(GREEK PHILOSOPHY / EASTERN STUDIES Explore the Ancient Western Wisdom Tradition. Did you know that sme of the best-known, most influential Grek thinkerincding Plato, Pythagoras, and Phatarch—were hewy influenced by enlightened sages ofthe East? History has often swept aside the deep comections between the East and Wes, but now Link Johnsen, eating author on Easter spirituality, reveals hw ideas about arma the fei, encaaton and God were taught in the ancient ‘Wester world and how yogic traions influenced early Greck cule Let Masters goes beyond what you wil eam ina classroom, or readin a Plilsopby textbook. It is an exploration of a deeply rooted Westem tradition that bears striking resemblance to the wisdom of Eastem spirituality Although the Greck sages profoundly influenced Wester and spiritual practic, many oftheir essntal bei and practices lost in the West. In this book i is easy to sce how what they isa relevant ody a twas two thousand years ago jr «tragedy, and deply absurd, that we in the West have lst touch with adem of the extrandinary msticswabo gave rset our own civiliza~ 1. This book sa lee and valuable introduction to that widom, and ips open the deor again to tose mptcr and tbr tramyormatioe teach bs which ae have een denied ant foro lng Petes Kingley, author of Reality and In the Dork Place of Wisdom t a mae Wl HIMALAYAN INSTITUTE* Ill we Himalayan ong Sages of Ancient Greece Linda Johnsen& Lost Masters Sages of Ancient Greece Linda Jobnsen& Lost Masters Sages of Ancient Greece Linda JobnsenHimalayan Institute Press 952 Bethany Turnpike Honesdale, PA 18431 ‘ww Himalayantnstitute-org © 2006 Linda Johnsen 1009.08 07 06 654321 All rights reserved. No part of this book in any manner, in ‘whole or in part, in English or in any other language, may be reproduced oF transmitted in any form or by any means, cdectronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval sytem without prior writen permission ofthe copyright owner. ‘The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard of Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984, Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data Johnsen, Linda, 1954 Lost masters: sages of ancient Greece / Linda Johnsen. pcm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-89389-260-9 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-89389-260-2 (alk paper) 1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Greece—Religon. 3. Yoga. L Tite, ‘BI71J58 2006 180—“de22 2006008293 1 2 3 4 5. 6 7. 8 9, 10, nL 2. 4B. 14. 15, 16, ¥7, 18 49, Tasie or Contents & Lost Masters: Sages of Ancient Greece ‘The Light of the West ‘The Mystery Religions Calming the Savage Heart Helea's Chalice ‘The Spiritual Colony ‘The Road to Reality ‘The Private Investigator ‘The Man Who Stopped the Wind Atoms and the Void ‘The Man Who Lost a Continent Apollonius Was Like the Sun ‘The Priest of Delphi From the Alone tothe Alone ‘The Work of Enlightenment ‘The Shepherd of Men ‘The Golden Chain Extinguishing the Light ‘The India Connection Exploring Our Western Heritage About The Author 155 175 183 197 209 219Lost Masters Time Line : “The dates of spisitual masters born before the fifth century ca, are rarely certain, whether they were born in the East orthe West. Many of the dates listed here are guesses based ‘on scanty of conflicting evidence. Before the Common Era ‘Common Era sons, | Fionn the | soe. Mal andthe Oy. Apallon of Fane ater begins ence, vs0-700nc8. —| Phat —| te Ort TL oestence. |_mea7oce 7 ‘The Plows sro-asnce | rosasce. Prien iabchas —| |_sss-snce Heri sisusnce |_sssasce Parmer Hype | ws-asner. Ener sosmecs, | oie ‘Leary of Aland ‘Demons | so-sscx. |_arsirnce, Prada mance, Paso ses. Dasher —| Enger ain cows the —] tse the Gest “Acne in Athen Hater ees ance. ee [Ret emp easelCuaprer One & The Light of the West No ONE READS THE ANCIENT GREEKS anymore, In the last century scholars accomplished something no literate person in past ages could have imagined: they made the Grecks boring. I slept through my Ancient Western Philosophy class in college, resentful that my Jesuit profes- sor inflicted the dialogues of Plato and Aristotle’ outdated metaphysics on defenseless freshmen like me. Trwould be decades before I realized the Greeks were neither dll nor irelevant—in fat, until the modern period, Plato was recognized as one ofthe greatest mystics in the history of Western civilization, and Plotinus (who caried fon Plato’ tradition five hundred years later in Rome) towered over the centuries as a giant of Wester spirits ality, These men were not just thinkers—they were considered sages, transmitters of a profound and inspired wisdom tradition chat paralleled the mystical lineages of India. As late asthe Renaissance, the stature ofthe