Zosimus and Iamblichus
Presented on: Tuesday, June 10, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 23 of 24
Zosimos and Lamblichus
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, June 10, 1986
Transcript:
The date is June 10th, 1986. this is the 23rd lecture in this series of lectures by Roger Weir in the series entitled the Hermetic tradition Osiris to Franklin. Mr. Weir announce his own title tonight.
The title is Zosimos and Lamblichus. We come tonight to the crisis in consciousness which hit the ancient world at the end of the 3rd century A.D. And we notice that at this time the ancient Hermetic tradition, which had always been a unity as far back as we can trace, and we traced it back to 3000 B.C., in the 3rd century A.D. it split. and it split at least in two. and the fragmentation proceeded in the 4th century to the extent that by the beginning of the 5th century the Western civilized consciousness could no longer sustain itself as an integral whole. That is to say that the civilization that had been in effect since the building of the pyramids, and had undergone a number of convolutions and additions, transformations, permutations completely collapsed.
We know today from death psychology especially that the unconscious and the subconscious aspects of our mind are at least as important as our consciousness. And that the extent of the unconscious and the subconscious is unfathomed. We don't know its full extent. Just like the full potential of consciousness becomes unfathomable. but what happened in the 3rd century was that the psyche of the classical world went crazy. And as far as we can tell it has never been repaired. It has been put back together like a bad repair job at least three times in the last 500 years. But like bad repair jobs the glue hasn't really held. And the unity of the psyche of modern Western man is very much in jeopardy. The only way that a doctor of civilization can diagnose the patient is that we have to go back to this level, back to this point, and reburied the elements that are necessary for an integral consciousness back together again.
This is why we're concerned with the Hermetic tradition. because it is the only tradition that's long enough in terms of time. It's the only one that has thousands of years continuity so that we can see the break. If we take Christianity as the civilization that we are in, we do not see the break. We in fact see the triumph of Christianity as the beginnings of our civilization. But this in no way can be true. Because Christianity did not actually triumph as a religion until the reformation, until the 16th century. That was the time of the triumph of Christianity. There is no triumph of Christianity in the sense of psychic wholeness of psychological stability in the third century, in the 4th century, In the 5th century.
And the old stylization of the Dark Ages is still psychologically apt and true. If we look at the engravings of Piranesi of the state of Rome in the renaissance at the beginning, at the close of the Middle Ages, we see the mountainous ruins of Roman civilization overgrown with weeds and broken. And people camped out in lean-to hubbles. And for hundreds of years, if not five six seven eight hundred years, they thought that these were fictitious settings. That men, human beings, men and women could not have lived on this scale in this dimension. The psychological interior of modern Western man, our interior, is in ruins in just this way and overgrown. And a lot of the chaos that we have trying to find ourselves as individuals is due in large part to the impossibility of the task. So that we have to settle for an isolated individuality which is often based on defensive patterns and makeshift bridges. And we put our confidence in to externalizations like institutions. Or jobs. Or causes.
But more and more we are seeing that people do not put their confidence into the person. Into their own person. In fact, we read in one of the glib so-called new-age journals The Aquarian Conspiracy that what is really important is not the person but the vocation. And that as long as you keep the dynamic up in your vocation, you're on your way. And you don't have to be concerned about being a person. These are real danger signs to be able to speak this way with intent and supposed integrity. And not understand the dead end that one is speaking of.
Now we've developed over the last six years sufficient patterns and evidence by having gone through hundreds of individuals. We've taken at least 500 individuals over the last six years in all these various lectures. Because the basic data that we can trust our human beings. So, we're not talking from an ideational standpoint at all. We're in fact doing the kind of work that Carl Jung did. Only instead of examining living patients we've been examining outstanding people throughout our history. Not so much putting them on the couch to psychoanalyze them. But looking at their lives in terms of those lives as honestly as possible year in and year out. And now that we've done about 500 of them, we can see that in this broad pattern of personality in the 3rd century A.D., there is a breakdown of the capacity to become a human being. To put colloquially, nobody could find themselves.
In the Hermetic tradition the split manifests itself in two major threads going astray. One of them was to build systems. to systematize. So, come up with grandiose universal plans and schemata. And the other was to esotericize everything and put everything on an arcane level. So that what had been livable, daily truth for thousands of years suddenly was not livable daily truth. But was either a part of a vast intellectual system or was part of a esoteric arcane development. And if it was the arcane development, one had to commit oneself and leave the mind behind. And commit one's emotions, one's feelings, one's experience to just going through this arcane sequence rather dreamlike. Or on the other hand one had to use one's intelligence and refine it to almost an almost impossible degree to be able to understand intellectual constructs that eventually became universal.
