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The Oligarchical Principle
September 5, 2011 • 3:27 PM

by Aaron Halevy1A special thanks goes to Riana Nordquist, who, without her essential passionate and poetic help in refining this piece, it would not be possible.

I:

An Introduction

Humanity owes a great debt. This debt is not financial in nature, but, rather, the debt we owe is for our very existence.

We know our solar system has gone through a series of developments over billions of years. We know that during this time, life on this planet developed into higher and higher systems that could support more and more complex forms of life. All of this was required as a prologue, to prepare for the emergence of mankind, who needed many thousands of years of discoveries to develop out of simple ignorance, to advance from sea-faring to space-faring. The only way we exist today is through the gifts of all of these processes as a whole. All this development, from the first single-cell on Earth, to the first Man on the moon, was necessary for this present moment.

In our history, we find that the mission of the wise, the mission of such as Plato, Dante, Cusa, Leibniz, Cotton Mather and Ben Franklin, is to do the good – to harness more of the universe into the power of mankind, and to make lasting contributions to the potentials for human happiness, present and future. That mission was embodied in the founding and the Constitution of the United States.

Yet, this is not the mission of the current president of that United States, Barack Obama. This is not the mission of the corrupted institutions of Wall Street and the City of London; it is not the mission of those who would allow millions to die to maintain their control on a few trillion dollars of a broken system. We have the ability to feed people, but we allow the starvation of millions every year. We have the capacity for an amazing health-care system, but we are allowing it to be thrown away. We have the ability to gain advanced warning on natural disasters, like earthquakes, but we are told we should look the other way.

What is compelling these little institutions toward the destruction of us all, including themselves, despite the upward direction of development of the entire universe? And why do these petty plans for the murder of civilization seem to be working? What is preventing the United States from taking up its historic mission? These questions must be seen as merely shadows of a much bigger question.

Mankind Emerges from an Ice Age

The Earth has a known past of many ice ages. The last ice age2Known to the Swiss as the Würm Ice Age began around 110,000 BC and lasted for about 100,000 years. Within the glacial periods, powerful changes occur, unlike anything anyone in our time has ever seen: the ice builds and recedes from the North and South poles and entire glaciers can come down, almost covering the continents. During glacial maximums, it is estimated that coastlines world wide would have been about 400 ft lower in elevation than we find them today. In North America, during the end of the last ice age, the powerful changing forces of the receding glaciers sculpted the beautiful rocky mountains, and formed the five great lakes. The current Ice Age, in which we are living today, is called the Holocene.

In the 1900’s scientists determined that the frequency of recent ice-age cycles seemed to be determined by the long-term cycles in the Earth’s orbital characteristics. But a reconstruction of the longer temperature history of the earth reveals that the simple orbital characteristics are not capable, alone, of explaining the cause.

Long term temperature changes are mapped by the change in O-18, O-16 and Be-10 in deep ocean fossil cores over time. Recent work by Dr. Shaviv and others, have correlated these changes with the flux of cosmic ray density, and there appears to be a 145 million year cycle of ice ages which corresponds with the passing of our solar system through the galaxy’s spiral arms.3The Milky Way Galaxy's Spiral Arms and Ice-Age Epochs and the Cosmic Ray Connection, by By Nir J. Shaviv.

Mankind, as a biological being has existed for nearly 2-3 million years, and has survived through ice ages. We have sparse evidence of how man lived in those ancient times, and the few remains that are left can faintly tell us what kind of a civilization those ancient peoples lived in. How many people were there? How did he travel? Were there anything like cities or towns? Was ancient man aware of these galactic cycles?

On questions like these, regarding man’s existence before written recorded history and archaeological fact, we are left only scientific principles to guide us. The principle of life as elaborated by V. I. Vernadsky, that “life comes from life,” and his further assertion that the principle of life is a universal principle, existing everywhere, in all matter, forces us to consider man’s possession of cognition in a different light.

We find in the evidence of advanced astronomy and art in the Lascaux cave, which dates back at least 30,000 years, and we find in the evidence of finely crafted, balanced hunting spears found in Germany, which date back 400,000 years, that it is very likely that mankind has always been creative.4See the Beautiful 3D tour on the official website of the cave Therefore, evidence which suggests a primitive state of man, should be considered as representing a degeneration of mankind from an earlier period of more complex social organization, or a local degeneration where a larger growth was occurring elsewhere in the world.

The British archaeological mafia declares that man has only recently been able to think, and that tools of the mind were only developed for survival. Though much of the archaeological establishment would like to ignore the ever increasing evidence to the contrary, mankind could not have come from cartoonish “Neolithic” or “Stone Age” cavemen only 12,000 ago.

