The Hermetic Tradition in Egypt

This lecture series is not so much about something that is mysterious but something that is forgotten. And what we're talking about here in the Hermetic Tradition is the central order of Western civilization. It's not an esoteric sideline, but it's the main history of the spirit in the West. And generally on the Hermetic Tradition the beginnings are made in Hellenistic times. They're made with the Greeks. And we will eventually get to the Greek Hermetic books, but first we're going to take a look tonight at the Egyptian origins because until we take the tradition back to 3000 BC we don't have an appropriate shape for our tradition. There is as much tradition between the first recorded beginnings and the writings of Plato as there is from Plato to our own day. Plato is about half way. He's about the midpoint of the written literary spiritual tradition. And one of the hallmarks of the early Egyptian pyramid text Hermetic material is that with the very first material the tradition is already complete, it's already developed. It shows all of the signs that intelligent sensitive human beings have put all of their ingenuity, all of their understanding, put their lives on the line for nations and for centuries and for millennia even before it begins. And the earliest written records are in a pyramid which is dilapidated now. I have a photograph. It's called the Pyramid of Unas and it's at Saqqara on the Nile. And the Step Pyramid of Djoser is nearby. And the inside of the Pyramid of Unas, all of the flat surface of the walls, has hieroglyphic writing on it and this hieroglyphic writing was found first about a hundred years ago - Henri Maspero found it in 1881 - and in making the translations, over the years, of the Pyramid Texts our understanding of Egyptian wisdom has slowly matured.

And we have come to a point now, in the 1980s, where we can understand that the Egyptians are enormously sophisticated and that we are just barely able with the development of modern nuclear physics, and with the intergalactical astronomy, to be able to understand the quality of mind that the Egyptian sacred order passed on and that the Hermetic tradition then carries, in some primordial way, an understanding of God which whenever human personalities are able to carry the full brunt of this realization, that characteristic pattern of wisdom unfolds itself. And this is probably the most difficult thing for us to understand. We rather glibly speak of a history of consciousness. But really what it is, is that we have a central spiritual energy flowing and wherever individuals exist who are able to exfoliate this it shines forth and radiates. And when there are not individuals who are able to carry the full brunt of this realization it seems as if it goes underground but it flows on unimpaired until other individuals come along and are able to develop themselves in classic ways. And as much as they can handle, the spiritual wisdom will unfold itself and the radiance will be there. And we will see in the Hermetic tradition, through this series of thirteen lectures, we're taking it from 3000 BC to roughly the time of Paracelsus which is a little after 1500 AD, so we're taking forty-five hundred years, and we will see that all along the way the so-called Hermetic Magus is the individual who learns that he cannot know this secret traditional enlightenment but that he can prepare himself to receive it and that it is the preparation of the receiving it that is everything.

And so I would like to give us a little hallmark of attention towards this matter. This is from a book called Esotericism and Symbol by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. And near the end of this little book on esoteric Egyptian symbolism, he writes in here a simple paragraph and it's profound. He writes, “Esotericism is not a particular hidden meaning in a text, but a state of fusion between the vital state of the reader and the vital state of the author: this is in the sense of a spiritual, spatial, synthetic vision which disappears at precisely the moment thought becomes concrete.”

And we will see that in the Hermetic tradition wherever there are authors wherever there are hermetic geniuses who are able to unfold themselves their writings will take the shape of this characteristic flowering of manifestation so that the patterns of their work come down to us and could be symbolized by a star, or sometimes could be symbolized by this infinity sign - the Mobius strip. Both of these are hermetic symbols. I put them up here. I think they're easier to see.

The quality that's here in the infinity sign is that wisdom when it unfolds itself perfectly always has this infinite eternal concourse. It's never exhaustible. And also the individual who understands this wisdom is like a star, becomes like a star in the night sky, becomes a star in the spiritual realm. And eventually we'll see even in the pyramid of Unas text there's a part where Unas is being cautioned about the dangers of the netherworld and when he is able to overcome certain resistances, which are there not because of evil so much, but resistances which occur because they are the articulation of the spiritual realm. The resistances provide the the gappedness, the abysmal spatiality which allows for the manifestations to come in and be distinct. And when Unas is able to overcome a number of these then in the text for the first time it is said that Unas has become a star. And this symbolism, this hermetic symbolism of the star, will become the archetypal image increasingly, through the centuries through the BC centuries. It first begins to constellate itself about 2400 BC, roughly around there, 2300 BC. The pyramid of Unas is roughly around 2400, 2300. And by the time that a whole cycle, a 2,160 year cycle has gone through about the time of say 100 BC this archetype of the star will have risen fully into consciousness and we will see that in fact the star over the incarnation of Christ is this archetypal Hermetic symbol come into physical manifestation in the universe, that there is a relationship between man and the universe which is quite real, and that his spirit unlike his mind does not reflect images from the world out here, but brings into being the images which exist in another world and that when the spirit has images it is able to project them out and create them in the world. And in just this way man made in the likeness of God creates the spiritual realm in the universe.

