Pharaoh's Rule:  Egypt, the Exodus, and the Myth of Osiris

 

The Indo-European invasions came from north of the Black Sea, from those great grazing areas where there were biologically plural races speaking related languages. The Indo-European languages were first recognized as one family about 1782 or 1783 by Sir William Jones, the first Westerner really to make a study of Sanskrit. A judge in the courts of Calcutta, he recognized that Sanskrit, the language of India, was related very closely to Latin, Greek, and the Germanic and Celtic languages. 

 

                  This one family of languages, with an enormous range, was carried by nomadic herding people, who mastered the horse and then the war chariot. These differentiated Indo-European groups were the Aryans. The word Aryan is a Sanskrit word meaning "noble." 

 

                  In the Caucasus Mountains, bronze first appears about 4000 B.C. It is picked up by the Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European bronze spear point becomes the token, the key, to their distribution. It also appears over an enormous range. The people that we have been talking about up to the time of these invasions were relatively peaceful people. But now the Indo-European warrior people come, and the whole world is transformed, you might say, into fighting tribal groups. At the same time, from the Syro-Arabian desert, come the Semites with the same essential warrior-like accent. The principal deities of warriors are male deities - thunderhurlers such as Yahweh and Zeus. 

 

                  In most of the mythologies of the Indo-Europeans, the principal deities are those of the universal order. The local tribal patrons are secondary deities-for instance, Indra. They pray to Indra for victory in war, but Indra is secondary. However, among the Semites, the tribal deity is top deity. So, if you are in the Indo-European context, you could say, "He whom we call Zeus, you call Indra." This is known as syncretism. A syncretic tendency pervades. 

 

                  When Alexander the Great went into India in the fourth century B.C., he and his young officers recognized the same gods that they were themselves worshiping. And they made correlations. Krishna is now identified with Heracles, Indra with Zeus, and so forth. When Caesar, three centuries later, went into Gaul - you can read it in book six of Caesar's Gallic Wars - he describes the Celtic religion in terms of Roman god names, Apollo, Mercury, etc. So we don't always know what god he's ttalking about. This is syncretism. But when you get to the Semitic tribes, you cannot say, "He whom you call Ezra, we call Yahweh." Try to say that and get away with it. Here you have an exclusivism and a tribalism, which in Judaism continues to this  day. Not only that, but Yahweh is the only God, the others are devils. There's no God in all the earth but in Israel. This is the religion that we have inherited in our Western tradition. 

 

                  I had a really very moving experience listening to Martin Buber back in 1955. He was in New York lecturing to a small group, and for some reason or another I'd been invited. I can't imagine why. He was a wonderfully eloquent speaker. When you realize that English was not his first language, it was quite a remarkable performance. But I didn't know what he meant by God, and he was using the word a good deal. I didn't know whether he was referring to the mystery behind all these galaxies or to some stage or other of the primitive biblical deity who is transformed from one century to another in this character. Also, he paused at one moment to say, "It pains me to speak of God in the third person. 

 

                  I raised my hand and I said to Dr. Buber, "There's a word being used here today that I do not understand." He said, "What is that word?" I said, "God." "You don't know what God means?" I said, "I don't know what you mean by God. You're telling us God has hidden his face, nobody sees him today. I've just come from India, where people are experiencing the face of God all the time." So what does he say? "Do you mean to compare?" The moderator cut in and said, "No, doctor, Mr. Campbell just wants to know what you mean." So he said, "Well, we all have to come out of our exile in our own way." But the Indians aren't in exile. Because God is right in them. These are the differences that have to be recognized when you're talking cross-culturally, about religions in terms of comparative religions. Compare? Yes, I do compare. It's my job. Those are different ideas. 

 

                  So what we have in India is a tendency towards syncretism, accent on the universal deities, with tribal deities who are the local patrons but belong to the larger system. You don't have different systems in different places. You have one great system with local ancestral patrons. 

