readoldthings

In the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades tell us this about Socrates:

One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this was not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the Sun, and went his way.

In this dialogue, Alcibiades is a bit of a dunce, and his understanding of Socrates is minimal; we are meant to work out on our own just what Socrates is up to. Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates himself has described the meditative practice which he learned from the priestess Diotima, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere:

For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please to give me your very best attention:

He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)—a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

And so we can see that Alcibiades is narrating, from the perspective of one uninitiated, the meditation of Socrates. And notice that Socrates closes his meditation and opens his day with a prayer to the Sun. This is another clue to the nature of the practice, for in the Republic we learn that the physical Sun is an image of the eternal spiritual Sun, which is the IDea of the Good Itself. As the Sun lights the living world, so the Idea of the Good illumines the spiritual world. For a Christian Neoplatonist like Marsilio Ficino, this means that the Sun is an image of Christ.

Every morning for some time I have, upon first seeing the sunrise, recited the following prayer:

Unto God I give thanks for all things.
In the presence of God I pray,

Hail Holy Sun, bringer of Light to the World.
Hail Divine Fire.
Hail celestial image of the Eternal Monad.
Hail source of Life and Health and Light.

As the Sun lights the living world,
May the Eternal Sunlight of the Spirit
Illumine my soul and guide my actions
In the ways of Perfect Justice
Today and always.

AWEN

Sometimes I say a variation, like

Unto the Sun I give thanks
For Life and Light and Heat and Health
And to the Earth I give thanks
For Solidity and Stability and Cold and Calm
And to the Middle World
For Fields and Farms, Towns and Trees
And all the phenomena I will meet with this day

Before closing in the same way.

I share these here; feel free to use them as is, modify them to suit your needs, or simply use them as inspiration to compose your own.

As many here know, I was raised in the Catholic Church, in a family that was rather traditional and a church that was nauseatingly modern. When I was a child I was extremely devout. I loved God, and never doubted his power or his presence. I loved the sacraments and the sacrament of Confession above all others. I remember leaving my first Confession feeling as though I were surrounded by a nimbus of golden light. I believed in and loved the saints and the Holy Virgin especially.

But I was not only a Catholic. From a very early age, as early as I can remember, I felt and experienced the presence of life and power in nature and natural forces, especially in the Sun, the Ocean and a gigantic old pine tree in the woods behind our house. Eventually some new neighbors bought up the woods and cut down the tree. This was one of the early traumas of my young life and the thing that lead me to become an eco-radical and member of Earth First! many years later. This is a decision I now largely regret and a group I now entirely disavow, but that's a story for another time.

The point is only that from early on I had a sort of bi-religious orientation. I was a worshiper at once of Son of God and the Sun of Heaven, the Star of the Sea and the Sea Itself. Winter in Pennsylvania is cold, and we heated our home with a fire. Making a fire was my favorite chore, and one I did gladly. The act of chopping wood, arranging it just so, lighting a match and seeing and feeling the energy of my labor transformed into heat and light, and then into warmth and comfort and joy for my family, felt as thoroughly sacramental as receiving the Eucharist. I prayed to the spirit in the fire, as I also prayed to the spirits in the trees, and to Jesus, Mary, the saints and angels.

This same orientation has continued throughout my life. Readers here will notice that I regularly write from a pagan and a Christian perspective. If this upsets anyone, they have yet to speak up about it, but I know that in other contexts many people don't like it. But I am the way that I am.

It raises the question, though-- What exactly do I believe in?

The answer is simply "an ecumenical Platonism."

Proclus shows us how the Platonic philosophy can be used to sustain the entire pantheon of the Hellenic gods. In his massive Theology of Plato, he works every last possible god named by Hesiod or Homer or the Chaldaean Oracles into a sequence rooted in his understanding of Plato, and above all (from what I can tell) the Parmenides, Timaeus, and Philebus.

Proclus's Platonic Theology is not the only one possible, nor even the only to be found at the time. The theology of Plotinus, his predecessor by several centuries, is much simpler, and the role of the old gods far less pronounced. Synesius of Cyrene was bishop of Ptolemais when Proclus was born. His own theological vision is of a Christianized Neoplatonism, with the Holy Trinity placed atop a divine hierarchy otherwise very similar to that found in the Oracles or the Hermetic writings.

Thee, father of worlds, father of the aeones, artificer of the gods, it is holy to praise.
Thee, O king, the Intellectual Gods sing,
Thee, O blessed God, the Cosmagi, those fulgid eyes, and starry intellects, celebrate,
Round which the illustrious body of hte world dances.

All the race of the blessed sing thy praise,
Those that are about, and those that are in the world,
the cosmic gods and the hypercosmic...

Following both Proclus and Synesius, a mysterious writer who called himself "Dionysius the Areopagite" wove Procline Neoplatonism and Christian theology together into a synthesis which became the basis of Christian theology in general for a thousand years after. But many centuries before Dionysius, Philo of Alexandria had already applied Platonic philosophical tradition to his native Jewish religion. And after the rise of Muhammad, various schools of Islamic thought adapted Platonic philosophy to their own religious needs.

What all this shows me is that we have in Platonism a unifying philosophy which is prior to specific manifestations of what we call religion. The ultimate end of the soul, Proclus wrote, is to unite itself to the One as a ship returning to its port. Specific "religions," in my view, are ladders of ascent, having the One as their goal. But the One is infintely remote from human beings, and there are countless other names by which It can manifest itself to us. Tao, Awen, Brahma, God. These names are not meaningless. Choosing one name or another to follow changes everything about one's path and one's life. But the Platonic philosophy-- for me-- is the unifying principle which allows me to work with one or another of the ladders of ascent as the occasion demands, and also to understand and respect the journeys of others.

Sallustius discussed the Dodecad in a form much simplified from that of Proclus in his treatise On the Gods and the World.

VI. On Gods Cosmic and Hypercosmic.

Of the Gods some are of the world, cosmic, and some above the world, hypercosmic. By the cosmic I mean those who make the cosmos. Of the hypercosmic Gods some create essence, some mind, and some soul. Thus they have three orders; all of which may be found in treatises on the subject.

Of the cosmic Gods some make the world be, others animate it, others harmonize it, consisting as it does of different elements; the fourth class keep it when harmonized.

These are four actions, each of which has a beginning, middle, and end, consequently there must be twelve Gods governing the world.

Those who make the world are Zeus, Poseidon, and Hephaistos; those who animate it are Demeter, Hera, and Artemis; those who harmonize it are Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hermes; those who watch over it are Hestia, Athena, and Ares.

One can see secret suggestions of this in their images. Apollo tunes a lyre; Athena is armed; Aphrodite is naked (because harmony creates beauty, and beauty in things seen is not covered).

While these twelve in the primary sense possess the world, we should consider that the other Gods are contained in these. Dionysus in Zeus, for instance, Asklepios in Apollo, the Charites in Aphrodite.

We can also discern their various spheres: to Hestia belongs the earth, to Poseidon water, to Hera air, to Hephaistos fire. And the six superior spheres to the Gods to whom they are usually attributed. For Apollo and Artemis are to be taken for the Sun and Moon, the sphere of Kronos should be attributed to Demeter, the ether to Athena, while the heaven is common to all. Thus the orders, powers, and spheres of the twelve Gods have been explained and celebrated in hymns.

Sallust links the twelve gods direclty to the planets and the four (or five) elements. The applications to magic are obvious, but as far as I know this is, to a great extent, unexplored territory.

The Hellenic Golden Dawn: A Speculation

A Hellenic initiatory system, modeled on the Golden Dawn or the Dolmen Arch, or both, would invoke Hera as the power governing Air, Hephaistos for Fire, Poseidon for Water, and Vesta for Earth. An invocation of Hermes as guide and guardian of the operator would probably precede the elements, in order to make use of the Hermetic material and keeping in mind that Iamblichus tells us that all priests have Hermes in common. The work would proceed into astrological magic with the deities as given governing the planets. Between the elemental and astrological work would come the encounter with Athena as the lady of the ether or fifth element.

One approach might be to begin with Hermes, and the Hermetic philosophy. After this, work with the four elements, under the appropriately named deities. Then an encounter with Athena, and an introduction to higher philosophy via Plato and (perhaps) Plotinus. Then astrological magic. Then an invocation of Apollo, then another round of philosophy covering Plato's more difficult work (i.e., Parmenides), and a final degree of magic covering what Sallust here is calling the hypercosmic deities.

Dodecad and the Zodiac

The twelve gods of the Dodecad must also correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Others have pointed this out. In my own astrological work, I usually assign the gods to the Zodiac as follows:

Aries--Ares
Taurus--Ceres
Gemini--Hermes
Cancer--Artemis
Leo--Apollo
Virgo--Vesta
Libra--Aphrodite
Scorpio--Hera
Sagittarius--Jupiter
Capricorn--Hephaistos
Aquarius--Athena
Pisces--Poseidon

It's interesting, however, to consider how the triads of Proclus and Sallustius could be assigned to the Zodiac. We have two ways of grouping the signs by three, either by the elements or the seasons. If we go with the elements, the arrangement looks like this:

Fire

Aries
Leo
Sagittarius

Air

Libra
Aquarius
Gemini

Water

Cancer
Scorpio
Pisces

Earth

Capricorn
Taurus
Virgo

If by the season:

Spring

Aries
Taurus
Gemini

Summer

Cancer
Leo
Virgo

Autumn

Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius

Winter

Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces

It's very hard to see how the Procline triads could be assigned to either set of Zodiacal triads. To take just the Demiurgic triad for example, Zeus doesn't fit the symbolism of any of the "firsts" in either series; his symbolism fits either Sagittarius or Leo. I assign him to Sagittarius, as this sign is ruled by Jupiter, his planet; is associated with the life of the higher mind, which elevates us above matter; and points toward Capricorn, which is ruled by Saturn, his father. Leo would also work, but I prefer to think of the Sun's sign as ruled by Apollo. Proclus tells us that "of whatever the Sun is the author, the Demiurgus [from whom he is emanated] is in a greater degree teh fabricator and precedaneous cause." Thus the power of the hypercosmic Demiurge is contained within Leo, but that of the encosmic, in Sagittarius.

If anyone out there has worked with these ideas or this symbolism before, I'd be very interested in knowing what you think.

Everyone knows the Twelve Olympian Gods. If you need a reminder, these are Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, and Vulcan; and Vesta, Ceres, Venus, Diana, Athena, and Juno. Yes, those are the Roman names; Thomas Taylor uses them exclusively in his translations, and I have those in mind just now.

The Twelve appear in Plato's Phaedrus, in a very specific role. In this dialogue we learn that each of us is ultimately gathered under one of the Twelve. We are, originally, immortal spirits, each of us one of the vast multitude of spirits that follows on each of the gods. It is in this dialogue that Plato gives us his famous image of the soul as a winged chariot drawn by two horses, which you may be familiar with from another source:

In any case, these Twelve play a specific and interesting role in the thought of Proclus, who discusses them in Book 6 of his Platonic Theology. For Proclus, the Twelve are divided in two ways. First, Jupiter and Vesta-- the king of the gods and the goddess of the hearthfire-- are the two most important; they are monads, the other ten gathered into a decad. Second, the Twelve may be gathered into four triads. These triads are shaped exactly the way we have seen Platonic triads structured before. One begins the series, one proceeds from it, and the third closes out the series, at once reflecting the first, returning to it, and beginning a new order.

This may also look familiar:

The four triads are named the demiurgic, the guardian, the vivific, and the anagogic.