ancient Greek philosophers as spiritual masters of the fist magni tude was acknowledged throughout the Christian and Islamic words,2 chapter one I didait have a lot of patience for the Greeks. Like many children of the 1960s, 1 rumed to the Hindu Upanishads not Plotinus’ Ennead for enlightenment, t0 Indias Ramayana and Mababbarata not Greece's Had and. (Ode fr inspiration, and to Krishna and Buddha rather than Homer or Socrates for heroes. Compared to Hindu seers and Buddhist siddhas, the much-vaunted Greeks seemed like lightweights Ironically, it was my Indian researches that led me back to Greece. I learned that a Greek magus named Apollonius of Tyana had visited India in the frst century Cx, and that a fairly detailed account of his ravels had actually survived. Reading Apollonius’ story was a galvi~ nizing experience, revealing astonishing connections between the Greely Roman, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian cultures, which most moder historians neglect. My inter- ‘est in the Greek thinkers was piqued: how did it happen that many of their doctrines and religious practices ‘matched the teachings of the Indian sages so closely? Was Apollonius correct when he claimed that the Greeks had leaned their doctrines from the Egyptians—and the Egyptians leamed them from India? So I returned to the Greeks, reading the portions of lato my Jesuit professor had advised us students to skip. Sure enough, there was the juice, the living spirituality that so appalls academics today but kept the greatest minds of the Western world enthralled for more than a thousand years, went back to the orginal Greek historians, such as Herodotus, Diogenes Laértes, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch, in an effort to learn what the ancients said about their own tradition before modern scholars reinterpreted it for them. I vas continually amazed at how similar the long-lost Greek world was to the India I travel through The Light of the We 3 today, where the perspective of the ancients still ives in Bengali villages and Varanasi enclaves and the palm jungles of Kerala. The type of spiritual practices that lotinus—perhaps the greatest of all the Hellenistic mas~ ters—describes in his Ennead: are as much alive in “Himalayan caves today, where Plosinus is unknown, a they are moribund in American and European universities that claim to teach Plotinus! Tes surprising that today yoga students can read Plocinus and instantly recognize the higher states of con- sciousness he's describing, correlating them point for point with the levels of meditative focus listed in India’s Yoga Surrarin 200 8.C.. Yet Wester scholars often ignore these very passages! They represent “Oriental contamination” of the pure Greek tradition, my professor claimed. And he ‘was ight—you can find Eastern influence throughout Greek thought 1 was so flabbergasted by the correlations between, the Greek and yogic traditions that I started telling every fone I knew about the ancient Western sages. My friends would get as excited as I was and insist, “This information, is incredible! It's unbelievable we havent heard about this before. You've got to write « book” So here itis very much want to introduce you, too, t0 the great spiritual masters of our past, Wester “gurus” whose tra sions, unfortunatly, we've forgotten. Ther life stories, like those of sages everywhere, are remarkable. And their discinctive approaches to spirituality will remind you of similar Hindu, Buddhist, yogic, and tantric lineages. They do difier from Indian gurus in many important respects, of| course. India was a much older and far more sophisticated culture. Yer the differences arent as great as you might imagine. The ‘mystery religions” that so inspired Greek and Roman civilization were also clearly related to the4 chapter one wisdom of India, especially in their doctrines of karma, reincarnation, and spiritual transcendence. ‘The Hellenes Let me saya few words here about the region of time and space covered in this book. The Hellenic and Hellenistic epochs were a period of astonishing intellectual advances ‘dominate bythe "Hellen" asthe Greeks elle tem. selves. The “Hellenic era lasted from about 800 ‘when the poet Homers said to have composed his briiant epics about the early Greek heroes who built the Trojan horse, to around 336 B.C. when Alexander the Great (the student of Aristotle, who was in tur the student of Plato) fist leapt onto the world stage ‘The “Hellenistic” era began with Alexander, who spread Greek culture as far west as Afghanistan, His eon- quests stopped only when his men refused to go father, recognizing the fatty of atempting to conquer India. ‘Thiserain one sense ended around 31 BCE. with che birth of the Roman empire. In