The Greek Hermes
Presented on: Tuesday, March 25, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 12 of 24
Greek Hermes
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, March 25, 1986
Transcript:
The date is March 25th, 1986. This is part 12 of the lecture series by Roger Weir on the Hermetic tradition, Osiris to Franklin. The Greek Hermes.
...Week we talked about how, we talked about last week how we have an Egyptian soul. How the inner spiritual shape which we have is Egyptian. But the mind that we have is Greek. And it's a curious interplay. And this bifurcation with its inner penetration has not been sufficiently taken into consideration in psychology. Psychology is a young science and is naive. And it's a at least a hundred years or perhaps 150 years away from any kind of maturation. we need to appreciate though for ourselves, we need to jump ahead in consciousness 150 years. So that we can appreciate you know what is being considered. What we are having to consider tonight. Let's try to approach it simply at first. Because the complexity is there naturally.
The mind is always a filter. The soul is always a unity with the universe. So that our sense of presence, when mental, is in a selective filtering mode. So, when we are personal, when I am Roger, I am Roger because of my mind. But when I am the being that I am, when I am in the spirit, when I am in my soul, I have no personality. I'm not Roger but rather am in the unity of this cosmos.
If the soul is Egyptian and if the mind is Greek the inner penetration of the mental selection of personality, the shaping of personality, the definition of character, will have a certain incommensurate presence with the inner spirit tone. These two were brought together slowly, largely in Alexandria, over about 300 years' time. 300 close to almost 400 years when you put it all together. And it took all that time to bring forth a, an interface that worked. And Christianity as a religion is actually, the working interface of the Greek based personality with the Egyptian soul.
A complication that comes into play is that all the time that this was happening the Greek mind was being put into another characteristic. It was being unified externally with the Roman State. So that about the time that there were Christians, there was also a Roman Empire. And the Christians and the Roman Empire shared a Greek mentality but opposed an Egyptian soul to a Roman State. so that the mind, which was shared between them, which was common between the two of them, became a battlefield. So that spirit and politics forever in Western civilization have been an explosive combination. The Western personality cannot help this. It is built in. It's a short circuit. This is why war is a spiritual problem. This is why nuclear war is a spiritual nightmare. And the roots of it go back that, just that far. You don't have to go back to the origins of man as apes. You go back to the formation of the way in which the Egyptian soul and the Greek mind came together. And the way in which the Greek mind and the Roman state came together.
So, we're dealing now with the Hermetic literature. With the quintessence of the Greek mind in its Egyptian mode. Pure. It's about the only chance that we have, strategically, to see what the Greek mind and Egyptian soul consciousness personality looks like before it gets submerged. And it gets submerged very rapidly because it comes into conflict with the Roman state. And the Greek mind as exemplified by the Roman State. Very, very quickly.
One permutation that happens is that the Hermetic consciousness takes into consideration an offshoot of the Greco-Roman character. In the particular episode around probably the beginning of the 2nd century, between the 110's to roughly maybe the 140's. And in that generation the Hermetic consciousness in order to balance itself against the increasing static of the Roman state produces Gnosticism. Gnosticism. The Gnostics. The first Gnostic, the first effective Gnostic is Marcion. And Marcion is effectively operating in the 130's to the 140's in Rome. And Marcion at that time in Rome was like Billy Graham today. He was fabulously famous. He was the evangelical personality. And he was the first evangelical personality to arise in the classical world who was not a God and who was not an emperor. And he rose to prominence at a time when the Roman Emperor in the Roman Empire was the Godman. There wasn't yet any consciousness of Jesus as a Godman yet. There was no consciousness of him as a Godman. He was at best a savior figure for a very small cult. The cult was smaller than what the Salvation Army would be like today.
Marcion's personality changed the whole character of what was possible religiously. Because up into that time all of the energy, all the archetypal energy, of the Greek mind in the Roman Empire had constellated itself in the persons of the Roman emperors. The Roman emperors were the were the Godman. And the whole mentality, the whole Greek mentality fed that image. But Marcion taking the Hermetic consciousness and taking it out of its eternal Egyptian teaching mode. and putting it into a temporal personality which was viable as a human being, named Marcion in this case, set the precedent for great individual spiritual teachers who were immediately opposed to Empire. immediately opposed to the emperor. So that by 140 A.D. in Rome, in the city of Rome, you had an opposition of the Roman soul and the Egyptian soul in the personage of the Emperor and the and the evangelical leader.
