Jerry's Excellent Adventure

8/9/2019 Jerry's Excellent Adventure

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Jerrys excellent adventure: ancient Greece, Jerusalem& the Great Pyramid: October, 2006


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Ancient Greece, Jerusalem & the Great Pyramid

From Bird Guano to Frogs

In the 1970s, my brother Jim married Veronica. In 1993

Jim died of a heart attack. At his funeral in England, hisIrish wife, Veronica, was busy calling priests and orderingfood when my mother and I walked in. I rememberfeeling ashamed of myself; I was financially andemotionally drained by litigation I was in, and here I wasat my only brother's funeral, and part of my mind waselsewhere obsessing and ruminating over ridiculously

mundane things. Veronicahad the incrediblepresence of mind to stopwhat she was doing and

sit down on the back lawnwith me. Well, Jerry,what's happening in yourlife? she asked. As I was about to answer and tell her of my inanepreoccupations, a bird shit on me. Not a small amount, but a huge

tablespoon of white bird dung landed kerplop on my funeral-black shirt. Jesus Christ! I exclaimed,and Veronica actually began to laugh_probably the only time she had laughed that year! Don't youknow what that means? she asked. In Ireland, it means you are about to receive some good news. It'san incredibly good omen.

Before Oh, really! could escape my lips, the phone rang. Uncle Jerry, you have a call from

America, shouted my niece, Siobhan. It was my wife, Anya, with news that my lawyer had called. Thecase was over; I had won. I still had bird shit on my shirt when I got the news.

Synchronicity, meaningful coincidence, a mystical Jungian concept, started to get my attention. Indeed,if my prankster brother was still around, it would be totally in character for him to have a bird shit onhis little brother_just as it would be in character for him to rescue his little brother if he could.

After that I started to wonder, more seriously: Is there a soul? Does it go somewhere? Is that all magicand superstition, or is there something to the idea of eternal life?

That was thirteen years ago. In the last three years I finished work on a book calledIn Search ofButterflies: The Quest for the Soul at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, which incorporates virtuallyeverything I ever learned about psychology. Two publishers are reviewing as I write this (fingersKrothed). Research on this book led to this trip; I had a few critically important places I had to seeand pictures to take for this book_a tight nineteen-day agenda_so I took no prisoners (nor fellowtravelers). It begins in Greece:

I. Ancient Greece

Athens begins in about 800 BC. Its golden age ismarked at about 580 BC; by 148 BC it begins a long


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series of occupations, plundered by the Romans, Constantine's Holy Roman Empire, the Turks, theEnglish, then the Nazis.

One fact gleaned on this trip, for the things-I-never-knew department, is that in 1923 Turkey andGreece had some real problems. A mass repatriation of 300,000 Turks living in Greece began, as over amillion Greeks living in Turkish areas returned home. Such a huge influx of Greeks caused

overcrowding, unemployment and mass famine. Today few Greeks speak Turkish and vice versa. Thepresent conflicts in Cyprus probably have to be seen through these historic lenses.

Athens is named after a virgin, Athena, agoddess whose most magnificentmonument, the Parthenon, actually means

virgin in Greek. Overlooking Athens this

mathematically engineered masterpiece is fivetimes older than any building we could find inNorth America. Built 500 years before Christ,the marble pillars encode incrediblemathematics, the sacred proportion, andvarious optical illusions which make up itsdesign.

At the same site (the Acropolis or high city)that overlooks greater Athens we find theTheater of Dionysius, where the plays of

Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes andAeschylus dazzled sophisticated Athenians.For such a tiny country, just imagine howmuch Greece gave Western civilization:

Homer, Hesiod (The Theogony) Hippocrates, Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid,Demosthenes...and Socrates himself.

The Parthenon


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Below the Acropolis is the Temple of Zeus,the largest ancient temple on the Greekmainland. Zeus had an notable OedipusComplex. His father, Kronos, fearing aFreudian takeover, swallowed his children,

but protected by mother earth (Rhea, orGaia) (seeJack and the Beanstalkfor abackground), Zeus survived to castrate hisfather, rape his mother, and sire the twelveOlympians plus a few scores ofmortal/immortal hybrids. I wanted to go toMount Olympus to visit Zeus' stompinggrounds, but it was 200 miles south...and Ino longer a Freudian.

