Spiritual Traditions at the Roots of Western Civilization

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Disney's "Goddess of Spring" Persephone short from 1934:

 
Among the Ancient Stones, Magic as Potent as Ever

'...I can even make out the line of a highway not far off, cutting across the meadows, commuters’ headlights poking through the grim mist. In the half-light, the surrounding stones seem almost familiar and scarcely mysterious. Is this really the place that Thomas Hardy called “a very Temple of the Winds,” describing it “rising sheer from the grass,” its stones seeming to hum with sound? Did Christopher Wren, the great architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, really think so much of Stonehenge that he left his signature chiseled in one of the stones? And why should this site now lure as many as 18,000 celebrants to a summer solstice festival on the day the sun rises through a gap between its central stones, bisecting the monument?

But after the rain, when the sun breaks through the clouds and the pillars of rock cast corridors of shadow, all misgivings are cast aside...'
 
Reading the Iliad in the Light of Eternity

'
While they both acknowledged the “tiger at the gates,” Weil and Bespaloff apparently disagreed on what to do about it. Completed and published before Germany’s defeat of France, the former’s essay condemned war outright and implicitly advocated a pacifist stance toward Hitler. It is significant that McCarthy’s translation was later printed by a Quaker press. Bespaloff’s essay, on the other hand, revised after the occupation, made an implicit case for resistance, and served, whether its author intended it to or not, as a response to Weil’s pacifism. To condemn war, “or to absolve it, would be to condemn life itself,” Bespaloff wrote. “And life in the
Iliad (as in the Bible or in War and Peace ) is essentially the thing that does not permit itself to be assessed, or measured, or condemned, or justified, at least not by the living.”

Weil and Bespaloff were finally concerned with something more than their own historical moment, however. In the Iliad they sought a significance to history’s entirety, a significance understood only in metaphysical or theological terms and informed by an anthropology grounded in a Judaeo-Christian Hellenism. Their appreciation of Homer’s poem, to find critical accompaniment in American letters, is of the kind intimated in Lionel Trilling’s observation:

“When we read how Hector in his farewell to Andromache picks up his infant son and the baby is frightened by the horsehair crest of his father’s helmet and Hector takes it off and laughs and puts it on the ground, or how Priam goes to the tent of Achilles to beg back from the slayer the body of his son, and the old man and the young man, both bereaved and both under the shadow of death, talk about death and fate, nothing can explain the power of such moments over us, or nothing short of a recapitulation of the moral history of the race.”'
 
Considering Weil’s Treatment of Force and Suppliance in The Poem of Force and What It Means for Aristeia in Homer’s Iliad

...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...
 
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Cratylus, Follower of Heraclitus

"Cratylus was a follower of Heraclitus, who, most notably, carried his doctrine of flux to its logical extreme. Consequently, according to Aristotle, he "ended by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and [he] criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once" (Metaphysics 1010a). He seems to have believed that true things cannot be said of things that change, because by the time words are uttered, things have changed. Words, therefore, falsify reality by introducing stability where there is none, and we would do well to say nothing at all.

Aristotle also tells us that "n his youth Plato first became acquainted with Cratylus and the Heraclitean doctrines -- that the whole sensible world is always in a state of flux, and that there is no scientific knowledge of it -- and in after years he still held these opinions" (987a). Indeed, Plato named a dialogue after Cratylus in which he attributes the radical flux doctrine of Cratylus to Heraclitus (see Cratylus 402a) and then wrestles with the problems that such a view raises for understanding language. Whether Plato confuses Cratylus and Heraclitus in this dialogue for literary reasons or whether he is genuinely confused about the two is difficult to determine. In either case, Plato does adopt the radical view of flux to characterize the material world and, as Aristotle suggests, on this basis, determines that it is impossible to have knowledge of it. Aristotle maintains that this characterization is what caused Plato to develop his theory of transcendent ideas, or forms, (see Metaphysics 1078b), thereby rendering knowledge possible."
 
He could not save her.
But when the woman's sweet-smelling body was
stretched on a pyre high as a wall,
the flames parted before the god's grasping hand,
and from the dead mother's belly,
safe and sound,
he pulled out Ascelpius,
the healer.
-Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
 
Real Druids

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.
 
Plato’s View of the Relation between the Self and the External World

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.
 
Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
 
Shaman Claus: The Shamanic Origins of Christmas

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

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.
 
Winter Solstice: Stonehenge crowd gathers for sunrise

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."
 
From Plato's Timaeus:

"Wherefore the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things is not to be termed earth or air or fire or water, or any of their compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible."

"Let us consider this question more precisely. Is there any self-existent fire ? and do all those things which we call self-existent exist ? or are only those things which we see, or in some way perceive through the bodily organs, truly existent, and nothing whatever besides them ? And is all that which, we call an intelligible essence nothing at all, and only a name ? Here is a question which we must not leave unexamined or undetermined, nor must we affirm too confidently that there can be no decision ; neither must we interpolate in our present long discourse a digression equally long, but if it is possible to set forth a great principle in a few words, that is just what we want."