Now I know that Hollywood and Cecil B. DeMille and so forth portrayed Peter in Rome as a charismatic figure. He was absolutely anonymous and extraneous in terms of history. But that Hollywood version is absolutely true and of the case of Marcion. Under Marcion there became more Christians than any other religion. It rose from being an obscure cult to being one of the most populous and popular religious movements in Rome. And Marcion is the first individual to put together a New Testament. He's the first one to put the four Gospels together and say this is, this is our Testament.
But because of the Hermetic tone to the consciousness that he was dealing with. Because of the Egyptian soul that he was manifesting, he was fiercely anti-Semitic. Fiercely. It's not that the Jews are no damn good. It's that the Jewish tradition is bastardizing the Egyptian tradition. And only by keeping the Egyptian tradition pure can that soul be purified. So that Jesus, the Christ, had to be shown to be Egyptian. In the Egyptian lineage. Not really Jewish so much but something else. Something different. And it's Marcion who makes the Christian personality. and the Christian personality when it comes in is Evangelical.
By Evangelical we have to understand that it is geared towards the person. Not the tradition. Not the state. Not the tribe. But the person. And Christianity as a religion wins the ancient world because it's the only religion that speaks to human beings personally. It says you count. You yourself and whatever you're doing, you're important. And within a hundred fifty years Christianity, the Christian person takes over the Roman Empire. That's only about six generations. It's an incredible story.
And we have to understand tonight that the trigger and the whole works that makes it work is the development of the Egyptian soul for every single personal individual. That every human being has a royal soul. That what was the prerogative of pharaohs at one time, almost exclusively, that Egyptian soul becomes democratized and made available to everyone who believes. Because the, the interchange will be that Jesus is the inheritor of that royal eternal lineage and delivers it to every man, every woman, every person. But that message will not be delivered in the lifetime of Jesus but will be delivered in the 2nd century A.D. Hundred years after.
The only way to understand this. The only way to appreciate the overwhelming significance of this and the ramifications of this once you understand it are far-reaching. Far-reaching. Our own time becomes understandable to an extent to where you can see what a sham game is being played. That almost nobody understands in our lifetime what is going on. And that the reason why the world is in this situation it is, is because the power to do things is literally in the hands of ignorant teenagers. Psychological teenagers who have no comprehension at all of who they are, or what they are, or what they could do, or what anything is for. There are no grown-ups. There are no adults anywhere in the world of decision or power.
The key to all of this is understanding that the Greek mind, which is shared between them, is ordered and organized by powerful images. Archetypal images. Nowhere in human history do you find the human mind more clarified than the Greek. Not the Egyptian. Not the Chinese. Not the Mayan. There is no other mind that is as clarified as the Greek. And the Greek mind is clarified because it is structured out by primordial images, archetypal symbols, which are organized in such a way to allow that mind to exfoliate itself to its full capacity, its full potential. there are almost no minds today as mature as say the mind of Plato. Or the mind of Aristotle. You can find almost no minds today that are as, as completely full as Sophocles or Euripides. The Greek mind still stands as a paradigm.
The reason for this, and you can sum it up in one name is Homer. It's because of Homer. Homer is the single root of the Greek mind coming to its full maturity. Before Homer the Greek mind is almost indistinguishable from a whole spectrum of mentality. Which included ancient Phoenicia, the ancient Canaanites, the ancient Egyptians, the Minoans, the Myceneans and so forth. The Hittites. There's a, there's a whole range of peoples. Let's put a date on it around 2000 B.C. and from 2000 B.C. to about 1000 B.C. there is almost no difference between the Greek mind and these other peoples. You could name a dozen peoples and they would all have about the same level of capacity. The differences in their lives and their civilizations as family differences. Cousins they're all like cousins.
