From Darkness to Light: The
Mystery Religions of Ancient Greece
The essence of the spiritual experience intended by the mystery
religions of Classical Greece was the shifting of consciousness from the purely
phenomenal aspect of one's life to the spiritual, the deep, the energetic
eternal aspect. Some of the many, many associated rituals began back in the
Bronze Age. With the coming of the Homeric patriarchal warrior people, they
moved into the background for a while, but later they came forward again.
The
mysteries of Eleusis - a wonderful shrine just
west of Athens that was a sacred spot for the Athenians date from the Bronze
Age. Eleusis flourished in the Classical world and survived in Roman times
until the conversion of the Roman Empire into a Christian empire. Under
Constantine, around A.D. 327 or so, Christianity was recognized as one of the
permitted religions in the Roman Empire. Very shortly thereafter, with
Theodosius, Christianity - but only the specific form of Christianity practiced
by the Byzantine throne - was declared to be the only permitted religion in the
Roman Empire. And so began a system of violent persecution and vandalism of
shrines, and the more sacred the shrine, the more violent the damage. The
destruction of Eleusis in A.D. 395 is a good example of what happened.
Prior to
that spiritual crisis in Western civilization, however, during the Hellenistic
period, many of the earlier mystery cults had come back into
manifestation.
It's my
belief that St. Paul's great insight on the road to Damascus was that the death
of Jesus Christ on the cross could be interpreted in terms of the mystery
religions' understanding of the death and the resurrection of the savior - that
is, as the death of one's purely material, animal existence and the birth,
then, of the spiritual life. This is symbolized in Christian terminology by the
transformation of the old Adam into the new Adam. Then we have the refrain of O
felix culpa, "O happy fault" -
original sin - and the notion that the fall of man into the field of time out
of the timeless rapture of Eden was followed by the coming of the Savior, who
represented a sublimation - a higher manifestation of the consciousness of
humanity than that which had been represented in the garden - and so, without
the fall, there would have been no savior. Well, all of this is really mystic
language from the Greek mysteries.
We actually
know very little about the Greek mystery religions because they did remain mysteries.
No one was allowed to betray or talk about what went on in the inner
sanctuaries. We have to depend on outside observations, some by people like
Clement of Alexandria who were attacking the classical mysteries. From them we
can glean something of what the rituals were like, but I think the best
evidence
is in the art - the ceramics, sculpture, and so forth - which
provides small clues that convey some sense of what the rituals intended and
what their forms might have been.
In the
classical world, the planting time was in the fall, the harvest was in the
spring, and the fruits of the harvest, the grains, were stored in silos in the
ground during the fierce heat of the summer for planting again the following
fall. Consequently, the richness, the wealth of the community, was in the keep
of the underworld, in the keep of the chthonic underworld divinity, Pluto. This votive tablet from fifth-century Athens
shows Athena giving the grain to Pluto in his aspect as puer eternis, the
eternal boy.
A deity
like Pluto - Merlin
in the Celtic stories - can be represented either as a youth or as an old man,
the aged one. He is frequently pictured with a cornucopia, the bounty of our
life in his keep. Athena sits near a serpent like the one in the Indian seal from
3000 B.C. The mythological notion of the cult was that Eleusis was the place
where grain agriculture was first invented by Demeter,
the goddess of the telluric earth. That's just a mythological idea. We all know
that Eleusis was not the place where grain agriculture originated, but for the
cult, it was.
The notion
that it's out of the darkness of the abyss, the chthonic realm, that life comes
is an important mythological motif. And so these cults were very much
associated with a cycle of death, descent into the underworld, and then life
reborn again. By analogy, this was symbolized in the agricultural cycle of the
harvest death, the planting of seed, and the plant - coming to life again. In
other words, agricultural imagery was used to render a spiritual message.
This is
from a vase in a museum in Brussels. The candidate for illumination is being
received by the psycho-pompos, the guide of the sanctuary. On the right
stands a figure, and the club beside him tells us who it is: Herakles, or Hercules, and we're going to see him in an
interesting situation a little later in the ceremonial adventure. And so,
carrying a torch - which means we're going into the dark realm - the candidate
is conducted into the shrine.
