Exploring the Hermetic Tradition 1

We've probably staved off serious work just about as long as we can unless someone insists. No. Okay. Well, today's thing is sort of a return to a more orthodox, educational kind of mode, hopefully not to such a degree that it's boring. But the agenda is to talk about hermaticism and alchemy, the way in which this tradition, which is counterintuitive and heterodox, if not heretical from the point of view of Christianity. And what it can mean for the present, what it means for the psychedelic experience, what it means for the notion of the end of history and how the loss of this point of view has probably done us a certain amount of damage. The great tension in the Middle Ages was between the late Middle Ages, was between the magical schema, the magical view of human beings, and the Christian view. And the Christian view is very strongly marked by the idea that of man's fall, that we screwed up early on, and somehow then by virtue of that, we're forced into a secondary position in the cosmic drama. We are doing penance as we speak. The world is a veil of tears. The lot of human beings is to till hard land. And we are cursed unto the 19th generation or something like that by the fall of our first parents. And we can be redeemed, this is I'm giving you, the Christian wrath. We can be redeemed through Christ, but we don't deserve it. If you are saved, it is because there is a kind of a hand extended to you from a merciful God who is willing to overlook your warmly nature and draw you up in spite of yourself. And this is deep in us, no matter how, you know, whether you may not think you've bought in because you're black or because you're Chinese or something, but it's just in the air we breathe, it's what Western civilization makes you think whether you want to think it or not, you know, even if you don't come out of these traditions, for us the concept of that you've got to pay your dues, that's what it comes down to in secular society. You know, dues will be paid. There is no free lunch, so forth and so on. This is the voice of Yahweh in the garden. You see, in a Christian context, magic is heresy because it implies that man can command God to act. In other words, that in some strange way, the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires. In hermeticism, it isn't so much put in terms of compel, but the idea is that humanity, human beings, men and women of great spiritual accomplishment, are co-partners in the project of being, and that God, as it were, stepped off the stage of creation with it only 90% completed, and the rest is left in the hands of His brother. The hermetic actually refers to humanity as the brother of God. So it's a completely different attitude toward being human. It's an empowering attitude with power comes the potential to abuse power, because you're no longer a worm. You remember that image in Jonathan Edwards' sermon that sinners in the hands of an angry God, where he says, "You're like a worm suspended over an abyss held there only by the love of a merciful God." Implying that if he weren't a merciful God, he'd just let go of your thread and you'd go down the tubes. In the hermetic, magical view, human beings are not tainted by original sin. And no ideology is without the potential of abuse. The hermetic attitude in the Renaissance was summed up in a single aphorism by the great Renaissance platenist, Marcello Fichino, and what he said was, and I have to, you know, there's no sexism in all of this. You just have to realize these guys were primitive types and they hadn't confronted the political issues we've confronted. So when they say, "Man, they mean humanity," the Renaissance magical attitude is summed up in Fichino's aphorism. "Man is the measure of all things." And this is a double-edged sword because in a single affirmation, you cast off the guilt trip. You cast off the view of ourselves as a flawed creature. But when you say, "Man is the measure of all things," I mean, you could be the chairman of the board of Louisiana Pacific or Dow Chemical. I mean, this is approximately their attitude. In other words, it ain't rain forests. It's not the life of the earth. It's none of that malarkey. We are to be the measure of all things. So it has to be tempered. We'll probably end up talking a bit here about what is about the pathological expression of the hermetic position, which is called Faustianism. And Faustianism is where you have unbridled ego, unbridled faith in the intellect so that you proceed forward without self-doubt. If you haven't read Faust recently, it's a surprising read. First of all, it's very funny. It's hilarious. It's funny, or in any of Shakespeare's plays, I think. And the way it ends is in the guy dedicates himself to a land reclamation and the draining of swamps to build low-cost housing for poor people. People don't know this. They're caught up in the images of the center of the story where magical power is running rampant. But Faust's final conclusion is that he should do some good work for the least of society and give up these prometian and titanic dreams of the mastery of power. Well, a little bit of history about this hermetic ideal. It's an interesting story in the light of our discussion of time yesterday. Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings. And one of the most severe of these misunderstandings has to do with this whole business of hermeticism. The Renaissance really believed that Hermes Trismagistus was a great teacher of antiquity who preceded Moses, who was in time older than Moses. And they had what they called the Prisky Teolochica, the three theologians. And they were Hermes Trismagistus, Moses, and Orpheus in that order. And the reason that I say Western civilization is built on a series of misunderstandings is because. They got it all wrong about Hermes Trismagistus, and there was great confusion and unhappiness in the 16th century when Marikasabond, who was an early philologist, attacked the dating of the hermetic corpus and argued correctly that this could not possibly have been written in a period preceding Moses. That in fact, this was post-Christian written no earlier than the first century AD. This is the equivalent of us finding out that, you know, George Washington was alive in Greenwich Village in the 1930s or something. I mean, it was a completely mind-bending re-alignment of how people thought the history of the world had unfolded because they had up to that time thought that when you studied Hermes Trismagistus, you were reading the oldest philosopher in human history. Actually, it's very late. And in a way, this is what destroyed the magical alternative. The advent of modern philology showed that these so-called ancient texts were not ancient at all. They were late Roman. They were Hellenistic. And so strongly was imprinted in the Western mind, what's called, and we've talked about it here this weekend, what's called the nostalgia for paradise. In other words, the belief that the older it is, the better it is. And Guillain Batista Vico in La Siencia Nueva laid the basis for this kind of thinking. It's called classicism in the Renaissance context. So once they found out that the hermetic corpus had been written in late Roman times, it was like it was finished. And science was able to use the confusion in the magical community at that point to force its own agenda very strongly. And there were numerous episodes of misplaced dating like this that have contributed to the confusion around the history of magic, for example. And I hope this doesn't bring somebody rising out of their chair in an air-clong rave. But Rosacrucianism rests on a whole bunch of phony dates because they want to tell you that somebody named Christian Rosencrantz wrote a book called The Chemical Wedding and sealed it up in a time capsule in the 12th century and that it was then dug up in the 15th, 16th, dug up in the 16th century. But actually all these Rosacrucian documents were ponyed up by people in the 16th century who had a very complicated political agenda which we will probably discuss as part of this weekend. Hermetic philosophy is based on what is called the hermetic corpus. This is a group of books, the most important of which is called the Schleppius. And these books, most of them, were completely lost during the Middle Ages. At the fall of the Roman Empire, copies of these hermetic manuscripts were systematically destroyed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians. And the hermetic manuscripts were scattered and they only survived then in monasteries, in Syria and places like that. Well then in the Renaissance, the Council of Florence under the patronage of the Borsches and people like that, they became very, there was this great interest suddenly in antiquities because these Roman statuary and stuff was coming out of the ground. So the Council of Florence commissioned a character named Jimistis Pletho to go to Syria and bring back these manuscripts and they established a translation commission. And they had in manuscript the works of Plato, the works of Hermes Trismagistus, a whole bunch of ancient literature and to show you what the psychology of the Renaissance was, here they had Plato, which they hadn't been able to read for a thousand years, sitting there waiting for translation. And the Cosmodimedici said to Marcelo Faccino, Plato can wait, translate the hermetic corpus first. And so it was done. If you're interested in Renaissance hermeticism, you can't do better than read Dame Francis Yates book, Gerda No Bruno in the hermetic tradition. Well I want to read you some of this stuff because it's very interesting and it has a modernity that is astonishing. It's also very psychedelic. Here's a little passage on the imagination. I'm reading from book nine of the corpus hermeticum in the Scott translation. This is a four volume set. I only brought the texts and translation volume. But if you read Greek it's all here, if you don't it's all here in English. But this will just give you a feeling for the approach. If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal and make yourself to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure. Rise above all time and become eternal, then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible. Dean that you too are immortal and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought to know every craft and every science. Find your home in the haunts of every living creature. Make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths. Bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once on land, at sea, in heaven. Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together, then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body and abase yourself and say, "I know nothing, I can do nothing, I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven, I know not what I was, nor what I shall be, then what have you to do with God?" Your thought can grasp nothing beautiful and good if you cleave to the body and are evil. Interesting, very different from the humble yourself, hard labor, spun wool and watery beer approach of medieval Christianity. Here is an amazing passage. People like to think people thought the world was flat until the Renaissance. This is an incredible psychedelic image of outer space that is second century AD. Would that it were possible for you to grow wings and soar into the air, poised between earth and heaven, you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea and the streaming rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire, the courses of the stars and the swiftness of the movement with which heaven encompasses all. What happiness were that my son? to see all these born along with one impulse, and to behold him who is unmoved, moving in all that moves, and him who is hidden, made manifest through his works. And it goes on and on. It's very readable. It's very literary. It's highly poetic. It's a celebration of nature. The notion of sin is completely absent, and it rings with a kind of confidence, a kind of joy that was completely running counter to the Brimstone and Damne Nation point of view of Christianity. Here's a, to me, a psychedelic passage. But he who presents all things to us through our senses, and