With the advent of Homer, the Greek mind changes radically. And when the Greek mind matures and gets used to its new clarity the Greeks rise above the rest of the peoples in their mental capacity. So much as to dwarf everyone else. And it takes about 300 years for the Homeric mind to have its impress. To set into the Greek population. And, of course it sets in unevenly. It doesn't sit into the population as a whole but only those areas that used Homer as the educational basis. The city of Athens, the Ionian Greek colonies, and a few outlying regions that were affine to the Ionian colonies and the city of Athens in the and the Attica colonists.
So that when you look at a map of classical Greece. And you have an overlay of say every hundred years or so. from 1000 B.C. you put the overlay on and there's almost no difference. 900 B.C. no difference. 800 B.C. almost no difference. 700 B.C. nothing. It's all the same. In 600 B.C. all of a sudden you get this isotopic jump. And wherever Homers been used as education the level of sophistication rises. And by 500 B.C. it's almost uncanny. And by 400 B.C. their as sophisticated as people have ever been.
What has happened is that the mind clarified by the Homeric structure of archetypal symbols has come into its fullness of set. Those archetypal symbols were the Olympian Gods. Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes. And a few others. What concerns us as Hermes. We're trying to understand how the Greek mind in its the tremendous energizing and power, exfoliated itself to the full capacity of human mentality. No one thinks as clear as Plato and Aristotle. Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Thucydides. The whole, the whole mythos is that of a crystal, clear balanced mentality. Sun-like in its ability. To think even quite adequately and clearly about the most tragic of scenes of life. There's no fear at all. There's no cultural of tone one way or another except for this clarity. Characterized by geometric structure which is in perfect balance.
By 300 B.C. the rest of the world is Hellenized. the rest of the world is, is transformed by this mentality. So that there's no difference whatsoever between Athens and 25-30 other cities. By 200 B.C. you see that that this has been mulched into a swath from Spain to India. And they call it the Hellenistic world because there's no difference anywhere at all. This is a tremendous change. And it's only by looking at this every hundred years or so for a while that you see that there's an hourglass shape that happens sometime between 400 B.C. and 300 B.C. that there is a shift. There's a change. That what had what had risen in just a few Greek centers having populations of very, very small populations. The total population of the city of Athens in Pericles age was about 200,000 people. It was smaller than Fresno. And it dominates the intellectual world of the Western civilization still. The Ionian colonies, the seven colonies were never larger than places like Merced or Modesto. Tiny. But their mentality is just outrageous. Pythagoras was born in a village that had maybe 2,000 people. it was considered ordinary. We're not dealing with space beings who come down and set up colonies. We're dealing with the mind that becomes exfoliated for the first time in history fully.
It's due to Homer. Great-granddaddy Homer. He makes the Olympian Gods. That is to say he structures out all of the primordial archetypal symbols which go to make up the matrix, the complex of mentality. And in portioning it all out in a geometric way, perfectly balanced, we have then the capacity to wake up. And this will be one of the key developments. When religion becomes personable in the 2nd century A.D. the emphasis will not be on accepting tradition but for waking up. Not about feeling right about being in the tribe but feeling right about being yourself with God. That will be different. And that was a monumental change. And it had never happened before, anywhere on the planet.
It's difficult to understand this. So let me review something that last year we talked about. There are three basic ways in which we may leave ourselves. Be beside ourselves. We can be beside ourselves with fear. Terror if you like. We can be beside ourselves through ecstasy. We can leave ourselves through ecstasy. The Homeric archetypal symbol for terror is Ares, the God of War. Or as the Romans called him, Mars. The Greek archetypal symbol for ecstasy was Aphrodite. or as the Romans called her Venus. Mars and Venus. Ares and Aphrodite. The third way that we may leave ourselves is through transcendental wisdom. And the Homeric archetypal symbol for that was Athena.
So that Athena and Aphrodite and Aries are the three archetypal symbols for modes of leaving ourselves. Or transcending ourselves. Or getting out of ourselves. Those three share this being able to leave the person. And so, the meta symbol, archetypal symbol, for the unification of those three was a very special Homeric God. And his name was Apollo. So that Apollo is not at all just another God. Apollo is the, is the ultimate refined focus of all the transcendental modes. All the ecstatic. All the terrific. All the modes by which we leave ourselves. Or could possibly leave ourselves. So, the Apollo becomes the, the metanoia of mentality itself. And of course, Christ will become the new Apollo.
