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Sciborg_S_Patel
Disney's "Goddess of Spring" Persephone short from 1934:
Nice. This (not the Disney version) story is a theme in the book I mentioned previously, which has the Mysteries of Eleusis as its background.Disney's "Goddess of Spring" Persephone short from 1934:
...Whereas Weil argues that force has a purely deleterious effect on the characters of the Iliad, I contend that Homer clearly conveys an understanding of force as that which exalts men above their peers. We come to realize that demonstrations of force in the form of martial prowess are the conditions for rising above the ranks of mere men. A reexamination of those passages in the text that are marked by exhibitions of aristeia allows us to understand force as a positive influence on its heroes, for it is through force that heroic character is made manifest.
I conclude with an attempt to synthesize the dualistic nature of force in a way that reveals Homer’s intentions of transforming the conventional ancient Greek notion of a hero. A careful reading of the encounter between Achilles and Priam reveals a novel form of aristeia in which combative force is replaced by an exhibition of love, self-sacrifice, and political diplomacy. Furthermore, the transformation of aristeia as that which affirms the mortality of man anticipates Homer’s Odyssey. I contend that heroic striving for immortality renders the hero similar to a thing insofar as he strives to be godlike, and yet the gods are unable to partake in Homer’s transformation of aristeia as that which is founded on man’s mortality. Perhaps, the hero’s dissatisfaction with being an “anthropos” is lamentable for Homer. Ironically, it is through my suggested reinterpretation of the passage on which Weil relies so heavily to make her point that one finds in Homer something like the promotion of civic virtue through the exercise of practical wisdom and selflessness over and against warfare’s savagery and vainglory...
This year's Earth Day in Ashland, Oregon, where I live, featured an interfaith service at the local Unitarian church, and I wasn't too surprised to get a call inviting me to be one of the presenters. Like the other interfaith events I've been to, this one was sparsely attended but enthusiastic; a choir sang upbeat songs about saving the planet in between snippets of Buddhist sutras, Baha'i prayers, Taoist poetry, and yes, a bit of Druid ritual. Afterwards, though, as I was folding up my robes, a kid about eight years old came into the little alcove where the presenters stashed their gear, looked up at me and asked, "Are you a real Druid?"
Half an hour later, as I walked home through Oregon rain, the question still burned.
It's not an easy question to answer. The original Druids, the priests and wizards of the ancient Celts, went extinct more than a thousand years ago, and all their beliefs, practices, and teachings went with them. Maybe they were the wise oak-priests of today's historical fantasies, maybe they were the "obscure barbarian priesthood of interest only to specialists" that historians like the late Stuart Piggott prefer to imagine. We'll never know, because they and almost everything connected with them vanished in the early Dark Ages.
Some modern Druid groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to their lasting discredit, claimed direct connections to the ancient Celtic Druids they didn't have. The real roots of the modern Druid movement go in a different direction: to the first stages of the Industrial Revolution in early 18th century Britain, and the Hobson's choice between dogmatic religion and materialist science, the two victors in the reality wars of the late Renaissance. Plenty of people sought a third option that embraced nature and spirit alike, and some of them found inspiration in the scraps of classical writing, medieval legend, and Celtic folklore that referred to the ancient Druids.
Historians call the result the Druid Revival.
In this paper I shall argue that Plato’s view of the self corresponds to how he believes the external world should be ordered. Some other thinkers, such as Lear (1997), Williams (1997) and Cooper (1999) have suggested this relationship, especially Bernard Williams (1997) with his work on the ‘analogy of city and soul’ in Plato’s Republic. I will take this work on a bit further.
Have you ever wondered why in modern Christmas tradition we do the things we do? What is the origin of the Christmas tree, with the star on top, decorations about, and all the brightly wrapped presents beneath? Or the idea behind Santa Claus who jets around the globe in a magic sleigh with flying reindeer – defying both time and space – to deliver the world’s children a bounty of Christmas gifts? And since when did Santa and the birth of Jesus have anything to do with each other? Where do these stories come from – and better yet: what are we actually celebrating on Christmas morning?