And we'll see how this happens. But it's difficult because in order for this to be understood or even to be perceived we have to engender in ourselves what is known now, and has been called classically, symbolic vision. That without symbolic vision we are unable even to see or to understand. For with only normal vision, with just the physical eye that we have and the physical brain that we have, we have only the limited earthbound mind and the image-base that we work with is an imitation image-base. And it's like the eye, the pupil of the eye, that reflects an image of whatever you are looking at. The mind can only give an imitation. And it is limited then by always referring back to the world as it is. But symbolic vision uses a different image-base. It uses a universal, as we would say, an interior image-base. And it's the honing of this interior image base that is important.

The first cycle that happens in honing this is that one notices that nature reoccurs, and that the cycle of nature always comes back to where it was. That it doesn't come exactly back but there is a enough of an affinity so that one can see a cycle of eternal return, but that the eternal return rather than being a circle of moves a little bit in increments and that this moving transposes the circle to an infinity sign. So that the cycle of nature then is the first grand order of reality which occurs to men, and is understandable. And in order to comport himself to this order, man makes a ritual movement which follows the order of nature. And this ritual movement then is a secondary order, and it is the imitative actions not just imitating but selecting out from nature those distinctive actions which then will make a ritual motion which will then come back around at the same time that nature comes back around. And this is done in large patterns, it's done in intermediate patterns, and it's done in daily patterns. So that the motion of the sun in the sky in the earliest Egyptian writings the sun just coming up above the horizon is referred to as Ptah - P-T-A-H - Ptah. The opener of the cycle of the day.

And later on it's not so much the opening of the cycle that's important, but it's the understanding that the whole motion of Ra or Ra through the sky in the day and then has its complement so that at night there's still this motion of the sun going through a netherworld. And while Ra will be the God of the upper world Osiris will be the god of the netherworld. And so these great cycles then of nature will be understood in a ritual way. And in order to convey the relationship between the ritual and nature, a mythological cycle will be put following the ritual order and it will color in, bridging in, through language. So that ritual and nature are sealed together and this is where Hermes or Thoth first comes in. Because language in this mythic mode seals man's comprehension to the reality of nature so that his comprehension is also real. And it is the recognition that all of this movement of nature, of ritual, of the seal of myth is a single unity the recognition of the singleness of that unity is what produces first by inner implication everything points to a center. Everything points to there being some fulcrum for all this some meaning which is hidden but which is unity in its aspect.

And it's the recognition that there is a center to all this that produces the symbol. And the symbol, the symbolic vision, is always the self of the unity, the self of that unity, that it has a being it has presence and that its presence is extraordinary because it takes two completely different motions. It takes first the motion of multiplicity. Everything relates to it. And opposed to that, it takes the motion as presence of the all. And so the symbolic vision, when it's engendered, of this unity itself is the first understanding; that the present moment is eternal; that the present moment in its comprehensiveness is eternal; that there is only the illusion that there is time. So that the understanding then for instance of the motion of the sun in the netherworld that is symbolized sometimes by twelve hours being put as individuals. Imagine now that there are twelve of these. And the sun is linked above the head of each one of the twelve. And there are links in between them. And each of these twelve hours - later on they will be called the caverns and they will be like stations - and each hour will not be so much a time element but a compartment of eternity. And each of the twelve compartments of eternity reoccur each night. And then the day will also have twelve compartments.