Zeus is the context out of which Athena comes. Out of which Aphrodite comes. Out of which Ares comes. Zeus is the as the father God. He's the context.
But Apollo is the, the, the trans conscious focus. So, Apollo and Zeus are quite different. Zeus is a foundation Apollo is the pinnacle. Zeus is the sky God, but Apollo is the Sun. And they go together. They're always together. But they're always together in that differentiated way. And the horizon of differentiation is the experience capacity of man. So that man, when one finally understands homer. When you really finally understand the Greek mind, the focus is on man. The Greek mind when it, when it is all exfoliated and working there is a sense of presence that what the fulcrum of all this is, is man. Me.
And so, the Greek individual becomes the prototype of, of the Christian person. But only when there's a fullness of understanding. Only when there's a fullness of understanding. This is why we can only feel ourselves when we have a wholesome outlook. When we feel that we finally understand. We have made sense out of life. We have made sense out of ourselves. And good, bad or indifferent we understand it all and that that saves us. We don't have to be given success. We don't have to be given guarantees. But we do have to be given a comprehensiveness. And so, we yearn basically for a comprehensive truthfulness. We would like to know what is the case and what is the situation totally truthfully for once and for all. And then whatever happens is fine. This is a legacy that we have.
Now in the Homeric hymns, the Homeric hymn to Hermes, we read a little bit I think last week. where he begins, "Sing oh muse of Hermes. The son of Zeus and Maya. Lord of Cellini. The pastoral Arcadia. Herald of Heaven. And bringer of luck." And then he tells us of how he was conceived deep down in the earth, in a cave. Through hidden pleasure. And how he grew extremely fast. And when he was just born and came out of the cave on the threshold, he was already plotting to steal the cattle of the Sun. Apollo's Oxen. The apis bull of the God Helios. And how in doing this he angers Apollo who comes looking for him. who would dare do this? And Hermes as the, the young trickster says well who would do this? This a terrible thing. And looks around and sort of winks at everybody. And Apollo loves the mischievous fullness and realizes that there's a kind of a kinship. And indeed, Hermes and Apollo are brothers in a very real way. Very real way.
The brotherhood between Apollo and Hermes though is not quite apparent. It's not quite clear. And we'll have to talk about that in a moment. We'll just suspend that for a moment.
Finally, Hermes has made a lute out of a tortoiseshell and out of horns of a ram. And he gives this seven-string lute, the seven-string lyre, to Apollo as a gift to make up for the oxen that. He stole they stolen fifty oxen. And Apollo then becomes the God of music. And he's so pleased with the lyre that he allows Hermes to have his do and be in the Olympic Pantheon. And Hermes then becomes a go-between. Because he is mobile. He is free. He is able to talk to anyone. He always has a plan.
Now Apollo in his stability of focusing Ares, Athena and Aphrodite. Because Apollo is the focus of that. sort of in the sky consciously. In the Greek mind there was another focus that focused downwards. That those three characteristics focused also downwards in a hidden way. The God that was in the focus that came downwards was Dionysus. Dionysus.
So that one has a basic opposition here between the ways in which we may leave ourselves which come into a focused form, a shape like the Sun. And the ways we may leave ourselves that come into a focus in something which is hidden. And not really shaped, which is Dionysus.
And the Dionysian and the Apollonian of course identified quite adequately by Friedrich Nietzsche and his brilliant study on The Birth of Tragedy. Written about a hundred years ago and still one of the great classics of Western thought. The Birth of Tragedy. And the whole way in which the origins of music are tied up with this. Of course, Nietzsche was a great friend of Ricard Wagner. And wrote the book as a tribute to Wagner's great archetypal understanding of musical form being integrated with archetypal drama in the character of his great operas. And Wagner of course, used Esquiline tragic modes as the mental structure for his operatic matrix. all of this we've talked about in lectures on Wagner and lectures on Nietzsche before.