That being said, the inland evidence from Europe near the last glacial maximum, is generally of a people who lived in scatted groups of low population density. Some of them, during this period, seem to have been cave dwellers, possibly nomadic hunters with little knowledge of astronomy or tool making. An environmentalist paradise, they seem to have had no concept of agriculture, no known writings, no known collective social structure. They were probably a savage embodiment of mankind, living day to day, fearing everything, knowing almost nothing, extremely emotional, basely passionate: man reduced to nearly an animal.

Despite this, by the end of this ice age, as the water levels began to rise, during approximately 12,000 – 9,000 BC, we miraculously begin to find the evidence of agricultural technology in use in these European peoples, the so-called “Neolithic Revolution.” By 7,000 BC there is agriculture all over the coasts of the Mediterranean, from North Africa, to Palestine, to Southern Europe. We find evidence of the harvesting of Wheat, Rye and Barley, the knowledge of the fermentation process, and the domestication of animals. So the question is: where did these advancements come from?

Ancient dramatists and poets such as Homer, Aeschylus and Plato, along with the historian Herodotus, and chroniclers Diodorus Siculus, Apollodorus and Pausanias bring us, though shrouded in the fog and tangle of myth, our first stories of how this change occurred, and the beginnings of what would eventually be called European civilization.

An Example from Plato

Take the evidence in Plato’s Timaeus. The character Critias recounts the story he heard from his grandfather about a trip Solon, the great poet-lawmaker, made to Egypt some time around 600BC. In Sais, Egypt, on the Nile delta, Solon meets the high Priests and discusses with them what he knows from his history of the Greek people. The Priests chide Solon for thinking like a child, and recall to Solon a story which is many thousands of years older than the stories he told them:

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others. … [F]urthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, … she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.5Timaeus 21-25, by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Plato Collected Dialogues, Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press 1973.

Whatever Plato’s ultimate reason for including this story in his Timaeus, we find within it a first glimpse of the ancient invaders into the Mediterranean. If these people did come from the Atlantic, exhibiting an advanced technology -for that time- of sea faring, yet basely intended to enslave whole races of people, they too were likely degenerated from some higher culture before them.

What is critical to reflect on, is what Plato recognizes in all his dialogues: mankind’s existence on the planet is threatened by two potential failures, those internal to society and its leadership, and those extraneous natural disasters beyond his immediate control. It is from here that we must redefine our understanding of the oligarchical principle.

II:

Principle in Human History

The revived concept of the cosmic ray driven universe, shows us that the entirety of the progress of life on the earth, has been driven by outside powers. Species experience mass extinction events, and explosions of species diversity in what coincides with the influx of cosmic radiation, all timed to galactic cycles. The biosphere, or as V. I. Vernadsky called it, the total of living matter, acts and is driven as a unique domain of space-time. Therefore, is what we see as the expression of life on the Earth something special within the galaxy, or is life, as a principle, an expression of the galaxy? What about mankind?

Schiller’s Method

Since man is not an animal, biological evidence, like animal fossils, is not enough to reconstruct his history. The method to understand man as an unique species, is demonstrated by Friederich Schiller, the greatest dramatist and poet of Germany, in his 1789 universal history lectures at Jena University. Here Schiller defines that the nature of the investigation of history is such that, one must infer backwards in time to determine what must have culturally taken place to arrive here, where we are, at the past's future.

“The real series of events descends from the origin of things to their most recent state, while the universal historian moves in the opposite way from the most recent state of the world up to the origin of things.... World-history proceeds upon a principle which directly reverses the world-order itself.”6The Nature and Value of Universal History - An Inaugural Lecture (1789) Frederich Schiller. Translation taken from History and Theory, Vol 11, no.3 – 1972.

Yet in this process, as we reach into earlier and earlier times, we find that mankind's record of himself becomes more dense and imbued as myth. Historical facts are manipulated and lies are propagated; so the truth is more and more difficult to determine. How does the historian take all these facts, records and data, myths and stories, and actually understand it as history? How does the historian draw out the causal connections?

“Now philosophical understanding comes to his aid, and, by joining these fragments together by artificial links, transforms the aggregate into a system, a rationally coherent whole.”7Ibid.

And so, keeping a constant eye to the effects of man’s past actions in our own time, and from the facts of archeology, from the writings of Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, and Diodorus, and with the help of the imagination, a story emerges of what European civilization's beginnings were, and from whence this fatal disease called oligarchism came.

