to thee. He has thrown his father down to earth. He has left a Horus behind him. He has two wings have grown as those of a hawk. His two feathers are those of a holy hawk. His soul has brought him here. His magical power has adorned him. Mayest thou opened thy place in heaven among the stars of heaven. Thou art indeed the unique star. The comrade of who mayest thou looked down on Osiris when he gives orders to the spirits. Thou standest high up far from him. Thou art not of them. Thou shalt not be of them. See this Unas stands among you. Two horns are on his head like two wild bulls. For thou art indeed the black lamb son of a black sheep. Born of a bright sheep suckled by four sheep mothers. He comes against you. Horus with blue eyes. Beware of the Horus with red eyes whose anger is evil. Whose power one cannot withstand. His messengers go. His quick runners run. They announce to the one who lifts up his arm in the east that the unique one in thee is going away. Of whom the God said, he will give orders to my fathers the Gods. The Gods are silent beside thee. The Aeneid has put their hands before their mouths. Before the one in thee of whom God has said he will give orders to my fathers the Gods. Step to the doors of the horizon. And the doors of the cool region open of themselves."
So mans great spiritual quest and triumph is assured when he makes contact with the everlastingness which is real. But the difficulty in all this is how to contact that. What is it that gets in the way? The obfuscation of the mind. The obfuscation of the world. They get in the way.
And what gets in the way triply is that the relation between the mind in the world also gets in the way. So that a Hermes, later on in a very sophisticated fashion, will have to be able to clear the mind, clear the world and clear the relation between mind and world. And thus he is thrice greatest Hermes. Hermes Trismegistus. And when Thoth becomes Hermes that's a fantastic jump in capacity. but when Hermes Trismegistus counties in the 2nd century A.D. that will really be something. Because Hermes Trismegistus not only instructs the mind, not only clears the world, but is able to deal with the relationalties between mind and world. Which is almost like an epiphenomenon that wasn't able to be dealt with before quite adequately. And so the instructions in Hermetic documents, like the Asclepius and The Poimandres, will be exceedingly refined.
And one of the difficulties for us to appreciate in 1986 is that somebody writing in Alexandria around 200 A.D. could be psychologically so sophisticated that we're like children compared to them. It takes a lot of humility to be able to to understand that. And we'll have to get to that.
Well I think we should leave off there. Thank you.
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