I chose a more Jungian destination_thetemple of Apollo at Delphi, 120 miles north.It is at Delphi that we come upon the Oraclepossessed by a peculiar divine insanity andin touch with the collective psyche's morefuturistic functions. The ancient inscribedmotto one sees as one enters Delphi isKnow Thyself. What an appropriate placefor a psychologist to visit! There is also amore mysterious inscription: You Are. Wewonder what that means. Does it mean Weexist, are eternal, have everlasting life, andwe should live in the now, as in the Power of

Now, or is it more akin to the Biblical I amwho am?

A Revelation: Chanteen

I wandered about the temple. It's beautiful, but one's more cynical side says, Big deal. This is just aview site_a wonderful, pretty place tobuild something...anything. It overlooksa lush set of valleys, a body of water, asmall city on the water_just a nice placefor any ancient land developer with taste.Ah, not so fast, my cynical friend! Delphiis weird. It forms isosceles triangles allover the place. Many cities in ancientGreece are equidistant from each other, sothe following made rather perfectisosceles triangles with Delphi: Delphi-Athens-Olympia; Delphi-Eleusis-Iolkos;Delphi-Megalopoli-Figaleia; Delphi-Pella-Corfu [There are more!].

Temple of Zeus


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When the oracle spoke (in her heyday her name was Pythia), she went below to sniff some volcanicfumes, got appropriately stoned and spoke in tongues. The priests interpreted her babble to renderintelligibility to the famous oracles. All around the temple there are treasuries, or ancillary templeswhere gifts were bestowed by those grateful for the correct predictions which streamed out of theoracle's mouth. Judging by the ancient opulence of these treasuries, the oracle must have been right on

quite a bit.

Perhaps a hundred sundry touristswere crawling all over this placetaking pictures, but none weremeditating or trying to contact theoracular source themselves. This is,after all, a symbolic and sacred place,so why not sit, close your eyes, ask afew questions? I did. I wanted to get asclose to the oracle's location as Icould. I closed my eyes and got onerather definitive answer, but all of myother queries were ambiguous.

A guide saw me and said I was theonly one who was doing what one should be doing when they came here. That made me feel a bit lessstrange. I had decided that night would be a great time to try to remember my dreams, so I wasprepared with pen and paper.

This subjective moment is really the most important moment of my trip, so before we go any further,remember that Delphi is a temple to the sun god Apollo, and that Apollo's major function was to drivefour horses that pulled his chariot across the sky. Each morning Apollo would pull the sun across thesky (dusk to dawn), and that made up his major workload: Apollo shot out arrows which cansymbolize the rays of the sun that bring light and insight.

On the bus back to Athens I met a man named David, a professor whoworked for thirteen years in Saudi Arabia. A Minnesotan by birth, thisrotund expatriate was interesting and articulate, had a uniqueperception of the world, and liked Vivaldi and Bill Evans. A fewtimes I found myself saying, What does that word mean that you areusing? I like speaking to someone when their vocabulary is over myhead. At the end of our two-hour bus ride, I gave him my emailaddress and said, Let's correspond. I really enjoyed talking to you.

That night I had probably one of the ten most important dreams of mylife. Here it is:

David is standing in front of me and says,I just bought someChanteen stationery to write to you. I said, Well, that's a new one,(referring to the word Chanteen). He says, I thought you'd like

that! (as if he intended to choose that word).

Apollo


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I woke up and wrote down the word Chanteen, then went back to sleep. The next morning Iremembered the dream, but forgot what kind of stationery he said he was going to write me on.However, I remembered that I'd written the word Chanteen and said, Wow, that's weird! I have tolook this up. I went to the hotel computer, checked dictionary.com and thesaurus.com, and there wasnothing, so I decided this was just a nonsense word that my frontal lobes tried to make sense out of inthe dream (referred to as the neurophysiological theory of dreaming).

