Question Mark 0950830801

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Copyright © B. W. Thring 1983

ISBN 0 9508308 0 1

Privately printed for the Author by Aiderman Printing & Bookbinding Co. Ltd., Russell Road, Ipswich IP1 2BN. 1983

QUESTION MARK

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Postface Preface, 1981-2 Ancient Parchments White Goddess Aristobulus Sources Literature and Athens Aristophanes the Comedian The Republic Aeschylus , . . . . . Sophocles and Euripides The Odyssey Hesiod and Isaiah More Plays Toynbee and the Gospelmakers

Page i 1 13 25 33 49 63 79 95 115 131 141 151 175

learning: This is the story of a search, written more or less as it proceeded. Conclusions are provisional.

SOME BOOKS QUOTED

G. I. Gurdjieff

All and Everything, or, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (A & E). Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York, 1950.. U.K. edition Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Meetings with Remarkable Men, (RM). Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Views from the Real World, Early Talks. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. It includes Glimpses of Truth.

Third Series, Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am”. Privately printed, 1975. P. D. Ouspensky

In Search of the Miraculous, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. Harcourt, Brace, 1949.

W. F. Albright

The Archaeology of Palestine, Pelican, 1949, revised to 1960.

F. J. Foakes Jackson History of the Christian Church to A.D. 461. Deighton Bell, 6th Edition 1914, reprinted to 1954.

Barbara Mertz

Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs. Delta, 1964.

W. M. Flinders Petrie Egypt and Israel. S.P.C.K., 1911.

Arnold J. Toynbee

A Study of History, Volume 6. Galaxy, 1962. First edition 1939.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Fourteenth Edition 1937. Penguin and Loeb Classics and other titles given in text. RECOMMENDED INTRODUCTIONS TO GURDJIEFF Fritz Peters: Boyhood with Gurdjieff. Gollancz, 1964.

Dr. Kenneth Walker: Venture with Ideas. Jonathan Cape, 1951.

POSTFACE PREFACE 1981-2

'T'HIS BRYNHILD WAS BORN in Melbourne on 20 November A 1913, and had an orthodox education, Newnham, London School of Economics, picture galleries, Paris sightseeing. She went to Ouspensky’s lectures in 1937, was in J. G. Bennett’s group through the war and at his Institute for Comparative Study, Coombe Springs, Kingston-on-Thames, from 1946 to 1966. She was one of the many visitors to George Gurdjieff’s Paris flat in 1948-9. She got from him a spark of faith to hold on to through what proved a withdrawal from life (in 1954) into the “unconscious”, with conviction that “they”, the dead, were leading. Mental languages of puns, symbols, numbers and colours developed. “Spelling” related words by their consonants. These were reduced to nine, 1, m, n, r, with k g, t d, b p, th v f, s z sh j grouped. Gurdjieffs made-up words invited interpretation. What were the “inexactitudes in art” to which he devotes an interminable chapter of Beelzebub? Gospels show small discrepancies, variant names, repetition of similar incidents. So there was persistent interest in Christian origins, with much imagination, little fact. She finally concluded that “there never could have been a divine person like Jesus, things don’t happen like that.” Then what did happen? Church Fathers made “Simon Magus” originator of Gnosticism. She thought he was a Gurdjieff-like writer with occult inspiration, and able to train young people. For personal reasons there was obsession with the idea of some psychic manifestation between “Stephen” and Katharine of Alexandria. Stephen’s death was believed to be by a fall while observing an eclipse in a high wind, from the battlements of the Jewish temple in Egypt.

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In 1973 she started writing what grew unintended into a book, Flying Saucer: Gurdjieff Revisits Earth, about the experience. Thereafter she was led into pagan literature, making unexpected discoveries which she considers are known to scholars, though only published by “inexactitudes” such as irony or proximity, to be read between the lines. The path was enlivened by “artichokes” — arty jokes — correspondences between ancient literature and Gurdjieffs writing, strewn like Hansel and Gretel pebbles, till it seemed his mission was to prepare publication of the secrets. Then archaeologists would no longer need subterfuge to harmonise their findings with scriptural history and perhaps we could have more honesty of discussion on world problems, or even a Renaissance! On ‘Who wrote Mark’s gospel?’ this non-classical-scholar had to travel via India, China, Greece and Babylonia to reach what Latinists can find quickly. So Question Mark is only a beginning. Try dipping into it, or start with Aristophanes. It is meant to be food, not logic. (P.S., December 1982. No, not quickly.) The writer would like to introduce beginners younger than herself to Greeks who have been good for her continuing education. She asks tolerance for the many references to Gurdjieffs books; the whole work flows from him as a seminal teacher. It is offered as Brain Research by witness of own head­ scratching, a kind of meditation. One cautiously expressed theme of the book is psychic sex, “It”, the arrheton, or psychic phallus, as on pp. 68 and 105, and on p. 118 about Oedipus. It is suspected of being Socrates’ daimon. The word arrheton, “thing not to be named”, mysterious object acting in the subconscious or underworld, is taken from Jung’s precious “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” p. 123, Fontana, where he calls it his No. 2. Sensations without evident physical cause. Made from reversed excretory nerve stimuli, nappy or sanitary towel reminiscences, or what? Morally neutral. A factor in insanity? Finger of God, auto­ eroticism, wet dreams. Multiform enigma about which one must not dare to dogmatise. As a password in literature and art, it shows acquaintance with the unconscious, but water closet seems more useful. Or call it lavatory — love door? Remember woman can be allegory for ii

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soul, which has to suffer and learn patience. Mixing bowl for ideas. For this female’s organs, womb squeeze is a way “they” say Stop. And there are the excessively frequent piss summonses. Her current feeling is that attitudes to bodily sex matter more; this occult sex is only a messenger, Hermes, angel. Though it has no voice, it implies someone is there. But who? Religion has always been concerned with sex. But how to get it right, neither rejection nor indulgence? Gurdjieffs key word is Responsibility. For partner as well as for child. Listening to BBC news, the writer feels the world is rushing to destruction like Gadarene swine. “Stop, stop! You’re going the wrong way!” Inner escape, to let in something new, or re-newal of ethical values, not by lip-service. Advertisers’ gospel is that sex and lots of money are the only things worth having in life. Is there nothing more? Selfknowledge, the art of daily self-management? To find the Husband of the Soul, the Wrestling Master? Skills to be achieved, new things to be learned? Bodily culture for the young? To make a real contribution to our common life — by honest work for a start? To earn immortality? Of course a living to be earned, a family to be reared; but don’t let’s agitate on politics, employment and population here. Seek goodness, or wisdom — in hope of lasting happiness. Philosophy! Not primarily by joining an external association, except as a reminder, but by choice of direction in the heart, often renewed. Involuntary prayer in a night of bombing: “Let me survive this, I’ll be good for the rest of my life.” Not without black moods and rebellions. Ongoing quest, not static achievement or feed for tapeworm imaginary I — the thing that must be purged at death. Friend (forgive please) told of several years of night visitations, unpleasant but felt as good for him. They completely destroyed his image of himself — which he didn’t know he had. So hard to find words for psychological glimpses. Parables are used. In Gurdjieffs House of Many Servants (p. 81 below) even real I is only a steward, but able to discover the will of unknown Master by conscience. Don’t tell the young men: “You need intercourse with women.” Tell them: “If you can control this force your being will iii

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grow.” Or in everyday language character and heart. Not by celibacy. Not women locked away. Marriage, with faithfulness by own decision. Not just sex — love, Gurdjieffs Love of Consciousness. Follow Ecclesiastes: “a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing . . .” Magic of young love is given by Nature for the birth of children. Love’s maturing must be earned. Transmutation — or is it sublimation? — does happen. Not by Aleister Crowley wizardry but by plain good heartedness. Sentimental praisers of love might remember its cruelty, when love is not mutual or you cannot find anyone to love. God is jealous. He is to be loved too — your ideal — with or without an earthly partner. Thoughts on 4th August 1981: Royal Wedding photos — family trees — dreamt of Auntie Phil who was killed by Flying Bombs — granny reared good wives, even her greatgranddaughters are good wives and mothers — family is running to girls again, it seems a sign to consider women’s point of view — Woman’s secret is that, while the male pursues his own ambitions and should be encouraged to useful ones, she cultivates personal relations — but she can be possessive, manipulative, managing — or too clinging — or fickle — “Women’s Liberation” wants to make women into imitation men — why should compulsory co-education be part of socialism? “The girls keep the boys back,” was one verdict on it. Doesn’t too early exposure of girls to physical sex arrest growth of body and psyche? If men have immediate access to the body beneath, why even bother with pretty clothes? There isn’t time. But virgin delivered in white for wedding sacrifice does not ensure happiness if attitudes inside marriage are not right. Family Planning Association reports wives too who feel they are being used as “free prostitutes” without mutual caring. Sex indulgence as habit is like flaring off natural gas at oil wells — splendid waste. Psyche is poorer. Sex war is older than class war. Women of the World, Unite!! Humans have been meditating on sex and motherhood since the Stone Ages. We can still ponder. A thought in 1954 was that you can judge a culture by the way

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it treats women. Too much sex isn’t even good for the men, letting their forces flow out automatically like an animal. Mutual masturbation. Sexual prowess is not something to boast about. And it exhausts the women. Worse is to take a girl’s best years in a long-running affair and leave her with nothing. Asia and Africa still appear to worship fertility, better than our birth control free-for-all, but it can mean subjection of women, or a baby a year till mother is worn out. Nor can Earth provide for all the children. If male’s proud egoism will admit how much of his life he owes to the inferior ancillaries — women — psyche can grow. Humility makes receptive. Be hermaphrodite, male enterprise with feminine sensitivity, best marriage! Redraft on 1 September 1981, season of anniversaries: a limited amount of pre-marital sex may be justified for learning and trial, with birth control and preferably with parents’ support. But not too early? There is schools problem that girls mature earlier than boys and they are the vulnerable ones. Boarding school fashion for “pashes” on prefect or gym mistress was “first love”. Whether first love for opposite sex proves suitable long term choice would seem to be a matter of individual type and fate. A crucial stage in life. Be someone worth marrying! 2 September 1981 5 a.m. Thought from staring at a fat man yesterday: “Say something about eating and drinking too much.” That is bad too. But eating and drinking are necessary in a way that sex is not, beyond that needed to provide children. So is it a good analogy? For adults in any particular case how much sex is too much, remembering the others involved? Back to square one. Why must this old maid theorise on matters mainly outside her experience? Have been recalling gallery of bits shown of many lives. Big jolly husband did not seem to notice his thin wife was working too hard. Unintended late fourth child was born severely defective; but it was reported that caring for the child became a bond of union in the family. Young masturbators used to be told they would go mad. It is probably the view of sex as sin which causes deep disturbance. Don’t careTor rebel counter-gospel of sex for its own sake. How to humanise this natural instinct?

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Correspondent once reported standing on chair to have erection for benefit of spinster at opposite window. Suggested he should look to the time when he could find a nice girl to share his life and perhaps rear a family. That did happen eventually, through a motor accident; only, she being Catholic, they looked to be heading towards too many children when touch was lost. Wrote up about age 25 for an Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge, in plain cover. One chapter on marriage and family, all the rest on sordid perversions. 4 September 1981. Marriage vows do not suddenly licence sex. It can still be irresponsible. Matrimony is a commitment to join lives, be travelling companions, a knot in the fish net of human continuity in time, by spirit if not by own children. But that can also define friendship. Might it be said that in its later stages marriage should become friendship. In friendship there is a sense of being linked though there may be no question of physical intercourse. I Corinthians 7: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” What about the women? Marriage is to avoid fornication. Churches have put too much emphasis on physical sex and not enough on quality of relationships, harder to define. Adultery has always seemed worse than fornication, but it is believed that adultery repented has sometimes strengthened a marriage. One has heard that partner was taken too much for granted. I Cor. 7. 33-34: “he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife” and vice versa. Perfection is unattainable! Why did Gurdjieff leave illegitimate children? To show it may sometimes be right to disobey convention? To make us ask, as with his other attacks on received opinion, what do we really know? At least he proved he was not celibate then; but he was privately reported as saying that for some people at some stage celibacy may be necessary. He was also reported to have said that the woman who allows intercourse other than for the conception of a child was letting herself be used as water closet; but when one came to see water closet was useful, the meaning was blurred. In Remarkable Men (pp. 54-55) he makes Dean Borsh say about sexual desire: “if a youth yields to this temptation even

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once, he will lose for the rest of his life the possibility of being a man of real worth.” Too unforgiving. “But when the youth is grown up, then he can do whatever he likes . . .” By which we hope G means that when control is achieved the young man will “like” to follow conscience! Surely someone who uses prostitutes at all regularly will never be a worthwhile man, a reliable politician or an honest business executive! 5-6 September 1981. Secretary of Schizophrenia Fellowship describes the illness to local free newspaper as “a jumble-up of emotions and a jumble of hallucinations.” Dictionary definition includes introversion and inability to distinguish reality from unreality. Neither mentions violence. Introversion hits home. What is the difference between introversion and inner life? This person too suffered sore “I” for being introverted. Why couldn’t she be a happy extravert? When she praises humility she is liable to be told that what people lack is self-confidence. A fair objection. The dividing line is tenuous but we do not want to build a fat self-satisfied ego for eventual deflation. Better to see “I” as a spark cut off from larger being. It must do its best with what it is given till it returns to its source. Parable of the talents is useful though it may not be easy to find what your talents are for. We are not here to please ourselves but to be Servants. Free servants with independent judgement. Or Actors: “All the world’s a stage.” Puppets? “Play conscious role without identification” (Gurdjieff). A widow writes of her brother who was damaged at birth and further hurt by an unsuccessful operation: “My brother is still in hospital and I visit him as often as I can ... he is very slowly deteriorating and can’t speak much but is always cheerful and grateful for any help.” A life with so few talents, that may have achieved more than we can see. Gurdjieff said: “I could lift you up to heaven, but you could not stay there.” This experience has not been about peak states but low ones, and their relation to the “unconscious”. Conceited, “male”, scientific, verbal Intellect should recognise the forces coming from An the unconscious concerned with the body’s life; the split be bridged in the individual if he/she is not to be a house divided. “Clean feet”, meaning “clean sex”, matter because vii

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sex is a major unconscious force. This equates Unconscious with Instinct, another myth. Unconscious can also be a less theological name for god, unknown but inferred; or for nature or for the excluded mother goddess; as well as for our own denying impulses, if indeed they are our own; and for the source of ideas, of imagination, and of psychic — and other — events. Or simply “the spirits”. Portmanteau! Creative womb. Catapulted into the next world like refugees, earthquake victims, or new-born babies, what is it we can take with us or send luggage in advance? Character, memory, relationships, Karma, formed “body of the soul” or psyche structured by many inner battles. Sorry if it sounds dogmatic. Stand up and argue back! We are not icebergs floating in the external world, but islands anchored on the seabed. Call the seabed Jung’s collective unconscious; “the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead . . .” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 216). Thou shalt not worship graven Words. We can’t do without Images, but are always liable to turn them into Idols. Religion that makes more asleep? Or ^^//fwAJ-development? “I” must reach out to not-I. But if it is rejected? It must go deeper. “I” didn’t want to become “just compost”. Perhaps to render up one’s soul for re-use as compost is the best way to find it. But can one, dare one? Practise letting-go, turning round inside. “Why should we be good? Because we want to help.” The original impulse for writing Flying Saucer was to find a basis for ethics. This answer comes from a night misery of sore eyes and asking imagined audience: “Don’t you want to help?” A basis not of authority, nor even of enlightened self-interest. But real help is not easy. GurdjiefFs formula was: “the striving ... to pay for their arising and their individuality as quickly as possible, in order afterwards to be free to lighten as much as possible the Sorrow of our COMMON FATHER.” (A & E p. 386) Or MOTHER. What a contrast to “human rights”! A conclusion, 8.8.81: Egoism is natural. And short-sighted. Respect for others has to be taught — if not at home, then at school. How? By example, attitudes, stories, “Religious

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Instruction” if it does its duty. And sometimes by punishment, not too severe. Care for others is present in the sex instinct, but it needs fostering. Look how disastrous has been Israel’s taking the Promised Land literally! It is a type for the Kingdom of Heaven, a psychological state. Judaism was only half a religion. The Old Testament was written to lead up to the New. Plato’s Er, who came back from the dead, saw former inhabitants of a well-governed state choose wrong for next incarnation, because their virtue had not been tested. Is the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, Plato’s well-run city, entirely misleading? We must not trust politicians’ promises but we will keep hoping. If enough people stand upright inside themselves our world can perhaps at least be redeemed from suicide. Even if it has to go through a Dark Age of destruction. Alas! Hurry! Impartial thinking can be striven for anywhere. A bit less corruption! Then God might help us, if He is so almighty, and there is anything in His covenant, another “basis for ethics”. 20.8.81. Night rains after a sunny spell. Killed 64 slugs on the pavement and our front path. A Party! Looked up a reference to Solioonensius in chapter Russia. After a revolution “the ‘newly-baked-power-possessing’ beings usually cut those capers thanks to which the birth rate of . . . ‘slugs,’ ‘snails,’ ‘lice,’ ‘mole crickets,’ and . . . similar parasites who destroy everything good, . . . increases ...” (A & E p. 630). Why, Gurdjieff must mean human parasites. Maggots in one dustbin breed flies for the whole neighbourhood. 27.8.81. Geneva minorities commission is asked to condemn female circumcision. Voyager’s camera got stuck pointing away from Saturn. Keep “third eye” trained inwards. If you can! 9 September 1981. Prayer for a school astronomy lecture: “Children, sit up straight for these last words. No one knows what God is like. We cannot see him with telescopes or measure him with instruments. But something which it is convenient to call God may be right here in the air beside us. O God, please help these children to grow into good people and us ix

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grown-ups to do our duty till you call us home.” 13 September 1981. Oxfam catalogue shows Peacock Namdha from a women’s co-operative in Kashmir. The tail is decorated with hearts, not “eyes”. Peacock can stand for immortality as well as pride. Let our lonely “I”s grow into hearts in the peacock’s tail. 29 .9.81. Daddy John’s funeral (a foster-father). What of medicine, geriatrics and more questionable trades like cry-onics (in Cosmic Trigger, A. R. Wilson, Abacus) when they pretend they can cheat death? For Jung the dead became “the Unanswered, Unresolved, Unredeemed” (p. 217). Surely not all? There is need of “education for death” (Alice Gilbert, quoted in Saucer). Use of thought force. Work of digesting life experience, to remember people, acknowledge gratitudes, forgive grievances. And maybe learn to fly or “levitate” in space-time by interest in human history and its central minds, Toynbee’s creative minority. When memories revive they seem to have an almost physical existence. They must be a constituent of the “body of the soul”. 2 October 1981. Jung suggests (p. 338) that the dead cannot progress beyond the understanding they reached during life unless we, the as-yet-living, progress too. In Odyssey the dead could not speak until they had drunk the blood of sacrifice. Alas, it is possible that some of our sufferings are tax to maintain the dead or allow interaction between the worlds. Overcrowded prisons here, overcrowded purgatory there. Sarcasm: “usual self-developer’s propaganda that man can reach the goal, whatever that is, by his own efforts.” Is there a goal? A Gnostic formula from Zosimos in G.R.S. Mead is “opening the inner door.” A kind of discovery that the other world is real, heaven does rule — faith of consciousness. Occult smells and sensations are a crude testimony. For a sudden opening not to be complete breakdown, preparation of ideas and character are necessary. Then it is only a beginning of further work. There is much misguidance. Sharpen the knife of discrimination. “Separate fine from coarse,” first in self. Can self let go its own hates? To love enemies appears impossible, but one x

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can try not to nurse hatreds, they wound oneself. Children seem necessarily egoist and Freud right that family jealousy may start ingrained negativity, if not watched for. So may school bullying, envy of better dressed children on telly, illegitimacy, step-child complex, real or imagined favouritism! But one must have something to fight against. Not too much. 4 October 1981. This person never “liked” the reincarnation theory. Harps in heaven and furnaces in hell are discredited. She prefers the simple spiritualist picture of going to live with ancestors and friends, as in Alice Gilbert where grandpa was “leader and helper” to his family. That it is Purgatory, an intermediate level, seems sensible. Many mansions. Some for Gurdjieffites! His Holy Planet Purgatory is very similar to Earth. 6 October 1981. It is as if a factor in prevalent mental illness could be the unsatisfied dead, who, not given proper values when alive, now prey on the living. Or warn them. Some people need defence against witchcraft and sinister fear. Exorcism? Nothing can do eternal harm if you are under the protection of higher forces, symbolised by Light, guardian angel, patron saint or the Lord. If depression or misfortune are sent from above, there will be compensation. It becomes the question: “How to pray?” By orientation of work. “Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that and the action fine.” George Herbert. 7 October 1981. President Sadat assassinated yesterday at a Yom Kippur procession. His “open door” to foreign investors increased disparity of incomes. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” This promise too is a bit optimistic, but other ways lead nowhere. World's richest man hiding in a hotel suite to die friendless and exploited by his servants; Stalin on his deathbed pointing an accusing finger to his entourage. One need not be too cast down at prosperity of the unjust. They will eventually have to pay. Grisly pun: growth the company director’s cure-all, and cancerous growth, dreaded way to enter the grave. 9 October 1981. At least it can be said that lack of a teaching about death, and about aims in life, injures mental health. Be

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Seekers! 18.10.81. Could Beelzebub’s Third Descent be on “Religion is the opium of the people”? Not logically since King Konuzion invented a religion to stop his people chewing poppy seed. Among its multitude of manifestations religion exhibits a wide range of human faults, but if it is opium, materialism is poison. Looking for Konuzion led past the writer in The First Growl, said to be Karl Marx, who thought he could make a better gospel than the uncultured four. To answer Marx is an aim Gurdjieff might have adopted already at the Tiflis seminary — through creation of a new body of literature by himself and others. His sometimes outrageous behaviour lent itself to future anecdotists. All and Everything is full of sociology. G was concerned about humanity and not only about saving an elite — or rather he wanted an elite who would learn how to give salt with savour. 21-22 October 1981. Smitten with lameness of right hip. Read encyclopaedia on Marx, then on Lenin, 1870-1924. He had paralysis of right arm and leg in his last months. The sclerosis of cerebral arteries was due to overwork like our Revolutionist Tony Benn’s recent polyneuritis. Strange idea came that Gurdjieff’s Ashiata is in part an inverted or love-your-enemies portrait of full-of-hate V.I. Lenin, sent from above to divide the world and create an organisation for man’s existence through various brotherhoods. American, French and Russian Revolutions. “. . . first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shall thou see clearly” to put the world to rights. Gurdjieffs career was an opposite to Marx, Bakunin, Lenin and Stalin, or perhaps a Third force, closer to Tolstoy and Dostoievski. “Not Left or Right, but Up.” The Remembering Feast in Third Series used only ingredients prepared by the deceased for the purpose. This passage could be inverted too, since the participants were to recall exclusively bad deeds. We claim G prepared such food, metaphorically. He must really have been able to contemplate the inevitability of his own death. Sly man’s pill to generate adrenalin? A form of intentional suffering. 23 October 1981. Mary’s birthday. Been in this house fifteen years. Jung’s communications came through elaborate symbolic dreams, but Gurdjieff said it took him fifteen years to learn not

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to dream. The implications of G’s mental self-revelations are that his madcap brain could receive inspiration direct, after brainwashing by heavy thoughts or by unconsciousness from bullet wound or car crash. Our brains are subject to outside interference in more ways than we notice. A feature of this experience has been, not the amount of reading, but that it was guided by “chance” to relevant texts. Possibly Gurdjieff meant something similar when he made Father Borsh (red beetroot soup) say that it was senseless for the boy to drag out eight years in municipal school, and offer to undertake his education. G’s father should not be an old man when his eldest child was of chorister age. The Dean’s lessons suggest Gurdjieffs to mischievous rascal Fritz Peters as well as Beelzebub’s to Hassein. There is something fishy in what Ouspensky says of Glimpses of Truth and the “Hindu’s” ballet. Suppose Glimpses describes how the philosophical “system” with its interlocking diagrams and Pythagorean love of numbers was worked out in inspired conversation between O and G? Glimpses begins: “Strange events, incomprehensible from the ordinary point of view, have guided my life ... It was as though some invisible person, in pursuit of a definite aim, had placed in the path of my life circumstances which, at the very moment of my need, I found there as if by chance.” It could be Gurdjieffs own experience. What a memory is implied by G’s literary correspondences! But he gives us a clue that his memory was selective (and might be “assisted”) in Third Series, p. 63, when he says its acuteness was extraordinarily sharpened for questions of writing. He remembered on which page were letters he “automatically wrote strangely incorrectly” (like Freud’s slips of the pen); but not important conversations of the day before. Gurdjieff contributes to brain research. After his dying grandmother advised “In life never do as others do”, he experienced “a tempest of whirling and confused thoughts — of which, fortunately for me, I had then in my childish brain still only a very limited number” (A & E p. 28). Third Series, p. 150, in 1934: thoughts were “swarming”, chiefly pertaining to writing which went very well till the

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telephone brought bad news. P. 152, 1927: “sleepless in a whirlpool of oppressive thoughts . . .” Verbal association makes turning dervishes analogy for whirling thoughts presided by a quiet sheikh, the steward. Cassian, Conferences with Abbot Isaac, extracted by J. G. Bennett in Values as “Pray Without Ceasing”: “The aim of every monk ... as far as it is allowed to human frailty strives to acquire an immovable tranquillity of mind . . . lasting and continual calmness in prayer ...” A “mantram” is given, picked out from the whole of scripture and divulged to very few: “O God, make speed to save me . . .” Hostility to meditation submits that, though the methods may be useful, the aim is misleading. It could be something like: “To learn how to WORK with the brain in its various states, including its relations to the body and feelings,” or: “To know and manage Plato’s many-headed animal.”

29 October 1981. Gurdjieff may mean by the contrived grandmother incident that he did already in childhood have at times a sense of special destiny. He repeats in several places the need to remember the inevitability of death. Perhaps it confirms that from the beginning of his teaching he was preparing mysteries to be unravelled after his demise. A cosmic practical joke or demon-stration of unseen power. 30 October 1981, 6 a.m. AWAKS planes. Wake up! Remember death to produce vigilance, not die just yet. After he stopped writing Gurdjieff stayed alive some 14'/2 years, through World War II. Hopeless idiot, waiting to die an honourable death because he had worked on himself during life. 1 November 1981. Who was the real Dean Borsh? The main Bible writer and composer of sacred canticles—psalms. “Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood . . .” Soup. He could say he wrote with heart’s blood, to feed multitudes. Another cosmic joker. And another Ashiata, namer of conscience. 3 November 1981. There is the connection of insanity with genius. Nietzsche had syphilis, studied by Thomas Mann in Adrian Leverkuhn. Dostoievsky was epileptic. Looked up Van Gogh, Gogol, Meryon (page after Mesmer), Isaac Newton, William Cowper — and the past was alive. Probably each case is

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different, according to the psyche of the time and the work the spirits want done. Perhaps some of the suffering was redemptive, for the sins of the age rather than their own. 6 November 1981. A Guy Fawkes peroration that seemed, like the other moralisings, quite good when first drafted, got condemned as trite, “automatic writing”. No peroration. To our next, maybe! 8-18 November 1981. But where are the energies to write it? Body is ageing. Body often has to be fought against, and finally has to be sacrificed. Thereby substances must be ferried across the border to form our future vehicles, among other purr-poses. Build your own Rolls Royce, Mini or dashing motor-bike! In the very sufferings of sickness, old age and death we must see hope — that they are labour pains for the birth of invisible bodies we shall inhabit. What is left behind is only the empty chrysalis. 20 November 1981. On the day Jung’s mother died, in spite of grief he “continually heard dance music, laughter and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated” (p. 345). Death as wedding, not birth. Is the parable of the marriage of the king’s son the crucifixion? Small wonder there is no bride and the guests are unwilling. The bookmaking is amateur, but give it a chance. You may find it nourishing. At least it ploughed up the soil for a crop. 25 April 1982. Sinai hand-over due. Falklands crisis. “Is Jesus true? NO. And YES. But HOW is a long story.” 5-18 May 1982. Loss of H.M.S. Sheffield. Contemporaries live on for those who die young; if we work for the dead by remembering, they can work for us. Time and Eternity need each other. We are all strands of the network of lives. Perhaps the dying need porters to help carry baggage. Inner support to re-establish the psyche. In what sense was he born of a virgin? Female element asks to be understood. 29 May-5 July 1982. Polish Pope John Paul II visiting Britain. O Pope, what an opportunity the Church is missing! Speak out against population explosion as the greatest cause of war and poverty. Argentina has increased eleven millions in twenty-one years. Britain has long been overpopulated.

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POSTFACE PREFACE

Never mind the means of birth control but condemn the use of sex for titillation, from lack of a higher aim in life. Sex is the finest force in natural man, and being wasted. Develop conscience by full responsibility for the sex act. Let young people set out, like that Task Force ploughing the Atlantic, on a voyage in search of the best. And a fight, not with guns. Put quality into a/l relationships. Admit you cannot! O Church, confess your own sins! Let the Irish show Belfast that Dublin has a government even Protestants would be glad to live under. Likewise other countries with national pride and territorial claims on their neighbours. If only we would try to put our own house in order. Admit the problem of providing for increasing millions. Admit there is greed, competition and will to dominate. Nothing but change of hearts can really help the world.

XVI

1 ANCIENT PARCHMENTS

£ i’T'HE EXISTENCE OF THE GOSPELS is an indubitable fact. A How one wishes there could be, in the Vatican or the Sinai monastery, ancient parchments, such as Plutarch’s stranger found at Carthage, telling how they came to be written.” This wish, expressed in a rough draft on the Philosophers for Flying Saucer p. 83, Plutarch’s Face on the Moon, did receive a partial answer in the sense of discovering a new source, though no more precision. 22nd July 1974. Let’s get an authoritative spelling for Jalalu’ddin Rumi for Saucer p. 169. Take down R. A. Nicholson’s translation of the Mathnawi, purchased in a fit of post-war enthusiasm but never studied. Tucked inside is a yellow booklist, Vincent Stuart and John M. Watkins, September 1963, announcing a reprint of G. R. S. Mead’s translation of “ThriceGreatest Hermes”. Mr. Mead intended that it “should serve ultimately as a small contribution to the preparation of the way leading towards a solution of the vast problems involved in the scientific study of the origins of the Christian Faith” — a sentence worthy of Beelzebub for superfluity of words. Petrie’s invaluable “Egypt and Israel” quotes the Hermetic books for the development of the Logos doctrine. One passage aroused a live interest: “In the Secret Sermon another simile is used, that of rebirth: ‘Whenever I see within myself the sincere vision brought to birth out of God’s mercy, I have passed through myself into a body that can never die. And now I am not what I was before, but I am born in Mind.’ After some days hesitation over the inflated price and because old texts often mean a struggle with sleepiness, an enquiry was written to Watkins, leading to noticing that the address of the bookseller on the leaflet was Auckland. The Nicholson must have been borrowed by Sidney Jenkins, the librarian, when he was at Coombe after his stay in New Zealand. The parcel came, plenty 1

1.

PARCHMENTS

of commentary and footnotes, always easier to read than the text itself. First exciting exploration. The Greek Corpus Hermeticum or Poimandres collection was found in a single damaged manuscript by Michael Psellus (1018-c. 1079 A.D.) at Byzantium; there are also the Perfect Sermon or Asclepius, preserved only in an old Latin version, and Excerpts (including the Kore Kosmou) made by John Stobaeus around 500 A.D. from pagan Greek authors. There are quotations in early Church Fathers (starting with Justin Martyr) who regarded the Trismegistic writings as exceedingly ancient and authoritative. The writings are mostly in the form of dialogues of instruction by Hermes, as the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian Thoth, to his son Tat, or to Asklepios, Greek god of medicine equated with Imhotep. During the (ecumenical) Council of Florence, 1439-1442, George Pletho spoke to Cosimo de Medici about Platonic philosophy with such effect that Cosimo decided to have his doctor’s bright young son, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), trained in philosophy and Greek, so that he could translate Plato into Latin. Cosimo founded the Academia Platonica at Florence about 1442; it lasted half a century and had great influence. Ficino’s translation of Plato was finished about 1482 and of Plotinus in 1486, but his Latin version of the Poimandres collection appeared already in 1471, and went through at least 22 editions up to 1641 to prove its popularity, as well as being translated into French, English, Dutch and German. The humanists wanted to substitute Trismegistus for Aristotle in the schools. In the 18th and 19th centuries there developed an opposite tendency to play down the Trismegistic writings as late Neo­ Platonic forgeries. Why? Because they are too obviously close to the source from which the Christian gospels arose. For small examples, one wants to connect “The Perfect Sermon” with that impossible exhortation “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5.48) or the name of the Secret Sermon on the Mountain, from which Petrie’s quotation comes, with the Sermon on the Mount. A German book of 1690 by M. Ehre Gott Colberg declares (with some truth) that Hermes was the patriarch of Alchemists, Rosicrucians, 2

FLORENTINE ACADEMY

Quakers, Anabaptists, Quietists etc. However, Mead himself, whose book proves to have been first published in 1906, seems to be wrong in taking the Poimandres (=Shepherd of Men) as the earliest because it stands first in the collection. Petrie’s “Egypt and Israel”, published in 1911, calls it the last and most developed of the Hermetic books. He says their dating has “recently” been found by historical allusions to lie between 500-200 B.C., which might make some of them sources of Plato rather than the other way round. An interesting footnote by Mead (Vol. Ill, p. 188) lists 38 “famous Greeks who owed their knowledge to Egyptian teachers”. The Egyptians of On (Heliopolis) who taught Pythagoras and Plato are named, though admittedly long after, by Plutarch and Clement of Alexandria. The allusions Petrie mentions are in the Kore Kosmou (in which Isis instructs her son Horus), and the Perfect Sermon and in two of the Corpus Hermeticum pieces. It does not seem likely that all the latter are so early. Mead quotes Menard, who wrote in 1866: “Between the first Gnostic sects and the Hellenic Jews represented by Philo, a link is missing; this can be found in several of the Hermetic works, especially ‘The Shepherd of Men’ and the ‘Sermon on the Mountain’ ... It seems certain that ‘The Shepherd’ came from that school of Therapeuts of Egypt, who have been often erroneously confounded with the Essenians of Syria and Palestine” (Vol. I. p. 21). In 1945 the Valentinian and Sethian books of a Christian Gnostic group were found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. This group also had non-Christian Hermetic books, according to The Jung Codex, Mowbrays 1955, p. 23. One would like to think that the Poimandres and the Sermon on the Mountain and some of the others were written by the founder, or a later member, of the Therapeutae (Saucer pp. 145-6 and 153); and that editions of older texts, perhaps with interpolations, were added to form their canon of scripture. It is suggested that the Hermetic writings are earlier than Philo. (WARNING, more later, maybe.) In the Poimandres an “I” is instructed in a vision by “ManShepherd, Mind of all-masterhood” (authentia). There is an account of cosmological creation and of the right way of life. “I, Mind, myself am present with holy men and good, the pure and

3

1.

PARCHMENTS

merciful, men who live piously.” Vol. II p. 9. These are themes of the other sermons but then comes a new note: “I began to preach to men the Beauty of Devotion and of Gnosis: O ye people, earthborn folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober now, cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamoured by irrational sleep! . . . Why have ye given up yourselves to Death, while yet ye have the power of sharing Deathlessness? Repent, O ye, who walk with Error arm in arm . . .” (pp. 10-11). What could be the date of this, in “The Cup or Monad” (p. 56):“Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed, but Mind not yet . . . Tat. Why then did God, O father, not on all bestow a share of Mind? Hermes. He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls, just as it were a prize. Tat. And where hath He had it set up? Hermes. He filled a mighty Cup (a Krater or mixing-bowl) with it, and sent it down joining a Herald to it, to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men: Baptise thyself with this Cup’s baptism, what heart can do so . . .” Baptism and a Herald — John the Baptist? One would also like to connect the Therapeutae with the two S’s, Simon Magus and Stephanos. Was Simon really a Samaritan or is it an anagram for Lake Mareotis, site of the Therapeutae settlement? In Acts 8, Simon, a sorcerer in the city of Samaria, offers money to Peter and John for power to convey the Holy Ghost by laying on of hands, whence the sin of simony is named. According to the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, “Simon was a Samaritan by birth, which is also stated by Justin, born in the village of Gitthae, the son of a certain Antonius and his wife Rachel. He went to Egypt as a young man, and at Alexandria acquired a knowledge of magic.” (“According to the Hebrews”, by Hugh J. Schonfield, 1937, p. 118). Mead, in his ample Prolegomena, translates the Naassene document from the “Philosophumena; or, Refutation of all Heresies”, written by bishop Hippolytus about 222 A.D. This too was only preserved in a single manuscript found in a monastery 4

NAASSENE GNOSTICS

of Mount Athos in 1842; alas, Books II and III, which divulged the mysteries of the Egyptians and Chaldeans, were missing, and the exclusion was apparently deliberate as the summary of their contents is omitted from the Epitome. These Naassene Gnostics are the first Christian heresy with which Hippolytus deals and so are presumed to be the earliest. Naassene is derived from the Hebrew for serpent. Mead finds that the document is a pagan Hellenistic text which has been worked over by a Jewish and a Gnostic Christian writer; he also finds a quotation from Simon’s “Great Announcement”. “The ‘Simonian’ tradition was regarded by all the Church Fathers as the source of all ‘heresy’ . . .” (note Vol. I p. 127). However it could be that some writers against heretics really did so in order to preserve a record of them. The document seems to have the theme “There are not different religions, there is only one God” (Gurdjieff A & E p. 349); it weaves together different Mystery traditions to show their common elements. There has never been any copyright in religious ideas, which are frequently borrowed. Mead’s note p. 106 says “that even in the foulest things the clean soul could recognise the reversed signs of the Mysteries of Purity . . .” “This is the Great, Hidden and Unknown Mystery of the Egyptians, Hidden and yet Revealed. “For there is no temple before the entrance of which the Hidden Mystery does not stand naked, pointing from below above, and crowned with all its fruits of generation . . .” “And the Cyllenians, treating this symbol with special honour, regard it as the Logos. “For Hermes is the Logos, who, as being the Interpreter and Fabricator of all things that have been and are and shall be, was honoured by them under the symbolism of this figure, namely an ithyphallus. “And that he (that is Hermes, so symbolised) is Conductor and Reconductor of souls, and Cause of souls, has not escaped the notice of the poets . . .” (p. 109, leaving out most of the later interpolations). This is a powerful passage and includes the Simonian part, which is regarded as having been added by the Jewish over5

1.

PARCHMENTS

writer:“Moreover, also, the Phrygians say that the Father of wholes is Amygdalos (almond-tree) — no ordinary tree; but that he is that Amygdalos the Pre-existing, who having in Himself the Perfect Fruit, as it were, throbbing and moving in His Depth, He tore asunder His womb, and gave birth to His own Son — For ‘amyxai’ is, as it were, ‘to break’ and ‘cut open’, just as in the case of inflamed bodies and those which have some internal tumour, when physicians lance them, they speak of ‘amychas’... “The Phrygians also say that that which is generated from him is Syriktes (the Piper) . . . “He is the Many-named, Myriad-eyed, Incomprehensible, whom every nature desires, some one way, some another. “This is the Word (Rema) of God, which is: “ ‘The Word of Announcement of the Great Power. Wherefore It shall be sealed, and hidden, and concealed, stored in the Habitation, where the Root of the Universals has its foundation — “ ‘Of Aeons, Powers, Intelligences, Gods, Angels, Spirits Delegate. Existing Non-existences, Generated Ingenerables, Comprehensible Incomprehensibles — Years, Months, Days, Hours — of the Boundless Point, from which the most minute begins to increase by parts. “ ‘For the Point which is nothing and is composed of nothing, though partless, will become by means of its own Thought a Greatness beyond our own comprehension.’ ” (pp. 126-7). A note on Amygdalos says that Mithras, in the most ancient myth, was represented as in (?born from) a Tree. Elsewhere (p. 123) Mead says that Mithraicism had the closest connection with the Phrygian mystery cult; and the Great Mother mysteries were used for the initiation of women,.who were excluded from the Mithriaca proper. Is there not something Pauline in the style of the Announcement? The apostle Simon Peter, with his dual nature, may be named for this Simon (Magus) who called himself Stadios, Standing (Clementines, Schonfield p. 120; see p. 4 above), one might say Pater; but the portrait of Paul may have something of Simon’s character. “Paul’s personality is one of the most striking in history”, says James Vernon Bartlett in the 6

BARREN WOMAN

encyclopaedia. He quotes F. W. Myers:“Desperate tides of the whole world’s anguish Poured through the channels of a single heart.” The “Acts of Paul”, written not long after A.D. 150, describe him as “a man small in size, bald, bow-legged, sturdy, with eyebrows meeting and a slightly prominent nose, full of grace” in expression. Our thesis is that among the disciples of Simon, but after his death, there was a psychic experience, perhaps broadcast telepathically or by hypnagogic images, which appeared to be communication from the dead. The death of Stephen was central to the “demonstration”, which was symbolised by the story of the resurrection of Jesus. Or should it be hypnopompic, as rather suggested by a cryptic sentence in the third paragraph of “Finnegan’s Wake”: “The fall (. . . 2 lines of nonsense) of a once wallstrait old parr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy”. James Joyce is so full of unknown words that one could not read much of him, but the name Stephen Dedalus, hardly Irish, was noted. Another Naassene passage (p. 122) says: “The Phrygians, moreover, call Him Fruitful. For: ‘Many more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who hath her husband.’ ” The quotation is from Isaiah 54.1 where verses 5 and 7 say: “For thy Maker is thine husband . . . For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.” In a different context there is Luke 23.29; “For behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren”. Mead’s footnote cites Philo, De Execrat. 7: “For when she (the Soul) is a multitude of passions and filled with vices, her children swarming over her — pleasures, appetites, folly, intemperance, unrighteousness, injustice — she is weak and sick, and lies at death’s door, dying; but when she becomes sterile, and ceases to bring them forth, or even casts them from her, forthwith, from the change, she becometh a chaste virgin, and, receiving the Divine Seed, she fashions and engenders marvellous excellencies that Nature prizeth highly — prudence, courage, temperance, justice, holiness, piety and the rest of the virtues and good dispositions.”

7

1.

PARCHMENTS

Mead asks whether this similarity of ideas shows that J, his Jewish over-writer, belonged to Philo’s “circle”. “Or rather, did Philo represent a propagandist side of J’s circle? In other words can we possibly have before us in J a Therapeut allegorical exercise, based on S (the pagan source), by an exceedingly liberalminded Hellenistic Jewish mystic?” The puzzle is that though Philo is a Jewish apologist, there is not really much evidence that the Therapeutae were Jews and there is nothing Jewish about the Poimandres and the other Hermetic writings. These are the things which Philo, the only authority for the Therapeutae, says of them which do sound Jewish: they meet every seventh day in general assembly to hear a discourse, sitting in order of age with “the right hand between the breast and the chin and the left withdrawn along the flank”, men and women separated by a wall three to four cubits high (Loeb Philo Vol. IX, p. 131). For their festal meetings these people, dedicated “to knowledge and the contemplation of the verities of nature, following the truly sacred instructions of the prophet Moses”, assemble “after seven sets of seven days have passed, for they revere not only the simple seven but its square also, since they know its chastity and perpetual virginity. This is the eve of the chief feast which Fifty takes for its own, Fifty the most sacred of numbers and the most deeply rooted in nature, being formed from the square of the right-angled triangle which is the source from which the universe springs.” (32+42+52=50). This is held to refer to Pentecost, but sounds as much Pythagorean as Jewish. First they pray to God that their feasting may be acceptable, standing white-robed in an orderly line with faces both cheerful and serious, “their eyes and hands lifted up to Heaven, eyes because they have been trained to fix their gaze on things worthy of contemplation, hands in token that they are clean from gain-taking . . .” (pp. 151-153). When was kneeling to pray introduced? Daytime is spent entirely in spiritual exercise. “They read the Holy Scriptures and seek wisdom from their ancestral philosophy by taking it as an allegory . . . They have also writings of men of old, the founders of their way of thinking . . .” (p. 129). A critic, whose name has been forgotten, pointed out that there are two major parables peculiar to Luke: the Good 8

LIBERAL MYSTIC

Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. It took a very long time to interpret the Prodigal Son. The jealous elder brother could be the orthodox Jews, unable to accept that the gospels might be the culmination of their own literary tradition. The killing of the fatted calf might owe something to the bull-slaying of Mithras, or be the sacrifice of Stephen. There was a feeling that the husks that the swine did eat were pagan literature and cults. At some point the prodigal returned to the Jewish traditions of his fathers; just when and why is not clear but the Gospels are firmly attached to the Old Testament by their Palestinian setting, the genealogies and the quotations of prophecies fulfilled. The wisdom or Gnosis sought in this Hellenistic Egyptian Religion of the Mind is a legitimate aim, like ‘The conscious striving to know ever more and more concerning the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance” (A & E p. 386), but a partial one. In the last chapter of Remarkable Men (p. 242), Gurdjieff uses “mind” in a more derogatory sense, to explain why the entrancing sermons of Brother Sez leave no lasting effect: they proceed only from his mind and therefore act on his hearers’ minds, whereas those of Brother Ahl, which make little impression at first, stay in the heart for ever because they proceed from his being. Two pages later we read that G and Skridlov left the monastery after six months because they were so over-filled with impressions it seemed as if even a little more would make them lose their minds. A birthday letter, September 1974, to sister in California: “I know you disapprove of all this, but to me it is irksome that the Church has always had to maintain faith by suppressing mind. In The Secret Sermon on the Mountain, before reaching his first experience of the new state, Tat is plunged into fierce frenzy and mind-fury by his father Hermes (or Thoth) — a good description of the mental confusion (say from Josephus’ inconsistencies — or just from young Andrew telling me such a slick lie yesterday), that can precede a new link-up of ideas — stirring the porridge. The effort to resolve contradictions — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — seems to produce a sudden lifting of consciousness I am inclined to call awakening of mind, though it is really just a stronger sense of physical presence.”

