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...plunging into the chapter on Greek -- Greeks and Jews, I would like to -- the manner I would like to test you. It is difficult, such a large group. The simplest thing, and I think the most profitable for you, is the following topic. I would like you to write till -- the end of the month a paper investigating Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah's chapters 40 to 65. In order to understand this, you must know that this is the so-called missing link between the ancient world and our own times. In this -- we don't know how it came about, that this book is a part of the Bible. It was certainly not written by the prophet Isaiah. Yet it is a most important and the most advanced book in the whole Old Testament. And we live by its doctrine to this day, because it is the doctrine of the separation of Church and state, on which the Constitution of these United States have been founded. It is very hard to understand what that is, the division of Church and state. It's -- goes as deep as the division between men and women. And it is something similar. It's between the male and the feminine element in our society.

In this country, of course, it is not understood, because the theological tradition has been -- has been destroyed by the sects. Every sect in this country, 287, has one little item of truth in it. But the whole truth is buried. And I think it is worth -- very much worth your while, if we now fight the Chinese, and the Hindus, and the -- I don't know whom not --. The one item which for the last 2,000 years has kept you human, is not conquest, is not California, is not the sun- -- sunshine, but the separation of Church and state, that there should be two powers like sun and moon on the earth, shining over you, alternatingly. And since it is nearly forgotten today that -- what importance this is, that John- -- President Johnson is not the pope--and even more important, that the pope is not Mr. Johnson--I think the paper will pay dividends for every one of you. Every one of you has to come to terms with this whole idea, which today is -- just doesn't strike you as very exciting: the separation of state and Church.

If there is such a separation of Church and state, it can only be in your own heart. There is no visible division, because you can go to church on Sundays; and on weekdays, you pay taxes. And -- or you become a soldier, or you sit here on these benches and look at the whole thing as a Greek.

However there is no person in the world today who can write and re- -- write and read who is not exposed to this great problem: are there two powers, Church and state? or is there one? And since it is plainly forgotten today that this is important, you don't even know whether the school belongs to the ecclesiastical side of mankind or to the state side. Mr. Reagan certainly doesn't know. And therefore, it is of tremendous importance that you should study this.

So please accept my topic, the 25 chap- -- or 26 chapters of Is- -- Second -- so-called Second Isaiah. The chapters now in the regular Bible always -- simply numbered 40, follows -- following to 6- -- to the end, to 66. It is the key to the Old and the New Testament, and therefore of course nobody reads it.

So, to the end of the month, I would like to have your paper. And I -- let me repeat: it is for your sake, and not for mine that I want you to write this. Because only by plunging into this text--this very strange text, by the way, and a very beautiful text--can you put to yourself the question, which anybody at the age of the Russian Revolution has to solve: Is the state the Church? Is the Church the state? Nobody seems to know any answers at this moment to this.

So bre- -- you will break out of the scheme of a universal history, of a monistic, of a single denominator if you become acquainted with the dreams and visions of Second Isaiah. The wonderful thing about the man is: we don't know anything about him. We certainly cannot understand -- I at least cannot understand however anybody had the bright idea to put it into the Bible. It had no authority. It has -- can lay no claim of being written by a prophet. It's just there. It's a part of the Bible. Two hundred years after First Isaiah, it was -- it must have been written and inserted. We know nothing about it. The Jews themselves have no idea. They -- there are biblical critics who know everything, who were present when Eve was created from the rib; this they do not know. So it is very exciting. And I don't see why not one of you should find the solution of the riddle. It's a total riddle. It's the most mysterious book of the New Testament. In many way -- of the Bible. In many ways, this book is -- belongs already to the New Testament. And it was obviously written around 540 B.C.

For our -- own course of universal history, this simple fact that here is a book which cannot be placed in any relation to the other books of the Bible on the one-hand side, of the Old Testament, and har- -- very hard to place in regard to the New Testament, you may perhaps adopt one viewpoint: that 500 years are a very short time in universal history, and that if you find a man writing in 540 B.C. about the coming of Christ, that's just, on an average, a decent chronology. Your chronologies have all to do with elections, or graduation. They are all too short-lived. Man- -- mankind, countries do not live from year to year. That's all nonsense. And that's why you are not in history. you are only in the latest news.

The latest news are nothing, because they skip of course everything that is important. And for this reason, I really think the Second Isaiah is an adequate training for people who pretend that they are students. Now a student is a man who is immune against the daily stimuli, including LSD.

What makes the modern university look so very childish is that you and

their -- your professors seem to be in a terrible hurry always to get the latest news. But gentlemen, the important thing for you and me is not to miss the oldest news. It's much more important than the latest news, because the latest news is absolutely untested, and has only to do with the fashion of today. Now will you -- do you want your grandchildren to be influenced by the passing fashions of your youth? It would be ridiculous.

So let's hold onto this. On -- on the last day of the month, or the first day of March, I want to receive a paper. And you can write on top {of it}, "written for my own sake." Not for my sake, but for yours.

We have today, since we lost a -- a lecture meeting, we have today to -- to say farewell to the Egyptians--although my heart is a little bit still there--and we have to make the transition to the -- to -- to this world, which after the return of the Great Year in 1318, the first return of the same constellations in the sky that founded Egypt, we have to return to this -- these thousand years. You can put it down. The -- the period of 1318 B.C. to 139 A.D. Now you will say, you have never heard of such a period. Of course, you haven't. But I have to explain why you -- perhaps from now on, we should consider this period as a serious epoch.

The Jews must have left Egypt after 1318. My guess is that Moses left Egypt in 1280 of B.- -- B.C. By 1200, the first influence of Egypt seems to have spread to this world, to Cambodia, to India, to China, and I suppose, from -- from there to Central America. I still think that the pyramids in Yucatan and in Mexico, they were built under the influence of the Egyptian tradition, just as certainly in Thailand, and in Cambodia, they have been built under this influence.

