Kore Kosmou (Lecture 2)
Presented on: Tuesday, February 25, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 8 of 52
Kore Kosmu, Part 2
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 25, 1986
Transcript:
This is the second part of the Hermetic treatise called the Kore Kosmu. And of course the, who is Kore Kosmu? It's Isis. Isis is Kore Kosmu. She is the Virgin of the world. You know when you look at the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck and you see the world card. And you see that graceful feminine stepping through the wreathed vesica piscis, she is the Virgin of the world. She presents the culmination of life. This is where life has its triumphal entering. The triumphal chariot as the alchemical phrase is.
Before we get into the Kore Kosmu though I want to bring in a quotation from Plato, from the dialogue The Philebus. We need to hear something. And reading through some of the commentary by G.R.S. Mead on the Virgin of the world reminded me that this passage from the Philebus should be introduced about this time. If you've been following what I've been doing here, the first four weeks we took the Pyramid Texts and showed the 3000 B.C. to about 1800 B.C. presentation of the after death wisdom initiation for the soul. And then we jumped and for the last month we've been doing the Hermetic texts. The Poimandres in two lectures. And now the Kore Kosmu in two lectures. To show how the wisdom literature is for the living and not for the dead. And when it's for the living then it is for consciousness and has a different emphasis.
In The Philebus Socrates talking with two friends, Protarchus and Philebus. And socrates at 17D. All the Platonic dialogues are numbered, each paragraph. This is 17D. "Socrates: But my friend when you know how many intervals there are in height and depth of sound. When you know their nature and the boundaries of the intervals. And the systems that they form. Which our predecessors who discovered them have taught us. Their successors taught us to call them scales. They also discovered other similar features in bodily movements. And they tell us that these two should be measured numerically and called tempos and measures. And they add we should realize the necessity of studying every unit and plurality from this point of view. Anyway when you understand these matters you're an expert. And by examining and understanding any other unit in this matter...manner you become knowledgeable about it. On the other hand the boundless plurality of individual things. And in individual things makes you bound for ignorance. You are of no account. You amount to nothing. Since you have never looked at the amount of anything. And Protarchus says, I think he has expressed himself very well, Philebus. And Philebus says, I agree but what on earth is he getting at by bringing these points up now. And Socrates says, you know Protarchus that's a very fair question. And Protarchus says, well of course it is. Why don't you answer it?"
"And Socrates, rolling his frog-like eyes and snuffling his pudgy nose a little bit as he used to do. Arranging himself and his sturdy bulk. Leaning against the column in the Agora, said I will. When I have gone through these matters a little more. Whenever any one perceives any unit he must, as we have said, take some number into consideration. And not make straight for the indeterminate." As the French say equite. Don't make straight for the indeterminate. For one thing you can't get there. It's indeterminate. Don't be in a hurry to shake God's hand. The hand is not there.
Socrates goes on, "The same goes for the opposite situation. When he is forced to take the indeterminate first again he must not make a rush for the unit. But he must attend to the number which circumscribes each plurality. And eventually reach the unit only when the whole number has been seen." That is when you're starting from the indeterminate you can't rush to the conclusions. You can't rush to the propositions. Just as you can't rush to the indeterminate when you're working with number. When you're working with units. When you're working with notes. When you're working with words. When you're working in between the notes. In between the words. One has to wait until the shape is circumscribed by the notes, by the words. The very essence of a definition is that the boundaries are cognized. It's not that any thing is labeled. If you think a definition labels something that's freshman English F on your composition. You fail. definitions are not labels. definitions are boundaries around. And when the circumscribing of the boundaries comes to a certain point where you see the shape, then one recognizes that within that realm, within that limitation, within that is that which you are talking about. You see when you get down to it it's all very mysterious indeed.
"Socrates says, once again let's use the alphabet to understand what is meant by this. And Protarchus says, how? Socrates says, some God or some man of divine stature, the Egyptians say it was Thoth, once saw that vocal sound is indeterminate. He was the first to perceive the vowels in that indeterminate and to notice that there are several of them not just one. He also realized that there are other letters which do not consist of sound as such but nevertheless do make some noise." In Egyptian there are seven vowels. In English there are five. Which is very nice Hermetically. There are seven vowels in Egyptian. There are eight semi vowels. And there are nine muted.