 

                  Here we are in Mycenae about 1500 B.C. Before the invention of the horse collar, which rests on the horse's shoulders, and so the weight is pulled from the shoulders, the vehicles were drawn by a band across the horse's chest. The horse's windpipe is out front, so that if you have a heavy vehicle, he chokes. They could not invent a really usable war chariot, a flexible one, until they had mastered a race of very powerful horses. As you see, very light chariots were used, and their invention took place around 1800 B.C. in those differentiated Indo-European plains culture spheres. 

 

                  In the great Mycenaean Acropolis, one burial includes a chariot with the two horses that drew it. A Chinese burial of the same date also has two horses, the chariot, and the charioteer. Different race, same culture. A page from the Mahabharata shows the great chariot warriors of India, and we have representations of Tutankhamen in the same chariot, about 1340 B.C. You can see it's from the same tradition. This is what's known as diffusion from a creative center, a new idea goes out and with it go the deities and energy symbols in association with it. 

 

                  We move now to Egypt and the Nile. Egyptian history is quite easy to follow because the earliest period is in Lower Egypt, the middle period is in Middle Egypt, and the final period is in Upper Egypt. From around 4000 B.C., we have this figure of the goddess. This mural, from the period known as Badarian, is from the tomb at Hierankopolis. It is a tomb with two chambers,  which suggests  suttee again. There's nothing Egyptian about the mural. It looks much more like something from Iran. There are the interlocked animals such as we saw in Samarra, 4000 B.C. But this is about five hundred years later. So the influences are coming in from Mesopotamia and inspiring a development in Egypt. Here are the figures of dancing animals and figures going around the center. All are motifs from Iran. And then suddenly around 3200 B.C., the First and Second Dynasties, we have the arrival and development of a specifically and indubitably Egyptian art form which remains for three thousand years. This is called the Narmer Palette. King Narmer of Upper Egypt, wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, is subduing the pharaoh, or whatever he was called, of the delta. Here is Narmer's totem animal, the hawk, with the king of the delta by the nose. Here is the papyrus swamp of the delta, and

here are the enemy slain. We also have a cow figure, Hathor, the goddess of the horizon. She appears in four aspects. The king is wearing a belt and a bull's tail. He is the moon bull incarnate. The pharaoh is the highest god. He is Osiris, the moon bull incarnate. And on his belt are the face forms of Hathor in front, in back, and on either side. The pharaoh fills the horizon. On the reverse side is Hathor again, and the king now wears the crown of Lower Egypt, of the delta. We see the symbols of his pharaonic power, the dead of the delta's armies, and the animals symbolic of Upper and Lower Egypt, forming one great state. From here on, Egypt is the two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt, and the pharaoh undergoes two installations on the throne, two coronations - one with the crown of Upper Egypt, the other with the crown of Lower Egypt. When one of these kings was buried, the whole court was buried with him. 

 

                  Now we come to the first of the great pyramids, the Step Pyramid of King Zoser, 2600 B.C. This was built by the great architect Imhotep, and all of the motifs of later architecture in Egypt are stated here. They have suddenly come to form. The earlier graves were covered by earth mounds which washed away with time. The Sphinx represents the power of pharaonic rule. Every king is an incarnation of this power. The Sphinx is the son of the lion goddess Sekmet by a strange moon-like god called Ptah, who is usually represented as a mummy. A moonbeam impregnated the goddess and she gave birth to the Sphinx. 

 

                  The pharaoh is the incarnation of Osiris. He is protected by the sun hawk Horus, the son of Osiris. After

the early dynasties, there was the First Intermediary Period. For a number of dynasties there was nothing but upheaval and destruction. Then the Middle Kingdom comes and that is wiped out by an invasion from Asia known as the invasion of the Hyksos. One theory for the entry of the Jews into Egypt is that they came in at the time of the Hyksos. This is just shortly after the time of Hammurabi. If that were so, however, they would not have been there in the time of Ramses because the Hyksos were thrown out at the time of the founding of the New Kingdom. These are the great dynasties of which we mostly read. 