So there is one great, epochal break. After the Great Year in Egypt, in 1318, had passed without an overthrow, so to speak, of the cosmic order, and the people began to settle down with the idea that the same constellation in the sky had now returned, that had been seen in 2776 B.C.. After this, the various parts of the world tried to go forward on their own. You find from the Trojan War and the exodus from Egypt in -- by the -- Israel, you find a kind of -- of unrest, a kind of experimenting there. The Etruscans who go to -- from Asia Minor to Etruria, to the cities around Florence, be- -- before the Romans. There you get the Roman chronology itself. Rome is allegedly founded in 753 B.C. In 23 B.C., half of the Great Year for Rome had lapsed. And that's why Livy -- Titus Livy began his history of Rome. Under the impact that one-half Great Year of Rome had gone by, just as -- exactly as with the pharaohs of Egypt. In 330 of our own era, Constantine moved to Constantinople, because he didn't want to be buried under the remnants of pagan Rome. That's why the pope today is in Rome, and not the emperor.

And so on -- all over the globe, you find the influence of this chronology. The unbelief of our archaeologists doesn't alter this fact. Man was deeply moved by his power to re- -- realize recurrent constellations high up in the sky. They followed different recipes to master them. You may know that in -- in the Maya culture in Yucatan, the Venus cycle was observed. There were stones erected every five years in Yucatan, and after 53 years, there was great jubilation, because man had gotten hold of the turning-over of Venus, and the accompaniment of the movement in the sky by the planet Ven- -- Venus was the great triumph for the Yucatan rulers.

What it matters today is not these details, but that these people tried to live on earth as it is in Heaven. That this old sentence of the "Our Father" was a command for all these people who lived at the time of the coming of Christ. The Great Year in some form dominated their thinking. For Rome, I tried to show you this. With the Greeks, it was the Olympiad. Instead of having four times -- 365 years, they reduced it to four times 365 days. That's what you call the Olympiad. But the spirit of Greece came down on the heads of the victors in the Olympic games, or in the Corinthian games, or NŒmean games, by obed- -- obeying the constellations in the sky. It is true that the -- that the Greeks abbreviated this period. But what you call an Olympiad is still -- valid if -- if you, instead of learning something on the front page, only want to read the fr- -- the sport page, you cannot escape the Great Year, because all they say about the Olympics still comes from the year 776 B.C., and still is an imitation, just as the founding of Rome, of the Egyptian idea of a tremendous cycle within which you and I cannot help moving. We have just to fulfill the constellations in the sky.

It's very wonderful how the professors have escaped the -- the doctrine of this. You don't find this in the books, but there it is. Everybody can test it.

Now -- when I now speak of the Greeks, and the Jews, I occupy thereby the period between 1300 B.C. and perhaps 200 A.D. If you take the Etruscans, if you take the Persians, if you take the {Canaanians}, if you take the Armenians, all these--it's the same in China, the -- ancient dynasty of the oldest Chinese emperors--you everywhere find that this period from 1280 A.D. -- B.C. to 200 A.D. is preoccupied with groups, countries, territories imitating the Egyptian example. They tried to ex- -- establish empires.

To give you an example. Egypt is based on the Nile. Everything is the Nile. The Nile is the god, the Nile is the -- calendar, the flood of the Nile has to be observed by priests who sit there 24 hours a day. And the permanency of work has been established by these empires, because the stars don't set. We, and you, and I have to sleep, and you have now the five-day week, personally. But our factory system, our electricity production goes on unbrokenly. This comes from

Egypt, the first time that the people realize that the stars go not to bed; they don't sleep. And anything we have today in the sense of telephone services, water services, everything is geared to this effect that these things have to go on forever. You take it all for granted. This was, of course, an invention of the Egyptians. They put, for the first time in human history, priests on the roof of their temples to observe the stars. And they have an expression: the stars that do not set. They considered them the most important stars. The -- the -- the Great Wagon, you see, Child's Wain is, for example, a constel- -- a constellation they love, because it does not set. It's -- it's there all the year around.

So this "Make haste," "Go on," this perpetuity of movement is the Egyptian dis- -- discovery, and the Egyptian cult. The wheel of fortune it has been called. Wheel is enough to drive people crazy. And I do think that the astrologers made people crazy with their superstition. It is not to be recommended that you and I should live on a 24-hour basis, or on shift work. But we do, so impressed are we with the natural order, the cosmic order.

All the nations, as I said, have tried to imitate this to a certain -- in a certain proportion. Until the Jews came along and said, "This is terrible. We have to break this up." They did. We'll come to this. Today, I'm only dealing with the Greeks. The Greeks are an example which I have to adduce, because there are other nations. The Phrygians, the Lycians, the Romans, the Etruria- -- Etruscans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, who took a leaf from the book of Egypt also. And if we -- dwell today on the ways the Greeks did imitate and did not imitate the Egyptians, it is a lesson for all the other countries, just as well.

You know, however, so much about the Greeks, that it would be a great pity if you would persevere in your errors about them. The Egyptians gave to the Greeks writing. They gave -- to the Greeks temples. They gave to the Greeks the calendar. They gave to the Greeks agriculture. But we'll see that the Greeks--as other nations, by the way, too--in a most ingenious way simplified matters. They took a leaf from the Egyptian book, but they did not go whole -- the whole way. The priest stands us -- for us for priesthood. And we said the priest is a man who has laity under them. The priests of Egypt had all these farmers, these peasants work for them, or build pyramids.