This
sarcophagus, from a palace in Rome, shows step by step something of what went
on in these ceremonies. On the left is a laurel tree, which is apotropaic;
that is to say, it defends the threshold against evil presences. It has a
sanctifying power as a threshold tree. Beside it is an aspect of Bacchus - or
Dionysos, it's the same deity - known as Iacchus,
which is the cry of greeting that was uttered at a certain moment in the
ceremony when the revelation of the new birth was rendered. Iacchus stands by an altar bearing the fruits of offering,
and he holds a torch, which - again - always indicates the underworld, or chthonic,
adventure.
In the
center are the two great goddesses - Demeter,
seated on the sacred basket with the serpent, and her daughter, Persephone, the one who dies and is resurrected, who
is abducted and then returns - the Anodos and Kathodos of the
maiden. The torch of Demeter is held upward,
purifying the upper regions. That of Persephone
is downward, purifying the lower. So this is a purification passage, and in
this cult these two are going to be the dominant figures - the dual goddess -
the goddess of life and the goddess of the underworld, out of which new life
comes.
In the
tableau on the right we see the candidate with his head covered, for he is
going to experience a revelation, an epiphany - the showing forth of the
mystery to a person who experiences it for the first time. The guide is pouring
offerings, and facing him is Bacchus-Dionysos.
The figure behind him is Hecate, the dark,
negative aspect of the goddess, often associated with witchcraft.
Some very
interesting research concerning the plants associated with these cults has
shown that the people who were going to go through the great ceremony consumed
a barley drink before attending the rites. One of the historically important
hallucinogens is ergot, which is produced by a fungus that grows parasitically
on barley. Since one family was for centuries in charge of the rites, many now
believe that this barley broth contained a bit of ergot. There is a very fine
study called The Road to Eleusis, written by Albert
Hofmann, who discovered LSD; R. Gordon Wasson; and classical scholar Carl A. P. Ruck. This book deals with the entire
ritual of Eleusis in detail as a ceremonial matching of the rapturous state of
the people who have taken the drink with a theatrical performance that is
rendered as an epiphany. So there's an inward readiness and an outer
fulfillment. Socrates himself is reported to have spoken about the importance
to him of the experience at Eleusis. Something in the way of a revelation was
actually experienced there.
Now the
story of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is that she's out picking flowers in the
spring, and suddenly Hades appears in his
chariot and carries her off to the underworld. Just as Isis
was bereaved of Osiris, so Demeter is of Persephone.
She goes to find her lost daughter. When Demeter
comes to Eleusis, she sits down by a well, just as Isis
sat down by the well outside the palace where her husband's body and sarcophagus
were enclosed in the pillar. That well at Eleusis is still there, at least a
reconstruction of it.
The people
come out to the well and try to comfort Demeter,
but she is disconsolate until a little creature named Baubo
does an obscene dance, and then Demeter has to
laugh, that's all she can do. This is a wonderful motif - the obscenity
provides another perspective. You move out of the sphere of the developed
person, back into the sphere of the nature dynamics of generation and
regeneration, and are released from the bondage of your grief.
An
equivalence to Persephone is the golden stalk of wheat. Clement of Alexandria mocks the Eleusinian mysteries and says what
a silly thing to have the culminating moment be that of the elevation of a
grain of wheat. Yet the culmination of the Roman Catholic mass is the elevation
of a wafer of wheat. It's not the object, it's the reference that is the sense
of a ritual. Any object can become the center of the cult. At Eleusis, the
central cultic object was the wonderful food plant, which nourishes our
physical life and, when consumed with the understanding that it is a divine
gift, our spiritual life as well.
In the
earliest primitive rites associated with food plants, the typical underlying
myth is of a deity of some kind who has been killed, cut up, and buried. And
out of the buried parts of the deity comes the grain or whatever the food
plant. Longfellow's Hiawatha
speaks of the visionary experience of a young man on a vision quest. A young
deity comes to him, wrestles with him for three nights, and then on the fourth
night says, "Now you're going to kill me and bury
me." Hiawatha does so, and out of
his buried body comes maize.