In this bifurcation then, which is what we're looking at now. And we're speaking about roughly 300 A.D. In this bifurcation what gets lost, what gets dumped in the shuffle is all the medium ground where human beings could achieve themselves. Where they could discover a life for themselves. They could have relationships with men and women. With children. With grandparents. With communities. All of that capacity went by the boards. And the only people who were doing that, still doing that. Still having babies. still getting married. Still having communities. Were the people who were just dull. Didn't know what was going on. And just did it because that's what you do. But for, anyone thinking, for anyone experiencing, for anyone with capacity, it was a nightmare. And the better of them went down these two paths.
These two paths then developed separately in the Hermetic tradition from the 4th century on. From 300 A.D on. The one leads to alchemy and all the other esoteric studies. Eventually tarot cards and Kabbalah and, and so forth. and the other one leads to scholasticism. Philosophy. Theology. So that by 500 A.D. this split between intellectual systems and esoteric experiences was complete.
And the last person to make some kind of a contact between the two was an anonymous person who took the name Dionysius the Areopagite. And he wrote a series of mystical treatises because by then the only way that you could connect these two essential elements of human life was through a profound vast mystical genius. And in The Celestial Hierarchies and in The Divine Names Dionysius the Areopagite makes them harmonized together. But only in the context of a almost complete vacuous mysticism.
And this is known in the Western tradition as the via negative. And it is profound. It is exceedingly excellent in its way. It cannot be lived in daily life. There is no way. You cannot fall in love and mean it. You cannot have children and raise them. You can't go shopping and enjoying it. None of that retains any value. So that the mystical via negativa becomes the last resort of wholeness in Western experience.
Now all of these developments leave traces. They leave there, they're impress. They leave their emanation, if I can speak Neoplatonic on the consciousness and the subconsciousness and the collective unconsciousness of man.
And we have seen that there are cycles that the subconscious flow seems to position itself about 600 years in. What we call the past and that the collective archetypal level seems to console itself about 2100, 2200 years in the past. So that what is archetypal for us is what happened about 2100 years ago. What is a subconscious imagery for us is what happened about 600 years ago. And of course, when we go to those junctures, those events. When we go back 600 years from now, we end up in the mystical 14th century. And when we go back 2100 years, we end up in the 1st century B.C. where the Hellenistic crisis was squeezing the lifeblood out of people who were in positions of power and control.
And we saw that in the 1st century B.C., the people who were on the anvil of development were the Romans. And they were totally unprepared as human beings, politically, psychologically or culturally, to sustain the demands made on them. To sustain the energies made on them. And that when we look at the at Rome in the 1st century B.C. it is smashed by super egotistical generals who seek to dominate everything. And it gets its apotheosis in Julius Caesar. Who finally says the only way somebody can handle this energy is to become a God and therefore I'll become a God. But not everyone has the talent of Julius Caesar. And certainly, his friends, his Roman senatorial friends did not, and they killed him for this. They killed him on the steps of the Senate in sight of all of his friends. all of his friends helped stab him to death. Because he had brought out an archetype which at that time was operating from about 2300 B.C. And the constellation of the archetype in 2300 B.C. was Sargon. The first of the world emperors. But they didn't know that in Julius Caesar's time. No way to know that. To them all this was mysterious. all this was the, the wonder working of the Gods. They had no understanding of this.
But it wasn't Julius Caesar it was the archetype that was working. And it simply singled out someone else. And the next one up was Marc Anthony. And he couldn't handle it himself. And he thought if he had a divine consort. This is why Cleopatra was so magnetic to him. And she could have handled it. She could handle that Godlike archetypal flavor because she had had have an Egyptian soul exfoliated through the Alexandrian tradition. But Marc Anthony was not Julius Caesar and he broke into the string.
But the archetype was still working. And it singled out the nephew of Julius Caesar, Augustus. And he managed somehow to deal with it. And it was Augustus then who set that power up. And expressed it and got it out of his craw.
And of course, the great monument that was built around the time of the birth of Jesus in Rome under Augustus was the Arapachis. The temple of Peace. And it's still there in Rome. And all the sculptural freezes were there. All the power people who had become Gods in their time were there. And they were collected around a central figure, Tellus Mater. Mother Nature, who sat on her throne and she was the center. The Emperor did not put himself; Augustus did not put himself in the center but put Mother Nature in the center. because he had good advice. He had the advice of a world-class sage poet Virgil, who helped Augustus to understand what was going on with him. And the reason that Virgil could understand was that he had apprenticed himself psychologically to homer. And it was Homer who was the only individual in the ancient world to understand these arcane workings.
So, when the crisis came in the 3rd century A.D., those individuals who were going for the intellectual system eventually rediscovered Homer. I went...eventually went back to great, great granddaddy Homer. And like the Christians were reading the Old Testament with metaphorical amplification, they read Homer with metaphorical amplification. And of course, in a mandala, The Iliad and The Odyssey are very superior literary mandalas. They are easily the best ever done. Still the best. Homer says in his hymns if some beautiful lady asks you who's the greatest poet who ever lives tell her a blind old man who lives in kayas. Homer is his name. He's still the best. And of those two mandalas which match each other, one is about how you lose your way in life. The wrath of Achilles. How you get lost. And the other is how you get back home. That's what The Odyssey is about. The Odyssey is about how you get back home.