 

                  And now I want to give the basic myth of Osiris and Isis. This is the heaven goddess, Nut. Just the opposite of the way it is in Mesopotamia, where the god is above and the goddess is the earth, here we have the heaven goddess, Nut, spangled with stars and here is her consort, Hem, the earth god. This is the lord of the cosmic abyss out of which all has come. Riding on the sky boat, the great boat of Ra, the god of the sun,

the souls that are in this barge course over the sky and instead of descending they enter the mouth of Nut and then are born in the east. The lord of air separates heaven and earth. These are basic mythic motifs that will occur in many other mythologies. Now the first children of Hem and Nut are Isis and Osiris. The goddess Isis is the throne on which the pharaoh sits. Osiris is her twin brother. They are husband and wife. The younger brother and sister are Set and Neftis. They are also husband and wife. Now, in a famous night, Osiris slept with Neftis, thinking she was Isis. This is inattention to details, and from things of that kind bad results can follow. She bore a child, Anubis, who had the head of a jackal. 

 

                  Set didn't like this, and he planned revenge. He took measurements of Osiris and had a sarcophagus fashioned that would fit him exactly. A jolly party was in full progress when Set comes in and says he has a beautiful sarcophagus and anyone whom it fits can have it. So, like Cinderella and the glass slipper, they all try the sarcophagus. And when Osiris is in it, it fits perfectly, and seventy-two attendants come rushing in, clamp the lid on the sarcophagus, wrap iron bands around it, and throw it into the Nile. Osiris floats down the Nile and is washed ashore in Syria and a great tree grows around the sarcophagus. 

 

                  Isis starts out to find her husband. She comes to the place in Syria where Osiris is enclosed in the tree. Meanwhile the prince of that little town has had a child. A little boy has been born and the prince has built a palace. The wonderful aroma that comes from this tree has so entranced him that he has had the tree cut down and made into a pillar in the palace. And so Osiris is in the palace, inside a pillar. 

 

                  Isis is sitting by the well where the young women from the palace come to draw water, and they invite this beautiful older woman in to become nurse for the newborn little prince. She accepts the job and nurses the child from her little finger. Goddesses can stoop only so far. 

 

                  At night, to give the child immortality, Isis places him in the fireplace and recites her charms. The fire is supposed to burn off his mortal character and turn him into an immortal. Meanwhile, she turns into a swallow and, pillar. Well, one evening the little boy's mother happens to break in on this scene, and as you can imagine,

she lets out a scream. There's her baby in the fireplace and there's nobody watching him, there's just a funny

twittering swallow flying around a post. And the child has to be rescued from the fire because the spell is broken, and the swallow turns into the beautiful nursemaid. So Isis explains the situation as well as she can, and then she says, "By the way, my husband's in that pillar. Could you please give me the pillar so I can take my husband home." And the king, very polite, says, "Here you are, my darling." 

 

                  The pillar's put on a barge, and on the way back to the papyrus swamp, Isis takes off the sarcophagus lid, lies upon the dead Osiris, and conceives Horus. Now Osiris has two sons: one by Neftis-Anubis, the jackal boy, and another by Isis-Horus. 

 

                  Isis is afraid to go back to the palace because Set has assumed the throne. She goes into the papyrus swamp and gives birth to Horus. The gods Amon and Thot come to assist her. 

 

                  Meanwhile Set, who is out hunting, follows a boar into the papyrus swamp and finds Isis with Osiris's corpse beside her. In a rage, he tears Osiris into fifteen pieces, scatters the fifteen pieces over the landscape, and poor Isis has to go hunt for him again. She's helped now by Neftis and Anubis, who sniffs around, and they find fourteen of the pieces. 

 

                  The dead Osiris is associated with the rising of the Nile, which fertilizes Egypt. And the juices of Osiris's disintegrating body are identified with the waters of the Nile. It is he, therefore, who is the fertilizing force of Egypt. 

