Father of Lies

Accounts of the Fall

What is it that binds us here, to this world of darkness and shadow? Or, to put it in the terms that we've been exploring with Iolo Morganwg, what is the cause of our origin in Annwn and our long sojourn through the realm of evil in Abred?

Plotinus asked the same question:
 

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?

Here is a part of his answer:
 

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.

 

Before we discusss this passage, let's look at another selection, from the Fourth Ennead. Here Plotinus gives us what is my personal favorite account of hte mystical experience of Divine Union in all of our literature:

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme...
 

But the state of union is not to last:

...yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

As an aside, notice that the first descent is "from intellection to reasoning." Intellection is the state of higher knowing in which there is no distinction between the knower and the object of knowledge. I've talked about this many times, but it bears repeating: This is a concept that we have lost in the modern world, and lost in the English language. The closest English word for this state is "intuition," which 1. we typically denigrate, 2. even if we don't, we see as a kind of helpful but fleeting faculty, something less real than reasoning, and 3. has a different meaning anyway. In the older way of thinking, Intellection comes first. After intellection comes reason, which is the sort of discursive thought that enables us to grasp concepts like "If All A are B, and All B are C, then all A are C." That sort of reasoning is called ratio in Latin, and is the root of our word "rationalism." Rationalism, therefore, is at once a kind of cosmic regicide and self-decapitation, in which the existence of the Highest is denied and a lower raised up in its place.

The Entombment

But let's return to Plotinus. Considering the discussion of previous philosophers on the subject, he writes:

 

Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary, speaks of ascent and descent, says that "change reposes," and that "it is weariness to keep toiling at the same things and always beginning again"; but he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he sought for himself and found.
 

 

Empedocles says that it is law for faulty souls to descend to this sphere, and that he himself was here because he turned a deserter, wandered from God, in slavery to a raving discord- reveals neither more nor less than Pythagoras and his school seem to me to convey on this as on many other matters; but in his case, versification

We have to fall back on the Divine Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him.
 

 

 

Everywhere he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of the soul with body as an enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the breaking of the fetters and the ascent from the depths are figures of the wayfaring toward the Intellectual Realm.

 

In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the entry to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the soul after it has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates and necessities driving other souls down to this order.
 

 

In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at body...

Now, the "failing of the wings" is a reference to Plato's model of the soul in the Phaedrus. In this dialogue, he presents the soul as a winged chariot pulled by two horses. One of the horses represents desire for things of the flesh. When the charioteer loses control of it, it crashes the whole thing towards the Earth-- the wings fail-- and here we are.

And the discussion of the body-as-tomb takes place both in the Cratylus and the Gorgias. In the latter, Plato wrote, "Perhaps we are actually dead, for I once heard one of our wise men say that we are now dead, and that our body is a tomb, and that that part of the soul in which dwell the desires is of a nature to be swayed and to shift to and fro." The line about "being swayed to and fro" is almost certainlymeant to call to mind the ghosts of the Underworld, who are often portrayed as powerless and nearly mindless shades:

 

Then the ghosts of the dead swarmed out of Erebus – brides, and young men yet unwed, old men worn out with toil, girls once vibrant and still new to grief, and ranks of warriors slain in battle, showing their wounds from bronze-tipped spears, their armour stained with blood. Round the pit from every side the crowd thronged, with strange cries, and I turned pale with fear. Then I called to my comrades, and told them to flay and burn the sheep killed by the pitiless bronze, with prayers to the divinities, to mighty Hades and dread Persephone. I myself, drawing my sharp sword from its sheath, sat there preventing the powerless ghosts from drawing near to the blood, till I might question Teiresias.’
 

 

The preceding comes from the Odyssey. At the bidding of Circe, Odysseus has gone to the realm of Hades to speak with the ghost of Teiresius, the seer. Why Teiresias? As Circe tells him, "His mind is still unimpaired, for even in death Persephone grants him mental powers, so that he alone has wisdom, while the others flit like shadows.”

Abred is Annwn

What emerges from all of this is the secret teaching of the Mystery Schools, hinted at by Plotinus above. While we perceive Annwn, the World of the Dead, as the lowest part of Abred, the truth is rather worse than that. Abred is Annwn, and as long as we remain here, bound to our body, enchanted by its desires, we remain in the world of the Dead.

At the beginning of this post, I shared the image of the Devil from the Waite-Smith tarot deck. In a dark world, he keeps two souls enchained. This is precisely the image of bodily life that Plato wants to share. And this is our condition in Abred: We are slaves of the Devil, who is Hades, the Lord of the Dead.

But again, how did this happen? 

Pride and the Fall

In Barddas, Iolo gives us the following account of the Fall:

 

God made all living beings in the circle of Gwynvyd at one breath; but they would be gods, 3 and attempted to traverse the Ceugant. This, however, they could not do, wherefore they fell down to Annwn, which unites with death and the earth, where is the beginning of all living owners of terrestrial bodies.

 

Question. Where is Annwn?

 

Answer. In the extreme limits of the circle of Gwynvyd. That is, living beings knew not how to distinguish evil from good, and therefore they fell into evil, and went into Abred, which they traversed until they came back into the circle of Gwynvyd.

 

Q. What ignorance did they commit?
 

 

A. They would venture on the circle of Ceugant, and hence became proud; but they could not traverse it, consequently they fell into the circle of Abred. 

And this account, of course, reminds us and is meant to remind us both of the fall of Lucifer and his angels, and of the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This seems somewhat different from the accounts of Plato and Plotinus. But is it? Or is there a way that the method of escape and ascent given by Plato and Plotinus, by Iolo and the Druidic tradition, and by Jesus Christ and his disciple Saint Paul, are one and the same? 

These are the questions that I'm going to explore next time.