"Demiurge" means "craftsman," and it is the term for the creator of the universe in Platonic thought. Plato's Timaeus is concerned with the original creation of the universe by the Demiurge. This Demiurge is unnamed in the Timaeus, and Plato leaves his identity open to question. For Proclus the question is closed; the Demiurge is Jupiter, or Zeus. This Jupiter is, in fact, the third in a triad of his own, a triad which begins with his father Saturn, procedes into his mother Rhea, and concludes with himself.

This Jupiter, however, isn't the Jupiter that we know and love. From him procedes another triad of demiurgic gods, consisting of a second Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the three sons of Saturn. Jupiter governs all things, Neptune guides them into material existence, and Pluto closes the series, ruling matter-- and the release from matter, as god of the dead.

But-- and this will confuse you-- we still haven't reached the Jupiter of the Demiurgic Triad.

After the Three Sons of Saturn follows another order of gods, who are divided into a Tetrad-- that is, a group of four. There may or may not be a third Jupiter as part of this series; I'm not clear on this.

Finally we come to our Twelve, who are called the Liberated Gods. These are, again, divided into the Demiurgic, Guardian, Vivific, and Anagogic triads.

Let's look at them one at a time.

The Demiurgic Triad consists of Jupiter, Neptune, and Vulcan. Like the preceding demiurges, these gods are concerned with the creation of things. Jupiter (either the third or four Jupiter) begins the series, in Proclus's words "supernally from Intellect governing souls and bodies." The meaning of this will be apparent in a moment. Neptune governs the middle of the series, as he is especially concerned with motion and generation; he governs the soul, as the soul is "essentially motion." Finally, Vulcan closes out the demiurgic series, as he produces bodies, including what Proclus calls the "mundane seats of the gods"-- that is to say, the planets and stars. And so in the demiurgic series we have three gods ruling or producing the three levels of being below the divine, that is, the Intellectual (or Noetic), the Astral (or Psychic), and the Physical (Hylic).

After this we have the "Guardian and Immutable Triad." This series consists-- in order-- of Vesta, Minerva, and Mars. Vesta-- who was the goddess, above all, of the altar; I believe that altars at Rome were sometimes called "vestae"-- "contains the summits of wholes," another one of these difficult phrases. Minerva preserves "middle lives," and Mars sustains corporeal things. As is often the case with Proclus, it's easier to understand any of this if you work backward. If we start from Mars, we realize that these three gods perform the role of preserving and sustaining the existence of things. Mars sustains the corporeal and gives it power; Minerva rules the intellectual life; and Vesta preserves things as a whole.

The Vivific Triad gives life to all things; it consists of Ceres, the Earth Goddess; Juno, the queen of the gods; and Diana, the moon goddess. Ceres generates all life in the world, whether intellectual, psychic, or corporeal. Juno governs the generation of hte soul. Diana, finally, as moon goddess, governs the life of matter, "perfecting its imperfections," and "moving all natural reasons into energy." The latter sentence is qutie a difficult one, because we have to do some detective work to understand what Greek words are being translated here and what they mean. "Reasons" usually translate "logoi." Logoi, at least for Plotinus, are the emanations of the Ideas at another level down. The Ideas, remember, are those unchanging principles which unfold the whole of things. Reasons or logoi, then, are more specific ideas which conduct eternal powers further downward into matter. "Natural" reasons are reasons having to do with Nature, that is, with living things below the sphere of the Moon, and "energy" has the specific meaning of activity. To put it in very modern and incorrect terms, Diana rules the "laws of nature."

Finally, we have the Anagogic Triad. "Anagoge" means "to lead upward." As the Demiurgic Triad creates things, the Guardian Triad sustains created things, and the Vivific Triad gives life to things, the Anagogic Triad conducts things-- that is, souls-- back out of material existence, to return to union with the Divine. This series begins with Hermes, procedes with Venus, and concludes with Apollo. These three represent the three paths of ascent given in the Phaedrus, which are the ways of Philosophy, Love, and Music.

The next two Theological Triads of the Barddas read:

2. Three things proceed from the three primeval Unities: All Life; All Goodness; All Power.

3. God consists necessarilyh of three thingts: the greatest in respect of life; the greatest in respect of knowledge; and the greatest in respect of power; antd there can be only one of what is greatest in any thing.

These two triads are best read together and in reverse order.

The second triad is the familiar Intelligible Triad. The Supreme God is understood as having life, which in this case stands for being; knowledge, which is to say, mind or intellect; and power, which is life or activity.

But in the prior triad, goodness, life, and power are said to proceed from the three unities, which are God or Being; Knowledge or Intellect; and Liberty or Soul. We can therefore see that life in this triad stands for being; goodness, in this case, for Intellect, for to know the fullness of Truth is to be good, and evil is always rooted in a lie; and power stands in for life or activity. These three are found at every level but resolve into unity in Ceugant, the Highest.

Section II of the Barddas of Iolo Morganwg is entitled "Theology," and opens with a long series of triads, largely concerning hte nature of God. As an ongoing project, I want to share some of these triads and provide a brief commentary based on the Platonic-Druidic philosophy I've been developing here.

The First Triad

There are three primeval Unities, and more than one of each cannot exist: one God; one truth; and one point of liberty, and this is where all opposites equiponderate.

Naturally, the first triad is one of the most difficult. I would rather have started with any of the succeeding five or ten. This raises the question, of course, of why this one comes first? Set before all that follows, it acts as a kind of roadblock, or, in esoteric terms, a Watcher Upon the Threshold. We can either work with this first Triad, or give up and turn back.

Let's break it down, piece by piece.

One God

The Druidic tradition is repleat with deities. We have Hu the Mighty, and Ced the Earth Mother, and Ceridwen the Moon-Goddess who is also a form of Ced. We have Esus and Hesus, Taranis, Toutatis and Cernunnos. If Morganwg is teaching monotheism, should his writings be discarded as non-Druidic? Or if we would preserve them, must we discard the gods, and submit to monotheism?

The answer to both is "No." The One God is the One Itself, the First Cause which precedes all things, and even precedes existence. Proclus, the last great pagan philosopher of antiquity, wrote of the One that nothing at all can be said of it. It was not even to be understood-- for Proclus-- as the leader of a triad, which makes it utterly unique in his thought.

I have written before that we can use the term "Awen" for the One in Druidry. And, of course, those who see the First Cause as triadic (or Trinitarian) are perfectly free to disagree with Proclus.

The realm of being which can only be traversed by the unitary God is called Ceugant in the Druid tradition.

One Truth

Let's turn to Proclus again. Criticizing another philosopher named Origen (not, apparently, the Christian Church Father, but another Origen), he writes

Origen ends in intellect and the first being, but omits the One which is beyond every intellect and every being. And if indeed he omits it, as something which is better than all knowledge, language, and intellectual perception, we must say that he is neither discordant with Plato, nor with the nature of things.

What Proclus is saying here is that the One is prior to knowledge, language, and intellectual perception. In what follows he will discuss that which immediately follows upon the One, which are the very highest of the Gods. These Gods are called "Intelligible," because they can be known by the highest faculty of the Mind-- and only by the highest faculty of the mind. They are beyond the material world entirely; they cannot be encountered via the senses. And yet-- this is critical-- they are more real than the things of the material world, and they determine everything which is found in the material world. What is true about them is eternally true, while truth has no fixed existence in the material world, which is the world of becoming.

This, then, is the meaning of One Truth. The One Truth is that which immediately proceeds from the One Itself, which is God or the First God. This is the highest of hte gods, starting with the First Triad and unfolding from there. Gathered into a unity, these are also One God, and One Truth.

This Truth is also Gwynfydd in the Druid, the Intellectual Realm of luminous life.

One Point of Liberty

...and this is where all opposites equiponderate. This is the hardest of the three to understand. But if we follow the preceding method of interpretation, it will become easier. The Point of Liberty is the third level of being, which is called Abred. Abred is the realm of material existence as it is encountered by the soul. That is to say, it isn't Matter Itself, which is a lower thing, called Cythraul ("Devil"), but matter encountered by mind. It is a paradox that it is here, in this realm of limitation and imprisonment, that the soul is able to free itself. This is because it is only by working against limitation that anything is able to be created, and only by experiencing suffering that suffering may be overcome. And it is also because it is only here that there can be found those beings who are in need of liberation, and have begun to work towards it. In Abred, Good and Evil are balanced, these "opposites equiponderate," and thus either may be chosen. God abides alone in Ceugant, and Gwynfydd is the realm of liberated beings. At the bottom of Abred is Annwn, the realm of the Dead; its inhabitants have not yet begun the journey.

Yesterday I shared a particular assignment of the classical virtues to the Four Elements, viz:

Earth: Courage

Water: Justice

Air: Wisdom

Fire: Temperance

In the comments section, JPRussel mentioned that this differs from the assignment given to the elements in the Dolmen Arch system.

I wanted to share, first, why I assign the elements in this fashion, and, second, some alternatives.

Systems of Correspondence

Structures like this one are called "systems of correspondence." They are universal in magical systems, and, in fact, in traditional systems of learning in general. The Cabala itelf is little more than one vast system of correspondences-- I believe it was Israel Regardie that referred to the whole system as a "filing cabinet." The point of such systems is to allow one to immediately contact particular states of consciousness, and thereby to produce particular modes of change.

Again, these systems are not limited to magic, but occur in pre- and non-modern modes of thinking in general. For example, as Western culture has its seven traditional virtues, and Helleniuc culture its four, traditional Chinese culture has five. It's actually not very easy to translate these into English, but, roughly speaking, they amount to: Benevolence, Righteousness, Propriety, Wisdom, and Faithfulness. (Notice, as an aside, that these are different from the four virtues of Plato, and that cultivating these five, rather than our four or seven, produces a different sort of virtuous person. This is a clue to the deeper meaning of cultural difference.)

In Taoist philosophy and Traditional Chinese Medicine, these five virtues have the following correspondences:

Benevolence-- Wood Element-- Liver-- Sour-- Springtime-- Green-- Vice:Anger Jupiter

Propriety-- Fire Element-- Heart-- Summer-- Bitter-- Red-- Vice:Excitement Mars

Faithfulness-- Earth Element-- Spleen-- Present or Late Summer-- Yellow-- Vice:Anxiety Sweet-- Saturn

Righteousness-- Metal Element-- Lungs-- Autumn-- Pungent-- White-- Vice:Grief Venus

Wisdom-- Water Element-- Winter-- Kidneys-- Salty-- Blue-- Vice:Fear Mercury

This system of correspondences allows a Taoist adept, or a TCM practitioner, both to cultivate particular states of consciousness in themselves and even to treat disease in their patients. For example, a client suffering from a lung condition might be found to have been attacked by an excess of grief. This can be treated by a qigong exercise which at once opens the chest and activates the muscles along the lung meridian, while the patient visualizes inhaling healing white light into the lungs and exhaling smoky gray light containing grief and sorrow. This can be combined with acupuncture and massage focusing on the lung points, and regularly taking pungent herbs in soup and tea.

Such systems of correspondences are not arbitrary, but they also aren't universal. It's neither one right way, nor anything goes. To give an example, the season of Winter may be plausibly assigned to the element of Water or Earth, as both are slow, heavy, and cold. It makes rather less sense to assign Winter to Air-- unless, perhaps, you live in a part of the world in which Winter is marked by wind storms. It makes very little sense at all to assign the element of Fire to the Winter season-- unless you're using the elements in a different way, which I'll discuss in a moment.

Personal Elements

The arrangement of the elements that I provided yesterday is personal to me, as I said, but I want to talk a little about why this is so.