 

                  The fourteen pieces are put together and Anubis, in the role later assumed by the priests, embalms Osiris. The missing piece, the genital organs, has been swallowed by a fish. This is the origin of the fish meal on Fridays; it's a sacramental consuming of the sacred flesh. 

 

                  Osiris, no longer being a generator, is the image of the dead pharaoh and he becomes the lord of the underworld. The resurrected Osiris is now the judge of the dead. His son Horus, who has rapidly grown up, has engaged in a great battle with his uncle Set to avenge his father. In that battle, Horus lost an eye. This eye is symbolic of sacrificial offering. Through the loss of that eye he brought his father back to life. Set lost a testicle in the combat. 

 

                  So now we come to the judgment scene, from the Book of the Dead of Ani. Here is Osiris seated on the throne of the judge of the dead, by the waters of eternal life. Behind him are his two queens, Isis and Neftis. He has the symbolic shepherd's crook and the winnowing whip, which winnows wheat, separating the chaff from the seed. We see the eye of Horus by which he has been resurrected, and growing from the waters of eternal life is the lotus of the world with the four sons of Horus, who represent the four points of the compass of the universe. When a person dies, he becomes identified with Osiris. This is a very important theme. The dead person is called Osiris. Osiris Jones, let's say. He goes on the underworld journey to unite with Osiris. Osiris is going to Osiris. I and the father are one, that motif. On the way, he eats back all the gods. This means that the gods are understood to be projections of the energies of ourselves. We consume the gods. In some cases it's represented actually as cannibalism. In other ways, other texts, he might simply say, "My head is the head of Anubis. My shoulders are the shoulders of Set." That is to say, every organ of my body is the organ of some

god and nobody will take my heart from me in the underworld. You get some sense of the dangers of the

underworld. "Get you back, you crocodile of the north. Get you back, you crocodile of the south." Then he

comes to the great moment of the opening of the mouth in the underworld: "I am yesterday, today, and

tomorrow. I have the power to be born a second time. I am that source from which the gods arise." This is a great realization. This is what must be realized - properly before you die, but if not, then on the way to the underworld. 

 

                  Next, in the underworld we come to the great weighing of the heart of the dead against a feather. If the heart is heavier than a feather, a monster will consume the man. If the feather is heavier than the heart or of the same balance, then the person is eligible for spiritual life. Ani, the scribe for whom this papyrus was prepared, is being conducted to the weighing. Anubis does the weighing, and the monster is waiting to see if he can have a meal. Thot records the results. Finally, under the charge of Horus, Ani is led to the very throne of Osiris. This is a book of the dead and the mythology is explicit. 

 

                  Now we come to an extraordinary man, Akhnaton. The dates of his reign are 1377 to 1358 B.C. He's said to have been the first monotheist. That's wrong. I regard him as the first Protestant. He rejects the ceremonialism, the ritualism of the Theban priesthood, which had gained enormous wealth. Priesthoods always do, as long as they survive. He rejects the priestly orders of (thieves?) and founds a city of his own, Amarna, in the desert. His idea was that the deities should not be imaged, and he presents as the symbol of deity, the solar disk. Instead of Amon, who is the lord creator of the Theban system, he calls the deity Aton, which actually is the reanimation of a much earlier notion. 

 

                  Sigmund Freud suggested in his Moses and Monotheism that Moses had been an officer in the court of Akhnaton and that it was probably one of Akhnaton's daughters who had pulled Moses out of the water in the little basket of rushes. With the collapse of Akhnaton's court in Amarna - when he died the whole thing was wiped out - Moses, who was a believing minister in the court, picked up a group of working people in the delta area and left Egypt with them to continue this monotheistic cult. But the difference between Akhnaton's

so-called monotheism and that of Moses is that Akhnaton saw this mystery represented in the solar disk as informing all the gods and mythologies of the whole Near East. You are the one who appears as so-and-so here, so-and-so there. But the Yahwehist  monotheism  says, "There is no other God in the world. Those others are devils." So this is a total distinction which has to be recognized if you're going to understand what's going on. 

