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

Would you -- close this door?

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to learn one Greek word today. It's a Greek word which nobody otherwise usually learns. And yet it contains the secret why a priest is not a poet, and a poet is not a priest. And since we are deep in the -- in the swamp of Greek poeticizing, and because you are in a liberal arts college, I think it is my duty to demand from you that this one Greek term, which -- perfectly harmless in itself, becomes known to you. The word is used in Homer in the beginning, and it contains the whole distinction between a priestly life and a poetical life, or a poetical action. And it seems to be unknown in this country, especially, which has all -- puzzled me all my life. I can tell you that when I was 10 years younger than you are now, this already has worried me. Because I knew and I saw that the poetical life doesn't lead to the good life. And the good life certainly doesn't lead to poetry.

And today there is this terrific confusion. The word which I recommend you is very harmless. Well, I must write it of course in -- pardon me, in -- in Latin script. It means {hamotin}. And in the beginning of the Homeric epics, the poet says to the Muse, "From all these stories which I want to tell my listeners, begin somewhere, dear Muse." Somewhere. That's what {hamotin} means. The difference between poetry and priesthood is that the priest is bound strictly in a beginning, a middle, and an end. Liturgy cannot deviate. The service -- the divine service goes in a necessary, indispensable, and irreplaceable, and unchangeable order, or it is not the divine service.

You take it so of course today for granted that the Church is also abused for Greek activities, for talks, and discussions. But that is no -- that is im- -- discussion, that is hot air. "To discuss" means to move the air. You do that. But out goes today, in this country especially, the severity of the service of God, that you have to celebrate the Sabbath. Who -- who understands this today? Why should you? You can just make the Monday into a Tuesday, the Tuesday into a Sunday, et cetera.

"{Hamotin.}" From "somewhere," the Muse begins. And that's what Homer in his greatness knew, that the thing, the deeds of the heroes of Greece, was dependent on the mus- -- music faculty to have something come to mind as an inspiration, anytime, anywhere. You can write a poem and you remember that we did re- -- listen to a poem written at midnight, in the midst of nowhere. That was Sappho's poem.

And that's very serious. Man has the freedom to deviate from the necessary course of events by this sprinkling of his arbitrary, poetical vein. You -- most of you live in this manner at this moment, but you must know that it is arbitrary, and that you are the most miserable of creatures if for the rest of your life you want to live in the same arbitrariness. And you end in Florida.

Life is not arbitrary. The mind is. This comes to mind, you can say, you see. Anything can come to mind. It is very hard for you to understand that the Greeks perished, were swallowed up, after Alexander the Great, by the Romans, and by the other empires and states, because to live by the Muse is impossible. To live by the Muse is impossible. She is the companion of the good life, but she is not the originator.

Goethe, who is said to have been quite a poet, wrote this poem for his -- when his son was born to him, and he was frightened that the son might follow the -- the poetic road of his father. He said it -- let me first say it in German: "S”hnchen, merke Dir bei Zeiten, Wenn sich Herz und Sinn erh”ht, dass die Muse zu geleiten, doch zu leiten nicht versteht." "My dear son, note, and note this in time, when your blood and your heart are beating high, that the Muse can accompany, but she cannot lead. The Mu- -- Muse can accompany, but she cannot lead."

You only have to think of Edgar Allan Poe, or of this unhappy creature Ginsburg to see that they can be the -- accompaniment of life, but they are not leaders. Anybody who wants to be led by the Muse, ends -- perishes either as an opium eater, or as a drinker, or as a pervert, or what have you.

No. No smoking. That's a Muse, too. I hope it's marijuana. Strange idea. He's very musical.

The Greeks felt that they had emerged from the drab, or monotonous, or sev- -- severe course of events by celebrating the Muse. And the emerging of the worship of the Muses therefore deserves your and my attention. Because as I said, obviously, we are still in Greece. Here, this whole liberal arts college pays homage to the Muses. And whatever you do in a classroom with a blackboard, you see, is musical -- follows the Muse. The invention of the Greeks is the blackboard. The blackboard of course is something terrible. But there it is. We have nothing better. We -- the real world has nice faces, and nice people, and angels, and devils, you see. The schoolroom has only the blackboard. And there stands revealed that it is all fiction. It is nothing real. It is all just your and my imagination.

And it cannot be stressed sufficiently after a century of -- of fantastic

devotion to the Muses, that this is so, that literature is fiction. We say so, even. But fiction is nothing that deserves your attention or your sacrifices. Not so easy. The conditions under which it perhaps deserves your attention and your sacrifices are very severe.

You -- you -- you see around you how many people destroy themselves at this moment, because they indulge in a homage to the Muses. From marijuana to -- to drunkenness, to suicide, it is all the same: the idea that your life is in your own hands.