But then I Googled the word and discovered that it really was word in the Navajo language. It appearedin Navajo poetry as the Chanteen and the function of the chanteen was, like Apollo, to raise the sunup into the sky. Incredible! Here is the Navajo discovery:

They looked up and saw two rainbows, one across the other, from east to west,and from north to south. The heads and feet of the rainbows almost touched the

men's heads. The men tried to raise the great light, but each time they failed.Finally a man and woman appeared, whence they knew not. The man's name was

Atseatsine and the woman's name was Atseatsan. They were asked, How can thissun be got up? They replied, We know; we heard the people down here trying

to raise it, and this is why we came. Chanteen [sun's rays], exclaimed theman, I have the chanteen; I have a crystal from which I can light the chanteen,

and I have the rainbow; with these three I can raise the sun. The people said,Go ahead and raise it.

So the Chanteen does what Apollo does; it raises the sun into the sky. There are a few things to payattention to here. (1) I never read any American Indian literature; (2) I certainly never encountered anyNavajo poetry; (3) Chanteen is not a nonsense word, but something that comes out of the silt of someother psyche_not mine! That is actually something I talk about in my book. Is our psyche just nothingmore than the sum total of our own individual life experiences, or do we have the capacity to tap into amore universal mind (a collective psyche), another symbolic archive to which we have access?

David, in the dream, is saying he has some Apollonian stationery, Sun god stationery, and he uses aNavajo word to carry the message. David is a messenger from the collective psyche, the same place theoracles came from. This was bewildering, delightful and confirmatory. This is a large interior chunk ofwhat my journey was about.

Back to Athens. Miscellaneous observations:

Athens is sometimes grubby, but it is filled withpeople talking, smoking and living. Restaurantsseem to be open and people schmoozing until 5 a.m.

I saw very few police, lots of people crossing streetsagainst the light, and through all the apparent chaosthere seemed to be an organic lawfulness. Peoplewere polite, even to Americans. Women could walkalone along dark alleyways without any thought totheir safety. There seemed to be an unseen safety nethere. Even in the immaculate marbled subway youjust validate your ticket (no turnstiles to stop you)and off you go. There is a sense of trust somewhere


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in the air which does not exist in American cities. I saw no homeless people and very few beggars, butapparently the average college graduate earns only about $800 per month.

Street food and wine were not memorable, but one souvlaki totally blew me away. Souvlaki is kind oflike Greek lasagna.

I came on a mission to Greece, a quest to touch the ancient life here, not to understand the present, but Iwas delightfully surprised by both. This was the navel of western culture, of philosophy, democracy,rational thought and civility. To summarize one author:

The magnificence of Hellenic life lasted no more than a century and a half, but this

short time was enough to make Greece the holy land of civilization: human thoughtwas born there. This small city changed, in the moral order, the poles of the earth.

The East had given birth to wise men, but under them the people were no more thandocile flocks ruled by the master's voice. In Greece, for the very first time, humanity

became conscious of itself.

II. The Holy Land

The most famous Jew in the world, and the most famous human being of all time is undoubtedly JesusChrist. Almost 32% of all the people on this planet consider him God_I'm talking currently!

I was raised Catholic from age five to age seventeen, and became angry and resentful over myindoctrination for many years. In my forties, Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung reminded me

that it is important to try to understand the meta-meanings of themyths into which we are born. (Did the Virgin Mary have a hymen,or does the virgin birth instead symbolize the need for all humanbeings to be born from the spirit and not the flesh?)

Norman O. Brown says it similarly: From literalism to symbolism,the lesson of my life. Touch, Norman!

Jerusalem was astonishing. I never saw so many churches,monasteries, abbeys and cathedrals all in one place. Pilgrims from allover, black Abyssinians, choir-singing Sri Lankans, Russians, andPolish, French and Spanish groups swarming over these temples andstations of the cross.