another sense it continued through about 500 C:e. when Christian rulers shut down the Hellenistic universities. Til then most educated people still wrote in Greek, and the Greek worldview held sway. cover Western consciousnes, In this book I will introduce you to some of the greatest spiritual masters of the full Graeco-Roman period, fom the Hellenic era through the sixth century Ce ‘The “Greek” scientists and philosophers, artists, and sages dda just come from Greece by the way. Some ofthe ageaest were fom Turkey and Egypt, Italy and Bulgari, Sicily and Syria “Greece” at this time was more a sate of ‘mind than a physical location. The Light of the Mos 5 1 believe bringing the viewpoint of the East to our knowledge of ancient Greek culture will vastly entich our understanding of our own spiritual rots as Westerners Burt frst we need to know what those roots are In reclaim- ‘ng our ancient European heritage, we reconnect with the living spirituality atthe heart of our civilization, a tradition ‘that speaks tous more urgently than ever as we “New Age” foundlings search for authentic spiritual experience. believe the time has come to resurect the ancient Greek masters, to hear again their perennial wisdom, and to live once more the ageless truths of the active spiritual life they embodied,Cuarrer Two & The Mystery Religions (ON SePremmeR 21, 1962, Robert Paget and Keith Jones liscovered the entrance to hell. They found it right where classical Greek and Roman authors had always said it was, in the volcanic felds along the western coast of Tealy— ‘zonically not far from the Vatican. ‘The two retired naval officers lowered themselves cautiously into a passage hidden beneath an ancient temple complex at Baa. Theyid been warned they might be killed Instantly by poisonous gases, but the air was just barely breathable. Stumbling down a long, nartow tunnel for about 400 feet, marked with niches where ancient priest- cesses had set oil lamps, they came to the ‘parting of the ways" where the tunnel split into two separate shafts, an {important feature of hel described in ancient texts. By this point the temperature had risen to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In another 150 feet the explorers were stopped dead by gurgling volcanic waters, They had reached the shore ofthe River Styx, In 1870 Heinrich Schliemann astounded the world when he took the fables in the liad, Homers ancient8 chapter two Greek epic, seriously enough to fllow thee tail to the ruins of Toy. Toy was supposed to be a myth, nota real city that had actually presided over the Hellespont, ‘where the Mediterranean greets the Black Sea. Here the amateur archaeologist unearthed Homer's defeated iy, ‘which perhaps ally did fll tothe jealous fury of Meneaus and Agamemnon long, long ago, as the Greek poet had chimed. But even Schliemann could hardly have imagined that Hades—the dark cavemn of the afterlife where Homer's heroes ulimately found dhemselves—might relly cas. Yet in Homer's Oey the soreress Circe described the sea route to Hades in specific geographic terms that hud seemed too detailed to be mythical to Robert Pagers literal way of thinking, Other ancient writes such as Virgil and Pausanias had described the site a fit were a physical location, and Livy mentioned that no les a hminary than Hannbal—the Afican general who drove elephants over the Alps to menace the Iaians—had paid his respects at the oracle there some twenty-two hundred years ag. Tehadat sounded to Page ike these asia authors were raking it up. With tieess enthusiasm, and with what rust also have seemed to their fends like embarassing rivet, he and Keith Jones fllowed the crumbs dropped by writers of antiquity to this hole in the ground inthe Phlegrean ls southeast of Rome In the archaeological furry chat followed Paget and Jones’ discovery experts agreed the two explorers had indeed uncovered “The Oracle of the Dead,” the entrance to Hades visited by such Greek and Tein hheroes as Odysseus and Aeneas in the hazy beginnings of European history. Suddenly i no longer seemed so odd that the poet Virgil had described hell in such minute detail in hs Aeneid He had no doubs stopped there many The Mytery Religions 9 times—he lived just a few miles away. ‘Hades’ remains one of the most enigmatic archaeo- logical finds ofthe twentieth century. The site is undatable, it must have existed in Homers time since his description both ofthe shrine and its environs is 0 acurae, suggesting the ste goes back toa least 800 #.C-E IF Odyseus really df vist it, as Homer claims in the Ody, it mast date back to Myeenaen times, perhaps 1200 8.C.. Te could in fact be fr older—Robert Paget suspects it was constructed sometime during the Stone Age. Its sacred purpose