9

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PARCHMENTS

Professor Skridlov asks Father Giovanni why he does not return to Europe, “to give the people there if only a thousandth part of this all-penetrating faith which you are now inspiring in me.” Giovanni answers: “Faith cannot be given to man”, it can only arise from understanding (R.M. p. 240). 29th October 1974, his anniversary. People have told of the power of GurdjiefFs eyes; this writer experienced it once during a reading. Father Giovanni says that to wish to teach people faith in Christ “by, so to say, grafting faith on by words is just like wishing to fill someone with bread merely by looking at him” (p. 240). It could be that this is a reversed way of revealing what was behind G’s awe-giving glances: he was wishing? Alexandra David-Neel says that Buddhists do not pray, they wish. Mead, discussing the Secret Sermon on the Mountain, says (II p. 153): “Hermes cannot teach to Tat this birth in words . . . Hermes can only guide Tat towards the realisation of the Blessed Sight, by putting himself into that sublime state of consciousness, so that Tat, so to speak, bathes, or is baptised in, his master’s spiritual presence, the Cup of the Mind.” The sermon ends: “make promise to keep silence on thy virtue, and to no soul, my son, make known the handing on to thee of the manner of Rebirth, that we may not be thought to be calumniators” (p. 146). It is again the question of affiliation, of what can be transmitted and how. Dean Inge said religion is caught, not taught. It would seem the process works the same in lesser teaching situations. If you are reading aloud, your hearers won’t go to sleep if your own attention is on the meaning. A movements teacher transmits his own prepared state of alertness and caring, or it is transmitted through him. “I am utterly weary of having to deal for so many months with people of alien blood”, Gurdjieff told Father Giovanni (R.M. p. 237). Difference of physical race, psychological make-up, cultural traditions — but there is one bond which can bridge the differences. How can one put it: recognising a common will to goodness? Mead quotes Philo’s “Race” or “Kin” of God (I p. 176) and “Now this natural class of men (lit. race) is to be found in many parts of the inhabited world; for both the Grecian and non-Grecian world must needs share in the perfect Good.” (I. p.

10

PRAY OR WISH?

142, from Philo’s Contemplative Life III). It makes one think of Beelzebub’s kinsmen living unnoticed on planet Earth, called “beings of Beelzebub’s nature’’ in “The Inevitable Result of Impartial Mentation” (A & E p. 1174); and of “For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, 'and mother.” Mark 3.35. Perhaps one can get a “feel” about the Pythagorean groups by analogy with more recent ones, such as the Moravians or the Quakers with a vital and genuinely attractive tradition of quiet piety; with perhaps a sense of being elect and separate from the wicked world, which sometimes persecutes, sometimes respects them; and having from time to time a more intellectual or influential protector or organiser like Comenius or Count Zinzendorf (Saucer p. 52). The Quakers have a definite founder: George Fox is described as a religious genius. Perhaps Pythagoras could be called that, though he also had his intellectual mathematical side. How far were the Pythagoreans celibate? It appears the Essenes and Therapeutae were mainly celibate, but not all. On the other hand in the continuity of the Moravians and Quakers the family must be important, the children of members being the recruits. Valuation of the family and natural kinship is the foundation of most human cultures and so is something they can share and build on; yet the “progressives” often try to destroy the family. As a minimum postulate surely as a general rule it is better for children to have two parents. It is true family can be tyranny and servitude, or alternatively an extended selfishness, and rebellion is natural in teenagers; but all human institutions are imperfect. If they were perfect we should depend on them too much. Another problem now is the family’s tendency to over-multiply!

II

2 THE WHITE GODDESS

OME YEARS BACK STEPSISTER insisted on lending her copy of this tantalising, maddening book by Robert Graves. On page 149 his Boibel-Loth alphabet leads him to Sinai, S. Judaea and the Dead Sea. “This is the region in which the Essene communities were settled from about 150 B.C. to 132 A.D. The Essenes appear to have been an offshoot of the Therapeutae, or Healers, an ascetic Jewish sect settled by Lake Mareotis in Egypt; Pliny described them as the strangest religious body in the world. Though Jews . . . they believed in the Western Paradise . . . and, like the later Druids, in the return of pure souls to the sun . . . They also avoided animal sacrifices . . . meditated within magic circles . . . and are therefore generally supposed to have been under the philosophic influence of Pythagoras . . On the next page: “It seems possible, then, that the Essene version of the Boibel-Loth letter-names was brought to Ireland in early Christian times, by Alexandrian gnostics who were the spiritual heirs of the Essenes after Hadrian had suppressed the order in 132 A.D. ... in times of persecution Egyptian monks often fled to Ireland . . One cannot follow Graves’ argument about a calendar divided into five seasons of 72 days in three 24-day periods, with five days over at the end of the year, and there is no reference to it in the encyclopaedia. 72 X 5 = 360. On pages 274-6 Graves says the Egyptians did have twelve 30-day months; the five extra days were made of one seventy-second part of every day in the year. The 72-day season occurs in the Egypto-Byblian myth that Isis hid her child Horus from Set during the 72 hottest days of the year. He also says that at the beginning of the Christian era the Jews of Alexandria used to visit the island of Pharos for an annual festival because the seventy-two doctors of the Law had made the miraculous translation of the scriptures there.

S

13

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WHITE GODDESS

Reading this on 13th January 1975, there came, as a kind of birthday present from Mr. Gurdjieff, the wild idea that Graves meant to show that the explanation of the mysterious number 72 in connection with the Septuagint could be in this Isis myth, to say “here is something hidden”. One has a heretical suspicion that in fact this “translation” in Egypt represents the original writing of the scriptures and that the Hebrew version could be made from the Greek. What sources were used is a great question: one thinks they were not all Hebrew but included Phoenician and Greek. Josephus quotes Manetho who put Egyptian history into Greek, and Berossus who did the same for Babylonia. Josephus also mentions a Menander of Ephesus and a Dius who wrote histories of the Phoenicians and the Tyrian kings, and of Hiram’s own temple-building (Against Apion Bk. I). The scriptures might have been intended to serve Semites in general, including the survivors of Tyre which was destroyed by Alexander the Great, rather than just those of Judaea. Our father used to say that many Jews were really Phoenicians and that after the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 B.C. it was politic for Carthaginians to call themselves Jews. This explained the Diaspora (Greek word, dispersion; Displaced Persons is a bitter verbal joke by history), the large number of Jews scattered in every city of the Roman Empire. Though so nationalistic, blood-thirsty and ostensibly primitive the Old Testament also contains advanced precepts: “but thou shah love thy neighbour as thyself’ is in Leviticus 19.18. In I Kings 19 the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but in the still small voice heard by Elijah in the cave on Horeb (though surely He can also act through the wind or the earthquake). Solomon’s choice in his dream in I Kings 3 is another: “I am but a little child . . . Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad . . .” At the dedication of the temple (I Kings 8) Solomon prayed: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded . . . hearken thou to the supplication of thy servant, and of thy people Israel, when they

14

HERODOTUS

shall pray toward this place: and hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place: and when thou hearest, forgive . . . Moreover concerning a stranger, that . . . cometh out of a far country for thy name’s sake . . . when he shall come and pray toward this house; Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and do according to all that the stranger calleth to thee for: that all people of the earth may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel . . .” Mead writes about how Philo tried to resolve the difficulties of ancient crudities in the scriptures by interpreting them as allegories; Philo never stopped to enquire whether this was the original writers’ intention; “much less did he ask himself, as we ask ourselves today, whether these writers had not in all probability frequently written up the myths of other nations into a history of their own patriarchs and other worthies . . .” (Volume I, p. 140). Examples may be Hercules as Samson, and Phaedra as Potiphar's wife. Absalom is described by the encyclopaedia as the Alcibiades of the Old Testament.

The morning after writing this far, there was a dream. “Cleaning windows, someone is helping. ‘Why not do the whole job while you’ve got help?’ . . . This makes sense, it’s worth waking up!” But the day, a Saturday, January 25th 1975, brought no progress, only restlessness; boys around, a new one, introduced as David Dixon — no, not Nixon; fruitless skimming through Josephus looking for a place one thought he said “and they are ancient, though some think not,” defending the Jews’ observances. (It is in Antiquities XVI. 2.3.) He has to explain why they are not mentioned by Greek writers such as Herodotus. (Herodotus is to be recommended. In the Penguin translation he will not send you to sleep. He says the Egyptians reverse the ordinary practices of mankind. In writing and calculating they go from right to left and say the Greek way is left-handed and awkward. Men carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women pass water standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors but eat outside in the streets, on the theory that what is unseemly but necessary should be done in private and what is not unseemly should be done openly.

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They are religious to excess, for instance they drink from brazen cups which they scour every day. They wear linen clothes which they wash continually. They circumcise for cleanliness sake, while men of other nations — except those who have learnt from Egypt — leave their private parts as Nature made them (pp. 115-116). Cleanliness has been next to godliness for a long time! Was it Billy Graham’s wife who was reported to have a notice beside her sink: “Divine Service conducted here three times a day”? So it is!) Also on that Saturday, reread Philo’s Flaccus, which has more appeal to the feelings than other ancient prose, for its account of the madman Carabas who was dressed up by Alexandrian antiJewish rioters as a mock-king. Some involuntary paragraphs had been drafted at breakfast as they often are, and this after reading some old notes: “There are no pre-Maccabaean fragments of scripture — were they commissioned, to provide a ’Homer’ for the new nation, from some scholar or group?” And usual plodding moralising. This was awkward, inconsistent with the theory about Tyrians and Phoenicians. As usual, speculation was useless without more information. Last thing at bed-time, opened the new Reader’s Digest. It had an article on the Apocrypha. “Judas Maccabaeus (‘the Hammerer’) is a great cunning guerilla chief . . . Once, he has to hide in the wilderness, keeping ‘himself and his companions alive in the mountains as wild animals do’ ”. Flash of similarity; it is like David, it could be that David is drawn from Judas Maccabaeus. Then at least that part of the Old Testament would have to be later than the Maccabee brothers’ revolt against the Syrian attempt in 168 B.C. to force Hellenistic paganism on the Jews. Sunday morning, puzzling over incompatible theories, there came recollection of another curiosity, about the monastery of St. Jeremias at Memphis. The article on Memphis says that the ruins of the town (like those of Heliopolis) were used to build Fostat and Cairo, but the necropolis was largely preserved because it had been covered by blown sand. “From 1905 J. E. Quibell was charged by the Service des Antiquites solely with the excavations in this vast necropolis. His principal discovery was the extensive remains of the Coptic monastery of St. Jeremias, with 16

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remarkable sculptures and frescoes.” This is a more straightforward sort of “pre-sand Egypt”. GurdjiefTs map of pre-sand Egypt (RM, pp. 99 and 120) was interpreted (Saucer, p. 130) as the pre-George Sand state of the “literary secret” — Rousseau’s Confessions. Cellini’s Autobiography may be another such map. Available sources have not produced any St. Jeremias — which does not say there wasn’t one. There is Jerome-Hieronymus, the translator of the Vulgate, the Latin Bible, who founded his own monastery at Bethlehem; and there is Jeremiah, the prominent Old Testament character, who had to flee to Egypt. This brought up another flight into Egypt (oh, and the New Testament one of Mary and Joseph and the infant Christ) of Oniah or Onias IV, whose high priest father was murdered in the troubles before the Maccabees’ revolt. He was successful in the service of Ptolemy Philometor and obtained permission to build the temple at Bubastis of the fields — Leontopolis — for the Egyptian Jews (Saucer, p. 147). So perhaps the story of this temple, emphasised by Josephus’ frequent references, does mean reorganisation of the worship and preparation of scriptures as well as the building of a physical temple. The quickest place to verify the Oniah story is in Petrie’s book; why, here on p. 99 is: “The fanatical Judas Maccabaeus may be otherwise looked on as the saviour-patriot, a second David . . .” In the article on Hebrew Religion S. A. Cook says: “The stirring deeds of the Maccabees must have called forth and must have been shaped by literature of a national ‘prophetical’ stamp, and many scholars have sought to discern Maccabaean passages in the Old Testament, as apart from the Book of Daniel, evidently contemporary in its present form.” How could a new scripture have been “planted”? The Old Testament gives hints. In II Kings 22-23 and II Chronicles 34-35, when good king Josiah repaired the temple, a book of the Law was “found” and read before the people; and the Covenant was agreed. He celebrated the Passover: “Surely there was not holden such a passover from the days of the judges that judged Israel .. .” Similarly, after the Babylonian captivity, Nehemiah, cupbearer of Artaxerxes, asked permission to rebuild Jerusalem; “And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me.” When the wall had been completed but the houses not yet

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built, all the people gathered themselves together as one man and Ezra the scribe read the book of the law of Moses for seven days. On hearing the instructions for the feast of tabernacles, the people cut branches, made booths and sat in them, which had not been done “since the days of Jeshua the son of Nun ...” A long list of priests, Levites and chief people signed the covenant. Is it possible all this really happened in the days of Oniah, in favour not with Artaxerxes but with Ptolemy Philometor, and that the wall which was rebuilt and the ruined city which was repopulated were at Leontopolis? Where did one read “there are no pre-Maccabaean fragments of scripture?” It turned up by lucky chance and the emphasis is different. It is in the Pelican “Archaeology of Palestine” by W. F. Albright, first published 1949, revised to 1960. “While not a single piece of papyrus or ostracon containing a biblical fragment from pre-Maccabaean days has yet been found in Palestine, the inscriptions . . . have given us a very clear idea of the physical appearance of the original writings of the Old Testament” (p. 220). The oldest actual Biblical texts found so far are the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah of around 100 B.C. and a Greek “Rylands fragment” of the second century B.C. “We are thus in a position to reconstruct the script and spelling used in virtually every phase of the history of the Hebrew Bible and its Greek translation. In the light of such evidence it is a far cry from the time, half a century ago, when adventurous European savants could seriously date the composition of a considerable part of the Hebrew Bible in early Roman times!” (When would they be?) Professor Albright continues: “Lest this idea seems unduly grotesque, it may be added that there were outstanding scholars at that time who dated parts of chapters and even whole chapters of the Hebrew Bible in the first century B.C.” (p. 224). Archaeologists have to write very carefully when dealing with the Middle East!

There was another “present” on January 13th, 1975. Checked some of Jill’s typing (the puns). “Ought to put in who wrote 18

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Oedipus at Colonus.” Not Aeschylus. Not Euripides. Third time lucky, it was Sophocles. But in the E. volume, saw the long article on Essenes; reread that later. It is by H. M. J. Loewe, Oxford lecturer in Rabbinic Hebrew, so it is probably a Jewish point of view. Loewe says it used to be accepted that foreign influences, Persian or Buddhist or Pythagorean or Syrian, were responsible for the Essenes; each of these theories had its distinguished advocates. (So if one is mistaken one is not alone; but one suspects there has also sometimes been deliberate mystification.) Loewe says: “Not infrequently the motive for exalting the Essenes has been the desire to decry the spiritual outlook of Jesus’ contemporaries.” This seems fair. Further one seems to meet a tendency to abuse the religions of Egypt, Babylonia and Phoenicia in order to exalt the Judaic ancestry of Christianity. Loewe speaks of the imperceptible disappearance of the Essenes, the way they faded from history. Not a word about Hadrian. Elsewhere it appears that Hadrian’s proscription was against Jewish practices in general, in an attempt to stamp out stubborn Jewish nationalism. The result was the rebellion of Bar Kochba, proclaimed as Messiah by a leading rabbi; and the final destruction of Jerusalem in 135 A.D. It was rebuilt under a new name, Aelia Capitolina, and forbidden to Jews. Some of the Dead Sea scrolls did give an impression that religion was being mixed with politics, and nationalist rebellion preached by using previous enemies as a code name for the Romans. Essene tenets have been traced in Gnostic writings; some at least of the vanished groups may have gone over into Gnosticism in the next generation. August 1975: Just discovered by looking up Pompey that Strabo means squint-eyed. Dictionary: strabism-squint, from Greek strabos and strabismos. Time to continue this recopying which got stuck in April. The “present” from the article on the Essenes was background information relevant for the possible history of the Hermetic writings. Plato and Eudoxus (probably 408-355 B.C., mathematician and astronomer) are said by Strabo to have studied in the schools at Heliopolis (6 miles N.E. of Cairo). Strabo speaks of buildings at Heliopolis, which the priests had taken over from the former

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guilds of philosophers and scientists. He was in Egypt about 25 B.C. He says the sustema (system) and askesis (askeo-exercise, as in ascetic; but not ascites, Gurdjieffs disease) were extinct, but Philo in describing the Therapeutae, considered already ancient in his day, uses the same technical terms. Chaeremon, a Stoic philosopher contemporary with Strabo, records the sustema and askesis in an account, preserved by Porphyry, which resembles the description of the Therapeutae, so the line of continuity was not necessarily broken. Figulus. A crumb of information was noted from F. J. Foakes Jackson, “History of the Christian Church to A.D. 461”, Deighton Bell, a reprint of the 6th edition of September 1914. On page 196, discussing the origin of the Neo-Platonists, he says: “The Pythagorean philosophy, revived at Alexandria about B.C. 60 by P. Nigidius Figulus, was further developed by the PlatoPythagoreans, among the most celebrated of whom were Plutarch, Galen the physician (A.D. 131-200), Celsus the opponent of Christianity, and Numenius of Apamea.” Monday, April 14th 1975. Absolutely frustrated from continuing the recopying. What is that P? One of the Penguin Classics gives a list of the ancient abbreviations for Roman first names. Yes. Tacitus’ Annals. (Every other Roman seems to be Marcus.) P is Publius. Nigidius only suggests neige, snow, Snowy Tin-tin’s dog, and a Snowy glove puppet seen yesterday — or was it Sooty? Ficulus just might mean fig tree. Fig does come from Latin ficus. Could it be something to do with the unkind miracle of the fig tree in Mark XL blasted for not bearing fruit out of season? Jesus said: “Have faith in God . . . whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart ... he shall have whatsoever he saith.” There is no report of anyone ever having had enough faith to cast a mountain into the sea, as Dostoievski points out, though bull-dozers can do it. But mountain is a key Hermetic symbol. The next advice is more practical: “And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.” Looking for the name in an index produced only Marsilio Ficino. What, it is Figulus, not Ficulus, and he is in the

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encyclopaedia. Must be crazy! He was a Roman savant with dates given as c. 98-45 B.C. In 58 he was praetor; he sided with Pompey in the civil war; after Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus in 48, Figulus was banished by Caesar, and died in exile. He was a friend of Cicero, who says Figulus tried to revive the doctrines of Pythagoreanism, together with mathematics, astronomy and astrology, and even magic. Jerome, the authority for the date of his death, calls him “Pythagoricus et magus”. “The indifference of the Romans to such abstruse and mystical subjects caused his works to be soon forgotten.” (That supercilious tone is a little fishy.) The works included “De diis”, an examination of cults and ceremonials; treatises on divination and dreams, and at least 29 books of “Commentarii grammatici”. Quintilian, in his lengthy instructions on wearing the toga becomingly and how it may slip as the orator’s vehemence increases, says the ancients let it hang to the heels, as Nigidius and Plotius recommended in their books about gesture. Why should Pliny (the Elder) assert that Cicero wore his toga long to conceal varicose veins, when the fashion is seen in statues of men who lived since Cicero? “As regards the short cloak, bandages used to protect the legs, mufflers and coverings for the ears, nothing short of ill-health can excuse their use.” XI. III. 143-4. That Nigidius should write about gesture does “ring a bell” because of Gurdjieffs talks about the “language of gesture”. “The left arm should only be raised so far as to form a right angle at the elbow . . .” (Quintilian XI.III. 141.) Elbow right angles are frequent in G’s movements. Suetonius’s testimony to Nigidius’s supernatural powers is worth quoting. He is reporting omens at the time of the birth of the future Augustus in 63 B.C. According to Julius Marathus, Augustus’s freedman and reporter, “a public portent warned the Roman people some months before Augustus's birth that Nature was making ready to provide them with a king; and this caused the senate such consternation that they issued a decree which forbade the rearing of any male child for a whole year.” However the decree was not filed at the Treasury and so did not become law. (Toynbee discusses this story as a parallel with St. Matthew’s gospel.) “Then there is a story which I found in a book called Theologumena . . . Augustus’s mother, Atia . . . once

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attended a solemn midnight service at the temple of Apollo, where she had her litter set down, and presently fell asleep as the others also did. Suddenly a serpent glided up, entered her and then glided away again . . . the birth of Augustus nine months later suggested a divine paternity.” “Augustus’s birth coincided with the Senate’s famous debate on the Catilinarian conspiracy, and when Octavius arrived late, because of Atia’s confinement, Publius Nigidius Figulus the astrologer, hearing at what hour the child had been delivered, cried out: ‘The ruler of the world is now born’. Everyone believes this story.” Meaning Suetonius invented it? (From Augustus section 94 in “The Twelve Caesars” translated for Penguin Classics by Robert Graves.) “Zeroes in cheque book” is a Gurdjieff joke which attached itself to statistics in Josephus. Suetonius Tranquillus, a chief secretary to Hadrian, emperor from 117 to 138 A.D., has some zeroes in his Tiberius section 40; 20,000 dead at the collapse of an amphitheatre at Fidenae, for which Tacitus’s figure is 50,000 mutilated or crushed to death. Suetonius and Tacitus were friends of Pliny the Younger, who addressed letters to both. Pliny is famous for his letters consulting Trajan, who ruled 98-117, about the Christians. Tacitus mentions Nero’s punishment of the Christians, whose originator was crucified by Pontius Pilatus in Tiberius’s reign. Suetonius has the other early Pagan mention of Christians, rather vague: “Because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he (Claudius) expelled them from the city.” (Claudius 25; zeroes and the three Romans were discussed, Saucer pp. 155-6 and 163-5). It is hard to see that Figulus can have been active at Alexandria for any length of time; perhaps the Neo-Pythagorean group there was just part of his general revival. A mid-first century B.C. date might also be about right for the founding of the Therapeutae. Could he be Simon Magus, could Simon also be a composite pseudonymous figure? But Figulus wrote in Latin while the Poimandres and the Announcement have come down to us in Greek. One wants Simon to be later, dying around 40 A.D.; Josephus gives such a long account of the assassination of Caligula in January 41 A.D. that one wonders if he could be giving a clue to the date of another important death.

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The encyclopaedia is, one feels, deliberately woolly on NeoPythagoreanism: Graeco-Alexandrian school of the first century A.D., forerunner of Neo-Platonism. It will not allow them Plutarch or Numenius, whom it calls Eclectic Platonists, together with Apuleius of Madaura (in Morocco; he was born c. 120 A.D.; he wrote the delicious “Golden Ass”, translated by Robert Graves for Penguin and obviously a source for later story­ writers). The article speaks of literature widely published without giving a single title. “Neopythagoreanism was an attempt to introduce a religious element into pagan philosophy in place of what had come to be regarded as an arid formalism.” “A degenerate society cared nothing for syllogisms grown threadbare by repetition.” “The only well known members of the school were Apollonius of Tyana and Moderatus of Gades” (Cadiz) — see the articles on them. But there is no article on Moderatus — perhaps there was in earlier editions; and Apollonius is mainly, if not entirely, a fiction. To a superficial reader the Hermetic writings do have the same exalted philosophic style as the Enneads of Plotinus, the best known Neo-Platonist, who had a great influence on later Christian mystics. 22 August 1975. Read up Cadiz. Still no Moderatus. “The church of Santa Catalina, formerly attached to a Capuchin convent which is now secularized and used as a lunatic asylum, contains an unfinished picture of the marriage of St. Catherine, by Murillo, who met his death by falling from the scaffold on which he was painting it (April 3rd, 1682).”

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HOSE WAS THAT ONE surviving name among Alexandrian Jewish philosophers before Philo? Aristobulusof Paneas, active probably around 160 B.C. A few fragments of his “Commentaries on the Writings of Moses”, addressed to Ptolemy Philometor, are quoted by Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius. He tried to prove that Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had borrowed from scripture, but the quotations were obvious forgeries (encyclopaedia, and Foakes-Jackson). Perhaps he meant he had modelled Moses from them. He is candidate to be the first Old Testament writer. Aristobulus (it “spells” Bristol) is the name of five listed members of the Maccabean or Hasmonean family. One had wondered why; it could be that it was in honour of this Aristobulus of Paneas. The earliest, son of John Hyrcanus, had a short reign about 104 B.C.; the last two were son and grandson of Mariamne, one of Herod the Great’s nine (according to Josephus) wives. He married this Hasmonean princess to strengthen his position; though he loved her passionately he finally had her executed like several others of his family. Paneas, modern Banias, became Caesarea Philippi. It is, appropriately, at a source of the Jordan. It was the scene of the battle of Panium, 198 B.C., by which Palestine passed from Ptolemy V of Egypt to the Seleucid or Syrian empire of Antiochus III the Great, ruled 223-187. Antiochus already tangled with Rome and lost Asia Minor. He left his son with a heavy war indemnity to pay to Rome. This son was assassinated. The heir being a hostage in Rome, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a younger son of Antiochus the Great, seized the throne, reigning 176-164, twelve years in which a great deal happened. In Jerusalem Joshua-Jason, brother of the high priest Onias III, the son of Simon the Just, obtained the high priesthood by corruption, offering Antiochus much tribute; he began the

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Hellenisation of Jerusalem, setting up a gymnasium and encouraging the young men to wear the Greek broad-brimmed hat. After three years his cousin Menelaus outbid him for the high priesthood and procured the treacherous murder of Onias. In Egypt Ptolemy VI Philometor reigned from 181-145 B.C., which seems a long reign, but he succeeded as an infant under the regency of his mother, Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus the Great; his younger brother Ptolemy VII, nicknamed Physkon for his bloated appearance, who seized the throne on Philometor’s death, lived till 116. When that Cleopatra died the Egyptians attempted to regain Palestine. Antiochus Epiphanes defeated them and invaded Egypt (170) capturing Philometor, so the Alexandrians put Physkon on the throne. Antiochus again invaded in 168 but was compelled by the Romans to retire. The story goes on, with Roman arbitration in quarrels between the Ptolemy brothers in which Philometor seems to have been remarkably forgiving and good-natured. In 168 the Roman envoy in Egypt drew a circle in the sand about Antiochus and demanded his answer before he stepped out of it (encyclopaedia, Seleucids). Is this significant scene an energising force behind the Yezidi inability to step out of a circle (R.M. pp. 65-66.)? Did it really happen? It is odd that Brecht wrote a play called “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”. While Antiochus was in Egypt, Jason assaulted Jerusalem, unsuccessfully. Antiochus thought Judea was in revolt: raging inwardly, he returned and took Jerusalem by storm with much slaughter and selling into slavery; he entered the Holy of Holies and carried off the temple treasure. He tried to compel the Jews to give up the laws of their fathers; the temple was to be called the temple of Olympian Zeus and the Samaritan one in Gerizim the temple of Zeus the Friend of Strangers. All this provoked the revolt of the Maccabees. Antiochus Epiphanes died in Persia; his young son was soon put to death by the cousin who had escaped from Rome . . . Philometor died of wounds received in a battle near Antioch over the Seleucid succession. The reign of Philometor does have similarities with that of good king Josiah (p. 17 above) who came to the throne at eight years old. After the repair of the temple and the “finding” of the

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book of the law, a prophetess said Josiah would be gathered to his grave in peace, and not see the destruction of Jerusalem. In the next chapter he is killed in an unnecessary battle. The carryings into captivity in Babylon and the destruction of Jerusalem happened in the reigns of his sons and grandsons. Petrie describes the great number of passover ovens, from the feast of foundation, which he discovered in his excavation at Leontopolis. Wherever the great mound was dug into at ground level, there were dozens of pottery ovens 2% feet high, open at the top, containing wood ashes and one or two leg bones of a lamb. After the feast earth was thrown on the fires to smother them, killing the fires for a sacrifice as work began on raising the mound. Is it possible this is the real great passover celebration described in II Kings 23 and II Chronicles 35? “In the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah was this passover kept.” The eighteenth year of Philometor would be 163 B.C., making the foundation of Oniah’s city a couple of years after the cleansing of the Jerusalem temple by Judas Maccabaeus in 165, commemorated by the Festival of Lights (Antiquities XII.7.7) or Hanukkah, with its nine-branched candlestick. How could a scripture written in Egypt have been accepted by the Maccabees? Did Oniah IV renounce his claim to the high priesthood? One does not know. In I Chronicles 13 David said: “Let us bring again the ark of our God to us: for we enquired not at it in the days of Saul . . . And they carried the ark of God in a new cart . . .” In II Samuel 6, “David and all the house of Israel played before the LORD on all manner of instruments . . . And as the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.” Yet in I Samuel 18 and 19 she had loved him when he won her with 200 Philistine foreskins; then she had saved him from Saul’s jealousy by letting him down through a window and putting an image in the bed. Dancing king can be penis symbol. “The lady at the window” is listed by Albright (p. 137) as the subject of one of the ivories found in Samaria, dating probably from the 9th century B.C. Whatever it means, “fiancee looks out 27

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of window” must be very old. Gurdjieffs compassionate idiot was only compassionate when fiancee looked out of window. Can David’s music and dancing connect with the Pythagoreans, and with the “very ancient Hebraic music and songs” heard by Gurdjieff among the Essenes, “most of whom are Jews”? His claims about the Dead Sea Essenes (R.M. pp. 58, 73, 133) bewilder the time-map. Had to find out more. It has always seemed curious that in English the word for Noah’s ark and the ark of the covenant should be the same. Dictionary says it comes from Old Teutonic arka, probably from Latin, area, chest. According to encyclopaedia there are two different words in Hebrew. 26th February, 1975. Early tea. Staring at the words NOAH’S ARK from an old toy, partly obscured by a hardboard, eyes saw it could read SARK for body. Noah-sark, Oniah. Nehemiah. Ahoon. Could Noah stand for Oniah, provider of refuge? One thing that can be said about the different flood stories is that the heroes have different names. Genesis 5. 28-29 says that Lamech lived 182 years; then he begat a son and called his name Noah, for “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands . . .” Margin has “Greek Noe. That is, Rest or Comfort.” A Greek derivation for Noah is an anachronism. Then it may be right about Beelzebub’s old servant. Ahoon, the body, the donkey, of limited intelligence and destined for death, but devoted to his master. Try as one might the only meaning found for the name Ahoon was that it was nearly an anagram for Noah. Perhaps you could say the body is an ark, the ship of the spirit. May one argue that this fetching of the ark by David could represent Judas Maccabaeus adopting the new scripture from Egypt, being at that stage just the books of Moses? Doubtful. Judas did not live as long as David; he was killed in battle in 160 B.C., but had time to make and alliance with Rome. His brother Jonathan became leader till killed by the ambitious Syrian, Trypho, in 143 or 142 B.C. The last survivor of the five brothers, Simon, made Judaea independent; the high priesthood and title of ethnarch were made hereditary in his family. A son-in-law murdered him with two of his sons but the other son, John Hyrcanus I, escaped the plot and ruled from 134-104 B.C. 28

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To return to Ezra-Aris-tobulus, the short article “Synagogue” calls the synagogue “Ezra’s main work” and says it has been termed the “child of the dispersion”. “The Onias temple built at Leontopolis about 154 B.C.” is mentioned; this does not disagree too badly with 163 for the start on throwing up the artificial mound. “The synagogue was the place of study: the law was read on Sabbaths, Festivals and market days in an annual, and also in a triennial cycle.” There was translation and preaching. It sounds so much more civilised than the old slaughter-house temples. One aim of the Pythagorean movement may have been to substitute self-denial for animal sacrifice. But Empedocles’ “Fast from evil” goes further than external abstinence from food, drink or sex. It is quoted in Plutarch, On the Control of Anger, 464.

5th March 1975. Jill gave a translation of “Fulcanelli: Master Alchemist — Le Mystere des Cathedrales”, originally published in 1925. The new introduction is by Walter Lang. Learned in 1980 that it is a pseudonym for Eddie Campbell. He says on p. 27: “Perhaps because Christianity had rejected the wisdom component in its total revelation — a decision in which Constantine was probably crucial — alchemy . . . had to operate in disguise.” “Fulcanelli” writes on p. 90: “The series of operations, which, when complete, leads to the intimate union of sulphur and mercury, is also called sublimation . . . ‘Our philosophic Mercury is the bird of Hermes’ . . . These are the sublimations described by Callimachus in the Hymn to Delos, when, speaking of swans, he says: ‘The swans went round Delos seven times . . . and they had not yet sung the eighth time, when Apollo was born.’ This is a variation of the procession which Joshua ordered seven times round Jericho, whose walls fell down before the eighth time.” Thank you, Fulcanelli. One begins to feel the Old Testament writer(s) deliberately laid a trail of literary, mythological and historical correspondences, a training ground for detectives. But with the centuries the clues become obscure; who has heard of Callimachus now? Poet and grammarian, he flourished around 250 B.C. and was appointed by Ptolemy II as head of the library at Alexandria, a real Ali Baba’s treasure house. Aristobulus might

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have put in a correspondence between Callimachus and the walls of Jericho to acknowledge his debt to the library. Ptolemy I, called Lagus, or Soter (Saviour), was one of Alexander the Great’s most trusted generals. In 285 he abdicated in favour of a younger son by Berenice (the lady-in-waiting who supplanted the true bride, as in fairy tales, but successfully). Ptolemy Lagus died in 283 aged 84, leaving a well-ordered realm after 50 years of wars. The son, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (died 246) had many brilliant mistresses; his court, intellectual and artificial, has been compared with the Versailles of Louis XIV. “The tradition which connects the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek with his name is not historical” says encyclopaedia firmly but not very informatively. Toynbee, Vol 6, p. 419, writes “the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek was made circa 170-132 B.C.” citing W. W. Tarn, “Hellenistic Civilization”, 1927. These dates fit well for what is claimed here (p. 14) may have been some of the original writing of the Old Testament. 8th March 1975. Headline: “52 days hunt for kidnapped heiress ends in tragedy”. Lesley Whittle, penned in manhole. Nehemiah 6.15: “So the wall was finished in the twenty and fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty and two days.” What does 52 call up? Weeks in the year, something to do with the Sabbath and the seven-day week, the Babylonian/Harran star-lore part of the Semitic inheritance, about which one has not been able to find much. 15th March 1975. Frank Kermode in The Daily Telegraph writes that Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”, published November 1899 though referred to as 1900, was epochmaking in its way. One has puzzled much over the ambivalent nature of Freud’s influence on the world. Now, trying to understand the role of Aristobulus, Freud and psycho-analysis are seen as a possible parallel. Jung called Freud “a man in the grip of his daimon” (p. 176). He uses the same words of himself in his retrospect at the end of “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”. 12th September 1975. An article in the Church of England Newspaper refers to Caesarea Philippi (p. 25 above) being the scene of the incident in Matthew 16 where Jesus said: “Blessed

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art thou, Simon Bar-jona . . . thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church . . .” On the way to the coasts (towns in Mark 8) of Caesarea Philippi Jesus had asked his disciples “Whom do men say that I the son of Man am?” The rebuke to Peter: “Get thee behind me, Satan” comes next.

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HE AMERICAN PROFESSOR W. F. Albright says in his Archaeology of Palestine, p. 254: “The discriminating student is constantly surprised to see how often the finest things in Babylonian and Egyptian literature reappear in transmuted form in the Hebrew Bible.” Archaeology shows some sources which may have been available to Old Testament writers. Both Petrie and Albright illustrate the famous tableau of BeniHasan in Middle Egypt, dated by Albright c. 1892 B.C. (he was born in 1891 A.D.), showing visiting semi-nomadic tribesmen and women from central Transjordan. They wear handsomely patterned tunics with one shoulder bare — “coats of many colours” — and are armed with spears, throw sticks and bows. One carries a lyre and a water skin; on donkey back are two children, and bellows, showing them to be travelling metal workers. This is said to fit the description of the family of Lamech in Genesis 4. In the different genealogy of Genesis 5 Lamech is the father of Noah (p. 28 above). Stephen Herbert Langdon describes under Hammurabi (encyclopaedia) the eight-foot high stela with a relief of the king receiving the laws from the seated sun god, Shamash. “a motif undoubtedly connected with the legend of Moses and the revelation of the Decalogue from Yahweh on Mt. Sinai”. The stela was found at Susa, where it had been carried off as plunder and partly defaced; some of the missing laws have been found on fragments of tablets at Nippur, and at Nineveh. The latter were written in the seventh century B.C. Langdon dates Hammurabi 2067-2025 B.C. but a more recent work — Larousse Ancient and Medieval History, 1963 — gives dates 1711-1669 B.C. He was the 6th King of the Amoritic or West Semitic (also called Canaanitic) dynasty of Babylon. He extended his father’s conquests and established an efficient government for his empire. “Henceforth Babylon was to be the

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political and intellectual centre of West Asiatic history right down to the Christian era.” Perhaps it is childish to see a similarity between the names Hammurabi and Abraham, for one also sees a similarity with Brahma. Under Babylonian Law there is a detailed account of the code of Hammurabi which throws light on ancient society. “A childless wife might give her husband a maid to bear him children, who were reckoned hers.” If she did not do this, he could take a concubine, who was free and a wife, but of inferior status to the first wife. The children of a slave-girl by her master were born free and could be legitimised by the father; the mother could not be sold and was free on her master's death. The motif of the childless wife giving an handmaid to her husband to bear children appears in the stories of Abram’s wife Sarai and Hagar; and of Leah and Rachel and their maids. Earlier than these Babylonian kings was the Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad; “a legend related how he had been born in concealment and set adrift in an ark of bulrushes on the waters of the Euphrates” (article Babylonia). In The Bible Comes Alive (revised to 1944) Sir Charles Marston describes the discoveries at the ancient Phoenician city of Ugarit, excavated from 1929 onwards, particularly a temple library, dated 1400-1350 B.C., with a school for scribes. There were alphabetic cuneiform tablets in a language close to early Hebrew, showing many affinities with the Old Testament. Sacrifice rituals refer to the Wave Offering, Whole Burnt Offering, New-Moon Offerings, Offerings of Firstfruits . . . “There is a ritual for offerings on the housetops, to the sun, moon, and stars, a practice which is forbidden in the Old Testament. There is also a ceremony of boiling a kid in its mother’s milk — for a milk charm — which is expressly forbidden in Exodus 23.19 and Deut. 14. 21.” (p. 53). There is a description of the Tabernacle and its contents. The word for priest is Kohen and the dead are called Rephaim. One tablet has: “Didst thou not smite Leviathan, the swift serpent, even the crooked serpent? Didst thou not break in pieces his seven heads?” which is compared on p. 54 with Isaiah 27.1 and Psalm 74.14. One may notice how correspondences tend to appear twice. Albright also discusses the Leviathan (Lotan) verse 34

UGARIT

(p. 235) and the rhythmic repetition of words. Albright says on p. 231: “The Phoenician inscriptions from tenth century Byblus swarm with literary reminiscences of this epic literature” from Ugarit. Tucked away under the heading Jebeil, a village 20 miles north of Beirut, encyclopaedia has a little about ancient Byblos. The temple of Baalat (Aphrodite Byblia) “appears to have been erected about 1900 B.C. and existed substantially in its original form until the middle ages”, when Moslems destroyed it after the crusades; since then it was used as a quarry for building stones. The dictionary says Biblion, book, comes from biblos, papyrus bark, but the similarity with Byblos is odd, since the city may have been important in the development of the Phoenician alphabet, ancestor of the Greek. The place had great prestige, and it does not seem impossible that ancient poetry and rituals, preserved in the temple inscriptions, were used for the Jewish scriptures and the revival of Hebrew. “A comparison between Phoenician and Hebrew reveals close resemblances both in grammatical forms and in vocabulary” (encyclopaedia: Phoenicia, written before the Ugarit discoveries). This argument is perhaps strengthened by the finding among the Qumran scrolls of a fragment of Leviticus on inscribed leather, “written in the old proto-Hebraic or ‘Phoenician’ characters”. (Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Pelican, p. 85.) The laws of sacrifice and of various offerings are in Leviticus 1-7. To an outsider the new square script seems designed to make learning difficult, several of the letters are so much alike. Try Psalm 1 19! Had not been able to find when the square Hebrew letters originated; it appears they may have been the current Aramaic script since Albright (p. 222) writes of “the four Aramaic (square Hebrew) letters of the divine name Y H W H” being inserted in the Greek Fuad fragment. Then the similarity between letters may be explained as due to scribes in a hurry; Barbara Mertz (p. 266) describes Egyptian demotic at its worst as “row upon row of agitated commas”. If aleph isn’t a vowel, what is it? It is the first letter of all, and more or less nothing? Perhaps that is a symbol. The alphabet, nursery education, may carry legominisms. The forms of Greek omega and our B are suggestive. Greek letter Y was used as a 35

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symbol for the Two Ways (Chambers Dictionary, Pythagorean letter). The story of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt seems to be based on memories of the Hyksos kings. Josephus says Hyksos means “Shepherd Kings”. The modern interpretation is “Rulers of Foreign Countries” (Mertz, pp. 149-150). They were Asiatics who went into Egypt as conquerors and ruled from Avaris in the Delta. The Larousse history dated them around 1650 B.C. They were driven out by Kamose of Thebes and his brother Ahmose. "There is no Egyptian reference to Moses nor to Joseph” (Mertz, p. 151). “Who then was the pharaoh of the Exodus? . . Was there, in fact — let us be daring — an Exodus at all?” (p.293). Professor Albright (p. 108) writes of the violent destruction by fire, to which the latest Canaanite town at Tell Beit Mirsim had been subjected by the invading Israelites. “A similar destruction was the fate of contemporary Lachish, at a time which cannot have preceded the fourth year of Marniptah . . . These destructions about 1220 B.C. were preceded by the destruction of Jericho and Bethel by the incoming Israelites.” The two latter destructions cannot be easily dated. The sentence about Marniptah is cryptic. Marni, Meme or Meren-ptah was the 13th son of Rameses II who left so many statues of himself. In his 5th year Merneptah was threatened with attack by migrating Libyan tribes, accompanied by “peoples of the sea” who may have come from Asia Minor. It was the beginning of the disturbed time of migrations when the Hittite empire disappeared, Troy was destroyed and the Philistines occupied the coastlands of Palestine, subjugating the Canaanites. Merneptah sought advice from the gods. In a dream Ptah offered him a sword, so Merneptah sent out the army, which was victorious. His granite stela names his victories over the Libyans and in Palestine, with lists of conquered towns, and is famous for the words: “The people of Israel is spoiled it has no corn (or seed)”. This is taken to imply that Israel was then an integrated nation. It seems possible that the destructions described by Albright were by Merneptah’s army and not by invading Israelites who were really the settled, but now impoverished, inhabitants. Aristobulus might have taken from this stela the idea 36

MERNEPTAH

for his story of the famine which sent Jacob-Israel and his children into Egypt. Petrie illustrates a wall-carving outside the forecourt at Karnak. The god Amon leads by strings the labelled cities, largely in Judah, conquered by Pharaoh Sheshenq or Shishak (1 Kings 14.25). Shishak (around 950 B.C.), founded the 22nd dynasty and seems to have fixed his residence at Bubastis. Such an inscription could help to account for the correctness of the Old Testament names of early towns. Some chapters read like an incantation of names. Palestinian archaeology has identified Biblical towns but it “is much less helpful in throwing direct light on biblical personalities, mainly owing to the scarcity of inscriptions. Actually, more biblical personages are mentioned in inscriptions discovered outside of Palestine than in documents found in the country.” (Albright p. 230.) There are Assyrian mentions of Ahab, Jehu, Menahem, Pekah, and Hoshea, kings of the Northern Kingdom of Israel or Samaria; of the capture of Damascus and devastation of Israel by Tiglath-Pileser III c. 733, and of the capture of Samaria by Sargon II about 721 B.C. Judah was fortunate in being further away, but there were Assyrian references to Ahaz paying tribute c. 733, and to Hezekiah and Manasseh. (Article Bible, chronology.) One cannot help feeling that some of the other kings with names like Jehoshaphat, Jehoram (2), Jehoash (2), Jehoahaz (2), Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, have been invented to fill in the gaps. In 1870 Clermont-Ganneau, a young man in the French consular service, sent to the Louvre the famous Stele of Mesha, king of Moab, recovered from the Arabs east ot the Dead Sea. A Polish Jew, Dr. M. W. Shapira (it “spells” Prusa), who kept an antiquities shop in Jerusalem, sold forged Moabite pottery to the Prussian government, and in 1883 offered to the British Museum sheepskins claimed to show a ninth century B.C. version of the history in Deuteronomy. Clermont-Ganneau exposed them as forgeries and Shapira killed himself; the skins had been cut from the ends of synagogue rolls 300 years old (encyclopaedia under Frauds; “Moabite” forgeries also mentioned by Albright p. 27). The Mesha stele is dated to about 825 B.C. and was the earliest Semitic inscription then known. The alphabet is a