The
meditation is that we are eating divine substance and this divine substance is
what is feeding us. It isn't just physical substance, and that's part of the
meditation: how our whole life is supported by the giving and yielding of some
transcendent power.
People
sometimes ask me, "What rituals can we have?"
You've got the rituals, only you're not meditating on them. When you eat a
meal, that's a ritual. Just realize what you're doing. When you consult your
friends, that's a ritual. Just think what you're doing. When you beget a child
or give birth to a child - what more do you want?
Here is the
youth Philophates, who is going to go forth
with the grain. He is being blessed by Demeter
and Persephone. He is the vehicle. On one side
of this vase he is pictured as an old man, on his mystic vehicle, bringing the
blessing of the wheat, the grain. Hermes is
leading him with the caduceus as his staff. Turning this vase around, we see Dionysos with a chalice, on the same vehicle, being
led by a satyr. There are the bread and the wine of the mass. The rituals of
the early Christian tradition were built on rituals that were already in place.
So we get a sense of how rites and myths develop organically without breaking
off: new readings, new vocabularies, new sophistications are brought in. This
is the chalice of the mass with the blood of Dionysos,
which is the wine, the transubstantiated wine. But in this ritual it doesn't
have to be transubstantiated because it is already the divine wine.
Now the story
of Dionysos' birth is that he was born from the
thigh of Zeus. Zeus
had a way of giving birth to children. He swallowed Athena's
mother when he knew that she was pregnant. Then, of course, one day he has a
fine headache. She has given birth, and he's got to be the medium, and he's
screaming with a headache when Hephaistos, the
mechanic of the gods, comes in with an axe, splits Zeus' head open, and out
jumps Athena, fully born. Voila!
We have a
similar thing now with Dionysos. Semele, Dionysos' mother, had slept with Zeus, and she had the indiscretion to boast of this
to Hera, Zeus' wife. Hera
said, "Yes, darling, but Zeus has not revealed himself to you in the same
majesty with which he has revealed himself to me." So next time Zeus comes along, Semele
is sulking, and he says, "What's the matter?" She says, "Well,
you haven't revealed yourself to me in the same majesty as to Hera."
"Look out," he says, "you're not quite ready for this." She
says, "Well, you've always told me you'd do anything I asked." So Zeus says, "All right, look out, girlie."
Bang! That was the end of her.
But he was
very much concerned about the fetus in her womb, and so he took it out and slit
open his thigh and put Dionysos in there. So Dionysos is the "one of two wombs" - the
female mother life and then the male initiation life. Then Zeus has a pain in his leg one day, and Hermes comes to
receive the newly born child on a golden cloth, and he turns him
over to the three nymphs. So little Dionysos is
raised by the nymphs.
Here is Dionysos at the tree. Notice the serpent. Here's the
whole story again. It's wonderful the way these
things recur. It doesn't take too much time and study to learn
this pictorial vocabulary. It's a pictorial script, and rearranging the forms
rearranges the order of the experience, the depth of the experience, or the
precise relevance to this or that myth.
The
Apollonian religion of the Olympians - of Zeus,
and so forth - was light-oriented. Dionysos
represents the dynamic of the dark, and so he's properly associated with these
mystery rituals. The best discussion, in my opinion, of Dionysos and Apollo is in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, where
they are shown in relation to the whole world of the classical arts. Nietzsche writes of Dionysos as the dynamic of
time that rolls through all things, destroying old forms and bringing forth new
with, what he terms is, an "indifference to the differences." In
contrast to this is the light world of Apollo and its interest in the exquisite
differences of forms, which Nietzsche calls
the principiurn individuation is. The power of Dionysos
is to ride on the full fury of the life force. That's what he represents. So,
the essential message of the rites, apparently, is that of a realization in a properly
prepared way of the dynamic of inexhaustible nature which pours its energy into
the field of time and with which we are to be in harmony, both in its
destructive and in its productive aspects. This is experience of the life power
in its full career.