Socrates goes on talking about Thoth. Talking about him understanding that in the indeterminacy of sound there are vowels. And they articulate. They are the units. And this was very peculiar. And he noted that they too have some number. And he distinguished a third class of letters which we nowadays call mutes. Next he divided these noiseless mute letters until he reached each unit. And he divided the vowels and the intermediate letters in the same way until once he had seen their number he gave the same, the name letter to each in every unit. So that you had the vowels. You had the semi vowels. And you had the mutes which are like consonants. Now then you have an alphabet. Now since he saw that none of us would understand any of the letters as it is in itself in isolation from the rest. It was very poignant. There is no way. There's no way that A means anything. Or G. Or you, you take a letter. Outside the matrix of the alphabet. It begs the question to try and say well A is just ah like that. That begs the question. It's the matrix of all of it together. What holds that matrix together is none of the letters in themselves but the articulation between the letters holds them together. The intervals. The indeterminacy.
And Socrates is saying there's something about the mind. That when it is very precise it at the same time cognizes and and is aware of that the precision is set in the midst of complete indeterminacy. And the complete indeterminacy of any precision, that indeterminacy is shared by all the elements alike. It's very peculiar. Very noticeable. Extremely esoteric. How esoteric? If one wishes to really move, to really go from one letter to another, the only way to go is through the indeterminate. However brief. You can't go from A to G without having the gap between A and G first. You can't go from A to B without having the gap there. The gap counts. It's glib of the mind just to say ABCDE. What's really happening is that there are intervals that are there that are unspoken but actually happen, actually occur.
So that later on in alchemy for instance when one is working with precise transformation of reality, you have to constantly go to the indeterminate before this can become that. The this has to dissolve into the indeterminant. And then the that has to participate out. And so the old latin Solvay et coagulate is like R=mc-squared. It's a very, very terse statement of an extraordinarily refined intellectual recognition. Which in its conceptual form is so powerful. E= MC squared is not so impressive when you write it in graphite paper on roll paper. Graphite pencil on a little paper, that's not so impressive. Or squeaky chalk on some professors study in Princeton in 1940. But you can take that and you can make a hydrogen bomb out of that. The same thing we'll see in the Hermetic tradition. They will learn how to transform. They will learn how to transform human beings. How to take that person who has every limitation that you would think. And through technique and patience and expertise transform them so that they are beyond the Gods. So that they no longer have any kind of destiny holding them in. Any kind of ions oppressing them. They will become free.
Socrates says, "Now since he saw that none of us would understand any of the letters as it is in itself in isolation from the rest he further concluded this that this interdependence is a factor." The interdependence is a factor which unifies. All the letters in some way. So he declared that there is a single science for them which he called literacy. And of course that science becomes very arcane after a while. What integrates? Interdependence of them all. There's an extraordinarily powerful idea. People talk about integration as if you're braiding a couple of things together. When I used to take graduate seminars in integration in the humanities 20 years ago, they would say well integration in the humanities is that you bring a little English literature and a little psychology in, a little philosophy and a little history and and you work it all in together. Or somehow an interdisciplinary study is when you take behavioral science and social science and psychological community science and you weave that together. That's poultry. That's powder puff stuff. It's just cosmetic gobbledygook. Integration is where the interdependence of all as a unity is seen. That is powerful. You can push a civilization off its foundations with that idea. Or you can put one back on its foundations with that idea. That's how powerful that is.
One manifestation of it, when he was asked in 1931 about majority rule Gandhi said the only way that enlightened man lives is by unanimous decisions. And if you're incapable of having a unanimous decision the civilization isn't mature. So work at maturing. It's that same, same notion. Hermetic wisdom.