I was in the tomb where Jesus' body came up missing and where theydeclared him risen from the dead. This is the holiest church inJerusalem, the church of the Holy Sepulcher. I asked a guy to take mypicture at the entrance, and he did. He said he was also an executiveproducer forGood Morning America and asked if I would submit to aninterview. I agreed. The program was supposed to air on November13, but they ran it without my wonderful comments. Anyway, he

asked me What do you think of Jerusalem?, and I said This is a religious Disneyland! Then heasked me to comment further and I said Well, if there is no God, then this is the absolute citadel ofcollective insanity. but if there is, then this is the very epicenter of man's most divine and sacred

Where Pontius washed his handsof it all and set Barabas free


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connection to God. I mean, look. Jesus resurrected from this very place. A block down the street,Mohammed did the same. This is really a very archetypal and divine place.

Thats probably why it didnt run.

All the religions except Buddhism seem to be here:

Judaism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, RomanCatholicism, Southern Baptist Convention. There iseven a place on the roof of the Holy Sepulcher, whichhouses a monastery of Ethiopian monks who live inprison-like monastic cells.

There is a church for everything. A church where Marywas born. A church where Jesus fell. A church whereMary died. A church where Jesus was whipped (theChurch of the Flagellation). A church where Veronicawiped his face. (There is no Veronica in the Bible, but itdoesn't seem to deter the construction of churches.) If Jesus farted, the spot would be marked by the

church of the Holy Flatulence.

The old city is really cool. Tiny, ancient streets, some where theslippery marble is even 2,000 years old.

This is a place of pilgrimage. People here are making a lifejourney_like me_and they have tears in their eyes, prayers: Jewishrabbis praying in the center of the street (where they suspect thefirst temple once stood), Sri Lankans singing in the church of theVirgin Mary, with tears streaming down their faces, obviouslyswooning that they have finally arrived at this place. This iseverybody's hadj, strong emotions here, moments that are catharticand visceral to everyone from the redneck evangelical fromAlabama to more reserved Orthodox priests from the Ukraine.

My mostemotional moment was inside the tombwhere Christ's body disappeared. Looking upthrough the ceiling of this church (right) youget such a feeling of leaving and ascending.Well done architecturally! But the emotionalmoment came when I put my hands on theslab where Christ's body lay. I mean that isthe place where Jesus' body was. Touch it!Freaky! A billion other people have put theirhands there too, sure, but it does somethingto you_at least to a person with my religiousbackground. (I'm no longer a Catholic, by theway, but that does not seem to diminish theintensity.)

The room where the Last Supper was held


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Probably the most beautiful church in Jerusalem isoutside the old city on the Mount of Olives. It boastsgolden Russian cupolas and was built by CzarAlexander III (right) This is where Jesus appeared toMary Magdalene after the Resurrection. It wasclosed on the day I came, but I spoke Russian outsidethe door and a Russian nun let me in_to the grounds,but not to the church itself. Next door is the Churchof the Ascension where Jesus appeared to hisapostles after his death (and Doubting Thomas puthis finger into Christ's belly).

I wanted to get a picture of myself at the mostprofound mythic site of Christianity, Christmas andthe manger. Trouble is the Three Wise Men, the

Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The entrance here is the

tomb where Christs body was placed, then disappeared.

To the right is inside the tomb, a slab of stone where

Christs body was laid after his crucifixion.


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sheep, all the hay_that's located in Bethlehem at the Church of the Nativity, and that's in the Palestinianterritory.

I met a Palestinian cabby who said he could get meinto Bethlehem. We drove there. Then I went rightinto the church, crawled down into a bit of a cave,

and had my picture taken right where Jesus was born,where the Three Wise Men presented the HolyFamily with frankincense and myrrh (boy, is myrrhstrong!!)_and then I split. (My camera was lost, so Ilost this picture and had to download itleft).

