A Sermon on Noble Speech, Good Conduct,
and Reverence to the Gods, against Αισχρολογία (Vulgar Speech)
by High Priest Zevios Metathronos
I. Opening
The way a person speaks tells you who that person actually is. The words come out of the mouth like water from a spring, and the spring is the soul. If the spring is clean, the water is clean. If the spring is muddy, the water is muddy.
Watch the people around you for a year. The pattern repeats.
This sermon teaches three things woven into one. First, what the ancient philosophers said about noble speech and good conduct, and how they themselves spoke in daily life. Second, what modern psychology has confirmed about the same matter. Third, the Zevist teaching: that the way we speak about the Gods reveals the size of our own soul, and that the Gods stand favorably toward those who hold them in proper regard.
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A Special Notice for the Initiates of the Hall of Osiris - Opening The MouthThe teachings of this sermon apply to every Zevist who walks the path, and they apply with multiplied force to anyone who has performed the Opening of the Mouth Ritual (Wpt-r) made available through the Hall of Osiris. This is no ordinary devotional act. It is a hieratic operation that consecrates the tongue, opens the inner speech-channels, and aligns the spoken word with the creative power of Ptah, Thoth, and the Logos. After it has been performed properly, the voice no longer behaves as it did before. Speech that was once light now carries weight. Words that once dissolved into air now leave a wake.
This is a great gift and a heavy responsibility, in equal measure. The one whose mouth has been opened must therefore guard his tongue with proportionally greater care than the uninitiated. He must not swear idly, must not speak in exceptional hate unless the cause is fully and gravely warranted, must not curse another being in passing rage, and must not spend the consecrated breath on idle complaint or vulgar discharge. Words spoken from an opened mouth carry massive power, and that power is morally neutral: it amplifies whatever it is aimed at, blessing or cursing the speaker first, then the world.
II. How You Speak Shapes Who You Become
Every word a person speaks travels in two directions. It reaches the listener, and it also reaches the speaker's own ears. Each sentence enters the speaker's own nervous system before it leaves the room.
When a man curses another driver from inside his car, alone, with the windows up, no one is harmed except the man himself. He has just trained his own brain. He has just dragged his own nervous system one inch toward the gutter.
Heraclitus put it in four words:
Ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων.
Character is the daimon of a man.
The daimon, in old Greek thought, is the inner spirit that shapes a person's fate. So Heraclitus is saying that character itself is fate. And character is built out of small acts. Most of those small acts are words.
III. The Ancients Did Not Curse Verbally (Warning: Not magically; that's another topic)
This part deserves attention, because it is not widely known among modern people. The great philosophers of antiquity, almost without exception, did not use foul language. They considered crude speech a sign of poor character, and they said so explicitly.
Aristotle treats the matter directly in the Nicomachean Ethics. He distinguishes the eutrapelos, the man of refined wit, from the bomolokhos, the buffoon. The buffoon reaches for the cheap laugh, the dirty joke, the crude word. Aristotle's verdict on him is plain:
Οἱ τῷ γελοίῳ ὑπερβάλλοντες βωμολόχοι δοκοῦσιν εἶναι καὶ φορτικοί.
Those who carry the comic to excess are judged buffoons and vulgarians.
(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IV.8, 1128a4-5)
In the Politics he goes further. Speaking as a legislator, he says foul speech (αἰσχρολογία, aischrologia) must be banished from the well-ordered city as one would banish any other corruption:
Πρῶτον μὲν οὖν δεῖ ἐξορίζειν ἐκ τῆς πόλεως αἰσχρολογίαν.
First then, one must banish foul speech from the city.
(Aristotle, Politics VII.17, 1336b3-4)
Aristotle's reason is psychological and is worth noting: he says that speaking shamefully easily leads to acting shamefully. The crude word is a rehearsal for the crude deed.
Plato is just as strict. In the Republic the guardians of the just city may never imitate the speech of slaves, drunkards, or men reproaching and reviling each other (Republic III, 395d-e). In the Laws he prescribes legal penalties for verbal abuse and forbids citizens to insult one another in public spaces (Laws XI, 934e-935a). Plato considers foul speech contagious. The soul that hears it begins to take its shape.