So now we move from Plato back to the Kore Kosmu. What's the, what's the relevance? As they used to say. The relevance is this. The Virgin of the world is giving instruction to her son. She's in fact not giving instruction to him. She is giving the cream of eternal wisdom to him. She's not telling him about this, that and the other. She is telling him about everything together as a unity. She is giving that kind of maturation to her son. Who is her son? Horus. Horus the wisdom eye. The sound wisdom eye. The feminine matrix of life, which is life, is giving instruction to consciousness of how its soundness occurs. Because the consciousness needs to know this. Because the consciousness as we saw in Manilas last week the highest consciousness always has a flaw in it. And the flaw is is that it is bashful. That it grows up slow. Slowly is the adverb. And in its slow growth is a sitting duck for all of the phonies, all of the pseudos, to attack it to lead it astray. And so the most sensitive intelligent people are always having tough time. As children, as adolescence, as young adults, as middle-aged, as old age. Always having a tough time. If you're enjoying life. If you enjoy this life and don't have any problems it's sign of low level. If you think this is all right then you are in trouble. But if you're disturbed, upset, curious then it's a sign that there's something cooking. Some intelligence that's working.
So Isis, Isis is the world mother in that sense. That she's like mother nature. And she wants the living matrix of life to deliver the sense of unity to consciousness. Because consciousness is forever finding the units. It can find the numbers. It can find the alphabets. But it's always missing the intervals. It's always missing the articulation. Always missing the spacing. So that consciousness without life tends to run everything in a unified blur that has no...it's like a waterfall. It has no way to be articulate at all. If you symbolize it purely phenomenologically symbolize it, it comes out as a nothing. Void. Shunyata. And you can have that consciousness. Nothing. You can do a little guerrilla theater feeling on yourself. You might feel like somebody took a great big huge q-tip and wiped your mind clean. And so it echoes and there's just, there's just nothing. There's no content at all. Because there's no articulation at all.
So pure consciousness doesn't do you any good at all to attain it. Enlightenment does no good at all. It's...you can't sell it. You can't bottle it. You can't even describe it. So that life is enormously necessary to come in to give the articulation. So that there's music. So that there's language. So that there's art. So that consciousness instead of not being has its articulation in being. And it's only Isis' instruction that can give this. So this is what's being given.
She says there it was a time then. Hermès made an explanation to surrounding space. How that not even to his son. Because of the yet newness of his youth had he been able to hand on the perfect vision. You see the, the, the teacher who has the perfect vision. Then how can you hand that on. Any, any student becomes a son. Anybody in the tradition then who is your having to pass it on to them. How do you pass on perfect vision? There's no way to get it. There's no way to have it. There's nothing to have. There's nothing to get. So how do you pass that on?
So Isis is telling Horus, look son this is how we do it. "But when the Sun did rise for me and with all-seeing eyes I gazed upon the hidden mysteries of that new dawn and contemplated them. Slowly there came to me but it was sure the conviction that the sacred symbols of the cosmic elements were hid away hard by the secrets of Osiris." That in the whole religious ecology of sacred symbols, wrapped up in the ceremony of Osiris coming back from the netherworld into life again, was somehow the meaningful matrix. That that meaningful matrix could only be cognized with the help of Isis who then made all of that work. The elements of masculine wisdom are no good without the feminine context to make them work. So that Isis and Osiris together, together create Horus. There's no way that either of them by themselves. There's no chauvinistic stance, no women's lib stance that can make that Horus happen by themselves. Can't happen.
But when Horus occurs he occurs always in the context where the masculine has to become fragmented and the feminine has to become withdrawn. It's only in that separation that the, that consciousness is born. There's a tension. The fragmenting of the masculine and the withdrawal of the feminine and consciousness is born from that. But because consciousness when it is born in that condition doesn't have the mother and the father there, so he needs an instructor and that's where Hermes Thoth comes in. Thoth comes in and he raises consciousness. He raises Horus. And as he raises Horus, a protagonist, a resistance called Set or Typhon comes into play always. And always threatens the young Horus, the young consciousness is always threatened. What does it threatened by? It's threatened by the unconscious. The non conscious. Anything that isn't in that consciousness is an obstacle to it, a threat to it. And so Thoth does the raising. And as he raises Horus in this conflict with Typhon, Horus as he wins that brings back Isis and Osiris into their unity. And they reoccur at the triumph of Horus when Horus is triumphal, part of his triumph is that he brings the feminine and the masculine back into play together. This is how he saves the world. This is why he is a hero. Why he's a hero.