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development of that on the Ahiram sarcophagus discovered at Byblus in 1923 and now dated shortly after 1000 B.C. (Albright pp. 188, 191). The language of the Mesha stele differs only dialectically from Hebrew. Omri had seized a number of Moabite cities, and for 40 years the Moabite national god Chemosh was angry with his land. Then he roused king Mesha. “The men of Gad had dwelt in the land of Ataroth from old; and the king of Israel built Ataroth for himself.” Mesha took the city, slew its people in honour of Chemosh, and dragged before him the altar-hearth (or the priests?) of D-v-d-h (apparently a divine name, but curiously similar to David). Nebo, where Y-h-w-h had been worshipped, fell with its thousands, “devoted” to the deity AshtarChemosh. The names of other places taken are listed. Moab fortified its towns and supplied them with cisterns. Mesha built a great sanctuary to his god. S. A. Cook gives these details in the article “Moab” and says the relation of Chemosh to his “children” was like that of Yahweh to Israel. “The inscription enumerates many places known elsewhere (Isaiah 15, Jeremiah 48)”. Isaiah 15 and 16 are a “burden” on Moab; in the very similar Jeremiah 48 some phrases are identical. One has puzzled over the Old Testament’s fondness for the period of forty years (and Ali Baba’s 40 thieves). It could point to the 40-year period of Moab’s subjection on this stele, which is full of possible material. In II Kings 3 the story is turned round, “And Mesha king of Moab was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred thousand rams, with the wool.” When he rebelled the kings of Israel, Judah and Edom soundly defeated him with the help of a water-supply miracle by Elisha. In 11 Chronicles 20 what is apparently the same story is further garbled. It is suggested the O.T. author was writing with his tongue in his cheek and fully intended his inconsistencies should be obvious. A reference to Chemosh, Judges 11.24, leads to the story of Jephthah. He vowed that if the Lord would deliver the children of Ammon into his hands, he would make a burnt offering of whatsoever came forth of the doors of his house to meet him, when he returned in peace. It was his daughter, his only child. This motif is found in fairy-tales; it may be a parallel

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for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia. Another Phu-Phu-Kle? (London-Phu-Phu-Kle changing their gloves in Gurdjieffs chapter Purgatory, p. 803, was taken as “clue of two Josephs”.) There is a Palestinian inscription (found 1880), carved in classical Hebrew in the rock at the entrance to Hezekiah’s Siloam tunnel under the oldest city of Jerusalem (Albright p. 135). Sir Charles Marston describes (p. 87) the Taylor prism in the British Museum with Sennacherib's account of his campaign in Palestine (701 B.C.) “As for Hezekiah of Judah, who did not submit to my yoke, forty-six of his strong-walled cities, 1 besieged ... 1 took two hundred thousand people . . . horses, mules, asses, camels, cattle, and sheep without number. As for Hezekiah himself I shut him up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a caged bird.” The spoils of gold, silver, jewels, ivory couches and chairs, elephants’ hide . . . the harem and the musicians, are described. The British Museum also has bas-reliefs of Sennacherib’s siege of Lachish, carved for the palace at Nineveh. The Old Testament writer spread himself. 11 Kings chapters 18, 19, and 20 are about Hezekiah, with two miracles. Unlike so many of the other kings, “he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord”. “And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the Kings of Judah?” This refrain apparently does not mean our books of Chronicles. In II Chronicles Hezekiah has chapters 29-32. He kept a passover: “for they had not done it of a long time in such sort as it was written.” Afterwards “all Israel that were present went out to the cities of Judah, and brake the images in pieces, and cut down the groves, and threw down the high places and the altars . . .” Isaiah 36 and 37 give the story of Hezekiah and Sennacherib nearly word for word as in Kings, but some names are spelled differenth. Hezekiah at first submitted and yielded up treasures. Then the King of Assyria sent officials w ith an army to Jerusalem. Lhey made a confused speech asking if Hezekiah was trusting the bruised reed, even Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it; or if he was trusting in the Lord? It seems the Lord had also told the Assyrian. “Go up against this land and destroy it.” Hezekiah prayed, and received 39

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a reassuring message through Isaiah. “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.” Sennacherib’s prism "is silent” about this disaster! Lucky chance produced a reference by Dean Inge to a parallel story in Herodotus, II 141-2. The Egyptian priest-king Sethos had offended the warrior class: when Sennacherib, the King of Arabia and Assyria, invaded, Sethos did not know what to do. He entered the shrine and complained before the image of the god; he fell asleep (like Merneptah) and dreamed the god would send helpers. So he marched to Pelusium with a mixed company of shop-keepers and artisans. In the night thousands of field-mice swarmed over the Assyrians and ate their quivers and bowstrings and the leather handles of their shields. They had to retreat with heavy losses. This story has travelled. One of the Folk Tales from Tibet (Captain O’Connor, Hurst & Blackett 1906) tells how the mice, to help a king who befriended them when barley was scarce, crossed a river on a hundred thousand sticks (or alternative!v cakes of dried yak’s dung) to the sleeping camp of the more powerful enemy. They gnawed bowstrings and musket slings, slow matches and fuses, clothes and pigtails, tents and provisions. The king kept his side of the bargain — to banish all cats. I he wonder-filled style of history writing is more entertaining and edifying than a factual record of the ups, and often downs, of ambitious rulers and would-be rulers, with their endless wars and destructions. Professor Albright says on pp. 141-2: “C. C. Torrey . . . has denied the historicity of the account of the Captivity in Kings, Ezekiel and Ezra . . . The account of the Restoration in Ezra is, according to Torrey, quite apocryphal ... (A) fair number of towns and fortresses of Judah have now been excavated many towns were destroyed at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. and never again occupied; others were . . . partly reoccupied at some later date . . . others . . . after a long period of abandonment . . . (It) was not until the third century B.C. that the country recovered anything like its old density of population.” So the destruction and carrying into captivity were 40

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real enough. What is not explained is how the Jewish sacred books are supposed to have been preserved through this time. Should not some information about the destruction have been available from Babylonian sources? Look up Nebuchadnezzar. The encyclopaedia prefers the form Nebuchadrezzar as closer to the cuneiform version. He succeeded his father Nabopolassar in 604 B.C. Only a fragment of his annals has reached us, of a campaign in his 37th year against Ahmosi of Egypt. There is a reference to Josephus, Against Apion, I. 19. In this Josephus deals with the Chaldean histories of Berosus, who apparently gives the deluge, the ark, the posterity of Noah and the chronology, at length coming down to Nabopolassar of Babylon who “sent his son Nabuchodonosor against Egypt, and against our land, with a great army, upon his being informed that they had revolted ... he subdued them all, and set our temple that was at Jerusalem on fire; nay, and removed our people entirely out of their own country and transferred them to Babylon . . Josephus quotes (I. 21) from Phoenician records; “Nabuchodonosor beseiged Tyre for thirteen years in the days of Ithobal, their king; after him reigned Baal, ten years; after him were judges appointed, who judged the people” — not for 40 years but for two months, ten months, “Abhar the high priest, three months ... six years . . .” Thirteen year siege? If the Berossus account is right the burning was apparently before Nebuchadnezzar’s accession. It is possible the writer of II Kings was embroidering with his account of two deportations, separated by an eleven year interval. II Kings 25.8 puts the final burning in the 19th year of Nebuchadnezzar, so the encyclopaedia fixes it in 586 B.C. Duplication is the trade-mark of the Old Testament. So there are also two returns. The first was apparently under Zerubbabel in the first year of Cyrus (after he took Babylon) 538 B.C.; the second was with Ezra in 458 B.C. One has not heard of any outside evidence for either, but it uo.y Persian policy under Darius I to protect the religions of subject peoples. He built temples in Egypt (encyclopaedia). The high priests of Judah, “like the contemporary high priests of Atargatis at Hierapolis in northern Syria, received permission to strike their own coinage and levy their own temple taxes.” (Albright p. 143) 41

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There was another deportation, which history has kept wellhidden, about 350 B.C.: "Deportation of many Jews to Hyrcania and Babylonia, probably for revolt against Persians.” (Encyclopaedia under Bible, O.T. Chronology) It is odd that under Hyrcanus the encyclopaedia should say "a Greek surname, of unknown origin, borne by several Jews of the Maccabaean period” when the adjacent article says Hyrcania was an ancient district south of the Caspian, called Virkana or "Wolf’s Land” in Old Persian. There was also a town Hyrcania in Lydia said to derive from a colony of Hyrcanians transported thither by the Persians. However they got there, Josephus speaks of the Jews in Babylonia being very numerous. There is a picturesque story (encyclopaedia under Johanan, and Jews) that during the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, Johanan ben Zaccai, seeing that the Bible was the Jews' portable fatherland, had himself carried out in a coffin, and was allowed by the Romans to found a school at Jabneh or Jamnia (near Jaffa). As Palestine declined in importance three Jewish schools developed in Babylonia and it was the Talmud of Babylon "which exercised a preponderating influence upon Jewish life in later times” (article Jews). Under the Moslems Jewish learning met Greek traditions, producing an intellectual flowering which spread to Spain. The hypothesis that the Old Testament was begun in the age of the Maccabee brothers raises the question of what Jewish religion was like before. In its paragraph on Alexander the Great the article “Jews” speaks of orders by Darius 11, in Aramaic papyri of 419 B.C., enabling his Jewish soldiers at Elephantine to observe the Passover and abstain from leaven. Petrie describes the Aramaic papyri from the Jewish colony at Aswan (Syene) and quotes Isaiah 19.18: "In that day shall five cities in the land ol Egypt speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the Lord of Hosts . . .” There are documents of one family extending from 471 to 410 B.C. The oath in the papyri is by Yahu, but the woman named Mibhtahyah, “Trust Yahveh” was willing to swear by the goddess Sati in dealing with an Egyptian. Petrie says this shows the standpoint of the Jewish monarchy, not of the zealots or puritans. Mibhtahyah’s second husband was an Egyptian who changed his name to Nathan. Her 42

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two sons by him each took one of the family slaves. The names are distinctly biblical, including Uriah, Zechariah, Hosea, Hananiah, Menaham. If such family documents could have come down to the time of Aristobulus, they would be a useful source of personal names. In the absence of the satrap, the priests of Khnum got the local governor to order the destruction of the temple of Yahu at Aswan, in 410. The Jews’ petition to rebuild their temple, and the answer giving permission, are among the papyri. The origin of the Passover is a puzzle which the experts have studied. This person confesses to thinking it officially celebrated the passing over the Red Sea. Wrong. In Exodus 12, the blood of the lamb was to be sprinkled on the Israelites’ door-posts so that the Lord would pass over their households when he smote the Egyptian first-born. One has one’s own idea about the symbolism of blood on the doorway. The Lord bade Moses tell Pharaoh: “Let my people go, that they may serve me.’’ Each time Pharaoh hardened his heart a new plague was sent. If only God’s actions were so direct! Petrie draws attention to an incident in I Kings 11; when the victorious David and Joab slew every male in Edom, the Edomite king’s small son Hadad was taken to Egypt by the king’s servants. Pharaoh gave him a house and land and appointed him victuals. Hadad found favour with Pharaoh and was given to wife the sister of Queen Tahpenes. After the deaths of David and Joab. Hadad asked to go back. Pharaoh said: “But what hast thou lacked with me”? “Nothing: howbeit let me go in any wise.” It is the situation of Oniah asking Ptolemy Philometor to “Let me go”, and getting permission to build his own temple and city. Hadad is the Syrian storm-god. Tahpenes, whose name was not in the Egyptian records known to Petrie, sounds like a variant spelling of Tahpanhes or Tehaphnehes in Jeremiah 43.7, Ezekiel 30.18 and elsewhere, taken to be the Greek Daphnae, a frontier fortress some 45 miles from Bubastis (Petrie p. 85 and map p. 29). Petrie’s map shows the land of Goshen, which Joseph’s Pharaoh gave to the family of Jacob. At one end is Bubastis on the eastern branch of the delta. Herodotus describes the temple.

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with its site made almost an island by tree-bordered canals led from the Nile. People came to its festival in barges and more wine was consumed than during all the rest of the year. Herodotus goes on to describe the Festival of Lamps at Sais (pp. 125-6 and 156 in Penguin Herodotus). There is a verbal echo in Josephus’s Festival of Lights mentioned above (p. 27). One thinks of these ancient “religious” festivals as rather like the recent fashion for huge outdoor pop festivals. Probably Stonehenge with its nearby cursus was a centre for such annual tribal gatherings. This Bubastis, now mounds called Tell Basta, is described by encyclopaedia as near the modern Zagazig (see Saucer pp. 147, 155, 168). It was a mistake to think it was the same place as the Leontopolis which is Tell el Yehudiyeh, 20 miles north of Cairo (pp. 17, 18, 27, 29 above). In Antiquities XIII 3.2 0nias was given permission to purge the ruined temple “at Leontopolis, in the Nomus of Heliopolis, and which is named from the country Bubastis . . .” Petrie (p. 100) calls it Bubastis of the fields. A stone shrine of the lion-headed goddess was found in the Egyptian quarter (p. 102). It is curious that there was also at Tell el Yehudiyeh a Hyksos fort, an earth bank enclosing a quarter­ mile square (Petrie p. 19 and above p. 36). Herodotus, who died 425 B.C.. belongs to the Persian period when Judah was underpopulated. Josephus, Against Apion 1.22, claims Herodotus does mention the Jews when speaking of circumcision: “The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they adopted the practice from Egypt” (p. 140 in Penguin Herodotus). So circumcision, basic phallic ritual, was ancient: the national epic provided an origin for it in Genesis 17, when God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, renewing the covenant that He would give the land of Canaan to Abraham and his seed for an everlasting possession, and that He would be their God; circumcision was to be the token. Seven­ year covenants, allowing charities to recover income tax, play such a part in our lives that they seem to echo this covenant which is so often made a key-word in the Old Testament. Apparently the name Isaac means “He laughed”. Is the author laughing at us for believing his miracles? Sarah laughed when she heard she would have a son, for they were “well stricken in age;

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and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” The Bible is an instructor in the “facts of life”. Abraham was an hundred years old when Isaac was born, and Sarah said, “God hath made me to laugh, so that all who hear will laugh with me.” When he is listing the 1207 triremes of Xerxes’ fleet, Herodotus says: “(i) The Phoenicians, with the Syrians of Palestine, contributed 300. The crews wore helmets very like the Greek ones, and linen corslets; they were armed with light rimless shields and javelins. These people have a tradition that in ancient times they lived on the Persian Gulf, but migrated to the Syrian coast, where they are found today. This part of Syria, together with the country which extends southward to Egypt, is all known as Palestine.” (p. 444.) Such a tradition could be the basis for the story of Abraham’s migration from Ur of the Chaldees. Herodotus may have contributed in a different way. Though one cannot be sure how much of his material is fabulous, he uses history to convey an attitude to life. Croesus had his treasuries shown to Solon, and hoped to be told he was the happiest of men. Solon refused to flatter: “1 know God is envious of human prosperity and likes to trouble us . . . as the years lengthen out, there is much both to see and to suffer which one would wish otherwise. Take seventy years as the span of a man's life . . . You are very rich, and you rule a numerous people; but the question you asked me 1 will not answer, until 1 know that you have died happily.” (p. 25.) When Xerxes had reviewed his huge army and watched a rowing match, he congratulated himself on his luck, and burst into tears. He told his uncle: “it came into my mind how pitifully short human life is — for of all these thousands of men not one will be alive in a hundred years’ time.” (p. 433.) Earlier, when the invasion of Greece was first proposed, this uncle, Artabanus, had persuaded Xerxes against it. “It is always the great buildings and the tall trees which are struck by lightning.” Twice the king dreamed that a tall man rebuked him for not undertaking the war. The king persuaded Artabanus to sleep in his bed and see if the dream would come again. It did. “You will not escape unpunished, either now or hereafter, for seeking to turn aside the course of destiny.” The phantom was about to burn out Artabanus' eyes with hot irons when he awoke

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with a shriek and ran to Xerxes. Both were now convinced that heaven itself was about to send ruin upon Greece (pp. 419-424.) There are dreams also in Herodotus’ Oedipus-like story of the birth of Cyrus. Astyages, King of the Medes, dreamed that his daughter made water in such enormous quantities that it swamped Asia. The Magi’s interpretation alarmed him, so he married the girl to a Persian, Cambyses, considered inferior to the Medes. In another dream a vine grew from his daughter’s private parts and spread over Asia. The King ordered his steward and kinsman Harpagus to kill the daughter’s new-born son. Harpagus told a herdsman to expose the child, but the herdsman’s wife had just borne a dead baby, so there was an exchange. When Cyrus was ten, other boys made him king in their games and the story came out. The Magi assured Astyages that dreams often work out in something quite trivial, and advised sending the boy to his true parents in Persia. Astyages took his revenge on Harpagus by serving him a dinner of his own son. What is the meaning of this mythological theme? Is it the same as Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, which was taken to mean something like self-restraint in sex? Turning over the pages led to the means by which Cyrus ended his siege of Babylon. By a cutting he diverted so much of the Euphrates into a former lake that his army was able to wade into the city. Could this be the original for the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea by Moses, duplicated in the miraculous crossing of the Jordan by Joshua? Josephus, Against Apion 1.19, has Berosus say that Nabuchodonosor “restored Babylon, that none who should besiege it afterwards might have it in their power to divert the river.’’ He erected a magnificent palace in fifteen dues. and the “pensile paradise” to please his wife. Josephus the old trickster! Really it is confirmation? A few pages later Herodotus says (p. 94): “When a Babylonian has had intercourse with his wife, he sits over incense to fumigate himself, with his wife opposite doing the same . . .” Where did G write about the self-fumigation of an Asiatic tribe? Chapter America, A & E p. 1025. Was he really providing encouragement for the seeker who reaches this place in Herodotus? 46

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The earthyness in Herodotus seems to be a technique for getting through to the “unconscious”. He describes the temple, still in existence in his time, of Bel, the Babylonian Zeus: “It has a solid central tower one furlong square, with a second erected on top of it and then a third, and so on up to eight.” It could be climbed by a spiral way round the outside. At the top was a temple with a couch and a golden table. It “contains no image and no one spends the night there except (if we may believe the Chaldeans who are the priests of Bel) one Assyrian woman, all alone, whoever it may be that the god has chosen.” (p. 86.) One more piece about Xerxes. A rich Lydian had entertained the whole army and been rewarded. Alarmed by an eclipse, he asked Xerxes to release the eldest of his five sons from the army. Xerxes was angry and had the young man killed; half his body was placed on each side of the road so that the army marched out between. Herodotus describes the column. Halfway, after a thousand picked spearmen with spears reversed, came ten of the sacred Nisaean horses, “followed by the holy chariot of Zeus drawn by eight white horses, with a charioteer on foot behind them holding the reins — for no mortal man may mount into that chariot's seat.” Then came the King in his own chariot, (pp. 427-432.) It is rather like the picture in II Samuel 6 and I Chronicles 13, where David and all the people fetched the ark of the Lord on a new cart. One of the drivers touched it, to steady it when the oxen stumbled, “and God smote him there for his error;” and he died by the ark. "And David was displeased because the Lord had made a breach upon Uzzah ... And David was afraid.” The same chapters were quoted above, p. 27. Jeremiah 34.18-20: The men who transgressed “the covenant which they had made before me, when they cut the calf in twain and passed between the parts thereof,” shall be given into the hand of their enemies. In Plato's Laws (753) voters are to walk between the victims of a sacrifice. However, these are literary parallels, not historical sources; which makes a good place to end this chapter. The overall conception of “The Book of the Acts of God”, from the creation coming down through history is magnificent, though one may not accept all its view of the Nature of God and His methods. 47

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Surely there is reason to think that the evolution of species and of civilisation cannot be just by mechanical chance; there is planning from behind the scenes. To seek to understand it better should be one of our strivings.

48

5 LITERATURE, AND ATHENS

TH SEPTEMBER 1975. Thought yesterday that the archaeological sources were finished. Reading through the further jumble written in the first half of the year produced a typical bewilderment and despondency. It had better be for something good! A dream and night-thoughts demand a return to Shishak and the Levitical cities. Rather than paste in another addition, let it be used to lead on to possible borrowings from pagan literature. On page 229 Albright says most critics since Wellhausen considered the list of Levitic cities to be “an artificial product of some post-exilic scribe’s imagination.” Joshua 14-21 contains lists of cities allotted to the Israelite tribes. In chapter 21 the Levites are given 48 cities scattered among the other tribes. They include Shechem, Golan, Hebron and the rest of the six cities of refuge, where anyone who slew his neighbour unwittingly could flee, and not be extradited by the “avenger of blood”. 1 Chronicles 6 repeats the list of Levitical cities with minor variations. Albright says: “Not a single town in the list can be shown to have been founded at a period subsequent to the middle of the tenth century B.C., though several cannot be much earlier than this date.” 950 B.C. is just the right date for them to be taken from Shishak’s list (mentioned above, p. 37) but it is too late for Joshua, which may be why Albright calls this “the extant form of the list, which seems to have had a pre-history going back to the Conquest.” The Levites as an hereditary priestly caste might owe something to the Magi, as Moses might to Zoroaster or to Solon (c. 638-c. 558 B.C.) the lawgiver of Athens, or even to the Muses. There is difficulty in applying the word Israel because sometimes it refers to the northern kingdom, Samaria, as distinguished from the southern kingdom of Judah with its capital

8

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at Jerusalem. It is also used to describe all the twelve tribes descended from Jacob, whose name was changed, after his wrestling with the angel, to Israel, interpreted as “a prince of God”, Genesis 32.28. The other tribes got so well “lost” that there does not seem to be external evidence that they ever existed. The Moabite stele (pp. 37-38 above) does not mention Reuben, one of the tribes to which that area was allocated; it does mention the men of Gad. Gad was supposed to be a son of Leah’s maid, but it seems it is also the name of “a god of fortune, originally perhaps Aramaean, whose name occurs not infrequently in compound place names.” (Encyclopaedia, Gad.) It was a surprise to read that Athens too had tribes or phylae. Toynbee (Vol. 6. pp. 107-8) says that Cleisthenes, a successful revolutionary about 507 B.C., wanted to break down old kinship loyalties so that allegiance to the all-embracing city-state could be dominant. He replaced the four old Athenian tribes by ten new ones, with names picked by the Delphic oracle from mythical heroes. By his constitution he became the true founder of Athenian democracy. Twelve is a more interesting number than ten, but are these Athenian tribes likely to have suggested the twelve tribes of Israel? No evidence. It appears twelve is also the official number of the Greek greater gods. Archaeology does not appear to have found any positive evidence of the existence of kings of an undivided kingdom with the names of Saul, David or Solomon. There are remains of a fortress at Gibeah of about 1000 B.C., the right time for Saul; and the fine stables and governor’s house at Megiddo “of the Solomonic phase”; but nothing to say to whom any of these belonged. Megiddo is half-way between Jerusalem and Tyre, and might just as well have been Phoenician. Indeed, two pages earlier (p. 123) Albright says painted pottery from this Megiddo IV B level is closely related to pottery found at Carthage; and again that “Solomonic masonry shows clear indications of having been borrowed from the Phoenicians . . .” In relation to the refineries at Ezion-Geber on the gulf of Aqabah he refers to “tenth-century Phoenician methods of smelting copper”. All this may be to be explained by the friendship of Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre (called Huram in Chronicles). The

50

QUEEN OF SHEBA

article on Phoenicia says: “Between the withdrawal of the Egyptian rule in Syria and the western advance of Assyria there comes an interval during which the city-states of Phoenicia owned no suzerain” (and prospered). “From 970 to 772 B.C. the bare outline of events is supplied by extracts . . . preserved by Josephus”. In Against Apion 1.18, Josephus quotes Menander the Ephesian that Hirom reigned 34 years. “He raised a bank . . . and dedicated that golden pillar which is in Jupiter’s temple; he also went and cut down timber from the mountain called Libanus, and got timber of cedar for the roofs of the temples. He also pulled down the old temples and built new ones: besides this he consecrated the temples of Hercules and Astarte . . . Under this king there was a younger son of Abdemon. who mastered the problems which Solomon, king of Jerusalem, had recommended to be solved.” Josephus had just quoted another author with a longer version of the riddles and money forfeits. That history should preserve for 1000 years, indeed approaching 3000 now. a story of kings setting each other riddles, is surprising; though they have left a riddle to us. Is it permitted to argue that the riddles are interpolated and intended to show that the idea for Solomon's temple-building splendour was in fact taken from Hiram, who built temples for his own city of lyre? Who could be the queen of Sheba? A possible candidate is Hatshepsut. the female Pharaoh, daughter, wife and stepmother/aunt of the three Thutmoses of the 18th dynasty, when Egypt’s power was greatest. She may also have contributed to the figure of Pharaoh’s daughter who reared Moses. Her temple at Deir el Bahri, “the most beautiful temple in Egypt”, has carvings of the expedition she sent to the unidentified southern spiceland of Punt, and of the ships returning with gold and ivory and myrrh trees. (Barbara Mertz pp. 170-174.) The queen of Sheba “came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones . . .” (I Kings 10.) She did come to prove Solomon with hard questions. In verse II “the navy also of Hiram . . . brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees...” In Chronicles it is algum trees; the dictionaries say it is a foreign word, probably red sandalwood. 51

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Other reliefs at Hatshepsut’s temple show how she was the daughter of Amon-Re the god. He made his form like that of the husband. King Thutmose I and found Queen Ahmose sleeping in the beauty of the palace. She waked at the fragrance of the god ... He went to her immediately . . . “Hatshepsut shall be the name of this my daughter, whom I have placed in thy body.” She lived around 1500 B.C., well before the amours of Zeus. Whatever the elaborate Egyptian tombs did for the souls of their occupants, archaeology has reason to be grateful for the custom. It is a symbol for the preparation during life of an immortal habitation, but in another kingdom” where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6.20). Could there have been a genuine ancient tradition of a Saul who was the first king? Why was the name Saul chosen as the Jewish equivalent for Paul? Belatedly realised the name could be looked up in the Chambers Name supplement. Saul in Hebrew = Asked for. Samuel’s warning in I Samuel 8, when the people asked him for a king, reminds one of Aesop’s wise fable of the frogs who asked Jupiter for a king. King Stork ate them up. Are we not over-governed now? Hannah named her son Samuel, saying “Because I have asked him of the Lord.” Margin meaning for Samuel is “Asked of God” but Chambers gives “heard by God, or name of God.” Josephus again. In Against Apion 1.22, he quotes Hermippus: “ ‘That Pythagoras, upon the death of one of his associates, . . . a Crotoniate by birth, affirmed that this man’s soul conversed with him both night and day, and enjoined him not to pass over a place where an ass had fallen down; as also not to drink of such waters as caused thirst again; and to abstain from all sorts of reproaches.’ After which he adds thus: ‘This he said in imitation of the doctrines of the Jews and Thracians, which he transferred into his own philosophy.’ ” No further information has been found about this Hermippus except that FoakesJackson (p. 5), referring to Josephus, puts Hermippus “B.C. 200”. It may be said that Josephus appears quite capable of inventing some of his authorities or of interpolating them. Hermippus — horse of Hermes? One may question whether it was not Pythagoras who influenced the Jews. Could the cryptic saying about the ass

52

BALAAM’S ASS

falling down connect with the story of Balaam (Numbers 22-24), invited by the king of Moab to curse the invading Israelites? Balaam’s ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and turned aside, and was beaten by her master. The third time there was no way to turn, so she fell down under Balaam. The Lord opened her mouth and she said: “What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?” Then Balaam saw the angel and was told to go on, but he must speak the word that God would put into his mouth — a blessing on Israel, not a curse. Talking ass — a variant on Socrates’ daimon? Josephus next says Theophrastus knew about the Jews and declared them worthy of imitation, because he wrote “that the laws of the Tyrians forbid men to swear foreign oaths.” Among them Theophrastus listed Corban; which can be found only among the Jews (says Josephus, not Theophrastus, presumably). Did not learn much about Corban (in Mark 7.11) but Theophrastus led far afield. It is the sort of name one hears without registering, but this time he was looked up. He was a pupil of Aristotle and succeeded him as head of the Lyceum at Athens. It was somewhat like a college, with dinners, a library and maps, and something of a staff (Ernest Barker under Aristotle). One had wondered what actual organisations constituted “a school of philosophy” such as the Stoics. Aristotle gave his friend the name Theophrastus, divine speaker. Ah, phrase — from phrazo, tell; or in the other dictionary, phrazein, to speak. Diaram, say, muttered head. Would Theophrastus be why Gurdjieff put in his elderly, intelligent Persian's rather boring disquisition on the difference between “speak” and “say”, RM. p. 12? The most important works of Theophrastus are on botany, but his “Ethical Characters” give a valuable picture of the life of his time; they were translated by La Bruyere in 1688-9. Ears pricked up. Could it connect with Gurdjieffs doctrine of types? Dictionary: character is a Greek word meaning stamp, from kharatto engrave — much the same idea as type. One thinks of character rather as what you make yourself, what you become; of type as something imposed before you begin, a limitation; of fate as events, what happens. Everyone is

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not the same. It may not be easy to find your right place. It is no good trying to become something you are not cut out for, though one must not be defeatist. A difficult fate may produce a more understanding person in the end. We need to think that there is freedom to make the most of the type and fate we are given. An old school-text of La Bruyere’s own “Caracteres” gives his Discours sur Theophraste. According to St Jerome he was 107 when he died, regretting that he was only beginning to be wise. This person too sometimes tells herself: "You’ll just about begin to know something when it’s time to depart” — which makes her hope she will be able to take some of it with her. A less legendary view is that Theophrastus lived to be 85, i.e. from about 372 to 287 B.C. “We who are so modern, will be ancient in a few centuries”, says La Bruyere; and indeed the century ol Louis XIV and the coup of William-and-Mary seem a long time ago now. What will people 300 years hence think of us? Can history last out another 300 years! Theophrastus was the teacher of Menander, the chief poet of the Athenian New Comedy which, through the Latins Plautus and Terence, set the pattern for comedies of Shakespeare and Moliere. This led to some weeks of sending for Penguin Classics. Theophrastus’s Characters are included with Menander. There are 30 characters, all negative, but some are like, such as the stingy, the mean and the avaricious: “he measures out the rations for his household with his own hands, using a ‘thrifty’ can with the bottom knocked in, and brushing off the top very close ... If his sons have missed some days from school through illness, he deducts from the month’s fee a proportionate sum . . .” The chatterer, the talker and the inventor of news shade into other sins of the tongue, the boaster and the slanderer. “The chatterer is the sort of man who sits down beside someone he doesn’t know and begins by delivering a panegyric on his own wife; continues with an account of his dream of the night before; then describes in detail what he had for supper.” Others are the superstitious, the cowardly, the arrogant, the flatterer and the anxious to please, the grumbler, the dirty. Then there are the unseasonable man, and the tiresome man,” who will walk in when you have just dozed off and wake you up to have a chat.” 54

SO MODERN!

Menander, with dates c. 343/2-291/0 B.C., predeceased his master. He was known only from the Latin imitators, and from quotations, e.g. “Whom the gods love dies young”, till the first papyrus fragments were found in 1844 in St. Catherine’s monastery on Sinai, of all places. Toynbee (Vol. 6 p. 455) says that I Cor. 15.33 is a direct quotation from Menander; and two passages in Matthew, 15.10-20 and 6.19, use motifs from a fragment of Menander which Toynbee gives in Greek but does not translate.

“By 338 Philip of Macedon had brought the whole of Greece under his authority”, so Menander passed his life as a citizen of a subject state. He writes about private lives. In two of the three mature comedies now fairly complete a husband or lover makes a hasty misjudgement, recognises his mistake, reproaches himself bitterly and earns forgiveness. “Dike”, right or justice — “the conviction that it is possible to find a principle of behaviour which will enable men and women to deal successfully with their own and other people’s errors of impatience, ignorance or folly ... is a direct inheritance from the moral searchings of Aeschylus and Euripides . . . Socrates had spent a generation and more, as a fellow citizen of Euripides, in pursuit of the meaning of justice and goodness . . . Plato recorded and developed this pursuit . . . Aristotle took up the trail . . .’’(from Philip Vellacott’s introduction p. 20). The search for “objective conscience” does run through this Athenian literature, it is “responsible art”.

Toynbee’s Menander fragment is Penguin p. 295: “.. . everything Goes rotten by a corruption that’s peculiar to it; Each thing's corruption originates within itself. For instance, look at rust — the way it eats up iron; Or moths eat woollen cloaks, or wood worms devour wood. Just so, the most evil of all evil things, envy, Causes consumption of the soul . . . envy, the impious tendency Of a wicked heart.” Penguin version of I. Cor. 15.33: “The thing that spoils good character is bad company.” p. 281 “But now I see that you who are called the lucky ones Have troubles just like ours. In fact, trouble itself 55

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Is twin brother to life.” P- 284 “But ask the gods to give you an enduring heart . . . Consider other men’s troubles; that will comfort yours.” p. 297 “This ‘Know Yourself is a silly proverb in some ways; To know the man next door’s a much more useful rule.” p. 283 “In marriage no survivor has ever yet been known.” p. 279 “But a woman who pays you compliments Is really something to be afraid of.” P- 299 “There’s one slave of the whole household, and that’s the master of it.” P- 299 Suddenly mind recalled Katherine Mansfield’s new idea for her writing, recorded by Orage in “Essays and Aphorisms”, Janus Press, 1954. “The greatest literature is still only mere literature if it has not a purpose commensurate with its art . . . the greatest literature of all . . . has not merely an aesthetic object, nor merely a didactic object, but, in addition, a creative object: that of subjecting its readers to a real and at the same time illuminating experience.” “One day, shortly before her death, she sent for me . . . she was in high spirits. Her face shone as if she had been on Sinai ... ‘I have found my idea’ . . . Briefly, the conclusion was this: to make the commonplace virtues as attractive as ordinarily the vices are made: to present the good as the witty, the adventurous, the romantic, the gay, the alluring: and the evil as the platitudinous, the dull, the conventional, the solemn and the unattractive.” The plots of the “comedies of manners” often end with the recognition of a stranger as a son or daughter long-lost by shipwreck or pirates, or exposed at birth. The recognition may depend on “tokens”, a scar, a bracelet, embroidered baby­ clothes. The theme is so hackneyed that it is hard to see whether it originally had some deeper meaning . . . The Loeb Philo has a wonderful index which saves you reading the text. Was looking for Essene (still don’t know who said they meditated in magic circles) and saw Er. As it is the name of the man who came back from the dead in Plato’s fable, it was worth looking up the reference to Genesis 38.

Er, Judah’s first-born, was wicked and the Lord slew him. Judah bade his second son Onan go in unto Er’s wife Tamar to 56

TOKENS

raise up seed to his brother. But Onan spilled his seed on the ground and the Lord slew him too. The plot of Menander’s play “The Shield” depends on a provision of the Athenian law of inheritance that is a little like this custom of the levirate (from Latin levir, brother-in-law). The nearest male relative was entitled to marry an heiress. He must do so, or give her a dowry, if the inheritance was small. Night thought: Tamar and the tokens. Judah sent Tamar back to her father, saying he would give her his youngest son when old enough. He did not do so, and Tamar veiled herself and played the harlot when Judah was passing; she took pledges from him, his signet, bracelet and staff. About three months later she told accusers: “By the man, whose these are, am I with child”. Judah acknowledged the pledges. Philo idealizes this incident. In one interpretation: “Tamar’s veil prevents her seeing her wooer, though she recognises his pledges: it is God impregnating the soul, the pledges being His working in the universe.” (J. W. Earp’s index, under Judah.) So it may be that the recognition theme in the plays should carry the idea that there do exist tokens or signs of the working of the invisible powers. Tokens reappear in the delicious Chinese classic “Monkey”, written in the 16th century A.D. It is in Penguin. The infant Tripitaka, tied to a plank, was set adrift in the river and rescued by an abbot, who preserved the mother’s letter and shirt. At 17 the young priest rediscovers her. There is a visit to the underworld. Several incidents in which the dead return to life suggest a Christian influence, perhaps via the Nestorians. There is also something Samaritan-like about the way Tripitaka’s grandmother was left behind at an inn and the bill eventually paid. The most recently discovered Menander papyrus had been recycled as wrapping for an Egyptian mummy. The conclusion of this play was, that two characters discover they are both of Athenian parentage, and can legally be married. “Take a wife of thine own people” was important in Athens as well as in Ezra’s Judaea. One would dearly like to know if the feeling against too much inter-racial marriage is sound instinct, or purely social prejudice.

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The opposite — close inbreeding — certainly is reckoned dangerous, but once blood is mixed it is mixed for generations. It is a heavy responsibility to the unborn. Must try to get a bit clearer about Athenian history. Ian ScottKilvert has translated (for Penguin) nine Greek lives by Plutarch under the title “The Rise and Fall of Athens”. Here are more tokens and more blown-up skins, in the story of Theseus. When Aegeus, king of Athens, wished to beget children, the Pythian priestess gave him this oracle: “Loose not the jutting neck of the wineskin, great chief of the people, Till you have come once again to the city of Athens.”

However, he lay with the daughter of the ruler of Troezen, and left a sword and sandals under a rock, telling the girl that if she bore a son who became able to lift the rock and find what was hidden, she was to send him secretly to Athens with the tokens. On his journey Theseus performed Heracles-like exploits, killing the Club-bearer, the Pine-bender, the wild sow and other villains. “Consideration for others, justice, fair dealing or humanity they regarded as qualities which men only praised because they lacked the courage to do wrong, or were afraid of being wronged themselves: they were no concern of men who were strong enough to get their own way.” Bandits' morality.

“Most writers agree” that the tribute paid to Crete of seven young men and seven young girls every nine years, was supposed to have originated from a treacherous murder. Not only did Minos make war on the Athenians but they were visited with divine vengeance; “the land would not bear fruit, there was a great plague and all the rivers dried up.” Apollo declared they must placate Minos. Theseus volunteered to be one of the seven young men. Plutarch gives various versions of the Minotaur and Ariadne stories; the poets had evidently been busy inventing legends about Theseus. 1 heseus and his companions returned salely but forgot to hoist the white (or red) sail announcing good news; his father in despair threw himself from the cliff and was killed. Theseus invited all the inhabitants of Attica to come and live in Athens. He abolished the local council chambers, and “built a 58

INFLATED BLADDER

single town-hall and senate house for the whole community on the site of the present Acropolis . . .” He consulted the oracle at Delphi about the city’s future and was told: “. . . The bladder shall buoyantly ride the surging waves of the ocean” and again, “The bladder may be submerged, but shall not drown: this is appointed.” Inflated skins in Plutarch’s Face on the Moon and in Gurdjieffs Remarkable Men were mentioned Saucer p. 85, and in a saying of Stoic Zeno on p. 101, Conclusion: Zeno might mean “something different” by his “inflated bladder”. Themistocies, who defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis in 480 B.C., had a non-Athenian mother. Such young men were enrolled at a gymnasium outside the city, sacred to Heracles who was not a pure-bred deity, for his mother was mortal. Themistocies persuaded young men of good family to go out there and exercise with him, and thereby “he is believed to have done away with the discrimination between pure Athenians and those of mixed descent.” Pericles does have some resemblance to Solomon, being wise, and a builder of temples, and disapproved for loving a foreign woman, Aspasia. In 451 B.C. he had proposed a law that only those with Athenian parentage on both sides could be counted as citizens. Many suffered at the hands of informers; nearly 5,000 people were convicted and sold into slavery. True Athenians were found to number 14,040 (Plutarch, Pericles 37). At the end of his life Pericles' two legitimate sons died in the plague which fell on Athens early in the war against Sparta; he was obliged to ask that the law should be suspended in his favour. The Athenians felt he had been punished for past pride and allowed him to enrol his illegitimate son in the family phratry lists. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the fate of the (Athenian) empire was sealed” by Pericles’ law creating a small privileged class, unlike Rome which learned to give citizenship to provincials (encyclopaedia, under Greece). Plutarch praises the beauty of Pericles’ public works, directed by Pheidias. “And yet the most wonderful thing about them was the speed with which they were completed ... the entire project was carried through in the high summer of one man's 59

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administration” — but still not in 52 days like Nehemiah’s wall. Pericles’ enemies accused him of misappropriating money contributed to the Delian league for defence, but if he had not used the money for building, later generations would have been the poorer. On 30th June 1975, during work on Pericles, the Apocrypha arrived. At the end of a day on that: “Could just look up the reference to that Phinehas, an unfamiliar name in Ecclesiasticus 45”. In Numbers 25 the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab and bowed down to their gods. The Lord bade Moses punish the people. One of the Israelites was seen with a Midianitish woman. Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, took a javelin, went after them into the tent and thrust both of them through. “So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel. And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand.” Is this juxtaposition of foreign women and plague allowed as evidence of possible use of Athenian history? Plutarch is a late writer, and apparently not too reliable. Never felt any wish to read Thucydides’ much praised, detailed account of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, but perhaps one ought to see if he was the source for Pericles and the mixed marriages. Apparently not, but what is this chapter called Pentecontaetia? 50 what? Must find out what that word means, because of Pentecost (p. 8 above) and the Jewish fondness for Jubilees of 50 years. Towards the end of the chapter there are 50 hostages, and older navies had 50-oared boats. The next chapter makes it clear, it was the 50 years between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, “50 glorious years” of Athens' greatest wealth and power — not without warfare. This was the time when drama developed in the contests at the Dionysian festivals. Themistocles had persuaded the Athenians to the heroic step of abandoning their city to the invading Persians, sending wives and children to safety with allies, and taking to their navy based on the island of Salamis. After the Persian retreat they came back to a ruined city. Sparta tried to stop them rebuilding the walls, as Samaria tried to stop Zerubbabel rebuilding the temple in Ezra 4, and Sanballat, Tobiah and allies tried to stop Nehemiah's wall­ building (Neh. 4). Themistocles temporised with Sparta until the hastily built walls were high enough to be defended; then Sparta 60

FIFTY WHAT?

desisted. The Greeks seem to like the number 50, 50 children of Priam, 50 daughters of Danaus. The Pythagoreans valued it as the sum of the squares on the sides of the most beautiful of the triangles, the right-angled triangle with sides of 3, 4 and 5 units; 9 + 16 + 25 = 50. It is mentioned in Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 56, and Philo (p. 8 above). What could 50 mean — 5 a number for the hand, 50 for a big hand, “the good hand of my God” (Nehemiah 1.8)? Silly, it is just a good round number, half of 100? In Philo five stands for the five senses. The encyclopaedia gives a map of ancient Athens. On the north west was a district called Ceramicus or "potters' field”; through the part outside the walls ran the street of tombs, the sacred way to Eleusis, and the roads to the Academy and to Colonus. In Matthew 27, when Judas repented and cast down the 30 pieces of silver in the temple, the chief priests “took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in.” The potter’s field had always sounded as if it had some special meaning, so it was striking to find there was one at Athens.

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ENT TO BARNICOAT OF Falmouth for Penguin Plautus and Terence, and added Aristophanes because he is often mentioned. The plays came quickly, on Saturday 24th May 1975, but Terence was out of print. It was a wild sort of day, the landlord came for a few hours, did much-needed repairs and cut a stack of branches from the overgrown thorny pyracantha, burning bush, by the back door. A lot to clear up. Other visitors. Then a blank, what to do? Tired, just read — Plautus, “The Rope”, taken from a Greek play “The Handbag”. Enjoyed it but no particular comment except its verbal topicalness for the coming Referendum on the Common Market. Europe in itself won’t save us, what we need to vote for is honesty and consideration. At the end, glance at the introductionto the Aristophanes translation by David Barrett, for 13 years lecturer in English in Helsinki, and the day all seems to have been in aid of finding the bit about the artificial phallus worn by the actors in the Greek Old Comedy. Doubtless they had a lot of fun with them. It seems uncertain whether women attended the performances. The actors were all male and masked. The audience had to sit through three tragedies and a satyr play before the comedy. In The Poet and the Women (41 I B.C.) Euripides fears the women are plotting to kill him because he slanders them in his tragedies; he persuades his lively uncle to dress up and attend the women’s three-day festival in disguise. The “famous disrobing scene” did indeed raise a la'ugh. It also called up Beelzebub’s difficulty over the medical examination, that it would betray his tail, hitherto skilfully hidden under the folds of his dress — A & E p. 608. It is only a few lines but remembered as deliciously funny.