What are the Greeks doing, instead? Now they have no authoritative priesthood. The man {Kaltas}, in The Odyssey, if you have read it, plays a very poor role, and even worse so in The Iliad. And he's insulted by the kings. You know, the father of Briseis, Briseus, comes and tries to get her in the -- in the Trojan camp and then Achilles said, "No. I like this lady and she stays with me. That's all." No calendar authority there.

If you want to understand the Greeks, I have -- we have run into trouble. You are so Grecianized, every one of you lives by the concepts of Greece--philosophy, science, art--so deeply that before I can speak to the Greeks about you, I have to show you your immersion, your completely being -- your head is turned by the Greek tradition. So I cannot talk to you, because you take the Greek superstitions for truth. They aren't. They are just Greek. But we have gone through the last thousand years of a strange reception of this Greek spirit. Just as we have about the Old Testament. Jews and Greeks are still, in your heads, superior. And therefore, before I can show you what the Greeks -- how they did it, what they actually performed--so that you can have some detachment and look at the Greeks from the outside--I have to give you a strange list which shows you the intoxication of western man with Greece.

You may have heard that a man called Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, at the end of his life wrote a book Zarathustra. Now this man Zarathustra is not a Greek. And the achievement of this madman, Nietzsche, lies exactly in the fact that he forced his contemporaries to go beyond the limits of Greece. The book of -- Nietzsche has no importance otherwise. It's the book already of a madman. But he had this incredible force, which no contemporary had. And -- they have -- don't have it in this country, to open up the limitations of our vision to a time where the man who did the thinking was not a Greek, but was a Persian. That's the -- meaning of the word Zarathustra. Zarathustra in my estimation has lived around 550--it doesn't matter; other -- B.C. Other people have said 560 B.C. The date is not important. The fact that for the first time in the occidental history of America, and Europe, and Italy, and Germany, and France, and England, and even Ireland, the -- the authority quoted was not an inhabitant of Greece or of -- in -- in classical antiquity. He was a Persian. Who -- what is -- who are the Persians? We don't know anything about them. So how come? Why is Zarathustra invoked as authority? This is quite exciting. At the same time, Mr. Robert Graves wrote a book, Hercules, My Shipmate. Have you heard of the book? Who has? Well, poor Graves. He needs the royalties badly. And -- he's always bankrupt.

Well, Hercules, My Shipmate, means that Robert Graves, in the year of the Lord 1940, had reached the end of his Greek rope. Hercules is the first Greek, the oldest Greek. Hercules, My Shipmate, there's another book now on the -- on the Argonaut--equally important--Argonauts and Hercules open up Greek history. They come before the Trojan War. Now the Trojan War and Homer became the paramount interest of Europeans and western man around 1800, not before. Then the Homeric question dominated everything else. And if you had gone to school in 1800, you would have been plagued by Homer, just as you may now be plagued by Robert Graves, or by Zarathustra.

Go back further, and you come to Racine and Corneille, and they write

Latin and Greek drama, the Eumenides, and Iphigenia, and Orestes. That is, Greek tragedy, composed in the fifth century of our era, became the obsession of the French court in the 17th century. You go back a little further, and you come to Erasmus of Rotterdam, and the Reformation. And the people who then read Greek read Socrates and Plato.

There's a famous scene in 1515, in the city of Basel, in Switzerland. There is the great Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest uni- -- humanist of his time, was asked to give a lecture, a public lecture, in -- in the -- in the -- before the faculty and the professors of Basel University. And his toast was "Saint Socrates: pray for us." Saint Socrates, pray for us. Well, two world wars have -- shown you -- where it leads to, if you pray to Socrates. Very dangerous performance. Platonism, since 1515, when this speech was given in Basel, has dominated more or less these philosophers. If I see rightly, the -- professors who teach philosophy to you in this college still are absolutely under the magic of Plato and Socrates. Socrates still ranks as a normal human being. He is not, in my eyes. He is just a Greek. And the Greeks are not normal. This is very important, gentlemen, and that's why I give you this story.

It is very hard for you to immunize yourself against the poison injected into you by Greece. The dogma, the domination, the sovereignty of the Greek mind. And you must forgive me, I had the nickname as a student, of Plato. So I resent it.

Plato came to the Occident in 1440 or 1453, with the destruction of Constantinople by the Turks. The last Greek scholars took their manuscripts and brought them to Italy, into the West. And ever since, the schoolboys of this country have been plagued by Plato. But this was only of a -- of a surprise in the 15th century, because Thomas Aquinas and the great theologians of the 13th century, they had written out the system of Aristotle. Aristotle is older -- is younger than Plato. So our way back, you see, beginning with Hercules, going back to Troy--here, it's still -- the Argonauts--going back to -- what did I have? Greek tragedy. Socrates, Plato. The next stage--going-backward movement--is Aristotle. You have heard -- all have heard that scholasticism in the Middle Ages based its argument on a debate between Saint Paul and Aristotle. Here was the classic philosopher, always called "Philosophus" in the sources, you see, "the philosopher says," and then comes poor -- poor Paul and has to negate this paganism.

But there is an older layer even still about the reception of antiquity -- of Greek antiquity into your lifeblood, into your schoolbooks, into all the expressions. From elementary school, to university, to faculty, to doctor's degree, it's all -- all Greek.

In 1315, Dante began his Divine Comedy, and the guide who guides him through the nether world is Virgil. Virgil is the last of antiquity whom we discover. And he is, at the end of the -- ancient cycle, he lives at the day -- in the days of Emperor Augustus and -- and Jesus. But he was the first to be rediscovered. Dante represents a Virgil renaissance, which is even older than the Aristotelian renaissance.

