{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...to make the transition from the -- Israel to the Greeks. It is just a question of timing. I want to give you the fourth chapter of antiquity, the Greeks, before we go home -- you go home for vacation. But in order to do so, let me go back to this book--the "Book of Books," it is called--the Bible. We know already that it is named within the orbit of the universal, Mediterranean tradition. The Greeks called a book "byblos," "biblion," and it was from the city which the Egyptians needed in the wider world in order to get their wood, their timber into their barren land.

The cedars of Lebanon, which you read in the Bible about -- for the temple of -- Solomon had of course been used for the temples of Egypt, before. If -- has anybody heard of the treasures of Tutankhamen, of the -- very beautiful furniture, which is to be seen in the museum in Cairo now? That's also cedarwood, largely, used for the graves of the pharaohs, and their inner equipment. Also brought from Byblos.

So you see the wider world has given the name of this book. And why is this now different from the historical documents of the tribe, and of the Egyptians, or of the Chinese? It is very important, I think, that we know why the Bible is the token of the constant presence of Israel, just as the Empire State Building all -- the Vatican or St. Peter are the token that we still have temples. And as your family name is -- an argument that the tribes have left us the faculty of a family tradition, so we must ask ourselves if the Bible is just a book of the Jews, gentlemen -- or if it is your book--whether you know it or not, makes no difference. It has nothing to do with your being a member of the Church. But it has very much to do with your being -- living in the Christian era, whether you like it or not.

Gentlemen, { } you ask yourself what all history is about, so obviously the first thing is to create continuity, an avenue through time. You yourself are impotent to do this. As you live day by day--by the news and so--you destroy continuity. You are at this moment perfectly useless for history. You are a drag on civilization. Not because you are bad or wicked. History has nothing to do with morality, gentlemen, but history has very much to do with perpetuity, with procreation, with heredity. And you are unable to know what price has to be paid for inheritage. You say that's not your -- your problem. You want to be happy. You want to do your own best or your family's best. But there the story ends, so it is no story. It has no con- -- no -- nothing before and nothing after it, so far. When once you have children, and -- it is very different. Then you wake up to the fact that you have to create continuity, and that you have to forgo certain self-expressions and self-satisfaction, because they are utterly unimpor-

tant in an historical sense. Man is that being, gentlemen, I told you, who has to become one through all times and all spaces. And whether you like this or not makes absolutely no difference. That's the one -- place in the animated -- I would say, kingdom of creation which distinguishes man from the animals and the plants. That's our one task, to become one over the whole globe, and to one -- become one through all ages. And he who contributes to this, contributes to an avenue through time.

Now we saw already that the tribes are un- -- living in -- by seven generations. They bring the greatest sacrifices to know of their ancestors, and to keep in line with the tradition of these ancestors. And any modern savage can put you to shame, because he still speaks exactly the language created for his tribe several thousand years ago.

So gentlemen, we have a tremendous discrepancy between the tribe's actual perpetuity, and its conscious perpetuity. The totem pole gives a tribesman only the consciousness of seven generations, by and large; 150 years. If you go into the tribal myth of the -- of the Indians in our ter- -- in our continent, they have no memory of the importing of the -- of the horses. We know that the Spaniards brought the horses into America. But you can go to all these tribes; they have forgotten it. Because they are unable to keep records, you see. Yet, do not underestimate their achievement. Since they glue men to this tradition of seven generations, the discipline of the tribe is not impaired. You can achieve within seven generations the faithfulness, the loyalty of your own language, and of your own customs, and of your own dances, and of your own ritual. And you don't have to know that you are much older. So we get the totem pole, and we get here thousands of years.

In fact, now, with the story of Egypt, now any empire, it is different. The -- Egyptians had a consciousness of millions of years, or at least of the Great Year. Their hieroglyph pretended that they knew everything. Well, just as our modern physicists. They tell you that we are 2 billion years old, or some such thing, which is perfectly valueless. The -- the real story, if you compare millions of years to the real story of Egypt, of course, it is limited from 2780, by and large, A.D. -- B.C. to 395 A.D. Again, a discrepancy: millions of years, eternity, never any change, year- -- eternal recurrence, you see, and factually the creation of a country at a certain time, and then it's annexation first by the Romans and then by the Arabs. Ja?