Diodorus Siculus Chronicles the gods

Plato’s account of foreign sailors coming from outside the Mediterranean region to dominate and colonize the people there, is corroborated by another account recorded by the chronicler Diodorus Siculus.8For more on this see Lyndon LaRouche's paper: Prometheus and Europe, (Fidelio Magazine, Spring 2000)

Diodorus, a Greek/Roman from the time of Julius Cesar, nearly 8,000 years later than the time in question, reports stories recorded in the mysteries of the ancient religions of the peoples who inhabited the coastlines of the Mediterranean. He identifies an ancient sea people, representatives of a culture which was transoceanic, and writes that these people sailed into the Mediterranean and settled near what we call the Straits of Gibraltar today, known to the ancients as the pillars of Hercules. The ancient indigenous inhabitants of this region, the Berbers, were subjugated like cattle. Enslaved, they were taught only the basics of how to harvest grain and grapes, and were forced to pay tribute to their masters. Their masters propagated among them a false religion, which enforced the Berber’s own ignorance and kept them in the chains of servitude.

Diodorus writes:

They say that Uranus was their first king, who caused the people (who then wandered up and down) to dwell in towns and cities, and, reducing them from a lawless and savage course of life, taught them to use and lay up the fruits of the earth, and many other things useful for man's life. It is said he had under his dominion the greatest part of the world, especially towards the west and the northern parts: and that, being much addicted to astrology, he prognosticated many things that were come to pass in the world; and measured the year according to the course of the sun, and the months according to the motion of the moon, and divided the days into hours; and therefore the people, as at that time ignorant of the constant motion of the stars, did so admire his prognostications, that it grew into a common opinion among them, that he was a god; and, when he was dead, they honored him as a god. The starry heaven was called after his name … he was called the eternal king of the universe.9This and all further quotes of Diodorus come from: The historical library of Diodorus the Sicilian: in fifteen books, published in 1814 by W. M?Dowall for J. Davis – Book III, Chapter 4

As Diodorus's survey continues, the same type of story is told and re-told all along the Mediterranean through the fertile crescent, even into India: travelers from distant places, come to these lands, subjugate the local peoples, and dominate them through a mysterious power. These invaders then establish local rulers, set up cults to themselves, and force the locals to produce goods as tribute.

Uranus had 45 children, from his many concubines all over his realm; one Terra, known to the Greeks as Gaea, managed to give birth to 18 children, and was therefore also lifted to deity status. These many bastard children of Uranus, were called the Titans. Many married each other, and became the inheritor lords over the Mediterranean dominions of their father's Empire, each in their own place.

Eventually things got ugly between these Titans: they became, as their like is like to do, spiteful and vengeful. One son, named Cronus, conspired with his mother to murder his father, Uranus.

Cronus reigned (they say) over Sicily, Africa, and Italy, and enlarged his dominion over all the western parts of the world, and by garrisons and strong forts placed in convenient places, kept his subjects every where within the bounds of their duty.

This new king, Cronus, established his brother Titans and their kin, among whom we find Helios, Atlas and Prometheus, as sub-rulers, the gods and demi-gods of the realm. Yet again, not long after this, a new war broke out amongst the gods, and by the end of the battle, however it was fought and manipulated, the son of Cronus, Zeus, turning against his father, was raised to the kingship of the Empire.

Zeus (they say) was the son of Cronus, who … succeeded in the kingdom, either as given up to him by his father, or set upon the throne by his subjects, out of hatred to his father: and though Cronus afterwards, by the help of the Titans, made war upon his son, yet Zeus overcame him in a battle, and so gained the kingdom. … [for his deeds] he was unanimously by all placed in the highest heavens, and called a god, and supreme lord of all the earth.

Zeus became the most degenerate of this line and was more of a tyrant than any before. Known to us from Homer's epics, Zeus, a Don Juan of ancient proportions, traveled around, raping all the women of every village, every city, every country, creating a whole new race of bastards who would inherit the realm and later call themselves the gods, demi-gods and heroes of the people. These “people” were really just the animal property of the god-class.

Zeus's first act was to send the Titans (his grand-uncles and aunts) who helped him to the throne, to prison. Then he planned a mass genocide of the peoples of the coasts, to rid the earth from its burden of overpopulation and to kill off any possible successor not from his own blood line. How was this done? Though the manipulation of wars among men, tricking them to kill each other off. Take a quote from the Cypria, a poem from around the 6th century BC: “There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth, and Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the world. And so the heroes were slain in Troy, and the plan of Zeus came to pass.”10The Cypria – Fragment 3, Translated by Hugh Evelyn-White.

One of Zeus’s uncles, Prometheus, who had helped Zeus overthrow his tyrannical father, and who was one of the legitimate heirs to the power of the colony, found Zeus's tyranny more brutalizing than his father’s. It is said that Prometheus, deceived Zeus, and Zeus would in turn enact tighter rules against mankind. Then, to save them, Hesiod says, “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and handed it to men, and for this he was clapped in chains by Zeus.” Yet, “there is no way,” says the submissive poet Hesiod, “to flee the mind of Zeus.”11Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Loeb Classic Library, Harvard University Press 1950.