The virtue of Courage is defined by Plato in the Laws as a knowledge of divine goodness that sustains us through every danger, and also through every pleasure. He is also at pains in the Laws to point out that Courage is the first and lowest of the virtues-- although it holds together cities like Sparta and Crete, it is insufficient to elevate the soul to the higher worlds. Aristotle, meanwhile, points out in Nichomachaean Ethics that Courage is not the opposite of cowardice, but a mean between cowardice and rashness. For Aristotle as for Plato, all of the virtues are means, with vices of excess and deficiency on either side.

Now, when I consider the virtue of Courage, I find that I am not lacking in the ability to face danger. Not that I throw myself into dangerous situations on purpose-- not these days, anyway-- but I have on a number of occasions had the opportunity to face physical danger and death, and acted in a way that I felt was appropriate.

On the other hand, one of my greatest vices is my inability to see projects all the way through. My harddrive is full of half-written novels, but no finished ones. I can read Spanish and Latin at a child's level (Iulia puella parva est); I can identify 1 or 200 words in Chinese and write the corresponding characters. I know the guitar well enough to play in a punk band, provided none of my bandmates is older than 16. I have a similar degree of proficiency in the dao or Chinese broadsword, and less in the jian, the Chinese straight sword. I recently acquired a bata, or Irish fighting stick, and if my pattern holds, in a year I'll know it well enough to fight an unarmed civilian.

What's the point of all this self-effacement?

Only the following: When it comes to assigning an element to Courage, I ask myself: "What is it that I need in order to cultivate the virtue?" For me, the answer is stability and endurance. Of all the elements, Earth represents this most strongly-- to my mind at any rate. And so I assign the virtue of Courage to the element of Earth, which is to say, I ask the powers of Earth for help in developing Courage.

But that doesn't mean this is a universal assignment. If I had no problem with stick-to-it-iveness, but I was terrified of physical danger, I might invoke Fire for Courage, as I might find its burning strength a great help in facing my fears. If, on the other hand, my issue was one of rashness-- that is, an excessive love of danger for its own sake-- I might invoke the calming power of Water. Finally, if I simply needed help getting started on my projects or adventures, I might invoke Air.

And I repeat the process with the remaining virtues.

Justice is defined as a right relationship between things. Plato describes it in the Republic as every part of the soul performing its own correct task; Aristotle defines it in the Ethics as giving everything what is due to it. I personally, usually, invoke Water to cultivate Justice. The reason for this is that Water is binding, unifying, and giving. I have a tendency toward selfishness and an equal tendency to be temperamental; these things stand in the way of giving to others what is due to them, whether a tip at a restaurant or a kind word on the street, and in the way of proper relationships with the people in my life, who often need my love rather than irritation or sarcasm.

Wisdom is described by Plato in the Phaedo as a separation of the soul from the body, and contact with the higher reality of the spiritual world. To my mind Air perfectly symbolizes this idea, as Air is the element of the sky (which is the symbol of the Noetic world), the mind, and Form.

Temperance, finally, means self-control, and for me this is symbolized by Fire, which is above all the element of power. Real power is power over the self, especially the lower self and its cravings.

In order to cultivate these virtues, I often say the following prayer, especially in the morning:

May I take up my hammer to work,
May I take up my cup to give,
May I take up my book to learn,
May I take up my sword and live.

The hammer symbolizes the gnomes who labor in the north; the cup is the cauldron of life; the book is the wisdom of philosophy and nature; the sword is my personal symbol of success and self-mastery.

External Elements, and Other Arrangements

In a sense, this way of working with the elements is a form of medicine, taylored to the individual. When designing a system of magic or initiation, it seems that it is often more important to choose a more universal arrangement.

It seems to me that a more universal Druidic arrangement might look like this:

Earth: Courage
Water: Wisdom
Air: Justice
Fire: Temperance

This again draws on Plato's Laws, which describes Courage as the first and lowest of the virtues, and Justice as a mean between Wisdom and Temperance. Water has straightforward associations with wisdom in Celtic lore, in the form of the Salmon of Wisdom who dwells in the sacred well. The animal associated with Justice is the Hawk of May, whose name, "Gwalchmai," is the Welsh form of Gawain, who was in the oldest tales one of the most important of Arthur's knights; his encounter with the Green Knight is itself a lesson in Justice. Temperance, finally, is assigned to Fire. In ordinary American English the word "temperance," if it's used at all, means something like "Not getting drunk," and maybe also "...and keep it in your pants, too." Its original meaning in Greek, dikaiosune, means "self-mastery." This is the final virtue, as Fire is the highest of the elements.

The following arrangement works equally well:

Earth: Justice
Water: Temperance
Fire: Courage
Air: Wisdom

This arrangement follows the assignment of the virtues to the parts of the human soul, and the parts of the soul to energy centers in the body, in Plato's Republic. To the abdomen, which is called the "lower dantien" in Chinese internal alchemy and the lower cauldron in the Dolmen Arch system, corresponds the Epithymia, which is the lowest part of the soul, the appetites for food and reproduction that we share in common with every animal. To this center corresponds the element of Water. The proper virtue here is Temperance, as Temperance is control over the appetites and the re-direction of the generative power of the lower cauldron toward productive ends. To the heart, which is called the middle dantien or middle cauldron, corresponds the Thymos, and the element of Fire. The Thymos is the seat of the social emotions, and here the proper virtue is Courage, which compels a warrior to stand with his comrades on the battle-field. The head, which is the upper dantien or cauldron, is the seat of the Nous, and the element of Air. The Nous is the reasoning mind, and also the part of the mind that extends beyond ordinary reason and is capable of direct contact with the higher worlds. Only the Nous can attain the virtue of Wisdom.

Finally, Justice is the unity of all three parts of the soul, and their performance of their proper function, under the command of the Nous. United, the soul functions as a microcosm of the whole world, and thus the element of Earth is associated with the body as a united whole, and also has special reference to the lower body as it conveys the upper body through the material world.

Ladders of Virtue

The later Neoplatonists assigned multiple definitions to each of the four virtues. These definitions then corresponded to the highest form of that virtue a person could achieve, depending upon their particular station in life. The virtues were arranged into hierarchies. In the writings of Plotinus, the virtues exist at two levels, the political and the purificatory. The political virtues are given the definitions of Plato's Republic and Laws; their cultivation allows us to exist together in society. But having established himself in the political virtues, the philosopher then cultivates the purificatory virtues, based on Plato's Phaedo, which aim at the union of the soul with God. This simple twofold hierarchy of virtue was then elaborated into four by Porphyry and seven by Iamblichus.

It seems to me that a Druidical take on this system would work by assigning the elements to the virtues in different ways at different degrees of initiation. Perhaps one assignment exists at the first degree, another at the second, but at the third, the initiate must discover his own set of correspondences. There is much to think about here.

The following selections are from the Ruth Majercik translation, published by the Prometheus Trust. The fragments of the Oracles are frequently found in other sources; the commentary in Fragment 46 is provided by Proclus, in 47 by Olympiodorus, in 48 again by Proclus.

Fragment 44:

The Father mixed the spark of soul with two harmonious qualities, Intellect and divine Will, to which he added a third, pure Love, as the guide and holy bond of all things.

Fragment 46:

(It is necessary)... to propose the virtues which, from creation, purify and lead back (to God),

...Faith, Truth, and Love,

that praiseworth triad.

Fragment 47:

Divine Hope, which descends from Intellect and is cetain, concerning which the oracle says:

May fire-bearing Hope nourish you...

Fragment 48:

"For all things are governed and exist in these three (virtues)," says the oracle. For this reason, the gods counsel the theurgists to unite themselves with God by means of this triad.

***

Application

The four cardinal virtues discussed again and again by Plato are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage. Each is given slightly different definitions in different dialogues, and later commentators interpreted these as hierarchies of virtue. For example, at the level of ordinary life, Courage might consist in not turning aside from one's task either from danger or for the sake of pleasure. Ascending the spiritual hierarchy, Courage becomes a total disregard of death, as the soul no longer identifies itself with the body.

To these four Christianity added three more: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The original four were called the cardinal virtues; the additional three, the theological, as they were supernatural in nature.

It has always seemed to me that in the Druidic tradition we might make use of the theological virtues, but I did not see how they could be grounded in pagan thought, as they seem thoroughly Christian in origin. The Oracles provide the answer. Faith, Truth, and Love are in fact higher virtues, which have (as our translator Ruth Majercik writes in her introduction) an anagogic effect. Hope may have been understood as a fourth virtue, as in Chaldean and late Platonic theology every Triad is lead by a Monad, so a triad of virtues may be preceded by, or proceed from, a single virtue.

It could be, then, that we could assign the four cardinal virtues to the four material elements, and the three Chaldean virtues to the three modes of spirit.

How?

There are many ways. In my own way of thinking, Earth is courage, Water justice, Air Wisdom, and Fire temperance. Faith may then be assigned to Spirit Above, Truth to Spirit Below, and Love to Spirit Within. Hope may be seen to either connect the material virtues to the spiritual, or else to be a higher virtue from which the spiritual virtues proceed.

The following occurred to me this morning.

There are three sorts of people who should not be allowed political power: Priests, Scientists, and Actors.

Priests-- Because their time is spent interacting with God and the spiritual realm, and they are therefore unable to understand the needs of human beings, who are imperfect.

Scientists-- Because their work forces them to reduce everything to material processes, and they are therefore unable to understand the complexities and nuances of human social life, or the moral forces which govern it;

Actors-- Because in the work of channeling countless other lives, they become hyper-sensitive and thus unstable and overly subject to passing currents in the Astral Light and whims of the moment.

In other words: Those who must be kept from political power are those whose minds are above the human, those whose minds are below the human, and those whose minds are all too human.

/|\

Magic and Memory

Some years ago I bought my wife a deck of Tarot cards.

It was our first Christmas together. She'd expressed interest in Tarot, which at the time I'd been working with for many years, so it was an obvious choice for a present. But which deck should I get her?

I knew I'd need something simple, standard, and good for beginners. More elaborate and specialized decks are based on the standard models, and so the basics are best for those just starting out. Still, it couldn't be too basic, or it would feel generic, which would take away the power of a gift. Part of a gift, of course, and often the most important part, is the demonstration to the other person of just how well you know them.

And so I spent at least an hour combing through the "Metaphysical" section at Barnes and Noble, trying to find the perfect deck. Eventually I settled on one. It was elaborate and beautiful, somewhat surrealist; she'd love it.

...Wouldn't she?

I was twenty minutes down the road when I realized, no, no, this was altogether the wrong deck. The one I'd seen before, the Beginner Tarot in the purple box with lovely artwork and detailed instructions, that was the right one.

And so I turned around. Or, rather, I made my aunt, who was driving the car, turn around. And we drove twenty minutes back to the mall, and, since it was Christmastime, I waited another twenty minutes in the line to make the exchange.

While we were there, I also picked up a lovely Celtic Tree of Life tarot bag to put the cards in. All in all, the whole process took at least three hours.

Then Christmas morning came.

I had fewer children, cars, and mortgages in those days, and so there were a lot of presents under the tree. Still, every time my wife picked up a giftwrapped box, I knew exactly what was in it.

Until that one. It was a little diagonal box. And I looked at it, and I said, "I have no memory of getting that for you." I was being completely honest; I had no idea what it could possibly have been.

Of course, it was the tarot deck.

Later, she picked up another box, this one holding the bag for the cards.

She said, "I think this is a magical gift too."

I said, in all honesty, "No, it isn't. I can't remember what it is, but I'm sure I didn't get you anything else related to magic or divination."