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Local — low call. Why are “they” so fond of low comedy and “lavatorial humour”. A letter to the paper speaks of the healthy bawdiness of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Rabelais. Classical authors write of pouring a libation, apparently on the floor, before drinking. It seems a messy habit. Now mind even suggests that it is a symbolic urination, because in Aristophanes’ Frogs. “Dear me, an involuntary libation”, says the terrified Dionysos at Pluto’s door. The culture-originating gods, Cannes, Thoth, Hermes, tend to be ithyphallic, and Indian religion is frank about the lingam and yoni symbols. Still one can’t pretend to enjoy it when boys come from primary school with cloakroom rhymes about their mother’s bum. Feeble protest, “It is where you were born from.” “I wasn’t, I was born from here,” said one from another school, indicating his tummy-button. One recalls having the same idea, and a fleeting picture of granny with five holes across her tummy, one for each child. There was the early idea that of course cow was wife of horse. Stages in education! “Women’s Lib” figured in the morning paper, so read Lysistrata (411 B.C.) in an American translation by Douglass Parker, Mentor. The women of Greece go on strike and sit-in in the Akropolis, successfully, to force the men to make peace. With the men away, the virgins are losing the best years of their lives. “A man, an absolute antique, comes back from the war, and he's barely doddered into town before he's married the veriest nymphet. But a woman’s season is brief; it slips, and she'll have no husband, but sit out her life groping at omens — and finding no men.” A man can be a father at sixty. It has always seemed unfair, but childbearing and rearing need youth. Aristophanes is given dates 448-385 B.C. or 455-375 or about 445 to between 386 and 380. This last series makes him bald before he was 25 if his jokes in “The Clouds” and “Peace” (421 B.C.) are to be trusted. Approximate birthdates are Aeschylus 525, Sophocles 495, Euripides 484, Herodotus also 484, Socrates 470, Aristophanes mid 5th century, Plato 427. 64

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An inherited copy of the Old Testament Apocrypha must have been “borrowed” for it has long disappeared. Now it seemed after all necessary to procure one as the earliest source for those Maccabees. The introductions and notes in the Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press. New York, did prove a help. The fairy story of Tobias and the fish was mimed in Mr. Bennett's first Coombe Springs Christmas play (1946) about the building of Chartres cathedral. As the old church burned down, the Master-builder’s students were called by the eager young apprentice. "Peter! Damian!” Mr. B. asked us why he chose those names. No one could guess. They were Mr. Ouspensky’s. his initials were P.D.O. A first lesson in names. Imitating the best precedents, the serious plays of those first two Christmases were followed by comedy, a skit on us written by Malcolm Stewart. There was Jack Allen clipping the grass edge of the round flower-bed in the drive, and admiring Mr. Bennett as he swayed by, Elizabeth carrying everywhere her little screen of good manners, and Olga de Nottbeck washing up with Lilia Bethune, over-fond mother (Bithynia, that name came to mean). Of self: “Who’s she?” “That’s not a she, that’s an it. A Burrogrove.” “Why is it so worried?” “It’s looking everywhere for 2d.” “Does it matter is she’s lost tuppence?” "She hasn’t lost it, she’s found it, she’s got tuppence too much in her accounts. The poor creature’s terribly conscientious.” (Memory has diverged a bit from the typescript). The satire was useful, but the features can have a positive side. Tamar had two husbands slain by the Lord, but Sarah in the Hook of Tobit had seven killed by her demon lover on their wedding nights. Tobias was sent by his father Tobit to fetch a deposit of money, accompanied by the angel Raphael in disguise. Raphael tells Tobias he is entitled to Sarah and her inheritance because he is her only eligible kinsman: smoke from the heart and liver of the magic fish will drive away the demon. “ 'The girl is also beautiful and sensible' . . . When the door was shut and the two were alone, Tobias . . . said, 'Sister, get up, and let us pray'. . . 'And now, O Lord, 1 am not taking this sister of mine because of lust, but with sincerity. Grant that I may find mercy and may grow old together with her.' ” The gall of the same magic fish cured Tobit of his blindness. 65

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One of his good works had been the burying of fellow Jews slain by the king of Nineveh, in spite of the king’s order that they were to be cast out without burial. Being polluted after such a burial, he slept outdoors; “the sparrows muted warm dung into mine eyes, and a whiteness came into mine eyes . . .” (This part is in “The Bible of the World”, so it can be quoted from the Authorised Version of 1611.) Lately a bird did it neatly on to a newly washed blouse whose wearer lay under the apple-tree. How surprising to find the same image in Aristophanes’ Clouds, (first produced 423 B.C. but later rewritten, and now translated by William Arrowsmith, Mentor, 1962) where Socrates was cheated of an immense discovery by a lizard. In his researches on the orbit of the moon, he stood “gaping wide-mouthed at the sky, when a lizard on the roof let loose on him.” “Ha! A lizard crapping on Sokrates! That’s rich.” And we are supposing Stephen met his death “researching on the moon’s orbit” — verifying the prediction of tin eclipse — some 470 years later but in the same stream of events. The lizard incident follows two stories about insects; dipping the feet of a Bea in melted wax to see how far it could jump, and Socrates’ theory that a gnat’s noise is made by compressed gastric gas escaping through its rump. Gurdjieffs sneezing flea comes in here. Mullah Nassr Eddin’s wise sentence was: “A flea exists in the World just for one thing — that when it sneezes, that deluge should occur with the description of which our learned beings love so much to busy themselves.” (A & E p. 351). In his introduction Arrowsmith (whose name comes near to “spelling” Aristophanes) speaks of the charge of moral irresponsibility; that “By circulating a distorted image of Sokrates, Aristophanes created, or abetted, those slanders which Plato believed led to Sokrates’ death.” In defence it can be said that abusiveness was expected of the Athenian comedian; Aristophanes’ picture of Euripides is just as distorted. The play-boy horse-racing son Pheidippides, who has involved his father Strepsiades (Twister), in heavy debts, is considered to represent Alkibiades about whom one reads (encyclopaedia under Alcibiades): “He was an admirer of Socrates ... but he could not practise his master’s virtues, and there is no doubt that the example of Alcibiades strengthened the charges brought against 66

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Socrates of corrupting . . . youth”. Sir Richard Jebb (1841-1905), Cambridge Professor of Greek, in his article on Aristophanes, calls the play “an attack on the new spirit of intellectual enquiry”. The physical philosophers and the teachers of speech­ making are attacked under the name of Sophist, and “Socrates is taken as the type of the entire tendency.” Strepsiades goes to Socrates’ “Thinkery” (Jebb calls it hall of contemplation) to learn the second Logic, the “get-away-withoutpaying” kind. A student shows him a map of the world: “where’s Sparta? . . . That’s MUCH TOO CLOSE! You'd be well advised to move it further away.” Then he sees Socrates dangling overhead in his basket. “I walk upon the air and look down upon the sun from a superior standpoint . . . The earth, you see, pulls down the delicate essence of thought to its own gross level.” Strepsiades is invited to “the mystical couch”, probably a battered settee, for an initiation rite. Socrates invokes the Clouds, who form the chorus, goddesses of all who walk with their heads in the clouds. “Olympian Zeus is a figment?” “Zeus? What Zeus? Nonsense. There is no Zeus.” “Then who makes it rain? . .” “Why, the Clouds, of course.” “And to think I always used to believe the rain was just Zeus pissing through a sieve.” “Look ... if Zeus strikes the liars with lightning, then why on earth is a man like Simon still alive?” The agon or contest is between Philosophy and Sophistry, the two Logoi, for the right to train Pheidippides. According to a scholiast they were wheeled on in cages, masked as fighting cocks. Philosophy speaks for the old education, by which he bred “a generation of heroes, the men who fought at Marathon.” “The three D’s, Discipline, Decorum and Duty”, “Boys should be seen but not heard”, hardiness, manliness, posture, honesty; courtesy and good manners compulsory at table; old familiar hymns; athletic prowess, the glow of health, modesty, honour — it seems to be the programme for our ice-on-the-washbasin type of school. One hankers for some of those old-fashioned virtues, if not for the boys standing at attention while the master drills them by rote. Sophistry wins. “I first devised a Method for the Subversion of Established Social Beliefs and the Undermining of Morality." If Justice is in the Lap of the Gods, “Then would you explain how

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Zens escaped punishment after he imprisoned his father? The inconsistency is glaring.” “. . . consider our national passion for politics and debating ... if politics were quite so vicious as you pretend, old Homer — our mentor on moral questions — would never have portrayed Nestor and those other wise old men as politicians . . . follow me. my boy, and obey your nature to the full; romp, play and laugh without a scruple in the world. Then if caught ‘in flagrante’, you simply inform the poor cuckold that you’re utterly innocent and refer him to Zeus as your moral sanction.” “And suppose your pupil ... is promptly convicted of adultery and sentenced to be publicly reamed up the rectum with a radish'.’” This is “The poetic punishment meted out to adulterers in Athens" says the note, is it possible? l or centuries it has been fashionable to denounce the immorality of the Greek gods, and certainly the theme of the love of a god for a mortal woman, leading to the birth of a hero, is endlessly repeated. Is it not in essence a meaningful myth, if outworn and debased by being taken literally? Is the storv of the virgin birth of Jesus really so different except that it has been possible to keep it holy? I he delusion ol being a Virgin Mary docs occur in insanitv. In high summer 1954. walked up the Fishbowl path holding the hand ol George, aged 3. to see the progress of the “new building”. “Are you going to be a builder when you grow up?" “Of course." In the small hours of that night, walked up the same path wrestling with the fear that psychic sex might lead to an illegitimate child. “If it must be. it must be. if that’s what the world needs." During her next monthly period, as that woman walked down the kitchen doorsteps. N passed behind and said firmly. “Well, that’s that!" There is no knowing whv he said it. but it was taken as establishing that psychic sex could not lead to physical birth. In symbolic form there had been a kind of consent for more imaginary torments. At the end ol “Ilie Clouds” Strepsiades drives off his creditors; but crime does not pay. he is Hogged by his own son. “Honour your father and mother. That’s the law. Everywhere”, argues the father, but Pheidippides proves that if fathers beat their sons for their own good, the sons are entitled to do the same; then he declares he will horsewhip his mother. Thal is too

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much. Strepsiades is through with Sophistry and admits he was wrong to cheat his creditors. He calls his slaves to help attack the roof of the Thinkery with an axe and a torch and set it on fire. Socrates scuttles out, followed by his emaciated students. The burning Thinking-shop called up another image, Rudolph Steiner’s first Goetheanum. set alight from the roof while he was lecturing, and burned down. These famous Athenian dramatists are really a kind of prophet, partly in the sense that future events followed patterns in their plays, and partly in originating ideas borrowed or developed by later writers. Aristophanes sometimes hits the nail on the head so exactly that we too need to listen to him. Dialectic is a deceiving weapon. Sophistry — hypocrisy with words — and cheap science which denies there are gods, are seen as roots of the evils in our world today. We do not have to look far for examples of “the Technique of Winning Lawsuits”, Arrowsmith's translation for “to overcome the truth by telling lies”. One such technique is not clever argument but emotional, to sound as kindly and virtuous as any noncomformist preacher, lulling the critical faculty to sleep. That we have brought "God” down to our own level by man-made pictures of him does not prove there is not a real God. A new pun: wrist. A/VA/ophanes. Aristos means best, aristocrat. Aristotle. Aristobolus . . . Harry Stubbings. bless him, the ugliest man. in the end nearly blind and very lame, but he went on Irving to do what he could to help. 23rd September 1975. Court case on homosexuality and "rent bovs”. Plead guilty to leaving out the Greek pederasty and buggerv in “The Clouds” as out of one's depth. I he note say s Sparta encouraged homosexuality as a military virtue because “lovers” would fight well for each other. So in the old education Philosophy says of the boys: "Toward their lovers their conduct was manly: you didn’t sec litem mincing or strutting, or prostituting themselves with girlish voices or coy, provocative glances." Christianity has reacted against Greek (im)morality with sometimes excessive condemnation. Perhaps the best balance between puritanism and permissiveness, repression and self­ indulgence. can never be attained by law. Like masturbation. 69

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homosexuality seems better discouraged not flaunted, but it may be more a misfortune or a case for medical help than a crime. Legal prohibition and secrecy increase its association with crime. May confess during a short war-time affair with a Polish Jew in the Pioneer Corps, to walking the streets once or twice looking at the pretty girls with what one felt were his eyes, out of curiosity to understand the opposite sex — but it seemed better not to let it become a habit. Our thesis is that, to some extent, irregular sex in literature points to intercourse with the subconscious. Let’s put in the Plato bit here, to counter-balance distortion of Socrates. 22-23 June 1975: Got out the Plato Selections chosen by Sir Richard Livingstone (World’s Classics) to see if there was a suitable quotation about his living in a time of post-imperial decline. Unlike Socrates he came of a wealthy and aristocratic family, but he at least was one who did make good use of his privileges. Found this (p. 169): “Goodness is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, while evil is its disease, deformity and weakness.” (Republic 444) No wonder one could not define goodness, it needs a Plato. He is wonderfully inspiring and uplifting, but even he cannot trap reality whole in a net of words. Catch one claw, one hair, at a time. The next passage, also from the Republic (588 f.) compares man to a monster with many heads of tame or wild beasts, a lion, and a man, smallest of the three; all enclosed in the shape of a man so that anyone unable to look inside would believe the creature to be a single human being. The believer in justice will aim to give the mastery to the man within, who will watch over the monster like a farmer, cultivating the tame elements and restraining the wild; he will make the lion-heart his ally. This may be the source for Gurdjieffs early teaching that man has many “l’s”, not one single “I”. A previous extract (Republic Book II 359 f.) gives one answer to why the wicked flourish and the good must suffer misfortune. “Let the unjust man be entirely unjust, and the just man entirely just ...” Let the unjust be a skilful master of his craft, and escape detection, “for the highest achievement of injustice is, to be thought just when you are not . . . And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing, as

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Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards . . . the eulogists of injustice . . . will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound — will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be crucified.”

The critics seem to find it hard to pronounce on Aristophanes; perhaps they don’t want to say that books as important as the Old and New Testaments may have used him. Jebb praises chiefly his lyrics; no word of the scatology, it must be included in “riot of the comic imagination”. The nightingale chorus in Birds is a short of book of Genesis. “Love with Chaos lay and hatched the Birds” before the Earth or the Gods. The play (414 B.C.) has been variously interpreted. Led by an adventurous Athenian the birds build a wall round the air and starve the gods into acknowledging their — or their leader’s — sovereignty by cutting off the ascending savour of sacrifices. Toynbee in his Volume VI (pp. 346-364) studies this “Cloudcuckooland” as the first recorded appearance of the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, as “a fantasy that had germinated in the fertile imagination of the Athenian dramatist”. In the troubles of a disintegrating society (and of other times) the only genuine escape “lies in renouncing This World altogether and migrating into a different spiritual clime.” Toynbee discusses parallels with: “ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14.62) and: “Behold the fowls of' the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap . . .” (Matthew 6.26.) As the only way in which one has been able to “love enemies”, this passage struck home in Arrowsmith’s translation: Koryphaios “What can we learn from men?” Hoopoe “If wise men learn from their enemies, then why not you? . .

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was it from their friends or their foes that mankind first learned to build walls and ships in self-defence?” The hoopoe (once a man according to the legend) may have a descendant in the hoopoe of the 12th century Sufi poem “The Conference of the Birds” of Farid Ud-din Attar, the perfumer. With Battery and promises the Athenian wins over the birds who sing: “a Man has come . . . Hail Savior of the Birds, Redeemer of our Race!” and agree to build the city of the Birds, with “walls of brick, like Babylon.” At the end the conquering hero and his bride ascend to heaven. This is not only Athenian empire-building, it is modern man's insatiable ambition — to go to the moon, to rule over the whole earth, to write the final philosophy, to be the most defiant and successful criminal. Where has one met that theme? The Tower of Babel. The confusion of tongues is not in “The Birds” but they do build “a Babylon of the Birds”, with walls 600 feet high. Aristophanes makes the tower a success, but that may be the elusive thing called irony. Aristophanes is one of the speakers in Plato’s Symposium or Drinking-party. When he has recovered from the hiccups he relates the myth of the three sexes. They were proud and strong and they attacked the gods, as in Homer’s tale of Otys and Ephialtes who dared to scale heaven. (More later Chapter 8.) The other view of humanity is given in the opening lines of the Nightingale Chorus: “O suffering mankind, lives of twilight, race feeble and fleeting, like the leaves scattered! . . Hear us now, the ever-living Birds, the undying, the ageless ones, scholars of eternity.” Here the birds almost become angels, the dead, the invisible daimons. “Birds are your signs, and all your omens are governed by Birds...” Sodom. 29-30 September, 1975. Don’t want to finish Aristophanes till two more plays ordered have come. Wasn’t there something in Plato relevant to the Kingdom of Heaven? At the end of Book IX of the Republic: “He will look at the city which is within him, and take heed that no disorder occur in it, such as might arise either from superfluity or from want . . . He will be a ruler in the city of which we are the founders, and

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which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth. In heaven there is laid up a pattern of it, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such city exists, or will ever exist in fact is no matter; for he will live by its laws and by no others.” Appalled at the possibility of having to study Plato “properly” Write to Jill, and, for lack of a better idea, make a list of the source dialogues of the Plato “Selections”. Would it be worth doing something about Lot’s wife being taken from Socrates’ advice to flee from a beautiful person, without looking behind you, as more dangerous than a phalanga? (Saucer p. 151.) Can’t find the Xenophon Memorabilia. Sodom in the encyclopaedia: Jebel Usdum, the salt-hill (that would be the pillar of salt which Lot’s wife became when she looked back. Genesis 19) at the south-west corner of the Dead Sea, has radically the same name. Have archaeologists found Sodom? There was an expedition to seek for the cities of the plain, reported in Bibliotheca Sacra (1924); probably that is why Sodom is now marked on the map and the traveller is told “It’s there somewhere, under the sea”, according to Jill’s mother on a visit from S. Africa. There is also the complicated question of references to Sodom and Gomorrha in Mark 6.11, the comparison of Chorazin and Bethsaida with Tyre and Sidon, and of Capernaum with Sodom in Matthew 11.20-24, and of the same cities in Luke 10. 12-15. In view of the similarity of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrha — fire and brimstone rained out of heaven — with that of Pompei and Herculaneum in A.D. 79, do these verses imply anything about the dates of finalising the text of these three gospels? Too difficult, give it up. At bedtime a very large spider ran across the floor. “Clearly the phalanga.” Next morning over toast-making the destruction of the cities in Genesis is seen as probably based on Plato’s story of Atlantis, which he also represented as a punishment: “as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and welldisposed towards the god . . . thinking lightly ... of property; ... but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these things are increased by virtue and mutual friendly feeling ... but when the 73

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divine element began to fade away . . . they were carried away by their prosperity and went wrong . . . full of avarice and unrighteous power.” (Critias, Selections p. 87.) The similarity Sidon — Sodom may mean the writer of Genesis was picturing the Phoenician cities of the Mediterranean Coast, not the Dead Sea. What is strange is that the tidal waves caused by the explosion of Thera, and the earthquake which destroyed Atlantis-Minoan Crete (Saucer p. 30), may indeed have swamped the coastal cities Ugarit, Byblos, Tyre and Sidon and others around 1400 B.C. The Thera-Santorini theory of Atlantis rests on memory of a Reader’s Digest article about the work of a Grecian professor. (Professor Marinates. The details are given by Desmond Lee in the Penguin Plato: Timaeus and Critias.) The advice by the two angels to flee to the mountain would be appropriate against a tidal wave. The plays, in Mentor translations by Douglass Parker, were worth waiting for. The Acharnians is Aristophanes’ earliest surviving play, produced in 425, the 6th year of the Peloponnesian war. Could he really have been only about 20? If so, he was a natural prodigy, like Mozart. Dikaiopolis (Just-City) makes a private 30-year peace with Sparta. Angry charcoal-burners from Acharnai are about to stone him when he declares: “The Spartans are not to blame for all our troubles” and have reasonable complaints against Athens; he threatens hostages — a scuttle of charcoal — so they consent to listen. He calls them “raw wine in rotted bottles, stopped forever against the infusion of Opposing Views, Fair Play, or Common Sense . . . Know Your Enemy, they say. Well, I Know My Audience . . . First the Farmers, up from the country for the day . . . Wafted into mindless bliss by any flag-waving . . . Their price is praise. They're bought and sold by demagogues, and never know it . . . But wait. They’re all Athenians, and every Athenian responds nobly to the Appeal to Poverty. That’s IT! I’ll dress in wretched rags, in pitiful patches . . .” Suggestion for the bottles and patches saying, e.g. in Luke 5 where the old wine is better. Dikaiopolis borrows the props from Euripides, including a pottie and sponge — “We beggars are 74

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cleanly where it doesn’t show” (no toilet paper in those days) — and returns to his defence. “Even Comedy is no stranger to justice, simple morality, and truth . . .” He blames the war on the Athenian blockade of the Megarians who, starving, appealed to Sparta for help. Half the chorus is convinced; there is a brawl with the other half who summon Lamachos — the original “braggart soldier”, ancestor of Falstaff. Suddenly Lamachos declaims with the voice of Churchill: “I shall fight on the seas and oceans, I shall fight on the fields and in the streets, I shall fight in the hills; 1 shall never surrender.” Dikaiopolis announces he is setting up a market, and invites the former enemies to leave their hills and fields, and trade with him in the streets. In the chorus with the author’s remarks the Persian King asked which side had “the famous poet who criticised his own city without mercy”? A starving Megarian sells Dikaiopolis his two starving little girls disguised as piggies (pig being also Greek slang for female genitalia). An informer who attempts to confiscate them as contraband is chased off. Lamachos is summoned to the cold frontier; Dikaiopolis is invited to a drinking feast as guest of honour. Lamachos calls for his emergency rations, plumes, spear, shield and buckler, breastplate and blankets. Soon he is brought back badly battered, having fallen into a ditch, whereas Dikaiopolis wins the drinking contest and returns drunk, with a whore on each arm, to receive as prize a huge full wineskin. There was a real Athenian general Lamachus. Thucydides transcribes the treaty of 422-1 with Sparta which began the uneasy peace of Nicias. Pillars were to be set up in various places. Lamachus is one of the seventeen listed as taking the oath on the Athenian side. Perhaps God’s Covenant with the Israelites was modelled on such treaties. In Book VI 101 (Penguin p. 475) Thucydides describes the death of Lamachus in a battle outside Syracuse. He “came up in support from the Athenian left . . . After crossing over a ditch, he and a few others who had gone with him were left isolated there, and he and five or six of his men were killed.” The bodies were recovered under an armistice. Was Aristophanes’ ditch prophetic, or was Thucydides 75

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borrowing? Dikaiopolis’ triumph is not quite the sort to appeal to a timid old maid, and mind refused to light up till it reached the point in the other play, The Congresswomen, where Aristophanes again impinges on Plato and may be an ancestor of communism as of so much else. This Ecclesiazusae is a late play, probably produced in 392 B.C., and is considered to lack structure. It is the first time one can recall meeting defecation shown on stage, though there was one in the bit of James Joyce read before giving him up from lack of vocabulary. Was it normal to do it in the street? Well, we still have to avoid dogs' messes on our pavements. Blepyros was so slow he must be squeezing out a hawser. No, he was constipated: “Goddess of childbirth, grant my labor some issue quickly, before 1 split . . . My mother didn't raise her boy to be emptied by hand.’’ A minor explosion. “Relief at last.” Disguised in beards and their husband’s cloaks, the women packed the Athenian Assembly. Neokleides, the bleary-eyed glaucoma king, tried to speak first and was shouted down. “What is the remedy?” “I'd have told him. If I'd been there.” Garlic, vinegar and Spartan milk-weed applied to the eyelids at night. It recalls Gurdjieff’s incident of the trachoma cure advised by the ez-ezounavouran (RM. p. 222):- ground copper sulphate drawn between the eyelids on a needle, every evening before going to sleep. The assembly passed a law handing the government to “a trained managerial class” — women. Then the leader reveals her programme: compulsory universal community property; no more rich and poor; clothes, food and sex will be communalized. with the old and ugly getting first pick of the opposite sex. All private parts are declared to be public. Children will trace their descent from all men who might have begotten them. Slaves will do the work. No more law courts, they will become dining halls. The first free dinner for all Athenian male citizens will be tonight. A dutiful citizen prepares to turn in his household equipment. In the later part of the play a crone, a hag and a harridan compete for the tense young man in manifest erection, desperate to get to his girl. Finally the women’s chorus goes to its free dinner, described in “the longest word of the Greek language, an 76

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original coinage” running to seven lines, and beating Llanfair P.G.'s 56 letters hollow. This communism is very like that of the guardians in the fifth book of Plato’s Republic, naturally raising the question of which was first. Douglass Parker inclines to the hypothesis of J. L. Adam (Cambridge, 1902) that Utopian thinking was rife in intellectual circles; Aristophanes adopted some of its ideas; Plato, who moved in the same circles and was then writing the Republic, was sufficiently impressed by the play to reply to its satire — or anyway, that Plato took some ideas from the comedian and not vice versa.

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7 THE REPUBLIC HE TEXT IS on hand: Everyman edition of the first translation into English, by a Scottish divine Dr. Harry Spens, published in 1763. To be honest, the quotation some pages back about the just man being crucified comes not from Socrates, the “I” of the Republic, but from one of the opposition, Glauco. The first of the ten books raises the question of what is Justice (dikaion, dikaiosyne, which Livingstone says could be translated righteousness). Is it to profit friends and hurt enemies? (“And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others?” Matthew 5.47.) One has some sympathy with Thrasymachus who gets'angry at Socrates’ wonted manner, confuting what others say without giving an answer himself. Thrasymachus declares: “that what is just is nothing else but the advantage of the more powerful . . . every government makes laws for its own advantage . . . they give out that to be just for the governed which is advantageous for themselves . . .” (pp. 14-15) “For such as revile wickedness revile it not because they are afraid of doing, but because they are afraid of suffering, unjust things.” (p. 22.) In the second book Glauco polishes up the argument for injustice in order to draw Socrates out: “according to nature to do injustice is good, but to suffer injustice is bad . . .” So, having suffered, men made laws and compacts; “and that which was enjoined by law they denominated lawful and just . . .” But no one would be just if they had a power like that of Gyges, a shepherd who found a magic ring conferring invisibility when turned; he was able to debauch the queen, kill the king and possess the kingdom of Lydia. Parents exhort their sons to be just for the honour it brings and for the favour of the Gods. Musaeus in his poem carries just men into the other world to a feast where they will “pass the whole of their time in drinking, deeming eternal inebriation the finest reward of virtue. But some carry the rewards of the Gods still further; for they say that the offspring of the holy and the

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faithful, and their children’s children, still remain” whereas “the unholy and unjust they bury in the other world, in a kind of mud, and compel them to carry water in a sieve . . .” But by another reasoning “mountebanks and prophets, frequenting the gates of the rich,” persuade them they can buy off their injustices by sacrifice (pp. 43-45). Glauco and his brother want Socrates to show that justice is itself the greatest good of the soul, apart from any other reward. The world today seems badly in need of such a convincing basis for morality; the search for it is one of the motives for this writing. At least it is following in distinguished footsteps. Socrates says that as a city is larger than a man, it will be easier to see what justice is in a city. He sets one up from scratch with its division of labour. As it grows larger it needs soldiers and so we come to the famous “guardians”, and their education. The best of the guardians are to become governors when they reach the age of 50. The rather tame conclusion in Book IV is that in the just city each person does his own proper and natural work. The Pythagoreans said there were three kinds of man: the philosophos, lover of wisdom; the philotimos, lover of honour, ambitious, active, wanting power and leadership; and the most numerous kind who love bodily pleasures and comforts (encyclopaedia, Plato). In the good city the wise, who are few, govern; the soldiers are brave, and educated to be loyal to the laws; and the crowd of craftsmen and traders are temperate; so harmony and justice prevail. Applied to the individual man this scheme is called “the tripartite soul” (psyche), claimed as source of Gurdjieffs “Many Ts” (p. 70 above). The many-headed monster is the concupiscible, avaricious, covetous part, the desires, necessary and unnecessary, connected with nutrition and propagation: the lion is the irascible, spirited, ambitious part (will, drive, fight?); and the man, the smallest, is reason. The healthy, just soul is the one in which the man, wisdom, governs the rest in harmony; this is also real happiness. Multiplicity of desires is echoed in the story of the Gadarene swine (Mark 5.1-20). The man with an unclean spirit dwelt among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no. not with

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chains. Jesus asked: “What is thy name?” “My name is Legion: for we are many.” The devils besought him, “Send us into the swine” — and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea (they were about two thousand). Gurdjieff gives a parable from “an Eastern teaching” comparing man to a house of many servants, where no one wants to do what he ought and each tries to be master. The only chance of salvation is to elect a “deputy steward” who can make every servant do his own work. Then the real steward, who knows the will of the master, may come. (In Search of the Miraculous, p. 60.) In Book VI of the Republic there is a ship in which “the sailors are all in sedition among themselves, contending for the pilotship, each imagining he ought to be pilot, though he never at all learned the art . . .” The true pilot is the strongest, but somewhat deaf and shortsighted. The comparison is part of an answer to the question why philosophers are useless to cities. “The sufferings of the most worthy philosophers, in the management of public affairs, are so grievous, that there is not any one other suffering so severe . . .” (p. 190). There are also unworthy philosophers, wrongly educated, or corrupted by the public, “private hirelings” or sophists, teaching only the maxims of the vulgar (p. 196). The word recalls the puzzling text: “The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.” (John 10.13.) “. . . souls of the noblest genius, when they meet with ill education, become remarkably bad ... a weakly genius w'ill never at all be the cause of anything remarkable, whether good or evil” (p. 195). The form recalls Gurdjieff’s saying: where there is much good, there is much evil; where there is little evil, there is little good; but the contraries are not true. (Hope it is correctly remembered.) “The worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant . . . Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such an one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts — he will 81

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not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and so seeing that he would be of no use to the state or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way ... he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good will, with bright hopes.” (Selections pp. 102-3, “Stephanus” page number 496 in the 1578 edition of Henri Estienne.) The idea of a remnant being saved occurs several times in Isaiah; it is possible it relates to this passage. Book VII starts with the famous parable of the Cave in which men are chained so that they can only watch shadows cast on the wall. Toynbee (Vol. VI, p. 244) points out the parallel with Psalm 107. 8-10: “Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness . .. For he satisfieth the longing soul . . . Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron . .The same idea comes in Isaiah 9.2: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” which is quoted in Matthew 4.16. There is a similar passage in Luke 1.79. In his just city Plato’s philosophers who have escaped the cave and seen the light of the sun, are to go back — because the city gave them their better education — and be magistrates, though at first they will be “aukward”, till their eyes are accustomed to the darkness again. There are four kinds of increasingly unjust city, and four corresponding types of men. There is the ambitious or Spartan type; the Oligarchy worshipping riches and affluence, and the Democracy worshipping liberty, where the men of substance are squeezed to give to the crowd. Democracy tends by reaction to turn into Tyranny, the worst kind of city, corresponding to the criminal type of man, ruled by his licentious desires. He is contrasted with the justest and happiest man, “who hath most of the regal spirit and ruleth himself with a kingly power . . .” (Bk. IX, p. 300.) “And excessive liberty seems to change into nothing else but excessive slavery both with a private person and a city.” (Bk. VIII, p. 279.) This psychology of man’s physical nature as a many-headed animal, which should be ruled in harmony by his highest part,

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corresponds at least as well with observation as either simplistic man-is-born-good noble-savage theories, or mechanical behaviourism and conditioned reflexes. One basis for morality which does not appear is duty to the neighbour. Since other human beings have reared us and may have to help us in old age, and even in the prime of life no one can be entirely self-sufficient, intelligence calls for some respect for other people even on a purely selfish basis. The Republic does not seem to discuss justice between cities. Nothing could stop the Greek cities fighting each other. However, after recommending in Book V that children, future soldiers, should watch battles from a safe distance, Socrates-Plato does say that Greek should not enslave Greek, strip the dead (shown on the Bayeux tapestry), burn Greek houses or lay waste the land; they should only carry off one year's produce, and punish the few instigators of the quarrel, not the whole city; but in war with Barbarians they can behave as they now do to Greeks. Some features of Plato’s guardians might have been taken from Sparta. “Nowhere else was the individual so thoroughly subordinated to the interests of the state.” (Encyclopaedia) Soon after birth the child was brought before the elders to decide if it should be reared; defective or weakly babies were exposed. Boys were trained by the state from the age of seven, with the aims of obedience, endurance and military success. They were liable to military service from their 20th to 60th years, and had to belong to a dining mess. They were forbidden to own gold or silver (the currency was iron bars) or to engage in trade or manufacture, which were carried on by the subject peoples. The Spartiates owned the land, which was cultivated by helots, state serfs. In Plato's city everyone was to do one job only, so that they would do it well, and the soldiers were professionals too. Plato has been blamed for the idea that trade and crafts are beneath the dignity of a gentleman, which has led to unduly verbal education. Plato exalts intellect or reason as the philosophic ruler in us. Gurdjieff says we should develop all our three brains so that they work together. The Pythagoreans were another example of communal living. The feature of the guardians which Plato may have taken from 83

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Aristophanes must be the communism of wives and children, to counter private family interests. The women are to receive the same education and do the same work as the men, according to their individual talents. “The wives, then, of our guardians must be uncloathed” (for gymnastics), “since they are to put on virtue for clothes, and they must bear a part in war and the other guardianship of the city, and do nothing else: but the lightest part of these services are to be allotted to the women . . .” (p. 153, Bk V.) No woman is to dwell with any man privately, but “they will be led from an innate necessity, as I imagine, to mutual embraces”, so the governors will arrange marriage festivals, whereby (as in animal breeding) the best men will for the most part embrace the best women. The rulers will aim to keep numbers constant so that the city be neither too great nor too small. The children of worthy persons are to be reared in nurseries, and be suckled by the mothers without knowing which is her own child. Men over 55 and women over 40 may cohabit as they incline, attending carefully that if anything be conceived it be not brought to the light, or if it is brought forth, to expose it. Incest is to be avoided by reckoning all children born (between?) in the tenth or the seventh month from the date of a marriage, as sons or daughters of all those parents; and “those born in that period in which their fathers and mothers were begetting children, they shall call brothers and sisters, so as not to touch each other . . . But the law shall allow brothers and sisters to live together, if their lot to (?) fall out, and the oracle give consent.” (p. 159) The mind reels at the mathematics of the system. It is absurd but stimulates thought. One has sympathy with the eugenics and the aim of keeping numbers steady.

At this distance it is difficult to understand the commenders of Homer “as a master to teach one both the management and the knowledge of human affairs, and that one should regulate the whole of his life according to this poet . . .” (p. 331, Bk X.) In several places Socrates speaks against artists and poets as mere

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imitators of life. Tragedy encourages men to bewail their misfortunes, whereas “when any domestic grief befalls any of us . . . we value ourselves on the opposite behaviour, if we can be quiet and endure, this being the part of a man.” (p. 330.) In Book 11 Socrates says that education must begin with what is false, i.e. fables; but most existing fables are to be thrown out. “Juno fettered by her son, and Vulcan thrown down from heaven by his father, for going to assist his mother when beaten, and all those fights of the Gods which Homer hath composed, must not be admitted into the city . . . For the young person is not able to judge what is allegory and what is not; but whatever opinions he receiveth at such an age are difficult to be washen out ... we should endeavour that what they are first to hear be composed in the most handsome manner for exciting them to virtue.” (p. 62, Bk 11.) Our best told fairy tales give a taste for heavenly beauty which does help to form aspirations. If Plato's guardians are to be brave they must not be told that “there is another world, and that it is dreadful . . .” Verses such as “The soul, like smoke, down to the shades Went howling” must be razed, (pp. 69-70, Bk III) What are the models for fables concerning theology? “ ‘Is not God essentially good . . ?’ ‘Without doubt.’ ‘But nothing which is good is hurtful, is it?' ” (What about the surgeon's knife?) “Neither then can God. said I. since he is good, be the cause of all things, as the generality say. but he is the cause of a few things to men . . . for our good things are much fewer than our evil . . . but of our evils we must not make God the cause, but seek for some other.” (Book 11. pp. 62-63) God is the author of good only. There you have it, clear, simple and all proved by dialectic. But is it true? Heard on B.B.C.: a five-year-old ran into the road after a ball and was killed by a lorry. Neighbour said to parent: “It is an Act ol God, you must accept.” Theologian says he doesn't know why it happened but passionately denies his God could be responsible. One is more inclined to feel with the Book of Job that God permits, even directs, misfortune; and that it must be for good purposes but it is not our small comfortable idea of good. Socrates does allow that God may chastise us for our betterment. Another insight is quoted by Toynbee (Vol. VI, p. 166, note) 85

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from the Theaetetus, 176. Socrates is speaking. “Evil cannot cease to be, for there must ever be something that is the antithesis of the good; and it cannot be situate in Heaven; so it must necessarily haunt This World and prey upon Mortality. So one must seek to fly, as quickly as may be, hence thither. This flight consists in becoming as like to God as it possible for Man to be. And becoming like to God means becoming rationally righteous and holy.” Socrates triumphantly “proves” that besides being its own reward, justice is profitable in this world and the next. He wants to draw people to goodness by his glowing picture. In view of his own fate, one may feel the argument about the just man persecuted has been slurred over, though it is covered by this on p. 339, Bk X: “We are then, to think in this manner of the just man, that if he happen to be in poverty, or in diseases, or in any other of those imaginary evils, these things to him issue in something good, either whilst alive, or dead. For never at all is he neglected by the Gods at least, whoever he is who inclines earnestly to endeavour to become just, and practises virtue as far as it is possible for man to resemble God.” “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God . . ." (Romans 8.28.) Sleep. How are the governors to be established? They should be lovers of the city, and stable through pains and pleasures; “he who came forth altogether pure as gold tried in the fire, was to be appointed ruler . . .” The most complete guardians must be made philosophers, but few will have all the necessary qualities. Some may be trusty in war, but be oppressed with sleep and yawning when obliged to labour at learning. (Bk VI pp. 208-9.) So this person yawning over Plato would not qualify! But seriously, there seems a possibility that Gurdjieffs rebarbative insistence that man is asleep may be taken from Plato. Here is a passage in Book V, p. 178: “He then who accounts some things beautiful, but neither knows beauty itself, nor is able to follow, if one were to lead him to the knowledge of it, does he seem to you to live in a dream, or to be awake?” But he “who understandeth both what beauty is itself . . . and such things as participate of it,” seems “Perfectly awake”. One cannot arouse any spark of enthusiasm for this world of

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Forms or Ideas. God made one only bed which exists in nature, another sort ot bed is made by the joiner, a third sort of bed may be in a painting. This third sort is only an imitation; so also the tragedian is only an imitator. (Book X, p. 319.) Perhaps it is “irony”. Here is a passage which did convey something (Book VI, pp. 214-216): the eye sees objects by means of light generated by the sun. What the sun is in the visible world, the “offspring of the good” is in the intellectual world. And when the soul “shall firmly adhere to that which truth and real being enlighten, then it understands and knows it, and appears to have intelligence; but when it adheres to that which is blended with darkness ... it fancieth and guesseth . . . and resembleth now one without intelligence.” “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6.22-23.) The idea of Two Worlds is basic to the thinking in this book, which knows no better than to call them visible and invisible. Or at least there is more to the world than visible matter existing at this moment. Where is yesterday, and its emotions? Where do ideas come from? What makes beauty? Where are the dead? Sunlight has so much effect on the inner state that it seems to be more than analogy. Light and radiation may be on the border line between the physical and non-physical worlds. But night also has functions. Here is a puzzling passage about sleep, in the discussion of the tyrannical man at the beginning of the ninth book (pp. 288-9): “Of those pleasures and desires which are not necessary, some appear to me to be repugnant to law: these indeed appear to spring up in every one, but being chastised by the laws, and the better desires, along with reason, they either forsake some men altogether, or are left few in number, and feeble; in others they are more powerful . . . Which are these you mean? said he. Such, said I, as are excited in sleep, when the other part of the soul, such as is rational and mild, and which governs in it, is asleep, and the part which is brutal and savage, being filled with meats and drunkenness, frisks about, and pushing away sleep, wants to 87

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go and accomplish its practices . . . for it scruples not the embraces, as it imagines of a mother, or of anyone else, whether of Gods, of men, or of beasts . . “But I imagine, when one is in health, and keeps himself temperately, and goes to sleep, having stirred up the rational part, and having feasted it with worthy reasonings and inquiries, coming to an unanimity with himself, and allowing the part of the soul which is concupiscible neither to be starved nor glutted, that it may lye quiet and give no disturbance to the part which is best, . . but suffer it ... to inquire . . . what it knoweth not, either something of what hath existed, or of what now exists, or what will exist hereafter; and having likewise soothed the irascible part, . . having quieted these two parts of the soul, and excited the third part in which wisdom resides, shall in this manner take rest — by such an one, you know, the truth is chiefly apprehended, and the visions of his dreams are then least of all repugnant to law . . . (But) there is in everyone a certain species of desires which is terrible, savage and irregular, even in some who entirely seem to us to be moderate. And this species becomes indeed manifest in sleep.” That curious “true pilot” (p. 81 above), somewhat deaf and shortsighted, may be rendered incapable by mandragora or wine so that one of the sailors can get the helm of the ship. Our politicians, civil servants and other leaders who will not see threats like that of world food shortages, could be described as blind, or asleep or hypnotised. Livingstone translates true pilot as “captain” and says he is the electorate (Selections p. 119). Only after copying the long quotation on sleep did one realise the possible meaning of the imagined embraces, at first left out in the shortening, which might be a chief point of the involved passage. Sir Richard Livingstone’s extract about the Remnant, further abbreviated above (pp. 81-2), left out Socrates’ own internal sign, hardly worth mentioning since rarely if ever has such a monitor been given to any other man (Jowett’s version). The report of Socrates’ daimon is precious to people seeking evidence of a non-material world. He is explaining how worthy people can remain philosophers and not be diverted to other activities. For some the cause is exile, for some “Theages’ bridle ... ill-health kept him away from politics.” In the Spens 88

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translation Socrates then says: “For as to my genius, it is hardly worth mentioning; for certainly it hath happened heretofore to but one other, or to none at all.” (p. 200.) Could the one other be Aristophanes? Aeschylus? However one fancies something of the sort is not quite as rare as that. Plato has an Aristophanian dig against Euripides for praising tyrants (p. 285) and his metaphors about drones (pp. 264. 279. 290) could be suggested by Aristophanes’ “Wasps”, the play about lawsuits and jurymen. Association brought up the story of a remarkable teacher, Emin Bey Chikhou, whom Mr. Bennett met in Damascus in 1953. Attempts at political action had twice nearly cost his life, so he concluded politics was not the way for him. His name may not be correctly remembered or spelled, but it stuck for its resemblance to Gurdjieffs Ekim Bey. Livingstone's introduction quotes Plato’s Leiter VII (tr. Crossman) telling his own story. As a young man he intended to enter public life. In 404 B.C., “The democratic regime of the time was generally detested and a revolution took place, headed by a supreme committee of thirty.” Some members of the committee were relations of Plato and invited him to join. “My feelings were in no way surprising if you consider my age at the time. I thought that it would substitute the reign of justice for the reign of injustice, and so 1 gave it my closest attention . . . And I saw these gentlemen within a very short time make the democracy they had destroyed seem like a golden age! I was deeply disgusted and dissociated myself entirely from this deplorable government. Shortly afterwards, the Thirty were turned out . . . on the whole the restored democracy exercised considerable moderation. And yet. as ill-luck would have it. certain influential persons brought an action against Socrates . . . “When I considered all this, the type of men who were administering affairs, and the condition of the law and of public morality — the more I considered it and the older 1 grew, the more difficult appeared to me the task of decent government. Traditions of conduct and the actual observance of law alike were degenerating in Athens with surprising rapidity . . . finally 1 came to the conclusion that every state without exception is badly governed . . . And so I was forced to extol true philosophy and to declare that through it alone can real justice both for the 89

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state and for the individual be discovered and enforced.” “But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matthew 6.33.) Plato did not retire to an ivory tower to enjoy contemplative abstract philosophy. By his teaching at the Academy founded about 387 and by his writing, he has had lasting influence. Ouspensky said it was the reformers who prevented things getting better (and that all governments were either stupid or criminal). This was an offence to someone brought up to believe in social reform, but one sees now that reform can be starting at the wrong end, attacking symptoms without curing the disease. Try to drive off the demon poverty and it seems he returns with, seven others worse than himself, selfish grabbing, litigation, class hatred, gambling, drink and drugs, every sort of crime and violence. “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, 1 will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.” (Matthew 12.43-45, also Luke I 1.24-26.) This text, so often in mind for its image “swept and garnished”, seems to echo a passage in Book IX of the Republic, pp. 274-5, about the democratic type of man: “Some «f the desires are destroyed, some of them retire, on the' rise of a certain modesty in the soul of the youth, and he is again rendered somewhat decent . . . And again, 1 imagine . . . there are (other desires) akin to them which grow up, and through inattention to the father’s instruction, become both many and powerful . . . And do they not draw towards intimacies among themselves, and meeting privately together generate a multitude?” “What else?” “And at length, I imagine, they seize the citadel of the sou’l of the youth, finding it evacuated both of noble learning and pursuits and of true reasoning, which truly are the best watchmen and guardians in the understandings of men beloved of the Gods . . . And then indeed, false and boasting reasonings and opinions. 90

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rushing up in their stead, possess the same place in such a one . . . And does he not now again, on coming among those Lotophagi, dwell with them openly?” The passage continues eloquently. Modesty is called stupidity and thrust out; they next lead in, shining with a great retinue, insolence which they call Education, anarchy called Liberty, luxury — Magnificence, and impudence — Manhood. But if he is fortunate and “not excessively debauched, when he is somewhat more advanced in years, and when the great crowd of desires is over, he . . . regulates his pleasures by a sort of equality and so lives delivering up the government of himself to every incidental desire as it chanceth . . .” “R. L. Nettleship rightly says that it (the Good or the Supreme Beauty) holds the place taken in later philosophies by God, when God is thought of as the ‘Light of the World’." (Encyclopaedia, Prof. A. E. Taylor on Plato.) In Republic Book VI Socrates says (p. 211) “that the idea of the good is the highest learning . . . that we do not sufficiently know that idea, and that without this knowledge, though we understood all else in the highest measure, you know that it profiteth us nothing . . .” Socrates refuses to speak of things of which he is ignorant, as if he knew them, but he will speak of the offspring: “Receive now then this child and offspring of the good itself.” (p. 213.) Off-spring of the good, “son" of God? Then comes the comparison about the eye, light and the sun. The form is echoed in the favourite learning-byheart chapter 13 of the first epistle to the Corinthians. “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge . . . And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” The “second model by which we are to speak and to compose concerning the Gods.” given at the end of Book 11, is that the Gods should not appear in disguise or mislead us by lies. “God then is simple and true, both in word and deed; neither is he changed himself nor does he deceive others, neither by visions, nor by discourse, nor by the pomp of signs, neither when we are awake nor when we sleep.” “So it appears,” said he, “to me at least, whilst you are speaking.” (p. 67.) This does hit at the old stories. Ambiguous oracles may be put 91

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down to priestly cunning, but surely visions and dreams, if not actually misleading, are in disguise and hard to interpret. How are we to know if they come from the Gods or not? 22nd October 1975. A letter about another “movement” raises again the question about all human institutions: “How can quality be preserved?” “The answer is ‘By Art. Is it’ It is at least one answer. Attacks by Plato (who had himself written tragedies and poems) and Gurdjieff on artists, poets and dramatists are not to belittle art, but to say that, just because it is so important, it should be responsible. Plato's Academy lasted 900 years, sometimes a centre of scepticism, but passages in his writing can speak directly to us still. The canon of Plato appears to have been fixed shortly before or shortly after the Christian era. By reckoning the epistles as one item, 36 works were arranged in nine groups of four; a few are not now considered to be by Plato. As it is asserted that the New Testament writers were not “uneducated fishermen”, it is likely they were familiar with Plato from their youth up. The New Testament is not history but a work of concentrated art. In Book X of the Republic Socrates-Plato “proves” by some of his unconvincing word-juggling that the psyche is immortal, and ends with one of his own fable-makings, the story of Er or Erus, who came back from the dead to tell what he saw. “And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him. If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” (Luke’s parable of the rich manand Lazarus, 16.30-31.) In Aristophanes’ f-'rogs, produced 405 B.C., the God Dionysos is allowed to bring back from the dead one “poet to save the city”. He descends to the Kingdom of Pluto where after a contest between Aeschylus — died 456 — and Euripides — died 407 — he chooses Aeschylus, who nominates Sophocles — died 406 — to occupy his chair of honour during his absence. If onlv Aristophanes had shown what happened when Aeschylus returned to the upper world! In the following year (404) Athens, crowded with refugees and weakened by starvation, fell to Lysander and the Spartans and her long walls were pulled down. It could be said Plato was the answer to the prayer of Frogs;

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in a way Socrates does speak from the grave in Plato’s dialogues. His contagious enthusiasm for the pursuit of the good is worthy poetry. Plato’s account of the last days of Socrates is moving; the trial, the final talk with his friends, his calm drinking of the cup. The simple last words, “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” take one to Peter’s denials at the trial of Jesus and the crowing of the cock. Today’s paper. 23rd October 1975, has the obituary of Arnold Toynbee, 86. He held that the only hope for our civilization was in a renewal of the Christian Spirit. How much of that spirit came through Socrates and Plato!