Prometheus opposed Zeus and for this offense, as the myths account, Prometheus was tortured to death. Regardless of all the unknown actions of Prometheus the man, the fact is clear, there was a policy fight between him and Zeus. This policy fight lasted, somehow, over the intervening millennia, and emerged as the pagan mythology of Olympus.12From Lyn's Prometheus & Europe “The legacy of these events in the ancient Atlas region, and the policy-fight between Prometheus and the Olympians, persisted so, somehow, over the intervening millennia, to emerge as the pagan mythology of Olympus, as reflected in such places as the Homeric epics. Such, in summation, is the chronicle and its setting.”

Was there an ancient man named Prometheus? How much of the story is truth, and how much of it is metaphorical? What is the significance of the account of Uranus and his detestable progeny for us today? Frederich Schiller discovered in his work that ancient man saw himself in his gods, and so, barring the factual truth of these stories, what might we still infer about the men of this time, if these are their gods? These questions must be answered to discover the real truth of the principle involved, lurking behind the shadows.

III:

Floods, Volcanoes, Tsunamis, Earthquakes

& The Grecian Dark-Age

Some time between those ancient maritime invader kings of the Uranus/Zeus cult and 800BC we find evidence that a major dark-age occurred in Greece. How do we know this? The records vanish by the 12th century BC. Suddenly, the earlier form of the written Greek language, known as Linear B, or Mycenaean Greek, disappears. All this is confirmed by Plato as we heard before.

What could have been the cause of this dark-age? Some geologists suggest that major earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and volcanoes, like the volcano at Thera were the cause for this near extinction. Some say it was the result of tragedy, reflected in Homer’s description of the long Trojan war. Whatever it was, there is an almost complete cultural disappearance of the Greeks for nearly 700 years, so it must have been something devastating on all levels.

Return to Plato’s Timaeus. Solon discovered that “neither he nor any other Greek knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old,” when he tried to tell the Egyptian priests what he knew of Greek history. They laughed at him and replied,

O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you… in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. … just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.13Timaeus 21-25, by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Plato Collected Dialogues, Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press 1973.

The religion of stupidity to which these coastal colonies were subjected over millennia after the last ice-age coincided with their periodic destruction. The idea that the gods were all powerful, that man had no right to intervene or object to the will of the gods, created a self induced impotence in the population. Even though the signs were there to avoid the danger, massive natural crises killed many of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean again and again, wiping out many cities, and destroying whole language cultures.
It is recently estimated, through sonar analysis, that before 8,000BC the shoreline around the Black Sea was 90 – 100ft higher than it is today, and that the entire body was once all freshwater.14The the expeditions, of the team of archeologists led by Robert Ballard In the time between 8,000 – 6,000BC, well into the age of these peoples of the sea, the so called Olympians, there was a major flood, due to the filling of the Mediterranean during the glacial melts. The flood into the Black Sea, is estimated to have occurred within nearly 300 days, covering 60,000 square miles of dry land and significantly expanding the Black Sea shoreline to the north and to the west. This was quite possibly a flood of biblical proportions.

Much later, in the winter of 373BC the people in Helike and Boura, ancient cities along the Corinthian Gulf, began noticing strange things happening around them.

“... all the mice and martens and snakes and centipedes and beetles and every other creature of that kind in the city left in a body by the road ... the people of Helike seeing this happening were filled with amazement, but were unable to guess the reason. But after these creatures had departed, an earthquake occurred in the night; the city subsided; an immense wave flooded and Helike disappeared”15Aelien's De natura animalium, book 11

What cause did the drowning Helikeans, and those after attribute to this disaster? “... The submersion was the result of the anger of Poseidon.”16Strabo's Geographica Book VIII chapter 9

A volcano on the island of Lemnos, is mythologized to be where Hephaestus fell, after Zeus threw him from heaven to earth; cults were founded on that island in worship to this god. In the Phlegrean Fields of Italy, where the god Hephaestus or Vulcan was reported to reign, there is a large Volcano which erupted in 10,000BC. In 1650BC one of the most devastating volcanoes in human history, categorized today as a "super-colossal" volcano17A 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) exploded on the island of Thera, in the middle of the Aegean Sea. More powerful then four hundred atomic bombs, heard as far away as in the British Isles, creating estimated 40-60 foot tsunamis.18This is twice to three times the size of those hitting Japan on March 11, 2011 See: Tsunami Generated by the Late Bronze Age Eruption of Thera (Santorini), Greece by Floyd W. McCoy – Heiken, Grant (2000) – Pure and Applied Geophysics. It has been estimated that this volcano killed about 40,000 people in a few hours, and many more by subsequent starvation. It has recently been estimated one of the largest volcanoes that mankind has ever faced.19“Atlantis Eruption Twice as Big as Previously Believed, Study Suggests” report by Richard A. Lovett for National Geographic News – August 23, 2006. The people of Greece at that time, no doubt were helpless to stop the destruction which ensued, and it is likely that this was part of a cause of the dark-age which wiped out the pre-Classical civilizations of the region.