(Does a tribe only remember the seven generations through the totem? {Would they} throw away a totem pole { } seven figures?)

Oh no, the -- it's a great honor for a valiant warrior to be put -- have his

eyes put on the totem pole. So the names get confu- -- get fused, so to speak. That's why also the names are always given again in the next generation. If the name is Eagle, you see, ke- -- Bald Eagle for the ancestor, and the -- your -- in your own generation somebody has this name and he's really valiant, he gets the same eye, so to speak. It's a constant duplication. That's why you get in the law of the family is that you find the same names going in -- what you do with one -- I, II, and III. You can imagine that after -- in your own family, if there is somebody, William Smith, I; and William Smith, II, you see; after six generations, just William Smith -- they are all William Smith. So this blurring of the past is -- no intention -- omission. They would love to go on counting, but it's just infeasible.

You must not think that -- under the impact of the white man, the Indians have made valiant efforts to get a longer memory, you see. You find all kind of compromises today among the Indians. But as our observation goes, the seven generations are the only ones that play an actual part in their actions, I mean -- so to speak, enthuse them.

But there is no -- it is just -- nothing more with -- inep- -- impossibility. For example, the right of inheritance in a tribe is extinguished after seven degrees of relationship, you see. If you are -- cannot -- trace your blood relation to a man through seven generations, you cannot claim his helmet when he dies. So it has very practical -- effect, this -- this law of -- you see, the law of inheritance in a tribe is determined...

[tape interruption]

...Solomon. That would play no part in a -- in a tribal order. The law of the tribe would say, "Nothing that can be traced -- cannot be traced," you see, "within the seven generations has any importance." So it is -- was a very -- it is not just a -- a mythology, you see. It's a very practical measure.

Now -- how about the Bible, gentlemen? The Bible is a book that is written over 1400 years, by and large. The oldest stories that we find in the Bible obviously were taken faithfully from Babylonian and other sources, because the Bible is a universal history. And it is open, the book, as long as the Jews had the -- had their existence before the coming of Christ, and before the destruction of the temple, there is a constant accrescence of books in the Bible. This Bible here, the King James Version, has 39 different writings in the Old Testament. Now gentlemen, this destroys any discrepancy between the real story and the conscious -- consciousness of the group that has this story.

As you know, America at this moment goes mythical. You all want to prove somehow or other that the Greenlanders or the Norsemen discovered

America. It is -- this urge to become mythical, which is very strong in America at this moment. There are any number of -- there is an association here for Americans of royal descent. One of the funniest institutions in this country, you see. It means that of course they are all bastards. But they are -- prefer to be bastards of some -- mistress and adulteress of a British king, than not to be royal, you see. So they -- they dishonor their -- their mother's bed. But it's mythical, you see. It's wonderful to have an indefinitely long origin.

I talked to an American who is the pre- -- founder of the Medieval Academy of America. And he said he had tried to trace his pedigree. And he had come to a shepherd, and his anc- -- in England somewhere, and the ancestor -- he was the seventh -- he be- -- came from the seventh son of this shepherd, in 1540.

"And then," he said, "I must take a leap. There is a -- primeval nobility in Germany, who have a similar name. And they died out in 1512. And between 1512 and 1540, I can't make the bridge, but I'm quite sure that I come from this noble family."

Well, I wasn't so sure.

But if you hear this said by a learned man, one of the -- great -- famous architects of this country, Mr. Cram -- Ralph Waldo Cram, you just wonder how weak human beings are. They need a myth. It's just perf- -- he went mythical. And I think the example -- I don't say it to belittle the man--he has great merits in other ways--but to warn you: the -- desire for such mythical existence is in -- all of us. And laugh at it, gentlemen. The -- worst people are the people who -- who try to trace their pedigrees. They are just funny. And they become a great nuisance, gentlemen. And be satisfied that you do not know too much of your -- the pedigree.

To give you an example: when I worked in a factory in Germany, a man came and tried to sell me the idea that all the workers should get their pedigree, the very thing Hitler later did.