Well, you know what happened next.

I learned an important lesson from the experience, which is just how delicate the memory is, and how strongly magical forces can affect it. When Jenn picked up the package containing the tarot cards, I could not find a single memory associated with it. It was like they were locked away behind an invisible wall. Once she tore off the wrapping paper, the memory of the cards, and of the entire afternoon spent shopping for them, was present in its entirety.

Keep that in mind, it will be important later.

Memory and Dreams

A strange thing often happens to me as I'm falling asleep.

Between wake and sleeping, I begin to have a very peculiar sort of dream. This happens almost every night. In these dreams, I am someone else, doing something else. So far, so good-- nearly every dream is like that. But it's not merely that I am someone else. In every single case, I have the full suite of this other person's memories available to me.

Think of your own life. At this exact moment, you aren't remembering what you did yesterday, or what you did on your last birthday, or where you were when you heard about the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11, or the first time you got drunk, or smoked a cigarette, or got into a fistfight, or had sex. But those memories are there, somewhere, in the background of your mind. If you thought about it, you could retrieve them immediately-- in fact, the images associated with those memories probably came to you when you read the words. But, even more to the point, even if you can't quite recall any one of those items, it's there, somewhere, in the background of your personality, shaping who you are to this day.

The dreams that come to me in the hypnogogic state are like that. It's not just that I'm someone else, I have the full range of that someone else available to me. I don't just remember, but I remember that I remember. I know, in these moments, a great deal that I do not know in my waking life, or in my ordinary dreams.

And then I shift in my sleep, or I hear a noise outside, or a cat jumps onto the bed, and it's all gone. Every image, every detail; only the memory of the fact remains. The information, the images, they're all lost. In forty years of dreaming these dreams, I can recall only two images. In one, I'm a man hurrying down a city street. The world feels brown and everything is brown. It might be the early twentieth century, or it might not be Earth. But I'm an ordinary man, probably dressed in a coat and a hat, with a complete set of memories and an attached identity unrelated to my present life. The other is an image of golden crystal towers set against a hallucinatory sky. I can't tell you anything else about it.

Where do these memories go, when I wake up or when a cat jumps onto my pillow?

I don't know, but I suspect it's the same place that the memories of the tarot cards went on that Christmas morning, years ago.

Memory and The Tooth Fairy

My stepson is nearly twelve years old, which is much too old to believe in tooth fairies.

Despite this, he lost his final tooth the other day, and placed it under his pillow as he has with all the rest. And my wife and I planned to take his tooth and give him his money. Did you know that the kids get five dollars these days? I know we've had runaway inflation, but that still seems like a lot, given that I never got more than a quarter.

In any case, we've been taking his teeth and giving him five dollars (five dollars! Good God) for years. But that night, we forgot.

That's not a huge deal, in and of itself; it's happened once or twice before, and each time we've said, "Maybe the tooth fairy will come while you are at school." Which the tooth fairy proceeded to do.

But the tooth fairy didn't come while he was at school. She didn't come the next night, or the next school day. And she didn't come last night, either.

This whole time, he's been playing along, wondering out loud why that Tooth Fairy is being so lazy. Finally, this morning, the kid looks right at me and just flat out says, "Why do you guys keep forgetting?"

And that was the moment I realized what was happening.

"Do you believe in the tooth fairy?" I ask him.

"No," he says.

"It's just your mom and me, right?"

"Right."

"Like the Easter Bunny?"

"Of course."

"And Santa?"

He nods.

"And there you have it," I tell him. "The tooth fairy isn't coming because you don't believe in her."

Now, this gets the most skeptical of looks, as you can imagine. At this point, in his mind, we're at the Peter Pan level of adult condescension. He's thinking, "This guy just wants me to clap my hands and say, 'I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!' when he and I both just admitted that there's no such thing, and it's just him and my mom putting money under my pillow. Well, five bucks is five bucks, so he can make me fake it, but he sure as hell can't make me like it!"

But I'm not playing Peter Pan. I don't ask him to fake believing in fairies. Instead, I ask again,

"Is the tooth fairy real?"

He says "Yes," because he thinks it's what I want to hear.

And so I say, "Do you think you could capture her on camera if you tried?"

"No."

"Or could you see her with your eyes?"

"No."

"No. With your eyes you'd just see your mom.

"Here's the thing.

"Centuries ago, there were many beings like the tooth fairy. Every time there was a holiday, someone would show up dressed as a saint or an elf or a monster to give out candy or presents. And since they had dozens and dozens of holidays back then, there were a lot of magical beings running around. And everyone would treat them as perfectly real. Now we have just a few left-- the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa. But it's still the same idea.

The thing is, these beings aren't fake. They aren't like you and me, human beings living inside a single body. They're more like forces, with their bodies distributed throughout the world. That might sound strange, but it isn't, not really. If you could imagine yourself the size of a single cell, or even an atom, you wouldn't like much like a body either. You'd like like hundreds, even millions of different beings-- your cells-- all doing different things, across an enormous landscape. And that'd be right-- but it wouldn't be the whole picture, either, because all of those different beings would be linked together into a single network by something called 'You,' your life, your intelligence.

In the same way, beings like the Tooth Fairy are distributed all through the world. Whenever a mom takes a tooth from under her kid's pillow, or the kid draws a picture of a fairy, or the kid's parents tell him the story-- that's how the Tooth Fairy is able to manifest. Those actions are like her cells."

He says, "If you're lying to me, I'm going to be so mad at you..."

I say, "I'm not lying. The tooth fairy is real, but she can't come if you don't believe in her; your disbelief caused me and your mom to fall asleep last night, and the night before, and the night before, without remembering your tooth."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Of course. Now, you don't have to believe me, if you don't want to. It might be that you need some time to not believe in tooth fairies, or the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus. But I believe in them."

At that point his three year old sister finally makes her way downstairs. Now the morning enters its frantic phase, as I realize I need to make lunches for both kids and get the little one dressed and get them out the door to their respective schools and, oh yeah, I've only got about 10 minutes to do all of this.

Should I have told him the truth about the Tooth Fairy? Was he too young to know? Did he need some time to keep disbelieving, like a big kid? I don't know. But I guess I'm going to need to go upstairs, and put some money under his pillow. Five dollars, these days. Plus interest for four missing days. Can you believe it?

In another world, I would like the following thing to happen.

For a year and a day, the initiate prepares himself, studying the teachings, gathering in fellowship with others, spending time in nature. At the end of this time they prepare to make his Retreat and Obligation, if they choose. And that is done in the following manner.

In public, he sets one piece of technology on a large stone. Any old stone? No, the Stone of Rebirth. The spirit who dwells in the stone has conducted many on this journey.

A cell phone, an apple watch, a set of virtual reality goggles, a bluetooth headset. Now, it can't just be any old thing-- it must be something to which the initiate himself or herself has been attached. That phone you can't keep more than two feet away from. Not the one you need for work-- no, the one that you keep checking because someone might have posted a Tweet, or liked your video.

Imagine the scene. It should be early Spring, I think-- a time for rebirth. The place is a large tract of forest land, managed and maintained by an assembly of Druid-monks who live in hermitages. Paths wind among the trees, guiding visitors through a network of shrines and small circles of standing stones. Here and there are small buildings, heated by wood stoves and lit by candlelight, that serve the various purposes of the monks. Everything here is sacred. Even the bathrooms are sacred. There are no septic tanks to be drained every year or two, but wooden humanure assemblies dedicated to the God of Decomposition.

Beyond the well-ordered paths and woods tended by the Druids is an open wilderness, with only narrow to guide human visitors through the trees. Before this woodland is a wide open space, surrounded by evergreen trees. A sacred grove; one passes an image of Nemetona as one enters through an archway of woven branches. At the back of this space is another archway. Overtopping the arch is an image of the goddess Elen; underneath, a path leads through the archway, down into the deep wilderness beyond.

And in the center of the clearing stands the stone of rebirth, over which a white cloth is spread. Here stands the Aspirant, dressed in ceremonial regalia. What color? Does he wear the green of the beginner, perhaps? Or the black of the last hour before dawn? Certainly, the sign of the Three Rays of Light /|\ is drawn on his forehead in charcoal, and the charcoal must have come from a fire which he tended overnight. And in either case, he is flanked by two archdruids in white robes.

The aspirant sets his iPhone-- the latest model, the 25, the one that can interface directly with the chip in your brain that was developed by early 21st century conservative folk hero Elon Musk-- on the Stone of Rebirth, and, standing nearby, a white-robed Archdruid passes him the Hammer of Sucellos, the Good Striker, who is also Silvanus, the Woodland God. The initiate raises it overhead and cries out, "I renounce thee, Ahriman!"

And he brings down the hammer onto the cell phone and shatters it into a thousand pieces.

The assembly of Druids raises a cheer. A light seems to shine from the aspirant's face; tears well in his eyes. He is free, really free!

Songs follow, and prayers. The cloth is taken from the stone, holding the fragments of the iPhone, and disposed of; other Druids whose task this is are careful to gather any stray fragment that may have fallen onto the ground.

The Archdruid whose duty it is to conduct the Great Initiation leads him under the archway of branches, into the Wildwood. How long will he spend there? I want to believe that it will be forty days at least. Forty days, for the first initiation; seven, for a yearly renewal of vows; perhaps three, for an occasional retreat. Of course it will be at least a year and a day for priests, longer than that, for some hermits like the Taoist immortals or the medieval anchorites, who have now become legendary.

Our initiate is an ordinary believer, dedicated to the New Way, but still a part of society. He will return in forty days. He will have written his own scripture, out there in the wild, and the Sacred Mountain will have given him a new Name, which he will keep secret.

He can, perhaps, expect persecution from society, which regards any sort of technological renunciation as treason, and declares the deliberate withholding of technology by parents to be child abuse. He may be imprisoned for his beliefs, or even killed-- yes, this has happened, and when it does the Druids gather the bodies of their martyred friends and bury them under the trees, and the spirits of those happy Dead are added to the rank of protectors in Gwynfydd.

Or perhaps this is many centuries later, and the persecutions have long since come to an end, having served only to create an invisible army of Druid guardians. Time will tell.

In either case, this is where I want to be, and where I want to live. I need a phone, these days. I have to check my schedule at work. And if I didn't have a phone, I couldn't listen to audiobooks during my two hours daily commute, and I'd know so much less. And, and, and... And there it sits, two feet away from me, as I type this.

Many years ago I made my own retreat into the Wildwood, and I climbed the Sacred Mountain and received my own secret scripture. And one day, I'm going to smash this phone with the hammer of Sucellos, and walk the paths of Elen into the deep woods, the realm of Silvanus, singing the Druid's prayer--

Dyro Dduw dy Nawdd;
Ag yn nawdd, nerth;

Ag yn nerth, Deall;

Ag yn Neall, Gwybod;

Ac yngwybod, gwybod y cyfiawn;

Ag yngwybod yn cyfiawn, ei garu;

Ag o garu, caru pob hanfod;

Ag ymhob Hanfod, caru Duw.

/|\

Way back in February, we looked at the idea of the daimon as a launching-off point for a discussion of American political philosophy. Or, to say it more correctly, American political theology.

The daimon, as we saw, is a power intermediate between gods and ordinary human beings. Actually, this is an oversimplification— there is another Order of beings intermediate between ordinary humans and daimones, as we will see shortly. For now it suffices to recall our descrption of the daimones as those powers which meet the following conditions:

To worship them is to court disaster;
Equally, to ignore or, even worse, to attempt to suppress them is to court disaster.