The Pythagoreans were stricter still. They were not even permitted to swear oaths by the names of the Gods emptily, as when people today say "I swear to God!" on the habitual basis of lying continuously and daily. Oaths on the names of the Gods are powerful, true and binding and they should not be thrown around lightly. A proof that the Gods of the Yehubor do not exist, is that they take void oaths. When yes or no would do, Pythagoreans said yes or no; they didn't "take Oaths to Gods" emptily. When an oath truly was required, they swore by Pythagoras himself, only in most exceptional cases, by Zeus or Apollo. Diogenes Laertius records the rule:
Ἀπαγορεύειν ὀμνύναι θεούς· δεῖν γὰρ αὑτὸν παρέχειν ἀξιόπιστον.
He forbade swearing by the Gods, holding that a man should make himself worthy of trust by his own conduct.
(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers VIII.22 (on Pythagoras))
Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome with absolute power over millions, used the opening book of the Meditations to list what he had learned from each of his teachers. From Alexander the Grammarian he records this lesson: never to rebuke another for using poor or crude speech, but gently to model the right form (Meditations I.10). From his adoptive father Antoninus Pius he records the absence of all harsh, biting, or boastful language (Meditations I.16). The emperor did not curse and did not complain. That was the point worth recording.
The Stoics generally counseled what Epictetus called speaking only the necessary, with few words (Encheiridion 33.2). Clearly, this is not to be taken to philosophical extremes. What I am illustrating here, is that in fact, one must in general, mind their speech. Crude speech is by definition unnecessary speech; unless warranted by extreme anger or terrible situations. There is always a cleaner way to say the same thing. The man who reaches for a curse over nothing, is the man who has not bothered to think.
One famous exception stands out: Diogenes the Cynic, who used blunt and shocking speech as a deliberate philosophical method. But Diogenes is the exception that proves the rule. He was famous precisely because his shamelessness stood out against the universal habit of philosophical decorum. And note carefully: Diogenes never used crude speech against the Gods. He aimed at vanity and pretension; he left the divine alone.
The pattern across the schools is consistent. Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean (Epicurus, per Diogenes Laertius X.10, was famous for the gentleness of his speech): all converge. The cultivated person speaks cleanly. The crude tongue belongs to the uncultivated soul.
IV. The Psychology of Manners
Modern psychology says the same thing the ancients said, in different language.
The vagal tone of a person, meaning the resting state of the parasympathetic nervous system, is shaped over time by speech. People who habitually speak in calm, measured tones develop a calmer baseline. People who habitually shout, curse, and use harsh language develop a more inflamed baseline. This is the work of Stephen Porges and the polyvagal theory. It is also visible to anyone who has watched two old men: one who spoke kindly all his life, one who spoke harshly. They look different even before they open their mouths.
William James wrote in 1890:
We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.
(The action precedes the feeling. So a person becomes gentle by speaking gently, not by waiting until he feels gentle.)
The polite habit, kept up day after day, eventually grows into the polite character. The reverse is just as true: the crude habit grows into the crude character.
Mirror neurons, discovered in the 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti's team in Parma, show that the brain activates the same neural pathways when watching an action as when performing it. So the man who keeps company with vulgar speakers becomes a vulgar speaker himself, even if he never opens his own mouth. The brain has already absorbed the patterns. Theognis of Megara warned about this twenty-five centuries ago:
Ἐσθλῶν μὲν γὰρ ἀπ' ἐσθλῶν διδάξεαι· ἢν δὲ κακοῖσιν συμμίσγῃς, ἀπολεῖς καὶ τὸν ἐόντα νόον.
From the noble you will learn noble things. But if you mix with the base, you will lose even the mind you have.
(Theognis 35-36)
Carl Rogers built his clinical practice on a single observation: when the therapist treats the patient with what Rogers called unconditional positive regard, the patient begins to heal. The Zevist needs to grasp what this means. The way you speak to someone is more than a delivery mechanism for information. It is itself an intervention in that person's nervous system, for healing or for harm.
Carl Jung named the phenomenon of projection. Whatever a person cannot accept inside himself, he attacks outside himself. The man who curses the Gods strikes only at his own capacity for reverence, since the Gods themselves are incorruptible and untouched by his words.