This
picture is of Dionysos and Semele, his mother. Between them is the cup of his
blood, the chalice of the mass. I am reminded of medieval pictures of the
coronation of the Virgin by her son, Jesus. The two are shown at about the same
age, thirty-five or so.
This golden
bowl, called the Pietroasa bowl, was dug up about one hundred years ago
in Rumania, with a whole hoard of gold objects. It was taken to the British
Museum and reproduced. This is from the reproduction. During World War I, when
the Germans were moving into Rumania, it was thought that it would be good to
protect this bowl, so it was taken to Russia, where it was, of course, melted
down. So we don't have it. We have to deal with the reproduction. So I've had a
photograph turned into a drawing so that we can go through the story step by
step. This will be our initiation.
Seated in
the center of the bowl, on the basket with the vine that produces the wine that
is in her chalice - or in the Grail - is the goddess, the mother universe with
the blood of her child, her son.
There are sixteen
figures roundabout. This is Orpheus, the
fisher. The theme of the fishing of fish out of the water into the light is
associated with initiation. Here we are lost in the waters of ignorance, and
Orpheus the fisher will fish us out. In the Grail romances, this is a theme
related to the Fisher King. In the Christian tradition, when Jesus called his
apostles, who were fishermen, he said, "I will
make you fishers of men." That's the same Orphic idea. The Pope's
ring is known as the fisherman's ring, and on it is an engraving of the hall of
fishes. So here we have Orpheus with his fishing rod and his net, and lying at
his feet is a fish.
Proceeding
clockwise, we see the candidate, bearing a torch. As he enters the sanctuary,
he takes a pine cone from a basket on the head of a door guardian. The door
guardian is represented as a small figure, simply to be able to fit the whole
thing on the bowl. Part of a magnificent, full-sized statue of one of these
door guardians, with the sacred basket still on her head, is in the museum at
Eleusis. It's one of the pieces that was smashed by the zealots of love.
So, the
candidate takes a pine cone from the basket. Why a pine cone? It's a
significant symbol. In the Vatican there is a twelve-foot-high bronze pine cone
that was formerly in the Roman Field of Mars. What is it that is important in a
pine cone? What is important is the seed and not the cone. And so, in each of
us, what is important is the seed of consciousness which is to be released -
the new Adam, the one reborn after the death of the old.
A Christian
lamp of about the third century is decorated with the Jonah legend, which is
symbolic of the coming of the human out of the fish condition. So you can take
a legend and read into it a mystic reading which
may or may not have been there in the first place. The Jonah story
is that he was a missionary who was told by God to preach in Nineveh, but he
fled on a ship and was a source of trouble to everyone. Evidently off center
and a negative presence, he was thrown overboard and consumed by a fish, but
later he came out of the fish. This motif is known as the "night sea
journey." It's an old, old story. Hiawatha was consumed by a fish, the
raven hero of the Northwest Coast Indians was consumed by a fish, and so forth.
This is the going down into the abyss and coming out again-the same mythologies
that we're dealing with here.
So our
friend has taken the pine cone and now, led by
a female guide with the little pail of the elixir of immortality, he is brought
to the sanctuary of the two goddesses.
Demeter, with the raven of death on her shoulder, is
the one in the field of birth and death - what we call the telluric
earth, the earth from which the plants grow. Beside her is Persephone, with the torch, who represents the chthonic
earth, the deep caves of the abyss.
This is the
first stage of his initiation. We do not know what the rites were that were
associated with this pair, but we do know what the message is - to come into
harmonious relationship with these two aspects of our being.
When the
hero has gone through this, he is symbolically older, so he is now represented
with a beard, and he's being blessed, then, by Fortuna,
or Tyche. He's now completed the first grade of
initiation, initiation through the goddesses.
We next see
our candidate, the mystes in the aspect of youth again, about to
experience the second grade of initiation, initiation into the ultimate depths.