And there is a stage at that where the feminine must give instruction to Horus. But she can't really be there so Thoth has to give the instruction. He has to be the mother. He has to be the father. And this is what's happening here. He foresees in the Hermetic tradition, Hermes, thrice greatest Hermes foresees the whole pattern because it's a unity. So he writes out all of the instruction at one time. And in order to preserve these he puts magical invocations on these books so that they cannot be destroyed. The the words in the Greek mean some kind of language and some kind of ointment. Both kinds of treatment. So if there's something done to these books and something said over these books, so that they are protected. They are to use the the phrase now they're Hermetically sealed. There is no way that they can be corrupted. They have to be physical to be in the physical realm, so they're protected that way. And they have to be discursive to be instructive so they're protected that way. The former by the ointments. The latter by the words. And when they're Hermetically sealed in this way.
What happens when something is Hermetically sealed? The interior of it is a vacuum. Remember from your high school physics? Where they put the Magda burns spears together and they pump the air out. And the little beeswax around the edges of it becomes so tightly sealed that you know 50 horses on each side couldn't pull them apart. Because the vacuum, the vacuum holds the two together so that they become more one than if they were cast as one. This is the mystery of the Spirit. Because the spirit when it is, when it is mature, when it is mature it has the vacuum at the very core. It's quintessence is a vacuum. And that vacuum holds the aspects together so well that there is no way to pull that apart. But a secular man, his mind, his soul, his personal qualities can be pulled apart. The secular person is extremely fragile. Just a year or two of office politics will send him up the wall. You know one year in a bad marriage and they're ready for the institution. We're fragile as secular. But transformed, mankind transformed that you have that Hermetic seal in you you can't pull that person apart. God's can't pull that person apart. Then that person reads his bill of rights to the powers of the universe and says here I am. I'm like the Sun rising. I am an integral part of this seamless motion of the real.
So you can see that they're working here with an extraordinary jump into the fabulous. They're not talking about just adjusting somebody so they can live in Alexandria. Or adjusting somebody so they can go to work. They're talking about remaking the cosmic structure of the person so that they are indelibly real forever. Forever. What's going to corrode it? Nothing. This is eternal life. This is eternal life. It's a long way from playing a harp. Long way.
So Isis in talking to Horus. And she's trying to convey this to to him. Life is trying to convey this to consciousness. "Hermes before he returned to heaven invoked a spell on these books. And he spake some words." Don't be disturbed by the word spell. It's what they called these things. They were they were sacred little sigils of language. "So he hid these books away and he said, oh holy books who have been made by my immortal hands. By incorruptions, magical incantations. Free from decay throughout eternity remain. And in corrupt stay from time to time become unseeable, unfindable for every one whose foot shall tread the plains of this land of ours until old Heaven does bring forth the right persons, the right people, whom the Creator shall call souls. Who are in need of these texts. Then they will find them. Thus he spoke and laying these incantations on them by means of his own works. He shut them safe away in their own zones. And long enough the time has been since they were hid away."
Where they hid away? It's sophomoric to think that they're hid in pyramids. Or they're hid in the earth. Or they're, they're hid in some strange kind of relation of counting stones and anything like that. They're hid in the mind of man. You know the old saying, the old Greek saying was that when the Gods wanted to protect the secret of eternal life they put it where no one would think of looking for it. They put it in the mind of Aristophanes. The most classically vulgar man in Greece. It's a colloquial way of saying that these are hidden away in the mind of man. That they are queued into play when our sense of maturation gets to a certain juncture. And when our sense of maturation gets to that juncture our heartfelt love of wisdom, energized by our humility matching that love of wisdom. That focus evokes them and they ignite. And they happen. And when they happen a new zone is opened up in the person.
In fact, the Hermetic tradition is that there are eight zones that open up in the person. And when one reaches the eighth zone the wholeness of the other seven zones, the other seven rungs, the other seven spheres. The eighth is that the wholeness of them occurs to one that all of this was a unity. Nothing was wasted. Everything was important. Everything was important. Nothing was extraneous. nothing was so bad that you have to leave it out or so embarrassing that you can't quite want to remember it. So these are the zones.