thereby manifest himself through all things, and in all things, and especially to those to whom he wills to manifest himself. Begin then, my son, taught, with a prayer to the Lord and Father who alone is good, pray that you may find favor with him, and that one ray of him, if only one, may flash into your mind so that you may have power to grasp and thought that mighty being. For thought alone can see that which is hidden in as much as thought itself is hidden from sight. And if even the thought which is within you is hidden from your sight, how can he, being in himself, be manifest to you through your bodily eyes? But if you have power to see with the eyes of the mind, then my son, he will manifest himself to you, for the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe, and you can behold God's image with your eyes, and lay hold on it with your hands. If you wish to see him, think on the Son, think on the course of the moon, think on the order of the stars. Who is it that maintains that order? The Son is the greatest of the gods in heaven, to him as to their king and overlord and all the kings of heaven yield place, and yet this mighty God, greater than earth and sea, submits to having smaller stars circling above him. Who is it then, my son, that he always obeys with reverence and awe? Each of these stars, too, is confined by measured limits and has an appointed space to range in. Why do not all the stars in heaven run like and equal courses? Who is it that is assigned to each its place and marked out for each the extent of its course? And so forth. So it's a nature-oriented celebratory. It glories in the exercise of the mind. It is not doctrinal, it is not a piotistic, it is magical, psychedelic, expansive, and I'm not implying that they used psychedelic substances. The evidence for that is incredibly murky and hard to get at, and probably they didn't. I mean, one of the real tragedies of Western history is that Western Europe is so poor in psychoactive plants. I mean, it had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece. Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did. I think you can make an argument that there were psychedelic mysteries in Europe probably up until the time of the fall of elusis. Hermeticism is only one heterodox strain among many that were in existence in Europe in the late Roman period and that then partially survived into the dark ages. I mean, you have neo-platinism, which is a group of philosophers in the third and fourth century who, platinous, porphyry, proclos and that crowd. And they took Plato, the late Plato, and contorted that into a mystical doctrine of emanation. They were what are called emanationists. What this means is you start with, it's either called the one or the unnameable or Brahman Atman or something like that. And then you have a series of declensions into more and more material and more and more multiplicistic expressions of being. These neo-platinists were emanationists and their theories about how the universe is constructed have become sort of the unconscious basis of all later magical speculation. They are the people who brought the angels into the pictures so intensely because they were trying to create a descending hierarchy of being from the most high down to the most low. And angels once set in place became a real problem for Christianity because they are not very easy to distinguish from the old stellar demons of paganism. Paganism was largely the belief that the power of the stars could be drawn down to earth through a series through sympathetic magic, really. By setting up resonances in a ritual situation, you could draw the power of the stars down into your projects and your intentions. And the late Middle Ages was a period of intensely working out all the associations between minerals, colors, perfumes, plants, musical notes and styles so that you could then bring together all these things for purposes of magical evocation. And if any of you are interested in this, the book to read which will point you toward many other interesting books is a wonderful book called Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Fichino to Campanella. Some of you may remember Campanella, hell of a fighter. Anyway, in the Renaissance, in an over-spirit of about three generations, this became a real problem because what starts out as angel magic ends up as out and out demonic conjuration. Something which I've noticed, my 14 year old son has an incredibly unhealthy interest in, which I did as well at his age. I hope it's not the family curse coming back. Yeah, so I mentioned the dating error. It was lactantius, who was one of the fathers of the early church, one of the patricistic writers. That's that generation of theologians that followed Christ who canonized the Christian religion and he placed Hermes Trismagistus as older than Moses, older than Pythagoras, older than Plato. And then it wasn't until Maric Casabone corrected that problem. See, we forget how the really transformative breakthrough that was represented for Western Europe by the recovery of all of this ancient literature, it had been completely lost and also a misimpression that probably needs correcting is I think most people who are not schooled in Western history think that the further back in time, the more "superstitious" people were, this isn't actually the case. It isn't the case of the further back in time you go, the more belief in demons, magical conjuration and stuff like that, you get. The 10th, 11th and 12th centuries in Europe were periods of remarkable piety and intellectual cohesion. Of course, it was also some kind of a fascist nightmare. That's how they achieved it. They had stamped out paganism. They had pushed heresy and heterodox thinking to the very distant frontiers of the empire, of the Holy Roman Empire. And people were not superstitious. And people were not obsessed with horoscopes and conjuration. And this sort of thing, where that all began, was, well, where it reached its culmination, is in the 16th century. The 16th century, the 1500s, it was the most magical obsessed century in the last 10. And alchemy and conjuration, and talismanic magic, and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished really, not as a throwback, but as a kind of prelude to modern science. Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise. And we will see, as we discuss this stuff, that in a curious and little, rarely discussed way, the program, the agenda of magical decidence in Europe, have been entirely achieved by the forces of what we call modernity. It's simply that it has been done in an entirely secular metaphor. I mean, if you take even the trivial belief about alchemists, that they were concerned with changing led into gold. Of course, that isn't what it was about, but there were plenty of con artists running around on the periphery of these deeper scenes, who were claiming they could change led into gold. Well, in the 20th century, we routinely change led to gold. You do it with neutron bombardment in particle accelerators. And of course, it costs far more to do it than the worth of the gold that you get out, but that really wasn't the point, was it? It was to prove that it could be done. The dreams of creating the homunculus are dreams that dovetail directly into the aspirations of modern biology, genetics, so forth, and so on. The great chain of being, a veristotle, is animated, given a dimension of motion and lo and behold, it becomes the Darwin Wallace theory of evolution. The Mersiliard talks about this, about how all the alchemical dreams of the 15th and 16th century have been brought to fruition in the 20th century. But again, in the absence of magical rhetoric, but certainly in a spirit of magical and foustine recklessness for sure. I mean, this is scientists, they claim such a devotion to truth that decency must never stand in the way because they serve a higher god than human values. They serve the golem of the truth in some weird way that makes the truth okay, even if it kills you. I studied philosophy from Paul Firobb, and then he used to say at the beginning of his epistemology 101 course, I will teach you to recognize the truth, and I will teach you to ask the question, what's so great about it? You know, I mean, so now you've got the truth, so what's so great about it? It was 1460 when these manuscripts were brought to Florence. Those of you with photographic memories can see the time wave signature as it turns over and heads through the floor. And the Cosimo Dometici immediately ordered Fichino to abandon his work on Plato, and the Pymander, which was one of these books, which had been, it was the only one which existed in Europe, even in partial form during the Dark Ages. Cosimo died in 1464, but the translation project went forward just so you understand that the tree, the developmental process in Western magic goes basically, all goes back to this Florentine translation project, and from there, people who were well placed got a hold of this stuff, the most important person, probably being a person, certainly an unsung hero in the development of Western thought, Trathamius Bishop of Sponheim, and Trathamius wrote a book, he was really a manuscript, it was never printed as a book in his lifetime, but later called the Stenographica. And in it, he put forth many of these magical doctrines and also encryption methods for code making and breaking so that this stuff could be circulated under the eyes of the clergy without causing a problem. And then the development of Western magic splits into two strains, the Bruno strain, Giordano Bruno, I understand he's running for president of the United States this year. Giordano Bruno and his school, he was a Franciscan monk who ended up being burned at the stake, his sin for which he was burned at the stake was he was sitting on a rooftop of one of these Italian city states one evening, presumably smoking some pretty decent boo that they'd brought in from North Africa. And he was looking at the stars and he, it occurred to him, these things are suns. These little points of light are like the sun. Jesus Christ and in a single moment, the universe became infinite. And he said, if these are suns, and he just, his mind was boggled literally. I mean, can you imagine inside the medieval worldview where they have these concentric shells of angels and demons and the fall this, suddenly this guy gets it in a single moment and he sees that the universe is infinite and he begins to say so. And this is against Starrist's daughter and the church just goes nuts and they drive him out of Italy and he has a whole bunch of adventures in England and other places. Eventually he makes the mistake of coming back to a place in Northern Italy where he's betrayed by his patron and he is, he's burned at the stake for a point of view which all of us take quite for granted. The other strain of magic coming down from Trithemius is the D strain and it is a bit more accessible to people like ourselves because John D was an Englishman and he wrote in English and so you don't have to conquer 16th century Italian or late Latin in order to read him although he wrote a lot in Latin as well. D is a very interesting character, worth spending some time on because D is the last person to be able to unify into one worldview, science and mathematics and magic and astrology all together. So he is the greatest magician of his age and the greatest scientist of his age. He designed the navigation instruments that Sir Francis Drake used to go around to the Cape Horn and sail up the coast of California. He was an intelligence operative, serving Queen Elizabeth on the European continent. He could cast the best horoscope in Europe and that was his entree into these various royal families of these various capital cities of Europe and then he was making maps of battlements and of the deployment of war facilities and shipbuilding capacity and stuff. like that and sending it all back to Elizabeth in these codes that he had learned from trithemias, not personally, but from the Stannan graphica. And D, a very strange incident happened, which was on a cold day in April at his house in Mortelake, which is on the outskirts of London. Now it's completely surrounded by modern London. I