And what's important in the Odyssey are the women. Because the only way a man finds his way back home is through understanding the feminine. it's the only way he can get back home. Because he can't be home, he can't be himself, without understanding the feminine aspect of his own nature. Which usually means having to understand women. Not conquering. Not manipulating. Not making deals with. But understanding.
And in that mandala coming back home in the center of this exploration of a man's mind of femininity. Right in the center of The Odyssey, as one would expect is the fulcrum. And at the beginning of book 13. There are twenty-four books in The Iliad and The Odyssey. And after the first twelve books of The Odyssey at the beginning of the next 12, right there, was the mystical sight that those Hermetic sages around 300 A.D. looked to see. How did the old man do it? What did he talk about there? And right there in The Odyssey, at that point Odysseus is being dropped off by friends' home on his island of Ithaca with treasures. But he's being dropped off in a very special place. It's a place which was called the cave of the nymphs. Now many people have explored Ithaca since Homers time. 3,000 years since great-great-granddaddy wrote. And there is no place on Ithaca that fits quite fits the description of the cave of the nymphs. There are some caves that might do in the northern part of the island. But in 300 A.D. nobody was looking at geography. Everyone was grasping at psychological straws to stay afloat. And they didn't care whether there was a cave there geographically or not, Homer put it in the center of the mandala and so the cave of the nymphs was a very, very special event.
And so, after the last attempt by Plotinus to bring arcane experience and intelligible structure, hierarchical structure, together. And that's what Plotinus did. And he's the last one to really do that except for Dionysius the Areopagite in his mystical way. But when Plotinus died in 270 A.D. the person who carried on his work with his secretary Porphyry. And one of Porphyry's remaining works is a work called Concerning The Cave of The Nymphs. Just like you would expect.
He quotes Homer describing this cave. And in sort of poor translation, this is Homer.
High at the head of branching olive grows. And crowns the pointed cliffs with Shady boughs. a cavern pleasant though involved in night. Beneath it lies the naiads delight. Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine and Massey beams and native marvels shine. On which the nymphs amazing webs display. A purple hue and exquisite array. And to the north is pervious by mankind a lofty gate unfolds. The sacred south, the immortals they're consigned.
Porphyry in talking about the cave of the nymphs says that this is the most arcane symbol given to them. That somehow in the archetypal reality confusion that they're swimming in, if they could but understand. If they could unfold the image of the cave of the nymphs from Homer that they would have a mandala like talisman of stability upon which then to develop themselves. And so, in about 40- or 50-pages Porphyry tries to unfold the image of the cave of the nymphs.
And fortunately, about 200 years ago about a hundred, 170 I guess, 180 years ago, a very great mystical artist painted a picture, a painting of the cave of the nymphs based on Porphyry's description. And he was a great enough mystical art artist to be able to do it right. And I've got a slide of it which I'll show you a little later tonight. That mystical artist was William Blake. And Blake painted it right at the end of his life. And it's curious because only one copy of it exists. And it's curious because that one copy exists because it was completely forgotten for 140 years. One of those English eccentrics, Lord Chi Chester purchased it in 1821. And stuck it in one of his mansions, a 3500 estate in Devonshire. And his daughter who inherited the estate, a spinster who liked to put up Christmas cards for a decoration. Stuck it on top of a pantry and it laid there for about 90 years. And when the estate went to the National Trust in at the end of the Second World War and they were sorting through the junk. On the last day, in the last hour before they threw everything to the junkman somebody reached up and pulled down a sheaf of old newspapers and stuff from the top of the pantry. And there was William Blake's great painting of the cave of the nymphs. It is the only, he never worked in the oils, but it's the only tempera oil painting that we have by William Blake. So, we're, we're blessed. We're fortunate. We're Hermetically given a chance to see what it looks like.
But we have to understand for ourselves that we are on the other end of that crisis of consciousness from 300 A.D. It's like that time is a parenthetical beginning and we are living at the parenthetical end. And it's very difficult for us to understand this because we have, we have such a peculiar setting in terms of history and consciousness. That it's almost more surreal and science fiction like than anything you could imagine. We are trying to find ourselves. We're trying to mature. Trying to be what we really are in an almost impossible archetypal scenario where the truth of our age is a convex parenthetical compliment to something that happened 1,700 years ago. No wonder we have problems. And when one gets an architectural psychological sense of the crisis of our time, you have nothing but love and tolerance for human beings in this time. That anybody is able to get through life is just a complete amazement.
But Porphyry in writing on The Cave of The Nymphs is tackling the intellectual side. But he was bothered because Plotinus his teacher held not only the intellectual side together but held also the arcane experiential aspect together with it. But Porphyry did not master that. He was afraid of psychological experience. There are dragons in those woods. You can get hurt. No telling what can happen. And so, he wrote to an Egyptian priest. An arcane Egyptian priest named Enebo. And we have his letter to Enebo that is still available.