Before the Muses were worshiped in the Homeric poem, there were perhaps -- it seems -- we know a lit- -- only a little, but it's quite interesting I think for you to know that they first tried to put the emphasis on a man called Musaeus. That is, the name of the Muses was personified in a person. This person seems to have lived around the days of Homer--we know very little about him; he's a mythical figure, as they say--but it was necessary for them -- for the Greeks to get hold of what this was, this musical attention. And he didn't win out. Of Musaeus we know very little, only that he was always mentioned as a beginner of Greek art, Greek poetry, Greek painting, Greek pottery, et cetera. And the Muses took his place.

Now let us look a little more carefully into these nine Muses, how they came about. In The Iliad, there is a catalog of the ships. That's one of the greatest achievements of poetry, the whole unfolding of the Greek army coming by Aulis is there given in the second book of The Iliad. Very wonderful. And in this list, at verse 594 ff., in the second book--and I want you very much to look it up--there it says that the Muses had to conquer, and had to defeat, and had to throw out a questionable gentleman called {Tamyrus}. Our books, if you look up the dictionaries, know nothing about him, except that the Muses slew him. They blinded him and sent him away. As I read the text, {Tamyrus} was active in Olympia near Pylos, where later the Olympic Games were -- were held. And of course you can imagine that Olympia was the center of Greek poetry and Greek competition--wrestling and boxing, just as much as singing.

Now {Tamyrus}, it seems from an old tradition, means the local, enthusiastic frenzy of the medicine man, of the chieftain in Mycenae, in -- in -- near -- near Pylos, near Nestor's Pylos in the south of Greece. And the -- the verses in Homer say the Muses, the nine Muses from the Olympus, up north in Thessaly, threw out this {Tamyrus}, and took revenge on him because he didn't honor them, but he tried to sing on his own.

We have here, in -- in so many words, the process by which the unity of Greece, which could not be achieved politically, or geographically, commercially,

legally, was achieved by singing. The nine Muses are the same in all of Greece. And they are the only goddesses who are identifiable throughout Greece.

And {Tamyrus}, our old lexi- -- lexicographer {Sweder} says -- means the popular assembly of a tribe, you see, the little group that sings together. So that this word {Tamyrus} needed substitution by the all-Greek Muses. Where you have the nine Muses, you have Greece. That is, you have the same language, despite the fact that there are 285 republics.

It is, I think, worth your mentioning -- worth mentioning, that you can see -- look into the process by which that which is today called poetry, or Greece, or art, and -- has come about. It was a very painful process. The local frenzy, the local mores, the local festivals had to be replaced by something universally Greek, pan-Greek. All Greece is represented by the nine Muses. They were the same on Delos, in Delphi, in Corinth, in Athens, in Olympia. And you know from the Olympiads today, in the sport, that they are -- have this rank to this day, that where you have the Olympiad, you have not a local competition. You just have not the village near Pylos in which the -- the -- Mr. {Tamyrus}--that is, the shaman, the medicine man--sings his local songs. But you have the nine Muses. Somebody comes over all the mountains and competes with all the other Greeks. And that is Olympia, competition between all the singers.

I mentioned already to you that Delos, the island, is obviously the first is- -- center in which these songs were intoned, of The Iliad and The Odyssey themselves. These two great songs, of course, were sung. They were recited. And this recit- -- recitation brought together the tribes for weeks and weeks. They would land on such an island and have a good time, a high time, an exalted time.

So what we call today the -- the stage, the theater, was prepared by these pan-Greek celebrations which took place from the North, or from the Olympus mountain, which is south of Saloniki. When you enter Greece, you have to -- to pass the Olympus mountains, and they are 9,000 feet high, and have eternal snow, and therefore are quite imposing, and certainly were not climbed in antiquity. They were just as imposing as Mount Rainier here perhaps is. And coming down then the whole length of Greece, the Muses went from place to place. And who is Greek, that was marked off by this fact that he would go and listen to the nine Muses, and ceased to be an adept of this wild medicine man, {Tamyrus}.

That is, we have -- an old gloss that says, "{Tamyrus}, people's assembly," which means simply, you see, the -- the town meeting, so to speak. So that this probably had never been a man. It -- was only later turned into a man's name, but is simply the political expression for the town meeting, for the small unit

which is not capable of running a state, or running a confederacy, or of being of political importance. It's the difference between speaking dialect and speaking high English, you see. From the very first day, the nine Muses speak Greek. But the local elders spoke -- Aeolian, and Boeotian, and Athenian, and that was a very drastic and drab dialect.

This country is -- privileged before any other, because we have not a -- a local dialectical display. We have -- we have the slang, which is a dialect that changes year after year. The difference between slang and dialect is -- marks the difference between America and Europe. In Europe, in every valley of Switzerland, they speak a different language, you see. Here, you speak a different language from me. I cannot understand you, but you can't understand me, either.

This is quite a way out, to invent the slang, you see, so that every two years, you -- keep it cool.