Before him is Pluto, or Hades, the god of the abyss, with a kind of alligator monster of
the abyssal waters under his feet and an enormous cornucopia in his arm. In the
candidate's left hand is a palm, the palm of the pilgrim, and scholars suggest
that in his right hand is a poppy plant, which is associated with dream and
sleep and vision. What is to be the fruit of this experience of the ultimate
depth?
One of the
experiences of this initiation is to be about transcendent androgyneity,
the realization that we are, as beings in time, simply one fraction of what we
truly are. Hence Herakles, the most macho of
all the gods, is sometimes pictured in women's clothes. And so the next figure
depicted is our hero as the androgyne. His hair
is long, on his head are the wings of the spirit, and in his hand is an empty
bowl. He is both male and female. But the sense of this final initiation is not
only of the androgyneity, the transcendence of the pair of opposites of our
sexual identification, but also of the recognition that our mortality and our
immortality are one - the union of the lunar and the solar consciousness that
I've talked about before.
Accordingly,
the next two figures are the twin heroes Castor
and Pollux, who are regarding each other. Castor is mortal and Pollux
is immortal. And so are we, both mortal and immortal. Notice the raven of death
on Castor's shoulder: we've come back, cycled around, and death is coming back
to us.
And then we
come forth from the initiation in one character - namely, mortal male, or
mortal female - as
does our hero, whose bowl is now full of the fruit of wisdom.
The next
figure, then, is a female guide, who leads us on and brings us to the very
throne of Apollo, the Lord of Light. And isn't
it wonderful: we have the Dionysian and the Apollonian principles in harmonious
relationship here. Apollo holds the lyre of the music of the spheres, which
sings to all things, and under his throne lies a deer, the animal associated
with him.
Now I want
to introduce you to the symbolism of this Apollonian idea as it was reawakened
in the Renaissance, after having been lost during the deep Middle Ages. During the
first three centuries of the Christian development in the Near East, developing
alongside Christianity - I mean before Theodosius
came down with "the axe of love" - were the classical Hermetic
traditions and a body of text known as the Corpus Hermeticum. As I
mentioned before, Cosimo de' Medici asked Marsiho Ficino to make a Latin translation from
this Greek text that had been brought to Italy from Byzantium, and when he did
so, art immediately took on a whole new radiance; for what was recognized was that
the symbolic imagery of the pagan world was equivalent in its mystic meaning to
the mystically interpreted symbology of Christianity. So artists of the time
began to use both Old Testament and classical themes, and they were all singing
the same song. This was a great moment, which brought forth a glory of art, and
it came precisely from the inspiration of this translation of the Corpus
Hermeticum, wherein the very symbols of the Christian cult - which, as we
have seen, go back to the classical world - were reinterpreted in terms of
Hermetic rather than of Mosaic mythology.
In the
Vatican there is a great picture by Pintoricchio
of the goddess Isis on a throne instructing two disciples. One of them is Hermes, and the other is Moses.
These are the two ways of reading symbolic
forms - Hermes being the Hermetic, symbolic way; Moses, the literal,
prosaic, historical way. There are two aspects to the form, and you take the
one you want.
A fruit of
this great moment is this page from a book called Practicum Musica, by a
man named Garforius. The date is 1493. What
it depicts is the whole mystery of the nine muses and the three graces in
relation to the Ptolemaic sequence of the planets - earth, moon, Mercury,
Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars. Let's go through this
schema in some detail. It's a wonderful summation of both Renaissance and
classical mysteries.
Associated
with each of the planets in this Ptolemaic sequence is a muse. There are nine muses, and they are clothed. Art is the clothing of a revelation. When we get up
top, at the very throne of Apollo, where the revelation to which the arts are
pointing is achieved, we have three graces naked. So, nine muses, and the
square root of 9 is 3. When Dante beheld Beatrice, she was nine years old. At his second
beholding of her, she was eighteen and so was he. And he said, "She is a nine because her root is in the Trinity."
She was his muse. The muses are nine, and their root is in the Trinity, which
in the Hermetic system is represented in the female form, whereas in the
Christian, it is in male form - the three persons in the one substance of the
divine Trinity in its mystery.