But my driver and I were about to leave when wediscovered that he thought I brought my passport,and I never thought I needed it. Here we were inPalestinian territory, and I couldnt get out withoutdocuments. We were turned away at one checkpoint.There I was, stranded with Hamas, Al-Fatah, and no

passport. A block away about fifteen Palestinian policemen with machine guns were arguing withHamas gunmen. I was actually quite scared, but my driver said, I am your brother. I will get you outof this. So we went to another exit gate. He told me to pretend I was his relative. They searched thecar for bombs, but let us go through without checking my I.D. Whew!

On the way out I took a good look at the wall_the recently built 400-mile-long wall now separatingIsrael from Palestinian territories. I can't tell you how sad it makes you feel to see it. It just elicits araw, naked emotion of sadness to seethis new Berlin Wall. An irrational,unspeakable emotion of total sadnessdescends on you when you get close tothis thing. My politics didn't changefrom this trip, but one statement keptcoming back, from psychiatrist FritzPerls: The more you resist, the more itpersists.

I think that is very true for the Israelisand very true for the Palestinians...and itis profoundly sad.

By the way, the feeling of hatred in thePalestinian population is, to this naiveobserver, palpable, seething. You cansense it; you can see it in their eyes.

The spot in Bethlehem, in the manger, were Christ

was born. They built a church around it called the

Church of the Nativity


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I was at the Wailing Wall, the Jewish holy site, and watched and listened while I was there.

The Wailing Wall sits very close to theDome of the Rock. This is the not amosque, but a shrine to the resurrection ofMuhammad. Muhammad made hisNight Journey here and ascended intoheaven in 687 AD. This place has someother historic attributes. It was the originalsite of Solomon's temple a thousand yearsbefore Christ. It was where Abrahamsacrificed his son. It was the place where

the Ten Commandments were enshrineduntil about 587 BC when theydisappeared. Today it is the third holiestsite in Islam (after Mecca and Medina),and it is thought the destruction of thisplace or its defilement will be the triggerthat sets off Armageddon.

Security is very tight here.


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III. The Great Pyramid

Just as I didn't go to Israelbut to the Holy Land, so Ididn't come to Cairo, but tothe Great Pyramid. The cityof Cairo, however, blew meout of the water. This wasmy first experience with agreat, overpopulated,polluted megalopolis. Whata place not to visit!Seventeen million peopleand counting. Garbageeverywhere. Peopleeverywhere. Scoundrels andhucksters everywhere.Suffocating.

Only on the Nile was there asense of relief, but even infront of the Four SeasonsHotel right on the Nile therewere plastic bottles, garbageand papers blowing around.Cairo runs right into the cityof Giza, and that lowerupper-class slum (all thebuildings seem to be paintedbrownish gray) runs right up

to the very base of thepyramids.

But when you see the GreatPyramid (Cheops), you juststand there...inawe...transfixed...and youhear yourself saying, Jesus

Christ, who the fuck built this?!!!

Miscellaneous and California-tainted observations about Israel:

There are no jazz clubs in Jerusalem.

It is impossible to find gefilte fish, corned beef, pastrami or matzo ball soup here.

Russians are everywhere; there is even a Russian TV channel.

No one wears Spandex or seems to jog, exercise or ride bikes for physical health here,

in Athens, or in Egypt.


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If the shrines of Jerusalem are 2,000 years old, and the temples of the Golden Age of Greece are 2,500years old, the Great Pyramid is 4,500 years old!I just looked at it, stunned, for ten minutes.

If you ever felt human beings had been

influenced by, or contacted by, extraterrestrials,or if extraterrestrials had any influence overhuman affairs, I think the Great Pyramid is thebest example of this. It is awesome, weird,wonderful. One of the Seven Wonders of theWorld, it absolutely and unequivocally deservesthis accolade.

I was interested in only Cheops, the largest ofthe three pyramids. It has the most physics to it.There are enough stones in this structure tobuild a six-foot wall around France! They are soprecisely cut that to this day no one reallyknows how they did it.