We gave the example of Eros. Eros, erotic love, is a force in human life whose role cannot be eliminated. Every attempt to do so simply ensures that he manifests in a way that is beyond the control, and far beyond the predictive capacity, of those who attempt the suppressing. The classic examples are the way that Victorian prudery led to the backlash of the Sexual Revolution, and the misguided attempts to impose celibacy on those unsuited for it have resulted in an epidemic of sexual abuse among Catholic clergy.

Eros and his opposite number, Anteros, are examples are daimones, as we saw, but so too are the spirits of the natural world, who can respond to respectful overtures from human beings with friendship, or at least cooperation, but who make for bad gods and worse enemies.

Having said all this by way of review, I want to turn now to a discussion of the Gods.

The Limit and the Unlimited

Let's start with a few quotations.

Socrates: Of all that now exists in the universe, let us make a twofold division, or rather, if you don't mind, a threefold.

Protarchus: On what principle, may I ask?

Socrates: We might apply part of what we were saying a while ago.

Protarchus: What part?

Socrates: We said, I fancy, that God had revealed two constituents of things, the Unlimited and the Limit.

Protarchus: Certainly.

Socrates: Then let us take these as two of our class, and, as the third, something arising out of the mixture of them both.

Plato, Philebus, 23.c

For law is order, and good law is good order; but a very great multitude cannot be orderly: to introduce order into the unlimited is the work of a divine power-- of such a power as holds together the universe.

Aristotle, Politics VII.4.1326.a.30

According to Plato, then, God has established three powers or forces, which can be found in all things. The first is the Limit, the second, the Unlimited, and the third, the Mixture of the two. Everything in the universe is brought into being by these three forces.

This is difficult to understand, because it is very different from modern ways of thinking. Let's try to illustrate it by way of an example.

In Geometry, Limit is equivalent to the geometric point. The Unlimited, then, is the line, which extends to infinity in either direction. The point is fixed; it has no dimensions, it goes nowhere. It is all boundary. The line is unlimited. It extends to Infinity.

On their own, neither the single point nor the infinite line is of very much use, and if that were the end of geometry, we wouldn't have much of a universe.

Now, imagine a power prior to both the point and the line producing both, and then deliberately combining them. How? By taking the line and bending it back upon itself, to produce the first shape, the circle. The circle, like the point, has a fixed location and is circumscribed. The point is nearly infinitely small; in a sense, there is nowhere that it actually is. Bringing in the line's power of extension allows the circle to have a location-- somewhere that it is. But bringing in the point's power of limitation allows the circle to function in the universe, because it now has somewhere-- or, rather, an infinite somewhere-- that it is not. The latter is just as important as the former-- a line extending to infinity is incapable of accomplishing anything. The only way to be anything in particular is to also not be anything else.

This is the beginning of geometry. Starting with the circle, the process then begins again. From the circle, a series of succeeding shapes can be derived, by the addition of still more circles. The triangle, the square, the pentagon, and so on. These then generate their own successions of shapes-- the equilateral triangle, the right triangle, the rectangle, the parallelogram, and so on.

The same process works again with human speech. For the point, there is the sound uttered for the briefest moment. For the line, the unending noise. The combination of the two produces the word, or, rather the letter or syllable- A, B, C and so on-- which then combined to produce the word, and then the sentence, and so on for the whole sequence of human communication.

Culture and the Unlimited

The same process is at work in human culture.

Like the line of infinite extension, the number of possible arrangements of human society is basically infinite. We know this from the anthropological record. Is farming best done by men or by women? Should hunting territories be owned by individuals, by fathers and sons, by clans, by secret societies, by tribes, by hereditary nobility, or by the Bureau of Land Management? Should marriage take place between one man, and one woman, for life? One man and one woman at a time, with the possibility of additional marriages for either once the first is dissolved? Between one man and a number of women? Between one woman and a number of men? Between any number of persons? Between two men, or two women?

All these questions and countless others have been given different answers by different societies across the world and throughout time. A set of answers to the full range of questions about how human life is to be lived which is shared among a discrete community and transmitted to its children is called a culture.

God and the Powers

Plato writes, as I said, that God has established the first two powers and caused their mixture. God, the cause of the mixture, is the fourth power to which Socrates alludes-- really the First, which is prior to the three.

Now God, in this context, was understood by the Neoplatonists to refer to the One. This, says Proclus, is why Plato simply says "God," rather than "Zeus" or some other particular God-- the One is beyond all description, and can simply be referred to as "God" or "the First God." In a Christian context, God would refer to the Holy Trinity, all three Persons of which are understood to be, somehow, prior to existence as the One is for Proclus or Plotinus. For our purposes here it doesn't matter-- use the framework that works best for you.

The triad of the Limit, the Unlimited, and the Mixed, is also the Intelligible Triad of Being, Life, and Intellect, which we've discussed at length elsewhere. As we've seen, the cycle of creation is recursive. The third term of the triad, the mixed, also called Intellect, begins a new cycle of creation and acts as the First for the beings that follow it. Thus the circle in my example, which is the third term in the tirad of Point, Line, Shape, produces additional shapes, and the word produces additional words.

Now, notice that the circle, the first shape, produces additional shapes, rather than colors, or notes, or catfish. In just the same way, in the First Creation of Things, the beings produced by God immediately are themselves Gods, immense Divine powers which shape life on Earth. The First God is universal; the second Gods, very nearly universal, but with elements of particularity. The more remote you get from the First God, the more particular the Gods become. The second term in the Intelligible Triad is life, the Unlimited, and she-- even numbers are feminine-- is all life, everywhere. Much closer to the world that we know, Ceres governs the outpouring of Life onto the Earth by the creator. Interestingly, the 3 sons of Cronus, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, also form the same type of triad. Here Poseidon is the second term, and his job is to conduct life into the world of generation.

Back to Culture

Let's return to the subject of culture, and let's introduce two more concepts from Proclus that will help us.

Every unity participates of the One. This means that everything which is united, whether the circle, or the musical note, or the human culture, is united by virtue of the One. As the One can be denominated as simply God, the unifying power which governs, say, a human culture, can be understood as a God.

Now the Divine is always good, and never evil. The Divine is always perfect and never incomplete. But the perfect and the good do not exist as such in the material world. The perfect circle exists in the mind; it cannot be found in nature. It is the ideal form which determines the geometries of the material world, which are always slightly off from absolutely perfect. In a similar manner, then, it must be the case, that every human culture is to a perfect version of itself as a circle in the material world is to a perfect circle. It is possible for a circle drawn by a human hand to come closer and closer to the absolute ideal, but it won't reach it in the material world. On the other hand, it is possible for material circles to be extremely sloppy. In the same way, the perfect culture does not exist. But the perfect version of every particular culture can be approximated, or we can be very far away from it.

Now, among shapes, which is different in each has its use. The unity of a triangle is the oneness of the triangle, or, even, the Divinity of the triangle. the triangle does not become a better triangle by trying to become more like a square. This is impossible it becomes a better triangle by becoming a more perfect reflection of the ideal form of the triangle.

Applying the same principle to human culture, there is not a single ideal human culture, because culture is a concept like shape. It is a genus, not a species. A given culture comes closer to the divine, the One, God, by expressing in the best form possible the ideal which itself is striving, not an abstract ideal toward which all of human culture is striving. If you were to try to create a perfect shape which consisted of it at once a triangle, a rhombus, and a pentagram, you would just draw a mess on a paper. It is its separation, paradoxically, it's unique identity as a triangle, which allows a triangle to express the unity of the one.

That being the case, the same must be true of human culture. To simply mash cultures together or to try to force them to become one another, does not actually produce unity between them. It destroys the possibility that they individually have for reaching unity by expressing in a clear and united way the Divine ideal which is their own origin and unattainable endpoint.

Now the isolated individual is not a culture, and neither is the isolated family. Moreover, the collection of isolated families, each with radically different modes of life is not a culture-- it is a return to the principle of the Unlimited. At this point, it feels very apropos to point out that the Unlimited is the principle of Evil. The Unlimited is the primordial chaos, the great void out of which being arises.

American Nations, American Gods

I've said before that there are four books that are necessary to understanding American culture. The first three are Albion's Seed, the Nine Nations of North America, and American Nations. The first is the most detailed. Each is a study of the ways in which the apparent unity of American, or North American, culture is illusory. There are between seven and eleven-- depending on the author-- major cultures, and dozens of minor ones, hidden under that unity. The fourth book is a good atlas of American Indian culture regions, which will demonstrate that the American cultural regions we have today aligns very closely with cultural regions that existed long before Columbus.

I submit that each one of these regional cultures is a unity properly understood. Just like a triangle or a pentagon. Each expresses in its own way one of the unlimited possible ways of being human. The major problems in our history down to the present day have been caused by our failure to recognize our actual differences and by our attempt to destroy these differences, thereby metaphorically speaking returning us to the primordial chaos.

It is my view that the persistent issues facing the United States arise from this fact. Left to its own devices, each culture has its own particular virtues, and also its own particular vices. United under a too-strong federal government, the pathologies of each manifest on a continent-wide scale, while the virtues are lost in the chaos. Next time I want to talk about the particular American regional cultures, the gods that govern them, and the demons that come with them.

Hi Everybody,

A reader of this blog named Quin has been compiling a weekly list of prayer requests from members of the Ecosophia community, which-- for those who have wandered in here from other parts-- is the community of people who have gathered around the works of John Michael Greer. I asked, and he is okay with me sharing the information here. Quin's list of prayer requests can be found at his blog here. This is the link to the current round of prayer requests. Please consider donating your time, and, of course, if you have a prayer request of your own, you know where to post it!

The Structure of Virtue

The human mind grasps objects more easily when it can divide them into categories. This is a fact of human life, found the world over. It is also the case, however, that one given object may admit of many different sorts of divisions. The object "animals" may be divided into those that swim, those that crawl, and those that fly; or into the wild and the tame; or into the edible and inedible; or into the Lynnaean taxonomy that we all learned as schoolchildren; or into more recent taxonomies based on cladistics; and according to many other means.

Excellence in human beings, also called in English "virtue," from the Latin "virtus," is no exception to this rule. Virtue taken as a whole is best pursued by being divided into several virtues which may be pursued separately. There are, however, many ways of doing this, and cultures the world over have produced lists 4, or 5, or 7, or 9 sub-virtures which, taken together, produce the entire quality Virtue.

Here are several examples.

For Plato and his contemporaries, the highest virtues are four, and these are Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom.

The Neoplatonists elaborated on Plato's scheme by producing a set of 7 gradations of virtue, fit for the various stages of human development.

The Christians also elaborated on this scheme, labeling the Four as the Cardinal or Natural Virtues, and appending to them the Supernatural or Theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Confucius also taught virtue, but his categories are different. For Confucius and his intellectual descendants, the Five Constant Virtues are Benevolence, Righteousness, Trustworthiness, Propriety, and Wisdom. (Those are the English translations, in any case; the Chinese words do not always translate exactly.

What matters is not what particular organization of the virtues that one chooses to follow, but only that one chooses a set, and follows them.

How We Become Virtuous

Virtue is not natural to human beings except in a very limited sense. A newborn baby is able to eat, cry, sleep and defecate, and not much else. While natural aptitudes exist, so that one, owing to a larger mental capacity, has a greater aptitude toward Wisdom, while another, owing to a naturally strong constitution, is more given to Courage, the virtues are only attained through learning.