When I was a boy, I was instructed by a very -- I must say, good teacher, fine man. And he had written a book on the traditions of Virgil in the Middle Ages. And he had found that long before Dante used Virgil as his guide in the nether world, the magician Virgil was worshiped around Naples in Italy. There was a tradition that he had -- had been a great magician. That is, poetry--and quite rightly so--was treated at that time as witchcraft. And I think all good poetry is just that.

So you have -- perhaps you add -- Virgil to the front line there. And then you get a very strange line of receptivity, of adoption. The Greek past has been adopted by your parents, and yourself, and your grandparents, and your greatgrandparents in the opposite order in which these people in antiquity had lived. We discovered first: Virgil in the 11th century as the outcropping of the antiquity, as his finest spirit. At the end of Rome, Virgil then prophesies in his Eclo- -- Eclogae, the future of Christ. And then we go on, and we end with Hercules, the first Greek hero, as we shall see, the first man in whom the Greeks tried to find a parallel solution to the agriculture and the pyramids of Egypt. Heracles is a very important man.

The strange thing is that we go backward in order to go forward. It took the occidental nations 900 years to fill themself to the brim with the spectacular achievements of antiquity. In the year of the Lord 1950, you can say, that Robert Graves ha- -- enables us to understand the beginning of Greece. Just as the other stations are there, gradually developed.

If -- once you see this, you become very silent about scientific progress, and about all this nonsense of self and knowledge. Man is very much a puppet. And you are, too. We can't help it. Perhaps we should be grateful that we are so securely guided. The more we have to live forward now into the year 2000, you see, the more urgent it is that we recover all the past. So by going backward, we go forward. And if people in the sciences only would know this, I could even make my peace with the mathematicians. But they don't know that they are the slaves of this vision. They insist that it's all their doing. They call this "progress."

The human mind is -- moves inside God's spiritual world. And you cannot get out by just observing "facts," as they call this, you see. Our minds are held,

are kept. And they are kept quite beautifully. They are kept in balance. The more you try to go forward, the more you have also to look backward. It's both.

I think it's quite exciting, once you realize, that Plato and Aristotle were not discovered by curiosity, but by compulsion. And this is the same reason why--if you read D. H. Lawrence, for example--you have to rediscover primitive man. You have to discover the bloody sacrifices of the Mexicans, or what have you in anthropology, you see. Your -- your anthropological studies are not a luxury. They are not based on a curiosity. They are based on the iron necessity to recover the whole past. Because you are only a human being if the whole past, from the first day of creation to the last, is with you. Otherwise, you are just a barbarian, with a number in the telephone book. But it is not enough to have a number in the telephone book, because that's only on the surface of the globe. Man is not that being who lives somewhere in California and has a telephone line. He's only a man if he comes at the end of a glorious sequence of ancestors of the spirit.

And this story of Greece in your and my textbooks--minds, schools--is I think an awe-inspiring textbook. Why are here universities? Why are -- have you -- are you academicians? Why is there an academic spirit? I even got an invitation today to an academic senate. Now, they may have no spirit, but the term "academic" they have. And the word "academic" is the name for the school founded by Plato in 387 B.C. in Athens. Do you think that's arbitrary? Do you think it's just a nice invention that you decorate yourself with such a term? It costs nothing? It costs terribly much. It costs anemia, for example.

So you move in a steel-girded presen- -- prison, in which you -- out -- out of which you cannot break out at whim. Americans have always been great in assuring their evi- -- independence. The more independent they believed to be, the greater fools they became. If you want not to be a fool, then don't be fooled by the words you use, by the thoughts you entail -- encounter, by the books you read. Then you can get free. I can read Plato and know what I am doing. You cannot, because you think it is just an interesting book. It's a very dangerous book, because it enslaves you. It takes you into the great tradition of the human race. And no budging -- no dodging the issue.

I -- I have given you a remedy. You may read back the whole story from the days of the Emperor Augustus, when Jesus was born and Virgil wrote, back to Zarathustra and the Persian empire, which is described in Second Isaiah, and that's why you ought to read it. My topic -- my theme for you, you see, has something to do with this limitation of your time memory, of your historical vision. Because Cyrus, the great Persian, lived just before Greece burst forth and had his -- its great thinkers.

Well -- to come back to the point. The power to overlook the Greeks, to make use of them, but not to be their slave, depends today on our stepping out of the Greek boat, of the Greek argos- -- of the Greek story, which so forcefully has made all people into philosophers. -- Why, in my private opinion, this is the deepest reason why to study philosophy today is a very dif- -- dangerous business, because we live today the execution of philosophy. It's enough -- has been sufficiently reiterated. You and I have to read Zarathustra. You have to know something of the Greek temples, yes. But much more about the Egyptian temples. Because I told you that a temple in Greece is not a complete temple. It is a temple without in- -- prescription and without inscriptions. And therefore the Greek mind, you see, reads its philosophies, its theology in its books.

I tried to -- show you last time that when the Greeks enter the scene, they throw out the inscriptions on the temples. They at least were honest. The temples said, "I'm standing here to watch the Nile, rise of the Nile, on June such-andsuch," you see. "And I have seen Sirius, and I have seen the sun, and I have seen my emperor move down the Nile."

This is a very innocent inscription, because it deals with facts. But if you come to a system of philosophy, then you are all enslaved by something in the mind, the philosophy being the temple. And you believe in these concepts. What's a concept, gentlemen? A human invention. And it's just as much an invention as a pillar, or an arc, even if it is an arc de triomphe.

And you have to learn--and that's -- will be your greatest task in life--that the concepts, most of the concepts you have inherited are only good for being dismissed. Because as little as pillars, and columns, and arcs can dominate your building principles, so as little can these concepts of Mr. Plato or Mr. Aristotle be your sovereigns and your dictators.