 

                  The symbols of Akhnaton's lordship were again the shepherd's crook of the good shepherd who guards and guides his flock and the winnowing whip for separating the chaff from the seed. This is the discipline and this the protection, the two aspects of rule - the god of mercy and the god of justice. 

 

                  Akhnaton's beautiful queen was Nefertiti. Almost every woman I know who believes in reincarnation thinks she was Nefertiti at one time. I was actually in Egypt with one of those ladies. When we were in Karnak she would say, "That's all so familiar." Here are Akhnaton, Nefertiti, and their three beautiful daughters with

their artificially deformed heads. We see the solar disk of Aton with its rays of blessing, each ray terminating in a hand, blessing this dear little family. 

 

                  Akhnaton had no sons, only three lovely daughters. One of his daughters married the young prince who is called Tutankh-Amen. That is to say, as soon as Akhnaton died, the Amon priesthood took over again and the

young pharaoh was again of the Amon cult. However, the solar disk and the hands of blessing continued. 

 

                  The tomb of Tutankhamen is a miserable little tomb in Egyptian terms. It's divided into two, and half was loaded with this gorgeous stuff, just thrown in as though in a junk shop. The reason it was all there was that nobody seems to have thought it worth trying to rob that tomb. Right next door is the tomb of Seti I, which

is enormous, and every bit of it is engraved and painted. The art is perfect and it was made never to be seen.

There was a kind of reality there, a concretization, that endured. The soul, one aspect of the soul, the ba, remained in the tomb. Tutankhamen's tomb has a very interesting symbolic form. There were three rectangular

boxes, one inside the other in the way of Chinese boxes. They were gold plated and there were four lovely

guardian spirits watching over them. Within the boxes was a great stone coffin and within that, two sarcophagi.

The outer one, in the form of the young pharaoh, was of precious wood inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli. The inner one was of solid gold, again in the form of the pharaoh. 

 

                  I've noticed many, many parallels between Egyptian symbology and the mystical philosophy of India. I'm just going to offer it as a suggestion that these three boxes, and the two sarcophagi inside the stone coffin, represent what in India are called the five sheaths - the five sheaths that enclose the atman, that enclose the self, the transcendent mystery. Since I'm going to be talking about Hinduism a bit, it is worth speaking of these five sheaths now. 

 

                  The first sheath is Anamayakosha, food. That's what our body is made of. It's made of food and when you die it becomes food for the worms, the vultures, the jackals, or the fire. The second sheath is Pranamayakosha, breath. The sheath of breath ignites the food, oxidation, burns, gives heat, temperature, and life. The third sheath is Manamayakosha,  the  mental sheath. Now, this mentality is in touch with the food sheath. And when the food sheath is in pain, it feels pain and thinks, "Oh, all is sorrowful." And when the food sheath is happy, it's happy too. The mental sheath is oriented to the food and breath sheaths. This is what I think is represented in the three rectangular boxes. 

 

                  Then we have a long gap, and I think this may be what is represented by the stone coffin, or maybe not. Maybe the stone coffin represented the next sheath. But I think more likely the wooden sarcophagus did. The next sheath is known as the Janamayakosha, the sheath of wisdom. This is the wisdom of the body: the wisdom that shaped you in the mother's womb, the wisdom that knew, the moment you were born, how to nurse, the wisdom that brings up the grass and informs the trees and the mountains and universe. The wisdom of the body: that spontaneous thing on which the mentality rides and which the mentality has to know about. We eat breakfast. Our body digests that breakfast. I dare say there isn't a soul who would know mentally what the chemistry of the breakfast requirements were for digestion. And yet you do it. Who else? That's your Wisdom Body. 