And in his letter to Enebo the high priest in Egypt, he said. He in effect says, "We know that you Egyptian priests know about these things. And therefore, I ask all the questions I wanted to ask my teacher. And because he's gone, I ask you now." he says,
In the first place therefore, it is granted that there are Gods. But I inquire what the peculiarities are of each of the more excellent. By which they are separated from each other. and whether we must say that the cause of the distinction between them is from their energies. Or from their passive motions. Or from things that are consequent. Or from their different arrangement with respect to bodies. As for instance the arrangement of the Gods as being ethereal and the demons being aerial and souls terrestrial.
And he goes on like this page after page in his letter to Enebo.
Well Enebo did not answer him. But Nebo's teacher did. And Nebo's teacher took Porphyry's letter and realized that here was the man who was the student of Plotinus. The great Plotinus. who is the inheritor of the whole tradition by default from Pythagoras and Plato through Plotinus on up. And the man took Porphyry's letter in hand and wrote him a long detailed 300-page reply. And the man was Lamblichus.
Amblichus...and Lamblichus begins his letter this way. His book letter. It's known by the title Lamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. but it's a reply to this man Porphyry. Who didn't know about arcane experience. And so, and Lamblichus going to now teach him. Don't write my student the priest. This is really serious. I will answer.
Here's how he begins, "Hermes the God who presides over language was formerly, very properly considered as common to all priests. And the power who presides over the true science concerning the Gods. He is one in the same in the whole of things. Hence our ancestors dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity. In scribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes." So, he's setting him straight. And he sets us straight. So, this is the Hermetic tradition. This is not Neoplatonism. This is not some development in classical thought leading to medieval thought. This is the Hermetic tradition. And this is written by someone who still understands the tradition.
If therefore we participate of a portion of this God adapted and commensurate to our own powers you do well to propose your theological doubts to the priests as friends. And to make these doubts known to them. I also very properly conceiving that the letter sent to my disciple Enebo was in reality written to me. And I shall give you a true answer to all your inquiries. For it would not be becoming that Plato and Pythagoras, Democritus, Eudoxus and many others of the ancient Greeks should have obtained appropriate instruction from the sacred scribes of their time. But that you who are our contemporary and think conformably to those ancients should be frustrated of your wish by those who are now living and who are called common preceptors. I therefore thus be take myself to the present discussion. And do you if you please conceive that that the same person to whom you sent the letter returns you an answer. Or if it should seem to fit you admit it to be me who discourses to you in writing. Or some other prophet of the Egyptians for this is of no consequence.
In other words, he's saying, if it bothers you that there are still Hermetic sages don't let it get in your way. Just take the reply and you imagine who you would like that somebody has written this to you. But the important thing is, is here's the reply. Here's the traditional understanding of truth.
Lamblichus writes, "In the first place therefore you say it must be granted that there are Gods." He's quoting Porphyry. and then Lamblichus, you can just see him settling down. He says, "Thus to speak however is not right on this subject. For an innate knowledge of the Gods as coexistence with our very essence. And this knowledge is superior to all judgment and deliberate choice." That there's no such thing as objective knowledge of God. That it's co-terminal innate with our very essence. It's there before you can think whether it's there or not. And that's the first lesson about, about God. Is that if you're trying to think about him you've already missed the boat. You got to back up one or two steps and reign in your horses. And your projections. And your questions. And settle into yourself first. And of course, this is the very thing that Porphyry has not done. It's the very thing that esoteric arcane Hermetic experience would have us be. You have to be able to lose yourself in ecstasy. Or lose yourself in terror. Or lose yourself in wisdom. before you can have the experience of wholeness. And if you fear terror or ecstasy or wisdom to the extent that you can't let yourself go; you will never have the experience of wholeness. And it's the experience of wholeness wherein the sense of the essentiality innate with oneself and divinity occurs. That barring that one only has the intellectual projections. Which become vast hierarchical systems that signify nothing.
He writes,
If indeed it be requisite to speak the truth the contact with divinity is not knowledge. For knowledge is in a certain respect separated from its object by otherness. But prior to the knowledge, which as one thing knows another, is the uniform connection with divinity. And which is suspended from the God spontaneous and inseparable from them. Hence it is not proper to grant this as if it might not be granted nor admit it as ambiguous. For it is always uniquely established in the energy. Nor are we worthy thus to explore it as if we had sufficient authority to approve or reject it.
In other words, the God, the reality of, of God is not contingent whether we doubt it or believe it. It's on somewhat a higher level of saying is Beethoven good music? Well if you can't hear music then that's problematical. But if you can hear music Beethoven is pretty good music. And it's in this sense that divinity is as it is. And whether you doubt it or whether you believe it is really extraneous. And just indicative symptomatic of your own condition of incompleteness.