Here's how it reads in the Kore Kosmu. "And nature or my son was barren till they who were then under orders to patrol the heaven, approaching to the God of all, their King, reported on the lethargy of things. The time was come for cosmos to awake. And this was no one's task but his alone. And so God says nature arise. And from his word, his logos, nature arise. And he says this smiling." In the Hermetic treatise there's always this love ability. "God smiling says nature arise and she comes forth." It's like the world card of the tarot deck. She comes forth. And what does she have in her hand? She has the baton. And who is she going to pass that baton on? To you. To you. And you have to have the dynamic, the awareness, the willingness, the cooperativeness to take that baton from her hands. To accept it. The gift of life. The Eleusinian mysteries version of this was a stock of bread wheat. And the kaikkion that was given to you as a little bit of honey and barley and wine mixed together. And you would sip that and accept these. The stock of the bread wheat. The staff of life. What other kind of scepter would you want? This allows for life to continue. This is very powerful. A very powerful of scepter to have.
What stops one from believing that, from recognizing that are all of the in crowding doubts. All of the false mentalities. That say no, no, no, not not bread. Gold. Or jewels at least. Or or you know mortgages on their kingdom at least. But bread. Bread.
So this in crowding of the pseudo levels has to be dispersed from time to time. So that Isis held in her hand not only the scepter of life but she has in her other hand what was called a sistrum. Which when you shake it causes a cacophony of sound that breaks up. It's meant to break up the stodginess. Break up the area.
Plutarch in volume 5 of his moralia. It has 16 volumes. And volume 5 has Isis and Osiris. And he talks about the sistrum in here. It's section 63 of Isis and Osiris. "The sistrum or the rattle of Isis, also makes it clear that all things in existence need to be shaken or rattled about and never see to cease from motion. But as it were to be waked up and agitated when they grow drowsy and torpid. They say that they avert and repel Typhon by means of the sistrums. Indicating thereby that when destruction constricts and checks nature, generation releases and arouses it by means of motion."
We have a Zen version of the sistrum in that top drawer. Open that top drawer here, John. the top one. Pull the center drawer first. Those two wooden things. Let me have those just for a second.
From the room: Roger **inaudible few words**
Yeah. This is the, this is the Zen sistrum. You know you're sitting, 2:30 in the morning with the dust motes and somebody comes up behind you and *smack sound*. If you still want to punch him you're not there. You're just not there. You're not even in the ballgame. This is, these are for civilized monsters. They used to have Kasich's where they would hit you like a broom handle. Pretty hard. Pretty hard. Hurts. If you have any kind of reaction you're not there. It's not not to have a reaction it's that all of this is cooperating to be precisely in a different mode. Precisely to break up the whole mentality that would think that that this is done to get your goat. That has nothing to do with it. And if those feeling tones are still there, then you have to work on those. It might take you 20 years. That's what's so hard about it.
Isis is telling Horus, "God says smiling nature arise. and from his word there came a marvel. Feminine possessed of perfect beauty. Gazing at which the Gods all stood amazed. And God the forefather." The forefather. Like in foreseeing, pronoia. The father who sees. Zeus the far doghter. Apollo the..."With the name of nature honored her and bade her be prolific." He honors her. He honors her and bids her to be prolific. How can she be prolific? Because she goes into the realm of nature and allows herself to be fertile. And we talked about this last week. This is an extraordinarily important element in reality. For if the feminine will not be fertile, then the articulation of consciousness will not occur. Then only a kind of pseudo surrogate level occurs. And this is extraordinarily deceptive. And all kinds of false religiosity comes from this. Enormous.
"Then gazing fixedly on the surrounding space he spake these words as well. Let heaven be filled with all things full. And air and ether too." The hermetic cosmology is four levels usually. There's heaven which is for the Gods. There's ether which is for the stars, ruled by the Sun. There's air which is the, the demons and the ruled by the moon. And then there's the earth ruled by Kings. Kings moon Sun God. Four levels. "God spake and it was so. And nature with herself communing knew she must not disregard the sires command. So with the help of Toil she made a daughter fair whom she did call invention. And on her God bestowed the gift of being. And with his gift she set apart all them.