At this moment, you must understand: the crisis of philosophy is the crisis of the human spirit in its relation to Greece. As far as philosophy today still claims to be the secular wisdom, which can replace our tradition of the liturgy, our tradition of the Church, our tradition of human behavior, of human fraternity--as long as you believe this, you are -- have not jumped out of the strange cycle of Hercules, Iason, down to Virgil, 1,000 years of prehistory. They turned short when it came to return to Egypt. And they remain Greeks.

I'm afraid we, and you and I, have to live in the future Egypt. That is, in one great empire for all the nations. You cannot afford to say that you go to a school and look at the world from the outside. Unfortunately, we are inside. The -- empires of old--before the Trojan War, and before Greece became anything in its own right--these empires are just as ours, universal, omnipotent, cosmic. They

didn't achieve it. China had only two rivers. Egypt had only one river, the Nile. And they tried to establish a universal order on the basis which was too small, on the basis of just these river valleys, you see.

Now we know more. We know all the valleys, we know all the mountains. But that only means that we have -- must be very good pharaohs. We must be very good pyramid builders. We must be very good birth-control planners. And what you all read in the papers every day is nothing but an attempt to replace Egypt by modern means for the whole globe. That's all that happens today. But for this purpose, ladies and gentlemen, you have to step out of the Greek magic, because the Greek magic consisted in the attempt to look at the empires without responsibility from the outside, from curiosity. What they call "intellectual curiosity," which I would call, with an obscene term, very differently.

This is very practical knowledge for you, gentlemen. Since the -- the globe now takes the place of the Nile empire, and the Euphrates and Tigris empire, and Peru, and Mexico, and the Maya culture, and we all live in one corn barn, so to speak, in one -- on one earth which has to provide for very, very many hungry people all the food for a year, the problem of Pharaoh--how to feed them all, and how to keep them busy, and how to keep them in -- at peace together--is your and my question, and not the Greek question: what do you think of the world outside? The Greeks looked at the world outside.

To give you a very nice example: the Egyptians discovered the laws of the -- Pythagoras, of the triangles on top of the two sides, the { }, you see, that the hypotenuse had -- had the same -- how is it? the same amplitude? How do you say this in English? -- the same content as the two sides on top of the rightangular -- rectangular triangle. I think this example is very primitive, but it's very instructive.

So here you have Osiris, the dead corpse of the Nile, waiting to be reerected by Isis, his sweetheart, and by Horus who travels. And this is the picture the Egyptians give -- gave of the proportions which they had to respect in building a pyramid. The rectangular triangle is very important, you see, because it explains that a wall -- how a wall is to be erected in order to last.

If you come to Greece, and Mr. Pythagoras--who of course, learned from the Egyptians--he says, "A, B, C." And mathematicians today would be horrified if I said, "That's -- just Isis, and -- and Horus, and Osiris; that's A, B, C." And you believe in the A, B, C. However, ladies and gentlemen, it's an abstraction. A, B, C was only invented by the Greeks because they met with this fact that Egypt was based on the relationship of the reigning Horus, who enthroned his father Osiris

with the big flood, you see, and united South and East Egypt in this movement, and his mother and his -- and the sweetheart of Osiris, Isis, who then throned there in permanency. Isis is sedated -- sedate throne -- throning, and Horus is emphatic ruling. One is in movement, and the other is in static. And therefore together they can found Osirian Egypt.

Now you may say that it is more reasonable to speak of A, B, C and mathematics, as you have learned it in school. But you have to know that it is only an abstraction from factual service of a whole nation, in the service of something divine, of an authority who can give orders. I told you of prescriptions and not just script. And as long as the mathematicians do not understand that our understanding of the universe is prescribing us actions, and is not just illuminating describ- -- describing pictures, we will never understand each other.

This today is the emphatic battle. It is a battle in Berkeley; it's the battle with Communism; it's a battle everywhere. The division of man is today is between those who stick to the Greeks--and the Communists are pure Greeks--and to the older tradition, that man is obliged, acts under prescriptions. And these abstra- -- these abstractions--A, B, C--are mere abstractions, that you can only discover your energy of action if you fall in love with A and B and say, "This is my power to which I have to bear witness by going forward, and unifying the universe until Osiris is brought from the South to the North."

It's the same question you have to solve now with your military service. It's very nice to look at it and say, "I'm a conscientious objector." And it's very different to say, "I'm just one of the figures that are called up."

Any man who has a long life before him and wants to have grandchildren better know that he has to be observant of the law. And this is not his business to have a philosophy about the law. But you are so Greek, that it may be very hard for you to understand, that what I try to do today is invite you to see the Greek experiment as having undertaken in relation to these great empires of the -- antiquity.

The Greek mind came from the mountains north of the Alps, obviously, they came in north of the Balkans, and intruded into the plain of Thessaly by and large 1100, B.C. You get the Trojan War as 1187. You get -- the Exodus of the Jews in 1215, as I said. When the Great Year once had cycled, and nothing special had happened, people began to feel restless and say, "Perhaps the authority of the Egyptian pharaoh is not omnipotent. We have to discover our own order." And this is what the -- Greeks, and the Jews, and the -- Aramites, and many other nations have tried to do ever since.

So my Greek repetition you will understand perhaps as showing you how immersed you are into Greek thinking. And I'm not sure that I can solve -- dissolve this spell that has been cast over you, that you look at history only as an explanation from the point of view of Greece.

What are the Greeks? The Greeks are insular. Even the word Peloponnesus, in which Sparta is located, you see--and Argos, and -- two main places for early Greek history--are treated by the Greeks as an island. Peloponnesus means the "island of the Pelops." And if you look into the text, the Greeks were very proud that they had even transformed the Peloponnesus into an island, because what they knew was that they were islanders. They were just as bad as the English. They were very proud of this fact.