The same,
unmoving substance is here personified as Apollo,
male, and the moved aspects are female. The text says, "The radiance, the bliss, of the Apollonian mind moves
everywhere the muses." The muses, the inspirations of poetry -
which is also to say, of religion, of mythology - are moved by the radiance of
God.
In the
center of the page is Cerberus, the
three-headed beast that guards the seat of hell, and rising up along the scale
is the beast's fantastic serpentine tail, by which we come to the very throne
of God. Notice the creature's three faces. When Dante
is lost in a dangerous wood at the opening of The Divine Comedy, he is
threatened by three animals. One is the lion, which represents pride,
hanging on to ego, hanging on to yourself. The second is a leopard,
representing lust - here it's a dog's face, desire. The third animal is a wolf,
which represents fear, the past, which tears away what you've got. And so these
three, they go together. This is the temptation of the Buddha. If he had hung
on to his ego, lust and fear would have moved him. They didn't. Yet they're
moving us, and so we're stuck.
The first
of the muses - her name is Thalia - is shown
under the ground. She's called "silent Thalia"
because we can't hear her. As long as we're hanging on to ego, and fear, and
desire - hanging on to our own personal problems - we're not hearing the voice
of the universe. So, relax. I'm reminded of a picture showing the figure of
Death playing the violin to the artist. Let Death talk to you and you break out
of your ego pride. That means you've got to put your head in the mouth of the
lion. Face the real experience of today. Don't reread it in terms of past
experiences.
One of the
problems addressed by Zen is that of having an experience. People talk about
trying to learn the meaning of life. Life has no meaning. What's the meaning of
a flower? What we are looking for is an experience of life, getting the
experience. But we're shoving ourselves off the experience by naming,
translating, and classifying every experience that comes to us. You fall in
love. O.K., is this going to lead to marriage or is this illicit or whatnot.
You've classified and lost the experience. So, put your head in the lion's
mouth and just say, "I don't know what the hell is going on." And
something will come out of it.
So we put
our heads into the mouth of the lion and let come what may, and we experience
an artistic exaltation that rises, along Cerberus'
body, through the notes of the conjoint tetrachord - what we now would call the
A-minor scale. On the right are the names of the corresponding Greek musical modes,
and on the left are the names of the notes of the scale in their classical
form.
So through
our artistic exaltation we come finally to the Apollonian radiance that moves
the three graces: Euphrosyne pouring the
energy down into the world; Aglaia, splendor,
carrying it back; and, in the middle, Thalia -
the same name as the muse - uniting the two. Remember, this is a translation of
the classical, pagan, Hermetic symbology. In the recognized biblical
translation these three female forms become the male persons of the Trinity: Jesus, dying
in love and pouring grace into the world; the Paraclete
carrying us back; and the Father, whose right
and left sides are these two powers. And again, at the top, instead of simply a
radiant substance, we have a personification of that substance as Apollo. So Garforius's composition is a very compact
statement of the relationship of the arts to exaltations and transformations of
consciousness.
Let's now
return to the middle of the Pietroasa bowl, to the inner circle of figures
surrounding the pivotal deity with the chalice. The reclining human being is
the mind that has not experienced the initiation. It is, as it were, in sleep.
It sees a dog chasing a rabbit, two gazelles eating a plant, and a lion and a
leopard about to eat the gazelles. "All is sorrowful, oh dear, oh
dear." But the illuminated one knows that this is a manifestation in
secondary forms of the dynamic process of being.
On the
ceiling of Domatilla Catacomb, we have Orpheus
playing the lyre. One would have expected to see the Christ.
The surrounding panels depict Old Testament, New Testament, and pagan
sacrificial scenes. In
other words, there was a coordination in early Christian Rome of
not only the Old and New Testaments, but also the New Testament and the pagan
tradition. And why not?
