My Most Heretical Thought
Feb. 24th, 2023 09:30 am
Heresies
This is a speculation which I sometimes indulge in. I call it my most heretical thought, because I imagine both Christians and pagans finding it annoying.
I posted a link yesterday to an interview with an occult author who believes he has found "Neoplatonic survivals" in the Hagia Sophia which demonstrate that this most famous church of Christendom is truly a temple of Saturn. I think that he overstates his case and misunderstands certain aspects of Neoplatonism, but the interview is very interesting for all that, and he reveals some details which seem astonishing to the 21st century listener, such as the fact that one of the designers of Hagia Sophia was a student of none other than Proclus of Lysias.
There are other elements of Neoplatonism to be seen in Catholic and Orthodox worship. Now, many of these are known; St. Augustine was profoundly influenced by Plotinus; St. Dionysius the Areopagite was probably a student of Proclus who pretended to have been a student of St. Paul; and so on. No one denies these things, and, only recently, it was common to acknowledge and to celebrate them. (The discussion between Bishop Maximos and John Vervaeke, which continues here, suggests that this acknowledgement is making a come back in our time, and we will all be the better for it.)
But if you look closely, it's possible to see other, hidden, survivals of Neoplatonic philosophy and practice in traditional Christian worship. Let me give two examples:
1. Easter is always celebrated on the Day of the Sun, while the Sun is in the sign of his Exaltation (Aries) and separating from an opposition to the Moon. Oh, and in addition to being the Exaltation of the Sun, Aries is also the sign specifically dedicated to the gods, and the gate through which they enter the world, according to Porphyry.
Proclus writes that the Demiurge-- that is to say, the God who created the visible universe-- especially constitutes the Sun among the planets, so that the visible Sun, itself a god in its own right, is also an image of the Demiurge. He tells us the identity of hte Demiurge: it is none other than Jupiter, the king of the Gods and son of Saturn.
2. According to an interview I listened to many years ago by an American priest, the clergy in an Orthodox church always move counter-clockwise. The meaning of black-clad clergy moving counterclockwise around a temple would have been immediately apparent in the ancient world. Black is the color of Saturn, the Father of Jupiter. And the counterclockwise movement? That has a very particular meaning.
According to the fable narrated in Plato's Statesman, the day will come when the Sun will stand still and then begin to move backwards, rising in the West, setting in the East-- in other words, moving counterclockwise. On that day, Jupiter will step down from his thrown, and Saturn will return to his seat of power and rule the universe directly. On Earth, the Dead will rise up from their graves, and the gods will descend and live among us. And the Golden Age will come again. We will grow young, instead of growing old with time, and there will be no war or killing, and the Earth will give up her fruits without struggle. To move counterclockwise, against the Sun, clad in black and invoking the Father of the Creator-God, is quite simply to invoke the Golden Age and bring it down to Earth, at least for a time.
Saturn the Terrible

Well, yes, and no.
Many people are aware of the famous-- or infamous-- passage in Plato's Republic, in which poets, especially Homer, are to be either censored or banned outright. Plato is often condemned for this sort of thing, but his reasons are clear. In the Republic specifically-- leave aside his discussions of the poets in other dialogues-- he is at pains to remove any poetic description of the Gods, or Heroes (sons of Gods) in which they are shown to act in ways that are evil or which might inspire evil or vicious behavior in a listener.
And
And so we see that, for Plato, the trouble with these sorts of stories is precisely that they make the gods look evil, and that young or uneducated people, who see myths are literal descriptions of historical events, may then see themselves as justified in committing evils. Notice, though, that he doesn't actually ban the myths outright: "A chosen ew might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice... some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of hearers will be few indeed."
In other words: Such myths are to be used only in ritual, by initiates of a mystery school. The uninitiated are to know nothing of them, but are to see God as good.
The Father of the Gods
Let us suppose the following to be true:
- There is a creator God, through whom all things were made.
- The creator-God can be understood as the Son of a Father-God, who abides beyond the created world.
- There is a Golden Age which will come again either in historical time or (more likely) in a time beyond time as we understand it, in which the spirits of the Dead will dwell with the Father and the lesser divine beings.
And let us also assume the following to be true:
- The nature and activity of the Gods is expressed allegorically through myth, but
- Many myths seem to depict obscene or evil behavior on the part of the Gods, and
- Most people take the myths about the Gods literally.
Suppose that all of this were the case, and suppose that you came across a different set of myths, one which didn't depict the Gods as occasionally evil, or fearful, or quarrelsome, but rather as good-- All Good, superlatively good? A set of myths that would be suitable for anyone to read, regardless of their station in life?
Now it does not matter for this speculation whether the myths in question happened to also relate true historical events as they happened or nearly as they happened. That's not the point; they aren't being considered as works of journalism, but as myths.
Would it not make sense, in such a situation, to adopt the better myths, and hide the old ones away? Might it not then be that traditional Christianity seems, under the surface, to invoke Saturn (the Father) and Jupiter (the Son) because that's exactly what it's doing? Perhaps the Father is the Father, regardless of the name; and the Son is the Son. And it's also just possible that those who designed the sacraments of the Christian Church knew exactly what they were doing, and had in mind just the passages from Plato that I quoted above when they were doing it.
But again, all of this is speculative. You might take it seriously, but please don't take it literally; it could be wrong down to the details.