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, 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!