So that to the Egyptian spiritual sense there is no such thing as time. There are blocks of eternity that are positioned exactly without space in between, without any interstices whatsoever. So that nature has its defining elements, its articulation. But the reality of its definition is that it is one, it is unity. And it's this quality that the Hermetic tradition from the beginning will always carry. That spiritual teaching is not to acclimate us to an exterior speculative order based on the world. And it's not to sharpen our minds to be clever at manipulating the world so that it's more fruitful to make an order which we can then imitate. That these two ways are the ways of ignorance, and the ways of corruption. And it is in this sense that the world corrupts. Not that the world is evil or bad, but that the understanding of mental order, based on the world, or to manipulate the world so it's a more rich possibility for having a mental image of the world. In this way the world corrupts because that imitative image-base is only a mental fiction, does not exist. Whereas the Hermetic teaching is always this eternality, this timeless eternal, which proceeds constantly to illuminate in its movement the progressions along the way. And so you can see that this motion of spiritual truth can be received but cannot be made up. It cannot be modified. One can only purify and transform and express it, manifest it. So this is the essence of what we're trying to to deal with.

Now this difference has sometimes been referred to as getting away from analysis. The analytical mind. The mind which dedicates itself to the world, to manipulating the world, to making mental images is always analytical and in its analysis, in order to sustain its basis, it works on a basic principle of identity and difference. And the identity is always A equals A, or I am I, a basic tautological identity and that B is not A, and you are not God. So that analysis proceeds in this sort of way. And it's this cutting up, this cutting up of the world then into mental compartments according to identity and difference that leads us astray. Instead the compartmentalization scission as it's called - scission, scission of the world. Not scissors but scission of the world. The making of the articulate manifestations the hours of the day, the stages of what seems to be a duration, the progression of what seems to be a journey through the underworld, the occurrences which seem to be the events of a lifetime. Each of those events, each of those hours, each of the stages on the journey, is an eternal happening and is complete in itself and has the all completely manifest there. So that the moving through of time, or space, or development, or a history, is to the early Egyptian Hermetic masters not a question of hurrying up to get through, or slowing down to be careful to get through, but to be naturally flowing in the recognition that one is in fact going through this as one should. That there is no speeding up and no slowing down. There is nothing you can do to change the articulation. What you can do is prepare yourself, purify yourself, to let each stage occur in all of its pristineness. And that that is the Hermetic tradition being able to do that.

But early in the Egyptian experience this teaching was for the royal personage only. Was not for everyone, was for the Pharaoh, or was for those high individuals who surrounded the Pharaoh. And we'll see that one of the major differences that happens around the time of Jesus is that the whole notion that this is only for a few is turned completely inside out and given back that it is for everyone. And the notion that it is for an afterlife, death experience, is turned inside out and is made to be wisdom for the living. And this major change, it will be like the whole universe of significance is turned inside out. That what was prepared to be seen only by the esoteric eye of the few within after death he has projected out to be seen by everyone with the personal experience in the world actually. And we'll see that this is a profound difference. And in fact the word, the classical word, for what happened around zero AD is called enantiodromia. If I can spell this it's a Greek term. It's a term that Carl Jung brought back into notion and he takes it from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher - enantiodromia. And what it means is that the entire structural order of the universe is turned upside down, or turned inside out. So that if you have a pyramid of order what is on the top will now be on the bottom and what was on the bottom will now be on the top. And the point of turn, the point of turning that horizon, will now instead of being the point of the pyramid, will be the fulcrum, the focus of an hourglass. And so this is one of the esoteric understandings of the eternal moment in a historical flow that the– for instance the the advent of Jesus is an eternal moment in a historical flow and that there is a paralleling then that what comes afterward balances out and compensates for what came before. And that if one can only understand the large scale structures of what that order is, what that shape is, one can see that this in fact is comprehensible, it's intelligible. And this is the Hermetic tradition, that all of this can be understood that the only reason the mind doesn't understand this is because it is clouded by false learning. It is clouded by an image-base which is imitative of a limited access to the world.

A person only lives maybe seventy years, eighty years. How much experience of the universe can you have in that short period of time? So even on that account our experience of the full range of reality is limited if we're imitating the world. And because of habitual styles of mentality these give us like rose colored glasses to look through and we only see in certain stylized ways certain habitual ways. So that the Hermetic teaching is we have to first of all demagnetize ourselves from this kind of ignorance that we have to pause and understand that whatever we think we know has to be put through a process of reconsideration. But that the reconsideration cannot be on an analytical basis because the whole development of an analytical mind, the whole analytical mental disposition has been imitative in the first place. So another quality of ourselves has to be brought in. That the quality that we are looking for in terms of functions - that feeling and thinking are analytical, and that sensation and intuition are what we call irrational. And it's indicative of our bias that we would call it irrational. That intuition and sensation must play a mercurial role. That like in the alchemical formula, as we will see later on, that while feeling is very much like salt, the element of salt and thinking very much like sulfur, intuition and sensation together are like mercury or the spirit Mercurius - this is wild intuition sensation intuition that is is like a wild card. It can go anywhere. And it can in fact go where the patterned mentality cannot go and discloses to us a new horizon. And it's this new horizon then that the Hermetic tradition is aiming to develop within us. So this quality, this quality.