There was a
great deal of discussion in the first four centuries whether Christianity had
anything to do with Judaism. That is to say, was the Son, Jesus, the son of
Yahweh, or of a higher power of which Yahweh was ignorant? Yahweh was called
the fool because he didn't realize there was a higher power than himself. He
thought he was God. And the son, then, who was to carry us past this, was a
revelation of a higher light. And so Yahweh was associated with the demiurge
who brought about all the agony and evil and sorrow in the world. This was a
very definite thrust in the early Christian tradition, and it was simply a
matter of fortune that the New and the Old Testaments were then united and that
the New was seen as a fulfillment of the promise of
the Old. That's why, when you read a Bible, you'll see a lot of
footnotes in the Old Testament pointing to predictions for text in the New, and
vice versa: they were woven together. Well, you could have woven early Christianity
back to the Greek traditions just as well. Those traditions also existed, and
why should they be separated? So, read mystically - and this is the point I
would like to bring out - read mystically, all of these traditions are telling
us this great, great story of our identity with the eternal power and our loss
of that sense of identity when we get involved in the ego-bound world of fear
and desire.
The
religious tradition that was put into you in infancy is still there. There's no
use getting rid of it just because you can't interpret these forms in terms of
modern scientific realizations. There cannot have been an ascension to heaven.
There cannot have been an assumption to heaven. There is no heaven. Even at the
speed of light those bodies would not yet be out of the galaxy. But we're
taught that this assumption and this ascension were physical events when they
can't have been. Such an interpretation is losing the message in the symbol.
The coordination of earthly and spiritual realizations can be interpreted out
of those symbols.
Another
aspect of Orpheus is that he was torn apart, as
Jesus was torn apart in the scourging and crucifixion. What does this represent
in the older, let's say, Corpus Hermeticum way of reading it? First,
that eternity is in love with the forms of time, but to come into those forms
it has to be dismembered, and then, that you, as a separate entity in the form
of time, in order to lose your commitment to this little instance, you must be
dismembered and opened to the transcendent. So the cross, in this tradition,
represents the threshold from eternity to time and from time back to eternity.
And that's also the symbology of the two trees in the Garden of
Eden. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of going from
unity into multiplicity, and the tree of eternal life is that of going
from multiplicity to unity. It's the same tree in two directions. Some of the
discussions in the rabbinical Midrash, during the first five centuries or so of
the Jewish Diaspora, revolve around the question "What
about the two trees in the garden?" They're seen in various
aspects, but it all comes out in these two senses.
So, Orpheus comes into the world and is then torn apart.
And his head is ripped off, but as it floats to Lesbos,
it is still singing, singing the song of the muse.
And,
finally, see what we have here: Orpheus-Bacchus
crucified, from a cylinder seal of A.D. 300. There's the crucifixion as
metaphysical symbol - Orpheus in the same sense as the Christ, and he goes to
the cross like a bridegroom to the bride. Atop the cross is the moon - the
death and resurrection motif - and above that, seven stars representing the Pleiades, known to antiquity as the Lyre of Orpheus.
All you have to do is spend a little while with these things and they sing to
you.
I'm going
to make just a brief reference to what happened with Christianity in those
early centuries. There was a conflict between two interpretations of the
Christ: either as an example of the mystery hero who dies to be resurrected or
as the unique incarnation. That was the big argument between the Gnostics and
the Orthodox Christian community. The Orthodox community opted for the
importance of the historicity of the incarnation, and to know what the
Christian belief is, you have only to recite the credo known as the "Apostles' Creed" with attention to what you're
saying.
"I
believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." That's
that. "And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by
the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary … suffered under Pontius Pilate, was
crucified, died, and was buried." Now those last few phrases -
"suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried"
- are the only historical statements inn that sentence. The rest of it is
mythology. "He descended into hell." This is all to be taken
literally. "The third day He rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God, the
Father Almighty, from whence He shall come to judge the living and the
dead." Do you believe those things literally? "I believe in the Holy
Ghost, the holy Catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of
sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen."
Now as for
the resurrection of the body, I can give you some assurance on that. You'll be
thirty-five years old, the age of the body in its perfection. So, try to
remember how it was back then, or get ready for a good-looking future
condition, and you'll have life everlasting. Thirty-five years old, perfect -
and won't it be a bore? O.K., that's the story.