And I said, "All right, we -- you can have your way in my paper"--they had a factory paper--"under one condition: that all the criminals, and all the failures in the family must also be traced, and not just the one great ancestor."

Oh, he was all against it. It should all -- all -- of course only be the -- the nice people should be in the pedigree. And all the disagreeable creatures should be carefully kept out of it. That's usually what the family does, you see. They have one great-grand-uncle who was any good, and all the rest were failures, and they are never mentioned.

They all went to America, the others, in Germ- -- Europe, you see.

So the myth is an eternal attempt of man, you see, to cut out for himself something special. Now the Jews--and this is the essence of the Bible, gentlemen--their history coincides with the real history. That's the -- why it is not seven generations, and why it is not millions of years. It's just as long as it is. There was a story before Israel existed. And that's the greatness. If you read Romulus and Remus in Rome; or if you read Theseus in Athens, they are all native-born. The -- the story begins, you see, as we begin, with the -- with 1620. Nothing before. -- And so it's abrupt, and it's arbitrary. The Bible is an attempt, gentlemen, to keep the evidence open. There are as many criminals in the Bible as there are virtuous men. We spoke about this already. But as to the chronology, the impor- -- important thing about the Bible is just, gentlemen, that it is the first time that in any country the official chronology cor- -- coincides with the facts. In Greece, the Trojan War is the beginning. Well, certainly it didn't happen in 1184, you see. And in Egypt, the -- the mortal -- these followers of Hor- -- Horus are antedated. There have been, according to the Egyptian chronology, 20 Great Years, at least, before. We have the pictures where all these followers of Horus are depicted, you see, for thousands of years backward. These -- in psychology this today is called a "projection," as you know.

Now all national stories, gentlemen, project. All national stories project. The Bible is written against these projections. The Japanese history is such a projection, you see. Japan became a country, 300 A.D. If you go to a textbook, it says that it was founded 661 B.C. A thousand years are just added, added, like -- like nothing, you see. It belongs to the -- the German story is the same, you see. The -- the -- the German story begins under Charlemagne in 800. But if you read the patriots and the Nazis, the Germa- -- Germanic people, you see, are -- at least began 400 B.C. They never existed then. But it's fantastic, you see. The Germanism of course is one of the -- the -- the most evil-doing forces in -- in -- in history, and Slavism, the same way, gentlemen. All these are inventions. They are all antedating. They are all projected. It is very tempting, gentlemen. You are -- live in a world where every group tries to project in the same manner.

Therefore, the Bible is in -- as a book, gentlemen, the anti-myth. And you must understand this, gentlemen, that for this reason, there is -- witchcraft, and sorcery, and magic are impossible in Israel. The Egyptian and the -- Egyptian magic of astrology--it was already said in this report--and the tribal witchcraft of the mask -- the speaker of the medicine man, the "masker" we could call him really, in order to have a universal expression -- could we say "masker"? No. I mean -- I don't like the word "medicine man," because it's the modern ma- -- word which doesn't express "speaking though the mask." You understand. It would be -- that would be the correct expression for this gluing together the

dead and the living over seven generations, these -- this forming of time avenues. The Bible trusts in God, gentlemen. There is no fabrication of a chronicle. There is no fabrication of a to- -- totem pole. There is no abstraction from a long story -- a condensation into seven degrees. The story of Israel is as patient or as impatient, as fast or as slow as God's creation works. And there are 400 years where nothing happens. And the Jews are -- may be despondent. And they may then worship the -- gods of their environment, as you can read in the Bible. You see, defection, and -- because the Jews are saying, "We can't stand it. We want to eat with our friends. We want to drink with our friends. We want to intermarry. Why should we last?" you see. And so they go astray. They have become assimilated. And then a prophet comes, and takes them, you see, to task and says, "You cannot prescribe the times. That's God's business. Don't be so impatient. And don't be too patient. Be ready."

At Easter-time, in Passah -- in the Easter, you see, they had to be -- { } have to be ready to leave Egypt. And that's the greatness of Israel, that it has to keep ready to leave Egypt, any minute -- the fleshpots of Egypt. Don't know why -- when. The hour can strike any moment.