is ‘immediately evident the fist section of the tunnel, 48 feet Jong, is oriented directiy toward sunrise on the day ofthe summer solstice. The inner sanctuary, where Odysseus spoke with the ghost of the sage Teirsas, is oriented toward the sunset. ‘But what isso puzzling is how “Hades” could posi- bly have been built in che fist place. Inredibly a 200-yard subterranean passage heads diecly toward. an under ground stream of boing water 150 feet beneath the surface of the earth, as fits planners knew exactly where to find “the River Sty” No fale stars or exploratory excavations have been located: the workers, digging or dling through. solid volcanic rock, knew exactly where they were going, Engineers today would be hard pressed to locate an under- ‘ound hot spring so accurately. ‘The construction of this underworld isa marvel The shape and dimension ofits galleries were cu with painstak- ing pression, the runnels measuring 6 feet all by 21 inches wide. The ventilation system is quite sophisticated and would pass an engineering inspection even today. The tem- perature and water level ofthe boiling voleanic springs at the bottom ofthe complex remained constant til the day Paget scrambled inside, sill regulated by mechanisms put in place hy the orginal builders thousands of year ago.10 chapter two So much about this rockchewn Hades remains a ‘mystery. What we know for sure is that sometime during the reign of Caesar Augustus, Marcus Agrippa (Caesar's right-hand man) was dispatched to close the gates of hel, this order 19,000 cubic fet of earth were hand carried into the complex to fill the northern shat. Given that only fone man could pass through the narzow tunnel ata time, the work must have taken years. Then immense 20-foot- long blocks were set in place to seal the tunnel forever, ‘Whoever wanted the entrance to hell shut down must have wanted it cery badly. An earthquake—probably the enor ‘mous temblor of 63 C.x:—parially sealed the rest of the site until our two indefatigable naval officers lowered themselves in almost exactly nineteen hundged years later. ‘Over the long centuries a temple to the wisdom goddess Minerva continued to operate atthe surfice of “the Oracle of the Dead,” but eventually the underground sanctuary was forgotten, and "Hades" fied into the shad cows of mythology. The Oracle of the Dead What on earth were the ancients doing in this carefully carved pit? Scholars today speculate it was an immensely successful business concern, a sort of ghoulish Disneyland. (Oracles go back 2 long way in the old world, and the ‘Mediterranean was peppered with them. There was money tobe made from people's fears, then as now, and pretenders to supernatural knowledge rarely sufer from a lack of pay- ing clients, ‘The scenario scholars have worked out runs some~ ‘thing lke this. Clients showed up at the temple complex ‘overlooking the Gulf of Baia frightened, confsed, desper- The Mytry Religions 11 ate, oF recently bereaved. They may have been in rouble withthe gods, ke Odysseus or could have had problems vith power relatives, lke Hercules, who was ordered to pillage the site by his vengeful uncle. Aeneas, legendary father ofthe Roman people, was sent to our orale by the famous Sibyline prophetess ftom nearby Cuma, who was undoubtedly pad a handsome kickback forthe refer~ sal The Sibyl explained this was the one spot on earth where someone who was not already dead was allowed t0 enter the world beyond—peovded, ofcourse, they brought a generous offering for Persephone, gddes ofthat gloomy underworld, and forthe priestesses and priests who served her ther. In the netherword one could reconnect with a parent or spouse who had pase awa, seek counsel from a respected seer of yore, and receive asurance ofthe souls survival after death, even if this meant living on in the damp and dismal cavities ofthe earth Each new cient fisted and prayed keeping all-night vigils in the temple of the grim goddess on the bey: Drugs ‘were sipped into his drinks, and once he was in asf ciently hallucinatory frame of mind, dark-robed priests sent their etifed customer int the dak corridor lading down toward his uyst with the dead, Knees knocking the visitor descended into the earth, accompanied by appropriate sound efects (the shrieks and moans of temple stall} othe boiling river below. Ase neared the end of this short but peviffing journey he glimpsed the departed soul he sought to contact, or rather a carey coached priest or priestess standing in forthe decease n a confusing blow of smoke and light The customer would ak his questions, hopeilly recive the guidance and reassurance he had come fr, and then rush back up the tunnel, gratefil to r-emerge in the land ofthe living, It was a glorious frau, bilan con-