Lamblichus concludes, "For we are comprehended in it. Or rather we are filled by it. Than it being something which we have or don't have." And he goes on. And of course, there are. As usual I outlined about three hours of lecturing so that you could have this. But you can you can buy these things for yourself. These books are still extent. The main point in this is that Lamblichus on the mysteries is a median between the systems that will develop. Because after a Porphyry, he dies about 303 A.D. about a century after Porphyry, the Neoplatonic tradition that's called that by then will be brought together in the great mind of a philosopher named Proclus and he will make a system out of it. And it is Proclus' system that is Neoplatonism. Proclus' system that becomes the intellectual power then that sustains itself. But in Proclus' system there is no teaching of the arcane practice at all. And so, people know the truth, but they don't know how to live it. And someone said the, the truth in the wrong hands works the wrong way.
But on the other hand, the arcane tradition survived also. And went into alchemy. Alchemy became the great arcane experience. but in its arcaneness, in being split off from the intellectual understanding, it more and more went into dream imagery. Into chaotic writing. Into complicated metaphorical presentations. So that in The Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis. This is from Jung Collected Works Alchemical Studies. He's the only one to ever present the visions and translation. So, we have to go to Jung's work.
When you really realize how few people actually make this civilization work its um it's a little shaky. I know we like to think that there must be grown up somewhere that run the world. But surprisingly there are about two handfuls of people who have kept this whole thing together in our century. Grandpa Jung is one of them.
Here's an example of The Visions of Zosimos.
And I thus fell asleep and I saw a sacrificer standing before me, high up on an altar which was in the shape of a bowl. there were fifteen steps leading up to the altar. And the priest stood there. And I heard a voice from above saying to me, I have performed the act of descending the fifteen steps into the darkness. And of ascending the fifteen steps into the light. And he who renews me is the sacrificer by casting away the grossness of the body. And by compelling necessity I am sanctified as a priest and now stand in perfection as a spirit. And on hearing the voice of him who stood upon the altar, I inquired of him who he was. And he answered me in a fine voice saying, I am Aion the priests of the inner sanctuaries. And I submit myself to an unendurable torment. For our, for there came one in haste at early morning who overpowered me and pierced me through with the sword and dismembered me in accordance with the rule of harmony. And he drew off the skin of my head with the sword. And he wielded with strength and mingled the bones with the pieces of flesh. And caused them to be burnt upon the fire of the art. Till I perceived by the transformation of the body that I had become spirit. And that is my unendurable torment. And even as he spoke thus, and I held him by force to converse with me his eyes became his blood. and he spewed forth all his own flesh. And I saw how he changed into the opposite of himself. Into a mutilated anthroparian. And he tore his flesh with his own teeth and sank into himself. Full of fear I awoke from sleep and I thought to myself is not this the composition of the waters. And I was assured that I had well understood and again I fell asleep. And I saw the same bowl-shaped altar. and on the upper part boiling water and a numberless multitude of people in it. And there was no one near the altar whom I could question. Then I went up to the altar to see the sight. and I perceived an anthroparian, barber grown gray with age, who said to me what are you looking at? I replied that I was astonished to see the seething of the water and the men burning and yet alive. He answered me thus, the sight that you see is the entrance and the exit and the transformation.
END OF SIDE ONE
When you get to the Golden Gate Peter and Paul are gonna say, you can't quite get in yet we're changing cassettes. You can always quit. does God need a repairman?
Notice, notice how in the writings here of Zosimos, who is a contemporary of Porphyry. They are both in the Hermetic tradition. They're both writing around to 80 to 90 A.D. Notice the difference. Zosimos is from Egypt. He's from Panopolis. Porphyry is from Syria. Lamblichus was also was from, from Syria.
Notice how those individuals who are raised with the Alexandrian touch have a ceremonial, esoteric, arcane feel for the Hermetic tradition. Plotinus is from Egypt, is educated in Alexandria. he had it. But Porphyry never studied in Egypt. Which is why then finally he wrote the letter to an Egyptian priest. Lamblichus was fully trained in Alexandria.
It's the same thing even in the Christian tradition. if you look at 2nd, 3rd century Christian writers who are from Alexandria, they understand all of the arcane teachings of Jesus. The recently recovered fragment of The Secret Gospel of Mark showing how Jesus showed individuals one by one in an arcane of transformation at night, how one transubstantiates the body. And for the Alexandrians, this is what you do. But for the Romans it's something that you have to wonder about. What does it mean? But meaning in order to have its substance has to refer not to the mind but to life. Because meaning that refers back to the mind is like a short-circuit. And eventually you just feed the mind and the mind grows. And the mind did grow for the Romans. But life became devalued. And the fall of the Roman Empire is largely because life became devalued. The fall of Western civilization was that life became devalued. And we of course today are developing life at a rate that will probably have it devalued before all the rainforests are cut down.
The value has to go the arcane value has to go to life and not the mind. If there's a moral in the Hermetic tradition, it's that. It is that life must be sanctified. All the arcane energy should go to life and not to the mind. But in, In Zosimos as distinct from Porphyry. And we're using Porphyry and Zosimos as the split now. And Lamblichus is one of the individuals who's still trying to keep it together.