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RISTOPHANES DID LEAVE a prejudice against Euripides, yet he is very famous, so it was necessary to look at him; that led backwards to Sophocles and to the grand old man, Aeschylus himself. The themes are too big for this inadequate pen, but, on the theory that the worst parts may be the most important, let us plunge in somehow. In “The White Goddess” (p. 464) Robert Graves speaks of the religious concept of free choice between good and evil, common to Pythagorean philosophy and prophetic Judaism. “In the primitive cult of the Universal Goddess . . . there was no room for choice: her devotees accepted the events, pleasurable and painful in turn, which she imposed on them as their destiny . . .” Perhaps the “higher ethical religions”, which said that righteousness was the way to win God’s favour, have over emphasised responsibility and sin. As a young church-goer one could not sincerely accuse oneself of being a miserable sinner. Here in the Agamemnon, called by Vellacott in his Penguin introduction “the greatest of all Greek plays”, we must be very near the source of ideas about choice, temptation and the descent into crime. Aeschylus rejects the old view that prosperity itself attracts misfortune. “I think alone, my mind Rejects this general belief. Sin. not prosperity, engenders grief; For impious acts breed their own kind. And evil’s nature is to multiply.” But how far is he right that misfortune is due to sin? The introduction to an older translation by E. D. A. Morshead, 1881, connects this third chorus with the 18th chapter of Ezekiel. That is a shortcut — Ezekiel, whose name is so similar to Aeschylus. Mead (Vol. I, p. 113) gives the astonishing

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information that Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica quotes verses from a tragedy called “The Leading Forth” by Ezechiel, an Alexandrian (?) Hebrew poet writing in Greek. Ezekiel's chapter is against inherited guilt and the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children. Ezekiel 18.2 and Jeremiah 31.29-30 attack the same proverb: “The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son . . .” (Ezekiel 18.20) “Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin.” (verse 30.) Ezekiel takes the opportunity of listing sins to be avoided, including not to “come near to a menstruous woman”. In Leviticus 18.19 the rule is given: “thou shall not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness.” Gurdjieffs Gynekokhrostiny (A & E p. 1108) were a shock originally; now one has heard of cultures where villages have a “menstruation hut”. Disposable sanitary towels are something for which to thank modern technology. At this point memory brought up a long-forgotten discovery, the surprising scene of the gambling match in the Mahabharata, where Draupadi, the one wife to the five brothers, was the final stake: “she was at the period of menstruation and was therefore clothed in one piece of cloth with her navel showing . . .” She was dragged before the assembled princes; she prayed for help. As her one garment was pulled off, Krishna, who is also Vishnu and Hari, caused another to appear till the floor was covered with many-hued dresses, (pp. 162-5, Mahabharata Selections by S. C. Nott, with line drawings by Kate Adamson, Janus Press, 1956.) Could there be any connection with the woman of Samaria? “For thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband . . .” (John 4.18.) Ezekiel's adjacent chapters strengthen the link with Aeschylus; chapter 17 has a parable of two eagles and a vine, chapter 19 of a lioness who brought up one of her whelps: “it learned to catch the prey; it devoured men.” In both chapters a victim is to be taken by spreading a net upon him, as Clytemnestra cast a net on Agamemnon, a voluminous bathrobe. Aeschylus' first chorus tells 96

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of two eagles tearing the body of a pregnant hare. The prophet Calchas said that Artemis in her anger over the hare had sent the fatal North Wind which stopped the Greek fleet sailing. “Cry Sorrow, sorrow — yet let good prevail! . . So be it! Yet, what is good? And who Is God? How name him, and speak true? If he accept the name that men Give him, Zeus I name him then . . . Zeus, whose will has marked for man The sole way where wisdom lies; Ordered one eternal plan: Man must suffer to be wise. Head-winds heavy with past ill Stray his course and cloud his heart: . . Man grows wise against his will. I-or powers who rule from thrones above By ruthlessness commend their love. So it was then. Agamemnon, mortified. Dared not, would not, admit to error; . . So Agamemnon rather than retreat. Endured to offer up his daughter's life To help a war fought for a faithless wife /And pay the ransom for a storm-bound licet.” I he sacrifice of Iphigenia is now seen to have suggested a more important incident than Jephthah's daughter — Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. This supposition is strengthened by the discovery that in both Euripides' Iphigenia plays, a deer is miraculously substituted at the last moment. I he third chorus of the Agamemnon compares the marriage ol Helen and Paris to a lion's cub reared by a shepherd. Gentle and charming while young, the grown whelp “f ulfils his nature as Destruction's priest!” Who was the unknown seer who chose the child’s prophetic name. “Helen, the Spoiler’"’ Morshead's version of two lines above may be quoted: “Zeus — if to The Unknown That name of many names seem good —” (p. 10) for a link with Paul's speech on Mars’ hill at Athens and the altar to THU UNKNOWN GOD (Acts 17.23). Ezekiel's chapter 17 carries a heading “Cedar of the gospel 97

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promised”. A tender twig shall be planted on a high mountain and flourish, “and be a goodly cedar: and under it shall dwell all fowl of every wing” (verse 23). Why does a cedar twig become a mustard seed in the New Testament? In the second play of the trilogy, the Choephori or Libation-Bearers, Electra finds at her father’s burial mound footprints and a lock of hair, and hopes they might be those of Orestes, reared in exile: “if deliverance lies ahead — A great tree might yet grow out of a little seed.” It is printed in italics as if it was a proverb. This is an early example of the recognition tokens so much used in the plots of later plays. The derivation of our word symbol is from symbolon — token, watchword (and creed), so maybe we owe that useful overworked word to the plays. The trilogy may not go as far as the forgiveness of sins, but it is about deliverance from the continuing burden of vengeance and retribution. Orestes is pursued by remorse, seeking to make himself clean again. So the trilogy is “a mustard seed”. In Ezekiel 16 there is strong language about the sins of Jerusalem, “an imperious whorish woman”. “I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged . . .” Her sisters are Sodom and Samaria. It would be odd if the description owed something to the sins of Clytemnestra, sister of Helen. In general the praises, reproaches and laments addressed to Jerusalem in the Old Testament would be apt also for Athens, or Rome. “And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all . . . but thou wast cast out in the open field . . .” (Ezekiel 16. 4-5.) This is the only reference one can recall to the salting of children at birth, which Gurdjieff says is an Armenian custom (RM pp. I 13-5). Is it his way of leaving a footprint to say he has been here, he has “read” Ezekiel? In “The Dead Sea Scrolls in English” (Pelican), Geza Vermes (born in Hungary) writes on pp. 210-211 that the Merkabah, the Divine Throne-Chariot in Ezekiel 1 & 10 with connections to Revelations 4, was a central subject of meditation in ancient and medieval Jewish mysticism, though the Mishnah lays down that no wise man is to share his understanding of the Merkabah with

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a person less enlightened than himself. The four living creatures, cherubim, each had four faces and four wings; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward; and when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels, they went upon their four sides, they turned not as they went — and so on, with much repetition. The idea came of connecting this with the also hard to visualise “wheels” of the myth attributed to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium (p. 72 above). “The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and a combination of the two. The primeval man was round ... he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways ... He could walk upright as men do now, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air . . . the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon . . .” To humble them Zeus cut them in half, “and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet. I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.” Each of us is always looking for his other half; “if we are friends of God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present.” (Selections pp. 72-5.) The Gynekokhrostiny for the passive sex described by Gurdjieff in the Chapter “Beelzebub's Opinion of War” have been mentioned on p. 96 above; in the male temples the men contemplated consciously in the state called “self-remembering” in order to liberate the active substance for the Holy Trinity. There were also buildings for the third or middle sex, who were “neither one thing nor the other”. The Merkabah leads again to the question: “Is it wrong to wish to publish secrets so long hidden?” Scholars of previous generations (not to mention Gurdjieff) have prepared material and left hints; since one has been led to it. maybe it is now time to gather the material together. There must be much more to be found, or understood better. Looking at the world today it seems more urgent to address

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unbelievers and the bewildered than to avoid offence to believers. Two texts from The Daily Telegraph: “The scepticism of the post­ Christian era has been high-lighted by the recent recommendations of the National Foundation for Educational Research that Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Communism and Fascism should all find places in a new syllabus to replace the present school period of compulsory religious education.” (Leader, 27th August 1975.) In the Saturday column, 13th September 1975, Paul Johnson said: “it seems to me at least arguable that the almost complete de-Christianisation of the British working class has been a potent element in the breakdown of industrial discipline and our relative economic decline.” Perhaps existing religions can be revivified it more of their members will look beyond the historical words and images to actual experience, and will follow the path of self-training. Aeschylus repeats his similes like a refrain — eagles, lions, the goad, the wind. Another concluding cock: almost the last line of the Agamemnon, as the chorus taunts Aegisthus. is “Brag blindiv on — a cock that struts before his hen!” In the last play of the trilogy Athene pacifies the Furies by offering worship and a home under the Acropolis, and asks them not to inflame the young men with “the temper of the mutinous cock . . . Let war be with the stranger . . . but at home Let no cocks fight.” One had been wondering what a net could symbolise. In the Oresteian trilogy it is a hunting net. the net of fate in which Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are trapped, not only by the family curse but by their own sins. When he grew up Orestes was threatened by Apollo with torments unless he avenged his lather. He purged his blood guilt by ritual, and by penitence and suffering in exile. Pursued by the Luries he is sent by Apollo to Athens. In the trial scene he is acquitted by Athene’s casting vote but she does endorse the Furies' sociology, all too apt today; Guard well and reverence that form ol government Which will eschew alike licence and slavery; And from your polity do not wholly banish fear. For what man living, freed from fear, will still be just?" "The poetry of Aeschylus is the precursor of the philosophy of Plato .. .” (Morshead).

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Aeschylus has a touch of scatology. Orestes’ old nurse comes out of the palace in tears on hearing the (false) news of his death. “These tears are not hired", say the chorus. She recalls his babyhood: “And oh! the times he shouted at me in the night, Made me get up, and bothered me with this and that . . . A baby’s inside takes no orders . . . and often, too, I know, I guessed it wrong; and then Td have to wash his things. For nurse and laundress both were the same pair of hands.” The Oresteia was Aeschylus' last work, exhibited in 458 B.C. when he was about 67. “That portent which amazed our marching youth. It was ten years ago — but 1 was there. The poet's grace, the singer's fire Crow with his years; and I can still speak truth With the clear ring the gods inspire . . .” “Old and ready to learn Is always young." says his Chorus of Elders (pp. 45, 63). Some of Vellacott's lines have a Biblical ring which it must be admitted is not recognisable in Morshead. When Clytemnestra’s chain of beacon fires has brought the first news of the fall of Troy, the Chorus returns to the sin of Paris in seducing the wife of his host: “The hand of Zeus has cast The proud from their high place!” (p. 55) “When man has once transgressed . . . Retreat cut off, the fiend Temptation Forces him onward, the unseen Effectual agent of Damnation . . .” (p. 56) There is resentment in Argos that their men had died “for another's wife". “And home, to claim their welcome. Come ashes in an urn . . . To drain hot tears from hearts of friends; Good measure, safely stored and sealed In a convenient jar . . .” (p. 58) Matthew 7.2: “with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again”; or in Luke's version (6.38) “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men 101

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give into your bosom.” After some days interval an olive-crowned herald brings confirmation. “Bless the returning remnant that the sword has spared!” Greet Agamemnon royally, “As fits one in whose hands Zeus the Avenger’s plough Passed over Troy . . .” (p. 61.) “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written (in Deut. 32.35), Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12.19.) The herald has to tell the bad news too, the storm on the return voyage. “The sky was a mad shepherd tearing his own flock . . .” At dawn “we saw The Aegean flowering thick with faces of dead Greeks . . .” (p. 65.) The Chorus mourns the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra: “O piteous mystery! Is Zeus not Lord? Zeus, Zeus, alas! doer and source of all? Could even this horror be, without his sovereign word?” (p. 94.) This Zeus is more than “the author of good only”. The description of the deserted Menelaus was unexpected: “ ‘O pillow softly printed Where her loved head had rested!’ There lies her husband fasting Dumb in his stricken room. His thought across sea reaches With longings, not reproaches . . . Her statue’s sweet perfection Torments his desolation . . . Visions of her beset him With false and fleeting pleasure When dreams and dark are deep.” (p. 57.) There are other stories which present the chilling image of a statue in the bed — or do they mean an imag-inary companion? In his introduction to Euripides’ “The Bacchae and Other Plays” (Penguin) Philip Vellacott writes of “The readiness of the Greek male to set the blame for everything upon a woman . . .” (p. 15.) Does he mean Helen? But the Old Testament does it too! The blame for human troubles is laid on Eve for accepting the forbidden fruit. Eve is Helen. Or Helen contributed. The only long-term cure for poverty is fewer babies, more 102

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attentively reared. All our troubles are the women’s fault for bringing too many people into the world! Often they have no choice. This is what Women’s Lib. should be about. Who begets the babies? At Delphi the Furies argue that matricide is worse than the killing of a husband because husband and wife are not of kindred blood. Apollo answers: “Then you dishonour and annul the marriage-bond Of Zeus and Hera, that confirms all marriage-bonds; And by your argument the sweetest source of joy To mortals, Aphrodite, falls into contempt. Marriage that joins two persons in Fate’s ordinance, Guarded by justice, stands more sacred than an oath.” The Old Testament has no goddess to support marriage, but Adam’s rib provides an alternative. “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” (Genesis 2.23-24.) Good marriage, and family ties, seem to be part of the Jewish strength. Nepotism works, if the nephews are able and loyal, though it may be hard on outsiders. In his introduction to the Oresteia Vellacott tells of the wedding of Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, attended by Olympian deities. One “Fairy Malignante” — Eris, strife — was not invited, but came. She threw the golden apple “For the Fairest” which led to the quarrel of the three goddesses, and the judgement of Paris in favour of Aphrodite for her promise of Helen. But from the introductions to Vellacott’s Euripides and to the Loeb Hesiod we learn that, in the lost early poem Cypria, the apple was part of Zeus’ plan "to ease the swarming earth of her measureless burden of men” by the war between Hellas and the Phrygians. The quotation is from the prologue to Euripides' Helen. Is that explanation of war so old? Helen and the apple of discord. Eve and the forbidden fruit. Other elements in the Eden story are earlier. Samuel Noah Kramer’s “From the Tablets of Sumer” (1956 title, Falcon’s Wing Press p. 169) tells of Dilmun, a paradise “probably” in S.W. Persia, without death or sickness but lacking water. Enki

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Fridu. the water god. also called Ea and bringer of civilisation) orders Utu the sun god (brother of Inanna) to bring up fresh water from the earth (? the mist of Genesis 2.6). Ninhursag. the great mother goddess, makes 8 plants by 3 generations of goddesses, begotten by Enki and born in 9 days without travail. Enki cats the plants, plucked by his two-faced messenger Isimud. Ninhursag curses him to death and disappears. Fie becomes sick and 8 organs fail. The fox promises Enlil (of Nippur, Lil = wind, air. breath, spirit) to bring Ninhursag back. She seats Enki by her pudendum. “My brother, what hurts you?” “My tooth (jaw, mouth, arm, rib, and three undeciphered) hurts me.” For each ill she gives birth to a goddess. The goddess created to heal his rib was Nin-ti (pronounced tee) “lady of the rib”, but “ti” also means “to make live”. The pun was carried over in the creation of Eve from a rib. “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve (Hebrew Chavah. That is. Living) because she was the mother of all living.” (Genesis 3.20.) One wonders if this Sumerian myth is a source of the fiercer story of Cronos swallowing his children by Rhea. By what channels did the story reach Aristobulus? 15th July 1975. For evening relaxation, take up Optima, review published by the South African Anglo-American Corporation. It has a survey on the fossils of Australopithecus discovered in South and East Africa. Where are they now. those poor little hominids, the true Adams and Eves? Reabsorbed into the spirit of the race? Reincarnated round and round in a band, like Alice Gilbert's animals, until they achieve individuality? One lesson of the theory of evolution, as opposed to the book of Genesis, is our kinship with the animals. If we do not make ourselves worthy of our claim to superiority as humans, Nature may tire of her spoiled favourites. Vcllacott's translation of the Oresteia was commissioned bv the B.B.C. and first broadcast'in May 1956. His translation of Prometheus Bound and the other three surviving plays of Aeschylus was published in 1961, too late for the stillremembered Coombe Springs performance of Prometheus for Christmas 1953. Victorian English tends to be woolly, the modern translations make meanings sharper. Prometheus had helped Zeus and the Olympian gods defeat

(of

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Cronos, but had championed the human race and stolen fire, “a teacher in every art”, to give to men. For this the Father, Zeus, Son of Cronos, ordered the unwilling Hephaestus to nail Prometheus to a remote rock. “Power newly won is always harsh.” Prometheus remains defiant though he knows the future and all he must endure, “Bared to the winds of heaven, bound and crucified.” He is visited by “Job’s Comforters”, Oceanus, and his daughters who form the chorus. Io, “the girl with horns”, is another victim of the tyranny of Zeus, and the only mortal in the play. She says: “At night in my own room visions would visit me, Repeating in seductive words, ‘. . . Love waits for you — The greatest: Zeus, inflamed with arrows of desire, Longs to unite with you in love.’ She dared to tell her father, who consulted oracles and was given riddling answers, till one said clearly that she must be turned out of home, or the thunderbolt would kill all her family. “I have run without rest In a leaping frenzy of pain and hunger. The victim of Hera's calculating resentment.” She was partly changed into a cow; “stung by the gadfly’s stabbing goad, Convulsed and mad, I rushed on . . . do not out of pity comfort me With lies. I count false words the foulest plague of all.” Prometheus tells Io her own future, and that Zeus will be deposed because he plans a union with one who is to bear a son stronger than his father; Prometheus will not reveal her name, it is his bargaining weapon. After tormented wandering, lo will reach Egypt. Canopus in the delta; “And here at last Zeus shall restore your mind, and come Upon you, not with terror, with a gentle touch;” she shall bear a dark-skinned son and name him Epaphos, “child of a touch”. Sorry, arrheton looks in here. In the lost later parts of the trilogy Zeus must have pardoned Prometheus in exchange for the secret, after 1000 years ol torture. Prometheus was freed by Heracles who was descended from lo. Thetis was married to a mortal; the son, greater than his father, was Achilles. The quarrel of the goddesses, started at the

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wedding of Thetis, must have been long drawn out for Achilles to be grown up in time for the Trojan war. Zeus has not escaped. He was superseded by Jehovah, though Aeschylus’s Zeus may have contributed to Jehovah’s character. Io throws another possible light on Zeus’s amours. She could be the human soul, destined at last to fall into the arms of God. One has always wanted her name to mean “I”, but it seems that is in Italian. Chambers dictionary says ego is “I” in both Latin and Greek. “Io” is an interjection of invocation, or expressing joy or triumph or grief. lo's torments call up the saying: “Blessed is he that hath a soul; blessed also is he that hath none; but grief and sorrow are to him that hath in himself its conception." (A&E p. 246.) Io could link up with Gurdjieffs very expensive immortality. If the sacred Prana is crystallised in you, consciously or unconsciously, you must without fail bring it to perfection; “otherwise this most holy coating will, changing various exterior coatings, suffer and languish eternally.” (ibid.) At his trial Socrates compared himself to a gadfly sent by God to wake up Athens, a horse lazy because of its size. (Apology 30.) He may have drawn the simile from Aeschylus. Epaphos is echoed by the word Eph-pha-tha, that is, Be opened, with which Jesus healed the man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. (Mark 7.32-34.) Hera had set a thousand-eyed giant Argus as herdsman to watch Io. Argus was killed by Hermes but lo still sees his ghost, who “drives me starving along the sandy shores; While the clear music of wax-bound pipes Fills my ears with a tune that longs for sleep.” The note says the playing of pan-pipes is heard, perhaps to represent the hum of the gadfly. Clytemnestra was roused from dreadful visions by the droning gnat (Agamemnon p. 73). One wondered if it could be describing across the centuries a ringing noise in the ears remembered as discouraging at night in one’s schooldays. Attempt to speak of it only brought ridicule. Now one has met a word tinnitus which seems to refer to it; it is such a help to have a name for things if you want to ask the doctor! But it also seems to be something “they” can produce to drive 106

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you to action; no wonder a doctor would think it neurotic. [here is repetition in Prometheus. The second mention of Argus gives him 10.000 eyes. Encyclopaedia says he was originally the starry heavens; the stars can indeed be felt as eyes watching us; they are also called flocks of sheep. They may be the flock watched over by night by Luke’s shepherds. Prometheus suggests the Anthropos, Primal Man, Cosmic Individual (where did these ideas arise?); also Lucifer or Satan, cast out for rebellion and the sin of pride, and so even Mr. Beelzebub himself. The play ends with the spectacular collapse of the rock in an earthquake, like Matthew’s earthquakes at the crucifixion, Matthew 27.51 and 28.2. Aeschylus’ Supp/ianls is about descendants of Io, the 50 daughters of Danaus, fleeing from forced marriages with their 50 cousins, sons of Aegyptus. “Right or no right, 1 will not be Man's chattel won by violence.” We learn that the cattle­ tormenting fly was “known as Oestrus among people of the Nile." Dictionary, Oestrus (from Latin, oistros Greek): “gadfly, frenzy, sexual heat." From Aeschylus to the Pill! The play has lines with echoes in the New Testament. Of Epaphos: “Certainly this is the child of Zeus." (p. 72.) “Truly this man was the Son of God”, said the centurion at the crucifixion (Mark 15.39). The chorus of daughters hymns Zeus; “Yours is not the humbler authority deputed by an overlord . . . You speak, and it is done.” (p. 72.) In Matthew 8.8-9 the centurion says to Jesus: “speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man. Go, and he goeth; and to another. Come, and he cometh . . .” King Pelasgus of Argos persuades the citizens of Argos to defend the girls in spite of the danger of war. They pray for blessings on the city: “Never let . . . lustful Ares raise his joyless clamour. Who mows the field of man where others sowed.” (p. 73.) In the parable the man who only received one talent said: “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown . . .” (Matthew 25.24.) The scene gets lively when the herald of the pursuing cousins arrives with soldiers and tries to drag the girls from the statues of 107

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the gods. “On board, on board! . . It you won’t, We’ll pull your hair out, stick daggers into you. Till you’re running with blood, blood, blood; Then we’ll cut off your heads." . . . “Help me. take away this terrible dream! O Mother Earth, O Father Zeus!” The king arrives and says the herald has not learnt how an alien should behave. “Have I not? How? Because 1 found here what was lost?” Perhaps it is as well the other plays of the trilogy are lost. The Egyptians won the fight, but by a pact with their father all the girls murdered their husbands on the wedding night — except one who spared hers for love’s sake. This couple became ancestors of the kings of Argos. Heracles was unwittingly killed by his wife with a poisoned tunic she hoped was a love charm. One recalls the bathrobe in which Clytemnestra netted Agamemnon, the most famous story of wife killing husband. Sorry about the obsession, but the “ritual” basis of these stories is still seen as symbolic of intercourse. The stories are too artificial to be easily made into convincing psychologizing. Maybe lovers do in a way eat each other; there almost seems to be a law that you cannot do people good without also doing them harm, or at least something they don't like. Give a child a scooter and start back trouble by uneven growth. Non­ interference is sometimes kindness. A Norwegian visitor to Coombe Springs, a widow with one precious, rather delicate daughter, told of a kind of vision of two candles, large and small; she must be careful not to smother the small flame growing beside her. On a different scale witness the benefits and evils brought through the ages by medicine and religion, law and government — or even the internal combustion engine; but we don’t have to accept all the evils. The Persians is the earliest surviving Greek play and the only one, apart from the comedies, with a non-legendary subject. It was produced in 472 B.C., only eight years after the sea battle of Salamis which is described, and which it is almost certain Aeschylus either took part in or watched. The Persians are shown

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as dignified and worthy of sympathy. In her chariot, Queen Atossa, Xerxes’ mother, describes a dream and how she “went to the altar-hearth, to pray For deliverance from evil,” and saw a frightening omen of an eagle attacked by a falcon. A messenger brings the news of defeat and heavy losses. Apparently Aeschylus’ account of Salamis does not fully agree with that of Herodotus. Aeschylus does not mention Themistocles, but both writers say the Persians were lured into narrow waters by a false message. Admiral Sir Reginald Hall of Naval Intelligence may have read the classics. His false telegram ordered Admiral von Spee to attack the Falkland Islands wireless station in December, 1914 (The Dark Invader, Captain von Rintelen, p. 211). Queen Atossa returns alone and on foot. “My ears are dinned with notes that hear no healing spell . . .” She offers milk, oil, honey and garlands as a libation to the dead, while the chorus sing to summon Xerxes’ father from the grave. The ghost of Darius rises. “Grief is man’s lot, And men must bear it.” The councillors ask how they can best take action. “By taking none. Even if your force be twice as great, Never set arms in motion against Helene soil. You cannot win . . .” He foretells the defeat on land at Plataea. “As for my son . . . admonish him To cease affronting God with proud and rash attempts.” He bids his wife comfort her son. “Councillors, farewell; And let your soul taste each day’s pleasure, spite of griefs . . .” Xerxes arrives dejected and tattered, and laments with the chorus. The play raised reflections that all these dirges were ritual, like elaborate funerals, hired mourners, or the cutting off of fingers among tribes in New Guinea to appease the departed spirit. One feels grief is something to be hidden and fought against, not made a show of, though perhaps a traditional show helps the first shock to pass. But that the dead should be kept in mind, if it can be done with sincere affection, is held to be a desirable link with the invisible. Seven against Thebes was produced in 467 B.C., twelve years after the Persians had left Athens in ruins; it helped to induce the Athenians to build walls for their city. The play is about brothers — the two sons of Oedipus — quarrelling over their inheritance.

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The ousted Polyneices (=Full of Enmity) has brought foreign allies against Thebes. A scout describes the leaders who will attack each of the seven gates; Eteocles (=True Glory) appoints champions to defend them. Five of the attackers are arrogant boasters; there is good hope of defeating them. One “tosses three tall shadowing plumes,” making one think Aristophanes took the idea for his Lamachus. The sixth is a seer, Amphiarus, modest, brave, upright and pious, with a plain round shield, “For he cares not to seem the bravest, but to be . . .” “For me it is this country’s earth I shall enrich; My tomb and oracle shall stand on foreign ground.” But at the seventh gate is Polyneices; in spite of pleas by the soldier and the chorus, Eteocles goes to fight his own brother. In a picture of the horrors of defeat when “The madness of Ares masters men in masses,” there is an unusual touch: “Stores of all kinds of food litter the ground at random — A sight to sadden a good housewife . . .” (p. 99.) One has long wondered why, if it was not the actual manner of the death of Stephen, stoning was the method chosen in Acts, natural though it seems for an angry crowd. “And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.” (Acts 7. 59-60) There is also the stoning of Paul at Lystra, where he and Barnabus had been welcomed as gods (Acts 14). There is the saying of Jesus about the woman taken in adultery: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8.7) There are other stones: “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” (Matthew 7.9) Jesus said: “Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.” (John 1.42.) “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?” (Mark 16.3) Eteocles says: “anyone who disregards my authority, Whether it be man or woman or anything between The stone of death shall sentence him ... the people’s hands shall stone him dead.” Vellacott’s note says the stone of death refers to voting with black and white stones so there is a play on the two kinds of “stone” which cause death.

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There might really be a connection between the Theban plays and Stephen, for when the messenger brings news that Thebes is saved he says, “but the seventh gate The Lord Apollo, he the dread Commander of Seven, Took for himself,” and the brothers killed each other. Stephen was chief of the seven deacons. The note says that “Commander of Seven” may have been a rank in the Athenian fleet, and that Apollo had various associations with the number seven. The encyclopaedia only says that Apollo was born on the seventh of the month under a palm tree on the island of Delos, where Leto found shelter from, of course, the jealous Hera, so the 7th (and the 20th) of the month were held sacred to him. The sun is the greatest of the ancients’ seven planets.

When Euripides treated the same subject in The Phoenician Woman in 409 B.C., Athens was nearly exhausted by the Peloponnesian war. He makes various changes in the story and introduces a new incident. Teiresias, the blind prophet, tells Creon, uncle of Eteocles, that he must sacrifice his son Menoeceus if he would save his country. Creon indignantly refuses and tells his son to fly to Delphi and Dodona. The boy pretends he will comply, but when Creon has gone he says: “I should be ashamed, if men . . . face death . . . while I betray My father, brother, and my city, and slink off A coward . . .” Later, a messenger reports:

“When Creon’s son, who died to save his native land, Had stood on a high tower and through his throat had plunged The deadly sword” . . . and went on to describe the battle. One feels the boy accepted the oracle too easily, though there was not time for deliberation. This is the surprise in Euripides’ last play, Iphigenia in Au/is — that after she has recovered from the first shock and horror, she consents to be sacrificed. “Mother, 1 have thought this over; I know now what I must do. I am resolved to die. Above all things I want to act nobly And renounce all cowardly feelings . . . And indeed I have no right to cling to life so passionately . . .” Achilles sees what a bride he has lost: “You have quit fighting against gods, which proves too hard

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For you; and made a virtue of necessity.” She says, in the messenger’s report: “Father 1 give my body willingly For my home . . . If this is what the god commands.” “Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people.” (John 18.14) Caiaphas — Calchas — Teiresias. Euripides returns several times to the theme of human sacrifice and it is to some extent present in other tragedies, for is not all dying a kind of sacrifice, which we cannot escape and must try to understand? It is believed Stephen felt his early death was needed as a sacrifice, but he might be wrong, it must not be his own judgement or act; if the invisible powers really wanted it, they must give proof by doing it themselves (through the wind). 19-20th June 1976. Finish going through this section. Write to Canada on a wet afternoon to thank for children’s photos. “Plod on with my book - that - nobody - wants.” State financial encouragement of large families. “Over-population leads to war.” How can you save a world that doesn’t want to be saved? What is salvation? Future of Mr. Bennett’s work: “lots of small communities starting up ... A new life-style to survive coming social disintegration?” In 1947 Machadodorp settlement was to be an ark to preserve the Work through the coming World War III. A bolt-hole? S. African racial tension was not foreseen. “Just read a travelogue about Corsica being depopulated, no jobs there.” Must find something more cheerful. “Go on making an island of happiness for your young family.” That’s it. If you cannot escape to an ideal community, or monastery, you must try to have your bolt-hole inside you; island of sanity, and aspiration. Even that depends partly on physical health. While you have energy store some, bottle it in an invisible glass jar, hope it will reappear when you need it. It may even have influence. 27-29th March 1977. Jumbo jet collision at Tenerife. Two days of howling North Wind. If Jesus “steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem,” (Luke 9.51) was it suicide? No. He accepted to offer himself if it was necessary, but the decision was left to his Father. “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this 112

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cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.” (Mark 14.36.) May we also have the courage to face death in that spirit.

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-8TH DECEMBER 1975. Rather stuck on these plays. How many more is it worth summarising? How are the sections to be arranged? Aeschylus has reached sheet 13, that is quite long enough. Still haven’t put in the latest explanation for “Boots” — the high-soled buskins worn by the tragic actors, like today’s fashion for platform soles. The theme is Old Testament sources but they are turning out to be more connected with the New Testament. 7th December. Write a rough draft on Antigone. Long after the death of Aeschylus, the end of his “Seven against Thebes” was rewritten to agree with Sophocles’ popular play, whose probable date is 442-441 B.C. Translation used is by E. F. Watling, Penguin, 1947. Creon, becoming king on the death of Eteocles, decrees that Polynices, who attacked his own city, is to be left unburied “to be eaten by dogs and vultures”. A guard is watching the corpse. “The punishment for disobedience is death by stoning”, but Antigone is determined to bury her brother. (Forbidden burying is used in the Book of Tobit, p. 65 above.) A frightened sentry reports that the body has been covered with earth. Lots were drawn; it fell to him to tell Creon, who threatens torture unless the culprit is found. The interval is filled by a lyric chorus in praise of man: “He is master of ageless Earth, to his own will bending The immortal mother of gods, by the sweat of his brow . . . He is lord of all things living . . . The use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain He learnt; found out the laws of living together In cities, building him shelter against the rain And wintry weather . . . For every ill he hath found its remedy, Save only death.”

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The sentry returns with Antigone and guards. They had swept the earth from the body and watched to windward, “Keeping clear of the stench of him,” and making sure “not to be caught napping this time.” Suddenly there was a storm of dust, “stripping the trees stark bare, Filling the sky . . .” When it stopped Antigone was seen, with a fine bronze urn to pour offerings, and caught. In spite of the remonstrances of his son Haemon, Antigone’s betrothed, Creon orders her “walled up Inside a cave, alive, with food enough To acquit ourselves of the blood-guiltiness That else would lie upon our commonwealth.” Teiresias rebukes Creon and says his son will die; Creon repents, too late. Haemon had broken his way into the cave; he found Antigone hanged and killed himself. Though it is not very specific, there is a feeling that this play contributed to the gospels. In Matthew the chief priests and Pharisees make “the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone and setting a watch”, “lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away”. In Mark and Luke the women brought spices to anoint him and found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. In John 11.38-39 the grave of Lazarus “was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.” Martha said: “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” The dust-storm which masked Antigone’s approach is puzzling; was it intended as a miracle? It was noted in case it related to Gurdjieff’s Gobi desert sand-storms (R.M. pp. 170-4). To say that Antigone’s devotion to the rites for the dead is a type for Katharine’s long mourning over Stephen is phantasy. Nevertheless it is not the actual rites that matter but the attitude to the dead which they signify. 8th December, Monday. Dream: A new dress, brown silk corduroy, two-piece, the back is pieced together from various materials, some discoloured, some even dirty. During dressing, mind was rambling about “phenomenally long lives” of the three dramatists . . . Hooray! A new idea, could they have given the idea for the three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob? Euripides, so hard to understand, has something of the tricky dual character of Jacob, though it is the twin Esau who has the right initial. Encyclopaedia makes Herodotus a “twin”, having the same birth

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date c. 484 as Euripides; or for strife with brother there are the attacks of Aristophanes on Euripides. Esau was father of the Edomites. Herodotus was a non-Athenian, born at Halicarnassus, on the coast of Asia Minor. In fact the estimated dates give Aeschylus a life of 69 years, but he went on developing, stimulated by the rivalry of the younger Sophocles, for the Oresteia was produced only two years before his death. Sophocles was the one who lived 90 years; his “Philoctetes”, which survives, was produced in 409 B.C., his 87th year, and “Oedipus at Colonus” after his death. Euripides lived 77 years, writing to the end, as did Plato, who lived to be 80. Socrates at “three score years and ten” was fully active. The longevity of Theophrastus has been discussed p. 54 above. Whatever may be thought of that idea, it can be said that Aeschylus and Sophocles fit well with Gurdjieffs two patriarchs in the chapter Skridlov (R.M. pp. 241-2 and p. 9 above). How often one has tried in vain to make something of their names. The entrancing sermons of brother Sez, said to be 300 years old, resemble Sophocles’s wonderful fluency and theatrical technique, while brother Ahl, the gist of whose speech remains in the heart forever, is like Aeschylus who grows on you with time. Law of Three and Law of Seven — Three Tragedians, Seven Gates of Thebes — though surely many other meanings too! 6.7.76: Seven plays of Sophocles survive; he introduced the three-actor scene. 31.3.77: Aeschylus — Abraham developed the character of Zeus-Jehovah. Oedipus Tyrannus is thought to have been written some fifteen or twenty years after Antigone. A performance was seen in the early 1930’s at the small Festival theatre at Cambridge; memory has kept the horror of the moment when the self-blinded king staggers on to the stage with bleeding eye-sockets. Why should quite unwitting incest be such tremendous pollution? Jung writes in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” on p. 191: “To me incest signified a personal complication only in the rarest cases. Usually incest has a highly religious aspect, for which reason the incest theme plays a decisive part in almost all cosmogonies”; and on p. 152: “incest is traditionally a prerogative of royalty and divinities.” Enlightenment! Is the theme not really incest but “the literary 117

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secret”, “religious sex”, the organ Kundabuffer, ambivalent, not particularly welcome, but a token of invisible reality? “Nor need this mother-marrying frighten you; Many a man has dreamt as much”, says Jocasta. “Father, brother, and son; bride, wife, and mother; Confounded in one monstrous matrimony!” The name Oedipus means “swollen foot”, because when he was exposed as a baby his ankles were riveted together. Sorry, could not swollen foot stand for penis? The tortured Man hanging on a cross is another penis-image. “. . . my reins also instruct me in the night seasons.” (Psalm 16.7) E/ectra and Orestes. In the introduction to his translation (1905) of the Electra (413 B.C.) of Euripides, Gilbert Murray points out that we have three extant tragedies on this subject. The date of Sophocles’ Electra is not known, but it is “perhaps the latest of the three”. (It is Aristotle we thank for preserving the chronology of the Athenian drama.) For Aeschylus “The mother-murder, even if done by a god’s command, is a sin . . . to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet, since the god cannot have commanded evil, it is a duty also.” The solution offered by Aeschylus did not satisfy Euripides. “It cannot, in its actual details, satisfy anyone. To him the mother-murder — like most acts of revenge, but more than most — was a sin and a horror. Therefore it should not have been committed; and the god who enjoined it did command evil ... He is no god of light; he is only a demon of old superstition . . .” Sophocles seems to have used the story for a different purpose. The “casket scenes” are pure comedy, full of hope renewed: “from this forged death I shall rise again like a new star . . .” One new character is a sister, Chrysothemis, who has outwardly submitted, while Electra, continuing defiant, is treated as a Cinderella. The old tutor brings Clytaemnestra false news that Orestes has died in a chariot race at the Pythian games. For Electra it is the end of everything. She has lost the last shred of hope, “The hope that you would come again alive To avenge your father and save your unhappy sister.” She will not go back to her slavery in the hateful house: “Here at the door I will lie and starve to death”. Chrysothemis returns joyful from carrying offerings to her

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father’s grave; she thinks garlands and the lock of hair found there must mean Orestes has come, but Electra says he is dead and asks for her help. “Would you have me raise the dead to life again?’’ No, but help Electra herself to kill Aegisthus. Their only prospect is “ageing spinsterhood . . . Aegisthus Knows better than to let our tree bear fruit”. Chrysothemis refuses. The chorus of women of Mycenae sing: “Even the birds of the air” know how to tend their parents! Ambiguous, which parent? It may be an echo of Aristophanes’ Birds of 414 B.C. Orestes and Pylades enter carrying the small bronze urn supposedly containing the ashes of Orestes. Electra mourns over it. Orestes cannot bear her distress; he asks if the chorus are friends. “They’ll not betray you.” “Give me back the urn . . . This is no time for funerals . . . Only the dead have graves.” “He lives?” “As I live.” . . . “This is the voice I never hoped to hear again.” “. . . To think you have come home Twice in this hour, first dead and then alive! How can I help my tears? It’s all so strange — If Father were to come back now alive, I could believe that it was really he, And not a ghost.” The tutor comes out of the palace, warning them to stop the speechmaking and everlasting jubilation. Electra learns that he is the man who carried the child Orestes away to safety: “O friend, our house’s only saviour ... To think That you were here so long . . . bringing that awful news Of death to torture me, and the lovely truth Locked in your heart.” Then the tragedy moves swiftly to its traditional end, though Clytaemnestra is killed before Aegisthus. Surely the Eleusinian mysteries must have included some hopeful view of life after death, whatever its precise form, which may be expressed in Sophocles’ “tragedy”. Aeschylus, born at Eleusis, was accused of revealing the secrets of Demeter; though he was acquitted, the mysteries must have influenced his thinking, and perhaps his symbolism. Murray says that Electra means A-lektra — the Unmated. In Euripides' play she has been married off to a peasant, but he, “a

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gentle heart”, has left her a virgin out of respect for the royal blood. “O friend, my friend, as God might be my friend, . . . Life scarce can be so hard . . . When mortal heart can find Somewhere one healing touch, as my sick mind Finds thee.” She has fetched the water and done the indoor work and the weaving, to lighten his toil. He goes off to sow the corn: “Not a thousand prayers can gain A man’s bare bread, save an he work amain.” Orestes and Pylades come, pretending to be strangers with news of her brother. She asks the peasant to fetch the old man, now a shepherd, who reared her father and carried Orestes to safety. The old man arrives, bearing a lamb, a wineskin and a wallet of cheese; at his master’s grave he has seen a sacrificed ewe, a tress of hair and a footprint. He recognises Orestes by a scar. He saw Aegisthus “out on the pastures where his horses stray”, preparing a sacrifice and feast of worship to the wild­ wood nymphs. “The watchers of men’s birth? Is there a son New born to him, or doth he pray for one That cometh?” This gives Electra an idea. Orestes and his friend go to get themselves invited to join the sacrifice as passers-by, apparently by some law of hospitality. Electra sends the old man to tell Clytemnestra she is “New-mothered of a man-child”, knowing her mother will visit to see it. “Her true Man-Child, the Avenger whom they had sought to rob her of!” says Gilbert Murray’s note. A virgin birth! To make an interval there is a song by the chorus of Argive women about what Murray calls “the First Sin”, the theft of the Golden Lamb, which Euripides chooses as the origin of the blood feud. A lamb of gold was given by Pan to Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, as a sign of kingship. His brother Thyestes, father of Aegisthus, seduced the wife of Atreus; together they stole the lamb and Thyestes showed the folk “that sign of the King to be”. “Then, then the world was changed . . . And the great Sun stood deranged . . .” 120

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and henceforth travelled from East to West! ’Tis an old shepherd’s tale; we deem not that the Sun ever turned, “Or beat backward in the sky, For the wrongs of man, the cry Of his ailing tribes assembled, To do justly, ere they die! Once, men told the tale, and trembled; Fearing God . . .” Murray suggests the Lamb was the constellation Aries, the Ram. In the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. the vernal equinox was moving from the Bull into the Ram. The Bull, Marduk, was the god of Babylon. The advance of the Ram upset the calendar and coincided with a decline of Babylon. Euripides uses the story also in “Orestes” and “Iphigenia in Tauris”. In the latter it is to Iphigenia that Orestes has to prove his identity. He tells her she wove the story of the golden lamb on her loom. “Also in your fine tapestry — the sun turned back!” (Caution! Murray’s Precession date seems to be wrong). 24.1.76. Another source of sun miracles has been found in Herodotus, Penguin p. 158. The Egyptian priests told him there were 341 generations since the first king, and in the whole of that time “no god ever assumed mortal form”, but four times “the sun changed his usual position, twice rising where he normally sets, and twice setting where he normally rises . . . Egypt was quite unaffected by this . . .” Joshua “said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? (margin, Or, the upright). So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man . . .” (Joshua 10.12-14) “The upright” is not so inappropriate a title for Euripides, and Electra is a vengeance story. What is this in Ecclesiasticus 48. 22-23? “For Hezekiah did what was pleasing to the Lord ... In his (Isaiah’s) days the sun went backward . . .” Another sun-miracle. II Kings 20 and Isaiah 38: Hezekiah was sick unto death, and prayed. Isaiah was sent to 121