The knowledge that we need to acclimate ourselves to, and this is very well put again by de Lubicz. He writes in here, “This suggests in hypothesis, the application of science would once again become as in Egypt and Greece an empirical science, that is one without research into causes. Knowledge being reserved for the temple, that is for a select group of gifted men and women taught to penetrate this knowledge because this penetration requires, as does our new scientific thought, knowing first of all how to think without objectifying.” How to think without objectifying, because the objectifying process is making an imitative image in the mind. And in a way we'll see in the Hermetic tradition one of the early training techniques that is used is to get you to stop making images of the world; that you're not going to go crazy, you're not going to die, you're not going to be blanked out. That if you will just stop making images for a while that there is a sense of a flow that is there for one, and in this sense of the flow one can begin by innate knowledge not by learned knowledge, but by innate knowledge, sense the quality of the seamlessness of the real that the articulations that are made in terms of time, or in terms of space, or in terms of individuality are all provisional that they fill out only because an energy flow is filling out all of this at the same time. And that unity experience which informs all of us at the very same time is understandable not by the mind on an image-base, but on the– by the spirit on a soul basis. And we'll see that the Egyptian understanding of three elements that take place in person – the Ka, the Ba, and the Akh without the aspirate h, and that this is the double. And this is the spirit, and this is the soul. And the this– the spirit is what fills out the Ba, the soul. And with that intact the Ka may re-enter the world wherever it would be.

So that we have an understanding here. And I'm going to come just before the break. We have an understanding here of what the Egyptian Hermetic origins would consider God. And I'm going to give you a couple of quotations from this book Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, by Eric Hornung, published by Cornell University Press a couple of years ago. And the basic term, initially, in the early Pyramid Texts for God is N-T-R, the consonants N-T-R. We don't have the vowels– Ancient Egyptian being a Semitic language, we don't– we don't have the vowels. Sometimes E’s are put in here so that is written N-E-T-E-R.

If we look at these consonants through our mind we see them as letters. But if we experience those sounds that the letters designate to us we have a different experience. For instance, if we sound that out, ‘un-ta-er,’ we find that there is a three-part, or a three-phase unity which is taken through a transformation. And the N it's a nasal, palatal, ‘un’, and the T is like a change of motion, change of tone - ‘ta’, ‘er’, and from that change we are able to carry on the R with the open mouth and the sound coming out from a closed to change to an open. It's this quality of experience and basic meaning.

We'll just take a break.

We're trying to understand not Egypt, but we're trying to understand a tradition, the Hermetic tradition which is still alive, which is still producing excellent human beings and tremendous results. It's been with us all this time. And we can look back once we have a few pointers, a few indications of comprehension. We can look back and we can see the signs that there was somebody who knew and here's what they did, and here's somebody that comes along a hundred years later who understands that this has to be taken up again and furthered. And so this understanding of a work, of a tradition, of a lineage is operative there. And we'll see that there are tremendous developments in this. That first, because of the sacerdotal nature of the tradition, it's passed on only in temples. It's a temple learning. It's a– it has a monastic, ascetic tone to it. And we'll see that there are great changes that come about. The world changes. The Roman Empire falls. The Hermetic teachers have got to find some way to be able to carry the tradition on. There's no more the assurity that there's even going to be one student. How do you keep a spiritual tradition going? And we'll see that they handle all of these problems. They take them all in stride, and they're able to deliver in such a way that the tradition remains intact even up to the present day.

I think we should probably get to these Pyramid texts. I'm going to use three of the volumes briefly. I'm not going to overload you with quotations or anything. We're not going to be hieroglyphically accurate. These are published by Princeton University Press and they're all in the Bollingen Series. And this is money that was made available by Paul and Mary Mellon. They approached Carl Jung in the 30s to see what they could do. They had millions, extra tens of millions, and Jung said what we need is to have basic materials available so that the intelligent inquiring person can have the basics of the tradition in their own possession. And so all of these books have been published and made available. And the Bollingen Series is one of those great series. It's like a– like one of those Renaissance publications, the Aldine Press or something, bringing the materials out so that it's available. So in this series of the Pyramid Texts – and it runs to about nine volumes – I think six volumes in nine parts. And we have the complete texts of all of the pyramid writings in beautiful translations, and wonderful introductions, so that we really don't have to read the hieroglyphics.