 

                  And then what do you think? Beneath the Wisdom Body, Anandamayakosha, the sheath of bliss. Life is a manifestation of rapture. And this poor mental sheath up here gets all tied up with what's happening to the food body. And it thinks, "Oh dear, oh dear. All life is sorrowful." Suppose every two weeks somebody goes over the lawn with a lawnmower. Suppose the grass were to think, "Well, what's the use?" 

 

                  These are the two completely different orientations: the mental sheath has to do with ethics, good and evil, light and darkness, pain and pleasure; the wisdom sheath knows that there's something before that. And it's rapture. So, that's what you are really. You're rooted in rapture; and even in your pain, in your great anguish, in your sorrow, if you know where the rapture door is you can realize that this is life's rapture. And where the pain is there's the life. This is the kind of stuff that we have in these heroic mythologies. 

 

                  If Moses was, as Freud suggests, a member of the court of Akhnaton, then the Exodus must have taken place around 1358 B.C., the death of Akhnaton. That's the earliest date anybody's ever proposed for the Exodus. In the Book of Exodus, the pharaoh, who is impugned there, seems to be Ramses II, whose dates are about 1305 to 1234 or 1236 B.C.. He reigned for a long, long season. He was enormously powerful. I don't think any scholar would suggest that he could possibly have been the pharaoh of the Exodus. Furthermore, he wasn't drowned in the Red Sea. He is entombed at Abu Simbel. There is a great pair of tombs for Ramses and his favorite wife, who was one of his daughters. In George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, when Caesar meets Cleopatra, he has among his officers a British officer. When he learns from Cleopatra that

she was born from an incestuous marriage, the British officer expresses great shock. Caesar says to Cleopatra, "Don't mind him. He's British. He thinks that the laws of his tribe are the laws of the universe." 

 

                  This great tomb, because of the ridiculous Aswan Dam, has been elevated and placed up above the waters by a miracle of modern engineering. The horrible thing about the dam is that Lake Nasser backed up and wiped out the whole province of Nubia. And where are the Nubians? They are packed into miserable housing developments nearby. 

 

                  When I saw that, I thought of Goethe's Faust, part II, act V. Faust has won the world war, and he's now going to make the world great. And what is he doing? He is draining swamps and building housing developments. But in order to build the housing development, he has to displace people who were there in the first place. Baucis and Philemon, a lovely little old couple, are living in their ancestral home. When they are displaced by a couple of rough thugs, they die. And this is it, for the whole province of Nubia. 

 

                  This fantastic tomb was carved with little pick-axes into the mountain. The date would be that of the death of Ramses, around 1234 or 1236 B.C. What great art! When you get over the distance, the form is perfect. In the representation of Ramses, he has the shepherd's crook and the winnowing whip, a standard motif in Egyptian art of the conquering pharaoh. The enemy is on his knees and the pharaoh has hold of his top knot and is about to slam him dead. These are conquering people. 

 

After the Hyksos invaded Egypt around 1750 B.C. and were then driven out, the Egyptians became imperialists. They moved up through Palestine and Asia Minor as far as what is now Turkey, to where the Hittites, the children of Hit, came in. And there they were stopped. And so you have the great Egyptian empire as a reply to the invasion that had taken place. 

 

                  At Abu Simbel, side by side with Horus, Amon, and Ptah, is Ramses himself. So, Ramses is now among the highest deities. 

 

                  With respect to the Exodus again, during the time of Akhnaton, who wasn't paying much attention to the

empire, letters were coming, written in Babylonian, to the court at Amarna. Known as the Amarna letters, they

were from the governors of the various provinces in Asia, complaining that their provinces were being invaded by Bedoums from the desert who were sometimes called Haberu. This is certainly the first appearance of the word in writing. These were tribes of the kind that are associated with the Mosaic history. So there were invasions taking place at the time of Akhnaton. Yet the Exodus is generally associated in the biblical tradition with the time of Ramses II, which was very much later. But nobody can possibly believe that anything like that happened at the time of Ramses. Another pharaoh, Merneptah, ruled from about 1234 to 1220 B.C. He was a weak pharaoh, actually physically ill, and he died very young. If there was anything like the Exodus, he may have been the pharaoh then. 