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say the Lord would heal him. For a sign Isaiah cried unto the Lord, and he made the shadow return ten degrees backward on the sundial of Ahaz. To return to Euripides — the body of Aegisthus is carried in. Electra makes a “wonderful speech” over it: “thou didst kill My soul within”, but “thy days Were all one pain”; men whispered “the Queen’s husband”, not “the King”. “The thing thou art, and not the things thou hast, Abideth . . .” Clytemnestra’s chariot approaches. Orestes begins to have qualms: “Flow if some fiend of Hell, Hid in God’s likeness, spake that oracle?” Electra spurs him on, but when the deed has been done they both have remorse: “She bent her knees to the earth. The knees that bent in my birth . . . And I . . . Oh, her hair, her hair . . .” (He breaks into inarticulate weeping.) A vision of Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux), twin brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen, appears in the air. Castor speaks the future. The brother and sister must part again and both be exiled from Argos. ORESTES Exiled and more am I; impure, A murderer in a stranger’s hand! CASTOR Fear not. There dwells in Pallas’ land All holiness. Till then endure. (ORESTES and ELECTRA embrace.) ORESTES Aye, closer; clasp my body well, And let thy sorrow loose, and shed, As o’er the grave of one new dead, Dead evermore, thy last farewell! (A sound of weeping.) CASTOR Alas, what would ye? For that cry Ourselves and all the sons of heaven Have pity. Yea, our peace is riven By the strange pain of these that die . . . ORESTES O faithful unto death Thou goest? ELECTRA Aye, I pass from you Soft-eyed at last. ORESTES Go, Pylades, And God go with you! Wed in peace 122

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My tall Electra, and be true. The twins depart to “the far Sicilian sea” (where Athens had sent her fleet in that year 413) to resume their work of helping ships in trouble. The graves of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra were still shown in Argos in the time of Pausanias; Electra’s marriage with Pylades was part of the fixed tradition. Was Apollo’s oracle “some fiend of Hell”? Murray’s note says the likeness to Hamlet is obvious. “The spirit that I have seen May be the devil . . .” (End of Act II). Look up Hamlet. What is this top line of the page? “With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle . . .” Turn back the page, “For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.” Scatology: when Hamlet sees the ghost but his mother does not: “Your bedded hair, like life in excrements, Starts up and stands an end.” Worms. Ugh! Mother-murder is not the theme, his father’s spirit from Purgatory was careful to warn Hamlet to do nothing against his mother. “ ‘Tis given out that, sleeping in mine orchard, A serpent stung me . . .” His brother poured poison in his ears. Here the important thing is not burial rites but receiving the sacrament: “Cut off . . . unhousel’d, . . unanel’d, . . sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head . . .” But Ophelia was buried with “maimed rites” because of the suspicion of suicide. Hamlet on the unconscious, to Horatio-Pylades: “Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends . . .” Act V. Scene II. The story of Amleth came from Historia Danica written about A.D. 1200 by Saxo Grammaticus at the suggestion of Archbishop Absalon. Amleth is in the earlier half-mythical part in which gods and foreign heroes were incorporated in Danish history; Saxo was not unique in doing that. Euripides' Electra was the last of his extant plays to be printed — in 1545, so there is no

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reason why Shakespeare should not have taken ideas more directly from the famous tragedian. Hamlet may be Orestes, but what is Or-estes? Apparently a standard answer is that he is a year-king, but isn’t that substituting one myth for another? Seem to have heard Orestes and Oedipus called prototype saviours. In the article Drama: Greek, Murray calls them the pharmakos, the old polluted year, the sin-bearer, who has to be cast out. The cycle of the seasons and the year is a basic life rhythm, worthy of celebration. The third O, Odysseus, “came back” to rescue his estate from the extravagant suitors. Oedipus did rescue Thebes from the Sphinx by guessing her riddle, like guessing Rumpelstiltskin’s name, but Orestes is still a riddle. There is no implication of incest but the brother-sister love of Orestes and Electra is strong. Does it connect with the three puzzling incidents in which Abraham (twice) and Isaac pretend their wife is their sister (Genesis 12, 20, 26)? Could we pretend that Orestes and Electra stand for sublimation, the potent magic of sex restrained where circumstances do not allow its natural outlet? Sophocles’ Phi/octetes is a satisfying play to a reader with an (excessive?) passion for honesty. There is a new symbol, a wound which will not heal: “a judgement sent from heaven, For having trespassed on the domain of Chryse, And encountered her sentinel, the secret watcher, The serpent that guards her open sanctuary.” In one place it is specifically said the wound is in the heel. Genesis 3. 14-15: “And the Lord God said unto the serpent ... I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” In this play Odysseus is a deceitful schemer, and comes from the island of Cephallenia, not the smaller nearby Ithaca. Because of the pollution of the noisome wound and his pitiful cries, Philoctetes had been marooned on the uninhabited island of Lemnos by Odysseus and the Atreid brothers. Ten years later a Trojan prisoner Helenus prophesied that Troy could only be taken with the help of Philoctetes, to whom the dying Heracles had given his invincible bow. Odysseus lands on Lemnos with

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young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, and persuades him to trick Philoctetes into sailing with them. “Let honesty go hang, only for a day . . .” During a burst of pain Philoctetes gives the bow into Neoptolemus’ hands. “My darling bow Which no man ever touched But I.” Neoptolemus finds he cannot go through with the deception. He tries in vain to persuade Philoctetes to come willingly to Troy. Finally he returns the bow and even consents to desert the Greeks and take Philoctetes home. Heracles appears above the scene: “glorious immortality Is mine, won by great labours bravely borne . . Philoctetes is to go to Troy, have his sickness cured and be the champion of the army. Now Philoct ces does consent. The relation between Sophocles and Aeschylus has something of that to Elijah of Elisha, who inherited his master’s mantle. In II Kings 1, Elijah twice called down fire from heaven to consume a captain of fifty and his fifty, because both troops summoned him too imperiously to the sick King Ahaziah, who had wanted to enquire of Baal-zebub the god of Ekron. The fifty sons of Aegyptus? The calling of Elisha was in I Kings 19. Elijah cast his mantle on Elisha who was ploughing. “Let me, I pray thee, kiss my father and my mother and then I will follow thee.” The miraculous death of Elijah is in II Kings 2. With his mantle he divided the waters of Jordan, so that he and Elisha went over on dry ground. “Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me . . . there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire . . . and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Elisha took up the fallen mantle; at the bank of Jordan he said: “Where is the Lord God of Elijah?” and the waters parted again. At Bethel children mocked him: “Go up, thou bald head ...” He cursed them in the name of the Lord and two she-bears came out of the wood and tore 42 children. Aristophanes is the one who was supposed to be bald. Elijah was described as “an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins.” (II Kings 1.8) “And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins . . .” in Matthew 3.4; or in Mark 1.6 John the Baptist had 125

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“a girdle of a skin about his loins”. Tiresome disappearance of a yellow belt forces attention to this leathern girdle. Could it be for the leather phallus worn by the actors in the Old Comedy? In Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles does present a unique death. Its nature is left mysterious, though there is sexual symbolism: thickly wooded grotto, overgrown sacred precinct, natural rock­ seat of the Holy Ones. Oedipus, old and blind, has been exiled from Thebes. Led by Antigone he reaches Colonus, Sophocles’ own birthplace, near Athens. “My strength has been in suffering . . . I am a holy man, and by holy ordinance My presence here is to bring this people blessing”, he pleads, asking the chorus of elders for asylum. “I can see a woman coming this way. Riding on a colt of Etna; but her face is shaded By a broad Thessalian hat . . . It is! It is! . . My own Ismene!” says Antigone. Sister Ismene came, “alone With the only faithful servant that 1 have” (the colt apparently), to bring news of the quarrel of Eteocles and Polynices. As with Philoctetes, those who rejected Oedipus have now learned from the oracle that he is necessary for their success. “Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be?” Creon comes to persuade Oedipus, who refuses. “1 never knew an honest man Subtle in argument.” Creon shows his true colours by forcibly carrying off the daughters, who are rescued by Theseus. Thunder gives the sign to Oedipus that his hour is near. He sends for Theseus, having promised him a blessing. “Soon I shall take you, None guiding me, to the place where I must die; And no one else must know it . . . That it may be for you henceforth for ever A source of strength greater than many thousands Of yeoman shields or allied spears . . . And when your life is drawing to its end, Disclose it to one alone, your chosen heir, And he to his, and so for ever and ever . The hand of God directs me ... Do not touch me.” Oedipus leads the way, while the Chorus pray: 126

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“Grant to our friend a passing with no pain, No grief, to the dark Stygian home . . . Surely a just God’s hand Will raise him up again.” After a pause a messenger returns: “He went on as far as the brink of the Chasm, where the Brazen Staircase plunges into the roots of the earth . . . There he stood, among those hallowed objects — the Basin, the Rock of Thoricus, the Hollow Pear-tree, the Stone Tomb . . . suddenly a Voice called him, a terrifying voice . . . ‘Oedipus ... It is time: you stay too long.’ . . . Oedipus . . . said: ‘. . . Only Theseus is permitted to remain and see the rest.’. . . We turned and looked back. Oedipus was nowhere to be seen . . . “Certain it is that he was taken without a pang ... a passing more wonderful than that of any other man. What I have said will seem, perhaps, like some wild dream of fancy, beyond belief. If so, then you must disbelieve it.” The daughters return, weeping. Antigone: “I must not know Where they have laid his head.” . . . Ismene: “He had to die alone, and has no tomb.” In a note E. F. Watling says that both in this play and in Antigone, Ismene is “the ‘Martha’ of the pair — the more practical but less sensitive.” Oho, did Sophocles’ sisters help to suggest the creation of those favourites Martha and Mary, and the home at Beth-Any (Beth means house). Don’t know what Antigone means, that “sister” who “buries”. There is gonad from gone, generation. Ismenus is the name of a spring and stream at Thebes. In Mark 14 and Matthew 26, in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, an unnamed woman poured precious ointment on the head of Jesus. The disciples murmured about waste and the poor, but Jesus said: “she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” In Luke 7 in the house of a Pharisee, Simon, a woman who was a sinner anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped them with her hair. Jesus said: “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much . . .” In Luke 10, immediately after the good Samaritan, we first meet Martha and Mary. In Martha’s house in “a certain village” her sister Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and heard his word. Martha was cumbered about much serving and asked that Mary be bidden to 127

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help. In John 11 there is the raising of Lazarus, brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany, and in chapter 12 they made him supper and Martha served. Mary anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped them with her hair. It was Judas who complained that the money could have been given to the poor. Simon the leper or Pharisee — Simon Magus? His house the contemplative Therapeutae? Mary ol Bethany — Katharine? Dictionary says a colt is a young horse, except in the Bible where it is a young ass or camel. Mark 11 and Luke 19 describe how near Bethphage and Bethany Jesus sent two disciples to fetch a colt on which he made the entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday). In Matthew 21 it is in fulfilment of a prophecy (in Zechariah). “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.” What of the Old Testament sisters Leah and Rachel? Just one point suggests itself. Gen. 29. 17: “Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured.” It sounds like Euripides’ Electra, “Soft-eyed at last”, cleansed of hatred. Leah means cow. In his fantasies Jung met an old man and a young blind girl, with a black serpent; they gave their names as Elijah and Salome: “. . . such couples are to be found in many mythic tales.” Simon Magus and his Helen are one example. They can be called Logos and Eros, but this is “excessively intellectual”. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 206.) Are Lear and Cordelia an image similar to Oedipus and Antigone? Wrong. When the old King is turned out in the storm it is the Fool who accompanies him. It is Gloucester who is blinded. He asks the madman, really his banished son Edgar, to lead him to the cliff of Dover, that he may end his life. “Poor Tom” pretends they are labouring uphill, then describes the dizzy height: “The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles . . .” When the old man has fallen on his face, Edgar pretends to be someone else picking him up, miraculously alive, at the bottom, and that he saw some fiend beside him at the top of the cliff. What a strange version of the precipice and temptation motif! In Hamlet Horatio warns against following the ghost: 128

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“What if it tempt you ... to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o’er his base into the sea . . .” The passages call up Josephus’ description of Herod’s temple in Antiquities XV.XI.5. The royal cloister on the south side “deserves to be mentioned better than any other under the sun; for while the valley was very deep, and its bottom could not be seen, if you looked from above into the depth, this further vastly high elevation of the cloister stood upon that height, insomuch that if anyone looked down from the top of the battlements, or down both these altitudes, he would be giddy, while his sight could not reach to such an immense depth.” It seemed exaggerated enough to qualify as an intentional inexactitude confirming that Stephen’s death was by a fall. It was transferred to the battlements of Leontopolis, modelled on those of Jerusalem, because of the stress laid by Josephus on this temple of Oniah, and because of all the lions, though now one has found additional (or other) reasons for the importance of Leontopolis and Egyptian Jewry. Perhaps it is necessary to explain the possible date of Stephen’s death, 14th April A.D. 51, given in Flying Saucer, p. 156. Josephus says the Passover tumult because a soldier insultingly let down his breeches, and the robbing of Stephanus, a servant of Caesar, as he journeyed, were under Cumanus. The article “Jews” dates the procuratorship of Ventidius Cumanus A.D. 48-52. In “Bible: N.T. Chronology”, discussing the date of the crucifixion (for which he arrives at March 18th, A.D. 29, as probable) Cuthbert H. Turner reports that according to Clement of Alexandria, Basilidian Gnostics (Egyptian) gave alternative dates for it: Phamenoth 25, Pharmuthi 25. Pharmuthi 19; that is, by the fixed Alexandrian calendar of 26 B.C., March 21, April 20, April 14. The idea that Stephen became a victim of the wind, when he went out on the battlements to watch for a predicted eclipse of the moon, admittedly arose by analogy with the death of the “pilot” described at the start of the Flying Saucer fable (he was found in a cruciform position but with one leg tucked under) but once the idea had arisen rather frequent references to falls, eclipses (e.g. in Lear Act I, Scene II), and crowns (stephanoi) were noticed.

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The theory is that Stephen’s eclipse was in the same Saros series as the one in Josephus on March 13, 4 B.C., shortly before Herod’s death. The Saros interval is 18 years 11 days, or 10 days if February 29 occurs five times. There is also a fraction, apparently 0.46 days. This makes 3 Saroses equal 54 years and 32 or 33 days according to the number of leap years; added to March 13, 4 B.C., it makes 14 or 15 April, A.D. 51 possible eclipse dates. So it could agree with the Pharmuthi 19 — April 14 Basilidian date. Admittedly the calculation is amateur, and even originally arrived at the rounder figure A.D. 50, owing to confusion; there is no year 0. If the death of Stephen was a central event in the arising of Christianity, to have it approximately dated shows where to look further. Josephus was then a boy of around fourteen. The name Ventidius does not seem to be in Josephus, but is in Tacitus; it would be so easy to make it mean “wind of God”, as one wants Pilate to mean hairy. An eclipse of the full moon of 29 January 1953 was followed by the disastrous North Sea floods next night, due to combination of spring tides and northerly gales; the connection is not superstitious since eclipse positions of sun and moon are also spring-tide positions. Plutarch’s “Decline of the Oracles”, set in or shortly before 83-84 A.D., ends with “the case of the Pythian prophetess who died not so long ago” (p. 95 in Penguin selection from the Moral Essays). This was taken as dating the death of Katharine, though in the essay the priestess died because she went down into the oracular chamber when the omens were unfavourable. Zagazig in the eastern Nile delta (see p. 44 above) was the reason for connecting Stephen with Gurdjieff s zigzag idiot, who has five Fridays a week (Good Fridays). Checking 22.11.1979: 29 January is Mother’s birthday.

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OVEMBER 1975. Have never been able to face the Iliad because it must be full of battles, a story for boys. Search produces only the Odyssey, a copy left behind by Neville Bewley, a young would-be poet who was at Coombe during his last illness. It is Penguin Classic Number One, 1946, translated by E. V. Rieu, first editor of the series. He discusses Homer’s recurrent epithets such as “noisy” dogs. Look them up. Book XIV, p. 222: Odysseus, landed on Ithaca by the Phaeacians, has been disguised by Athene as a beggar. He approaches the hut of the swineherd, a faithful steward. “The noisy dogs suddenly caught sight of Odysseus and flew at him, barking loudly. He had the presence of mind to sit down and drop his staff; yet he would have come to grief then and there, at his own farm, if the swineherd had not intervened ... he dashed through the gateway, shouted at the dogs and sent them flying with a shower of stones.” Oh dear, is this the real reason for the dogs incident in Huckleberry Finn, claimed. Saucer p. 149, as a literary correspondence with Gurdjieffs chapter Pogossian? G. and Pogossian remained sitting, surrounded by dogs, “for about three hours.” The trail is as endless as the wanderings of Odysseus. It must mean they are to be studied. At the start of his introduction Rieu says: “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have from time to time afforded a first class battleground for scholars. In the nineteenth century in particular, German critics were at endless pains to show, not only that the two works are not the product of a single brain, but that each is a piece of intricate and rather ill-sewn patch work. In this process Homer disappeared. By now he has been firmly re-established on his throne . . .” It sounds like higher criticism of the Bible. But how old are they? Turn to Gilbert Murray’s long article on Homer. Some of the material is very old. There are Minoan

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rings, whose “genuineness is avouched by Sir Arthur Evans” (p. 695a), engraved with scenes of a man clinging under the body of a ram, like Odysseus; a prince slaying a king in a narrow defile, like Oedipus; a creature like Scylla with many heads attacking a ship; a prince like Orestes killing two guilty lovers. The names Atreus, Paris, Helene, Odysseus or Olytteus do not seem to be Greek words; Achilleus, Agamemnon, Menelaus look like non-Greek words twisted to appear Greek. (However, in book XIX Odysseus is given an etymology — victim of enmity — when the child was named by his mother’s father Autolycus, who had made many enemies.) “Herodotus considers that Homer and Hesiod made the Greek pantheon ‘not more than 400 years before me’, i.e. about 830.” The first solid fact in the history of the Iliad and Odyssey is that they were recited by teams of rhapsodes (stitchers of songs) at the four-yearly Panathenaic festival. “The custom continued at least to the times of the author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Hipparchus, and seems to have started with the foundation or refoundation of the Panathenaea by Peisistratus”, tyrant of Athens off and on from 560 to 527 B.C. This text did not maintain itself. Quotations made in the fourth and third centuries, and papyri earlier than 150 B.C. show that current texts differed considerably from one another and from our vulgate. It was about 150 B.C. that Aristarchus of Samothrace, then head of the Alexandrian library, published his editions, which are approximately the present vulgate text. “It is still disputed how far he created that text, and whether it is really some old text — that of Peisistratus, or even of Homer himself — re-established by the great critic out of the mss. which he collected.” Discussing the possibility that different sources have been combined, Murray cites insults to Odysseus both by Melanthios son of Dolios and by the maidservant Melantho, daughter of Dolios. To someone looking for Gurdjieffan “intentional inexactitudes” it seems the awkwardness may be deliberate. Moreover in the translation the goatherd’s name is sometimes Melantheus and sometimes Melanthius. An amateur wants to translate it “black god”, perhaps Dionysos, horned god of Tragedy (goat-song) and the drama. There seems also to be

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deliberate confusion between Eurynome the housekeeper and Eurycleia, the old nurse who recognises Odysseus by a scar seen when she washes his feet. It is a very liquid story. Besides all the seafaring and shipwreck, and much preparing of mellow wine in mixing bowls, Odysseus often weeps. Telemachus is bathed and rubbed with olive oil by Nestor’s daughter, when Athene takes him to visit Pylos seeking news of his father. Odysseus is bathed by one of Circe’s maids, after which another pours water from a golden ewer into a silver basin so that he can rinse his hands. Nausicaa’s famous riverside washing day wakes the wrecked Odysseus from his bed of leaves. “So the gallant Odysseus crept out from under the bushes, after breaking off with his great hand a leafy bough from the thicket to conceal his naked manhood.” “. . . and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” (Genesis 3.7.) There is something Eden-like about the king’s four-acre orchard, watered by two springs with fruit always in season. It is suggested these parallels may not be borrowing so much as collusion by Aristobulus and Aristarchus, beavering away in the library at their archaic Hebrew and archaic Greek. January 1977. Came on “one Aristarchus, a Macedonian of Thessalonica, being with us”, in Acts 27.2. Hoped Thessalonica might be near Samothrace. Not really. But Samothrace, a mountainous island, is in the Iliad, XIII. 12, where “the poet represents Poseidon using its summit to survey the plain of Troy.” The archaic fertility worship of the Cabeiri survived in the Samothracian mysteries. The Phaeacians, with their remarkable and ill-rewarded generosity, could be a contribution by Aristarchus to the Odysseus story. Their city with its two harbours and its narrow causeway sounds like the description of Alexandria. Nausicaa’s mother is Queen Arete; doesn’t it mean Virtue? The fifty-two oarsmen of the Phaeacian ship appear to be a deliberate change from the traditional fifty (Bk. VIII, p. 124). There is much that reminds one of the tragedians, but which was first? What is the relation of those indecent baths to the climax of the Agamemnon? “The palace doors open, revealing Clytemnestra. At her feet Agamemnon lies dead, in a silver bath

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and wrapped in a voluminous purple robe. On his body lies Cassandra, also dead.” “Yes, this is my work, and I claim it” says the queen. In the Odyssey it is said more than once that Aegisthus killed Agamemnon. On leaving Pylos Telemachus drives to Sparta in a chariot with Peisistratus, son of Nestor and reputed ancestor of the tyrant Peisistratus. At Sparta Menelaus tells of his adventure with Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, on the island of Pharos, a day’s sail out off the mouth of the Nile. (White Goddess p. 276 explains away this apparent absurdity.) Menelaus was advised by Eidothee, daughter of Proteus. After transforming himself into various animals, running water and a tree, the Old Man was forced to answer questions. Odysseus was a prisoner of the nymph Calypso. Agamemnon's landing was observed by a spy posted by Aegisthus, who had time to hide twenty soldiers and prepare a banquet at which Agamemnon and all his followers were killed. Wait! All those names in Eury . . . besides Eurycleia and Eurynome, there are Prince Eurymachus, a leading suitor, Euryalus and Eurylochus, who play small roles, and mentions of Eurynomus, Eurydice, Eurytus, Eurytion the centaur, even Eurymedusa, Nausicaa’s chambermaid. Chambers dictionary yields Euripus, the narrow sea with strong currents between Boeotia and the island of Euboea and similar seas; Euros — south east wind, and eurys — wide, broad. Supposing all those names were to suggest Euripides? Perhaps it is safe to take our Odyssey as later than the tragedians. (Not very safe.) Odysseus fumigating the hall with burning sulphur after his carnage sounds like an anachronism. Gilbert Murray tells us that Helen was, in historical times, the Spartan marriage goddess and must go through the marriage ceremony of carrying-off. So there are stories of the carrying-off of Helen by several different men. There is also ritual (does he mean sexual?) significance in her rescue by her twin brothers the Dioscuri, or by the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus. Sometimes the story explains that it was not the true goddess but only her eidolon or image which was stolen. Euripides used this version for his Helen, already quoted p. 103 above. Paris carried to Troy a living image compounded by Hera

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out of the ether, so the whole war was fought for nothing. Hermes bore the real Helen, wrapped in a cloud, to the palace on Pharos of the honourable Proteus, king of Egypt, where her chastity could be preserved. When the play begins, Proteus is dead and his son by a sea nymph is pressing Helen to marry him; she has taken sanctuary in the old king’s tomb. The shipwrecked Menelaus appears, dressed in nothing but a rag of sailcloth, having left his crew to guard the phantom wife in a cave — and there is a good comedy situation. It may be this play which helped the evolution of Eve, sailcloth to fig leaves from Odysseus’ leafy bough. “Look, what a millstone life has hung round my neck!” says Helen. “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” (Mark 9.42) The millstone had been interpreted as the turning wheel of the starry heavens, the weight of cosmic responsibility. Simon was “cast into the sea”, according to our theories. 29 June 1976. Re-reading discovers a washing day in Helen, at the first entry of the chorus: “1 was at work, spreading Purple clothes on the young reeds to dry . . . When 1 heard my lady’s voice, a pitiful cry . . .” The joy of Helen and Menelaus over their reunion will be short-lived if the king catches them, so they make a suicide pact. It seems prophetic of the suicide pact between Antony and Cleopatra, if Plutarch’s tale be true. Plutarch describes Cleopatra’s refuge tower as a “monument”. Shakespeare uses the same word. There seemed something odd about it. Does it connect with the seashore tomb of Proteus, Helen’s sanctuary in this play? In the encyclopaedia Gilbert Murray says that Euripides “held the stage for 600 years”, so the play was probably well known in Plutarch’s day. Maybe Plutarch did think Euripides’ Helen was linked with Genesis. Helen and Menelaus must persuade Theonoe, Proteus’s prophetess daughter, not to give them away. Helen was left in trust with Proteus to keep safe for Menelaus. Theonoe agrees to remain silent. “I love myself; 1 am anxious not to cloud my father’s good name; while to my brother I must refuse any

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service that would turn to his dishonour . . . The mind of one departed may not have life; but it has become one with immortal spirit, and therefore has immortal understanding.” Theonoe — thought of God? There is a Nightingale Ode in this play, which is probably later than Aristophanes’ nightingale chorus. The “enmity” of those two men was fruitful for both. Aristophanes’ skit on Euripides in The Poet and The Women or Thesmophoriazusae can now be appreciated. Euripides’ Helen may have been written for such a women’s festival, but it was first publicly produced in 412 B.C., not long after the Sicilian disaster: “Through Hellas too the same river of weeping runs . . .” From the nightingale ode: “. . . ten thousand Hellenes dwell with death, Leaving heart-broken wives to mourn shorn-headed In empty chambers.” “You who in earnest ignorance Would check the deeds of lawless men, And in the clash of spear on spear Gain honour — you are all stark mad! If men, to settle each dispute. Must needs compete in bloodshed, when Shall violence vanish, hate be soothed, Or men and cities live in peace?” “. . . reasonable words could have solved the quarrel for Helen.” “You who with learned patience plod Remotest realms of toilsome thought, Can you by searching find out God, Or bound his nature?” But aggressors won’t listen to reason, or else they use falsified words. Helen appears in black with her hair cut short. She tells the king she will now marry him, for she has news of the drowning of Menelaus; but first may she have a ship to carry out rites at sea for the drowned? Another song, about Persephone and the Great Mother, ends: “She pardons none who taste the forbidden fruit.” Striking are the characters of two slaves. Helen had said that in a country like Egypt “all are slaves except one man” (the

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king). The old Greek remembers carrying a torch at Helen’s wedding. “To a slave his master’s affairs mean a great deal; he shares in joy and sorrow alike; if not, he’s no true man. I’m a slave by birth, I know; but there are slaves who are noble, who have the mind of a free man, if not the name: I want to count as one of them.”

The Egyptian who brings the king news of the ship’s escape blocks revenge against Theonoe. “Kill me! But you shall not kill your sister if I can prevent it. The noblest thing a slave can do is to die for his master.” The Immortal Twins, Helen’s brothers, immediately appear above the palace door; the king yields: “I renounce my bitterness of heart for my lost bride.” The brothers have foretold that when Helen’s course is run, she will rise divine and receive worship with them. Menelaus will reach the Isles of the Blest: “For the noble and brave are not Hated by the gods; but they meet more trouble than common men.” There are sentences in the Odyssey with Biblical echoes. In Book XI Odysseus visits the dead; when his mother has drunk the blood of the sacrifice she is able to speak to him and asks how he came, “For between you and us flow the wide waters of the Rivers of Fear . . .” (p. 179) Luke 16.26: “between us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . .” Later Odysseus speaks with Achilles: “For you, Achilles, Death should have lost his sting.” (p. 189.) “O death, where is thy sting?” is in I Cor. 15.55. In Book XIV, p. 223, the swineherd says: “For our fatted hogs are eaten up by the Suitors, who have no fear of the wrath to come ...” Again in Book XVI, p. 260, of the Suitors: “their day of judgment is at hand.”

More interesting is the story of how Odysseus was originally given his famous bow by Iphitus, in Book XXL Some Messenians had stolen 300 sheep from Ithaca, shepherds and all. The young Odysseus was sent to recover them and made friends with Iphitus, who was searching for a dozen lost mares with the sturdy little mules that they had foaled. Odysseus and Iphitus exchanged gifts. Iphitus was subsequently murdered by Heracles, who took the mares. The story of Iphitus’ murder by Heracles 137

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and the straying horses is told differently in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis. Again one feels deliberate variations are introduced. In I Samuel 9 Saul set out to seek his father’s lost asses and was anointed by Samuel as the future king. Odysseus consulted the dead prophet Teiresias. In I Samuel 28 Saul asks the woman with a familiar spirit to call up the dead Samuel. “God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do.’’ But he learns only of the Philistines’ coming victory: “and tomorrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me . . .” It may be argued presently that Samuel and Kings are later than Aristobulus, so Saul’s asses and necromancy can’t be collusion. Penelope is cautious. When she interviews the “beggar” for news and weeps for the husband who is sitting at her side, she tells a dream about her geese being slaughtered by an eagle. Though the eagle spoke with her husband’s voice, she will not trust the dream, for these insubstantial visions reach us through two gates; “one is of horn and the other of ivory. Those that come through the ivory gate cheat us with empty promises that never see fulfilment; while those that issue from the gate of burnished horn inform the dreamer what will really happen.” (Book XIX) For one useful dream such as those reported in this writing there have naturally been many which faded without leaving a trace. There were also some seemingly important which turned out apparently just to relate to some trivial happening next day. One way “their” plan for the next day is put into Time could be during the night before. Penelope refuses to be convinced that the token of the scar means the stranger is really her husband, absent nineteen years. First he must be tested by the secret of their bed, immovable because he built it himself on to the trunk of an olive tree still rooted in the ground. As we have repeatedly been told that Penelope’s chamber is “upper”, and “upstairs”, it would seem the author wishes to give special prominence to this symbol of the bed. When they finally go to it together, Athene prolongs the night and holds back the dawn; but the reunion is still to be brief for Odysseus has to set out on his travels again to appease 138

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Poseidon, as he had been instructed to do by the soul of Teiresias. Afterthought: one is surprised to read twice of beds for visitors being made up in a portico with rugs and sheets; and that Laertes, in his grief for his missing son Odysseus, has given up sleeping in laundered sheets and blankets on a proper bed. Is it an anachronism? Does it connect with Gurdjieffs “luxury of lying on a clean sheet and of rubbing myself at night with eau de Cologne” with his “original library table” “formed of books, tied together with a string” at his head? (RM p. 138: water from the column, colonne). In the Odyssey the after-bath frictions are with olive oil. 3 November 1976. How did this idea arise at a too-early breakfast? Penelope as the soul, surrounded by no-good suitors — say desires — weaving and unweaving the web of thoughts and memories, is reserved for her true Lord. But when Odysseus comes disguised as a beggar she does not recognise him.

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HY PUT THOSE two together? Only because they are both attributed to about the 8th century B.C., and the names are vaguely similar. The Penguin Hesiod was out of print so the Loeb translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, first published 1914 and twelve times reprinted, was used. Works and Days has an unusual motive; Hesiod is preaching to his brother Perses, who cheated him of the greater share of his inheritance by “swelling the glory of our bribe-swallowing lords” at the court-house. Greek love of litigation already! Then like the prodigal son he wasted his share and came begging to his brother. “Little concern has he with quarrels and courts who has not a year’s victuals laid up betimes, even that which the earth bears, Demeter’s grain.” (p. 5.) In his praise of Dike, justice or right, Hesiod is a genuine ancestor of Aeschylus and Socrates. “For whoever knows the right and is ready to speak it, far-seeing Zeus gives him prosperity; but whoever deliberately lies in his witness . . . and sins beyond repair, that man’s generation is left obscure thereafter . . . Badness can be got easily and in shoals: the road to her is smooth and she lives very near us. But between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows; long and steep is the path that leads to her, and it is rough at the first..." (p. 25.) The strait and narrow way has a long history, e.g. Matthew 7. 13-14. “He does mischief to himself who does mischief to another, and evil planned harms the plotter most.” (p. 23.) A fragment from another poem. The Great Works, gives the saying of Rhadamanthys: “If a man sow evil, he shall reap evil increase . . .” (p. 75; see Galations 6.7.) “. . . work, high-born Perses, that Hunger may hate you . . .” (p. 25.) “Work is no disgrace; it is idleness which is a disgrace.” (p. 27.) “While it is yet midsummer command your slaves: 'It will not always be summer, build barns.’ ” (p. 41.) “Do not put your

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work off till tomorrow and the day after . . .” (p. 33.) “Never cross the sweet-flowing water of ever-rolling rivers afoot until you have prayed, gazing into the soft flood, and washed your hands in the clear, lovely water. Whoever crosses a river with hands unwashed of wickedness, the gods are angry with him and bring trouble upon him afterwards.” (p. 57.) “Do not stand upright facing the sun when you make water, but remember to do this when he has set and towards his rising.” (p. 57.) “Never make water in the mouths of rivers which flow to the sea, nor yet in springs; but be careful to avoid this.” (p. 59.) The end of the poem is about days of the month. “Sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother.” There is no week; the month is divided into three, waxing moon, mid-month, waning, but they seem to overlap. The 13th of the waxing month is bad for sowing, good for setting out plants. The 6th of the midmonth is unfavourable for plants but good for the birth of males; it is bad for the birth of girls or for their marriage. “The ninth of the midmonth improves towards evening. . .” “On the great 20th. in full day, a wise man should be born.” Such ideas should encourage an interest in counting. His months do not seem to have names. He does not say “Sow in March or April,” but that the voice of the crane from the clouds gives the signal for ploughing (mid November, p. 37). “When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising, begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set.” (p. 31.) That is. when they are rising (May), or setting (November), just before dawn? We still use the same names for the constellations. One month is named. “Avoid the month Lenaeon,” JanuaryFebruary. The description of winter follows (p. 41), but some critics consider this passage is later (encyclopaedia). Hesiod has an Eve — Pandora. Zeus was angry because Prometheus had stolen fire: “a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But 1 will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.” (p. 7.) He bade Hephaestus mould clay in the likeness of a modest maid; the goddesses clothed her and crowned her with spring flowers; Hermes the guide put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature, and led her to Epimetheus, the scatter-brained brother of Prometheus, as 142

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a gift. The woman took the lid off her jar and scattered ills, hard toil and heavy sicknesses among men: only Hope remained in the jar. Diseases come silently, “So there is no way to escape the will of zeus.” The other myth in Works and Days is of the five ages. The golden first race of mortals lived free from toil and ageless, when Cronos reigned. When they died as if overcome with sleep, they became “pure spirits dwelling on the earth . . . kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist, and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth . . .” (p. 11.) Then the Olympians made a second generation of silver, “less noble by far”; they became blessed spirits of the underworld. After them Zeus the Father made a brazen, bronze-using race (“there was no black iron”), lovers of war, who destroyed themselves leaving no name. The fourth generation was nobler, heroes and demi-gods; some perished at seven-gated Thebe and some at Troy, others dwell in the islands of the blessed under Cronos. (The metals may be remotely related to Nebuchadnezzar’s vision in Daniel 2.) “Thereafter, would that 1 were not among the men of the fifth generation . . . For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day and from perishing by night . . . But. notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils.” It seems the race will degenerate till they are born grey-haired. Ageing quickly, men will dishonour their parents, not knowing the fear of the gods. “The father will not agree with his children... nor comrade with comrade; nor will brother be dear to brother as aforetime . . . might shall be their right: and one man will sack another man’s city. There will be no favour for the man who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil-doer and his violent dealing . . . Envy, foul-mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all.” Aidos and Nemesis, sweet 1 forms in white robes, will forsake mankind. The note calls them shame over wrong-doing, and righteous indignation; but does not Nemesis include retribution, like Karma? In Larousse Mythology Nemesis is divine anger, which makes more sense if hardly a “sweet form”.

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“But you, Perses, listen to right and do not foster violence; for violence is bad for a poor man . . . The better path is to go by on the other side towards justice; for Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race . . . they who give straight judgements to strangers and to the men of the land, and go not aside from what is just, their city flourishes and the people prosper in it . . . But for those who practise violence and cruel deeds far-seeing Zeus, the son of Cronos, ordains a punishment. Often even a whole city suffers for a bad man who sins . . .” (pp. 19-21.) It is proverbial, peasant wisdom, still a valid foundation, like Aesop. Hesiod’s Hawk and Nightingale is the “earliest known fable in Greek literature” (encyclopaedia). It is bitter about violence. “And now I will tell a fable for princes who themselves understand . . . ‘One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger . . .’ ” (p. 19.) Or are powerful princes to understand that they themselves cannot escape the Lord of Death? Not sure this quarrel of brothers at the start of Greek literature has not contributed to the quarrel of Cain and Abel. Tradition says that Hesiod was murdered, though not by his brother. It is a bit like Orpheus and other victims. 18th November 1975. In the same volume with Works and Days, the Theogony and various fragments are the Homeric Hymns. These are enjoyable: Aphrodite’s love for Anchises leading to the birth of Aeneas; Demeter, who in her sorrow and anger for the loss of Persephone would not let any seed sprout, causing famine; the adventures of new-born Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle; how Apollo founded Delphi, taking the form of a dolphin to lead a shipload of priests from Crete to serve the oracle at his new temple; and Dionysus’s miracles on the pirate­ ship. But one feels doubtful about their antiquity; they are assigned to the 7th century B.C. or earlier, except “Hermes” to the early 6th century because of its burlesque character. “Conceivably the collection was arranged in the Alexandrine period.” (Introduction p. xxxiv.) 144

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Breakfast thought: could some have been written by Pindar, one Greek lyric poet one has heard of? There was a Major Pinder in the Gurdjieff Odyssey. Pindar is dated c. 522-443 B.C. so he is too late to be the arranger of the Peisistratus Homer. Sir Richard Jebb’s article says rather pointedly, of the birthdate 522: “He would thus be some 34 years younger than Simonides of Ceos.” Pindar belonged to the Theban nobility, but did study “music” in Athens and was esteemed there as well as by the priests at Delphi. He visited the court of Hiero at Syracuse, and of Theron, despot of Acragas. He “stands midway between Homeric epos and Athenian drama . . .” “Pindar has more of the Homeric spirit than any Greek lyric poet known to us.” Simonides of Ceos, c. 556-469 B.C., went to live at Athens at the court of Hipparchus, the patron of literature, son of Peisistratus. After the murder of Hipparchus in 514 Simonides went to Thessaly, returned to Athens after the battle of Marathon, then was invited to Sicily by Hieron, at whose court he spent the rest of his life. “For his poems he could command almost any price.” Aristophanes and others accuse him of avarice. Only short elegies, epigrams and lyric fragments remain to support his reputation. They are praised for strength, simplicity, mastery of form, pathos and feeling, combined with a genial worldliness, e.g. “the race of fools is infinite.” He is evidently a candidate for the authorship of the Peisistratid recension of the Iliad and Odyssey. Did Jebb (18411905) lay that trail deliberately? The Simonides article, being shorter than Pindar, is unsigned, but may be included in the et cetera of Jebb’s list. Simonides “was also the inventor of a system of mnemonics (Quintilian XI.II. 11).” Quintilian relates the following “wellknown story” (also in Cicero): Simonides wrote an ode in honour of a boxer’s victory, with a digression praising Castor and Pollux, so he was told to claim part of the fee from them. And the gods paid. He was called out from the celebration banquet to speak to two horsemen. No one was to be seen but at that moment the banqueting hall fell in, wreaking such havoc that the dead were unrecognisable. Simonides was able to identify them because he could remember the order in which the guests had been sitting.

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The story calls up a picture in Judges 16. When the Philistines were merry they sent to the prison house for the blinded Samson to make them sport. He took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might and the house fell upon them; so he slew more at his death than in his life. There were about 3,000 on the roof (see zeroes p. 22 above). Under Samson the encyclopaedia says: “It has often been noted that there are points of resemblance between the story of Samson and the myths of Gilgamesh, Melkart and Hercules . . . The story contains many features drawn from solar mythology.” From Gilgamesh to Simonides is a far cry. In Job 1: “Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house . . . there came a great wind . . . and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men . . .” If Simonides was “Homer” it was worth copying the banquet incident. 20th November 1975. After that the 19th had to be bad — rainy and heavy. (Was the 20th Hesiod’s own birthday number?) Tried letter writing, ran out of steam, so read some of Gurdjieffs Third Series, printed at last for private distribution. Had not noticed before that the jacket gives his date of birth as December 28th, 1877 — making him only 2 years older than Stalin, born December 21st, 1879. It does not say whether it is by the Russian or the Western calendar. December 28th (1969) is the birthday of the only boy in the new generation of our family among 8 great­ nieces, the last born on January 13th (1975) hitherto celebrated as Mr. Gurdjieffs birthday, Russian New Year’s Day by the old calendar. Last March it was reluctantly seen that some attempt must be made to read the Hebrew prophets. Tried Isaiah, with the encyclopaedia commentary by the Rev. George Herbert Box to help attention. Astonishingly there is some one called Isaeus, an Attic orator about 420-350 B.C., a teacher of Demosthenes. Eleven speeches have survived. The Rev. Box happily distributes different passages to dates from the first Isaiah (active 738 to at least 701 B.C.) onwards. Of the “remarkable verses” 16-25 of chapter 19, he says: “Note the broad universalistic spirit of the passage which can hardly belong 146

IF SIMONIDES WAS “HOMER" . . .

to an earlier time than the Greek period.” Egypt and Assyria are to be saved as well as Israel. “In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt . . . and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one . . .” Chapters 24-27 are about divine judgement, with the description interrupted by songs. “The date of this section is hard to determine . . . probably . . . 350-330 B.C. A number of distinguished scholars, however, date these compositions late in the Maccabean period, but on insecure grounds.” Isaiah 25.8: “He will swallow up death in victory . . .” is quoted I Cor. 15.54, see p. 137 above. The poetical meditation in Isaiah 26. 1-19 “contains perhaps the first clear allusion to the doctrine of the resurrection”: “We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind . . . Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust . . . the earth shall cast out the dead. Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself. . . until the indignation be overpast.” Clear! (26. 18-20.) This in 28. 20-21 could have been written yesterday: “For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it. For the Lord shall rise up as in mount Perazim . . . that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.” 29. 1-4: “Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! . . and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground . . .” The margin says “O Ariel, that is, the lion of God.” Is that where Shakespeare got the name? Lions can suggest Leontopolis. 30. 22: “Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images ... thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth ...” A new heresy, could the writer be a woman? Even a Penelope to Aristobulus’s Odysseus? Or a relationship with all the heartache of the Leah-Jacob-Rachel triangle? Modiktheo, says head, the planet where beings are born from 3 parents, A & E p. 771. Mot = word, spoken or dictated by God? We do not have a name for such a prophetess. Could it be Mary, the name whose prominence is rather unexplained, Mariamne, Miriam the prophetess, sister of Moses and Aaron, in Exodus 15.20,

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Numbers 12.1, 20.1 and 26.59? (P.S. 18.8.77. This was a false trail.) 21st-22nd November 1975. Bright sun caused book dusting. Took down “Greek Studies” by Walter Pater, Macmillan 1904. Read some without apparent profit but it focused attention on Demeter. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter survived in a single manuscript found in 1780 in the Imperial library at Moscow. Demeter learned from the sun, watchman of gods and men, that Zeus himself had given her lost daughter to his brother Aidoneus (Pluto, Hades) to be his wife. In grief and anger she avoided Olympus and wandered among men. One day, in the form of a woman too old for childbearing, she sat by the Maiden Well and was invited to their home by the daughters of the Lord of Eleusis, as nurse for their late-born brother. She refused wine, but asked for a drink of meal and water and mint. “So the great queen Deo received it to observe the sacrament . . .” The Loeb footnote says: “An act of communion — the drinking of the potion here described — was one of the most important pieces of ritual in the Eleusinian mysteries, as commemorating the sorrows of the goddess.” Demeter nursed the boy, who grew wonderfully fast, but his mother spied and saw Demeter hiding him in the heart of the fire at night (to make him immortal). Naturally the mother was horrified. Demeter took on her true form and bade them build her a temple and celebrate rites she would teach them. To avert famine, because Demeter would not let any seed sprout, Zeus sent Hermes to bring back Persephone; but as she had eaten a pomegranate seed while she was below, she must spend one third of every year there (the winter). Surely one has read somewhere a similar nurse incident in the story of the sorrowing Isis. Yes, Plutarch: Isis and Osiris, 357. So to which goddess did the story first belong? The dying husbandson in the older myths becomes a daughter in the Greek. Understanding dawns next day. Does the incident mean we have to go through the fire of suffering to become immortal? Is this part of the content of the mysteries? One cannot believe that all the ancients held the poets’ gloomy view of the after-life, which may have been to make people think. Christian apologists naturally overstress pagan pessimism to contrast their 148

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Resurrection hope. During tea-making, mind says: “through ‘fire-water-copperpipes-and-even-through-all-the-roulette-halls-of-Monte-Carlo. ’ ” (A & E p. 350.) It could be Gurdjieffs recipe for his very expensive immortality, though the official context in the Ashiata chapter is with the “virtuoso-affairs” of the initiates of new formation, criminal gangs stealing “essence-values” under the pretext of following “supernatural” or “mystic” sciences. A meaning for G’s red copper is to come later, D.V. (chapter 13). If Demeter at the well contributed to the story of Jesus sitting on Jacob’s well and talking with the woman of Samaria, her five husbands could be Zeus, Osiris, Attis, Adonis and Tammuz, all being variants of the same myth. The next passage has: “look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” (John 4.35) Demeter is the goddess of grain. 29.6.76. In the song already quoted p. 136 above about the search for Persephone, “Maiden of Mysteries”, in Euripides’ Helen, the Great Mother stopped the streams and springs. “And cattle starved on the brown plains; The sapless earth could bear no fruit; The child died in the womb . . .” It is topical because “record-breaking temperatures” are rousing fears of another winter of potato shortage. “But the maid had sinned, in childish innocence Breaking her fast in the dark rooms of earth. The Mother of all birth Saw her law slighted, and her anger rose. A fearful power fills the bright dappled folds Of a fawnskin cloak . . . (Bacchus) She pardons none who taste the forbidden fruit.” As if Dionysus was the result of Demeter’s anger? Yes, there is sexual symbolism. Yes, Dionysus is the male organ, fertilising, dangerous, root of trouble. Expendable? Almost we must be induced to get ourselves into trouble, that we may fight and endure and grow a soul. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women, another play about burying, Theseus says (p. 210 Penguin): “Permit their bodies To hide below ground, and each part to return there 149

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Whence first it came into this light; breath to the sky, Flesh to the soil. For we have in our own bodies But a life-tenancy, not lasting ownership; At death, the earth that bred us must receive us back . . . Think how men’s existence is Beset with hardship — our whole life a wrestling match . . . Then we should recognise these truths, Meet wrongs with calmness, not with furious rage . . .” Jacob’s wrestling in Genesis 32? 29.12.1979: we did say Jacob could be Euripides, p. 116 above.