So gentlemen, the Bible is written for the -- for history against myth. And perhaps you begin to understand. You live in a time when history is degraded. It is just today an abstraction, what you call "history." But in -- Israel's time, history was written year after -- decade after decade, as it came along. Every one of these books originated at another time, and yet it -- all the books together proclaim one avenue of time. That's the incredible story. This book is over a thousand years long. Can you imagine this? Think of your book production today, and you understand what this means, that a book was written over a thousand years. That's the whole dignity of the Bible. There's nothing else in the Bible. But if you have this breadth of a thousand years, you can say the -- tell the truth. You have not to flatter the despot.

All -- your books, gentlemen, you either flatter the populists, or the electorate, or -- Mr. Eisenhower, or the banks, or the farmers. You all are flatterers, because you want to sell your public. You ask a man, "What do you write?" and the answer {is made} in the greatest frivol- -- frivolity, "Well, I -- I write to please the people." Gentlemen, this is infamous. This has nothing to do with your right to write. You have no right to write to please others. In other countries, that's called "servility," "adulation." It's a crime. And you -- you buy even these -- these funny books, gentlemen, where the author confesses that he only wants to bribe you, and to make you pay him $3, so that he can make a living. Why do you listen to a man who says officially that he makes a living by writing? Are you crazy? He says, "I'm going to cheat you; I'm going to sell," and you buy it. Well, this is a country, as Chesterton said, where they call cheating "psychology."

Yes, gentlemen, you can make anybody do anything in this country by the right psychology. And you boast of this. Are you mad? The word is prostituted in this country. That's the sickness of this country, gentlemen, that the word -- the -- of history, the word the -- of what has really happened has no dignity. You don't buy a book because it is true. You buy a book because it pleases you.

Gentlemen, as long as you do not buy unpleasant truth, you will never know the truth. The truth about you is very unpleasant. You don't want to listen to it. That's all. Everybody has to -- kowtow to the democracy, to the demos, to the people, to the mob. And as long as I can't tell you the unpleasant truth, I can't tell you the truth. And that's -- is the Bible, gentlemen. It tells unpleasant truth. And it has -- pays no attention to the -- its immediate success. All the prophets that are contained in this book were not read in their own day. They were not read in their own days. And these are the only important books. And all the books you read are utterly unimportant, and they only ruin your brain.

That's why you have to turn at least to the classics. I mean, in Shakespeare, you cannot go wrong, you see. That's something. So that's why -- if you -- neither read the classics, gentlemen, nor can you stand in opposition in your own time, you are deprived of any access to the truth. You have no truth, gentlemen, because to you the truth must come in a sugar-coated form. Then it has ceased to have the -- the effects of truth. Truth is neither unpleasant nor pleasant. It is neither one. It's just true.

But they want to make your religion palatable. And the history of man in the -- in Life, in this issue, the -- palatable! Why should it be palatable? You have to readjust your stomach, obviously, to -- you have a palate for the truth. It's the other way around. You have to be educated into the truth. The truth cannot be educated into your stomach.

Very strange situation, gentlemen. I've never heard this officially acclaimed, except in these last 30 years, that the truth has to cater to the wellmeaning of a blind and pleasure-seeking populace. The pleasure-seeking comes first. We couldn't drive an automobile, if this was true -- isn't that obvious? The -- the automobile is -- is based on hard facts. Now do you think it's different in politics, or different in religion? Religion is based on the fact that we are all original sinners. Go by birth, because we live in a separate entity. And then that's laughed out of court, and everybody has to begin the book, that all men are good. Gentlemen, "All men are good," just meaningless, then, the -- both words: "men" and "good."

So this is then the incredible reason why the Bible, this small, little volume, has survived, gentlemen. It has cost a lot. It has cost a lifeblood of a whole

people. And still costing it. And the first thing any tyrant has to do -- has to throw out the Bible. He still does. Mr. Hitler did. Couldn't be printed dur- -- during the war. There was no paper for the Bible in Germany in the Second World War. "Just paper shortage," he said. He was still afraid to say openly that he didn't -- didn't want to have it printed. But there was "paper shortage," so it couldn't be printed.