should say he had the largest library in England. He had 6,000 books, Sir Philip Sidney and the Queen would occasionally call upon him to shoot the bull. And he was very learned and manned. So one day in April of 1582, he's working at his desk at his room in Mortelake. And he goes outside, there's some disturbance in the garden and he goes outside. And his story, and we have only his story, is that an angel descended in a ball of light and gave him an object, which is to this day on exhibit in the British Museum. If you ever have a chance, it's worth hunting it down. It's in the Renaissance Hall. And it's a piece of black polished obsidian, roughly about this big and about that thick and very highly polished. He called it the Shoe Stone, SHW. And what the deal was was you could look into the Shoe Stone if you had the right talent. And it was a magical theater. There were gods and demons and female spirits and all kinds of things swirling around this thing. Well, for the next many years, the Shoe Stone was the major guiding force on these life. And a guy came to him named Edward Kelly. And Edward Kelly, legend has it that he had no ears, which in England at that time meant that you had committed some infraction in the province and they had removed your ears. It was the mark of a con artist, so you couldn't fool anybody else. They took your ears off. So then if you met somebody with no ears and a big scheme, you knew to keep your wallet in your pocket. So this guy Kelly had an immense facility with this Shoe Stone. I mean, he could just sit down with it. And it is one of the most puzzling and undiscussed episodes in the evolution of Western thought. The straight people just say, whoa, this is a bunch of crap, you know, this guy Kelly. First of all, D was married to a much younger woman named Anne D. And at one point in the 10 years or so that D and Kelly were together, the angels of the Shoe Stone gave very explicit instructions that D should allow Kelly to bed down with Anne. And this was, and as he says, and in the light of God's will, it was done. And his diary. So this guy was a sharpie for sure. However, it's very puzzling because if he was a con artist, he must have been a con artist of immense cleverness because often the way the D angels would work is they would deliver very, very long messages in Latin backwards. And Kelly would just dictate this stuff at a very rapid speed and D would write it down. And then they would put away the Shoe Stone. And then they would very laboriously rewrite this stuff from back to front. And then there would be these long coherent harangs about what they should be doing, about which courtly figures they should support with money and who should be introduced to who. It was very political, you know. So what kind of a polymathic talent was, Edward Kelly, that he could invert whole pages of Latin and reel it off and then have it be reconstructed and make sense? Also there are, you see, we know about this because de-kept a diary over the years that this was all going on. It's one of the most astonishing books in all of English literature. And until the last ten years, the 1658 edition was the only edition ever published. It's called a true and faithful relation or in full, a true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr. D and some spirits with annotation by Marik Kasabon, the guy who did the correct dating on the Hermetica. And it's very interesting reading. It's, as I say, one of the most puzzling incidents in the whole history of science. What D was doing was eventually he came to rest at the court of Rudolf II, Rudolf I of Bohemia, who ruled from Prague. Now you have to understand, is that a hand up? Yeah. Is there evidence of drug use? Not strong enough to warrant any getting thrilled about it. The great awareness of drug use came slightly later and strangely enough the drug was opium. It's interesting, the history of opium. We think of opium and its derivatives, junk and heroin, as just the lowest, well maybe crack, is now the lowest of the low. But anyway, it's a real skull drug according to most people's opinion. But did you know that no, they had been using opium for 3,000 years before anybody noticed that it was an addicting drug? It was not ever noted that opium was addicting until 1611 when John play fair, a very famous English physician, wrote a book in which he commented on opium and said, "Once one has begun the habit of opium, it must be maintained unto death." So in the 30 years after D, there was a great hermetisist and alchemical thinker named Paracelsus who arose on the European continent. Paracelsus is an interesting guy. He's essentially the inventor of drugs because he was the first person to extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence that if you have a medicinal plant, then there's something in there which you want to get out and concentrate. He called his school of alchemy, Iatrochemistry, the doctor's chemistry. And he invented pills of the ordinary sort and he said, "I have made a great discovery. The center of my alchemical opus rests with the magic of lodenum," which was of course gum opium. There was a craze in the late 15th century among alchemists for opium. The alchemist Van Helmut, he signed some of his alchemical tracks, Dr. opium. He was the first croaker. Used in pre-dynastic Egypt and in the Manoan civilization. When they first started translating linear B and all that, they had these tallies with little symbols stamped at the end of the tallies. For the first few years after linear B was translated, they thought the tallie mark for opium was the tallie mark for corn because the amounts being recorded. as being produced and sold were so huge. that they assumed it must be a serial grain. And then finally, they realized it was opium. The character of the late Minoan civilization was very heavily characterized by a dreamy, dissolving, decadent quality that lasted for the last 500 years or so. And there are many depictions of the goddess holding a quiet in one hand and poppies in the other. Somebody had a question? - Yeah. - What do you also got a fall of elusis? How does it