The Greek art, or all art, you see, has a unifying, and abstracting, and leveling influence. Poetry needs a language. -- When you read a novel, you may mix in some local slang from New York or Santa Cruz. But it's very rare compared to the high English which you -- must write there, and which has very little to do with what you really say at home. If you would watch what you -- how you speak at home, you would realize that we too have a literary language, which is far away from what you usually chew.

The -- the Muses then, without political power, without military might, without a navy and without an army, have unified Greece. And thereby the people at leisure, the Greeks at leisure, at their festivals became a nation. And what we call a national literature all takes today its leaf from Greece. Because you assume that the Albanese can have a literature, and even the people in California--which is very doubtful, but they try. The Americans can have a literature. National literature to you is a self-understood thing. You assume that the people in Wales have a literature. They think so, too. They have even, as you know, according to the model of the Greeks, annual great festivals in which there is competition in singing--do you know this?--in Wales.

And I had a friend who was a proud Welshman, and he always tried to sing them to me, but I couldn't understand a word. But this is going on. This -- the Welsh live today still by these singing matches. People get up and begin to recite, and then another gets up and tries to sing him down. And the Welsh language would be dead long ago if they hadn't this remedy, you see, to -- to sing in exalted language of the glorious past of the Welsh. And the eagerness of the Welsh is -- is remarkable. I mean, here they are, this little, little bit of someth-

ing, you see, with Lloyd George as the only man.

The creation of language, therefore, is something that you must understand as following very different ways, indeed. The Greek language has been kept alive through the arts. Not through politics. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cicero had to bow to the Greek language. And they did. They read it, and they spread it.

When this Roman-Greek story came to an end in the 4th century of our era, there was a great father of the Church. And he was so eloquent--he spoke such wonderful Greek--that he was given the name John Golden-Mouth, Chrysostomos. You may have read in some theological book or historical book his name, John Chrysostomos. "Chrysos" is gold, and "stomos" -- "stoma" means mouth. So John Chrysostomos means man of the golden mouth. And he once more personified Greek eloquence. But he, looking back to his way from paganism to Christianity, said that the Greek plane, the Greek odyssey, the Greek navigation around the universe now was at an end. And I think it was a very important fact that the last, most eloquent Greek who could measure up to Homer, and to Aeschylus, and Euripides, in looking back to these political vagaries, called it all a plane -- you know, like the word "planet." You know, that the planets are called, because they are irregular in the sky; they are on an errancy. They are vague, and irregular, inpredictable, and mischievous. They mislead us. Exactly what poetry does.

Pardon me for stressing first this negative side of the poe- -- poa- -- poets. They are not meant to rule. Where the poets rule, the people perish. And since this is not said in this country, you see, it has to be said. All the Americans in their -- in their privilege of a safe harbor and -- will end in Pearl Harbor.

Poetry is not the guide of life; it's the companion of life. This seems to me at this moment the most important insight into this strange buildup of our universe. We have given free range to the Muses. There is nothing that has not been written, formed. Stage plays have been staged, and poetry -- poems have been recited, and monuments have been erected. We have sculpture; we have painting. And it looks all so wonderfully rich, that you forget that it is utterly arbitrary.

The law of life is not there where you have leisure, where you have free time. The order of life is where you have liturgy, where you have an- -- in- -- unshuttered and adamant sequence of events. As you know, the -- or you don't know. When Greek -- the Greek plane, the Greek errancy, the Greek mischievous navigation through all the oceans of the mind came to an end, the Greek expressions for the stage, for the theater, the entrance for -- of the hero on the Greek

stage, and the way he went out, and the place for the chorus, where he had the -- he had to stand when he accompanied the death of Agamemnon, the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra -- these places on the stage served as the words for signifying the Christian Mass, the Christian service. The divine service in the Catholic Church, or--especially in the Greek Church, of course--are borrowed from Greek tragedy. It was the way of sanctifying even the ways of genius, the ways of poetry, you see, of saying, "Now this is no longer a theater. Jesus is a -- the real man who goes to His Crucifixion, not just a figure like Agamemnon, whom a poet has given life and words."

I think that's important, and it is never mentioned and -- for good reason, of course, because the professors of literature don't want to show that they ended in bankruptcy in the antiquity. The bankruptcy of the Greek theater, this one end of all Greek art, and poetry is in -- contained in this transmission, in this migration of the words for the Greek stage into the Mass of the Cath- -- Christian Church.

The Christian Church--and we'll come to this very soon, I think, next time--is the heir of Israel and of Greece. And as much of Greece as of Israel. And it's funny that nobody knows this. The bishops I have talked to have no idea that the expressions for the divine service are partly taken from Greek tragedy.

Which only goes to show that Greek tragedy had to be overcome, had to be metamorphosized, had to be transformed into something more real, more powerful, more sacrificial, and containing not a dead-end street, but an openingup of a new horizon into the future.