" The bones and flesh, and other similar parts of us, were made as follows. The first principle of all of them was the generation of the marrow. For the bonds of life which unite the soul with the body are made fast there, and they are the root and foundation of the human race. The marrow itself is created out of other materials : God took such of the primary triangles [!] as were straight and smooth, and were adapted by their perfection to produce fire and water, and air and earth; these, I say, he separated from their kinds, and mingling them in due proportions with one another, made the marrow out of them to be a universal seed of the whole race of mankind ; and in this seed he then planted and enclosed the souls, and in the original distribution gave to the marrow as many and various forms as the different kinds of souls were hereafter to receive. That which, like a field, was to receive the divine seed, he made round every way, and called that portion of the marrow, brain, intending that, when an animal was perfected, the vessel containing this substance should be the head ; but that which was intended to contain the remaining and mortal part of the soul he distributed into figures at once around and elongated, and he called them all by the name 'marrow'; and to these, as to anchors, fastening the bonds of the whole soul, he proceeded to fashion around them the entire framework of our body, constructing for the marrow, first of all a complete covering of bone."

"But now the argument seems to require that we should set forth in words another kind, which is difficult of explanation and dimly seen. What nature are we to attribute to this new kind of being? We reply, that it is the receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation."

"... as the several elements never present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the assurance to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may be, is one thing rather than another? No one can. But much the safest plan is to speak of them as follows:-Anything which we see to be continually changing, as, for example, fire, we must not call "this" or "that," but rather say that it is "of such a nature"; nor let us speak of water as "this"; but always as "such"; nor must we imply that there is any stability in any of those things which we indicate by the use of the words "this" and "that," supposing ourselves to signify something thereby; for they are too volatile to be detained in any such expressions as "this," or "that," or "relative to this," or any other mode of speaking which represents them as permanent. We ought not to apply "this" to any of them, but rather the word "such"; which expresses the similar principle circulating in each and all of them; for example, that should be called "fire" which is of such a nature always, and so of everything that has generation. That in which the elements severally grow up, and appear, and decay, is alone to be called by the name "this" or "that"; but that which is of a certain nature, hot or white, or anything which admits of opposite equalities, and all things that are compounded of them, ought not to be so denominated..."

"...Wherefore also we must acknowledge that there is one kind of being which is always the same, uncreated and indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from without, nor itself going out to any other, but invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is granted to intelligence only..."

"And there is another nature of the same name with it, and like to it, perceived by sense, created, always in motion, becoming in place and again vanishing out of place, which is apprehended by opinion and sense."

" And there is a third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real ; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another [i.e. in space ], grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things [i.e. the image and space] are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time."

" my verdict is that being and space and generation, these three, existed in their three ways before the heaven ; and that the nurse of generation, moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and receiving the forms of earth and air, and experiencing all the affections which accompany these, presented a strange variety of appearances ; and being full of powers which were neither similar nor equally balanced, was never in any part in a state of equipoise, but swaying unevenly hither and thither, was shaken by them, and by its motion again shook them ; and the elements when moved were separated and carried continually, some one way, some another ; as, when rain is shaken and winnowed by fans and other instruments used in the threshing of corn, the close and heavy particles are borne away and settle in one direction, and the loose and light particles in another. In this manner, the four kinds or elements were then shaken by the receiving vessel, which, moving like a winnowing machine, scattered far away from one another the elements most unlike, and forced the most similar elements into dose contact. Wherefore also the various elements had different places before they were arranged so as to form the universe. At first, they were all without reason and measure. But when the world began to get into order, fire and water and earth and air had only certain faint traces of themselves, and were altogether such as everything might be expected to be in the absence of God..."
 
Like their South Asian counterparts, Platonic theurgists believed the soul mirrors a hierarchy of cosmic realities and that by nurturing these powers they could transform and perfect their lives. The sixth-century Platonist Hierocles explains that philosophy must include theurgic rites: “Philosophy is united with the art of sacred things since this art is concerned with the purification of the luminous body, but if you separate philosophical thinking from this art, you will find that it no longer has the same power” (Hadot, 2004, p. 48; modified, italics added). Philosophy in the West long ago became an entirely intellectual enterprise separated from the art of sacred things.

Philosophy no longer focuses on transforming the soul’s affective energies, aligning them to their correspondences in the cosmos or recovering the soul’s luminous body. This affective aspect of philosophy, communicated through the physical presence of sages, is no longer recognized today, which is why no one goes to contemporary philosophers for self-transformation. Yet the Platonists maintained— like yogis today— that each soul possesses a subtle body that can be transformed into an augoeides ochēma, a luminous vehicle with supernatural powers. Hierocles’ sacred art is theurgy, rituals that purify and strengthen the subtle body and allow the soul to share in the life of the gods and their creation— demiurgy. The disciplines of theurgy, like those of Yoga, include attention to diet, exercise, and the care of both physical and subtle bodies.

(2015-02-19). Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (Kindle Locations 5312-5323). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
 
Rune Soup: Talking Hermeticism with Gary Lachman

"In this week’s episode we talk to esoteric author and Rock N Roll Hall of Fame musician, Gary Lachman about his excellent new book, Secret Teachers of the Western World. We also cover Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, the 1970s New York occult scene, Colin Wilson. Something for everyone!"


 
From the Deoxy Site:

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.
 
Introduction to The Golden Chain

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)
.

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...
 
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