look like the way I'm going to go to? - The fall of elusis. Well, as you all probably know, elusis was a cult site near Athens on a plane. There's now a big lumber yard there the last time I was there. But anyway, it was this very fertile plane outside of ancient Athens. And they celebrated the greatest of the Greek mysteries there. They celebrated, it was a biannial, or I mean a twice yearly festival. In the spring, they would celebrate the lesser mystery. And this seemed to be a fairly local get together of some sort and probably a planting festival. But every September for 2,000 years, people from all over the Greco-Roman world would come for the festival at elusis. And the rule was, first of all, it was open to everyone. Men, women, free man, slave, everyone could attend. The rule was, you could only attend once in your life. And so you had one shot at whatever this thing was, and you were sworn to silence. And literally, everyone who was anyone went to elusis to experience the mysteries. I mean, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Eskulus, Euripides, everybody, people would make journeys of thousands of miles. It was the wellspring of Greek spirituality. The problem is, we don't know with certainty what the excitement was all about. I mean, we know that there was an inter-cult area called the Tele-Stareon, and that people would, that something was drunk, and that something was seen. And in the 19th century, they just went nuts on this subject. I talk about it in my book. And they finally, all these constipated Victorian classes decided that the mystery of elusis must be a representation of the female genitals illuminated at the height of this ceremony by a laser light show of some sort. And so it was just absurd. I mean, it was a complete distillation of the Victorian mind being prejudiced. I mean, you'd like to believe that the roots of Western civilization are deeper than a peep show. But hey, who knows? There was a very interesting incident in, it's called the scandal of 415, which is that in 415 BC, a wealthy Athenian noble, named Alchabiaides, was busted for the charge was possessing the elicinian mystery and distributing it to guests at dinner. Well, this seems to make it fairly clear that this was not a clay representation of anybody's genitals. This was some kind of dope of some sort. So then the scholars without their knives and all kinds of theories have been brought forward. Some of you may know the scholar Robert Graves discusses this in the white goddess. And his theory, which I think deserves to be more looked after than it has, his theory was that these recipe, people drank something from a special cup called a cacchewon and recipes supposedly exist for what they drank and it's honey, barley, something else and always water. And Graves argued that you don't, but water is not something that you list as an ingredient of something you drink. Obviously it has water in it. So he said the inclusion of water in this list is in order that there can be an augum. Do you know what an augum is? I'm, you will when I tell you, because you've all seen them. An augum is when you make a list of things in such a way that the first letter spell out a word. You grok that. So the idea was that in Demotic Greek, the words for barley, honey, water and this fourth ingredient that I can't remember, those four words can be arranged to spell out the word Mikko, which means mushroom. So Robert Graves was convinced that a psilocybin mushroom lay behind the Elycinean mysteries. This is a pretty good, this is not entirely unreasonable. Now a few years ago there was a book called Written by the great mushroom enthusiast and discover Gordon Watson and the chemist who discovered LSD, Albert Hoffman and the classicist rock, the three of them and Jonathan Ott, I think was also in there, wrote a book called Persephone's Quest, not Persephone's Quest, that's a different book. The Road to Illusus, good, watch me. The Road to Illusus and they put forth there a new theory which was that on the plane of Illusus they grew barley and these people thought that there may have been a special strain of claviceps. Do you all know what claviceps is? Do you all know what Urgod is? Urgod is a smut. A smut is a disgusting disease, a fungal disease of grain. Have you ever been in a corn field and seen an ear of corn that looks like it's covered with some black, slimy, horrible stuff that's flowing out of it and all over it, it's absolutely disgusting. Although God in California, I don't know if this is hit here yet, but in California for the past year, the hippest thing that you can be served at pretentious art openings and stuff like that is corn smut which they spread on crackers and it's just horrible and it's really expensive. I mean, it's more expensive than caviar and it's just become a craze and I wouldn't get near it. I mean, it's not only disgusting to look at, but the chemistry of it is so weird, God alone. I mean, hives would be the least of your problems. Anyway, so corn smut and there are rice smuts and there are wheat smuts, but interestingly, the rice smut which is Urgod is an organism called Klavaseps Puspole produces LSD like alkaloids and the problem is that LSD Urgod related alkaloids also very tend to cause convulsions or they can cause convulsions. If any of you suffer from migraine headaches, now there are a lot of different drugs for migraine, but up until just four or five years ago, the drug of choice for migraine was called ET, Ergonamine tartrate. Ergonamine tartrate, if you've got a kilo of it, you can settle down and make several million hits of LSD. Ergonamine tartrate is this very rigidly controlled underground substance that is produced. produced legally only in certain sanctioned fields in northern Pakistan, and it's produced for the world market of migraine sufferers. And you get these little tiny blue pills. I have migraines. I used to take or got, but I don't, I've gotten them under control. But anyway, it's the drug of choice for migraine because it constricts the vessel, the blood arteries going into the head. Anyway, wassand and Hoffman argued that what