In Pyramid of Unas, the idea of a pyramid is an energized mountain, not energized with electricity, but energized with life. That what is scintillating in this is life, life, and that the scintillation is both massively complete as a unity in the universe as a whole and at the same time incredibly specific and exacting so that any one of the sun's rays that comes out will have this akh, this life-giving vitality. So that one is acclimating oneself at the same time to two completely different seemingly different proportions. One is to refine oneself, and refine one's mind, and one's thinking, and one's feeling, so that it can be exactingly specific. It is just this. That in the electromagnetic spectrum, if the– if the frequency is so many ten thousandths of an angstrom that light will be orange and if it changes just a couple of ten thousandths the light will be red or it will be green and it's incredibly accurate. So we're– we're trying to tune our thinking and feeling to great specificity, great sophistication. A specificity that an imitative base mind could never even hope to approach. A mind that is glued to the world is glib and shallow. It just doesn't have any kind of capacity at definition at all, or discrimination. But at the same time as learning to hone ourselves – our thought and our thinking – to this specificity of being able to see the single ray of sunlight with a single akh for oneself. There is the overall context. In fact the context – capital C – the Context that all of this is a seamless unity. There is– there is no articulation. There is no discrimination. Where is it? It just is not so.

So both these functions, both these qualities, have to be learned at the same time. And so the Hermetic tradition is constantly working with the seeming impossibility. And we'll see that the Hermetic texts tell us that there is a fine moment where the teacher and the student, coming closer and closer in their affinity, finally realize that the language between them, whatever it is, begins to outstrip their capacity to follow it or engender it. And that's when a mystery happens. And the mystery is that there is such a thing as a communion, that it actually does occur. And that understanding passes, it jumps. It's like a– it's like an impulse jumping from one axion to a dendrite and over that synapse gulf goes the impetus for a thought. Only, between the teacher and the student what there is, is there is that incredible moment of magic, real magic, real mystery, where the affinity is realized that they are one. And from that affinity then it becomes easier and easier for the spirit to refine the mind so that it can be specific and for the refined mind then to help tutor the intuition and the sensation to open up to the akh. And in one sense one has to get over one's fear of becoming definite, of becoming concrete, becoming specific. And this is a very fearful thing. And at the same time of opening up, which is also fearful, to open up to the all so that there is no defining dimension whatsoever. And this has a lot of trepidation in it. So both these– these movements.

But there needs to be a vessel where this can happen. The earliest vessel was the– the pyramid tomb– the pyramid tomb. And the effective medium in the tomb is not the architecture of it, but the language that made that work. That if you look at the architecture of a pyramid as a tomb, this is dead mortuary. But if you look at it as a living alchemical vessel for the transformation – from life through death back into life again – then the language that vitiates this that informs and keeps this life of vitality flowing through it, we change the tomb into a transformation vessel and death does not become an end but becomes the context for the new beginning, the eternal return, and one rises then as a star.

There are– in the Pyramid of Unas– I'm going to have to skip over some of this because of the time– When one comes into the antechamber of the Pyramid of Unas the first thing that one sees here is a symbolic door. And the door is bolted by an iron phallus that must be pulled aside before the door can be opened, before there can be an entry into the antechamber. That life must actually be lived, it must actually be experienced. The death must be actually lived through, it must be experienced that the opening up to the wholeness of that flow and the encouragement that one can do this and Thoth-Hermes is always that teacher who gives us the language by which we can do this. We could not do this without the language, without the right language.

Why is that? The nature of the universe doesn't need language, and we can make a ritual imitation of that nature. But we will be forever limited by our ritual selection if we cannot bridge from what we do to what nature does. And in this way art and nature have to be brought into harmony, into union. And it's the Hermetic instruction that gives us the ways in which this can be done. The earliest instructions then are spells that are given, and the spells are meant to command resistances to participate in allowing one to pass. Not to try to erase those resistances, not to try to ignore them, or gloss over them, but to remind them because they are also needing to be conscious, that they are part of the whole. And through the Hermetic instruction then – Unas in this case – but any soul journeying reminds these resistances that they have a part to play. And while their part is to resist, the resistance is only an articulation to allow for the occurrences to manifest. And if one knows the way in which the specifics manifest then the resistances only last as long as is needed for the articulation. And the overall motion is for unity to occur, for the journey of the soul to continue. But it continues not so much in a step-by-step plodding, but in a manifestation being allowed to reoccur and reoccur along the various stages, each one being eternal.