There are answers to these questions. And the history is not so farfetched or even that hidden. You just have to know where to look. And the first place we look is the North Pole; seriously – in ancient Siberia, near the top of the world. The story of Santa and his likely origins begins where he supposedly lives: the frigid North...
Wyrd (or sometimes Weird) is a term for concepts roughly corresponding to those of fate or destiny but involving complex interactions of universal necessity and individual choice within a cosmos beyond any fixed notions or concepts of mortal minds. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, which retains its original meaning only in dialects. The Old English term wyrd derives from a Common Germanic term *wurđíz. Wyrd has cognates in Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt, Old Norse urðr, Dutch worden (to become) and German werden. The Proto-Indo-European root is *wert- "to turn, rotate", in Common Germanic *wirþ- with a meaning "to come to pass, to become, to be due" (also in weorþ, the notion of "worth" both in the sense of "price, value, amount due" and "honour, dignity, due esteem"). Old English wyrd is a verbal noun formed from the verb weorþan, meaning "to come to pass, to become". From the 14th century, to weird was also used as a verb in Scots, in the sense of "to preordain by decree of fate". The modern spelling weird first appears in Scottish and Northern English dialects in the 16th century and is taken up in standard literary English from the 17th century. The now most common meaning of weird, "odd, strange", is first attested in 1815, originally with a connotation of the supernatural or portentuous but by the early 20th century increasingly applied to everyday situations. In modern paganism and mysticism use of the words "weird" and "wyrd" have been revived with more of their original connotations and meanings.
Senior druid King Arthur Pendragon, said: "What we're really here for is to celebrate the fact that the cycle of the world turns, and from now on the days get longer and it's the return of the sun.
"It's a time of change and hope is renewed - the same message really from a pagan perspective as from a Christian perspective.
"That's what this season is all about - a message of hope."
Personal Daimons
From Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld
by Patrick Harpur
Guardian angels derived from Neoplatonism and, along with the other classes of angels, became part of Christian dogma at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325). But, long before this, the ancient Greeks believed that individuals were attached at birth to a daimon who determined, wholly or in part, their destiny. Philemon was clearly such a daimon for Jung, who emphasized the crucial part this strange Gnostic figure played in his life and work. Plato's mentor, Socrates, had a daimon who was famous for always saying "No." It did not enter into rational discourse with Socrates; it merely warned him when he was about to do something wrong (especially something displeasing to the gods), like the prompting of conscience...
However, Plato in Timaeus identified the individual daimon with the element of pure reason in man and so it became "a sort of lofty spirit-guide, or Freudian super-ego." This may be true of certain, perhaps exceptional individuals, but is is also true—as we shall see—that daimons are as likely to represent unreason or at least to be equivocal. But meanwhile it is instructive to consider the case of Napoleon. He had a familiar spirit "which protected him. which guided him, as a daemon, and which he called his star, or which visited him in the figure of a dwarf clothed in red that warned him."
This reminds us that personal daimons favor two forms by which to manifest: the abstract light, globe, oval and (as here) shining sphere, or the personification—angelic, manikin-like or whatever. It confirms, in other words, my speculation ... that the two forms are different manifestations of each other, with (in Napoleon's case) different functions: the star guides, the dwarf warns. Both are images of the soul, which is another way of understanding the daimon.
Indeed, it seems that, next to personification, daimons prefer luminous appearances or "phasmata," as the Syrian Neoplatonist Iamblichus (d. 326) called them. He was a real expert on daimons, and ufologists could do worse than study the distinctions he makes between phasmata. For instance, while phasmata of archangels are both "terrible and mild," their images "full of supernatural light," the phasmata of daimons are "various" and "dreadful." They appear "at different times ... in a different form, and appear at one time great, but at another small, yet are still recognized to be the phasmata of daemons." As we have seen, this could equally well describe their personifications. Their "operations," interestingly, "appear to be more rapid than they are in reality" (an observation which might be borne in mind by ufologists). Their images are "obscure," presenting themselves within a "turbid fire" which is "unstable."