In Zosimos there's no explication whatsoever. Jung writes a commentary. And Jung is the first one since antiquity to write a commentary on Zosimos. And in fact, he begins, general remarks on the interpretation. "Although it looks as if this were a series of visions following one after the other frequent repetitions and striking similarities suggest rather that it was essentially a single vision. Which is presented as a set of variations on the themes it contains." And this is the key to understanding life. This is the key in the Hermetic tradition. That everything that happens is of one piece. Nothing that happens to you is ambiguous. Can be thrown away. Can be wasted. Was a mistake in the sense that you erase it and it doesn't count. That all this prejudicial thinking is exactly what the mind does to simplify its structure building. Oh, I don't want to talk about those things or these things. Those aren't important. This is important. this I like. And so, the mind more and more deceives itself and wens itself away until it becomes a fragile impossible puppet. Subject to all the manipulations of other people who were more clever, more Swift, have the bucks, have what you think you need. And you queue up for them to give it to you sometime.
But the arcane Hermetic tradition emphasizes that all of our life is one vision. Everything that happens adds some, something germane to that vision. So, it's the unity of the reality of yourself that must be uncovered, discovered. And that the Hermetic way of doing this, and using Jung's term here, which is 20th century inadvisable but it, it still works. The term is this, presented as a set of variations on the themes that single vision contains. So, there's a set now. Use the term matrix for this because that's the mathematical term. But set theory is applicable to this. But the important thing is that life is a single matrix. A single matrix. And only by having the singularity of that matrix does the visionary capacity, the arcane visionary capacity, touched the mind.
And we're going to see in the slides in just a few minutes that the reason that Jung can write this kind of commentary is because he went through all of this. And he didn't know that he was going through all this. Jung was 38 years old. He was the head of a mental ward in a Burkeholtz Hospital in Switzerland. He was very successful. Married. Had five children. He was very successful. And he broke down. And it took him five years. And the only thing that he knew how to do because he was that kind of a person, is he kept a book. A red book. In which he wrote everything down that happened. Everything. Drew pictures in it. wrote down. And he just let everything that happened accrue in that red book. His will says it cannot be published until I think a hundred years after he died. But we have some excerpts from it. Visual excerpts.
And Jung understood, finally. He gave this lecture on The Visions of Zosimos at the arañas conferences in Ascana Switzerland in 1937. The reason he gave it in 1937 was that he was having all of the, the nightmares that were like a prelude to him of for the second world war. He saw Europe drowned in an ocean of blood. And he saw it in the deep of collective unconscious of his patients. Until finally he couldn't ignore it anymore. And he realized that it isn't just me, it's everybody who is in touch with this collective level is having the same vision. And something monstrous is, is being born. slouching towards Bethlehem is to B.B. Yates says.
We have good news because the collective unconscious of people sensitive now are sensing of coming wholeness. coming wholeness. But it still takes work to get there.
So I'm going to show you some slides of Jung's visions. But in order to bolster Jung. Not so much to bolster him but to show you the collective nature. I'm going to also work in some of Max Ernst's paintings. Because Max Ernst very similar to Jung. German-speaking European who worked with the subconscious and the unconscious almost exclusively for all of his lifetime.
When you're looking for the great master of surrealistic art it isn't Dali. Dali is a four-flusher. But Max Ernst, who for about 70 years just opened himself up like Jung did to whatever is, whatever is there and experienced it. And was able to smile even with his white hair at the end of his life. Which is some kind of a triumph.
But with the illustrations from Jung's red book of his visions and his mandalas and Ernst paintings, which will be remarkably similar, we'll have some sort of a prelude to seeing some of William Blake's visionary work. And then the final slide will be this painting of The Cave of the Nymphs. And you be able to see, I hope, with a visionary eye.
Well it's should we take a break? Or should we see the slides? See the slides? Okay let's do that.
This is a photo that had took out of A History of the Bollingen volumes. This is a shot of a, that's kind of seminars. There's a Carl Jung on the, on the right. The man with a whitish moustache and glasses. Joseph Campbell is there. Marcella, Mircea Elianae is there. Tony Wolf. Many. Heinrich Zimmer is speaking. Many famous individual. So that's the setting.
This is Uncle Carl in his library. and this is Uncle Carl his garden. Notice that the library and the garden have to go together. That there's an archetypal significance. Its why Whirling Rainbow has a garden and a library. It's an archetypal balance between the garden and the library. That a library is the cultivation of the mind just like a garden is the cultivation of nature. And that if you're going to deal with that archetypal energy you have to have respect for it, and you have to do it right. You can't approach grandfather's spirit and mother nature with impunity. They will cuff you.
That's Uncle Carl reading. And in the center of the garden is a stone, a carved stone which has all kinds of symbols carved in it.
And this is what Jung looked like at the end of his life. He was 86 I believe.