“The sky is serene, Sothis lives,” – Sothis is Sirius, the star – “for it is Unas who is indeed the living (star), the son of Sothis.” Sothis is identified with Isis also. “The two Enneads have purified themselves for him as the Great Bear constellation which cannot perish.” And always we see in the Hermetic tradition beginning in Egypt and coming to a culmination in late Hellenistic times with Plotinus that the formulation of a– of a node of reality generally happens in triads. There's generally a– like a Trinity principle, like Isis, Osiris and Horus. There's generally a man and a woman and a son, or a man and a woman and a child, or an occurrence and its complement and the relation. And there is, in fact, in Egyptian syntax – I'm sorry our friend left – in Egyptian syntax there's a whole syntax for speaking of unities, there's a whole syntax – what we would call singulars – there's a whole syntax for plurals, but there is a special third syntax for dualities. So that one can speak in the singular, in the dual, or in the plural. And the plural and the dual are quite different. The one, the two, and then the three. It's like in the– if I can digress for just one second – in the Tao Te Ching, the presentation is that the one produces the duality. The duality produces the trinity. The trinity then produces the ten thousand things, and it's the ten thousand things which reveal the complementarity, so that one goes from unity to duality to trinity as a base, to multiplicity to complementarity. And the complementarity allows for one to return back to unity. So that this is the– this is the motion then this is spiritual knowledge not image thought up metaphysical speculative knowledge, but spirit knowledge. This is the ecology of the processes of the real.

“The house of Unas which is in the sky will not perish,
the throne of Unas which is on earth will not be destroyed.
Men hide themselves, the gods fly up.
Sothis has let Unas fly towards heaven among his brothers, the gods.
Nut, the Great, has uncovered her arms for Unas.
The two souls who are at the head of the souls of Heliopolis
have bowed down [to] the beginning of the day,
[and] they who have passed the night while they have made this bewailing for the god.
[and] The throne of Unas is with thee, O Re; he will not give it to any other god.
[and] He ascends towards heaven, to thee, O Re,
while his face (is like that of) hawks…”

And so he is like Horus rising. And later on in the antechamber here is a spell – this particular designation is Utterance 248 – so that in the Pyramid of Unas along in the antechamber now we have this hermetic spell. And one is then to say there is the little hieroglyph for reading to say. And then you say this:

“Unas is a great one,
Unas [has come] out between the thighs of the divine Ennead.
Unas was conceived by Sekhmet;
it is Shesmet who gave him birth
(as) to a star with sharp front (sight),
with wide stride, who brings provender for the road to Re every day.
Unas has come to his throne which is over the Two Goddesses (who protect Upper and Lower Egypt),
and Unas appears as a star…

“...he comes out of the horizon every day,
and at the sight of whom the gods purify themselves.
Unas is he who is over the Kas, [over the devils]
who unites hearts for the One-over-Wisdom,
(he is) the Great One who is in possession of the Divine Book,
the Wisdom at the right of Re.”

So the book. What is the book in this case? The book is the tomb itself – the writings on the tomb. Later on this will be transposed– would be a great great transition so that the book will not be written on a tomb but will be written in a memory so that one then changes the hermetic transforming vessel from an archaic Egyptian tomb to a living memory. And the memory will become the hermetic vessel. And we'll see later on in the Renaissance that the whole idea of a theater was to give free play to the characterizations that the memory then can play out. And we'll see that, for instance, Shakespeare is not entertainment but is actually teaching hermetic wisdom. The play's the thing he says and means.

Because of time I'm going to skip over then to this volume which is entitled, The Wandering of the Soul. And in here there are three texts, three Pyramid Texts. The first one is the book of the Two Ways. I'll just give you a little bit of this.

“... ‘I have made my way at the prow of the barge, my light is his disc,
I have become a spirit through his soul, elevated in front of his Uraei,
His associate [with the] gifts as the Lord of Truth in his shrine.
I am he who serves the Bull of the Great Ones, the son of… Osiris.’
‘Behold, his father, the Lord of those who are there, testifies on his behalf.’