they were doing at elucises is that they were brewing an Urgot beer. They were deliberately gathering barley that was infected with claviceps, and they were brewing an intoxicating beer. And people were having a hallucinogenic experience. Well, now this is a great area for the able bodied among us to do research because it should be possible to collect claviceps and maybe even to go to elucis and collect claviceps there and culture it out and see if you could make an Urgot beer that would actually get you hallucinogenically stoned. I'm not sure what's going on. Urgot is a dangerous substance. I remember an anecdote once, many years ago, I knew these people who occasionally dealt illegal substances. And one day they were moving some ET to somebody. And they asked this guy there if he would take this ounce of ET and deliver it to this certain address. And when they gave it to him, they said, "Now, this is ET, so just leave it alone." And he got out in the car and he opened up the baggy and it was this white powder and he said, "You know, these people can't fool me." So he honked up a little of it and then he went on his appointed rounds and the guy who was supposed to have the stuff delivered, he was sitting in his house and he heard this commotion on his front porch and opened the door to find this guy flopping around with his legs and feet in the air having convulsive seizures because of the ET he'd snorted up. It's just one more story about the dangers of white powder drugs, folks. Anyway, it's important for the argument because I don't see how they could have been serving several thousand people, ergotized beer every September for two thousand years and not had the Ellicinian mysteries get a certain reputation for risk. You know, that people would have convulsions and conceivably even die of heart attacks. How could they get that many people loaded, year in and year out and not get a bad rap on it? And then I talked to Albert Hoffman about this and he didn't seem to feel that it was such a problem. He said that what you could do is float hot oil on the surface of this beer and you could draw off the convulsive alkaloids, would have an affinity for the hot oil and then you could just skim this oil off and discard it and you would leave the hallucinogenic material in the beer while I haven't tried this, like I say, it's for the able bodied. But in any case, this was the last outpost in the west of psychedelic mystery. And eventually, those enthusiastic Christian barbarians appeared on the scene. In this case, it was Alleric the Visigoth, a great guy to take to an art museum. And they smashed it all to pieces. Alleric the Visigoth was kick ass. People don't realize that these barbarian invasions of the late Roman Empire, the vandals took over a huge swath of North Africa. They didn't just stop at the bottom of the boot of Italy or on the Peloponnesian peninsula. These guys just kept rolling. And huge parts of Africa were under the control of Visigoths and vandals, North Africa, Carthaginian coast of the Mediterranean. And that killed, that was the end of the Illusinian mysteries. But it shows how late this mystical psychedelic impulse persisted in Western civilization. Maybe the thing that gave the Greeks their genius was that it was a mingling of a northern mentality coming out of Thracia and places like that. Meeting a very old mystical, feminist culture that had its roots 10,000 years deep in Saharan Africa via Egypt and Chattalhya Yook in Turkey. Because it was said even in classical times what is celebrated in secret at Illusus is celebrated publicly at Knossus in Mycenae. You see the Mycenae in Minoan Crete. You see Minoan civilization was an archaic civilization. It preserved the goddess worship, the opium use. All of these archaic styles were preserved in Minoan Crete from millennia after the rule on the coast of Asia Minor was kingship, bronze tipped spears, city building, and that whole sweat socks mentality that built up there. But finished those folks off was around 950 AD, Mycenaean pirates eventually laid siege to these Minoan cities and after centuries of slowly drifting deeper and deeper into opiated decadence, Minoan Crete fell. But all of the mysteries and the mysticism and the orgyastic rights and all of these archaic forms were then imported into Greece as mystery religions, as cult practices. One of the puzzles of Minoan religion is that they worshipped these things or they had a religious relationship to these things called an iconic pillars. They're called what they are mushrooms as far as I can tell. They built shrines. They worshipped columns, but these columns were slightly flared on the top. If any of you are interested in it, well, something that should be said, see we have a distorted view of how culture developed and what classicism really meant because throughout the 18th and 19th century, European scholarships spent a huge amount of time distorting and erasing the debt of Greek civilization to Africa. They basically screwed with the record because they just couldn't bring themselves to believe that all this wonderful architecture and proportion and mathematics, that it was little brown people who were responsible for this. If you're interested in this book, there's a book by Bernal called Black Athena that is a really radical book. Have any of you read it? It was very controversial a couple of years ago. Great book. Black Athena by Bernal and it shows how Western culture misrepresented the debt of classicism to Africa. They could tolerate the idea of Egypt as long as you always made sure that these people were white as the driven snow. It's a bunch of malarkey. It was a thoroughgoing black culture. Everything was derivative of it right up until the Byzantine Empire or something. Plato freely acknowledged his debt to this stuff. It was just that it was unswallowable to late European culture. That was a big article. Oh yeah, they did a cover thing on it. I didn't read it a few months ago. What was it called? African rule. or some, yeah. And it's no shock and jive. I mean, we think 19th century scholarship was so careful and so wonderful and what