The Muse accompanies. If you would write this down as the main -- and first result of our discussion of the arts, you will never be able then to go totally astray. You know all the victims in your -- in your midst, of the boys and girls who cannot see it this way, and who think that the -- these means of getting the intoxication of an artistic experience, you see, are freely available to you, even if they destroy you. The number of victims of the liberal arts is quite considerable. In -- in my class, when I graduated in 1906--it was a very, very small class--but one-fourth of the -- of the boys with whom I had graduated had committed suicide when the World War I broke out. The other half was killed in the -- in the war.

The victims of the liberal arts are very considerable. The reason, of course, being that to stand in front of a blackboard is impossible. This chases you into the world. You cannot sit here, you see. You get nervous and you go to the next best irritant and stimulus, because you have seen enough of this after a while.

The Greeks have coined the word which you take for granted. Where are you here? You are in school. The word "school" is a Greek term, and it means leisure. It doesn't mean what you call "school." It doesn't mean a grind. But it means the freedom of spending your time according to your own volition, exactly what the Muses invite you to do. The word "skhole" in Greece does not mean to be in school, but to be at leisure. "Scholastic" -- you know the word, and "scholar," therefore are in Greece very noble words, because they mean -- they mean this -- the man of independent means, the man of independent time. And you should know this. You have de- -- we have degraded this by calling it "grammar school," by calling -- only seeing the little child, struggling, you see, and going to school in the morning because it has to. In fact, the word "school" means you do something which you don't have to do, which you volunteer to do.

And that is the eternal, original meaning. And if you think you are in school here, you abuse your being here. You should feel that you are here at leisure. Then you will use your time right. But you -- of course think, "My parents pay," or Mr. -- the governor pays, and--does he?--and therefore I can do as I please, even against the -- the schedule.

I think it's important that you restore the meaning of the word "school" to its Greek ori- -- origin, where it means that time of life which is neither here nor there, which is {hamotin}, somewhere.

So go home and open your Iliad and Odyssey, and you will find on the first line this word "{hamotin}," "somewhere" occurs. And now we come to the secret. Once it is looked through, that the Muses have no political power, have no guidance to -- to -- to distribute for your actions, but are entertaining you in an in-between world of semblances, of metaphors, of pictures, of ideas.

If you consider this, then you will not be surprised to find that the difference between liturgy and poetry is in this right of the poet to begin in the 10th year of the war of Troy. A -- a -- a priest would have had to enact the ten years. The liturgy of life is that all the 10 years, you see, are there, somewhere mentioned. The poet can just skip it; and he does. And you know, the greatness of The Iliad consists in this very fact that it begins with the { }, with the wrath of Achilles, and omits all the { } and boring details of the first nine years. Well, then I can be a poet, too. It's very easy. All the boring things, you see, are omitted. Only the interesting things are given. That's called "literature." And you admire this, and -- but you don't know the price of this. It's a fiction as though this drab, and monotonous, and slow life doesn't have to be -- lived. You cannot be interesting all the time. But that's what people today try. Here in college, you all try to be so interesting, that you -- that you take up any -- any irritant, any-

thing stimulating in order to have this feeling all the time that it is worth living. It can't be done, because life is monotonous, life is slow. Life is un- -- not -- under your and my rule.

I have been in the trenches for six years. I have been a soldier -- I have not been in the trenches for six years, but three years. You don't -- wouldn't believe what boredom this entails, how you really felt you couldn't stand it for one more minute. And the whole problem was that you had to stand it, several more minutes.

And this is the secret of living, of course, that the time is not under your or my administration.

So the spur of the nine Muses is this attempt to escape, to run away from the liturgy of life. And I use the word "liturgy" on purpose, because it would be a great help for your own judgment over your own life if you would see that half of life must be lived liturgically. You will have a good wedding for your sister or for yourself if you know that such a wedding has to have a liturgy, an order which is adamant. Sin- -- why the daughter has to leave her parents' home, and has to be given over to her husband. If it isn't, something will -- is bound to happen. Now it doesn't here, except the divorce. That's the only remnant of the liturgy in this country now, of wedding. Because you pay a terrible price if you try to escape the liturgy. You can be sure that in some unexpected and very painful way, this crushing of the proper order of things will come home to roost and will demand its toll from you.

The liturgy of life is, as I said, today suspect. The word is {foreign}; it isn't taken seriously. I know no better word to express this fact, that the -- if you follow the Greek way, you enter the myth without the liturgy. I have -- spoken of this in -- in Egypt. I said to you the liturgy was the going-down of the pharaoh from the First Cataract to the -- to the mouth of the riv- -- Nile River, with all his entourage conquering and -- and calling Osiris into life, the -- the river god, the flood, the fertile flood. And then there was the myth telling his return next year, which nobody saw, because of course this myth said that he went to the -- to the deserts of Libya or Nubia and then could undertake the liturgical journey from the South to the North again.