So there's constantly a sense here in the pyramid text that the instruction constantly comes around to a recognition of a present moment and that it's the the efficacy of being able to continue the journey is being able to bring that present moment full. And until that present moment fills completely up, one then cannot go on. And so it's the ability then if one has the life vitality, which is a wisdom, one can fill each present moment as it comes along and one can move effortlessly through. But if you were trying to think of what you were needing to get to the next step, or thinking of the next step, you wouldn't be able to fill this present moment. You would be distracted. And it's that unpurified mind then that balks. And when it balks, the first thing it does is it throws out the negative complement to that situation. It thinks, ‘Where am I?’ This is what a lost soul is. ‘What am I doing?’ And because one was working with no objective imagery whatsoever one can't remember. Because there's nothing to remember. And so one is lost.

One needs then a savior who is able to bring the word back. And the word becomes the light and that light becomes the light of men. It works in just that way. In the Book of Two Ways writes,

“I am the Great Name whom you created on the Road of Truth.
My abomination is decrease.
This [is] my protection [it is] the protection of Horus the Elder of Re.
I acted according to his wish.
There is no opposition to me, I am not repulsed at [any of] the gates.
I am the well provided one… [from] the Birth-goddesses of the Watery Abyss.
[No one can wrong me.]”

And so the– the motion of the soul moves through.

And I'm going to have to skip over here because of time, to the Litany of Re.

Now what we've been looking at is about 3000 BC and now we're going to jump just for a few minutes fifteen hundred years. We're going to come to the New Kingdom, The Litany of Re. Suddenly everything is changed, and we have a concern with caverns.

“The term Querert, translated ‘cavern’ was originally applied to the burial shaft of a mastaba (a tomb with a low, flat, superstructure) where offerings were placed for the deceased. It occurs with this meaning in the funerary formulae of the Old Kingdom tombs.
A coming-forth-at-the-voice-offering is made for him at the head of a burial shaft in his domain of eternity.
But already in the Pyramid Texts there is mention of a serpent called Krr who acts as a doorkeeper at a particular locality in the Netherworld, and the association of the word Krrt with the caverns [is] supposed to be situated in the infernal regions becomes more and more common in later periods.”

And so the word for ‘cavern’ becomes ‘Krrt’ from this plural, the names of these guardian serpents. This– there are twelve of these Krrts, and later on when the archetypal enantiodromia happens around 0 BC it will be a single tomb, a single cavern, out of which the rising comes. It will be unified into one. So there are these caverns.

“The Gods of the Caverns One to Seven
According to the Abydos reliefs, each of the Caverns One to Seven appears to be inhabited by a triad of divinities shown standing, a female between two males.” – Generally the form is a male child because this male child is going to take the place of the father – “The triads are presented alternately as mummies or as living beings. The mummified gods are attributed to Caverns One, Three, Five, and Seven, whereas those of Caverns Two, Four, and Six are animate.”

And then the Gods of Caverns, “Eight to Twelve contains a different number of groups of gods with various numbers of gods in each group.… Cavern Eight [for instance] contains 7 groups; Cavern Nine, 20 groups; Cavern Ten, 8 groups; Cavern Eleven, 18 groups; and Cavern Twelve, 9 groups. The individual gods who go to make up each group are characterized by a particular bodily position, gesture, or action.”

That is what is important to them. What is important to all of this is not their– their persons, but the configuration of all of these gods who are various gestures, actions, or positions brought together. That is to say Caverns from Eight to Twelve are what we would call gestalt images. In astronomy they are called asterisms. Instead of a single star, which might be a person, it's like a constellation, or an asterism, which is the configuration of– of that whole group is what is significant. So these are different here then.

“Thus the gods of the first group in Cavern Eight, of whom there are four, are identifiable by the fact that they carry an individual, sometimes a child, sometimes an adult, seated on their heads or on their shoulders.”

And we can go on in this light. I mention this because here is how the New Kingdom presents this tradition.

“Hail to thee, O thou who belongest to the… One Joined Together. Thy soul is glorious, thy bodies breathe. King N passes by the mysterious caverns and he traverses the mysteries among which thou art. He calls thee as the Soul of Re, thou callest him as the Soul of Re. His soul is thy soul, his body is thy body. He enters in the train of the soul of Re the mysterious place of the inhabitants of the caverns. Thou rejoicest at the glory of King N, he rejoices at thy glory as thy second self. Re says to King N: Thou art like my second self.”

Re says to oneself, you are my double, you are my God. Well if you are that if you are the double to Re, then it's easy for you to realize your real origin. Your real origin is not the image that you thought in the world was an image of the divine as reclaimed you. So in the New Kingdom already you see that there is a massive change in consciousness. A whole different way of presenting this. There's still Pyramid Text, but there's a whole different tone that has come in here. Some massive change has happened.