And of course, th- -- this A-B-C business, gentlemen has to do with it. The first Greek who said, "Everything is water," and A, B, C, Pythagoras, then who discovered this in southern Italy, they were people who wanted to apply the rules of empires to their little island kingdoms. Two hundred fifty-eight citystates filled Greece. Aristotle wrote -- on the constitution of every one of them. If you compare 258 to one empire, as Egypt or of China, you understand that the Greek mind was filled with this experience that he could reduplicate, he could repeat, he could multiply the empire form that had existed so far and had been dug out.

The Greeks also divided their work. They had a division of labor; they had carpenters; they had smiths. But they simplified everything. As I told you, they didn't inscribe the temples with something permanent. Two hundred fifty-eight islands have not the same splendor -- than the one river Nile, with its 36 counties, you see, these 36 -- always the same majesty of the great flood.

This explains everything in Greece. The authority of the local group was all the time transcended by the experience of any Greek, that he could move from one city to another. All Greeks are {polyhistors}; all Greeks are polytheistic. All Greek have an experience of "this town," "my town," and some other town. For the first -- from the first beginning of a Greek, he never is contained in one city. He is never is only a citizen of Athens. He always knows that there are other people behind the moon.

And if you look at Greek tragedy, the -- the -- great tragedians, Aeschylus, from the very first, took up issues of other cities of Greece, of Thebes, like Oedipus, you see, who was slain -- who slew his father, you see, on the way from Thebes to Delphi, in the midst of Boeotia. Now, Athens has nothing to do with it. Just the same, it was a sovereign city, and it did enact the play, of -- you see, of Oedipus, in Athens.

So the -- Athens -- the Athenians, or the Greeks fir- -- are the first people in whose members there is deeply engraved the fact that his city is not the only city, that there are many cities of man. To an extent which you even cannot re- -- very much -- realize. Because if I analyze you rightly, you still think that the normal thing -- is to be an American. The Greeks knew that it is quite abnormal to be the member of one city. You couldn't live -- at that. All the time, there was interference with other people's cities.

And this led the Greeks to coining this strange phrase, which nobody can understand, and nobody can imitate, but you all use and you all abuse, and that's the word "nature." The nature of the -- Greece is the city beyond your own -- the order of things beyond your own town wall, beyond your city wall. Beware of the term. It has misled people for centuries now to terrible things, because we are not natural. That's nonsense. You and I are the most supernatural. You can be unnatural. There are unnatural vices. But we cannot simply be natural. Because I speak to you, we all represent the divine spirit. There's no other way out. And if you deny it, you get very, very unhappy and you land in jail, or in the me- -- lunatic asylum. The illness of America is the natural man. He has never been seen; he doesn't exist. He can -- he is only an abstraction em- -- imposed on you by the true fact that most people today in the world are one thing and another. You are an emigr‚ from -- from Germany--I am--and there -- I am an American. So that's a combination.

And so every one of you has three or four strands. And therefore your nature is not exhausted by any one political order. Everywhere, you see, it's extravagant. It goes beyond it. And for this reason, the word "nature" offered itself to the Greeks very handily. But this doesn't -- mustn't lead you to the error that anything ever is natural. You and I are not natural, except as corpses, when we stink. Nature is death. Nature is destruction. Nature is pollution. Nature is dirt. Nature is suffering. What have you. But certainly nature is not order. Everything in order -- in nature kills the next. Nature is without mercy, because it is -- cont- -- every part of it doesn't know of any other part.

But that's of course the great heresy of the United States of America, that you have these -- these -- this slogan of the natural man. Now the Greeks invented it. But you must not forget that they had not only Alaska as the 50th state. They had, as I said, 258 cities. So there was something that they had to solve. And you know how they solved it? They solved it by reducing the natural order, the cosmic order inside which they lived, to a point, to a residue, to the Olympian gods. The gods of Egypt were all over the country. Osiris moved from the First Cataract to the sea.

Now you look at these poor Olympian gods in Greece. They lived on

Olympus and catch -- caught a cold. The compromise of Greek religion is that here were nomads, tribes, marching across the Balkan mountains and coming into this wonderful fruit land of Thessaly, which you should see before you understand where -- why Achilles was a man from Thessaly. It's a very fruitful plain. It's as good as -- as California. No oranges, I admit.

However, when the Greeks had entered this realm of Thessaly, they came in touch with anything -- everything Egyptian, with regular agriculture, with plowing, with taming horses, with building stone walls and stone temples, and in their admiration for what they inherited there, they worshiped, or they--not worshiped, no--they believed that they were led by a hero. The hero which dominates the Greek organization, the Greek story, including Greek philosophy, is Heracles. That's why it is interesting that he should have come in -- in Robert Graves' book, Hercules, My Shipmate, last.

We -- you and I have to discover today the importance of Heracles for the Greeks. He's much greater than Plato or Aristotle. Why? In -- coming into this broken-up territory with hills and dales, mountains and valleys, the Greeks felt that the great goddess of the earth, the Isis, the Greek Isis, you see, that they -- that she needed their collaboration. Every hero who tran- -- came with a handful of 50 or a hundred -- mehr -- there mustn't -- won't have been invaders, had to reconcile his existence with the traditional agriculture in these places. I'm sure in Thessaly, for example, there was agriculture long before any Greeks ever arrived, because it's so invit- -- inviting. Such a fruitful country.