You have the same in the Church, of course; when the Mass is celebrated, this is liturgical. How the priest became a priest, how he donned his -- his--how do you call it? his in- -- vestments in the vestry -- that is not mentioned. The faithful don't see this. And that would be the mythical part of the story. And the liturgy would only -- that which you can share in, where you can accompany the priest, you see, in his actions, and understand what's going on.

I would like to say that this course has done its -- its most necessary duty, if you would believe that in all history, the liturgy and the myth are twins. Something has to be said which we cannot follow out. The whole meaning of the -- of the Mass of the Last Supper, of the Holy Communion cannot be told while it is going on. You have to admit that there were twelve Apostles, and that the Lord went to the Cross; and you have to know this is -- that is the story.

As you know, our theologians--funny people as they are--have now -- developed a whole system of de-mythologizing, whatever that may mean. And they are the real myth-maker -- -makers. And I have a great hatred against what they are doing, because they want to -- to betray us of our heritage, that part of our life consists in stories -- of stories which have to be told, and part of life has to be enacted by you and me, faithfully, at cemeteries, or at -- in funerals, in weddings, in what have you, on birthday parties, examinations, et cetera. They try to convey to you the notion that -- that the myth is superfluous, and the liturgy is wanton, is arbitrary. That's not so.

Mankind is bound by certain orders. The word "ritual" and the word "liturgy" are quite decent origin. The word "ritual" comes from the -- the same root as the word "virtue" in Greece -- Greek "{arete}." And it is common in India, and in -- in the Germanic languages, and in Greek, and in Rome. And this already "ritus", "ritual" is the same word as litur- -- as -- as "virtue." And this should put on brakes for your contempt for the liturgy.

What has been done by the Greek mentality for the last 150 years is this contempt for the liturgy. I don't find any of you at your age having a feeling that liturgy is nothing except high church. Arbitrary, I mean. It's just solemnity, so many ceremonies, et cetera. Don't believe this, gentlemen, and friends. You are only human beings if you know how to bury a person. And that's the liturgy. I can't help it. And most people don't know how to bury, and so they go to the undertaker. But you should overtake the undertaker.

It's highly necessary that you can bury your friend, and decently, and in the proper manner, and so that everybody understands that a good man now is buried. You have no idea of this. You think it's something pecuniary. You -- you pay a sum of $10 or -- $700, you see, and le- -- leave it to the commercial people to bury them, The Beloved. This is scandalous. You are absolutely impotent. You cannot cope with the slightest problem. And -- no accident in your family, no mischief in your family, no illness can be treated by you in the proper shape. You go to doctors, you go to nurses, you go to professors. How about yourself? Aren't you anybody? Don't you have any voice in the matter? Don't you have any style in the matter? No. You read poetry. You read then Lord Byron's, you see, dirge to drunkenness.

This is scandalous. I mean, the -- the helplessness of this whole class with regard to any catastrophe in life stinks. You haven't learned to do anything, to cope with reality. But you can drive a car, and -- and then comes the accident, and then the car is smashed up, and some undertaker comes and carries away the -- the corpse. But not you yourself.

So this Greek problem is -- is very burning today. And you know there have been reactions. I mean, you know, Mitfor- -- Lady Mitford's book--what is it called? The American Way of Death--in which this is described, your impotence. You are impotent to cope with reality, because you want only to be potent in the sensuousness. But to make sense, my dear people, you have to be able to be potent with regard to forms, with regard to consecration, with regard to blessings, with regard to prayers, with regard to songs, and not just with regard to your five senses. It's -- absolutely scandalous what's going on in this country, that you can buy liturgy for money: "first-class funeral."

There are no first-class funerals. There is only stench. And -- it is not ac- -- no accident that an Englishwoman had to write this book, The American Way of Death. And what are they? They are like the harlequins. These undertakers are the richest men in the community, the most distinguished people in the community, you see; and you all pay homage to these bastards. But they come in, because nobody else does it. Because there is no tradition. Your parents don't teach you how to bury somebody. But it should be learned. I had to bur- -- bury my father and my father-in-law, with my own words and my own hands. And that's quite an instruction, I assure you.

And why shouldn't you? I mean, why -- what is extraordinary about this? It's the most normal thing in the world, that what happens in -- in my family, I am master of it, and I can do it.

All this is -- comes from the es- -- overestimation of the nine Muses, because they are somewhere. They are not at the proper liturgical place of your or my life. But they are between 11 and 12. That is, an hour borrowed from eternity, you see, for leisure.

A colleague of mine in the liberal arts manufacturing business wrote a book on the Puritans. And of course, being a Greek, he said the Puritans had 180 days of leisure, meaning all their holidays and their Sundays. Well, they would have turned in their graves if they had been told that a Sabbath was a -- was a holiday, was a day of leisure.