These peoples of the ancient world were beset by natural disasters, over and over. But because of the religious cults imposed by oligarchism, the people fooled themselves into believing that the causes of these terrors were outside their knowability. It was therefore, as Plato implied, not only these natural disasters which destroyed the people of Greece resulting in their 700 year long dark age, but it was also their tragic stupidity in adhering to their traditions. Backed up by the brainwashing of the cults of the gods, their fear added to the power of the oligarchy and must have created a deeply inlaid anxiety about the natural world.

For them, displeasing the gods, in any way, could bring on one of these destructive events. In times of crisis, like that which the Athenians faced in 399BC after the Peloponnesian war, this paranoia could play a major part in political decision making. For it was this thinking which participated in the murder of Socrates.

IV:

The Governance of Men

Was it the major earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and volcanoes, which caused this near extinction of the Mycenaean Greeks? Was it the tragedy from that long war, known as the Trojan war, which destroyed their population and their culture? Was it both?

The Cult at Delphi

The first historical words we hear from the Greeks after this dark age, were sung by that all-seeing poet, Homer. Poetry heralded the re-emergence of the Greeks and through it, Homer shows that the great Trojan War was mere folly created by the cruelty of the so-called gods of Olympus for their own selfish pettiness.
But as Greek civilization re-emerged from the ashes, so too did the cult of the gods. A network of oracular sites grew over the Hellenistic landscape. Accounts of these oracles reveal that they only promoted the same division of men as had existed before: the all powerful gods and the mere mortals. For instance, take the famous mottoes of Delphi, conscripted on the wall of the temple: “Think as a mortal” and “know thyself.” For a 5th century Greek visiting the temple, this would convey “you are not a god, nor could you ever reach such powers – you are just a beast.” Old Olympus was now transformed into a system of oracles, and the center of influence in this network was pronounced to be on the cliffs at Delphi.

The story of the founding of this cult is basically the following: one of those bastard sons of Zeus, named Apollo, went to Delphi on his travels. There he found a Gaea cult combined with a Dionesius/Python cult. Apollo killed the phallic snake, cut it into pieces and buried the evidence in Gaea's womb, a crack in the ground. He thus replaced the old Earth goddess cult, and established the new Pythian-Apollo cult at Delphi.

This cult, it was believed, had the power for prophesying the future by evoking the words of it's founder god. How? A local woman was abducted and placed in the basement of the temple, which was built over a fissure in the ground which leaked ethylene gas.20Ethylene can have an hallucinogenic effect on people who breath it, and once, it was reported, during a divination the Priestess had a seizure and died from the fumes 21Plutarch writes that: “the gases of the oracular chamber smelled sweet, like flowers.” A study, reported in the August 2001 issue of Geology, reveals that two faults intersect directly below the Delphic temple. See: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/08/0814_delphioracle.html and: http://geology.about.com/cs/odds_and_ends/a/aa081901a.htm This woman, known as the Pythian Oracle, was the sexual vessel for the divine words of Apollo himself. The Oracle would babble wildly to the hopeful visitors who came asking questions of great significance. Kings and rulers from all over the Mediterranean visited the cult and asked for advice regarding concerns of their state. Since it was nonsense that the Oracle babbled, the priests would, for a price, interpret what she said and give Apollo's answer. And thus, through the belief of the credulous, these priests of Apollo were the architects of almost every folly that the Greeks and others brought upon themselves. Delphi was the epitome of the Oligarchical system.

Take the story of king Croesus, the tyrant of Lydia. After conquering much of Ionia, Croesus decided to war against the growing power of Persia to his East. Before he would dare such a move, he decided to send delegates to all the oracles of the region, to test them for their accuracy. Upon deciding to confide in Delphi, Croesus made very expensive offerings which were sent to the temple: many glorious statues made of gold, rich garments, jewels and bowls of gold and silver, almost all his wealth - he even sent items from his housemaids. With the offering, he sent a message: “Croesus the king of the Lydians, in the belief that yours is the only true oracle in the whole world, gives you gifts worthy of your prophetic insight, and asks weather he should wage war against the Persians.” The answer that the Pythia gave him, was that “if he were to wage war against the Persians, he would destroy a great Empire, and they advised him to find the most powerful Hellenes and make them his allies and supporters.” Croesus being overjoyed at the good proclamation, joined with the Spartans and launched a war on the Persians. Once the dust was cleared from the war, king Croesus had lost his army, his kingdom and his freedom. “This is how Apollo treats a worthy subject who sacrifices to him?” Croesus bitterly complained, “Does he not feel ashamed?” Croesus sent a final messenger to Delphi to ask these questions to the Pythia. What was the response? “Fated destiny is impossible to avoid even for a god. Apollo predicted that he would destroy a great empire. Croesus should have asked a second time to determine weather Apollo meant his empire or that of Persia.”22The Histories of Herodotus, Book I: (sections 1.26 to 1.93 in the Landmark Edition, Edited by Robert B. Strassler – Anchor Books, NY 2007)