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There is no mortar, but fitted granite that has stood, undisturbed, through 4,500 years of earthquakes,floods and volcanoes. It stood so well that today the northern tip of the pyramid points precisely to themagnetic north pole. Its height with respect to its base delivers pi to the second decimal place. If you


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multiply its height times 10 to the tenth (abillion), you get the closest point that Earthcomes to the sun (the perihelion). The baseis not a perfect square but bends in just bit,just enough to compensate for the curvatureof the earth, implying that whoever built

this knew the circumference of the earthwhen they engineered it. It was the tallestbuilding on Earth for forty-four centuries,only to be surpassed in the eighteenthcentury.

(Remember: Human beings had nothing toread, that is, no written language, only fivehundred years before this mother was built!All the math they thought the Greeksdiscovered was already here two millennia

before the Greeks discovered it.)

I went inside to the very center of the pyramid. One crawls through a four-foot opening. Only 100tickets are sold for this. When the vents of the pyramid were eventually opened, a rush of air stabilizedthe temperature. The King's Chamber, the center of the Great Pyramid where we crawled, is sixty-eightdegrees all year long, right in the middle of the Egyptian desert_air conditioned for four millennia.

So inside the pyramid is supposed to be the center of healing, with unusual magnetic energies. Evenfood is supposed to remain unspoiled here. The king's chamber is about 20x20x40 feet, a clean, smoothroom with no writing or hieroglyphics at all. As five of us entered, a yoga hippie was in the centerchanting ohhhmmm, so I thought I'd try my hand at it. I stood in the center of the King's Chamberand started my ohhhmmm. For some strange reason, I sang the lowest note that I can sing (G belowC), and it was low, strong and overpowering. It just filled up the room. I was amazed at the echo-resonance reverberating through my voice...and through me.

I did it again, just for good measure, and felt something strange inside me. Not to make a big deal outof it, but since I was in the pyramid I feel a certain absence of fear in my life.(How nice if that lasted!)

On the Nile


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Nearby is mankind's first block-long, maximalist sculpture, the Sphinx. The enigma of the Sphinx,solved by Oedipus, is that it represents man. Whatever the interpretation, it is also stunning. You can'tget very close, but I had a wonderful Egyptologist guide who was superb in explaining things. Thesestones are some of the biggest in the entire pyramid complex, many tons, and cut perfectly.


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I also went to the Museum of Antiquities, where I saw the usual stuff: an 18-foot mummified crocodile, a mummified dog and cat, a pharaoh's condom,King Tut's 120-pound solid-gold sarcophagus. I was most impressed byRamses II. He's in very good shape for 6,000 years of age. I think it isimportant to be buried in salt and then properly embalmed.

I couldn't wait to get out of Cairo. Its suffocating overpopulation andpollution is like Guadalajara to the power of 15. I really felt that twentyyears from now this area of the world will be unfit for human habitation. Itreminds one of the movie Soylent Green. (Rent it if you haven't seen it!) Butthe pyramid was a stunning jewel. Awesome!

Completing the Circle

This journey started in England at my brother's funeral with bird shit. Well, last year his beloved wife,Veronica, died at the tender age of fifty-nine. I came to her funeral, too, and now here I am with theirdaughter, Siobhan, at the burial site. The stone has been changed. Both Jim and Veronica are nowburied in one spot, and the stone reads, Together again. I stood there in contemplation and a momentof silence. Then, as suddenly as a bird shit on me thirteen years ago, Siobhan blurted out, Oh, look atthat! It was a frog. A little frog jumped on top of Jim and Veronica and nestled himself under a leaf.This journey is pregnant with symbols from bird shit to Chanteen, but frogs also have major symbolicmeaning. They change from tadpoles to something else. They are symbolic of a change of state, goingfrom form to another, of metamorphosis, as in Kiss a frog and it will turn into a prince.

Solid granite cut from asingle stone to form a 90

degree angle


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The symbolic meaning of a frog in the textbooks is that it is a symbol of resurrection. How fitting thatthis symbolic little guy would alight on top of my brother and his wife. This is where my pilgrimagebegan, where the seeds of my book began, and where my nineteen-day trip ended.

Thanks for reading this.

Jerry KrothNovember 2006

Jerry's Excellent Adventure

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