Now what is Hera- -- Hercules? As you know, the Greek term for Hercules is "Heracles." That's the correct way of writing it. And "Heracles" means the man who makes Hera famous. "Cles" is the glory, and Hera is the city goddess, the goddess of the plain, the goddess of the agriculture, the Isis of the Greeks. And now all the heroes of Greek couldn't do any better but build those walls around Argos, build those walls around Sparta, build those walls in Athens. And thereby giving splendor, and -- beauty, and riches to the goddess who dominated this place. And you go to Argos in Greece, you still find the tremendous plain stretching out from the city of Argos, and you are told that the plowing-up of this field made Argos the town of Hera. Is worshiped to this day.

The word "Heracles" is I think is the most important word for your understanding Greek religion, Greek philosophy. Here was a tribal group, having no country their -- of their own, moving, moving, like the Bororos in South America, or the Eskimos, or whom have you. Like all the tribals -- here, the -- these Germanic tribes, the Indo-Germanic tribes were not any better. We learn today that they were geniuses. Gentlemen, they escaped from being just tribesmen, and they were civilized, and they became the geniuses of Greece because they

entered an alliance with Hera, with the goddess of settlement. "Hera" is, after all, the same term as the word "hero," in feminine, you see.

So when the people who crossed the Alps, and the Balkans, they saw that every year bread was produced; there was no starvation; the horses could be tamed, and pasture; and there was enough to go around. And therefore, they said, "Well, that's the power of our heroic age. We, heroes, also, in cha- -- hunting, and feuds, and so, provide it. This goddess, which the natives--they were natives--worship. then let's call her 'Hera.' But she needs somebody to execute her will. She needs the soldiers, the marching com- -- battle -- groups, who came across the Balkan mountains and settled one after another."

And that's why Heracles is so important for Greek history, because it's the combination of the tribal order and the imperial order. In Heracles, you find that Greece consists of a reconciliation between the migrant tribes and the settling Egyptians, or Babylonians, or what have you.

In the Greek spirit, there was produced a sacred marriage, as they called it, themselves, a sacred marriage between the migratory spirit of the nomad, you see, and the settling spirit of the city-dweller of the Egyptian pharaoh. And in Heracles, you have the first symbol. Imagine, to call a hero: "He who makes Hera famous." I think it's a very beautiful way of reconciling the irreconcilable. The migratory Berserker, the migratory fighter, you see, and the city goddess who has a temple in town, and who is worshiped in regular intervals as a sedate deity, get together. And the subju- -- subjugation of the -- of enemies, the subjugation of wild animals, the subjugation of the resistance of the country is ascribed to that hero who makes the goddess of settlement famous. "Cles" is the word for glory. You may perhaps want to know this. And Heracles as I said, is he who makes Hera famous.

With this, if you want -- would concentrate for one moment on this vision, you will understand that the fact that 258 times a Greek city was dedicated to Hera, was enough to make these people rest. These migratory tribes came to peace and to settlement through this great experience that they -- if they built this -- the city walls, if they built the castle, if they built, measured off -- up the fields around the -- city, their one goddess was honored and reconciled. And they had thereby overcome the resistance of the former settlers, the previous settler.

That's why I think the word "Heracles" deserves your greatest attention. It's not an accident that I think for you it is more important to under- -- read Heracles runes in history than Plato, or Heraclitus, or any one of them. By the way, the word -- the great philosopher Heraclitus of course has his name also

from the goddess Hera. And it only means she's -- he is famous through Hera. But I prefer the -- the other version, you see, in which Hera is made famous by the services of Heracles.

The -- you may know that the Greek tradition is filled with stories about the feats -- the fea- -- fea- -- the features of Heracles, his -- his great del- -- deeds. He -- everywhere he overcomes natural obstacles; everywhere he subjugates the reluctant and resisting countryside to this regular service of agricultural endeavor.

Keep in mind then today that we have taken a step -- deliberately back, and beyond Greek philosophy. Heracles is not a philosopher. But he is the man who enabled the Greeks to become Greeks. And that's more important than later to write books in Greek.

The story of the discovery of the proper religion of Greece is not simple. It has not been advanced in the last 200 years much. We know not much more than the people -- of Erasmus' day knew. How come that Zeus, and Hera, and Apollo, and Aphrodite are gods? Do we have anything to do with these gods? You know, our poetry has. You can't write a love poem without running -- the risk of mentioning Aphrodite.

These gods must be seen in the same light as Heracles. Heracles is the hero of the tribe who puts himself into the service of the goddess of settlement, Hera. Hera is the domestic one, the -- the lady with the white elbows, because she wears gloves, you see--as decent people should do--instead of being -- having brown arms. She is the one with the -- with the white underarm. This impressed the Greeks, you see, that there was a lady in the house who -- who would not show her arms to the sun, you see.

In addition to Heracles and Hera, unifying the old tradition of Egyptian and Mediterranean permanent settlement, and the migration of tribes, there is of course Zeus, the great god of heaven. There is Hades, the god of the nether -- world. And there is Poseidon, the god of the earth and earthquakes. These three gods you take for granted. When you speak of gods, they only -- ones you usually know are not Baal and Vitzliputzli, but they are these Greek gods.

Something has to be said about them. I will do as little as is -- indispensable. The god on which I would to concentrate is Apollo. Apollo is the god of the migratory boy, of the homosexual boy, of the man who is deprived of his possibility of founding a family, because he has to be on the boat 200 or 300 days a year. Apollo is the great inspirer of Greek poetry. And we are talking here about the transformation of a whole nation into poets. You remember that we moved

away from the Gree- -- the Greek priesthood and his temples now to the third stage, to poetry. What is poetry? You don't know it, but it is necessary for you to know it, because you must also get out from under poetry. Nobody can live by poetry.

Goethe, the great German poet, has warned his son not to become a poet, because he said, "My dear son, poetry is very good as an accom- -- a companion in life, but not as a guide." Poetry cannot guide man.

