Course XXVIII - Teaching 11: The Greeks

In the Egean islands, a barbaric people grew up, which would become origin of the Celts and founder of Greece.
Seemingly, destiny will leave in the deepest darkness and abandonment those peoples that had to be founders of great races and glorious dynasties.
These half-savage peoples that were unaware of writing, arts or social system, lived totally in contact with Nature and practiced a purely human and external religion, which was a residue of the early Aryan religion.
They transformed any power of Nature and any manifestation of life into a divinity. They were unaware of a Unique God or an Initiated King to rule over earth like that of the Egyptians of Pharaohs. They established clans, and Greece never was as great as when it was ruled as a republic.
Greece was formed with these Egean, Ionian and Dorian tribes.
Its oldest memories are told in two national epics: the Iliad, which describes the destruction of Troy, and the Odyssey, which sings Ulysses’ adventures.
Great cities emerge around temples of different divinities, and they are at the same time religious and legislative heads of these peoples, among them, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos and Mileto. Greece progressed and extended until the southern part of Italy, called Magna Graecia.
Zeus, son of Rhea, inspire a feeling of strength that has to win at all costs.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love, born of sea foam, grants to them their right to pleasure and life. Demeter, the goddess of earth and fertility, assures them the fruit of a work properly done.
And the Olympus, mount of Macedonia, becomes a paradise where many gods stay and where youth and happiness become perennial.
The Greeks defeated the Persians and later they became more and more strong and great, and in times of Alexander, son of the King Philip of Macedonia, their splendor reached the acme.
Alexander founded a city in Egypt, which would be seat of the new Ptolomaic Empire and established there the greatest and riches museum and library that contained learned and historic documents never seen before by Humanity.
As Greece grew greater, it acquired knowledge about the unity of God.
The greatest philosophers will come from Greece: first, Socrates, later sentenced to death for believing in a Unique God; and later, Plato, his disciple, who in such a wonderful way declared the existence of a supreme being and explained the hidden meaning of different Greek divinities. Aristotle, Xenophon and many others came later.
The Greek wisdom is prophetically synthesized by Pythagoras. He explains the Vedic sense of eternity and the creational aspect of the universe with mathematical accurateness.
No religion explains, like the Greek religion, the purity and simplicity of the early worship of the Aryans. Natural forces that gradually are incorporated and transformed into living persons and divinities, are so beautiful that thousands and thousands of years after the disappearance of the Greeks and of their religion, continue to live in treatises by philosophers that are studied until our days, and in art testimonies immortalized by those legends.
In the ancient Greece, the true worship of gods, images and ceremonies began on the period called Mycenian. But Greek idols reached their acme just in the Hellenic era.
The Hellenic era is composed of Eolian, Ionian and Dorian dynasties. The union of these three forces makes the ancient Greece thrive in religion, poetry, sculpture and music, since the Hellenic worship is a result of fine arts, and fine arts are not a consequence of the worship like in other religions. Any force, impulse and courageous action come along with arts and create a god.
You can see this in the birth of popular mythology. Chronos and the ancient Titans are civilization in its infancy and culture in its beginning, since Zeus, the Great God, emerges from this uneducated and strong people.
Now he is a God, symbol of strength, order, victory and law established for the progress and grandeur of the Greek.
In the Olympus, which is his kingdom, he assembles divinities of all kinds –of air, sea, earth, heaven and hell.
He is the Absolute One that contains in his invulnerable fist, in his unbreakable will, any human and divine power, according to the Hellenic dream of a unique people that subdued all others and controlled them by persuasion, strength and arts of any kind.
Zeus shares his celestial kingdom with his siblings Poseidon and Hera. The latter, wife and sister of the God, is symbol of potential and manifested power; numerous sons help these severe gods in their reign.
Pallas Athena is the goddess of power and war, and patron of Athens and of studious people, since she is born of an inspired thought of Zeus.
Phoebe, the god of the Solar light, symbol of vital energy of this luminary, adorned with beauty and grace, and holding an arrow and a lyre, hurts all those that desire to learn and captivates them by means of inspired poetry, music and fine arts.
Artemis is sister of the son, symbol of clear night, of the Moon, of the countryside and of hunters; she protects and regulates the female physiology.
Hermes, symbol of the son of God, is revered as messenger of the gods; he protects youth, the future promise of the people, and finally saves the souls and guides them toward the mansion of peace. Hephaistos is the God of fire, none like him is able to work metals; he is symbol of mystical fire and of vital current generating beings. Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, love and generation, would be unable to give life to men without Hephaistos’ intervention and power. Hephaistos is the only legitimate consort despite her other lovers, because generation power is one in its fundamental aspect. Aries is the god of violent war, which is abhorred by the rest of the gods.
Hestia is patron of home and guardian angel.