Interestingly, we find by the 6th century BC, as Delphi grew in influence amongst the Greeks, so too did the use of coined money. In fact, the temples located all over Greece minted these coins.23Greek Art and Architecture, see "Coins in the Archaic Period" by Max Hirmer (pg190-195). Delphi amassed a huge treasury for itself through tribute, money lending and manipulation, and after many profitable wars, which Delphi helped to create, Delphi became the leading treasury of all the wealth of Greece.24Coins in the First and Second Half of the Fifth Century BC by Max Hirmer (pg 288-294 and pg 381-389) By the end of the murderous Peloponnesian civil-war in 404BC, Delphi was effectively the Central Bank, Stock Market and currency exchange of the Hellenistic world: all major transactions went through Delphi.

Delphi’s method, in its essential characteristics, defined the shape of all the future Empires: Rome, Byzantium, Venice, and the New Venetian/British Empire of today.

The Fight Against Empire

Though the oligarchical principle of the Olympian Zeus continued to reign, transferred to the orifice at Delphi, Homer implicitly rekindled Prometheus’ fire in Greece and re-founded civilization upon a poetic principle. He satirized the pettiness of the gods of Olympus, their childish rage and lusts, and he revealed that all such short sighted societies end in tragedy. At the same time, his poetry inspired people to find the creative spark in themselves. For instance Homer’s famous description of the shield forged by Hephaestus for Achilles has inspired a creative fire in his audience for all time. After Homer, all real artists must consciously strive to re-create moving images of the imagination in their works and arts.

Homer laid the cultural basis for communication in Greece. Because of this, Solon of Athens, the poet-lawmaker, was able to compose his revolutionary constitution and the Athenian people were able to consent to it. As the elected archon, the leader of the Athenians, his first act of government was to wipe out the system of debt slavery and to force the hand of the oligarchy into assisting the productive development of Athens. Thus, Solon laid the foundations culturally and intellectually for the youth that followed him.

One of those young men was Aeschylus, a warrior in the Persian wars, who became the father of drama. Aeschylus wrote over 90 plays in his career. He continued in the tradition of Homer, using Homeric mythology as the basis of many of his tragedies. Above all, near the end of his life, Aeschylus wrote about the ancient battle of the gods. In treating his subject, he did not follow exactly the myths and accounts of his predecessors. He altered them through his insight into the principle which lay outside the facts presented, the principle which was the true cause of those facts.

But yet, as is too often the case in doomed societies, not all were ready to accept Aeschylus's challenge. At the end of his life the Greek authorities would rather exile him, than to admit the truth which he exposed.

Prometheus Bound

All that remains to us today is the second play of Aeschylus's Prometheus trilogy, “Prometheus Bound.” The first was called, “Prometheus the fire bringer,” and the third “Prometheus Unbound.” Aeschylus opens “Prometheus Bound” at the edge of the earth, where Prometheus is being chained to the rocks for disobeying the new king of the gods, Zeus. What did Prometheus do? He stole the fire of the gods, and brought it to lowly mankind, those pitiable creatures who were treated no better than cattle by the Olympians. What was this fire? No historian or mythologist before Aeschylus elaborated beyond the fact that Prometheus stole fire. Aeschylus brings out the meaning of what fire represented: the inspiration of artistic and scientific creativity.

For seeing they saw not, and hearing they understood not, but like as shapes in a dream they wrought all the days of their life in confusion. No houses of brick raised in the warmth of the sun they had, nor work in wood, but like the busied ants they dwelt underground in the sunless depth of caverns. No certain sign of approaching winter they knew, no harbinger of flowering spring or fruitful summer; ever they labored at random, till I taught them to discern the seasons by the rising and the setting of the stars. Numbers I invented for them, the chiefest of all discoveries; I taught them the grouping of letters, to be a memorial and record of the past, the mistress of the arts and mother of the Muses. … I too contrived for men sea-faring vessels with their flaxen wings…. And the secret treasures of the earth, copper, iron, silver, gold, — who but I could boast their discovery? No one, I ween, unless in idle vaunting. Nay, hear the whole matter in a word, — all human arts are from Prometheus.25This and all quotes from the play which follow come from Paul Elmer More's translation of The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, 1899. With the help of Riana Nordquist, this version was chosen over others by many days of comparison of several versions and the original Greek.