it really was was an old boys club. I mean, they were fast and loose with this stuff. You know, I think when it's all sorted out, it all happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 BC up until around 9,000 BC in the Saharan grasslands, which then because of drying, these people were forced into the Nile Valley and into a different cultural style. But the African cradle of civilization, I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't believe that is going to have to do some fast talking. And there's been this recent effort to say that the Australian aborigines broke off very, very early. But it's pretty species, I think. You probably all know the theory of Eve and the fact that you can trace the maternal line through the episome of the mitochondria. So you can actually, it's actually now believed that every human being on Earth is descended from one woman. And this woman lived in Africa less than 200,000 years ago. It's really amazing. All other human lines have been quenched somewhere along the line. She was, her progeny, were phenomenally successful. And this is, I would say, now the strongest theory about this now is the Eve theory. When it was first propounded, it was thought to be screwball. But that's because the physical anthropologist didn't really understand how the molecular geneticists achieved this conclusion. Once it was explained to everybody, it's pretty clear, that we are all descended from one single female human being, not that there weren't other human beings, that she was embedded in as a society. But none of those lines of descent reached to the present. When you said of the non-scivilization, was decadent? And what sets do you mean that? Well, it was decadent in the sense that it went into a kind of a deep freeze, that level of change in the last thousand years of menow and civilization, the dating of ceramic and stuff like that is almost impossible, because they were completely static. They were unchanging for a very, very long time in that late phase. And that's when these opium tallies were rising like crazy. And it was a tremendous shock to the Renaissance when they realized that what they thought was 5,000 years old was less than 1,000, was about 1,000 years old. And that's what really discredited that whole worldview, which is in a way silly, because who cares how old it is? The question is, how much sense does it make? But the Renaissance was so strongly imbued with this belief that the ancient things were the better that if something was shown to be not as old as previously thought, then it usually went on the discard pile. Who were they? Yeah, the ones that were promoting as new way of looking at things. It was Cosimo de Medici and that family and the Borges. But this family, there were, I think, 11 popes who bore the name Borges in a 100-year period. So these people were very, very well connected. They were very wealthy. They had disposable income, which was something new in the world. And they invented a whole bunch of things, which God knows this city lives or dies by. I mean, like connoisseurship, patronage of the arts, and secular research projects. I mean, they were funding Da Vinci's work on catapults and flying machines at the same time that they were keeping all these painters paid and in mistresses and so forth. They were organizing archeological digs. People couldn't believe this stuff. I mean, we have assimilated all this, but they had forgotten the classical world. And then they lived in places like Rome, and Naples, and Venice. But they had never dug. And they'd just been quarrying the Colosseum and stuff like that. Well, then when they began bringing this stuff out of the ground and then the platonic corpus and all this, they just went ape for classicism. So ape that now we're this year celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage, which in a sense can be seen as the cherry on the top of the Renaissance mental explosion, we are still living in a classical world. We still react against classicism. The buildings we live in, the clothing we wear, our notion of how gentlemen behave, our attitudes toward women largely, our attitudes towards private wealth. All of this is classicism. And it had been dead 1200 years before these Italians latched onto it and dusted it off and set it up. And the modernism in its broadest context, whatever that means, is the first movement to come along to be able to, in any way, challenge classicism. The sub-sets of cl-- the art movements and literary movements that preceded modernism were simply aspects of classicism, romanticism, mannerism, the baroque. All of these are like facets of the classical object. It's only in modernism. And what modernism represents in my humble opinion is a kind of return to the archaic. Modernism deconstructs the clarity of the Western eye. If you have to date where modernism begins, it begins with impressionism, which takes the clarity of the Western eye and begins to dissolve it, you know? And the linear, you know, the columns and lines, that's how narrative was until James Joyce and Henry James and people like that showed that narrative could be broken up. Modernism is a form of primitivism, strangely enough. The people who created modernism, people like Marcel Duchamp and Picasso and the surrealists, they were tremendously influenced, in the case of Picasso. By African art, masks, and sculpture, stuff that had never been seen in Paris in 1905 through '15, and everyone was tremendously excited by it. Modernism is part of this much larger phenomenon which I call the archaic revival, you know? The discovery of the unconscious through Freud and Jung, the deconstruction of the image, first the image seen through impressionism, and then the image imagined is deconstructed through surrealism and Dada, and then finally, you know, the concentration on the materials of art, which you get in abstract expressionism, where it is about paint, it's no longer about paint in the service of the visual pictorialism, it just, and then all the postmodern stuff, which is, of course, just sort of running naked, screaming through the street kind of aesthetic.