V. The Gods and the Reverent Person
The Gods respond positive to positive speech, because we, ourselves, do positively respond to them and open up the necessary channel, when we address positive speech to them. In opposite, the people who speak to the Gods like their little brothers, or worse, their servants, and issue requests or treat them lowly, will receive the lowly treatment. With that stated, we don't need to boast or be pretending in our speech, but formal respect is highly recommended when addressing the Gods.
The law of universal sympathy still governs the relationship. The Neoplatonists called it sympatheia ton holon, the sympathy of all things. Like attracts like. The reverent soul opens a channel through which divine grace can flow. The irreverent soul closes that same channel, by their own act, unrelated to the Gods. The Gods do not punish the irreverent person; the irreverent person punishes himself, by walling himself off from a current that would otherwise have helped him.
Iamblichus taught in his On the Mysteries that prayer rightly performed operates as alignment of the worshipper's soul with the eternal will of the Gods. The worshipper becomes something new.
The way you speak about a God matters more than you think. When you say Zeus with reverence, you train your own soul to recognize majesty, it benefits you first and foremost, and not the God (who is already reverent whether you recognize it or not). Similarly, blasphemers and those who speak lowly, punish themselves because they undervalue their own dignity as it's reflected by Zeus, back at them. When you say Zeus lightly, as a curse word or a joke, you train your own soul to recognize things like that. The God remains unaffected by negative and lesser talk. The speaker is the one who shrinks, thus creating distance.
Plato wrote in the Laws:
Ὁ θεὸς ἡμῖν πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἂν εἴη μάλιστα.
God would be for us, most of all, the measure of all things.
(Plato, Laws IV, 716c)
When God is the measure, your speech finds its measure. When you make yourself the measure, your speech drifts toward whatever satisfies you in the moment, which is usually crude.
VI. Reverence as the Mirror of Self-Respect
The deeper teaching follows. The way you speak about the Gods, the way you picture them, the way you name them: all of this reveals the relationship you have with your own higher nature. In other words, lesser names, enemy dogma and for all respects, lesser intelligence around the Gods, does harm both their perception and your own perception around the Gods, technically making you more foolish.
Plato gave the rule in the Theaetetus. The goal of the philosophical life is homoiosis theo kata to dynaton, becoming like God as far as is possible (Theaetetus 176b). Whatever picture of the Gods you carry, you slowly become. If your Gods are halloween monsters, isolationists, dumb and lesser, as ghoulish frogs, so you do become. Likewise, your addressing, your perception and the inferiority complex which you project on them to attempt to equalize them, only equalizes you to a lesser level limitation of your own.
If you see them as luminous, regal, magnanimous, you grow toward those qualities likewise. If you see them as tyrants, or as absent, or as petty, or as lesser characters in a show, you likewise project this onto yourself.
For the very same reason, kings, queens and other important people, were addressed in high reverence and respect in the Ancient world of Initiates and Mystics, because when you revere what is advanced, you advance yourself. The more you flame to satisfy your inferior complex for "equality", the more you dissuade your mind from recognizing what is higher, therefore rendering yourself less and less advanced.
When he refuses to picture Zeus as a senile patriarch and the "fallen of the Bible", Aphrodite as a "Prostitute", Artemis as "Cold hearted", or Hera as a "Jealous wife", or when you clothe the Gods in inferior names which produce incoherent isosephy, or when you adopt crude forms and half-measured approaches - or whatever of these things, the person doing this, he keeps his own soul from internalizing those caricatures. You are internalizing caricarutes and therefore you become a caricature and that's on you. What's on me as a High Priest of the Gods is to explain how you can utilize proper conduct, to become your greatest version. Your own freedom decides what you do with the knowledge given.
Be aware however, how you define things, doesn't mean the things are as you see them in the real world. The damage from such speech reaches you alone. Speaking to Zeus like your "bro", does not make him your "bro", and speaking lowly of higher entities, does not bring you "closer" to them.
Reverence is a two-way river. It flows toward the Gods and returns to the reverent person carrying proper conduct.