This is a drawing that Jung made in his red book. I believe this was done around 1920. And Jung was coming out of what was almost a psychotic breakdown. And of course, you can see the radiant energy around this quaternary start, circle star pattern over the nice bucolic countryside.
This is a painting done by Max Ernst in 1909, when he was still a teenager. There's the suspended circularity above the horizon of the earth. I think he was 13 years old or something like that when he did. This is the first painting he ever did. This is how he began. You see he was he was a natural visionary. And he was sick when he was about 12. And he lay in bed and lay in bed week after week month after month. And he kept looking at the grains and the woodwork and he kept seeing things in them. It's not that they were in the grains but they, they were drawn out of him. And so, he'd start paying attention to his fantasies and all kinds of things were drawn out of him. And he didn't know enough not to do that. And so, by the time he was 13 he was already committed to a life of consciousness. And so, this is how he worked.
By 1953 Ernst was able to do this with that. after forty some years you get good at this. I'm looking forward. I've only been doing it for 30 years.
By the end of Ernst life, he was able to do this with it. You can still see the same pattern that Jung had in his red book mandala. But there's a lot of differentiation here. And when we get in the Saturday classes, when we get to the symbols section, we're going to do a lot of work with this, these materials. Another one of Ernst's works. Right at the end of his life.
Here's the red book. I've got these in backwards so you can't read the script. but there's the red book. It actually exists. big leather-bound. One copy in the world.
This is his spirit guide. Jung's spirit guide, Philemon, who was from Alexandria, who appeared to Jung. and the archetype of the wise old man. And he's going to help him find his way. And he did. You notice the gold dome at the feet of Philemon? You know where that gold dome is? That gold dome is in Jerusalem. It's the Dome of the rock.
This is the first mandala that Jung ever drew. What's curious about this mandala, and we don't have to go into its meaning. But if you look at it's, it's kind of tacky in the way. It's like sticks. It's like pasting something together. It's a highly intellectual. It's a really...when you compare this to Max Ernst's paintings you can see this is finicky. This is somebody who's taking his care because he doesn't understand yet that the spirit moves in broad swaths. It moves in billions of light years and it moves in cosmoses. And it's not too picky about whether you color over the edge or not. It just doesn't matter.
Now further on you could see that his mandalas began to be excavated more and developed. Those are clouds in the center surrounding the star. But the star still is separated from the clouds, you see.
This is a mandala from Jung's red book in the shape of the city. Because it's in our collective unconscious the resolution of those archetypal confusions of civilization resolve themselves in the city. That's why a city is so important. That's why Los Angeles as a city is so important. Because it doesn't have anything to do with geographical shape, but it has everything to do with psychological shape. It's the most geographical unshaped city in the world. But is the most psychologically advanced city in the world. It's like Alexandria. We don't need a new Rome we need a new Alexandria.
This is the stone. One facade of the stone in Jung's garden. And you can see now that the questor here has become like Philemon only a younger version. And he has his center, the star is in the person. And the lightning is coming out with the Sun and the moon in balance and everything. Male and female balance.
Another illustration from the red book. You can see the enormous energy in Jung's psyche.
This is the first confrontation with the shadow. The archetype of the shadow. Whenever one deals with one's opposite, the man deals with his anima with his female image the shadow comes out. And if the woman does with her masculine image the shadow comes out. That's why it's so difficult at first because there are two archetypes that come out at the same time. And so, if we're, if we're in a, if we're in an unstable position those that we love best we seesaw back and forth between over idealization and negativity. Because it's a double archetype that comes up through that energy.
And here's one last illustration from the Jung's red book. This is where the terror becomes a protector for the light, the inner light. What was terrific before now becomes honorific. It protects you.
This is a Max Ernst painting of that exfoliation of the of the inner light. The, the shadowy priests like, bird-like consciousness has been able to crystalize its diamondness to include the brilliance of the mysteriousness of the unconscious. Which now is radiant. The radiant darkness. Dionysius the Areopagus talks about the, the radiant darkness. So that so one **(2-3 inaudible words)**. The radiant darkness.
This is a self-symbol from the Navajo Indians here in the United States. And you can see what calm, clear, beautiful, classical excellence they have. When you look at the torrential struggle for imagery that Europeans like Max Ernst and Carl Jung and they're the best of the Europeans of the 20th century. What trouble they have of getting it out in here. So-called primitive Navajo means just deliberate zoom. Notice that nothing is positioned in the center exactly. That the center occurs because of the confluence of what's going on around it. And this way, in this spiritual way, the center is more of the same. And the same is all of it. It's just that the process of getting there has delineated as a center as a focus.