So -- and the Bible is this same avenue of time that a temple is, or that the tattoos on the skin of the tribesmen are. It is the third form of writing. Can you see this? But the -- the -- the words of this book of the Bible are lived generations of authors. And we call these living -- lived gen- -- generations of authors we call the Prophets. So the third part of the Bible -- the first part is the necessity of having one group that is out for the whole universal history of the whole human race, and is no -- not bound by its own self-interest. The second is: some encouragement is given to their separate existence. And it goes, this story, from the taking of some land -- this little bit of land--as the Jews have it again, now; it's a tiny slice of -- of land, after all, nothing compared to the big empires, you see, nothing compared to the nomadic roaming, of the people -- the Mongolians via the Bering Strait into South America. Compare this little bit of a land, you see, it's just a concession so that the carriers of the Revelation have a little relief, that they are a little bit like everybody else, too. And this is the story then of the Davidic kingdom, gentlemen, and of the temple of Solomon, and all -- all the kings later in Israel. They had to have something that would not totally monopolize their lives as a service to the authors. You cannot. You have just to get some coughing drops, and you have to get some relief, and you have to get some fanning, some cooling of the sufferings which you have in your patient waiting for the coming of the Lord.

So gentlemen, you -- there are many books today written on messianism; and I warn you against them, because it's not the cheap thing. It's -- if you take the Jehovah Witnesses, they are messianists -- messian- -- a messianic group. Gentlemen, if they wouldn't be condemned by the Supreme Court for forbidding their children to dance around the flag, they wouldn't be worth anything. It is the suffering which -- condem- -- commands respect. They are persecuted. And therefore, mess- -- the messianic hope is today vested in these so-called Pentecostal sects. In Christianity, gentlemen, the third great holiday, Pentecost, is the Jewish holiday, that is the most Jewish. It is this waiting for the non-yet-fulfilled times. And therefore, in our days, if you look at the Pentecostal sects, or if you look back to the persecution of the Mormons by the British -- American army in 1867, I think it was--when was the execution against the Mormons? Who knows? Well, who is from Utah? Who is from New -- from New Mexico? Who is from Arizona? Nobody? Who is from Colorado? Well, we are a very provincial lot here. You are? When was -- did -- were the Mormons coerced militarily?

({ } I think they went on through Wyoming. I don't think they came down to Colorado.)

Obviously you live in a dead-end street. Now tomorrow you will kindly tell us when Uncle Sam sent soldiers into Utah, and who was the commanding general.

({ } last year, { } because they lived { } there was a town down in -- in -- in Utah, that was practicing polygamy, and they went down and { } but they broke up that particular community {where the Mormons were practicing polygamy.} Is that the incident you're referring to?)

Oh no. The whole Mormon sect was militarily, you see, put under martial law in the '60s. You'd better look that up, you see. This, after all, you -- are your neighbors. Why { }, if you don't know?

Gentlemen, the messianic hope, the expectation that the future commands my present-day behavior, is a very costly thing. It is not something of the mind. You all have utopian dreams. That doesn't count, you see. But to put yourself in a position that shall coincide with the final state of affairs already now -- in anticipation, that's the prophetic attitude of Israel. And therefore, it is a -- a very dangerous attitude. And you may say, gentlemen, that the Bible is written backward. The last word of the Old Testament is this famous prophecy in the prophet of Malachi, which I can only recommend highly:

"Behold, I will send you the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:

"And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

Now gentlemen, it can't be said simpler, that history consists in the continuity between the hearts of the fathers, and the hearts of the children. That's -- the whole prophecy here is summed up in this one verse. This final prophet shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers. If this is done, you have an avenue through time. They are glued together. You have hewn out an approach, you see, into the future that lasts for hundreds -- for thousands of years. The Egyptians tried to do it with temples--in stone, and gold, and diamonds; the -- the tribes tried to do it with tattoos, initiating everybody into the tradition of the ancestors. The Jews are not interested either in ancestors or in temples. They are interested in waiting, in keeping ready so that something better can occur. If everybody fights desperately for the -- merely for the existing order, nothing ever can improve -- be improved. And the

templar -- temple people and the tribal people are in an eternal separation from the rest of mankind, because they had something so good to defend that they will never, never, you see, survive. The only outcome, gentlemen, for an ancient empire was to vanish from the ground. All the cap- -- people who were made captives were -- would be slain. Or the totem pole of a tribe, if conquered, would be broken, and all the women would enter the other tribe, and the tribe would vanish from the { } of this earth.