The first of the great Neoplatonists, Plotinus (AD 204-70), maintained that the individual daimon was "not an anthropomorphic daemon, but an inner psychological principle," viz:—the level above that on which we consciously live, and so is both within and yet transcendent... Like Jung, he takes it as read that daimons are objective phenomena and thinks to emphasize only that, paradoxically, they manifest both inwardly (dreams, inspirations, thoughts, fantasies) and outwardly or transcendently (visions and apparitions). Plotinus does not, we notice—like the early Jung—speak of daimons as primarily "inner" and as seen outwardly only in "projection." He seems to agree with the later Jung—that there is a psyche "outside the body." However, his use of the word "transcendent" also suggests that the real distinction to be made is not between inner and outer, but between personal and impersonal. There is a sense, he seems to be saying, in which daimons can be both at once.
Personal daimons are not fixed but can develop or unfold according to our own spiritual development. Jung might say: in the course of individuation, we move beyond the personal unconscious to the impersonal, collective unconscious, through the daimonic to the divine. Acording to Iamblichus, we are assigned a daimon at birth to govern and direct our lives but our task is to obtain a god in its place.
The present anthology of the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition disagrees in certain important respects with the modern understanding of philosophy in general and of Platonism and Pythagoreanism in particular. Following the valuable insights of Pierre Hadot (supported by the witness of countless traditional sages throughout the world) we regard ancient philosophy as essentially a way of life: not only inseparable from “spiritual exercises,” but also in perfect accord with cosmogonical myths and sacred rites. In the broader traditional sense, philosophy consists not simply of a conceptual edifice (be it of the order of reason or myth), but of a lived concrete existence conducted by initiates, or by the whole theocentric community, treated as a properly organized and wellguided political and theurgical “body” attended to the principle of maat—“truth” and “justice” in the ancient Egyptian sense of the word.
In Plato’s definition of philosophy as a training for death (Phaedo 67cd) an implicit distinction was made between philosophy and philosophical discourse. Modern Western philosophy (a rather monstrous and corrupted creature, initially shaped by late Christian theology and post-Descartesian logic) has been systematically reduced to a philosophical discourse of a single dogmatic kind, through the fatal one-sidedness of its professed secular humanistic mentality, and a crucial misunderstanding of traditional wisdom. The task of the ancient philosophers was in fact to contemplate the cosmic order and its beauty; to live in harmony with it and to transcend the limitations imposed by sense experience and discursive reasoning. In a word, it was through philosophy (understood as a kind of askesis) that the cultivation of the natural, ethical, civic, purificatory, theoretic, paradigmatic, and hieratic virtues (aretai) were to be practiced; and it was through this noetic vision (noesis) that the ancient philosophers tried to awaken the divine light within, and to touch the divine Intellect in the cosmos. For them, to reach apotheosis was the ultimate human end (telos)
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In the original Orphico-Pythagorean sense, philosophy meant wisdom (sophia) and love (eros) combined in a moral and intellectual purification in order to reach the “likeness to God” (homoiosis theo, [Plato, Theaet. 176b]). This likeness was to be attained by gnosis, knowledge. The same Greek word nous (“intellect,” understood in a macrocosmic and microcosmic sense) covers all that is meant both by “spirit” (spiritus, ruh) and “intellect” (intellectus, ‘aql) in the Medieval Christian and Islamic lexicon. Thus Platonic philosophy (and especially Neoplatonism) was a spiritual and contemplative way of life leading to enlightenment; a way which was properly and intrinsically intellectual; a way that was ultimately based on intellection or noetic vision (noesis), which transcends the realm of sense perception and discursive reasoning. Through an immediate grasp of first principles, the non-discursive intelligence lead to a union (henosis) with the divine Forms. “Knowledge of the gods,” says Iamblichus, “is virtue and wisdom and perfect happiness, and makes us like to the gods” (Protr. 3). Even for Aristotle, who seems to be a much more earthly-minded rationalist, the highest and eternally active Intellect, or God, as the ultimate metaphysical telos of any true philosopher, erotically attracts and harmoniously moves everything in the multi-dimensional cosmos...