Between Apollo and Dionysus, through this matrix of ecstasy and terror and wisdom, the only liaison that was effective was Hermes. He is the messenger of Gods but he's not an errand boy. He's not a bellhop for Zeus. He is specifically, exactly the messenger of the Gods between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Through the transcendental modes of human nature. Wisdom in its most poignant aspect. Ecstasy in its most poignant aspect. Terror in its most poignant aspect. Hermes is the archetypal symbol figure of the mobility in the mind that is able to have liaison. And go through either way at will. This tremendous penumbra of excessive capacity. So that Hermes is tied up not only with wisdom. but with eroticism and with terrificness.
Now the terror was never played up so much in the Greek mind. The terror became mitigated somewhat by identifying the image base of Hermes with night. With hiddenness. With the ability to go underground. With the ability to go into the netherworld. or to be of someone who lurks freely at night. We don't have too much of the capacity now to, to sense what the world must have been like 3,000 years ago, or so. When there were no electric lights. And there were still wild animals everywhere. The night was a kind of a fearful scene. So that Hermes has this aspect. And he's identified like Thoth with the moon. Because it's the it's the, the luminary of the night. And in this way, there's sort of a kinship between Hermes and the moon and Apollo with the Sun. And Dionysius as the, the underground world.
All of this comes to the phrase Hermes guide of the souls. because it is the soul which must leave the body. It's the soul that must leave the mind. It is the soul that is the vehicle for ecstasy, for terror, for wisdom. It is the soul that does this. The mind can't leave the body. The body can't leave the body. So that the soul, the spirit, the spirit vehicle is that aspect of ourselves which goes into ecstasy. Or goes into terror. Or goes into wisdom. so that her me as guide of souls is intimately tied up with the whole structure of the Greek mind understanding of its superior quintessential element that can transcend in all these ways. Hermes is able to guide the soul. Both up and down. Both to the nether realm and back. And into the upper realm and back. If necessary.
So, the whole figure of Hermes in the Greek mind, which is extremely complex and problematical. Almost nobody understands this. Almost nobody is able to talk in this way. It's not in these books. It's only when we talk this way that these books, which are the best books that there are, illuminate themselves and arrange themselves into a pattern which can now be understood. Because no one has, has brought the caduceus forth high enough to show this is just how the souls are guided.
Now the statement that our souls are Egyptian and that it's our minds that are Greek shows us how the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth then in Hellenistic times came together. In a very strange kind of a, almost like an optical illusion. an interplay between these two happened. The Egyptian soul of Western man, with the Greek mind understanding. It's the Greek mind's function of its transcendental capacity for journeying was all bound up with Hermes. Thoth was never called Hermes but when Thoth and Hermes come together is when you get Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes Trismegistus is when that mind understands that the quintessential Mercurial function of consciousness, which enables it to function transcendentally in ecstasy, in terror, in wisdom. to the point of either Apollonian shaped specificity. Or to the point of Dionysian comprehensive flowingness. That is Hermes. And that is also the quintessential spiritual guide consciousness of Thoth.
And so, Hermes Trismegistus at the end of the great Hellenistic age becomes the great figure because of this interplay and interpenetration. If you try to understand it from the Egyptian side alone, you never get it. If you try to understand it as just another one of the pastiche of the Hellenistic era you will never get it. It's not just another religion. It's not just another cultural happening. It is the lifeblood main spinal column development of consciousness.
Please turn your cassette to the other side where Mr. Weir it continues without a break in the continuity.
Pause.
END OF SIDE 1
Now we come to try to understand Greek religion. And one of the best books ever done on it by Gilbert Murray, who was Regis professor of Greek in the University of Oxford. His great book Four Stages of Greek Religion. And refined later on to Five Stages of Greek Religion. Has in it and unchanged in the new 1951 version, chapter three entitled Failure of Nerve, The Failure of Nerve. And what broke the Greek character was a failure of nerve in the mind. And this is poignant because we face the same crisis in the late twentieth century that they did then. We have almost a sine wave parallel crisis today.
And the first time that I heard about this and realized about this was in conversations with Arnold Toynbee in San Francisco. About twenty years ago. He was there for several weeks filming at KQED educational television stations. And I spent a lot of time with him. And his basic thesis is that, summed up in the phrase challenge in response, that man and his capacities constantly makes challenges for himself. And if he has sufficient response, he's able to grow and continue. But that in this interplay there comes a time when there is an ultimate challenge. When there's a challenge to his consciousness to transform. to give up old ways, old patterns of thought that if continued would lead to dead ends. And of course, one of the old patterns of thought is all bound up in war as a viable expression of civilization.