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JUNE 1976. After Sophocles the writing out of 1975 was interrupted, from the Christmas holidays into June 1976, by new finds. Though the writing threatens to become as long as Beelzebub, the earlier material can’t all be scrapped. 7-12 June 1975. Flaming June (it is flaming again). The Daily Telegraph Saturday column by Christopher Booker went from the Baader-Meinhof terrorist trial to Shakespeare to show how, in four of his tragedies, hatred destroys the hater; but in three late comedies the hero takes the upward path through similar testing. Waiting for books, could read some Shakespeare. Two of the comedies are unfamiliar and allow the pleasure of first time surprise. The plot of Measure for Measure (“death for death”, an eye for an eye), acted in 1604, is traced to a book published in 1566. Shakespeare’s severe Angelo is given temporary power to reform the permissive morals of Vienna, where “the baby beats the nurse”. He falls to worse temptation himself in a Leah-Rachel substitution episode, but is saved by his own repentance and the duke’s mercy. Angelo is not Savonarola but there was enough resemblance to make one look up dates. In the favourite comedy device, disguise, the duke, like Haroun al Raschid, moves among his subjects during his supposed absence; “the duke Dare no more stretch this finger of mine than he Dare rack his own . . .” “I love the duke as I love myself.” The delicious moment comes when the monk’s hood is torn off and the duke revealed: “your Grace, like power divine, Hath looked upon my passes.” This wise duke is an optimistic parable of the ways of God with men, planning tricks, testing, spying on them, seeming unjust, but all for their ultimate good. Escalus, whose name vaguely suggests Aesculapius (more like Aeschylus), describes the duke as: “One that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself.” “Twice treble shame on Angelo,” says the disguised duke to himself, which 151

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could be an echo of Trismegistus. The plot allows many speeches about imminent death. Barnardine (Barabbas?), the common murderer, is “a stubborn soul That apprehends no further than this world, And squar’st thy life according.” The Winter’s Tale may have been first produced in 1611. “The plot is from Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, or Dorastus and Fawnia (1588),” (encyclopaedia). Fawnia was the name of the family cow in Australia about 1918. Memory is selective. Mother read English under the beloved Professor W. P. Ker. The play is magnificently unhistorical and ungeographical. Bohemia has a sea-coast. There are Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia and a daughter of the emperor of Russia; they send to Delphos for an oracle, not an ambiguous one. “This isn’t so good as the other play; three deaths in Act III, although it is a comedy.” Weather to match the crimes and a shipwreck. “You can see the end coming.” No; first surprise, the discovery of the lost Perdita, with tokens, is not shown, only recounted by “messengers”. More, the “statue” proves to be Hermione herself, still alive, sheltered for sixteen years by Paulina. Resurrection joy! The name of Leontes, the penitent king, suggests Leontis, a natural shortening for Leontopolis. The penitent Stephen? Euripides’ Helen has reunion joy after seventeen years’ separation. There may be a connection, for Hermione is the name of the daughter of Menelaus and Helen. Autolycus, the rogue, picks a pocket by pretending to have fallen among thieves, and mentions the Prodigal Son in the same scene; “beating and hanging are terrors to me: for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.” Autolycus, “the most accomplished thief and liar of his day,” was maternal grandfather of Odysseus (Odyssey Bk. XIX, p. 308, mentioned above, p. 132). In Ovid Autolycus is son of Mercury, the god of thieves and cunning, and of a grand-daughter of Lucifer, the morning star. This view of Mercury/Hermes is rather different from the thrice greatest philosopher! One “cause” of Shakespeare’s genius was the excitement of the New Learning. Shakespeare’s Autolycus robbed the rustics at the sheep-shearing festivity; he also helped to make the fortune of the old shepherd and the clown his son, by betraying them on to 152

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prince Florizel’s ship. “Here come those I have done good to against my will ...” A parable? Hope our stealing from best authors will be forgiven. It may be significant for claiming Simonides wrote the original Iliad and Odyssey that Plato contrives to couple Homer and Simonides, in connection with Autolycus: “The just man, then, hath appeared to be a sort of thief; and you seem to have learned this from Homer, for he admires Autolycus ... It seems then . . . according to Homer and Simonides, that justice is a sort of thieving, for the profit, indeed, of friends and for the hurt of enemies.” (Republic, Spens p. 9.) Earlier, Simonides had been praised for saying “That to give everyone his due is just”. It is “not easy to disbelieve Simonides, for he is a wise and divine man”; but what did he mean, asked Socrates (p. 6). The start on Euripides was made with an inherited translation by Gilbert Murray, 1905, of The Trojan Women. As usual, read introduction and notes first, anything to delay tackling the text. What an understanding mind is Murray’s! Athens, in the hands of the War Party, had compelled the neutral island of Melos to take up arms against her, and after a long siege had conquered the ancient, quiet town, massacred the men and sold the women into slavery, in 416 B.C. Thucydides selects it as the crucial crime of the war. In the spring of 415 Euripides produced his Trojan Women, Greek victory as seen by its victims. It is “a prophecy, a bearing of witness” to the spirit of pity for mankind. But: “Pity is a rebel passion.” The play brought its author accusations and hatred “down to the day when, ‘because almost all in Athens rejoiced at his suffering,’ he took his way to the remote valleys of Macedon to write the Bacchae and to die.” The Trojan Women sing of the Horse: “that mountain Thing Smooth-carven, where the Argives lay, And wrath, and Ilion’s vanquishing: Meet gift for her that spareth not, Heaven’s yokeless Rider.” “Athena like a northern Valkyrie, as often in the Iliad. If one tries to imagine what Athena, the War-Goddess worshipped by the Athenian mob, was like — what a mixture of bad national

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passions, of superstition and statecraft, of slip-shod unimaginative idealisation — one may partly understand why Euripides made her so evil.” “The Wooden Horse is always difficult to understand, and seems to have an obscuring effect on the language of poets who treat of it.” So maybe it is partly an esoteric symbol. Murray suspects “a real historical incident misunderstood.” Possibly it was “a wooden siege-tower, as high as the walls, with a projecting and revolving neck.” “When a still city lieth in the hold Of Desolation, all God’s spirit there Is sick and turns from worship”, says Poseidon in a prologue. The women are portioned by lot to new lords — “For Thessaly, or Argos, or the steep Of Theseus’ Rock.” Ah, the Rock of the Acropolis at Athens must have contributed to the general symbolism of Rock. Later comes the Rock of Ida that catches the first rays of sunrise, and the Rock of Corinth. At one point the play did arouse feeling. On the advice of Odysseus, taken by Euripides as “the type of the successful unscrupulous man”, the Greeks send their herald to tell Andromache, widow of Hector, that her child Astyanax must not grow up but is to be cast down from the wall. If she surrenders him without struggle or cursing, he will be allowed burial. “O thou bed And bridal; O the joining of the hand, That led me long ago to Hector’s land. To bear, O not a lamb for Grecian swords To slaughter, but a prince o’er all the hordes Enthroned of wide-flung Asia----------- Weepest thou? Nay, why, my little one? Thou canst not know. And Father will not come; he will not come; Not once, the great spear Hashing and the tomb Riven to set thee free! . . How shall it be? One horrible spring-------- deep, deep Down. And thy neck----------- Ah God, so cometh sleep!” The herald brings back the dead child for the last rites by his grandmother Hecuba. The captive women sing: “Deep in the heart of me I feel thine hand.

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Mother; and is it he Dead here, our prince to be, And lord of the land?” She says: “I make thee whole; I bind thy wounds, O little vanished soul. . . . Nay, not I, but he, Thy father far away shall comfort thee!” Hecuba, aged mother of 19 of the 50 children of King Priam, her “gardener”, is the central character. “Ye Gods------------Alas! Why call on things so weak For aid? Yet there is something that doth seek. Crying, for God, when one of us hath woe.” Menelaus comes. Hecuba prays that he will slay Helen. “These lines, as a piece of religious speculation, were very famous in antiquity”:“Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne Above the World, who e'er thou art, unknown And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be, Or Reason of our Reason; God, to thee I lift my praise, seeing the silent road That bringeth justice ere the end be trod To all that breathes and dies.” But Menelaus delays. He will take Helen back to Greece before deciding. The Athenian audience knew they would be reconciled. After the rites for the child Hecuba finds a sort of consolation: “Lo. I have seen the open hand of God; And in it nothing, nothing, save the rod Of mine affliction . . . Vain, vain were prayer and incense-swell And bull’s blood on the altars!----------- All is well. Had He not turned us in His hand, and thrust Our high things low and shook our hills as dust, We had not been this splendour, and our wrong An everlasting music for the song Of earth and heaven!” Murray says this speech expresses the inmost theme, “an answer to the injustice of suffering in the very splendour and beauty of suffering. Of course it must be suffering of a particular kind, or, what comes to the same thing, suffering borne in a particular way” — the way of heroes and martyrs.

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The ruins of Troy are set on fire. “God! O God of mercy! — Nay: Why call I on the Gods? They know, they know, My prayers, and would not hear them long ago.” She tries to spring into the flames but is prevented. “Then at last there remains — what most but not all modern free-thinkers would probably have begun to doubt at the very beginning — the world of the departed, the spirits of the dead, who are true, and in their dim way love her still. This last religion . . . represents a return to the most primitive ‘Pelasgian’ beliefs, a worship of the Dead, which existed long before the Olympian system, and has long outlived it.” “Te have hearts and forget not, ye in the darkness lying.” “Now hast found thy prayer, crying to them that are gone.” She is a Job, questioning the gods as blow after blow falls. Job’s fortunes were finally restored. For Troy there was no restoration, but Euripides shows that there was justice. Poseidon was preparing the storm to wreck the Greek fleet. Cassandra knew that Agamemnon was going home to his death and that Odysseus was condemned to ten years wandering. Cassandra sang: “Our father’s hope is won! ... he lies Happy beneath the sun!” She tells her Mother: “Even now this town Is happier than the Greeks . . . Hector’s woe, What is it? He is gone, and all men know His glory, and how true a heart he bore . . . and even Paris hath loved withal a child of heaven: Else had his love but been as others are. Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war! Yet if war come, there is a crown in death For her that striveth well and perisheth Unstained: to die in evil were the stain!” And seeing the herald: “guide me to the house of Death, To lie beside my bridegroom! . . Dead--------- and out-cast----------- and naked----------- It is I Beside my bridegroom: and the wild beasts cry, And ravin on God’s chosen! . . but a space, ye Dead, And I am with you . . .” 156

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Gilbert Murray was born in 1866 at Sydney, but left Australia at 11. He was professor of Greek at Glasgow and Oxford. He must have shared Euripides’ feelings about war, for his generation lived through 1914-18, seeing all the young men die. He helped to draft the covenant of the League of Nations, was a delegate to the Assembly, sat on the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation, was interested in the protection of minorities and chairman of the League of Nations Union. But alas, League of Nations, United Nations, sad stories of post-war hopes disappointed and distorted. What a demonstration of octaves that turn into their own opposites, and of the difficulty of doing good by large-scale government action! “Small is beautiful”. Start at your own doorstep. It must be admitted that the same passages in the Penguin translation seem less meaningful for our purposes. “God's chosen”, with its hint of Messiah, is only “Apollo’s priestess”. The five lines “Deep in the heart of me I feel thine hand . . .” are: “Yesterday so great a prince; Now a sight to break my heart!” It is claimed that the great classical scholars of Murray’s time knew that the Bible used the Greek authors. Their translations might therefore overstress similarities, as in “a dumb beast ... A thing not in God's image” Murray p. 44? 27.6.76. Sorry the writing is only a linking of quotations, but let’s put in Dag Hammarskjbld here, the second (in time) Secretary of the United Nations, who was killed in an unexplained air crash near Ndola, N. Rhodesia (Zambia) in September 1961, a sacrificial victim. His “Markings” are beautifully translated by Sjbberg and Auden, Faber, 1964. 1952 “Incapable of being blinded by desire, Feeling I have no right to intrude upon another, Afraid of exposing my own nakedness, Demanding complete accord as a condition for life together: How could things have gone otherwise?” 1952 “Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakens enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness — by making the ultimate escape from life — No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life:

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it must not be an act of treachery against it.” “The hardest thing of all — to die rightly — an 1952 exam nobody is spared — and how many pass it? And you? You pray for strength to meet the test — but also for leniency on the part of the Examiner.” “Respect for the word is the first commandment 1.8.55 in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity ... to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heart-felt love of truth — is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race. To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.” A Son of Ibsen! 24.12.55 “The Lover desires the perfection of the Beloved — which requires, among other things, the liberation of the Beloved from the Lover. God desires our independence — which we attain when, ceasing to strive for it ourselves, we 'fall’ back into God.” Whitsunday 1961 “But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour was certain that existence is meaningful . . .” June 8th 1961 “But body, My playmate. You must not flinch Nor fail me when The moment comes To do the impossible.” June 18th 1961 “He will come out Between two warders, Lean and sunburnt, A little bent, As if apologising For his strength, His features tense, But looking quite calm. 158

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He will take off his jacket And, with shirt torn open, Stand up against the wall To be executed.

He has not betrayed us. He will meet his end Without weakness. When I feel anxious, It is not for him. Do I fear a compulsion in me To be so destroyed? Or is there someone In the depths of my being, Waiting for permission To pull the trigger?” July 6th 1961 Tired And lonely, So tired The heart aches. Meltwater trickles Down the rocks, The fingers are numb, The knees tremble, It is now, Now, that you must not give in . . . The way chose you — And you must be thankful.” 28 June 1975. The inflated price of Thucydides made it necessary to send another cheque to Barnicoat, so the Penguin Bacchae volume was ordered, perhaps connecting with unusually persistent backache. “The Bacchae takes an old ritual story with fixed characters: God, Old King, Young King, Prophet, Mother . . . the cult of the Year Daemon: the Daemon and his enemy, who is exactly like himself: the Contest, the Sparagmos or Rending, the Messenger, the Lamentation mixed with Joy-Cries, the Discovery of the scattered members, and the Epiphany of the God . . . The marvellous power of the Bacchae is beyond doubt . . . But the

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meaning of the play is much disputed . . .” (Gilbert Murray’s encyclopaedia article.) The young King of Thebes, Pentheus (sorrow), first cousin of Dionysus, has man’s youthful sin of pride to justify his being made the victim. He thinks he can do without the Gods. Dionysus has “taken the likeness of a man” to vindicate his mother. Pentheus imprisoned the Bacchants: “The fetters simply opened and fell off their feet; The bolts shot back, untouched by mortal hand; the doors Flew wide. Master, this man has come here with a load Of miracles.” Guards arrested Dionysus: “But, Sir, we found The beast was gentle; made no attempt to run away, Just held his hands out to be tied . . .” In the dialogue with the prisoner Pentheus asks: “And those who worship — what advantage do they gain?” “It is not for you to learn; yet it is worth knowing. . . . The god Himself, whenever I desire, will set me free . . . He is close at hand here, and sees what is done to me . . . You know not what you are saying, what you do, nor who You are . . . Nothing can touch me that is not ordained.” He is shut in the stables. An earthquake shatters the palace and Dionysus walks free. In The Acts of the Apostles (chapter 5) an angel opens prison doors by night and releases apostles. In Acts 12 Peter’s chains fall off, prison gates open and an angel leads him forth. In Acts 16 an earthquake opens prison doors but Paul and Silas and the other prisoners do not escape, thereby converting the jailer. When he is free Dionysus advises Pentheus: “I would control my rage and sacrifice to him If I were you, rather than kick against the goad.” Acts 9.5: “it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks”; and again, in 26.14, where Paul recounts his vision to King Agrippa. Since then the goad used as a simile has also been found in Aeschylus (Agamemnon, Eumenides and Prometheus). Years ago it seemed comic that the Ever Ready Co. should produce an electric goad. “It does less harm to the hides”, explained the boss. 160

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Pentheus is induced to put on women’s clothes in order to spy on the women’s celebration. “Now I will go, to array Pentheus in the dress Which he will take down with him to the house of Death, Slaughtered by his own mother’s hands. And he shall know Dionysus, son of Zeus, in his full nature God, Most terrible, although most gentle, to mankind.” He calls. “Come, perverse man, greedy for sights you should not see . . .” Pentheus is out of his mind. “Or shall 1 put my shoulder under The rocks, and heave the mountain up with my two arms?” Moving mountains is in Mark 11.23 and Matthew 21.21. In Aeschylus, Agamemnon p. 59, God’s lightnings “stagger mountains” of unrighteous success. “One man alone, you agonize for Thebes; therefore It is your destined ordeal that awaits you now. Come with me; I will bring you safely to the place; Another shall conduct you back.” Pentheus leaves first. “Pentheus, you are a man to make men fear; fearful Will be your end — an end that shall lift up your fame To the height of heaven.” A messenger describes how the foreigner bent down a pine tree and sat Pentheus on a high branch to see better, but the Maenads saw him. A voice from the sky called the women to punish him. “We must catch this climbing beast, Or he’ll disclose the secret dances of Dionysus.” A thousand hands uprooted the pine; Pentheus plunged to the earth and was torn to pieces. Agaue, the mother, returns carrying the head which, in her hallucination, she thinks is that of a young lion. The old King, her father Cadmus, brings her to her senses. “At this point the two MSS on which the text of this play depends” show a considerable lacuna. Some quotations and “less than twenty lines from Christus Patiens (an anonymous fourth century A.D. work consisting largely of lines adapted from Greek tragedies)” allow a guess at the missing part, with Agaue’s mourning and the manifestation of Dionysus. The text resumes with a speech by Dionysus saying Cadmus and his wife Harmonia will become 161

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serpents but finally win immortality. There are two other short lacunae in the play. Tantalizing. Has something been deliberately suppressed? Vellacott’s filling for a 3-line gap includes: Agaue, “How could I touch his body with these guilty hands?” Compare Oedipus p. 126 above, and John 20.17: “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father . . .” Eight days later Jesus did invite Thomas to touch. Other verses which may echo the Bacchae are John 12.28: “Then there came a voice from heaven . . .” and verses 31-32: “now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And 1, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” In John 19.11 Jesus answered Pilate, “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above . . .” Luke 23.24: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” At the arrest in Gethsemane, Matthew 26.53: “Thinkest thou that 1 cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” Orestes’ mother-murder reversed, the ghastly image, of the mother holding out her son’s bleeding head, asks: “Does Nature bear us and feed us only in order that we may die?” Tragedy is about suffering and its causes. Sometimes the victim is guilty, of unlawful passion, ambition, jealousy. But pity is misguided if it thinks all innocent suffering could be avoided. Neither reasonableness nor sinlessness nor piety to the gods nor stoical and Buddhist detachment can entirely prevent suffering. The crucifixion presents a tragedy in which the suffering is to be wholly creative and redemptive. “Intentional suffering”. The woman bearing a severed head is repeated in “Judith with the head of Holofernes” and “Salome with the head of John the Baptist”. The article Dionysus says the name may mean child or son of God. “Like most deities connected with vegetation, Dionysus, at least in Thrace, died and rose again. This is reflected principally in Orphic mythology . . .” Dionysus is called “twice-born” because when his mother, Agaue’s sister, Semele (really Zemelo, Phrygian for “earth”) was killed by lightning for asking to see her lover Zeus in his glory, Zeus sewed the premature child in his own thigh. “Twice-born Dithyrambus! Come,

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Enter here your father’s womb . . .” (Chorus, Bacchae). The encyclopaedia says dithyrambus probably comes from Phrygian dithrera, tomb. But the idea of being twice-born is found in many places. Why is Dionysus connected with Thebes? It must have been an early centre. The suggestion that its founder Cadmus came from Phoenicia is interesting. Hesiod makes some of his fourth generation, hero-men, die “in the land of Cadmus at seven-gated Thebe when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus . . (Works and Days, lines 162-3). In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the third part of the Oresteian trilogy, the priestess at Delphi in her opening prayer salutes the nymphs of the cave, “where Bromius too makes his home, Since, once, he led his frenzied Bacchic army forth To tear King Pentheus as a hare is torn by hounds.” It makes one wonder whether it was Euripides who added that his mother did it. Teiresias tells Pentheus there are two powers in human affairs: Demeter, who is also Earth, who gives solid food, and Dionysus, who gives wine, the counterpart of bread. (No tea or coffee then). Dionysus, “Himself a god, is thus poured out in offering To the gods . . .” Are the myths of the dismembering of a god a celebration of and thanksgiving for food? “. . . he was known of them in breaking of bread.” (Luke 24.35) This was the token of recognition for the two disciples at Emmaus. We could do with more respect for the sources of our food. The chorus, of women of Asia, sings: “The earth Bows with milk, flows with wine, Flows with nectar of bees . . . ‘On, on! Run, dance, delirious, possessed! . . Praise Dionysus, god of joy!’ ” Dionysus with bull’s horns (as Pentheus saw him when possessed) and the Maenads (mainas, mainados, raving), seems to be the horned god of witches’ sabbaths. “His followers included spirits of fertility, as the satyrs, and in this ritual the phallus was prominent.” (Encyclopaedia.) Such a “religion” is puzzling, not to say alarming! The Athenian drama contests were festivals of Dionysus, perhaps a result of trying to bring this wild movement

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under control. The development of drama was surely a major gift to human culture. 28 June 1976. One of Vellacott’s notes is interesting. Teiresias explained Zeus’ thigh by saying originally Zeus gave Hera a phantom of the infant Dionysus as a pledge. The note says homeros means pledge and meros thigh. Is this homeros relevant to the Homer question? If the name meant pledge it might make him a Hermes, a symbolic messenger. Three Aegean islands: Ceos, off Attica, known for its good . laws; birthplace of Simonides and his nephew Bacchylides, poets; and of two philosophers and a physician. Cos, off S.W. Asia Minor, known for lettuces; Hippocrates, father of medicine; a painter and two poets. It was settled by colonists from Epidaurus, worshippers of Asclepius, whose sanctuary became a health resort. Chios, half-way up Asia Minor, was “famous for its school of epic poets, the Homeridae, who claimed descent from Homer . . .” Such a school of epic poets could have developed the complicated stories and genealogies of heroes and gods, but then do Iliad and Odyssey come at the end or the beginning of the development? Do we really need Euripides’ lorii Yet there is a feeling that it is influential. It is an ancestor of romantic comedy. Perhaps it does show the pitfalls of taking “son of god” stories literally. T. S. Eliot’s Confidential Clerk, once heard on BBC, has somewhat similar complications. Temple recognition reappeared in Monkey (p. 57 above). How did it travel? Creusa, princess of Athens, when innocently gathering Bowers like Persephone, was raped, she believes, by Apollo. She managed to hide her pregnancy and delivered the child alone in a cave, where she exposed him in a shawl made when she was learning to weave. It showed the Gorgon’s head and snakes, some weaving! “Many a song and story I have heard Of sons that mortal women bore to the gods, And not one tells of happiness.” Hermes carried the child to Delphi, centre and navel of the earth, and laid him outside the temple. The priestess took pity and reared him. He appears sweeping with laurel branches; 164

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“And with my bow and arrows I'll send the wild birds flying That foul our temple treasures. . . . Slave to no mortal master, But an eternal god, I am exalted, Toil without weariness in praise and prayer . . . Apollo, Healer, Saviour . . . Blest be thy name, Apollo!’’ “Now with pure hands knowing no carnal touch” he sprinkles water from the fountain of Castalia. Athenians arrive: “may we take off our shoes and go into the sanctuary?” Creusa’s marriage to a foreign ally Xuthus has proved childless: they have come to Delphi to consult the oracle. Xuthus is told that whoever meets him as he comes out of the temple, is his son. It is the youth, whom he names “Ion”, because “first” met. Xuthus admits to lying with a Delphian girl when he came to the Bacchic mysteries before his marriage. Vellacott’s introduction says: “we surmise that there must have been an annual crop of chance babies . . .” Ion accepts the story but is not impressed. It is a mother he longs for. Being a king is over-rated. “Give me the happiness of a plain man . . . Let me choose my own way!” But Xuthus proposes to take him home as a visitor at first, after a celebration banquet at Delphi. Creusa learns of this bastard ready-made stepson, while she remains childless. It is the last straw in her bitterness against Apollo. She tells her secret so long hidden. “What treasure of suffering is here laid bare!” (Is this giving the game away? Suffering is treasure in heaven?) “Take your revenge . . . Set fire to this holy temple,” counsels the old slave. Ha, shall we see arson again on stage? Aristophanes’ Clouds with the burning of Socrates’ Thinkery is apparently earlier. Creusa dare not do that, but it is agreed the old slave shall poison Ion with a drop of the Gorgon's venom. A choral lyric provides an interval till a messenger comes, warning that the plot was discovered by an ingenious miracle or synchronicity. He describes the banquet; “a herald made a proclamation . . . inviting any Delphian who wished to come to the feast . . . When the time came for music and general drinking,” the slave gave the new prince the poisoned cup. At 165

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that moment another slave spoke an unlucky word; recognising a bad omen, Ion had ail the cups emptied on the ground and fresh wine poured. A Hock of doves flew in and eagerly drank the spilled wine. The one which drank where Ion poured out his cup died in agony. “Who was trying to murder me?” Ion now tries to kill Creusa who takes sanctuary at the altar. The priestess stops him and brings out his original cradle, which she had kept hidden. Creusa recognises it and correctly describes the shawl, golden serpents and an unfading olive wreath. “Dear Mother, I was dead, and am alive again . . . but . . . Are you certain that you did not — as many a girl does — they cannot help it — become infatuated and yield to a secret love, and then lay responsibility on the god . . .” She swears that “no mortal man is your father, my son, but Apollo who reared you.” Finally Athene appears. Apollo gave Ion to Xuthus so that he could be recognised as heir to an illustrious house. Let Xuthus go on thinking he is Ion’s true father. Ion will rule Athens and be the ancestor of the lonians. One trait is a little like Mary and Joseph: Creusa and Xuthus will now have children, sons Dorus and Achaeus, who will also give their names to nations. “So, Apollo has done all things well . . .” Perhaps Ion will be a good king just because he was not reared to power. God does do cruel things, but in the end we shall find that it was for a good purpose. We hope! Euripides’ Hippolytus of 428 B.C. has the Potiphar’s wife theme. Aphrodite explains her plan to punish the chaste Hippolytus, son of Theseus and the Amazon, for his contempt. She has smitten Theseus’s wife Phaedra with an incurable passion for her stepson. The queen has struggled in silence and is now fasting to death. Chorus: “But there is an unhappy perversity Belonging to women's complex nature — A despairing helplessness before labour Causing irrational fancies. 1 have felt this wind shudder through my womb; But 1 cried aloud to the heavenly helper of women, Artemis of the arrows; And always — the gods be praised! — she comes to my deep need.” Phaedra comes out, supported by her old nurse, who says: 166

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“Better to be sick, which is a single trouble, Than wait on the sick, which troubles both heart and hand. The whole of our life is full of pain . . . And after this life, is there a happier world? That is concealed from us, wrapped in clouds and darkness.” (The last two lines are said to be of doubtful genuineness.) At length Phaedra confesses her secret. The nurse collapses. “What does it mean? A good pure-hearted woman lusting after sin Against her own will! Aphrodite is no god! She is something different, something greater — she it is Who has brought the queen, and m ,d this whole house to ruin.” In Phaedra's long speech: “What I desi , and the desire itself, 1 knew, Were both dishonourable. I knew too, ai J too well, I was a woman — a thing hated by ever) )ne.” She is dying that she may not bring dishon ur on her husband or her two sons. “One thing can make the most bold-spirii d man a slave: To know the secret of a parent’s shameful act. They say that a clear conscience and an upright heart Alone give strength to wrestle in the trials of life; While evil doers, soon or late — as a youn girl Sees truth in a glass — so they, when Time holds up his mirror, Are exposed.” Compare I Cor. 13.12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly ...” The nurse recovers. “Often in human life Our second thoughts are wiser.” She thinks Phaedra should have her man, and speaks of medicine and spells. Asking for an oath of secrecy she approaches Hippolytus, who is furious. “Forgive, son; we are human, we do wrong by natuie, Hippolytus: O Zeus! Why have you established in the sunlit world This counterfeit coin, woman, to curse the human race.’ If you desired to plant a mortal stock, why must The means for this be women?” Theseus returns just as Phaedra has hanged herself, with a note tied to her wrist accusing Hippolytus of violating her. As soon as 167

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he reads it he calls on Poseidon, who once promised him three curses, to strike down his son. He will not listen to Hippolytus. “The gods will need to create a second earth, to house Such vicious, corrupt natures as this world rejects.” The planet “Eternal Retribution”, A & E p. 410? “So now Take Orpheus for your master, dance his crazy rites And reverently recite his wordy vapourings!” Oh, for more understanding about the Orpheists, because named A & E p. 495! Hippolytus is sent at once into exile. A loyal slave returns to tell how a monstrous savage bull burst from a sky-high wave, stampeding the horses; the chariot overturned on rocks; Hippolytus was dragged by the reins and mortally injured. Artemis appears. She rebukes Theseus for believing his wife’s lies without witness; even when wrongly accused Hippolytus would not break his oath. “My son, my son!” cries repentant Theseus. David's lament for Absalom! The semi-legendary king of Athens could have contributed to David. “Your sin is great; yet even for this you may yet find Pardon. For Aphrodite willed all this to happen . . .” Pardon, syngnome, was a new word first appearing mainly in Sophocles and Euripides. Artemis promises ritual honours for Hippolytus. “Men may well sin, when gods so ordain. Hippolytus, I commend you not to hate your father; This doom by which you perish was apportioned you. So now farewell. I may not look upon the dead . . .” Two words are hardly a parallel, but Theseus did also say: “If only, my son, I could die in place of you!” (Line 1410) II Samuel 18.33: “would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Encyclopaedia compared Absalom with Alcibiades for his personal attractiveness, lawless insolence and tragic fate. In II Samuel 14 we learned of the weight of Absalom’s hair and that three sons and a daughter were born to him. His death, like that of Hippolytus, was extraordinary. After the battle which crushed his rebellion, he rode under an oak in which his head caught, “and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; 168

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and the mule that was under him went away. And a certain man ... told Joab . . . Behold, I saw Absalom hanged in an oak.” Joab hastened to kill him. This time we are told that Absalom in his lifetime had reared himself a pillar: “for he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance . . .” (18.18). Another possible parallel between Theseus and David is dancing. Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, 21, says he and the Athenian youths with him executed at Delos a dance representing the winding Labyrinth, called the Crane dance. Is there any further reason why Old Testament writers should borrow from Hippolytus? Yes, this Aphrodite could really be described as a jealous god, as could Dionysus in the Bacchae. A/cestis. 438 B.C., is the earliest of Euripides’ surviving plays. Because much of it “is written in unusually simple Greek” (Vellacott’s Introduction p. 15) it is often read by beginners. Mrs. B. chose it for performance, Mr. B. cancelled it. It shows husbands in too bad a light, reversing Inanna and Dumuzi! Apollo explains that Zeus killed his (Apollo’s) son Asclepius because Asclepius raised the dead. Apollo was angry and killed too. As punishment, he had to serve a mortal, Admetus, a good man. Apollo persuaded the Fates to allow Admetus to escape from imminent death if someone would die instead. His old parents would not, but his young wife offered herself. Apollo must now leave the house to avoid the taint of death. A woman servant asks the chorus of citizens: “How Could any wife give clearer testimony that she Honours her husband, than by freely dying for him?” “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15.13.) Alcestus is helped out of the palace: “I see the two-oared boat . . . And Charon . . . calls me 'Why are you so slow? Hurry; you make me late! . . 1 feel a hand grasping my hand, leading me — don’t you see him? ... He has wings . . . Let me go ... I am terrified.” Admetus promises never to give the children a stepmother. He will have Alcestis’s image carved in stone, to lie on the bed: “to see a loved face even in dreams Brings pleasure, for as long as the illusion lasts. Oh, if I had the songs that Orpheus had, his voice . . . 169

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I would go down to fetch you . . . It cannot be. Look for me there when I shall die; And make a home ready, where you can be with me.” “1 go to prepare a place for you.” (John 14.2.) Orpheus and Eurydice were much in mind in 1954. They seem to be the earliest version of the theme of not looking behind you. Why was it made the condition of Orpheus’ rescue of Eurydice from the underworld and why did he fail? The only answer seemed to be that it was to emphasise the power of the glance, the importance of controlling the eyes and so desire. “. . . whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” (Matthew 5.28.) “When you most need me living, children, I must die.” A mother leaving young children is one of the cruellest deaths, but perhaps also one that makes strong links between the two worlds. The end comes, followed by preparations for the funeral. Enter Heracles, journeying. “But what’s the cause of this funereal short hair?” “A death. I have a burial to perform today.” For hospitality’s sake Admetus gives evasive answers about who has died. He orders the guest’s entertainment. An angry scene between Admetus and his old father follows. “Marry wife after wife, let them all die for you! . . The sun god gives us light; and it is sweet, yes, sweet.” Bluebeard? Or is Bluebeard Henry VIII? Heracles is shown as wine-bibber. “Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber,” (Matthew 11.19.) A servant describes how “there were two tunes Going on together: he was singing, without a thought For the sorrow in this house; while in the servant’s room We were all weeping for our mistress . . . To me and to all the servants here she was a mother. A thousand times, when the king was raging, it was she Who calmed him down and saved us.” Heracles comes out and invites him to drink. “All mortal men are bound to die — inevitably. There's no man living who can confidently say — Not one — that he will still be living the next day. The road of chance leads on by a mysterious way . . .” “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee . . .” 170

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(Luke 12.20) A note in Dean Inge’s Every Man’s Bible, p. 206, says the literal rendering is: “On this night they (unspecified) are demanding thy soul, or life”. It is a welcome precedent for the use of “they” as a short name for the unseen powers. The servant admits it is Alcestis who has died, and Heracles changes. “Come now, my endlessly enduring heart and hand, . . The woman’s newly dead; and I Must save her . . .” The king of the dead will come to drink the blood of victims offered at her tomb; Heracles will hide and spring on him. Admetus returns from the funeral. Now he fully understands. “I should not be alive. My life Will be, as I have learnt too late, a sorry thing.” “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it . . .” (Matthew 16.25 and similar sayings in 10.39 and the other three gospels.) “Chance has come upon you; you cannot wrestle with chance”, say the Chorus. The plays often blame chance (Tyche), but what is chance? “This blow found you unskilled in suffering, Filled with good fortune.” Chorus: “1 have searched through many books, I have studied the speculations of astronomers, 1 have pursued innumerable arguments; Yet I have found nothing stronger Than Necessity. Nor is there any remedy Either in the Thracian inscriptions Written down from the voice of Orpheus, Or in all the salves and simples Which Apollo gave to the priests of Asclepius To heal the many hurts of mankind.” Necessity, ananke, is another “An” word. Heracles returns, followed by a veiled woman. He says he won her in a wrestling match; he wants Admetus to keep her till his return. Admetus begs him to ask someone else. “Young woman. Whoever you are, you have the same figure and height Alcestis had; you stand like her. — O gods! Take her, Take her out of my sight! . . When 1 look at her, I think I see My wife. My heart pounds, my eyes flood with tears . . . It is impossible for the dead to live again.” Heracles insists, and Admetus must lead her in himself. Admetus

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holds out his hand, but turns his head away. “You have her?” “Yes, I have.” “Hold her for ever, then; And tell the son of Zeus he is a generous friend. Turn round, look at her! Is she something like your wife? Is she? Now farewell sorrow, welcome happiness!” But she must not speak till the third dawn. “. . . she is paid for with my own sweat”, said Heracles. The raising of Lazarus too was costly: “he groaned in the spirit and was troubled . . . Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave.” (John 11.) If a more hopeful teaching on immortality was part of the mysteries (e.g. the corn of wheat), the playwrights were revealing them in their own form of symbolism. Talk of a gloomy underworld, a “sunless home” (Alcestis), “endless, lifeless exile underground” (Helen), was an obligatory contrast, a denying factor. But to say concretely what resurrection really is, was as impossible then as it has been for eschatology. In the Odyssey, in Circe’s instructions, we hear within a few lines of “prayers to the helpless ghosts of the dead” and “invocations to the glorious fellowship of the dead”. Plutarch, in his consolation to his wife on the death of their little daughter, writes of “the experience which we share together of the revelations in the mysteries of Dionysus. We know that the soul is indestructible and should think that its experience is like that of a bird in a cage; if it has been kept in the body for a long time ... for birth after birth (it) will never stop becoming entangled in the passions and chances of this world.” Moral Essays, Penguin, p. 184. 6.7.76. Once more the attempt to move on to “Toynbee” only leads back. Don't we need that play about the death of Heracles? Women ofTrachis is called by E. F. Watling an example of Sophocles’ “Euripidean” manner. “I dreaded marriage, dreaded it more than any Of all the girls I knew”, says Deianeira, for she was wooed by a river-god. Heracles fought him and chose Deianeira for his second wife, but she has been constantly anxious. “We had children — but he never sees them . . . Home one minute and away the next, A slave to his employer” The man who was never at home! It is an example of chief feature given by Gurdjieff (In Search p. 267). 172

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Ouspensky was astonished at his artistry. “And psychology ought to be art.” G. replied, “psychology can never be simply a science.” The day has come on which the Dodona oracle promised the labours of Heracles would end. The Herald tells of his avenging Eurytus’ insult by killing his son Iphitus, who was “in search of straying horses” (see above, p. 137). For this Zeus had him sold as a slave. When he was free again, Heracles sacked the city of Eurytus, and killed him. In the Odyssey Eurytus died earlier, leaving the bow to Iphitus, who gave it to Odysseus. A messenger reveals that Heracles’ real motive was to get Eurytus' daughter lole as a concubine. Shocked, Deianeira sends him the fatal tunic (which reappears in Grimm's Faithful John) to wear at his sacrifice of first fruits. It is anointed with what she believes is a love charm. Too late she learns that the charm was poison. Her son Hyllus accuses her. she kills herself. Heracles is brought home on a litter, his long death agony vividly shown. “I wore myself to death for you ... To root out evil . . .” Will no one end his sufferings? His son’s arms are around him, “but there is nothing more that I Or anyone can do to make him live again Released from suffering. This visitation is from God.” The oracle is fulfilled: “The dead rest from their labours.” (line 1173.) He gives instructions for his funeral pyre. “How? Heal your body by setting fire to it?” Hyllus will see the pyre built but he cannot kindle it. Heracles commands him to marry lole. The cortege moves off. “You have seen strange things. The awful hand of death, new shapes of woe. Uncounted sufferings; And all that you have seen Is God.” It is at the end of Sophocles' Philoctetes that Heracles appears from heaven, having won immortality (p. 125 above).

Heracles and Deianeira — Samson and Delilah. Hero undone by his wife, intercourse symbol. Fire is a recurrent theme. Chorus, hearing of Heracles' return: “sing to Artemis . . . huntress of the deer, The fire-encircled . . .” Deianeira to the Herald: 173

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“By the fires of God that flame on the high hill-forests, Give me the truth! . . No man has loved more women than Heracles. I’ve never blamed or scolded any of them — Nor this one, though she be melted heart and soul In the fire of her love; because I am sorry for her . . .” “Neither do 1 condemn thee:” John 8.11? The poison was activated by the fire on the altar. Brynhild in the circle of flames. Demeter hid the child in the fire to make it immortal. Fire is the funeral pyre, a gateway to immortality. From Heracles to Guy Fawkes! When she plans to use the love charm, Deianeira says of lole: “The two of us Under one blanket, wrapped in one lover’s arms! . . This is my fear, Heracles to be called my husband, but her man . . .” Another monstrous matrimony (see p. 118 above).

