That's a fine meditation, although I think it's missing a certain piece that I left out of this post. If you set Yod and Vav side by side you'll see that the Yod is like a Vav whose, um, "extension" has been removed. In Christian/Jewish Cabalistic thought, Yod-Heh-Vav are Father-Mother-Son. In Hellenic terms, that means that Yod is Saturn: The first father who abides by himself, beyond generation; Heh is Rhea, the vivific foundatin of life who receives the energy of Saturn and gives it form; and Vav is Zeus, who completes the triad and then proceeds into further triads with various Heh's, his extended letter still intact.
Those observations on Greek religion are very interesting, thank you! I have not read Greek Qabalah, but I can tell you that it was years of studying the Tree of Life which made the work of Proclus comprehensible to me. The influence of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy on Christianity is not something anyone denies. (Well, except for Protestants, who mutilated their tradition in order to remove elements that they thought were foreign.) In fact Plato, Aristotle and other Greek philosophers have icons in some Orthodox churches, although they aren't give halos, and St. Basil the Great specifically recommended that the work of the philosophers should be studied and treated as a kind of alternate Old Testament. The only really heretical thing that I'm suggesting here is that I think that the influence may have been deeper than anyone is willing to acknowledge.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-02-26 09:04 pm (UTC)Those observations on Greek religion are very interesting, thank you! I have not read Greek Qabalah, but I can tell you that it was years of studying the Tree of Life which made the work of Proclus comprehensible to me. The influence of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy on Christianity is not something anyone denies. (Well, except for Protestants, who mutilated their tradition in order to remove elements that they thought were foreign.) In fact Plato, Aristotle and other Greek philosophers have icons in some Orthodox churches, although they aren't give halos, and St. Basil the Great specifically recommended that the work of the philosophers should be studied and treated as a kind of alternate Old Testament. The only really heretical thing that I'm suggesting here is that I think that the influence may have been deeper than anyone is willing to acknowledge.