And the last thing then I want to -- tell you is that leisure--which comes from "let be," "let go," "let alone"--and holiday have nothing to do with each

other. Any such gentleman who says that the Puritans had so-and-so many days of leisure dishonors the Puritans and has no idea of real life. Because they had holidays, and that's the opposite from leisure. Holidays are in a liturgy in -- in -- inside which we walk, inside which we perform the duties of a human being -- to our neighbors, to our maker, to the animals, to the fields, to the wood, to the sea, to the -- neighboring nations; that's liturgy. You have to send a message in all directions if you want to live the good life. The messages are different kinds. The wood needs a message that hasn't the same content as -- as the Mexicans, you see. But messages have to go, if you want to be at peace with the rest of the world.

Now these messages -- messengers, these ang- -- angels--that's a Greek word, you know, "angel" for messenger--pop- -- people the world. We are surrounded by angels, if we are healthy. The Muses are only one form of angels. It's the same idea. The Persians called them angels, messengers; the Greeks called them Muses.

Since you do not know this, that the Muses are only one form of angels, you are very unhappy today. You have isolated the Muses into something very unangelic, into something of drunkenness or vice, or bor- -- fighting boredom or something. But in fact the Muses tell you -- tell us to fill out the -- the empty moment with the proper movement. In this sense, the Muses must be rescued and re- -- vindicated today. We have to emigrate from -- mere Greece, from the liberal arts college. But we have to know that the world is peopled by voices, by actions, by interactions, by letter-writing, by correspondence, by tel- -- even by telephone calls, long distance.

And these are the angels. The Greeks had not this word "{angeloi}" at all, but they helped themselves with this word "Muse," which means sounding boards, some- -- something like that. It has of course to do with the word -- of the word "mind," "mental," you see; it's the same syllable.

Perhaps it's worth your while to take note that the word "Muse" is contracted from the word "mind." That is, "nd," is contained in -- in this long "u" -- "u." It has been here thrown out. Now you can't recognize that the Muses are something every one of us experiences when he uses his mental faculties. The Muses are your and my mental faculty. And they are those angels by which we transcend our physical limitations. Any mental faculty enables you to meet, to join, to communicate, to transform your environment. And there is nothing -- there is perhaps something miraculous, but there's something -- nothing unnatural in believing that we are surrounded by angels.

And you would do better if you would begin to believe this. It is much

more -- truer than -- that your own mind is sovereign and master. It isn't. It has a nervous breakdown tomorrow. You are full of nervous breakdowns, because you don't live -- believe either in good angels nor in bad. So you never meet the Devil just when he has you here, at his -- your neck. It is all forbidden today to speak of the Devil, except in Church in the afternoon. But the angels, and the Muses, and the devils, and the demons, and the spirits, they all have to do, of course, with Greece, with the Muses, with music, with the theater, with the stage, because the -- the form of the Greek mind is that you can "somewhere," "somehow" get hold of them and dismiss them again. but they will never overwhelm you, that they will not choke you, that they will not kill you, but that they are, so to speak, of a second-rate nature, what we call "entertainment." If you look at the word "entertainment," it means in between. "Enter," in between your attitudes which are necessary. Here you work; there you eat; in between you are entertained, you see.

And this weakness, I think, is the greatest accusation against this modern philosophy of the humanists, of the scholar, of the leisure group. Leisure is without direction. And if a country like this one boasts of leisure, it is nuts. It will go mad. It will go insane, as you -- are in Vietnam, because there is no -- rhyme or reason anymore for any action, once you live for leisure, for this purpose of being at leisure. We are not meant to be at leisure. Is a -- is a -- is an animal--a lion, an elephant--meant to be at leisure? Now should we be a little more than elephants and lions? If they are not meant to be at leisure, we certainly aren't. We have a mission to fulfill. Every hour is full of duties. I have to tell you these things, because you are at great danger, my dear people. If I don't tell you this, obviously something can go wrong. That's why I teach you. Do you see -- think I feel this is a luxury? I have just thought this out, because somebody has the bright idea of asking me to come here? Why do I teach this? Because you are in danger of drowning in Greek -- in Greek civilization or what have you.

The danger of life--that's what I tried to say--is the limitation of the Greek leisure. Where there is danger, there is a must, there is a necessity. And so the problem of the Greek tradition boils down to the fact that the Greeks are filling our empty spots. our leisurely moments. They entertain us, they refresh us--like Sappho in her lonely hour at midnight. And who will not bow his head to the greatness of this poem? But you must also know that this poem is a poem. That is, that it does not organize reality, you see. But it comes into reality for assuaging it, for -- mitigating it, for giving us some linien- -- ointment in the plagues of everyday living.