In On the Virtues of Women Plutarch of Chaeronea asked whether virtue was the same in men as it is in women, and answered that it must be so. If painting is the same art whether done by a man or a woman, and if poetry is the same, why would virtue be different? Courage consists in the ability to endure steadfastly through both danger and pleasure, as Plato taught in the Laws. This is the same whether it is a man or a woman tempted to flee from danger, or to pleasure.

Moreover, if, whilst we go to make appear that the poetic or comic art is not one thing in men and another in women, we compare Sappho's verses with Anacreon's, or the Sibylline oracles with those of Bacis, can any one justly blame this way of argumentation, because it insinuates a credence into the pleased and delighted hearers? No one surely would say this. Neither can a man truly any waybetter learn the resemblance and the difference between feminine and virile virtue than by comparing together lives with lives, exploits with exploits, as the products of some great art; duly considering whether the magnanimity of Semiramis carries with it the same character and impression with that of Sesostris, or the cunning of Tanaquil the same with that of King Servius, or the discretion of Porcia the same with that of Brutus, or that of Pelopidas with Timoclea,— regarding that quality of these virtues wherein lie their chiefest point and force. Moreover, virtues do admit some other differences, like peculiar colors, by reason of men's dispositions, and are assimilated to the manners and temperaments of the bodies wherein they are, yea, to the education and manner of diet. Achilles was courageous in one manner, Ajax in another; the subtlety of Ulysses was not like that of Nestor, neither were Cato and Agesilaus just after the same manner; neither was Eirene a lover of her husband as Alcestis was; neither was Cornelia magnanimous in the same way with Olympias. But, for all this, we do not say that there are many kinds of fortitude, prudence, and justice specifically distinct, so long as their individual dissimilitudes exclude none of them from the specific definitions.

Men, Women, Boys, Girls

There is a difference between a man and a woman, and there is a difference between a man and a boy. There is also a difference between a man and a man who acts like a boy. The differences are clear in each case:

A man is an adult human who possesses the virtues, and who takes the masculine role in acts of generation. A woman is an adult human who possesses the virtues in whole or in part, and who takes the feminine role in acts of generation.

Make no mistake about what masculinity and femininity are as they pertain to generation. To take the masculine role in generation means to participate in generation by providing semen. The feminine role in generation means to participate in generation by providing an ovum. Considered with respect to creation as a whole, masculinity means to create by going outside of oneself, while femininity means to create by drawing something from the outside into oneself. Masculinity and femininity in this sense pertain only to acts of creation. To attend a party is masculinity; to host a party, femininity. In relation to creative activity, masculinity and femininity have no other meaning.

A boy is an immature human male, who necessarily does not yet possess the virtues, because he has not yet had the opportunity to attain them.

A man who acts like a boy is a mature human male who lacks the virtues, because he has refused to attain them.

From this it is easy enough to define a girl, and a woman who acts like a girl.

Now a man who acts like a man is called masculine, while a woman who acts like a woman is called feminine. Note, though, that "masculine" and "feminine" have here a different meaning than above, because they pertain to virtue as a whole, not to generation in particular. A man who acts like a boy is called puerile. The female equivalent, for a woman who acts like a girl, would be "puellile," and as far as I know this word does not exist. But it ought to, because men who act like boys and women who act like girls, and also men who act like girls and women who act like boys, are in very large supply right now.

More on the Topic of Virtue

Three more things need to be said on this topic before we can continue.

Though the virtues are the same in men and in women, men and women have different natural aptitudes, taken as a whole. There is a virtue which we may call gentleness or nurturing; there is another which we may call severity or strictness. Men often find strictness easier to practice than women, and women often find gentleness easier to practice than men. We can call the virtues that come more easily to women "feminine virtues," and those that come more easily to men "masculine virtues." But we can only do this if we understand that we mean men in general and women in general, and that knowing the general gives us no knowledge about the particular. Gentleness practiced by a man is still gentleness, and strictness practiced by a woman still strictness, and there will always be some men more inclined to the feminine virtues, and some women more inclined to the masculine.

The opposite to virtue is vice. However, this isn't precisely true, as virtue, as Aristotle discussed in the Nichomachaean Ethics, can also be seen as a mean between two vices. Thus Courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness, temperance a mean between gluttony and self-denial. And so on, for the entire list of virtues.

Moreover, the virtues can conflict with one another. In the Statesman, Plato gives the examples of courage and temperance, the latter of which can also be understood as self-restraint. A state whose citizens have an overabundance of courage will go to war regularly, until they either start a fight with an enemy too great for themselves, or else induce their neighbors to league against them, and are conquered. But a state whose citizens have an overabundance of temperance will suffer the same fate, as they will be unwilling to fight even when it is necessary.

Children and the Childish

Children are not naturally vicious, but they do lack virtue, having not yet attained it; thus their behavior is akin to vice, even if it isn't properly called vice. Some of these vices or semi-vices are more common in boys, others more common in girls. Social pettiness, vengefulness, and hatred of boys or men are more common vices in girls; violence, sexual profligacy, and hatred of girls or women more common in boys.

Adults who act like children are properly called vicious, because they have chosen to live without virtue.

This has been a great many words to bring us to a very simple point.

An adult male who acts like a man is masculine, and he is virtuous.

An adult male who acts like a boy is puerile, and he is vicious.

An adult male who acts like a girl is girlish, and he is also vicious.

What of an adult male who acts like a woman?

He cannot be a woman, because this requires the ability to take a feminine role in acts of generation. But he can possess those virtues which are more common to women than to men. And if that is the case, he is virtuous, not vicious. Moreover, an adult woman who possesses those virtues more common to men than to women is masculine, and she is also virtuous, not vicious. But an adult woman who possesses the vices common to boys is puerile, or boyish, and she is also vicious.

What's the Point?

This is all necessary to say because an enormous amount of nonsense has been written on this topic in recent years. In particular, on the internet, an entire cottage industry has grown up dedicated to teaching men "masculinity." This is called the "manosphere" or "mgtow" and any number of other silly names. It's been my experience that in almost every case, what is actually being taught is puerility. To possess the vices of a boy is to be vicious.

Of course, the "manosphere" came into existence as a reaction to the radical feminist movement, which, at the present time, is no mere cottage industry but a big business on the scale of oil, pharma or tobacco. This movement sought to liberate women from men, and in so doing it taught women that they only have value insofar as they are able to be men. Since most women are more naturally inclined toward the feminine than the masculine virtues, it therefore set them up for failure. It then compensated for this by blaming men, thus descending from a mere failure of femininity to a full-on embrace of girlish vice. From there, it has set about, especially through the entertainment industry, to teaching women to act not with the vices of girls but those of boys. Thus our whole society becomes vicious.

Nothing can be understood to exist without an opposite. White can be seen because of black, sweet tasted because of bitter, hardness felt because of softness. Everything, then, only exists in relation to an opposite. The same for men and women. But the opposite to a man is not a woman, but a boy, because a boy can become a man, but a woman cannot. The opposite to a woman is not a man but a girl, because a girl can become a woman, but a man cannot. Many men are only capable of the masculine virtues; a few, only of the feminine; most, a balance, tilting toward the masculine side. Similarly, many women are only capable of the feminine virtues; a few, only of the masculine; most, a balance, tilting toward the feminine side. But it is better by far for a man to have the virtues of a woman than the vices of a boy, and vice versa.

True masculinity, then, consists in embracing manhood not in opposition to womanhood, but in opposition to boyhood.

Socrates and the Rhapsode

Plato's Ion is a dialogue between Socrates and Ion, a rhapsode. Rhapsodes, in ancient Greece, were traveling musicians who performed the work of poets such as Homer or Hesiod.

Ion tells Socrates that he speaks better of Homer and has more to say about him than about any other man. Why is this, he wonders? Socrates explains:

The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet... This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revelers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.

Notice, again: A true poet is not an inventor, but the subject of a divine possession. And in a case of a truly great poet like Homer, he forms a first link in a great chain of possession which extends to everyone who hears his words and finds themselves enraptured by them. Ion is a link in the chain.

The Unbroken Chain

The Ion is a great example of why you should always ignore whatever introduction appears before the dialogue in your copy of Plato, unless the introduction was written by Thomas Taylor. The introduction to my copy of the Ion helpfully explains that the whole thing is a joke; Plato is just screwing around. Don't believe it. You only need to watch the way that psychic forces move through musicians and music to understand what he is talking about.

Here is a contemporary example:

He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

The writer of these words is Bob Dylan, and he is describing his first experience seeing Buddy Holly in concert. Soon afterward, note well, Buddy Holly died in a freak plane crash. And Bob Dylan went on to become, as they say, the voice of his generation, as the force which had possessed Buddy Holly went on to speak through him bring about great changes in our cultural landscape which, for better or for worse, endure to this day.

Day of the Moon

Monday is ruled by the Moon, and the Moon rules all those activities related to the home and domestic concerns, such as cooking and crafts, brewing, and (with Venus) gardening.

It thus provides an opportunity to talk about something I've wanted to talk about here for some time: baking bread. Oh, and one other thing, which I'll get to presently.

The Simplest Bread You Can Bake

Here is the simplest bread recipe, and the one I followed for a long time. You will need to 4 ingredients:

1. 3.5 cups flour
2. 12 oz lukewarm water
3. 1 tsp Fleischmann's bread yeast
4. 1 tsp salt

None of these has to be especially fancy. I recommend Fleischmann's bread yeast in particular because it's also good for brewing mead, but if there is something else available, use that. I like King Arthur flour, but the cheapest all-purpose flour at your grocery store will also do nicely (you can find a 5 lb bag at the Walmart up the road from me for $2.24). I do recommend getting a real salt, such as Kosher salt or Himalayan pink salt, so that you know it isn't adulterated with foreign chemicals, but, here again, it's up to you.

Then do the following:

Step 1. Add 1 tsp yeast to 12 ounces of lukewarm water.
Step 2. Mix 1 tsp salt into 3.5 cups of flour in a large mixing bowl.
Step 3. Now, add the mixture of water and yeast to the mixture of flour and salt.
Step 4. Mix it up just until

Now cover it with a clean towel, and leave it alone. For how long? In this case, overnight, and you're going to start all of this in the evening, around the time the sun goes down.

Step 5. The next day, when you wake up, check on your dough. It should have doubled in size.
Step 6. Turn the dough out onto a floured cutting board and kneed it. If you don't know how to kneed dough, you can watch a video. Or just wing it. The easiest thing to do is just to press it down until it's flat, then gather it into a ball, then press it again. After a while it will build up resistance and become harder and harder to press. That's when it's time to return it to its bowl.

By the way, yes, you can over-kneed bread. At this point you're more likely to under-kneed it, so don't worry about that. Just do a good job with it and put it back in the bowl, and cover it again with that towel.

Step 7. Let the bread set for a while longer. How long? Usually about 2-3 hours. What you want is for it to double in size. If it's cold in your house it may take a little longer.
Step 8. Now that the dough has doubled in size, turn it back out onto that cutting board and do a little more kneeding. And set your oven to 450 degrees.
Step 9. Once your oven is ready, check to see if your dough has returned to its previous size. If it hasn't, give it another 20 minutes or so. Then transfer your dough to a floured baking sheet. The one you use for cookies is fine.
Step 10. Stick the bread in the oven, and turn the temperature down to 375 degrees. Then set a timer for 42 minutes. Yes, I know, that's oddly specific.
Step 11. Take your bread out of the oven and set it on a drying rack or cutting board to cool down. Leave it alone for 30-60 minutes.
Step 12. Cut a piece of bread, add butter or jam or whatever you like (I prefer beef tallow, but that's just me), and eat it. It will taste better than any bread you have ever bought at a store.