So what you call "mission" today, gentlemen, is the way of Israel to all these benighted, mythical groups, to tell them that they do not have to totally disappear; only they have to open to the future. They have to give -- ma- -- allow God to make a dent in their armor.

So there are two things, gentlemen, which you should practice, if you want to be an educated and civilized man. That is, read the Bible as a whole. Never read chapters. And the second: read it from backward -- from the back to the beginning. And always see that this problem--how two generations in your own time and day may co- -- cohere--is the reason why the Bible is written as it is written. We know that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh, gentlemen, because we know what it means to be created out of nothingness. You know that the Bible postulates, and is written on this fact that God creates out of nothing. And people have -- have minced many -- no -- I mean, have -- spoken very much about this strange principle that God creates out of nothing.

Gentlemen, if you have neither felt like nothing, and been reborn the next morning, you will never understand the Bible. The Bible is written from man's own experience. It is not a natural history. It is not a construction from the beginning, backward. It is a construction from the last moment of history, backward. Can you understand the difference? Any man who has lived--you haven't, yet, but you will--and who has proposed to a woman knows that he is made over at that moment, and the whole past seems only to have led up to this one point of decision. At that moment, he looks back and says, "Oh now, this makes sense," you see. "Now I understand why I had to go so -- be befogged so long, and looked at so many different girls."

({ } retrospective aspect { }, backwards.)

Yes, it's a constantly revised revision. "Revision" means to look backward. Quite.

({ }.)

Well, because it's restated all the time. You can -- you see, this prophet -- the last prophet finds a way of expressing it which is much simpler than the first. There's a rule in the Bible, gentlemen, and the rule in your own spirit: the simplest is the last, you see, in your mind. Your mind is far too complicated now. When you're older, you can state the same truth as Lincoln did it in his Second Inaugural. If you wanted to express now the truth of the Gettysburg Address, it would take two volumes; he said it in 261 words. That's the last wisdom.

So the Bible becomes wiser all the time. And the last prophet is only four chapters. And the last verse of the fourth chapter simply says, "He shall turn the heart of the fathers to their children, and the heart of their children to their fathers." That's all. Very little. But it's the gist of the matter, you see. Because if this would go through all time, then we would have done what we are expected to do. Can you see that this per- -- verse is very simple, rather primitive, you see, but it couldn't be thought out in the beginning, because in the beginning, Moses had to shout to the children of Israel: "Out of Egypt, away from sorcery, no magic, no tattoos," you see, and had to conjure up all kind of curses and blessings, you see, to get them to the beginning of their understanding.

Will you make this, gentlemen--it's very important; we'll come to it in the New Testament again--that the complicated is not the last. The simplest is the last. That's against all your expectation, gentlemen. It's also true of a document. You write a novel, and then you cut it down to size, don't you? It is much more difficult to write a short stor- -- a short, short story, than to -- a prolix one. Anybody knows that cutting is half of the virtue of a manuscript. Now why is that so, you see? Because to be concise, and precise, is the latest achievement. It's not the first. We'll see this, you see. People have argued: because Mark is shorter than Matthew that Mark must be older than Matthew in the New Testament. It's the other way around. The first Gospel of course had to be more prolix than the second Gospel. But these -- these -- all these -- the treatment of the past has been done without any experience. Just mechanically.

My time's up?

It's a scandal. I have not said anything about the Greeks. But the question is before the house, gentlemen, tomorrow: we have exhausted the three tenses, the past, the present, and the future. We have seen that there is a Bible; that there are temples; and that there are totem poles, or tattoos, masks. The Greeks have lasted over a thousand years in antiquity. And they are still with us in the liberal arts college. We have to ask ourselves: how did the Greeks master the continuity problem? Because we are only interested with groups who do solve this problem of continuity. And there is a fourth way, a very different way. And on this, tomorrow.