Now Apollo is the companion of all the skippers, and all the shipper -- the -- the travelers on the Mediterranean Sea. We have no ma- -- map here. Perhaps we should. If you look at the Mediterranean in the -- in its eastern part, hundreds and hundreds of islands are there. And in the heart of this Mediterranean archipelago, or -- in the Aegean Sea, there is a little island, Delos. Delos is the island in which the epiphany, the appearance of Apollo, became known. Because the word "Delos" means to appear, to reveal. That's the Stamm of Delos. And therefore, Delos was an island at which all the Greeks in some form or other would stop. A temple island, like St. Peter in Rome. It was not settled by civilians. It was not settled by craftsmen. It was only lived in, in a temple there. And very nicely, the architects of our own day, as you may know, under the leadership of a Greek architect, have now decided to meet in Delos. And it's one rare case where a -- such a revival has -- makes sense. And -- like the Olympic Games, you see, this Delos meeting, these Delos meetings are really very significant, because all modern architecture is threshed out there.

The island of Delos, an uninhabited island, but already mentioned in Homer as a -- the place of pilgrimage for any Greek, is under the protection of Apollo. It is very dangerous to go into detail about Apollo. We don't even know which language his name has come from. As far as I can see, he was the companion of the unmarried. And he was so important, because he allowed them to stand these months, and months, and months of navigation. I've all -- never understood how the Pilgrim fathers did it, you see, what they did sing in these three months on board ship. Because you cannot live if you don't do anything in -- in -- inaction. And it is inaction to be marooned three months in such a boat, you see. And we have no report what they did. They died. Fifty percent died, but the other half didn't. So did they sing all the time? Did they vomit all the time? Did they eat all the time? I don't know.

And yet for the Greeks, gentlemen, this in-between time became the time of their lives. You cannot understand the Greeks if you think of them as Athenians, and Boeotians, as Thebans. They were travelers between cities. And that gives you quite a different character. The -- god Apollo is a god that compromises, negotiates, transacts between -- Zeus on Olympus, Poseidon in the sea, Hades

in the nether world. Apollo is therefore the god of the unmarried spirit, of genius. That's why he was allied with the -- to the Muses.

And if you think that the -- that the -- you can stay without Greek mythology, you are quite wrong. Anybody who is unmarried, and anybody who has the fate to stay in Cowell College, or in some other such institution, you see, for the demented, he -- he has to be led by the Muses. I got the {Rock} today, the invitation to the {Rock}, you see. That's a fabulous attempt to conjure up the Muses.

Who are the Muses? The Muses are, you see, one kind of angels. The Catholic Church believes in angels. The Greeks believe in Muses. There's not much difference between angels and Muses. They are always kept separate, and that's always one of the great misfortunes of our era. Angels are Muses, and Muses are angels. And you cannot understand the world, and its God as creator, if you do not understand that the God is the same -- who listens and who speaks, who sings and who commands, who condemns and who acquits,

All the Muses have, therefore, in -- in proportion, so to speak, one of these functions. It is quite -- much more difficult to believe in one God. You seem to -- to think it's not difficult. I always have felt it's very difficult, because we experience Muses. We experience angels, wicked and good angels. We certainly do not experience God, except in our -- the -- the day -- the hours in which we are ready to die. God is only visible or audible in a day -- on a battlefield when you know that this will be your last minute, on -- many other such critical moments. But real -- the real divinity is not a luxury for your evening prayers. He's very rarely kept, and held, and touched, because He is too dangerous. There is too much power in the real God. He has created the universe. He has created you. When you go in the -- to bed in the evening at 6, your memory is very faulty. What you take before Him is just a very tiny bit of yourself.

And therefore don't be betrayed. You can be musical. You can sing. You -- and one of the Muses, you see, is therefore Polyhymnia, for the music. But God--the same is true of the -- the Persians believed this, too--God is the one in whose faith in His presence all the speaking powers play. God decides whose voice He will listen to. Your prayer, somebody else's prayer. One only can be heard of, isn't that true? One prayer is better than another. It's more efficacious. It's more in His -- in His sense.

It's very strange. The oversimplification of God I resent. I think I'm quite an orthodox citizen of this world. But the -- your pretense that God is just a button you push in the telephone book is a mistake. You cannot approach God just like that. He's very far removed from your understanding and your en-

deavor.

And the Greeks said therefore that nine Muses were necessary before you could appeal on the memory of man, on the music of man, on the theatrical way of man, on the dramatic, on the justice, on the poetical, on the mental. I think that's much more real- -- realistic. God is so vast that the whole -- that the -- the fact that the Greeks selected the Olympic -- the Olympic mountains to harbor Him is very much more nor- -- normal to me than your idea that any moment you just mention Him, and He allows you to draw on Him by -- some black magic.

The Greeks were very religious people, and they created a religion for the in-between. The in-between for the Greeks is the migratory ti- -- period from one island to another. If you found 258 governments within 200 years--that's a bigger item than the founding of the United States--then you must understand that they needed a divine helper. Those people who were settled in Greece worshiped Dionysus. They worshiped the god who made settlement tolerable, because you could get drunk. Dionysus is a god of wine without movement. Apollo is the god of movement, you see, without wine. Salt water. That's -- was all they had on board ship. And a -- a ram, and a goat -- goat's milk.

And therefore the whole story of Greece is composed of this dualism, of the Dionysian religion of the people fortun- -- already settled, able to cultivate the -- the -- the grapes -- grapes, and drink themselves to death. And Apollo is the man on board -- the god on board ship, where you had to forgo all conveniences, where there was nothing to be had except a little water and piece of bread, and where -- which you could embellish and -- and glorify by song. The Greeks have been condemned to sing by the nature of their existence. They had to transform the terrible experiences of seasickness into music. Now you try this.