Optional Steps

While you pour the yeast into the water, trace a holy symbol over it such as the Sign of the Cross or the Three Rays of Light. Say words like "May this yeast be blessed."

Before you add the salt to the flour, trace a holy symbol over it, and say something like "May this salt be granted the power of healing.

Once your dough is made, say a prayer over it, asking an appropriate God to bless it. For example, you might trace the sign of the cross over the dough and say something like, "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I ask that this bread may be blessed, that it may bring healing to the body and soul of all who will eat of it, and call to our minds the Bread of Life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen." Or, "Hu the Mighty, Great Druid God, enlighten me through Thy initiation. In the presence of the Holy Powers of Nature I pray that this bread, formed from the gifts of the Earth Mother, may be blessed in the sign of the /|\ Three Rays of Light. May it bring healing to the body and joy to the hearts of all who eat of it." You can add another blessing while putting the bread in the oven, and, if you are part of a church which does this sort of thing, you can use it for a communion service.

I like to set aside a part of the first piece that I cut for the spirits of the house, and to imagine that they join me when I eat the first piece.

Okay, Why Are We Talking About Bread?

I started baking bread for my family every day during 2020, when I was at home with the kids and we were trying to save money. I found that it was very easy and very cheap to make bread that tasted better than anything I'd ever gotten out of a bag at the grocery store.

If you're a serious baker, you'll notice that this recipe is extremely simple, and missing a lot of details. There's no Dutch oven, no cast iron, no pan of water in the stove;, no poolish, no proofing baskets, no sourdough starter; no pull-and-stretch technique. That's very deliberate. I've found that even with something as simple as baking bread, people will look for any excuse not to get started, and the internet provides 10,000 excuses in the form of extra steps you can take. Yes, it's true that by using a starter or a preferment you can improve the flavor of the bread. Yes, you might want a proofing basket eventually, and you might consider investing in a Dutch oven or at least cast iron pans down the road. But you don't need these things, and in general all they do at the beginning is to keep you from getting started.

A lot of things are like that. Bread making is far from the worst. Writing is the worst. If baking bread was like writing, there would be bakers' bars in trendy neighborhoods, where young people dressed up like bakers would talk about the coolest bakers in history while agonizing over their bakers' block. Most of them would never have baked anything in their lives, except for a couple of half-finished loaves back when they studied baking in college.

But baking bread is very easy. And, more than that, it's sacred. Bake a loaf of bread in the morning and share it with your family, and you will find yourself connecting to 10,000 years of human history. That simple act of mixing six ingredients: yeast and water, salt and flour, Time and Fire, is an alchemical working of great power. Through it we unite ourselves to all of the hearth goddesses and fertility gods and grain mothers that the Divine World has ever given us. Brigid and Hestia, Freyr and the Dagda, Ced and Ceres: All are with us.

The same can be true of every craft that we undertake.

A Change In Direction

When I started this blog, the purpose was simply to talk about old books. I attempted to begin with a discussion of Plotinus's Enneads. This was a terrible idea; I'd barely started making my way through Plato and had no base from which to approach Plotinus. Reading the Enneads felt like beating my head over and over into a brick wall, and so I gave up.

But then something very unexpected happened: 2020. In March of that unforgettable year my workplace closed its doors, and so did every other employer in my field, not to reopen for some time. And so I found myself with a great deal of time on my hands-- time for which I am eternally grateful. Yes, I know how hard a year that was, and it was hard for me too. Never forget that Saturn rules difficulty and pain and struggle, and also wisdom gained through suffering. And also, as we saw recently, the Golden Age. 2020 was a year of Saturn for me, and I made the best use of it I possibly could.

For a long time I was able to update this blog almost daily. I worked my way through the writings of many ancient writers, including Seneca and others among the Stoics. Then I turned to Sun Tzu, and then to the Gospel of Matthew (a work still in progress). In late 2021 I was gripped with the need, which seemed sent from without, to write down the intuitions toward a Christian magical system that had been percolating in my mind for some time.

This is all to say, I was able to take the same approach to writing that I did to baking.

I've been both surprised and delighted with the support this little blog has received. It's not just the donations to my paypal links or the support that many here have given to my Etsy shop, though I'm grateful for all of that. Even better, though, are the comments that I receive both here and privately. The people who read this blog are very smart and very fun to talk with. More than that, I've never had a single troll or negative comment here. Even when someone disagrees with me-- which is not something I mind, by the way-- they do so respectfully, and in a way that shows that they've thought through the issues under discussion.

Now, since April of last year I've been working full time again, and that's made updating this blog as often as I'd like more difficult. And more than that, I find myself wanting to expand in different directions. I want to go into more detail on Astrology and the way that I approach that practice, which I think is different from anyone else. I want to talk about politics, but not form the usual angle, since I dislike the Democratic and Republican parties, the oppositions within those parties, and all of our third parties. And there are other things I'd like to talk about, too-- I have entire books wholly or partially written on topics including Christian magic, Druidic spirituality and practice, self-improvement, and classical Hermeticism, and it's past time for these to see the light of day. Continuing with the original theme of this blog, I plan to do a serious collective reading of Plato, including the Republic and the Iamblichean sequence of dialogues. I also want to start incorporating audio or video discussions. I like writing, but the truth is, I like talking more.

In order to do all that, I'm going to need a new format, and a new way of structuring things. I'm going to keep this Dreamwidth journal. In fact it's going to be updated more often now. But I'm going to start working with other platforms soon, that will allow me an expanded range of options. If that sounds interesting, stay tuned!

Eros and the Daimones

In Neoplatonic thought, daimones are a class of spiritual beings intermediate between gods or angels and human beings. Diamonds come in many varieties. They include the classical nature spirits that are familiar to students of Greek mythology, such as nymphs saters and so on. They include malevolent spirits, such as the lamia memorably exercise by Apollonius of Tyana. They even include spirits of the human dead.

There is one class of daimones which are greater and more powerful than the others. We could call these daimones proper, though that coinage is unique to me. These are those mighty forces in the cosmos and in human society which we are unable to escape, with which we have to deal, but-- and this is the critical point-- we must not worship. You know it that you are dealing with one of these daimones if you have a cultural, natural, religious or other force which comes back no matter how hard you try to repress it, usually in destructive ways, but which is equally destructive if you wholly give yourself over to it.

The classic example of such a dime on and the one who makes an appearance in some of Plato's most important works is Eros-- that is, erotic love. Eros makes a good exemplar of the entire class. Anyone who was raised in the sort of fundamentalist religious tradition which attempts to repressed or deny a rose knows what happens. He returns, usually in a destructive fashion. Sometimes the person who has attempted to repress their own Eros-- meaning, of course, their own sexuality-- develops a dangerous or simply unfulfillable sexual fetish; sometimes if they repress it very deeply and end up lashing out at others who remind them of that part of themselves; sometimes there are worse results. On the other hand, the consequences of the enslaving oneself to Eros are also all around us in our society, in the epidemic of pornography addiction, Hollywood's culture of sexual exploitation revealed by the Me Too movement, and the abuse crisis in the Catholic church. Eros is a daimon; he makes a bad god, and a bad demon.

There are many other daimones, spiritual forces that we must neither ignore or worship, in the same class. There is Eros's opposite number Anteros. There are forces like money and the marketplace; the harmful consequences of either worshiping or trying to eliminate these daimones were on display throughout the Cold War. There are nature spirits, from those nymphs and dryads I mentioned before and their equivalent and other lands, to mighty forces like the winds, the oceans, and great forests. These are mighty powers. They deserve our respect, and they will have our attention; James Frazer documented the consequences of worshiping them.

The daimones come in many different forms. According to some traditional Chinese demonologists, there are 64,000 types, which is how the Chinese say "uncountable." But the human mind finds it easier to grasp things if it can categorize them, and the Seven Classical Planets provide a convenient way of doing this. Under the Moon we have family and ancestry, the mysteries of motherhood, intoxicants from alcohol to entheogens and even a cup of coffee in the morning. Under Mercury, the mysteries of the marketplace, and also magic. Under Venus, Eros himself of course, as well as most forms of arts and entertainment, and femininity generally. Under the Sun, the mysteries of fatherhood, and everything that falls under the category of identity and individuation. Under mars, Anteros, every form of sport and physical culture, and masculinity generally. Under Jupiter accumulated wealth, and political power, and also religion. Under Saturn, the powers of the land, of places, countries and cities, Death, and the Dead.

This list is not intended to be exhaustive; doubtless you can think of more examples. What it is intended to do is to provide an entry point into something I've wanted to discuss here for some time.

If you read Proclus's Elements of Theology, you will see that he starts by discussing the One, which is the highest term in Neoplatonic thought, and works his way downward through a series of theses concerning the succeeding terms, the Henads, Life, and Intellec, until finally concluding with a discussion of the descent of souls like yours and mine into generation. This was a common way of thinking in earlier times, to beginw ith the most exalted and abstract principles and work one's way downward into the concrete and quotidian. This is more or less the opposite to how modern people think, and it's one of the things that can make approaching ancient philosophy somewhat difficult. I would rather think more like an ancient than a modern, but I cannot help the era of my birth, and neither can my readers. But what I hope is that by beginning this discussion with the daimones, who are midway between humans and God, can act as a kind of compromise.

Ancestral Daimones

I know a man who is a high ranking officer in the United States army. He is also of Eastern European descent-- to protect his identity, we'll say he's Polish, but that isn't true. What he will tell you, though, is this: "My father was Polish. I'm American." In fact his father was forced to flee to the United States during World War II, after killing an invading Russian soldier. The result is that this man hates the Russia and supports the Biden Administration's current aggressive posture toward that nation. This post isn't about whether or not Biden is right, by the way. The point is only that this man, who is in a position to have at least some measurable influence on American foreign policy, is motivated in his attitudes by his Polish ancestry. On the other hand, if you ask him directly about it, he will insist that he is not Polish. His father was Polish.

The trouble is that his actions belie his words. Americans have never fought a war with Russians except in the context of the Cold War, which was against the Soviet Union, not Russia. Americans have no reason to have an emotional antipathy of that kind toward Russians-- but Poles do. In his attitude, he's a Pole.

I have a friend who married a girl from Germany. (That's not true either, and you'll probably be able to guess which country she's really from.) They had a baby and moved back to our home town here in the United States. Where we grew up, ethnic culture is very strong, and people identify as German, Polish, Italian or whathaveyou. My friend's wife is very upset by this, because she's having a hard time adapting to life in the United States, and it doesn't make it easier for her when Americans tell her "I'm German, too."

I sympathize with her, but the trouble is, the Americans in question are Germans, too. It's not just that German cultural identity is strong in the city in which they've settled, though it is. It is also quite simply that we have an enormous amount of evidence showing that no immigrant group to the United States ever fully "assimilates." Cultural and behavioral patterns persist generation after generation, even among those groups who explicitly reject their previous cultural heritage. Some things endure.

An academic named Jason Richwine has done good work on this issue. Here is a talk he gave at last year's National Conservatism convention, in which he discussed some of these issues, including the way that Donald Trump's support was strongest among Americans descended from the Scots-Irish. He also references a paper which you can read here, discussing civic participation among various European groups in the United States. Americans of Swedish and Danish descent have the highest levels of civic participation. Italians are much lower, Germans and English somewhere in the middle. Now much of this data comes from rural towns in the American Midwest, where everyone is "white" and everything is as American as can be. This suggests to me that, in the United States, ethnic ancestry is daimonic in exactly the sense I described above.