So please, what I try to -- have tried to say is: there is a relationship of the liturgy of the Muses, of their singing, and the liturgy of liv- -- living. For the Greeks, it meant that they all got together beyond the narrow scope of their little

towns. Greek art, Greek Muses--just as the Olympic Games today, are justified--because they take the man out of the narrow confines of his everyday living and put him already in advance, in a larger community, you see, of the future. All Olympic Games promise the peace of mankind. All art, all theater--when you go to Shakespeare play, I hope you do--As you Like It -- Twelfth Night--is an attempt to anticipate a day of peace in the future. If you deny this futuristic function of the arts, you get into trouble. We can be -- may be Greeks if the arts are subservient to the final future of all men. If they are universal, if they are Catholic, if they speak one language to all. If -- if they don't, then they lead you astray.

This is also the measurement for the vices, very often declared and described in the arts. As far as sterility, perversions, drunkenness, and so is praised in the arts, you see, they have a very limited right to exist. It is the -- criterion is always the universal character of this poetry, of this sculpture, of this painting, of this drama, you see. If more than peo- -- people can be gathered and be impressed by it than before, then they heard of -- the saga of the -- of Orestes, or of The Odyssey, then it is justifiable.

So the political character of the Muses is the anticipation of the future of mankind. The Greeks are model cases, because they demanded from the people that they left their hometown, and came to Corinth, and came to Olympia. And it is very significant that this place, Olympia, near Mycenae, in -- in the South of Greece--which has been excavated, as you know, and where we have found there very beautiful statues in the last 70 years--that this place is far away from the mountain of -- the Olympic mountain in the North of Greece. The Greeks felt that the domination of the nine Muses, under the leadership of the Olympic Zeus--he -- they were called his daughters, these Muses, which he had begotten from his -- from {hymnosine}, from his mind--that these nine Muses were carrying the message of all Greece into every corner of Greece. And it is quite strange that there is in Thessaly, the high, snow mountain of the Olympus Mount- -- and the place, Olympia, is -- cannot be seen from there. You cannot see the Olympus in Olympia. But here they were, {Tamyrus}, the local singer, you see, dethroned -- thrown down. We sing something that all Greeks have in common.

And now you can understand why The Odyssey and The Iliad became the great -- the great center of the Greek literature, because both united all Greek tribes. They mentioned in the first place in The Iliad, their togetherness, their march towards Troy, these hundreds and hundreds of ships. And then Od- -- in Odysseus, he mastered the sea, he goes through all the islands and channels of Italy, Asia Minor, Egypt, the {Circars}, I mean, the -- North Africa, and --.

If you, after the lecture, come forward and look at the map, it is too small, I

know for you now to under- -- to see it--but here it is, in the latest book of -- on the Greek spirit and the Greek religion, by a man who has been 10 years in a concentration camp in Russia, and who has studied in Paris; and he's quite a remarkable man. And I -- despite the -- this fact that he has studied in -- in France and lived in -- or vegetated in -- in Siberia, has written the book in English. Which is also a very mus- -- a victory of the Muses. Here he has given this strange map of the Greek plane, of the Greek errancy, of the Greek migration.

You will recall in your own mind, I'm sure, a little bit, the map of the Eastern Mediterranean. And all the great sagas of Greece try to -- to tell the story of the movement from one place to another. It's not a local story ever, you see. It's always the movement. Orestes goes from Argos to Athens in -- in -- in the tragedy, you see. That's the great point, that all the cities are brought together. And the -- the Greek tragedy is a way of giving the leadership of the Greeks to the Athenians. They played the heroic stories of their neighboring cities. In Oedipus, they told the story of Thebes. And in -- in the trilogy of Agamemnon, they told the story of Argos. It's far away, these two towns, but they were enacted in Athens so that the Athenians could now boast that they had been made at home in these neighboring cities. Just as you think, when you listen to Shakespeare, that you are part of merrie olde England.

The theater is translocal; it mobilizes us. And to this day, we are -- we are educated by being able to give our hearts to something that has not happened at home, to our own parents and our own relatives, but to others.

The Greeks not only united in these celebrations, but they did more. They invented a new script. They invented for the recitation of their great epics a musical script which contained vowels. Any -- most of you will know that the Hebrew, the Phoenician, the Chinese language doesn't write vowels. It only -- they only write words, or syllables, or consonants. Now the Greeks invented five vowels for the simple purpose that the reciter, the singer, the blind Homer could recite these verses, you see, with the proper intonation. Because the -- the great clue of this invention was that there was a short "e," the so-called epsilon, and there was a long -- epsilon, the long -- called "eta." The same way you had the omicron, and you had the omega. And you still know these words quite well, the long "o," and the short "o." What is not in the books, strangely enough, is that the reason for the Greeks was that in this manner, the manuscripts of the Greek singing could be handed over to newcomers, you see, and they could know how to recite them. Because if you have the {dachyla}, the hexameter, you have the six heavy accents, and two -- and 12 shorts, then you must know which vowel has to spoken slowly: "oh," and which has to be spoken briefly, "oah." And this they did.