Aeschylus writes that this is why Zeus tortured the immortal Prometheus. In the play, it is not Zeus himself who chains Prometheus, but his lackeys and henchmen, his servants, Force and Power, and the impotent and lame Hephaestus. Chained to the rock, Prometheus does not complain. Because, although all bow down to Zeus as the ruler of the universe, Prometheus knows that Zeus is just a scared little boy, who is terrified at the inevitable loss of his power. Prometheus also knows that his unique gift to mankind, knowledge, will live on no matter what torture he endures. Yet, in the play, no one recognizes this truth other than Prometheus, thus the audience can see the evil and corruption of popular opinion exposed for what it is.

For example, when a co-Titan, Oceanus, visits Prometheus, his advice is:

I would admonish thee to prudence. Learn to know thyself, put on the habit of new ways, for there is a new tyrant among the gods. If still thou hurlest forth these harsh and biting words, perchance from afar off, Zeus, sitting above, may hear thee, and thy present burden of sorrows will seem as the sport of children. O wretched sufferer, put away thy moody wrath, and seek some respite from thy ills. My advice may sound as the trite sayings of old, yet thou thyself canst see what are the wages of too bold a tongue. Thou hast not learned humility, nor to yield to evils, but rather wouldst add others new to thy present store. Take me for thy teacher, and kick not against the pricks,26Surprised? In the original greek the word is 'kentra' (gen.) spur, pricks, something sharp. for there rules in heaven an austere monarch who is responsible to none.

When the daughters of Oceanus, the water nymphs, come to Prometheus, their advice is:

Care not for mortals overmuch, whilst you neglect your own profit. … you have failed in understanding and wandered astray; and like a poor physician falling into sickness you despond and know not the remedies for your own disease. … For Zeus might still harder torments inflict.

Finally, when Hermes himself, the ultimate lackey of the gods, comes to Prometheus bringing fresh threats from the off-stage Zeus, he declares:

Thee, the wise, the bitter beyond bitterness, the thief of fire, who hast revolted against the gods and betrayed their honors to thy creatures of a day, — to thee I speak. The father bids thee declare the [cause] that shall bereave him of his scepter; and this thou art to state clearly and not involve thy speech in riddles. Put me not, O Prometheus, to double my journey; thou seest that Zeus is not appeased by dubious words.

Yet every time, Prometheus denies this impotence; he refuses to respond to the multitude who would submit and doom themselves. Excepting the rape victim of Zeus, a poor mortal girl, Io, Prometheus seems to pay no mind to his visitors and their complaints. If he is not speaking to them, to whom is he speaking? Is it to the ever present, but never appearing Zeus?

Yet shall Zeus himself, the stubborn of soul, be humbled, for the union he purposes in his heart shall hurl him to outer darkness from his throne of supremacy. Then at last the curse of his father Cronos shall be fulfilled to the uttermost, the curse that he swore when thrown from his ancient seat. All this I know and how the curse shall work, and I only of the gods may point out a refuge from these disasters. Therefore let him sit boldly now, trusting in his thunders that reverberate through the sky, and wielding fiery darts in his hands; they shall avail him naught nor save him from falling in ruin unendurable.

Ye are but young in tyranny, and think to inhabit a citadel unassaulted of grief; yet have I not seen two tyrants fall therefrom? And third I shall behold this present lord cast down in utter ruin. Do I seem to cower and quail before these new gods? Hardly, I think; there is no fear in me.

I feel no dishonor
In suffering wrong from a foe.
Ay, let the lightning be launched
With curled and forked flame
On my head; let the air confounded
Shudder with thunderous peals
And convulsion of raging winds;
Let tempests beat on the earth
Till her rooted foundations tremble;
The boisterous surge of the sea
Leap up to mingle its crest
With the stars eclipsed in their orbs;
Let the whirling blasts of Necessity
Seize on my body and hurl it
Down to the darkness of Tartarus, —
Yet all he shall not destroy me!

By being Promethean himself Aeschylus places a question at the focus of many of his works. As Solon before him knew, the question posed is a political one, one by which men are to be governed: what is the essential distinction of man from beast?

The short lived Renaissance of Greece, embodied in these men and a handful of others for a very short time, established what that Greece would represent to all humanity to come, and created a place where, as Schiller put it, “reason might soar.”27Frederich Schiller's, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen), first published 1794.

The good that man expresses in his creative works: his poetry and his technology can not be suppressed for it is the foundation of the human capacity for civilization: his mind.

Those who would ban the spread of knowledge, and limit the use of fire, or nuclear fusion, by mortal persons; those who would ban the inherent artistic and scientific qualities of the human imagination, hate mankind and are the imitators of the Oligarchical Zeus: the arbiters of pure evil.