 

                  Now we come to this amusing problem of crossing the waters of the Red Sea. Is this to be interpreted as a mythological event, as a spiritual symbol of some kind, or is it a fact? I have many friends who say that they crossed in a shallow place and the wind was blowing from just the right direction and so they got across. Read on a few more chapters, and we come to the Jordan. The waters of the Jordan pile up like walls on either side and the tribe again walks between. This is a mythological motif you'll find everywhere, the crossing of the waters. It's comparable to the Symplegades, the rocks that clash together. The pair of opposites have withdrawn and we've gone through the middle. 

 

                  What came into Egypt? The patriarchs. Joseph, through the well, was the first~mythological again. It was a dry well, but it was a well just the same. So we come in through water and we go out through water. When you have this in and out in a mythology, try to see what came in and what went out and then you'll find what the mystical value is. What came in were the patriarchs; what went out were the people. That is a great thing that coalesced and came to knowledge of itself in Egypt, in the land of suffering, in the abyss. Moses was not the hero. The hero of the Old Testament is the people. They are conceived of as a unit, and one is a member of that people or one is out. The accent is on the group, the group, the group. Membership in the group is entirely Near Eastern. In Europe you get another accent. Now, one of the problems in the European assimilation of Christianity was recovering and maintaining the sense of the individual as a unique entity - the translation of this group tradition into a tradition of individual realization. This is the problem of the Grail tradition in the thirteenth century in Europe. This is when it was pulled together in a new way. 

 

                  This struck me when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. More than half of my students were Jewish girls. One young woman, who had been one of the most remarkable members of her class, said to me, "You know, Mr. Campbell, if I didn't think of myself as Jewish, I wouldn't know my identity." I was stunned. I said, "Rachel, what are you saying? I never thought of you as Jewish or anything else, but as Rachel. Suppose I were to say to you, 'If I didn't think of myself as Irish, I wouldn't know my identity.' That wouldn't make sense, would it?" 

 

                  These are two totally different ways of relating to race. One is "Oh, yes, that's what I am and all my peculiarities come from that misfortune." The other is "No, this is my own being." This is important to realize about the Jewish tradition. It has its roots here in the idea of a people. 

 

                  At the next meeting Martin Buber was talking about the Phoenicians and what terrible criminals they were in sacrificing their older sons to Moloch. About fifteen minutes later he comes to Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. Well, you can't let a thing like that go by and I raised my hand. He looked at me a little more cautiously than the first time, and I said, "Dr. Buber, how do you distinguish between a divine and a diabolical invitation?" He said, "What do you mean by that?" I said, "Well, only fifteen minutes ago you were excoriating the Phoenicians for killing their oldest sons and now you're celebrating Abraham for having been about to do the same thing with his oldest son. So what is the answer?" Dr. Buber said, "The answer is We"- that's a capital W - "We believe that God spoke to Abraham." That's all I got from that man. 

 

                  So things that are done by us are different from things that are done by others and that's another characteristic of our whole tradition. Moses is not the hero. The tribe is the hero. Ours is a tribal mythology, and the only god of the universe is ours. This is very important. 

 

                  What about the plagues and all that kind of thing? What kind of deity is that? He sends these plagues for the fun of it; he hardens pharaoh's heart so that he won't let the people go so he can send another plague. This is what it says in the book, which is a good thing to read, you know. 

 

                  Just at the time of Akhnaton, 1377 to 1358 B.C. or so, the Indo-Europeans are invading India. This is the beginning of a total transformation of the Indian consciousness. These are nomads, and from here on I want to discuss the emergence of the philosophies and ritual cults of India. We will then move on to more recent matters.