Alban Arthan

[readoldthings]

The Winter Solstice has arrived. On this night of Alban Arthan, the longest night of the year, I want to thank everyone who has read and supported my work here over the years. The readership of this blog has, from the beginning and consistently been a group of very smart people. I always get a lot out of the comments here, even or especially when it's readers who come from a different perspective from my own.

Over the coming season the series on reincarnation is going to continue to its natural conclusion, and then I'm probably going to go in a completely different direction again. I've never thrown this blog open to suggestions before, but if there's anything that anyone wants to hear about, feel free to let me know in the comments section. More astrology? A return to the Gospel of Matthew? Another readthrough of an ancient and arcane text? Whatever it is, feel free to share. (If not, I'll probably just pull another random book off the shelf and start writing about it).

In any case, I want to wish everyone reading this a blessed Winter Solstice, health and prosperity in the season to come.


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Comments

[readoldthings]

Well, the thing about the "bad translation" is that it wasn't accidental. He's basically repeating late 19th/early 20th century ideas about Plato, rooted ultimately in the work of an 18th century German whose name escapes me. C.S. Lewis made fun of this perspective in an address on Biblical criticism--

One was brought up to believer that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T.H. Green.

His line, "Plato was far too brilliant to have ever been a Platonist" is not original, but comes from another Professor in this tradition.

The discussion of what Plato was up to in the Parmenides is also a modern and very serious misunderstanding. But it happens that it's one that I've been putting off dealing with for some time now. So I'm grateful for having read this, because it's going to force me to sit down with Parmenides again...

[jprussell]

Hah! I think you had shared that quote before, but it's still quite funny. It's also somewhat ironic, given the author's anti-modernist stance. I find him interesting because he's a heathen that takes spirituality seriously and has problems with the modern worldview, but where he goes with those positions doesn't always work out so much for me. I haven't read The Ancient City by Coulanges yet, but this guy treats it as pretty much the be-all, end-all of authentic polytheistic religion, and so sees later Greco-Roman religiosity, like the Platonism of Julian, as a departure from the "true" religion of their ancestors, if that helps put this in context.

I'll look forward to your thoughts on Parmenides! I'm still working my way through Plato's dialogues, in the slightly-modified Iamblichus reading order you recommended to me on a Magic Monday some time back, so I'm not up to it yet, but maybe soon!

Cheers,
Jeff

[readoldthings]

Well, you'll have fun with Parmenides when you get to it. Either that, or it will make you want to put your head through a wall. Or both.

As for Coulanges, I enjoyed the Ancient City a great deal, and certainly it's influenced my way of thinking as well. But where I think both Coulanges and this particular blogger go astray is with the idea of a kind of permanent tradition that endured-- the phrase recurs regularly in The Ancient City-- "through long ages." This is also the error of people like Guenon and Evola. There is no "traditional man"-- there are traditions, which always originate somewhere and somewhen, change over time, are lost, abandoned, rejected, revived, and repurposed based on the needs of real people.

[jprussell]

Yeah, exactly. One of the things about his writing I have found valuable is the continuity he attempts to trace from modern, liberal views of the world straight back through the entire axial age. I don't know that he's right, and I suspect it's far over-simplified, for the reasons you say and others, but it's a perspective that spurs some thinking.

I'll have to keep that in mind about Coulanges when I get to him, and about other sources on the misty border between history and pre-history: just because a practice, belief, or something else is the oldest we can reconstruct/infer/have a record of doesn't mean we can project it unchanged to the beginning of time. There was likely a ton of change we have no idea about because no one wrote it down!