The End?

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology … It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment. … Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.” 28The Impact of Science on Society, by Bertrand Russell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951 and 1953)

~by Lord Bertrand Russel, Honorary chairmen of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)

The operation known as the environmentalist ideology, is the out-right rejection of this Promethean principle of man. Environmentalism was established by the followers of the cult of Delphi, known today as the British Empire. Today, in our time, by the putrid sewage of environmentalism, the Empire has brought the United States, the world, and civilization as we know it, to the edge of its own doom.
Aeschylus, through his Prometheus Bound, forced onto the stage, and thus, into the imagination of his audience, that terrible evil lurking in their society. This same evil hovers under our circumstances today. We see it in the sickening actions of the British Empire with their tools for a new mass genocide: President Barack Obama and institutions like the WBGU.

“These are, on the one side, phantoms of the stage; but, they are very real, in the sense that it is the manipulation of these phantoms of the stage which reflects the way in which the superstitious mind is controlled on the streets of real life, as in the U.S. Congress presently. So, by mastering those crucial fantasies placed upon the stage of our public life, we would be empowered to master ourselves.”

~Lyndon LaRouche29‘THE MASK OF NANCY PELOSI’ The Force of Tragedy, November 2007 , by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Footnotes

1A special thanks goes to Riana Nordquist, who, without her essential passionate and poetic help in refining this piece, it would not be possible.
2Known to the Swiss as the Würm Ice Age
3The Milky Way Galaxy's Spiral Arms and Ice-Age Epochs and the Cosmic Ray Connection, by By Nir J. Shaviv.
4See the Beautiful 3D tour on the official website of the cave
5Timaeus 21-25, by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Plato Collected Dialogues, Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press 1973.
6The Nature and Value of Universal History - An Inaugural Lecture (1789) Frederich Schiller. Translation taken from History and Theory, Vol 11, no.3 – 1972.
7Ibid.
8For more on this see Lyndon LaRouche's paper: Prometheus and Europe, (Fidelio Magazine, Spring 2000)
9This and all further quotes of Diodorus come from: The historical library of Diodorus the Sicilian: in fifteen books, published in 1814 by W. M?Dowall for J. Davis – Book III, Chapter 4
10The Cypria – Fragment 3, Translated by Hugh Evelyn-White.
11Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Loeb Classic Library, Harvard University Press 1950.
12From Lyn's Prometheus & Europe “The legacy of these events in the ancient Atlas region, and the policy-fight between Prometheus and the Olympians, persisted so, somehow, over the intervening millennia, to emerge as the pagan mythology of Olympus, as reflected in such places as the Homeric epics. Such, in summation, is the chronicle and its setting.”
13Timaeus 21-25, by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Plato Collected Dialogues, Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press 1973.
14The the expeditions, of the team of archeologists led by Robert Ballard
15Aelien's De natura animalium, book 11
16Strabo's Geographica Book VIII chapter 9
17A 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI)
18This is twice to three times the size of those hitting Japan on March 11, 2011 See: Tsunami Generated by the Late Bronze Age Eruption of Thera (Santorini), Greece by Floyd W. McCoy – Heiken, Grant (2000) – Pure and Applied Geophysics.
19“Atlantis Eruption Twice as Big as Previously Believed, Study Suggests” report by Richard A. Lovett for National Geographic News – August 23, 2006.
20Ethylene can have an hallucinogenic effect on people who breath it, and once, it was reported, during a divination the Priestess had a seizure and died from the fumes
21Plutarch writes that: “the gases of the oracular chamber smelled sweet, like flowers.” A study, reported in the August 2001 issue of Geology, reveals that two faults intersect directly below the Delphic temple. See: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/08/0814_delphioracle.html and: http://geology.about.com/cs/odds_and_ends/a/aa081901a.htm
22The Histories of Herodotus, Book I: (sections 1.26 to 1.93 in the Landmark Edition, Edited by Robert B. Strassler – Anchor Books, NY 2007)
23Greek Art and Architecture, see "Coins in the Archaic Period" by Max Hirmer (pg190-195).
24Coins in the First and Second Half of the Fifth Century BC by Max Hirmer (pg 288-294 and pg 381-389)
25This and all quotes from the play which follow come from Paul Elmer More's translation of The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, 1899. With the help of Riana Nordquist, this version was chosen over others by many days of comparison of several versions and the original Greek.
26Surprised? In the original greek the word is 'kentra' (gen.) spur, pricks, something sharp.
27Frederich Schiller's, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen), first published 1794.
28The Impact of Science on Society, by Bertrand Russell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951 and 1953)
29‘THE MASK OF NANCY PELOSI’ The Force of Tragedy, November 2007 , by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.


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