VII. Practical Rules for Daily Life
A teaching that does not reach the kitchen, the car, and the email inbox is not really a teaching. So the rules below are given in plain form. The Zevist who keeps these will see his life change within a quick time if you practice them. They aren't easy and require habitual training. But you'll see them transform you if you apply this.
On waking. Your first words of the day set the tone for everything that follows. Greet the Gods, even briefly: "Great is Zeus [or the name of your Guardian]" Three seconds. Then make sure your first words to other people are not in anger in the day. Don't grunt pointlessly and set a bad mood for your day. Don't complain about the weather all the time as if it's going to change it. Greet life properly.
In traffic. The other driver cannot hear you. You shouting at how much whatever they are, doesn't matter for them. Cursing him hurts only one nervous system: yours. Drive in silence or play music; if you get anger, don't dwell on it for 12 hours. If you must speak, or must argue on validated reasons, then it's justified. If you just argue because all the cars don't go your way, then you just torment yourself - cars were never meant to go all your way.
Alone. What you say to yourself when no one can hear is the truest test. The Pythagoreans believed the Gods always listen, and they were right in this practical sense: the daimones inside you are always listening. How do you talk to yourself?
Online. Write nothing in any message, post, or email that you would not say to the person's face in a room. If a draft contains the usual trash of the internet of infantile entities, delete and rewrite. The internet is a public square; speak there as in the public.
When angry. Pause for ten breaths before saying anything. The Stoics called this prosoche (προσοχή), watchfulness. Musonius Rufus said: if you would not say it the next morning, do not say it tonight.
When insulted. Marcus Aurelius gives the rule (Meditations VI.6): the best response to a wrong is not to become like the wrongdoer. If someone curses you, stay silent or answer in measured words. You have just won the encounter, even if no one else sees it. Admittedly very hard, but worth to impart in most cases.
With those below you in rank. The way you speak to the waiter, the cleaner, the junior employee, the child, the new Zevist: that is the truest measure of your character. Anyone can be polite to those above them because power is in the middle. The man who is gentle to those below him has actually shows true character.
When you slip. You will slip. Apologize once, simply and honestly, address the mistake, and move on. Don't grovel. Don't make excuses to never rectify. If you made a mistake you did it, move on and don't repeat. Don't repeat the offense to dramatize the apology to restart again and again endless arguments. "I was rude. I am sorry. It won't happen again." Then back to the work.
On gossip. Before you speak about someone who isn't in the room, ask yourself: would I say this if they walked in right now? Gossip can be fun, but gossip past a point can absorb all your mind into nothingness in your day.
On divine names. Don't take divine names in your mouth for no reason. When you say "by Zeus", or "by the Gods" mean it. The names carry power. Spend them like coins, of untold value.
At day's end. Review your speech, as the Pythagoreans recommended in the Golden Verses: where did I speak harshly? whom did I offend, even slightly? what kind word did I withhold? Three minutes of honest review at night reshapes the next day before it begins. Refer to the Pythagorean Meditation in the Temple of Zeus section. It will help you understand yourself better. To remind you the crucial statement of Pythagoras:
Μηδ' ὕπνον μαλακοῖσιν ἐπ' ὄμμασι προσδέξασθαι, πρὶν τῶν ἡμερινῶν ἔργων τρὶς ἕκαστον ἐπελθεῖν· πῇ παρέβην; τί δ' ἔρεξα; τί μοι δέον οὐκ ἐτελέσθη;
Do not let soft sleep close your eyes, until you have gone over each of the day's deeds three times: where did I go wrong? what did I do? what duty did I leave undone?
(Pythagorean Golden Verses, lines 40-42)
VIII. Closing Blessing
The Zevist who walks this path will notice changes in his life within months if they practice this. People around him will soften; it won't be magick, it will be literally your behavior. One will start understanding that interaction with other people, matters. His own sleep will deepen. The small injuries of daily existence will lose their grip on him. He will find that the Gods, who never moved, now seem closer, because he has finally cleared the noise that was keeping him from hearing them.
Honor and glory to the Gods, blessed be the speech of all Zevists.
ZEFS AENAOS.
High Priest Zevios Metathronos