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PRESENT CAME from sister in California in 1973: Toynbee’s A Study of History, Volume 6, The Disintegrations of Civilizations, Part Two, being the only one in stock in the bookshop. He gives much useful material, some of which has already been quoted, pp. 21, 30, 50, 55 above, though his explanation by “folk-memory” is seen as a cover-up. He provides a possible answer (p. 487) to one puzzle. Why should Luke’s story of Jesus at twelve years old, talking with the doctors in the temple, be so like Josephus claiming that when he was about fourteen “high priests and principal men of the city came then frequently to me together, in order to know my opinion about the accurate understanding of points of the law” (Life, 2)? Toynbee says that the precocity of Jesus is like that of Socrates. In Plato’s “Parmenides” Socrates is described as being “extremely young”, and Parmenides and Zeno as delighted at Socrates’ intellectual eagerness. Toynbee makes a long study of correspondences between the life of Jesus and some would-be political saviours. In many cases the source is Plutarch. There may be a simple explanation for Biblical correspondences in Plutarch: that he wrote Parallel Greek and Roman lives to show that he had collaborated in the parallel lives of Jesus, possibly St. Matthew’s gospel in particular. Old Testament echoes appear in the discussion of his Athenian lives, pp. 59-60 above. Matthew incorporates Mark’s gospel almost entirely, has about 200 other verses also represented in Luke, and about 400 verses not in other gospels. The author “skilfully builds up the long discourses characteristic of this gospel . . .” Internal evidence shows that he “was a Christian Hellenist, probably ignorant of Hebrew,” with “very intimate knowledge of his sources, . . the popularity of the book in the early Church is a witness to his ability. But these results are . . . curiously at variance with the

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traditional account . . . (that) the book was composed in Hebrew by the Apostle Matthew.” (Encyclopaedia.) Toynbee says (p. 457): “it would seem that the gospels contain elements which are not ‘historical’ in the conventional usage of that word.” But he goes on to diminish the “historicity” of the hero-stories of Agis and Cleomenes (two Spartans) which Plutarch drew from Phylarchus. Toynbee quotes Polybius’s criticism of the methods of Phylarchus, “all cluttered up with aged parents and tiny children, on their way to the gallows . . . tricks of the playwrights. The historian’s business is to give an exact record of the things that were actually done and the words that were actually used, even if these happen to be rather tame.” As Phylarchus may have borrowed some of his romance from the legends of Herakles, Toynbee tabulates correspondences with these. He explains how the old peasant-demi-god was “made over” into a saint or the finest type of manhood (pp. 467-8). Euripides contributed by his Alcestis and Hercules Furens. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia Socrates related the fable by Prodicus of Ceos about the Choice of Herakles between the two females, Virtue, and Vice whom her friends call Happiness. Graceful and modest, Virtue says, “I will not deceive you . . . with promises of pleasure, but will set before you things as they really are, and as the gods have appointed them; for of what is valuable and excellent, the gods grant nothing to mankind without labour and care . . .” (Bk 11. 1.27-28, Bohn, 1862.) Antisthenes and Diogenes continued the reshaping of Herakles into a good example. After Alexander’s conquests Herakles was equated with various oriental gods, e.g. with Sandan of Tarsus “because an effigy — inanimate or living — of the Tarsian god was annually cremated on a pyre”, or with Melkart of Tyre, whose resurrection was celebrated every year (p. 477). Hercules is prominent in “The White Goddess”; it seems to connect with this identification of him in the Hellenistic period with other dying gods. Heracles “spells” Carolus, our very own dying king, Charles I — not quite nonsense for some saw the king as a martyr. 20-21 October 1976. The Penguin with Euripides’ Heracles is now reprinted. Yes, this Heracles is a hero. After his twelfth labour, binding Cerberus, he gets home to Thebes just in time to 176

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save his (first) family from a tyrant — only to be struck, on Hera’s orders, by madness in which he kills his wife and sons himself. On recovery he defies the gods and resolves to die. Theseus dissuades him:“You speak now like some common, ordinary man. . . . all-enduring Heracles . . . mankind’s greatest friend and benefactor. For vow — a fool’s death? Hellas would not stomach it! ... I cannot Commend your wish to die, but rather counsel you To live and suffer.” Presently Heracles says: “Yet even in this despair I have been pondering: To kill myself would surely be a coward’s act; For one who cannot face the blows of Fate will quail Before a spear held by a man. I will await My death with patience; and I will come with you to Athens . . .” To accept remorse is a suffering powerful for work. It kills imaginary I. Reminding factor. Even Gurdjieff needed one (Third Series p. 25). Some of Toynbee’s Herakles parallels come from very late sources, two of Seneca’s tragedies (which are not in the Penguin Seneca). The purported letters between Seneca and St. Paul are acknowledged as forgery, but there does seem to be some connection between Seneca and the Christians. The introduction to Penguin “Letters from a Stoic” says (p. 18): “Christian writers have not been slow to recognize the remarkably close parallels between isolated sentences in Seneca’s writings and verses of the Bible”, and (p. 24): “he was frequently quoted by such writers as Jerome, Lactantius and Augustine.” He is seen as somewhat like our Ipswich character Cardinal Wolsey, in acquiring great wealth and in his fall from royal favour. There is the same tendency for critics to run down Seneca’s character as there is with Simon Magus and Josephus. April 2, 1975. What is it one has missed about Seneca? A bald head went by in the rain. Is there something in Seneca’s baldness, shown on the cover photo of the Letters, a bust that looks like a realistic portrait? Calvus = bald. Calvaria is Latin for skull and the Vulgate rendering of the Greek Kranion, skull, for Golgotha 177

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(Chambers dictionary). The description of St. Paul as bald has been quoted p. 7 above. This makes another possible connection for Gurdjieffs shaven head, puzzled over in Saucer, p. 166. April 5, 1975. A giant American Galaxy plane crashed carrying refugee Vietnamese babies; the rear doors blew out. “What malign powers are calling the tune for America today?” asked The Daily Telegraph leader. A thought about names: should not Plutarch mean Rich Ruler, could the rich young ruler of the gospels be for him? Mark 10.17: “there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” Jesus reminded him of six commandments. “Master, all these have 1 observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. ” The accounts in Matthew and Luke are tamer; only in Luke is he called a ruler. The emotional urgency in Mark recalls passages in Gurdjieffs Remarkable Men. “Suddenly, Karpenko, without consulting any of us . . . said 'Holy Father! As by the will of fate we have met you ... a man great in knowledge and rich in experience of ordinary life as well as on the level of self­ preparation for the being after death . . . give us your advice . . , on the life we should live . . .’ ” (p. 222.) Gurdjieff promises to give the old ez-ezounavouran’s answer as a chapter on the astral body. There is a similar feeling about questions on pp. 190, 240 and 243, leading to promises of chapters on the physical and the divine bodies. Though G says that ez-ezounavouran means “he who beats himself’, it comes near to spelling Jesus of Nazareth. The ez-ezounavouran was linked with Dostoievski’s Zossima in Saucer, p. 151. 14-16 June 1976. Read Plutarch’s Brutus. On the day of Caesar’s murder, Brutus’ wife Porcia “sent messenger after messenger to learn the news.” She should not have shown such nerves, for earlier she had given herself a deep gash in the thigh, with a little knife for cutting finger-nails, to show she could be trusted with whatever secret was worrying Brutus. Somehow it 178

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links with Pilate’s wife. It is in Matthew that Pilate has a wife, who “sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.” It is also in Matthew that Pilate “took water and washed his hands before the multitude ...” A hand washing ritual is given in Deuteronomy 21 for murder where the slayer is not known. It was Caesar’s wife who had a warning dream, according to Plutarch’s life of Caesar. Is that name Porcia Shakespeare’s Portia? Yes. Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene I, “nothing undervalued To Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia . . .” So it was silly to connect her with porte (Saucer p. 170)! Also in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar the name is spelled Portia. Shakespeare has Brutus say: “stoop, And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood Up to the elbows”, and Casca “Stoop, then, and wash.” Plutarch only says Brutus and his companions went up to the Capitol “with their hands smeared with blood ...” It is argued from Shakespeare’s stress on the hand washing, and from his general fondness for using material from the Parallel Lives, that he did connect Plutarch with the gospels. Toynbee discusses elements common to the stories of Buddha and Jesus. The Mahayana scriptures are later than the Christian and have probably been influenced by them but the Pali Suttanipata, which “appears to have been written circa 300 B.C.”, tells of Asita taking the infant Gautama in his arms and prophesying his future greatness, which the seer will not live to see. Two scriptures, which appear “to be at any rate anterior to the beginning of the Christian Era”, have incidents of Mara’s temptation of Gautama which resemble the temptation of Jesus. Communication was possible since Toynbee’s footnote says that Greek navigators were making through voyages between Egypt and India from about 120 B.C. (pp. 448-452). 29 September 1976. There is a parallel nearer home for Luke's story of Simeon blessing God as he held the infant Jesus: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace . . . For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” It is in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (Penguin, On the Good Life). When the young military tribune met King Masinissa, a close friend of his famous adoptive grandfather, the old man embraced him and wept. Then he lifted 179

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his eyes to heaven, saying: “Most glorious Sun and other heavenly beings, I offer you my thanks! For before I depart this life, I am now seeing with my own eyes . . . Publius Cornelius Scipio.” That night Scipio dreamed of his grandfather. “Every man who has preserved or helped his country, or has made its greatness even greater, is reserved a special place in heaven” — in the Milky Way. “Was he, was my father Paullus, were the other men we think of as having died, . . still alive? ‘To be sure they are still living, . . seeing that they have escaped from the prison house of their bodies . . .’ “ ‘Since this ... is true life . . . why must I stay any longer upon earth?’ . . . ‘You must not abandon human life except at the command of him who gave it to you . . . Cherish justice and devotion . . . That is the life which leads to heaven . . .’ ” The nine concentric spheres, with earth as central, are explained. The outermost, of the fixed stars, is heaven itself, “the Supreme God in person”. The seven planetary spheres from outside are: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. Almost midway “ ‘blazes the Sun. He is the prince, lord and ruler of all the other worlds, the mind and guiding principle of the entire universe’ . . . ‘what is this sound, so strong and so sweet?’ . . . ‘the music of the spheres’. “ ‘Strive on. And rest assured that it is only your body that is mortal; your true self is nothing of the kind . . . Understand that you are god.’ ” Does it matter whether we know what happened in the two first centuries, B.C. and A.D.? Is this intellectual study too rarefied an escape from our common problems? Cicero suggests one answer: a soul’s “flight will be all the more rapid if already during its period of confinement within the body it has ranged freely abroad, and, by contemplating what lies outside itself, has contrived to detach itself from the body to the greatest possible degree.” Gurdjieff may have remembered the Dream when he worked out his basic diagram of the Ray of Creation, for in both the sun is midway in the scale. Cicero seems to make the sun a second god; in the Ray of Creation the subsidiary octave of organic life originates in the sun. Another version of the temptation of Heracles (p. 176 above), 180

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choice between Lady Royalty and Tyranny, is in the first Discourse of Dio Chrysostom, believed delivered before Trajan. More interesting is his fourth Discourse on Kingship, with the famous conversation between Diogenes and Alexander. Diogenes asked the king why he had come. “Was it to take some of my property?” “Why, have you any property?” “Much indeed, and very valuable, in which I do not feel sure that you will ever be able to have a share . . . are you the Alexander whom they call a bastard?” The King flushed but controlled himself and thought the man rude and an impostor. “Or is it not Olympias who said that Philip is not your father . . . but a dragon or Ammon or some god?” Thereupon Alexander smiled and was pleased as never before. “If you are self-controlled and know the royal art of Zeus, nothing prevents your being a son of Zeus.” (Loeb, shortened; for Dio as G’s dervish of Broussa, see Saucer p. 159.) Boys at play “know that the winner who has the title of‘king’, is only the son of a shoemaker or a carpenter . . . perhaps you kings are also doing something like that . . .” (A king who is son of a carpenter!) A real king will prevail over all women as well as all men. No, not the Amazons, but “ ‘women of another kind who are extremely dangerous and savage. Have you not heard the Libyan myth?’ . . . Diogenes told it to him with zest and charm, because he wanted to put him in a good humour . . .” Just as Gurdjieff thought, when Ouspensky was sulky, “ ‘Let us try to cheer him up' . . . One likes funny stories. For another you must find his hobby. And I know that Ouspensky has this hobby — ‘eternal recurrence’.” (In Search p. 251.) The Libyan myth is given separately in Dio’s fifth Discourse. The dangerous beasts had the face and breasts of beautiful women, but the lower part was scaly snake, ending in the snake’s head. They attracted men to come within reach, then devoured them. To interpret them as the passions “would not be a difficult task for a clever man who perhaps has more time at his disposal than he should have.” A Libyan king attacked their dens successfully, but those who had been away hunting, finding his army asleep by a river, destroyed it. Heracles however was able to slay the creatures. So men try to clear their souls of lusts, but they are not thorough and are soon afterwards overwhelmed by the remaining lusts. Heracles completed the task “and made his 181

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own heart pure and gentle or tame . . Found in the Bacchae (Vellacott, lines 989-990) that the Chorus say Pentheus’s mother will shout: “No, that lad never lay in a woman’s womb; A lioness gave him suck, or a Libyan Gorgon!’’ 9.7.76. Bad night. Ought to put in that cremated tooth. In Dio’s fourth Discourse Diogenes said the “Sown men” (from dragon’s teeth) of Thebes “had what seemed a spear mark on their bodies, and ... in the souls of the offspring of Zeus also a sign is to be found . . .” Alexander asked “How could one be the best king?” Diogenes said: “. . . education is of two kinds, the one from heaven, as it were, the other human . . . But if the man (educated after the pattern of Heracles) were burned, as Heracles is said to have burned himself, yet his principles would abide in his soul just as, I believe, the teeth of bodies that have been cremated are said to remain undestroyed . . .” (Loeb pp. 179-183) “. . . though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity . ..” (I Cor. 13.3.)

The tooth in “The Arousing of Thought” (A & E p. 33) came to mind. Perhaps there is something in the connection for Gurdjieffs incident also includes “a Greek priest from Turkey”, persecuted for his political convictions (Dio of Prusa was banished by Domitian), and pigeon-trapping. Pigeon or dove for the Holy Ghost. Dio was the candidate to be Luke, author of the gospel and of Acts with the Pentecost story, and “the most literary among the writers of the New Testament.” (Encyclopaedia.) 11.7.76. Put in more about the best king? Diogenes “eyeing him sternly, answered, ‘But no one can be a bad king any more than he can be a bad good man; for the king is the best one among men, since he is the most brave and righteous and humane, and cannot be overcome by any toil or by any appetite.’ ” (Loeb Dio I, p. 179.)

In that sense we can all aim to be kings, as Gurdjieff says, A & E p. 1236: “each one of us must set for his chief aim to become in the process of our collective life a master. But not a master (meaning) one who has many slaves and much money . . . but in the sense (of) . . . devout acts towards those around him ...” 182

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During his banishment Dio “could no longer depend upon his property in Prusa for support and . . . had to make a practical test of the tenets of the Cynics and lead the simple life.” (Loeb introduction.) Hardship did injure his health. Other discourses about Diogenes are attributed to this fourteen years. The eighth begins: “When Diogenes was exiled from his native Sinope, he came to Athens, looking like the veriest beggar; and there he found a goodly number still of Socrates’ companions . . .” “After Antisthenes’ death he moved to Corinth . . . because the city was situated as it were at the crossroads of Greece. Accordingly, just as the good physician should go and offer his services where the sick are most numerous, so, said he, the man of wisdom should take up his abode where fools are thickest . . .” “Luke, the beloved physician,” Colossians 4.14? Diogenes camped out in the Craneion, of which the footnote says: “Suburb and aristocratic quarter of Corinth with cypress grove and gymnasium. In it near the city gate Diogenes’ tomb was shown even in the time of Pausanias.” Kraneion is close to that newly-learned word Kranion, skull; is that something? Diogenes went to the Isthmian games, among writers reading their works aloud, poets reciting, jugglers, fortune-tellers, lawyers innumerable, and pedlars. He gathered a crowd too, saying he was surprised that if he had claimed to be a physician for the teeth or the eyes, people would flock to him, but no one would listen to him to be cured of folly, wickedness and intemperance. He said he had come to take part in the contest, wrestling against hardship, and against pleasure. “Or do you think those pot-bellies are good for anything? — creatures whom sensible people ought to lead around, subject to the ceremony of purification, and then thrust beyond the borders . . .” The footnote, taken from Jane Harrison’s “Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion”, says the community was purified on Thargelion 6th (May 24th) by two pharmakoi or scape-men, so that Apollo might be received on the 7th. The Hebrew scapegoat for atonement is in Leviticus 16. Hardships are like dogs, who “pursue and bite people who run away . . . but fear and slink away from men who face them . . . and in the end wag their tails . . .” More dogs! Heracles “did not look at all like any of these athletes; . . No 183

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... lean like a lion . . . having no use for bed, shawl, or rug, clad in a dirty skin, with an air of hunger about him, as he succoured the good and punished the bad.” Ancestor of Robin Hood. Diogenes’ speech ended with Heracles cleaning away the dung in the Augean stables. “ ‘For he (Heracles) considered that he ought to fight stubbornly and war against opinion as much as against wild beasts and wicked men.’ While Diogenes thus spoke, many ... listened . . . with great pleasure. Then, possibly with this thought of Heracles in his mind, he ceased speaking and, squatting on the ground, performed an indecent act, whereat the crowd . . . called him crazy, and again the sophists raised their din, like frogs in a pond when they do not see the water snake.” Disciple of Aristophanes. Augean stables, prototype temple cleansing. Dio’s sixth Discourse is also about Diogenes, who thought hunger was the best appetiser; he got more pleasure from a barley cake than others did from the costliest foods. That on which men spend most money he found least expensive. “For he did not have to go anywhere for his sexual gratification but, as he humorously put it, he found Aphrodite everywhere, without expense; . . he gave a public demonstration before the eyes of all . . . Fish showed themselves more sensible than men almost; for whenever they needed to eject their sperm, they went out of doors and rubbed themselves against something rough ... In a joking way he would say that this sort of intercourse was a discovery made by Pan when he was in love with Echo and could not get hold of her, but roamed over the mountains night and day till Hermes in pity at his distress, since he was his son, taught him the trick. So Pan, when he had learned his lesson, was relieved of his great misery; and the shepherds learned the habit from him.” May not masturbation be used occasionally to discharge what has arisen? But not as habit. Inhibitions have their uses. Churches over-blackened masturbation, unmarried and homo-sex partly, we suggest, because of arrheton. The goal is not only physical, but purity of heart — conscience. Dio’s eleventh Discourse begins: “I am almost certain that while all men are hard to teach, they are easy to deceive.” He then turns Homer upside-down. 184

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Fragments of Dio from Stobaeus’s Anthology: “For while the begetting of offspring is an act of necessity, their rearing is an act of love.” (Loeb Dio V, p. 351.) “But wifely piety is love of husband.” (p. 349. Compare I. Cor. 11 and Eph. 5.22-23.) “Christians who are in sympathy with . . . Christian Socialism find most of their texts in Luke’s gospel”, wrote Dean Inge (Every Man’s Bible p. xxix, 1931). Luke aimed to increase popular appeal and does bear a responsibility for the abuse of compassion. Toynbee (p. 488) refers to royal lineage being a correspondence between the lives of Jesus and Josephus. The latter claims descent from a daughter of one of the Maccabee brothers (Life 1). On examination two generations are found to span 140 years, Matthias Curtus being about 67 when his son Joseph was born, and Joseph about 73 when his son Matthias, father of our Josephus, was born in the 10th year of Archelaus. He gives his own birth as in the first year of Caius (Caligula), A.D. 37. Josephus’ adventures during the revolt in Galilee are very confusing, and almost too good to be true. The principal men of Jerusalem sent him and two other priests to persuade the ill men in Galilee to disarm (Life 7). He wrote to the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem for instructions (12); he attempted to make a speech to the multitude at Tiberias, “standing on a certain elevated place”, but his domestics persuaded him to escape by ship (17, 18). The whole multitude of Galileans begged him to stay with them; he was moved with compassion, ordered 5,000 to come to him armed and with provisions and sent the rest away to their own homes (42, 43). The siege of Jotapata, Josephus’ cunning over the suicide pact, and his prophecy to Vespasian that he would become emperor, are told in “The Jewish War”. After the tall ot Jerusalem Titus showed favours to Josephus, one being to allow him to have taken down three acquaintances he saw among crucified captives at Thecoa (Life 75). The New Testament echoes were maddening. Who was copying whom? At last it seemed they were in collusion. Josephus is one of the Fathers of Christianity. It was for this Vespasian set him up in a house in Rome, like Ignatius Loyola organising the Society of Jesus. He is seen as Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, who does not appear in Mark, and Joseph of Arimathea, who

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does: phu-phu-kle (p. 39 above). In Mark 14.51-52, there was at Gethsemane, “a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.” Tradition says he may have been Mark. A connection was eventually found with the Old Testament Joseph who left his garment in the hand of Potiphar’s wife and fled. Another Joseph. But could Josephus have written Mark, taken to be the earliest of the four gospels?

If the precocity of Jesus and Josephus was taken from Socrates, and Simeon’s blessing from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Josephus’ account of his own education is like that of Cicero. In his Life Josephus says that when he was about 16 he made trial of all three Jewish sects as well as spending three years with the hermit Banus, yet he returned to the city at 19, when he joined the Pharisees, who were of kin to the sect of the Stoics. According to J. M. Ross (Penguin Cicero, The Nature of the Gods); “Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-one Cicero had a very good philosophical education from the best Greek teachers”. These were the Epicurean Phaedrus with his sweetness and charm of character, Philo the head of the Academy, who came to Rome as a political refugee, and the Stoic Diodotus, who spent the rest of his life with Cicero’s family. One reason for thinking that Epictetus might be G’s Father Giovanni (Saucer pp. 42 and 133) and author of St. John’s gospel, was a “Bishop’s Candlestick — Victor Hugo” episode, of the forgiveness of a thief. “I also had lately an iron lamp set beside the images of the Gods; hearing a noise at the door, I ran down, and found the lamp carried off. I reflected that the thief’s impulse was not unnatural. What then? Tomorrow, I said, thou wilt find an earthen lamp.” It is from Epictetus, translated by T. W. Rolleston, Camelot Series, inherited, no date, p. 80. This linked, perhaps unreasonably, with a story reported by Eusebius (III. 23) from Clement of Alexandria about St. John who, like Epictetus, was banished by Domitian, but to Patmos. After Domitian’s death he worked in Ephesus. A promising young Christian found bad companions, and then formed a band of brigands, being himself a born chief. When John heard of it, 186

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he rode straight to the place, and was seized by the sentinel; John asked for the leader, who was ashamed when he saw the old man. “Why do you run away from me, child? . . . You have still hope of life. I will account to Christ for you. If it must be, I will willingly suffer your death . . .” John stayed with him till repentance was fully established. Josephus’s Antiquities and Against Apion are addressed to a most excellent Epaphroditus as Luke and Acts are to a most excellent Theophilus. Whiston’s notes quote a Dr. Hudson and Grotius, that this Epaphroditus cannot be the freedman of Nero, executed by Domitian in his fourteenth (or fifteenth) year of rule. The Nero Epaphroditus was the owner of Epictetus, so the name might be used for the latter. It seems to mean “cheerful” (Mead I, p. 60. 4.3.79 Met the name in Plutarch’s Sulla, Penguin p. 95. When writing to Greeks the Dictator called himself “Epaphroditus” or “Favourite of Venus”.) The Epistle to the Philippians has in chapters 2 and 4 an Epaphroditus, their messenger, who had been sick, nigh unto death. Epictetus was lame and of weakly health. Oh, could he be Gurdjieffs “weak friend” (Third Series p. 10) who rescued him on a donkey like the Samaritan? “What are you doing, you Jericho jackass?” (A & E p. 21) was one of the first intimations of Biblical connection. Like the Kurd we must go on eating our red peppers. Baron von Hiigel’s article on the Gospel of St. John says: “the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, though admittedly earlier, are of the same school, and, with the great Pauline Epistles, show many preformations of Johannine phrases and ideas.” It was tentatively suggested that Epictetus worked on the Epistles. On “supposed resemblance between Stoicism and Christianity” Foakes-Jackson quotes Epictetus on p. 192: “To have God for our maker and father and guardian, should not that emancipate us from all sadness and from all fear?” and: “When you have shut your door and darkened your room say not to yourself that you are alone. God is in your room and your attendant genius likewise. Think not that they need the light to see what you do.” Compare Matthew 6.6. Here are some active reasonings from Epictetus. A dialogue 187

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with Agamemnon: “ ‘Shall we be, then, despised of the Trojans?’ ‘Of the Trojans? Of what manner of men? of wise men or fools? If of wise men, why do ye make war with them? if of fools, why do ye heed them?’ ” (Rolleston p. 28). Gurdjieffs active reasoning, February 13, 1923, at the Prieure, is similar. It is in Views from the Real World and in C. S. Nott’s Teachings of Gurdjieff, and was quoted Saucer p. 92. “For nothing can be gained without paying for it . . . your servant . . . may not obey. For him, indeed, that is not well, but for you it is altogether well that he have not the power to trouble your mind.” (Rolleston p. 87.) “. . . the Divine Law ... to use what is given him, and not to covet what is not given; to yield up easily and willingly what is taken away, giving thanks for the time that he has had it at his service.” (p. 82.) “Remember that thou art an actor in a play . . . thine it is to act well the allotted part, but to choose it is another’s.” (p. 90.) “How, then, shall one preserve at once both a steadfast and tranquil mind, and also carefulness of things, that he be not heedless or slovenly? If he take example of dice players . . . carefully and skilfully to make use of what is thrown, that is where my proper business begins . . . ‘Outward things are not in my power; to will is in my power. Where shall I seek the Good, and where the Evil? Within me — in all that is my own.’ But of all that is alien to thee call nothing good nor evil nor profitable nor hurtful . . .” (p. 46.) Biblical echoes:- The true Cynic “must be flogged like an ass, and, being flogged, must love those who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of all mankind . . . Doth he call upon any other than God? Is he not persuaded, whatsoever things he may suffer, that he is being trained and exercised by God9” (p-31.) “Solitude is the state of one who is helpless . . . Therefore when we are on a journey we then, above all, say that we are solitary when we are fallen among thieves; for that which taketh away solitude is ... a faithful and pious and serviceable man. . . Caesar seemeth to have given us a great peace . . . But can he give us peace from fever? or from shipwreck ... or from love ... grief . . . envy? . . But the word of the philosophers doth promise 188

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us peace even from these things . . . ‘If ye will hearken unto me, O men, wheresoever ye be, ye shall live untroubled ...’ Whosoever hath this peace . . . which God proclaimed through his word, shall he not suffice to himself when he may be alone?.. Whoso hath these things to think on, and seeth the sun and the moon and the stars, and rejoiceth in the earth and the sea, he is no more solitary than he is helpless.” (pp. 133-5.) “No great thing cometh suddenly into being, for not even a bunch of grapes can, or a fig. If you say to me now: I desire a fig . . . let it first of all flower, and then bring forth the fruit, and then ripen.” (p. 20.) One of Toynbee’s quotations from Epictetus includes: “remind yourself that the being whom you love is mortal ... It has been given to you only temporarily ... It is like a fig or a bunch of grapes that one has at the appointed season: and if one goes on craving for it in wintertime, one is a fool.” (Toynbee p. 147.) “You are a citizen of the Universe and a member of it . . . one of those in authority; for you have the intelligence to follow the divine economy . . . What, then, is the citizen’s vocation? It is to have no private interests of his own . . . but rather to act as one’s hand or foot would act if they were reasonable beings . . ." (Toynbee p. 336.) Epictetus attended the lectures of a Stoic, Musonius Rufus. Tacitus calls him an Etruscan. (Did they tend to red hair? Red­ heads do tend to early baldness.) After telling of the leading Romans required by Nero to commit suicide w hen Piso’s plot was betrayed by Milichus, Tacitus comes to those who were merely banished, with or without confiscation of property. “Two more, Verginius Flavus and Gaius Musonius Rufus, went because of their distinction as professors of rhetoric and philosophy.” 6th April 1975. Sunday breakfast: now would be the time to write out the snippets about Musonius Rufus. Associating about names, possibly from the goddess Gaia for Nature met twice recently and whether Gaius could come from it, there was a jump. Gaius or Caius Musonius Rufus, C M R spells Marc, this is the M.R. Mr. Mystery Man who wrote Mark? But did he? The introduction to the Loeb Dio says that Dio reached Rome in the time of Vespasian. Dio was then a Sophist and seems to have attacked Musonius, but finally was converted by him and

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became one of the company of Stoics in Rome. Dio Volume 5 includes testimony by other writers. One is from Lucian’s Death of Peregrinus, about Christians. “However, this too brought him (Peregrinus) renown, and he was on everybody's tongue, ‘the philosopher who was exiled for his frankness and extreme independence’; and in this particular he came close to Musonius and Dio and Epictetus and anyone else who found himself in like situation.” The linking of Musonius, Dio and Epictetus is noteworthy. Lucian in the Penguin selection (which dates Lucian’s birth shortly before A.D. 117) is very lively. He wrote space fiction, with a visit to the Islands of the Blest, where “None of the Stoics were present. Rumour had it that they were still clambering up the steep hill of Virtue . . .” p. 279. Only fragments of Musonius’ known writings have survived. Toynbee quotes one (p. 356) in Greek, not the Latin which one might have expected, rediscovered on a papyrus. “Layman: ‘That is all very well; but I am a poor man — financially destitute — and I have a swarm of children. Where am I going to find the means to bring them up?’ Philosopher: ‘Well, how do these little birds that are much more destitute than you are — the swallows and nightingales and larks and blackbirds — manage to bring up their young? Homer, too, has something to say about that: “And as a bird proffers a morsel, when at last she gets one, to her unfledged young, though she is sore an hungred herself . . .” (Iliad IX, 323-4). Are these creatures superior to Man in intelligence? The question can only be answered in the negative. Well, are they superior in physical strength? The answer is in the negative a fortiori. Well, do the birds store food and hoard it?’ ” Toynbee compares it with Luke 12, Psalm 147 and Job 38, which are about ravens, and with Aristophanes’ Birds and Matthew 6.26 as quoted p. 71 above. It may be claimed to show links between Aristophanes’ bird-kingdom of heaven, the Gospels and Musonius, particularly as the advice is not actually sensible. This person resists it and prefers Aesop's Ant and Grasshopper. If man wants to eat in winter he must work in summer. On the opposite page (357) Toynbee gives a correspondence, “dogs who feed on the scraps that fall from the feast”, in the (highly fictional) life of Apollonius ofTyana (not far from Tarsus) the long-lived 1st century A.D. neo-Pythagorean, by Flavius 190

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Philostratus, born about A.D. 170; Apollonius was mentioned p. 23 above). Toynbee links this with Aeschylus who said his tragedies were “slices from the great banquets of Homer” (according to Athenaeus of around 200 A.D.), and with the Syrophenician woman of Mark 7: “the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” See also Luke 16.21. Gurdjieffs “idea-table”, with crumbs and kennels (A & E p. 1188) is close to the gospel. (Gilbert Murray, article Homer, says Aeschylus’s remark “is true if ‘Homer’ means the heroic tradition, markedly untrue if it means the Iliad and Odyssey.”) Philostratus has several references to Musonius which tell little but keep the name alive. One calls him Musonius of Babylon. The Penguin footnote says “a corruption in the text may be suspected.” Babylon is a name with subconscious interest, perhaps from containing Baby — only now did it echo Biblion, book. Perhaps it is sometimes used as a code for Bible. Later he is correctly named Musonius the Etruscan, confined by Nero on the island called Gyara; it had been waterless before but Musonius discovered a fountain. In Book V. 19 there is another version of the exile: Musonius was seen in chains at the Isthmus of Corinth digging the canal. “ ‘Does it pain you, Demetrius, to see me digging the Isthmus for the good of Greece? What would you have felt if you had seen me playing the lyre like Nero?’ There are other even more admirable remarks of Musonius, but I had better not mention them. I do not want to be thought to be drawing an unwise comparison between myself and the man who made them so off­ handedly.” The Life of Apollonius was written at the suggestion of the Empress Julia Domna, daughter of a priest of Baal. The introduction (p. 20) to the Penguin abridgement says it “has been infrequently translated into English. In 1680 Charles Blount published a version of the first two books . . . But he never released the rest because of an outcry ... It would appear that publication in the vernacular was considered a threat to the Christian religion.” On a first reading the most interesting point was conversation at Alexandria between Vespasian, who had just become emperor, and Apollonius, Dio Chrysostom and another philosopher,

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Euphrates. “Dio was a graceful talker, who avoided quarrels and had a charm in his speech like the perfume that comes from a temple: and he also had the gift of extraordinary improvisation.” At his goodbye to Apollonius the emperor said “You will remember me, won’t you?” “Of course,” was the reply, “if you remain a good emperor and remember yourself." (V. 37.)

It was felt this pointed to conversations at Alexandria between Vespasian and, at any rate, Josephus, in which the emperor agreed secretly to sponsor the new gentler religion in Rome. Suetonius tells a surprising story (quoted Saucer p. 164) of healing miracles performed by Vespasian at Alexandria, which may be another indication of this significant meeting. 24 April 1975. A tiresome wakefulness before midnight on 22nd produced only the realisation that tomorrow was St. George’s Day. Meant to read Cicero’s Dream of Scipio but spent most of the time on his Laelius: On Friendship. First thing on 24th, muttering Cicero, which, one read somewhere, should be pronounced Kikero . . . adding crow as often before — Oh, Gurdjieff’s crows on the planet Saturn, Gornahoor Harharkh (A & E p. 151) and his son, godson of Beelzebub — and their mellifluous small voices — and Cicero can be made to spell Georgi. Unfortunately it is the being-bird raven that they resemble (A & E p. 92), a mistake made before because of wanting crow to spell work. However, both in the chapter Arch-preposterous about experiments with the omnipresent Okidanokh, and in the chapter Electricity, friendship is stressed. On p. 92 their beautiful utterance and on p. 1154 Rhakhoorkh’s “angelically musical voice” are mentioned, and on p. 152 that they spoke in dialects still unknown to Hassein. “Red copper” catches the eye several times in the description of the experiment: it could be for Musonius Rufus. On p. 176 there is “giving-one’s-word-of-honornot-to-poke-one’s-nose-into-the-affairs-of-the-authorities”; just what one is doing, not without fear.

On pp. 165-6 Beelzebub confesses that when Harharkh floundered in “that absolutely empty space” he, Beelzebub, felt “a criminally egoistic anxiety for the safety of my personal existence.” Marcus Tullius Cicero (born Jan. 3rd 106 B.C., killed Dec. 7th 43 B.C.) has been accused of cowardice in avoiding political dangers; but not in 192

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his Philippics attacking Mark Antony. In the Triumvirs’ proscriptions Cicero was on the list of those to die. He was being carried to a ship in his litter when the soldiers caught him. On Antony’s orders his head and his right hand, with which he had penned his invectives, were cut off and nailed up in the Forum. (Plutarch, Antony, 20. In his Cicero it is “hands”.) It calls up the over-harsh text of Matthew 5.30: “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee . ..” There are some crows, a flight of them settled on the rigging on Cicero’s last voyage, a bad omen. 18 November 1975. Who could be Harharkh’s son, thanks to whom his father, once considered a “great-scientist”, was now a “has-been", who “is-already-sitting-in-an-old-American-galosh” (p. 166)? Could it be Quintilian, a “son” in that he so extolled Cicero? Though less known to us, he could, if he collaborated in the gospels, be said to surpass Cicero anonymously. 25th. Huckleberry Finn is itself a kind of Odyssey. Huck and Jim seem to drift on and on for ever down that river. Mark Twain? Two Marks? Katharine and Musonius, or Musonius and Plutarch, or even Musonius and Quintilian? Quintilian really is a Mark, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a Spaniard like Seneca. (General Franco died last week, after prolonged medical torture.) Is that the answer? Mark’s gospel was written, or launched, by collaboration of a committee of four, Musonius, probably the eldest, Quintilian, Josephus, and Plutarch the youngest, four gospel makers in a different sense? But then what about Alexandria? Was it just the outline that Josephus brought? How were the Gospels launched? Captive audiences, the slaves of great households, is one possibility. There may already have been Gnostic groups. How did a teaching of almost excessive gentleness become an authoritarian church persecuting dissidents? Probably it is inherent in human nature, but did the elements of deception and fostering by Roman bureaucracy contribute? The demand for faith was present from the start: Mark 1.1. says firmly, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . .” Chance discovery in Quintilian X. 1. 58-9. He argues that taste should first be formed on the best writers only, by reading that is deep rather than wide, “just as at banquets we take our till of the best fare and then turn to other food which, in spite of its

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comparative inferiority, is still attractive owing to its variety.” It suggests the favourite miracle at the marriage in Cana (John 2): “When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine ... the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Was he a symposiarch? Found it in faithful old Concise Oxford dictionary: “President of symposium, toast master”. That would be Gurdjieff’s Director. Symposium is not banquet but specifically drinking party, posis = drinking. Von Hiigel says of John’s gospel that “a date somewhere about 105 would satisfy tradition.” Quintilian “probably died not long before the accession of Nerva” in 96 (encyclopaedia) i.e. aged about 60; or, according to the Loeb introduction: “He died full of honour, the possessor of wide lands and consular rank. The date of his death is unknown, but it was before 100 A.D.” Epictetus was expelled from Rome with other “philosophers” by Domitian in 90 (Encyclopaedia) or 94 (Rolleston). He settled at Nicopolis, in western Greece. Titus 3.12: “be diligent to come unto me to Nicopolis: for 1 have determined there to winter.” If Josephus’ Antiquities were finished in the 13th of Domitian (93 A.D.) and Dio was in exile from 82 till the killing of Domitian in 96, does it mean Luke and Acts were written before 82? Josephus is polished off in ?95 A.D., age about 58. Is there any evidence except the date of Antiquities? It seems more likely Dio wrote after his own experiences of “missionary journeys”. In his Life of Cato the Elder (17) Plutarch tells of a drinking party: “On this occasion the youth was reclining, as he usually did, next to Lucius and serving up flattery to his patron” — which could echo John 13.23: “Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” In Cato 22 Carneades the Academic came as an ambassador to Rome “and before long the city was filled as if by a rushing, mighty wind with the sound of his praises.” Acts 2.2, Pentecost: “there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind . . .” So it could be argued that Acts and John were known to Plutarch when he wrote this life. When was it? Rex Warner’s 194

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Introduction to six of the lives in “Fall of the Roman Republic” says “Like Tacitus, whom he may have known (Plutarch) wrote his historical works rather late in life, during the period of the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian — a time when, after a long lapse, something in the nature of free speech (providing that the imperial idea was respected) was encouraged.” 13.7.76. Let’s cheat and put it in here. The pressure was to get written out, however clumsily, More Plays and Four Gospelmakers, as if it could help to break the drought! Finished yesterday, no sign of rain here. The recently found dating points from Quintilian's feast and Plutarch’s Cato were seen as precarious. Worse! “They” are cunning. More than that is precarious. Seems to be wrong that Epictetus wrote St. John’s gospel, an early conclusion not re-examined. Mind a blank, thinks it deserves a holiday. Another quick look at Von Hugel's article, by no means properly studied. Wander to window . . . cut down the buddleia branches which have been dead for some weeks. Several Philo references in the article: the Word or Logos derived from Heracleitus and Stoics via Philo, the paraclete in Philo is the intelligible universe, allegorism from Philo to Origen. In the light of what has been found this year, it must be Philo who wrote this gospel. The beloved disciple — Philo does mean friend or lover. Tarry till I come — a feeling has grown that Philo was still alive in 70 A.D., may have introduced Josephus to Vespasian. Then epistles would be the main contribution of Epictetus. But the Epistle to the Hebrews is conceivably also by Philo. The “chateau” where Gurdjieff learnt his 21 toasts may link with Philo’s Therapeutae as well as with John’s 21 chapters. Late dating of John’s gospel and confusion between John the Apostle and John the Presbyter are a smokescreen, together with the too early dating of Philo. What a subtle game theologians play! This article is a good one. careful analysis of the book and where it differs from the synoptics, survey of criticism, and hints which put you on the track when you are ready for it but pass unnoticed when you are not. The casual way in which the Baron chose a date to satisfy tradition should have been noticed. Stephen and Katharine, who seemed to have disappeared, are rescued. Their story may have contributed to John’s incidents, 195

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the marriage at Cana, the woman taken in adultery, the woman of Samaria, the raising of Lazarus. It is suggested S and K were used to renew the underground source of mystical experience, whatever that is. (October 1980. Alas, Philo for John’s Gospel seems to have been another case of jumping to premature conclusions.) 13-16 July 1976. Dream before midnight: “Fire! . . still smouldering behind that picture.’’ It is “John’s heraldry”, coat of arms drawn by nephew John while unemployed. A pun from a dream, John’s gospel now appears earliest of our four. Remembered about breaking a useful glass jar. Wasn't something found about “in a glass darkly”? Could now start that scripture index. No other results from John’s heraldry on 14th. On 15th work has gone stale. Realise Nicopolis in Titus 3.12 would mean that was written after Epictetus’s banishment. Read article by J. Moffatt on Pastoral Epistles (2 Timothies and Titus). One view is that they contain “extracts from Paul’s correspondence, but largely expanded and edited . . .” Then J. V. Bartlet on Hebrews: “The Old Testament is cited after the Alexandrian version . . . The author was, in fact, a Hellenist . . .” “. . . the divergencies from Philo’s spirit are as notable as the affinities.” Try Moffatt on Romans. “. . . now it is high time to awake out of sleep . . .”(13.11). List of greetings, 16.13: “Salute Rufus chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.” It sounds like “that man’s father is my father's son”, the old riddle. Reference to Mark 15.21: “And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, . . the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross.” The sons are not mentioned in Matthew or Luke, in John Jesus carries his own cross. Rufus could be the signature to Mark’s gospel and the epistle to the Romans? Thunder brought a good rain that night. Was it wrong to think Plutarch’s essays on Talkativeness and On Being a Busybody meant he wrote the epistle of James as suggested Saucer p. 87? The epistle to the Romans, different in style from Corinthians, was thought to be by Plutarch, but now appears likely to be by Musonius Rufus, at least in parts. Romans 13: “the powers that be are ordained of God . . . Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due . . .” It could be that this links with the denarius incident: “Render to

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Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Mark 12.17) which may have been devised by Musonius. Matthew 17.24 adds a doublet, the Herodotus-Polycrates-ring-like incident of finding tribute money in a fish. This is surprising, Romans 3.7: “For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am 1 also judged as a sinner?” Is Matthew’s gospel likely to be as “late” as Luke? It is thought not, because Herod's killing of his own family and the wise men confusion, held to relate to the Matthew birth story, are in both Josephus’ earlier Jewish War, and the Antiquities. Whereas the echo of the Lukan Samaritan parable in the Stephanus incident (p. 129 above) is stronger in Antiquities; “robbed Stephanus, a servant of Caesar, as he was journeying, and plundered him of all that he had with him” (XX.5.4). In War 11.12.2 it is: “at the public road of Beth-horen, one Stephen, a servant of Caesar, carried some furniture, which the robbers fell upon and seized.” If Josephus helped to devise the Matthew birth story, his collaboration probably also shows in the many Old Testament prophecies quoted in Matthew, though they do not correspond exactly with our Hebrew Text. Here is a way to harmonise the dates. Take the encyclopaedia's 90 A.D. for Epictetus’ exile. Suppose that Josephus did “winter in Nicopolis” with Epictetus in 90-91 or 91-92; Dio could have been there if his banishment was from Italy; Plutarch’s home at Chaeronea was not so very far. Then Luke and Acts could have been planned that winter, together with correspondences in Josephus and Epistles. The favourable times of Trajan and Hadrian would have been used for propaganda and expansion after the writing and preparation. If Epictetus wrote the parts of the Epistles with longer sentences and poetic intensity he was the most original. “We are fools for Christ’s sake ... we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place; And labour, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it ... we are made as the filth of the world . . .” (I Cor. 4.10-13). “Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift.” (11 Cor. 9.15). Arrheton? “I knew a man in Christ . . . caught up to the third heaven . . . and heard unspeakable words . . . And lest I should be exalted 197

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above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh . . . Most gladly therefore will 1 rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me . . . when I am weak, then am 1 strong.” (II Cor. 12.) An advocate of intentional suffering going beyond Stoic endurance.

II Cor. 4.12-5.3: “So then death worketh in us, but life in you . . . though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day ... we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen ... we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: If so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.” This clothing may relate to Gurdjieff’s word “coating” of the higher bodies, as well as to the wedding garment of the parable, Matthew 22.11. The personal messages in Colossians 4 include, as well as “Luke, the beloved physician”, an Epaphras (which could be a shortening of Epaphroditus) who has zeal for the Colossians and them in Laodicea and Hierapolis. The latter is supposed to be the birthplace of Epictetus, though Toynbee questions whether it was the Phrygian or the N. Syrian Hierapolis. Both were important centres of goddess worship. The house of Stephanas, first fruits of Achaia (1 Cor. 1.16, 16.15 and 17) may be noted for the Stephen question. These personal messages recall the BBC war-time jumbles which included code instructions to the French Resistance. There is also a message from “Marcus, sister's son to Barnabas” in Colossians 4.10. Acts 12, 13 and 15 do not say John Mark was Barnabas’s nephew. In Acts 23.16 we hear of a “Paul’s sister’s son”. These nephews raise the question of whether Josephus could have been a nephew or a relative of Philo, and so a native of Alexandria, not Jerusalem. In his “Life” Josephus claims to belong to the chief family of the first course of priests (therefore of the tribe of Levi), so he could call himself “an Hebrew of the Hebrews”, if not “of the tribe of Benjamin” (Philippians 3.5 and Romans 11.1). For our Gentile epistle

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writers it was more truthful to say: “unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews” (I Corinthians 9.20). Cannot recall any reference to Philo having wife or child, so he may have been celibate. Josephus details his own three marriages and names three surviving sons, in Life 75, 76. 20.7.76. Time to return to January’s interruption? No peroration? Let's just repeat the plea for a psychology not afraid to point out defects in human nature — sins, such as dishonesty, desire to dominate, and its opposite, persecution complex. Too much ego, whether inflated or injured.

Materialists, which is all of us when “asleep”, are unaware that there is an ethical dimension. People with sore “Es” could be told they are lucky, it is a call to wake up. Slim the ego to feed the real “1". 25-27 October 1976. Afterthought on completing revision: Josephus could have written the Epistle of Clement of Rome? Then perhaps the Epistle of Barnabus, or some of the minor epistles in the canon? Clement I has been dated around 96 A.D.; it shows a thorough knowledge of the Old Testament. Barnabas “belongs to the end of the first or beginning of the second century”; “the writer carries a symbolical exegisis as far as did Philo” (Loeb Apostolic Fathers 1). It is included in the New Testament by the Codex Sinaiticus.

Barnabas reinterprets Jewish law. Eat cloven hoofed and ruminant animals means: consort “with those who know that meditation is a work of gladness, and who ruminate on the word of the Lord. But what does ‘the cloven hoofed’ mean? That the righteous both walks in this world and looks forward to the holy age.” (Loeb p. 379.) “ ‘Circumcise the hardness of your heart', . . . every Syrian and Arab and all priests of the idols have been circumcised; are then these also within (the Jews') covenant? — indeed even the Egyptians belong to the circumcision." Barnabas goes on to quote Genesis 17: “And Abraham circumcised from his household eighteen men and three hundred.” He explains that 18 is 1 H. the first 2 letters of Jesus, and 300 is T, the cross. “No one has heard a more excellent lesson from me, but I know that you are worthy.” (p. 373.) In Greek letter numerals iota is ten,

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TOYNBEE

eta eight. Our Authorised Version from the Hebrew does not give the number circumcised though in Genesis 14.14. Abram “armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen . . .” Still no author for the letters of Ignatius (= the man who was kindled?) and Polycarp. Dio? The Martyrdom of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, is moving but is it, with its voice from heaven and miraculous dove and coincident resemblances to the Passion of Christ, “obviously genuine”? (Loeb Apostolic Fathers II. p. 309) A police captain is named Herod. It is in Luke that Pilate refers Jesus to Herod, the ruler of Galilee. When the Pro-Consul pressed Polycarp: “ ‘Take the oath and 1 let you go, revile Christ,’ Polycarp said: ‘For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?’ ” (p. 325). A thought: could 86 be Philo’s age at his death? It is to be claimed (wrongly!) in a later section that he originated martyr-stories. “Mathete”, “Learn” caught the eye in Barnabas, pp. 354-5. Although the language is wrong the feeling persists that the name Matthew was chosen for its Greek associations, as in mathematics. Matthew was a tax-collector. Philo's father was Alabarch, believed to mean tax-farmer for the Arab side. Could it be argued that the three Matthiases in Josephus’s list of 5 generations of his ancestors connects him with Philo’s taxcollecting family? 19 August 1977. “When is the rain going to stop?” "Christmas , answered the milkman. Yet another revision. Shortened the Clement Eusebius story of St. John and the brigand (p. 160 above), whose formulation gave so much difficulty and which hadn’t much point. Have perhaps after all cut out just the part that mattered? Tiresome! Long wanted a link for Gurdjieff's Caucasus brigand example of crystallisation (In Search p. 32), but found nothing definite. Suppose Clement’s old apostle John is Philo. He commended the young man, strong, beautiful and warm-hearted, to “the bishop who had been appointed”, at Smyrna according to footnote. The presbyter, called bishop immediately above as footnote points out, took to his house the young man entrusted to him. But dissolute companions led the young man on from

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THEORIES UNSTUCK!

expensive feasts to night robbery; like an unbroken horse he “rushed all the more to the precipice because of his natural vigour . . . and now he planned nothing small . . .” The newly appointed bishop could be Vespasian, who had just been elected emperor when Philo recommended Josephus to him. Josephus did write of his adventures as war-leader to Galileans. Does the interpretation tell anything new? It suggests the role of Josephus as a leader who gathered the band of writers and others necessary for launching Roman Christianity. 2 April 1979. Another peroration, to plead for Impartial Mentation. Think for yourself, but don’t be in a hurry to act! 9 March 1980 and 26 February 1981. Authorship theories of chapter 13 have come unstuck but the characters are still relevant, and their writings do contain Bible correspondences. 3 November 1980. First class BBC talk by Christopher Butler, auxiliary R.C. Bishop of Westminster, to start a series on: “Can man live without God?” God not as super dictator but as central mystery. Some reference to literary criticism. This literary criticism does destroy faith in man-made dogma of any particular religion, but we claim that as it unfolds it discloses a total action too complex to be invented by human brains unaided. 7 and 26 February 1981. It still seems correct that Aristobulus of Paneas, working at Alexandria around 160 B.C., was the first Old Testament writer, and that he did create literary parallels.

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