“Make adorations, O ye of the Caverns, when Re sets in life!
Salutation to you, Those of the Caverns, gods [of] the West!
May you be keen, may your soul be glorious, may you annihilate the enemies of Re! The Joined Together makes you breathe, and you shine; your darkness is dispelled…”

You see it’s the radiant manifestation.

“...while you call the One in His Disk…” – the sun's disk, the One in his disk, you call him. “...and the One in the Disk calls you.” The reciprocal language; the dialog with the divine. “You move as Re moves, you see the glory of Osiris, you live as he lives,”

You see as Re sees you live again. As Osiris lives again you not only participate in Re but in his compliment Osiris you can come back to life. You move as he does. You see with the Eye of Horus the Sacred Eye. This unity. There are no barriers. Where are the barriers? It's like when Lazarus is raised from the dead. He's not– No one is going through any rituals. He is told get up. Where is death? There's no death.

“King N is one of you. The power of King N is the power of Re when he reaches the bank of those who pass by. The victories of King N are the victories of Re when he strikes in the West. [Chastising] his enemies… The power of King N on earth is [like] the power of the Soul of the One of the Horizon. The victories of King N on earth are indeed the victories of the soul of the One of the Netherworld…. Victorious… Great God, He on the Horizon.” And then repeat this four times.

This movement as you can see in the language begins then to choreograph for us in a mythological way so that the– the mythology of the soul begins to choreograph the ritual movements of man in a sealed way. But this is a sealed cycle and that this sealed cycle is annealed and made whole with the sealed cycle of nature so that the eternity, the eternally reoccurring moment that is there in nature, occurs in every ritual step. And the mythology, the Hermetic mythology, seals that in. The language makes that all part of a unity which is then realizable and one is able to to have this – the great mysterious One, the great mysterious One. And then we are said,

“Thou art indeed like that One of the Horizon. And the births of yourself are like the births of Re and reciprocally. And the births, your births are like the births of the soul of Re on high reciprocally. And the lives, your lives are like the lives of the soul of Re.”

And Ray then conceives and giving birth we come into manifestation again and again world without end. It's this quality that the Hermetic tradition begins with. And for about three thousand years of recorded history we can trace through tremendous changes and motions of consciousness until we discover that an enormous culmination to this happens about 0 BC, and all of a sudden the motion of the intact whole comes from the deepest levels of universal experience to the surface and breaks through the surface. And as it breaks through the surface, the two complementary motions happen at the very same time. Single individuals have the penetrating insight, specifically, and understand individually, specifically. And the one that we're going to take next week is Saint John. The Gospel of Saint John is a hermetic classic. And the understanding of the mysterious spiritual light in Saint John is the specific individual, but at the same time the archetypal pattern of the whole also comes to the surface as the figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Thoth which has been transformed a number of times becoming Hermes Trismegistus. And it's like about 90 AD, the light of the Gospel of Saint John, the words of his book, are like a laser of the specific mind that when it hits the Alexandrian archetype of Hermes Trismegistus all of a sudden there– that whole archetype is illuminated, is irradiated and the whole ancient pattern that was there in the Pyramid Texts is suddenly there again, but now it's there around 90 AD and a whole new tone. And the document that we have that comes to the surface exactly at that time is the first book in the Hermetic Corpus – the Poimander.

And we'll see next week that if we take the mythologies of ancient Egypt and put it next to it the magic of Hellenistic Alexandria we see the conscious side of the unconscious nature and then we do a complete flip flop at that time. And we'll see that next week. And we'll see also that because it's so highly energized that the Corpus Hermeticum text, The Divine Poimander is perfectly clear and understandable. But other documents that come from the same place at the same time like magical spells. And I'll bring in a book of those, of Hellenistic Greek magical spells. And they're– they're completely blown out in fragments by the realization because they haven't purified themselves and they tried to translate it in terms of a metaphysical speculation in terms of a mental tinker toy understanding and that what comes out is like gibberish. And we'll read some of those magical spells. And you can see it's very much like what happens today. It's the very same sort of thing. It's a lot of gibberish and it doesn't go anywhere. Only if that's all that you have, you don't realize what clarity can be. And then you turn to the Poimander and it begins, and it says, “I am a vast space and a clarity in that space understands you.”

Well we'll take a look at that next week. Thank you. Thank you.