And so the Greek alphabet is a great innovation. And it's the laziness of the philologists that they don't -- never dwell on this great contribution. The oldest Greek script was simply Phoenician script. We can now read it. A great man in England, Ventris -- Michael Ventris, who unfortunately died from an automobile accident in 1952, in -- discovered how to read the Cretean and Mycenaean language. But the Homeric period, 800 B.C. by and large, added to this old script these five vowels: epsilon, alpha, omega, u, and oi. And for this reason, it was possible to write down the Homeric poems, you see, for anybody, for -- to recitation.

I think that's worth your knowledge, that writing can be something very poetical, and something very important. It's not just a technicality. The idea of dividing the -- the sounds into long and short has to do with the necessity of celebrating these festivals in -- in Delos, or in Olympia. And somebody had to get up and be able to decipher them, you see, when the man who sang them had a cold and couldn't speak it himself.

You don't find this in the books. There are certain things which I have -- tried to learn outside of them.

Now this Greek alphabet, and these Greek Muses, and this Greek leisure did not spare Greek independence. The Greek independence is a dream of 130 years, or 150 years. From the Battle of Salamis, in which the Persians were turned back, to the conquest by Alexander the Great in 336. Battle of Chaeronea; it was his father who really defeated Greek independence. Now -- you may say it's a short while that this whole Greek civilization had his own day. It is a very short while. And it's a -- miraculous that it ever had his day at all, because by the nature of their political location, they were impossible; they were unable to defend themselves. You must understand that the Greek spirit is a disarming spirit, and a disarmed spirit. There is no way for Greece to be independent.

Then later came -- fell into -- under the Diadochs, the sec- -- the followers of Alexander, until the -- the Romans swallowed up finally the Turks. And that's only natural. The -- Greece is not made for political independence. It's important to know this, that you must not be tempted by Greece if you want political independence. Political independence takes power, and not the nine Muses. We want to have it both ways today, and that's not so easy. It's impossible.

So the same geography, however, which bound the Greeks to these musical celebrations, to these temporary gatherings in Olympia and at the other competitions, who made the Greeks the gamesters of the world--the people who invented the pentathlon, and the competition in racing, and all the laurels, you see, of the Olympia victor--these same situation of a weak, political unit inside a

world of empires--like Rome, or Egypt, or Persia--also played a part in the coming-up of the counter-force of the Greeks, to which we now have to turn. The counter- -- -force, of course, of the Greeks is -- who? Wie? Israel is. The Jews.

The Jews did with their same equipment--the geographical equipment, a very poor geographical equipment--the opposite from the Greeks. They relegated the Muses, they exiled them from their order, and proclaimed the law of the Lo- -- coming of the Lord. They devoted themselves to the future. They are the nation of the prophecy. They are the nations were the angels of the Lord are not Muses, but are angels. Angels of wrath, and angels of mercy, but certainly not nine Muses singing and twiddling: twiddle-a-dee and twiddle-a-doo.

It is very hard for you to understand--I have put up this map, and I would like you to look at it, because on this map, you see that the same geography can lead different people to two opposite solutions. You know we come from a pagan century in which everything -- among other things, was derived from natural causes. From climate, mountains, water, you see. If you drank a certain amount of water, you were a genius; if you had drunk another water, you were an idiot. And on it goes, all these natural causes. Now I don't believe in natural causes. I've never seen one. I only know that a human being who is exposed to natural causes will fight to the -- to his death to overcome them. Natural causes are only a reason not to obey them. Who is a man, if he gives in to natural reason? Be ashamed of -- even -- ev- -- even thinking this! Man is provoked if there is a natural cause to think, "What of it? To Hell with it. Natural cause, that's not good enough for me." So they marry the most impossible girl, only because it would be natural, you see, not to marry her.

Please don't believe in natural causes, or you go to Hell. And we are in Hell, because of the people -- who think they have to follow natural reason. There are no natural reasons. Nature has no reasons. Nature is just blind, deaf, and dumb. Physics. Goes in the laboratory. We are, after all, the people who make physics, because we are superior to physics.

Now I'm quite serious. The -- the strange story by which we may be able today to recover our sense of the sublime, our sense of your freedom, our sense of our destiny is: if you come to the conclusion that Israel and the Greeks were living in exactly the same conditions, and did the opposite with it, drew the opposite conclusion, and though they were identical people, you see, because all -- Thebes, Salamis, all these people, these were Semites who -- who settled in Thebes --. Cadmus was of course a Jew -- for -- for modern racial concepts, you see, the first king of Thebes. And on it goes. This is -- hasn't made Greece, or this hasn't made Israel. But the turning in freedom to a task for the rest of mankind has made the Greeks the great artists and the great playwrights of the world, and

the epic -- writers of the epic, and has made the Jews the people of the prophecy.

And so next time we will turn to the fact that the same geography, the same environment, the same conditions can lead one man to earth, and the other to Heaven.