Poseidon, image of the instinctive matter, is king of waters and sea, and of storms and earthquakes; he holds a trident, symbol of power over the elements or over the lower triangle, namely, mind, energy and matter.
Demeter, sister of Zeus, is the mother earth that gives life to Nature, makes trees flower, fertilizes crops and makes grapes thrive.
But Dionysos or Bacchus is the god of wine, like symbol of bacchanalia, oblivion and astral pleasure. These are not the only gods in the Hellenic Olympus because after them there are many minor gods and goddesses, such as the Parcae, symbol of the goddesses of destiny, the nine Muses; and the three Charites, symbol of grace and beauty. The Greeks deified also their heroes, but the true worship strove for finding the Unique God behind all aspects of every divinity.
Xenophanes, a great philosopher, deplored the concept of ordinary people that worshipped the external symbol of the gods and forgot the Only God, bodiless and formless, but that is pure essence. Poetry helped worship in a significant way by means of nuptial, funereal and epic songs.
Long ago, before Homer’s Odyssey, Linus, Hymeneus and Orpheus are remembered as great poets. All arts created and co-operated with the worship.
No people achieved so much in arts and philosophy as the Greeks, to such extent that will be difficult to surpass them.
This civilization, born amid the pillars of the seven sciences, touched and deepened all knowledge, discovered and synthesized all beauty and gave a new sense to life by means of poetry, literature and philosophy.
It is impossible to enumerate all artists of the archaic period, because they are very numerous. Of them we can remember Solon, who besides poet, gave laws of Athens and was one of the seven sages in those heroic times. Even we should not forget Sapho, that wonderful poetess, who chanted so sweetly to pleasures of living like very few could ever do after her.
But the greatest poet of Greece was Pindar, but only fragments of his poems came to our days.
Like them, many others, namely, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Epicharmus and Aristophanes.
We should not forget Aesop, author of satiric prose, or Herodotus, the historian.
The Greek knowledge grows richer by a legion of studious men that loved the truth, namely, the philosophers.
That row of wonderful sages begins with Xenophanes. In those days he wrote in an excellent way about the origin of the Universe and the concept of divinity.
But it is in the Attic period when philosophers flourished.
The oldest philosopher is Thales of Mileto, who based his philosophy on the study of physics, geometry and astronomy; in his view, water was the original principle of all natural things.
Anaximander and Anaximenes belong to his school; the two were from Mileto and in their view the Universe, besides its physical conception, resulted from a subtler unknown element, which they called “Infinite concrete mass”.
Also Heraclitus of Ephesus belonged to the physical school and attributed a divine spirit to the elements.
In those days, Xenophanes, a monotheistic philosopher, abhorred images and apparently preceded the iconoclasts.
But the most outstanding philosophical school was the Italic school under Pytaghoras. Over all, he was a great mathematician that applied mathematical and algebraic foundations to the Universe and metaphysical laws. He is one of the first that expressed the idea of metempsychosis or reincarnation. Leucipus of Elea founded an atomic philosophy; in his view, the soul of man causally and energetically results from atomic cell agglutination.
Empedocles wanted to synthesize spirit and matter. So he images the Universe like two intermixed significant currents that create manifested life.
For the first time, Anaxagoras distributed and arranged the elements in groups, and Hippocrates, a physician and philosopher, did the same.
Greek philosophies had declined and became more and more materialistic, and finally Sophists and their school arrived.
It is then when Socrates, great philosopher of the spirit, emerges.
His work is completed by his disciple Plato, founder of the Academic school, who left very numerous writings; in his works one can clearly see his deep spiritual and esoteric sense.
Since then, the philosopher starts flying through spaces of the mind and to look for subtle questions about imponderable things.
Aristotle is the philosopher of ideas, mind, spiritual conceptions and static sense of living, and founder of the Peripatetic school.
As this schools expanded, other two schools came into being in Athens, namely, the Epicurean school and the Stoic school.
Epicurus, founder of former, taught his disciples that the gods do not deal with human matters, and that man is born to enjoy wisely pleasures of living, meeting his desires with righteous desires, disposing of pain and unrest, and that one should not fear death because death becomes only dissolution of our body.
In the Stoic school’s view, founded by Zeno of Cippus, human virtue consists only of virtue and total control of passions.
The Christian moral is based on this school, which considered the human soul like a part, not like an emanation of the divinity, and that the supreme good consists of being able to help our neighbors. The last Greek philosophers, called of the Roman period, very influenced by the grandeur of Rome, were Iamblichus, Heliodorus, Dionysius and many others. Among them, there are certain Christians belonging to the Neoplatonic school, namely, Justinus, Plotinus, Origen, Basilius and Eusebius.
Also we should mention Ammonius Saccas, the great philosopher of Alexandria, founder of the Neoplatonic esoteric school.
Also Basilides belonged to this school, and we can say that stupendous legion of Greek philosophers perished with those men that founded all schools in force until our days.