Bertrand Russell toward the end of his life. I think he was 94-95 in an anti-war speech said, "It is true that man has never made a weapon that he is not used." And if this habit is not changed man will end. Because the nuclear arsenal is a dead end. That if the mentality is carried on one more generation that will be it. That there is no amount of good hope or good cheer that will change it. Because what we're dealing with here is a structural element and unless we dismantle the structure and transform it and have a new structure, it will like a glacial landslide end in universal death. There's no way to stop it. It doesn't matter about political beliefs. It has nothing to do with maturity of individuals in terms of their ethnocentric or religious capacities. It's a in-depth character structure that needs to be changed.
The Failure of Nerve. Murray writes,
Anyone who turns from the great writers of classical Athens say Sophocles or Aristotle to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian. It is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithra worshipers as in the Gospels and the apocalypse. I In Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism. of mysticism in a sense of pessimism. A loss of self-confidence of hope in this life and a faith in normal human effort. A despair of patient inquiry. A cry for infallible revelation. An indifference to the welfare of the state. A conversion of the soul to God. it is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly to help the society which to which he belongs. And enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures. But rather by means of a burning faith by contempt for the world and its standards. by ecstasy. By suffering. By martyrdom to be granted pardon for his unspeakable worthiness. Unworthiness and his immeasurable sins. There's an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions and increases sensitiveness a failure of nerve.
So writes Murray in 1912. Quite interesting. Quite intelligent. But still not fully grasping the profundity. If I may be forgiven the temerity of speaking apparently so glibly about such a great mind. But it happens to be the case. Is not so much a failure of nerve. It is that consciousness has gone out from the human person. Out from the body. Out from the mind. Into these transcendental modes of terror, of ecstasy and of wisdom. That the focus of the soul is no longer in the body. It's no longer in the mind. But it's in these ecstatic, terrific, wisdom horizons which are outside of the normal life. Outside of the Hellenic life where a decent meal is an important thing. Outside of the structure where the normal blood family counts. The tone in the 2nd century A.D. was forget about your relatives. Forget about mortify the body. Because the emphasis was all on these extra body, extra mental, spiritual realms. This was it.
So, it's not so much a failure of nerve as a transposition of the focus of human being. That human being was in the soul now focused in the soul not in the mind and not in the body. So, it no longer mattered whether you had a fine classical education or not. It didn't matter whether you read Greek or didn't read Greek anymore. It didn't matter where you lived. Whether it was in Spain or in Parthia or in Germany or in Egypt. It just didn't matter anymore. It didn't matter who your family was. What kind of social position you had. It just didn't matter. Increasingly, increasingly the only thing that mattered was is your soul safe with God. Because if your soul is not safe with God nothing else is going to matter at all.
But the archetype was that the soul cannot by itself be with God. It has to be guided to God. It has to be guided there. And the Hermetic archetype rose to the occasion. Because it was the only effective functioning archetypal symbol in that mentality that was able to do that, to guide the soul. And it's true that Christ was the Apollo, but Hermes became the Holy Spirit. Hermes Trismegistus. And this accounts for the way in which Hermes, who is a transformative consciousness element. Almost like an RNA. A messenger which, which enables the transposition to take and grow. Hermes is like this kind of spiritual RNA. But Hermes has a female counterpart which balances him. Because the Greek mind always balanced. always was balanced. From Homer.
What was the figure that balanced Hermes? The feminine figure. The feminine figure that balanced Hermes archetypally was Aphrodite. And when you put together Hermes and Aphrodite you get Hermaphrodite. The bisexual unity that is primordial being. The hermaphrodite. The male/female. It's not that Hermes and Aphrodite are sisters, as sometimes pointed out. By perfectly intelligent adequate psychologists and mythographers and so forth, it just is not profoundly so. It's that Hermes and Aphrodite have an interface. They have a tonal interface. So, if you pull Aphrodite, if you pull that erotism in such a way that its masculine undertone comes out, there's Hermes. It's the same thing in terror. In war. In Ares. That in a certain way if you pull, there is Hermes. The same way in wisdom. If you pull consciousness it's not just Athena but there's, there's Hermes. He's the, he's the hidden aspect that is able to be brought out. He's the, the glue as it were in all of these figures, in all of these modes that hold them finally together and allows them to be held together. And Apollo allows them to be held together. And Dionysus.
