David Breeden is speaking all week about hidden knowledge.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom and the first of our summer wisdom in which we will be here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This week, I want to look a little bit at Mystery and the Inner Sanctum. What’s that? Well, there is this persistent idea among human beings that there is some kind of “mystery”. The truth is out there somewhere. And if we just keep digging, we can find it. Although a contemporary guru will say, “Truth is not hidden, you’re hiding from it.” Well, I don’t know which of those two is true, but. Or maybe both. Who knows? But there has been a lot of search for hidden things over time within a spiritual religious realm. You can get out your crystal ball and and talk to the crystal ball of people who can tell you something. Look, here it is. “The Lost Principle kept hidden from humanity”, the real law of attraction, by golly. And it’s right there. And apparently, I guess you need to pay something probably to access this knowledge. I don’t know about that. Of course, the tarot cards are always a very popular way of talking about that, which is hidden. And you can pay certain people to reveal those truths to you. And there’s all kinds of things like this when you start digging around the real story of the stunning discovery of hidden knowledge in the first five books of the Bible, “Cracking the Bible Code”, whatever could that mean? Well, actually, numerology and counting the letters of the Bible in various languages has been around for a very long time. And also we’ve got “5 Hidden Magical Secrets That Can Transform Your Life”. Again, one assumes there’s something to do with paying somebody something or buying something when this is involved. Of course, there are very old ones such as the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is ancient mystic Jewish religion and is very much part of the tradition, but also has some kind of new age elements to it, too. It’s according to who you talk to, Alister Crowley, famous romanticist, “And the Hidden God”, again all kinds of hidden knowledge out there that you can find out all you gotta do is buy the book. Well, there’s also hidden knowledge that is very much hidden in plain sight. This is from a late 19th century painting. John Collier’s “The Priestess of Delphi”. He had studied the actual historical way. We think this actually worked. The Pythia this is the woman in the chair sat on a tripod chair holding laurel reeds and a dish of spring water. There she is. And you see the gas emanating from the bottom under this big crack and that has been studied over time. Did this really occur? What kind of gas was it? Was it hallucinogenic in some way? We don’t really know. There’s also some ideas that it was snake venom that was used to cause some kind of hallucinogenic state, or maybe it was a group of women who were out of power, obviously in a very patriarchal Greece of the day, and that they were stacking those cards by deciding what kind of fortunes they were going to tell at as the Oracle of Delphi.

It was a sisterhood of women who were brought in. They had to fast, they had to ritually bathe, and to get into the sisterhood. And then they became for a very short time, one of the Priestesses of Delphi. We don’t really know. We do know that the Oracle at Delphi was the most long lived of all the real, actual Greek religious sites. Over time, it’s mentioned by Socrates, it’s mentioned by Plato,