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What happens when a human being first understands that there's maybe not that all this is going on but that something is going on. The first thing that they feel is Gloam. The very first thing. It's a sign of quality of character. It's a sign of spiritual dignity to feel oh no. To feel depressed. "They were first plunged in deep gloom in learning that they were condemned. That they had to accept this. They began to wail. And I was myself amazed at the souls wailing utterances. Now give good heed son Horus for thou art being told the mystical spectacle. Which Comethus, our forefather, was privileged to hear from Hermes record writer of all deeds. And I from Comethus, most ancient of us all, when he did honor me with the black write that gives perfection. The mystery of the nothing. Here though it now from me."
So this motion, this outcry from man. Realizing, the human being realizes that he is not at all in the right mode. That there's something else. What he needs to know then is what is called basically a cosmology. He has to be given the ABCs of how everything is put together. And that's what Isis does in here. And I'm skipping over all of it. It's like a Genesis. how everything came to be. And what the arrangements are. And all this is for openers. Just to assure the person that, look you're not. Yeah you're feeling bad but you're not seeing this right. You're not occurring by yourself. You're not in isolation. You're occurring in a matrix of elements and units which can be known exactly with great precision. And one of the healing aspects in Hermetic silen...science is to show the suffering man the specificity of reality. See here it is exactly. Nothing is ambiguous. The mystery is not in ambiguity. The mystery is that in all of this precision that there is unity. That's the mystery. If one doesn't want to recognize just what image God is because you don't want to be disappointed, you don't have to play that kind of mental trick at all. It's irrelevant. I'm not sure just to **inaudible word**.
So a cosmology is given. And in this there are four creatures that are given to us as being Hermetically symbolic of, of the highest aspect. Eagles, lions, dragons and dolphins in their respective elements. But the fifth, the quintessence is man. The quintessence is man. He is the most noble. He is the most...because he has imperishable mind. Imperishable. And in imperishable mind there is a wondrously mighty spirit which no massive body could contain whose strength consisted in the purity of the intellect. And who knew full well the things in which he questioned. It is a dignified and fair body. And this then given the imperishable soul makes man eternal. And Isis then says, "It is they who are filled full of life. It is they who cause this tremendous development. And they have learned from Hermes to know the secrets of my records. All of them. And we'll make separation of them and they will put them back together. And we'll find them all. It is they who have taught man how to wrap up all of this. and how to live as they should live. And they alone have been taught by Hermes in God's hidden codes to become the authors of the Arts and Sciences. And all the pursuits which men do practice and givers of their laws. Does they who are taught by Hermes that the things below have been disposed by God to be in sympathy with the things above. Established on earth the sacred rights over which the mysteries in heaven preside. They know the destructibility of mortal frames. And they devised the grade of prophets and all things perfected. In order that no prophet who stretched forth his hands unto the God should be in ignorance of anything. That magic and philosophy should feed the soul and medicine preserves the body when it suffers in pain. And having done all this my son, Osiris and myself perceiving that the world was now quite full. Were thereupon demanded back and brought back by those who dwell in heaven. And God then in hymns of rejoicing welcomes us both back together again. And now you Horus you must learn the sacred hymns to bestow this knowledge to man." And so this is how the Kore Kosmu then ends.
So we have here in these two hermetic treatises, The Poimandres and The Kore Kosmu, an introduction to The Corpus Hermeticum. And we're going to come back to the other documents in The Corpus Hermeticum. We will take them all. We will not leave a single one of them out.
But next week we need to have a transition lecture to show overall what happened in the historical world. How all of this came about. How from the early Ptolemaic times to the Hermetic and Gnostic times, the tremendous change in culture externally, historically, actually showed this great transformation that we've been talking about. So next week will be sort of a coverall lecture to give us some background. And then the week after that we'll go back to our Corpus Hermeticum. And we'll take a look at the Asclepius.
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