One can be glib and say, well what is this that does this? It is consciousness. And say well Hermes is a symbol of consciousness then. But this kind of reductionism is not intelligent. It takes us away from this very tenuous and yet very comprehensive understanding that we're dealing here. Not with something written in books. And not something that is speculatively just made up now. But this is the archetypal symbolic core of the consciousness which actually obtained, actually did happen and we are the inheritors of. We cannot be other than this. This is there. We may be very high off the cultural floor in the 20th century. But all the lower floors of our building are built this way. All of them.
What happened with Greek religion was that it completely collapsed. between the 4th century BC and the 3rd century B.C. Greek religion collapsed. I mean it folded like an accordion. By the, by 300 B.C. almost nobody believed in the Olympian Gods. It was devastating. Absolutely devastating. But even though the belief system collapsed the mind, the mental structure, that was based upon it was at its pinnacle of sharpness. So that you have a characteristic which is, was Greek, and now belongs to Western man. Was that he has a poignant pathos of self-criticism exactly at the point where belief should be. Exactly at the moment when we should believe most, we doubt most poignantly. It's not that we will not believe it's that we cannot really. It's not so much of being a doubting Thomas who can be shown. It's a being pathetically and tragically someone who cannot be shown.
And the reason for this, psychologically, because it's their archetypally, symbol...symbolically and it can't be any other way, is that our capacity to see and understand critically is based upon a coordination of all of the transcendental modes together focused. And that's the only way that it happens together. That we can't just take wisdom by itself. You can't just understand. You have to integrate the ecstatic and the terrific at the same time as the wisdom. They have to go together.
Now some people are willing to go far out and, and say well I can bring my ecstatic experience and my wisdom experience together. And they find nice little tantric models and everything. But they don't understand that when you pull all of this together, you're pulling the terror along with it. And the terror is what's hooked up. The anchor of the terror is hooked into the mind. Exactly into that response level which produces war. Which produces Holocaust. Produces a nuclear disaster.
So that in our time because of the naivety. Because of the stupidity. Because of the ignorance and the arrogance. The more spiritual maturity that's linked up to our full living capacities without paying attention this, the closer we're going to come to really pulling the trigger. Without ever having really understood profoundly why it happened inevitably. This is why adjustment is no damn good. This is why surrogates are no good. This is why new religions are no good. None of it has any effect. None of it is real. It's only by going into the spiritual core of it as it really is and seeing it. And seeing how it has to work and bringing it together in the right way so that it does work. So, that we don't in our glee to be spiritually perfect and ecstatically full pull the horrific in on ourselves unknowingly.
One of the great cues of the 1980's is the rise of phobias. About a quarter of the population now suffers from phobias of one kind or another. And it doesn't matter what they are. And this is rising. Because it's an index but to use that word. It's an index of the way in which given our mind and given its striving for transcendental consciousness will pull this phobic cover along with it. And the only way to deal with it is to integrate it all together. And the way to integrate it together one has to go back into the Hermetic tradition and understand how it was integrated all along the way.
And we'll see, because that's what this course is about, that all through the centuries champion human beings kept alive exactly the ways, the technical ways, in which consciousness can be integrated in terms of its truthfulness, its origins, in terms of the history that we have. This is the alchemy. It actually does work. Doesn't produce gold so much but produces the golden personality. The Apollonian quality of presence which is able to see all.
In a book called Greek Piety by the great Swedish professor Martian Nielson. Published by Oxford number of years ago. He quotes from The Failure of Nerve chapter from Gilbert Murray. Because it's very, very, very famous. And he writes then, quoting Gilbert Murray, "There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions. an increase of sensitiveness and a failure of nerve." You see the three of them together. Now you can understand. Spiritual emotions becoming attenuated. Sensitiveness, which is part of eroticism, part of ecstasy, becoming attenuated. And also, at the same time a failure of nerve becoming attenuated. And it happens all three together. They go together. They go together.