Now to William Blake. This is William Blake's own pencil sketch of his spirit guide. When Blake was 16, he was apprenticed to an engraver. He had to learn engraving. And the engraver was a little lax and wanted to Blake to have a lot of discipline but didn't want to busy himself too much with him. So, he gave him an assignment. He was making up a large portfolio book for illustrating Westminster Abbey. And so, he put the 16-year old William Blake in Westminster Abbey and left him there to engrave the interior of Westminster Abbey. And it took in five years. And for five years Blake trained as I and his vision by engraving every square inch of Westminster Abbey with all of its gothic filigree. And the, towards the end for his graduation present the Holy Spirit because it blesses people that do this gave him graduation present. They opened the oldest tomb in Westminster Abbey. The tomb of Edward the Confessor. The last Briton King of England before the Norman conquest. And when they opened the tomb, the sarcophagus, of Edward the Confessor there was a white cloth over him just like the Shroud of Turin. In the shape of the face and the features of Edward the Confessor there on that shroud when it peeled back. And 21-year old mystical William Blake nodded thanks to grandfather's spirit for showing him what to do. And he never engraved like that again. He always then engraved on a plate that would print out because he knew that was the spiritual reality. You don't ever do anything yourself. You put it out to where when it works what you made will print out. And this is a spiritual life. And this was his spirit guide. This is the portrait of him. You can see the flaming tree in the Sahara chakra. Blake loved the swirl of humanity finally delivering oneself to understanding arcane experience. You can't go into all this. This is from his illustration to Dante. He did about a hundred illustrations. Which were left unfinished when he died.
Here again. This is from some illustrations to The Book of Job. You can see that the divine is presented as a swirl. Swirl of angels coming down. And, and what makes Jobs of suffering and patients both necessary is that he's not in the swirl. He doesn't understand yet that he's in the swirl. And it's that lack of understanding that makes him be in this gunnysack on the mound of ashes.
But the swirl is sometimes energeia, dynamic. And the calipers of light are extensions of the fingers of the divine, the creator. The Ancient of Days, this is called. All of this is archetypal imagery of the highest order.
This is from The Book of Job where everything is together. Where the mandala is put together. And Job and his family are in the cave shape underneath. And there's the Sun and the moon. And there are the four Archangels of directions and the morning stars singing together.
And this is The Cave of the Nymphs painting that we started the lecture with tonight. And it is full of arcane symbolism and understanding. It was a woman who finally understood this. An Irish poetess named Kathleen Rain. And she was doing a large study for the Bollingen foundation in the mid 1950's. 1957. we have her study up there and two big volumes called Blake and Tradition. That she kept thinking that this was so explicit it must be illustrating a text. And nobody had thought of it that way. And all sorts of explanations. I was going to read to you from one published by Oxford University the same year. An excellent attempt to explain this work but an explanation rather than an understanding. And there are many good explanations in this world. And they sound great, but they are not the truth. Because when you finally learn the truth everything rings clear. Because it is the truth that we finally need to know in our time. We have enough good explanations and now we need the truth. And the truth was is that this illustrated Porphyry's book The Cave of the Nymphs. And this was William Blake's vision of that illustration.
The protagonist down there in the red, the man is Odysseus. The standing figure next to him is Athena. And this of course is Odysseus being delivered home to Ithaca all the way back to Homer you see. And the Goddess of wisdom is showing him the balance now that he's home from the sea. He's home from the thrashing world of the unconscious coming back home to his consciousness. The Cave of the nymphs up there on the left in the upper part. And all of his treasures. What were the treasures? The main treasures he was given were twelve tripods. And the tripods were ceremonial cauldrons for sacrifices. And the twelve was like a cosmic symbol. Because only, only a king then is able to sacrifice in the scale of having 12 tripods. And only a king who was re regaining his kingdom. And of course, the second half of the Odyssey is all about his coming home.
For those who remember the last stage of coming home after he got rid of all the suitors, won his son back, won his kingdom back. the last thing was winning his wife back. And Penelope says, you've been gone for 20 years how do I know you're the man? Because he was all grimy with blood and gore and sweat. So, he took a bath and when he came back in, she eyed him steely as someone after 20 years would. And she said I need to think about this. And he said well all right take your time. And she motioned to the maid to have his bed set out in the corridor. And that's when he lost his temper. He said set my bed in the corridor? He said when we were first married, I pruned an olive tree myself and the bedstead of our bed is rooted into the damn ground has someone cut that free that you can move our bed. And of course, she said ah it is Odysseus. No one else knows this and no one else would speak to me this way. So, all's well in forthrightness. The time for truth-telling.
So, this painting by Blake done in 1821, it measures about 20 inches by 16 inches. One of the few paintings we have by Blake. And its subject matter goes all the way back to this crisis of consciousness in 380 A.D. And it is for us now in the 1980's here a talisman of understanding. How all of these odd events and strange connections throughout history somehow managed to bring themselves together. But notice now what brought them together were the lectures here at whirling rainbow tonight. Otherwise they would still be scattered. They'd still be in the damn shelves and hidden away. And that's the only function that a teacher has is to bring the bowl of fruit together and offer it to you. And say there is so much available just go and find it yourself. This is just one illustration of it.
Well thanks for coming.
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