When we ask the reason for this conversion the usual answer, we get at present is that Greece was strangled in the grip of the East. And it is true that Eastern mentality triumphed over the Hellenic. But how was this possible? During the centuries before the Persian Wars a strong current of oriental influence poured over Greece. During the centuries before the Persian War. There were all kinds of oriental influences. The Greek mind took them in, mastered them. To the extent that the Greek mind sent back its integration into the Orient. But something happened. he says,
The first Greek natural philosophers got their astronomical knowledge from Babylon. And if our acquaintance with his period were not so insufficient, we would certainly discovered more Eastern influence still. But on that occasion and all the others the Greek refined the oriental element, which they encountered. And remade it in the Greek spirit and worked it into Greek culture. The most glorious creation of antiquity and fundamental for all time to come. But when the relations with the East once more grew lively. During, during the Hellenistic period. And oriental influences again poured over Greece in a torrent the very opposite took place. And despite the fact that in the meantime during the height of the Classical period, the Greeks had developed science and philosophy. And set up an intellectual culture of whose superiority they were well-aware. And at which they were all proud. It might have seen that they now possessed much greater capacities and capabilities than formerly of testing and refining the foreign elements. But they couldn't.
They couldn't. Because the wholesomeness of being able to, the healthfulness of the mind which is able to take in and refine is all based upon balance. And the Greeks had lost the balance. They were no longer able to accept the terrific along with the ecstatic, along with the wisdom. You cannot say, no I won't do it. I won't face that aspect. You can't wish it away. You can't say it doesn't exist. You can't say it's not going to affect me. That is prideful in the extreme to say that I am an exception. That the horrible and the terrific will not count. They do count. They have to be counted.
Nielson at the end of his book says,
If it has not been made sufficiently clear from our foregoing account that the eternal question whence and whether became the deepest problem of late antiquity. Let their own religious thinkers bear witness in conclusion. At the beginning of the first and in its way the most remarkable of Hermetic Writings, The Poimandres, the disciple wishes. Explains his wishes to Hermes Trismegistus. 'I wish to learn the things that are. Know their nature and get knowledge of God.' That is the program of Hermeticism. The greatest of the Christian Gnostics Valentina says, 'Fate our hem are many. Then is true only until baptism. After that the astrologers no longer speak truly. But it is not only the lustral water that sets free but also the gnosis as to who we were, what we are become, where we were and where we have been placed. Where we are hastening from. Where we are ransomed. And what birth and what rebirth are.'
So that a great change, a great monumental change, has come over. I won't, I was going to read also in here from L.R. Farnell's Outline History of Greek Religion. Let me just state here two points that he makes which go together with what we have been saying. Two points. "From the 4th century B.C. on the scales were tipped towards personal religion. More and more and more. And after the 1st century A.D. personal religion was the most powerful force in the world. The complement of the personal religion was the development of religious brotherhoods." The Greek word is a thaisoi. Thaisoi. T-h-a-i-s-o-i.
The guilds of brethren devoted to the special cult of one divinity. These unions belong to the type of the secret religious society which is found in all parts of the world and at varying levels of culture. They show the development of the idea of a humanitarian religion in that they transcend in most cases the limits of the old tribal and civic religion and invite the stranger. So that the members, both men and women, associate voluntarily. No longer on the ground of birth or status. But drawn together by their personal devotion to a particular deity to whom they stand in a far more intimate and individual relation than the ordinary citizen could stand in relationship to those of tribe or city. The sense of divine fellowship was enhanced by sacraments of which the members partook together. And this bond of fellowship then made both the person come into focus and the brotherhood achieve its firmness.
So that the religious community and the certainty of personal identity were formed together in a new kind of consciousness. And this simply swept aside. Not only all of the old tribal religions not only Greek religion but the whole Roman Empire. In the space of about six generations.
Well we'll come back to our Hermetic material next week. But I thought you needed this little background this week to see what a tremendous push is happening. And while we're reading these nice little Hermetic treatises, I want you to know that this was the dynamite that blew the ancient world apart. It was, was never put back together.
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