And that leads me to wonder the following: If my friend the military officer would simply spend one evening a month at the local Polish-American Society, or drinking beer every Friday night at Polish Hall-- that is, if he were to express his Polish-ness in a deliberate, conscious and contained sort of a way-- would it still come out the way it is now, as an inappropriate hatred for Russians?

Here is a personal example of the same thing. Over the last few years I've done a great deal of research into my own ancestry, and discovered some things which surprised me. My family is Catholic, as you may have surmised, and we have Irish and Italian ancestry. And I thought that that was the end of it. But as I looked into it, I discovered that many of the ancestors that I thought were Irish were actually German. And not just any Germans-- they were specifically Swabians, from a part of Southern Germany known for its Catholic culture. It's not, by the way, that I have one Irish line and one German line. Instead, the two ethnic groups appear to have been intermarrying in Pennsylvania for centuries. (So why did I think of myself for so long as Irish, but not German? I don't know, but I suspect that it became much more convenient to be Irish than German when that meant being in the same ethnic group as John F. Kennedy rather than Adolph Hitler.) In any case, since then, I've done a bit of research into Swabian culture. One of the things that I came across is this cultural trait, neatly summarized here:

Putzwut, literally meaning "cleaning rage", sums up the stereotypical excessive Swabian affinity for cleaning

"Cleaning rage" is something that literally everyone in my family does. Especially the women. And, well, me. Now, my tendency to start cleaning the house when I'm angry about something-- or just to suddenly fly into a rage at a minor mess and start cleaning!-- doesn't do much besides annoy my wife. But as I suggested above, the work of these ancestral daimones can have more serious consequences.

There are other American Daimones besides the ancestral. There are the spirits of the land, the spirits of our dead, the consequences of our wars. There is a natural American religion which is very different from the European, and there are spirits of the European (and other) religions which have followed us here. And in addition to American daimones, there are American demons-- and American angels. And there are American Heroes-- these are those humans who stand midway between ordinary men and the daimones themselves. I believe that all of this adds up to nothing less than an American Political Theology-- and that's what I want to explore in the posts that follow.

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

But wait-- I hear you say-- Wasn't Saturn that creepy cannibal who ate his children? And didn't Jupiter overthrow Saturn and bind him with chains? Doesn't that suggest that they don't really like one another?

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.

Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials

‘Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no sickness. And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul. And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would not fail. And now he himself who uttered the strain, he who was present at the banquet, and who said this—he it is who has slain my son.’

These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall we allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young, meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be true worshippers of the gods and like them.

And

Then we will once more entreat Homer and the other poets not to depict Achilles, who is the son of a goddess, first lying on his side, then on his back, and then on his face; then starting up and sailing in a frenzy along the shores of the barren sea; now taking the sooty ashes in both his hands and pouring them over his head, or weeping and wailing in the various modes which Homer has delineated. Nor should he describe Priam the kinsman of the gods as praying and beseeching,

‘Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.’

Still more earnestly will we beg of him at all events not to introduce the gods lamenting and saying,

‘Alas! my misery! Alas! that I bore the bravest to my sorrow.’

But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him say—

‘O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased round and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.’

The meaning of all this and its solution will become clear as we consider Plato's discussion of the myths associated with Saturn in particular:

First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,—I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few indeed.

Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.

Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

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.

This post was inspired by a comment at John Michael Greer's blog. The commentator pointed to a new book entitled Music to Raise the Dead, and shared the following quote:

It seems like an unfair battle. How can music ever be more powerful than logic? But Plato—and the other leading ancients who laid the groundwork for our rational and algorithmic society—feared music for a good reason. They saw the hypnotic effect of the epic and lyric singers on the masses. For centuries, people learned life skills from songs. They preserved history, culture, and the entire mythos with songs. They tapped into their own deepest emotions with songs. They celebrated every life milestone and ritual with songs. They reached out to the gods themselves with songs. Above all, they used this music to secure personal autonomy and what today we would call human rights. So we should not be surprised that Plato, Aristotle and the other originators of Western rationalism had to displace this dominant worldview of their ancestors—mythic, magical, musical—in order for them to create a more rigorous, disciplined, and analytical society.

This is not the first time I've encountered this idea lately. In an interview here, an Eastern Orthodox bishop criticizes the Western phlosophical tradition for being "rationalist," and claims that that rationalism is rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy. A new book by the author Peter Mark Adams discusses the survival of Proclean Neoplatonism in Christianity, but the author insists of separating Proclus from Plato, who he also seems to consider a kind of rationalist, or a philosopher in the modern sense of "university employee who writes about stuff." (Yes, that's me arguing with him in the comments.)

So we see that this idea is pervasive. And it's also completely wrong.

To say it as simply as I can:

The only way to read Plato as a rationalist is never to have read him at all.

Plato, Music, and Madness

And that goes double for the idea that he was "fearful of the power of music." The importance and power of music features prominently in many of Plato's dialogues. The Philosopher-King in the Republic, who is intended as the model for every complete human being, is to be trained successively in arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. And this in turn is because "music" isn't simply something we enjoy, it's built into the structure of the Cosmos itself. That's very far from "fearing the power of music"!

Now, one could still make the case that this is a kind of rationalist sequence, since the same structures underlying arithmetic and geometry also give rise to musical harmony and then to the locations of the planets in the Solar System. But this is also incorrect, for three reasons: First, in Platonic thought the highest part of the soul, the nous, is *above* the reasoning mind, not identical to it. Second, many of Plato's shorter dialogues specifically point to the failure of rationalism. This is what is happening when, in dialogues like Euthyphro, Laches, Lyses or Charmides, Socrates's debating partners/victims find that they are unable to explain what they mean with common words like piety, courage, temperance or friendship.

Third and very importantly, several of Plato's most important works specifically celebrate the mystical and non-rational. In Phaedrus in particular, the question arises as to whether madness, which is the most non-rational state imaginable, is always a bad thing. Socrates answers that it is not, because there are at least four forms of madness that come to us directly from the gods. These are prophetic madness, during which the gods speak directly through oracles; "telistic" madness, which is a form of divine purification and can include such altogether anti-rational activities as the Bacchic ecstasies; and the madness of erotic love, which, properly directed, can lead the lover upward toward union with the Divine. Finally, the fourth form of madness is poetic madness. In this form of madness, the poet is possessed by the Muses, and it is only through this Musical possession that one can write poetry, or at least, GOOD poetry! It's hard to imagine anything less rationalist than that.

...Unless maybe it's this statement from Socrates, later in the dialogue:

...the priests of the temple of Zeus at Dodona say that the first prophecies were the words of an oak. Everyone who lived at that time, not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth...

These days, those are the sorts of words that one expects to find in a New Age bookshop, or perhaps in an anthology on Native American or Ancient Celtic spirituality-- the sort that opens with a long chapter explaining the difference between this worldview and our own rational, disenchanted way of looking a things. It's certainly not something you expect to see in one of the most important works of one of the supposedly-rationalist philosophers who gave rise to our supposedly-rationalist civilization. But there it is.

Disenchantment and the Western Mind

All of this is important for another reason, and it directly relates to something else that our preceptor Mr. Greer has been discussing, which is the idea of the disenchantment of the world.

"The disenchantment of the world" is a concept which originates a century ago in a sociologist named Max Weber. Weber claimed that, whereas primitive people had seen the world as alive, filled with spiritual beings and the possibility of magic, we moderns know better. It's very sad in a way, because the old worldview was nice, but it was also wrong, and now that we've outgrown it we're finally able to make things like medicine and trains and widgets.

In the intervening century, many authors have built on Weber. And one of the very common ways that ideas evolve in human history is that they are taken up in their entirety, but the terms are reversed. The classic example of this is the "Objectivist" philosophy of Ayn Rand. Rand swallowed hook, line, and sinker every Communist claim about the greed and selfishness inherent in Western capitalism, and then turned around and said "...But that's a good thing!"

In a similar way, many authors over the last century have believed Weber's claims about the disenchantment of the world, and then gone on to read them back into the entire history of Western civilization, as far as the Ancient Greeks. And then they've turned around and said, "And that's the problem with Western civilization, all this rationalism and disenchantment!" We are then, invariably, treated to a discussion of an another, non-Western worldview, which is fully enchanted, spiritual, mystical, and natural. Sometimes this view is imputed to Native Americans; sometimes to ancient and conveniently extinct peoples, especially Celts; sometimes to mystical traditions from India, China or Japan; sometimes all of the above.

The trouble with this idea is that it is wrong. And it is wrong in both senses of the word, factual and moral. As a factual truth-claim it fails immediately. If you want to understand how wrong it is as a truth claim, consider how many of those great speeches about the sacredness of nature and oneness of all life that were supposedly written by Native Americans, ancient Celts, ancient Egyptians or whathaveyou were actually written by modern urban Americans.

This we know: the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

This was supposedly written by Chief Seattle in a letter to President Franklin Pierce in the 1850s. In reality, it was written by an unknown American environmentalist in the 1970s, based on several earlier versions-- all of them written by white people. Don't get me wrong, it's a very fine sentiment, and very true. And also very much a product of the true heritage of Western culture and Western philosophy. The very fact that we find it so moving demonstrates this. We value these words, because they express our values.

And that leads to the second problem with the idea of disenchantment: It leads us to reject our own heritage. This is the sense in which it is not merely factually but morally wrong. Rationalism, insofar as it exists, is not at the heart of our civilization. The Greek philosophers employed reason, but they were not rationalists. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages were not rationalists. Even the founders of the scientific revolution were not rationalists. We have rationalists today, but to be completely honest with you, I'm not sure where they came from; they seem to have turned up all but spontaneously during the Victorian era and back-read their own existence through the whole of Western history.

The problem with the West is not its rationalism, but its belief in its rationalism. We are not really rationalists, and we never have been. For a few centuries we've suffered through the existence of a few rationalists, whose volume was dialed up to 11 in recent decades. But at its core, our heritage is as mystical and as enchanted and as spiritual as any other. While we can look to Native American or Far Eastern teachers for spiritual direction if we choose to, we don't have to; we have all the resources we need within our own heritage and our own history. Plato employs reason, but he also rises above it, and he calls all of us to do so as well. This is the real heart of our common Western heritage. Don't reject it, embrace it.

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulveram reverteris.

Ash Wednesday

As all things come round again, we have come once again to the time of Lent.

A reflection for Ash Wednesday.

As we saw at Christmas, Adam and Eve are, in a sense, a single person, Adam-Eve. Adam represents the higher part of the soul, the nous; Eve, born from his chest, represents the middle and lower parts of the soul. Turning toward material creation in obedience to Desire, the Serpent, the Human Adam-Eve sins. Turning away from the Eternal, the Human Being is trapped in matter, doomed to struggle perpetually with Desire, to die and return to dust, and return to life again.

Repenting, purifying, turning again toward Eternal things over the long course of the Earthly sojourn, the Human Being is born now as Mary, sinless (Immaculate) and unencumbered by desire (Virgin). As Adam brought forth Eve from his chest, so Mary brings forth Christ from her womb, signifying that the soul is now purified unto its lowest parts, and now turns only toward eternal things. Before the nous was masculine, which is to say, active; now the nous becomes female, receptive to the will of God. The Desire, signified in the body by the lower dantien, is altogether purified and turned toward the higher.

Now, at the beginning of Lent, the adult Christ is the New Adam, the restored humanity, beginning the process by which the chains of matter will be overcome, and mankind restored to the Eternal.

Ashes, Again

In the ritual of Ash Wednesday, consecrated ashes are placed over the Third Eye of the initiate. This is done on a day of fasting and abstinence, which begins a season of fasting, repentance, and atonement for sin. The activation of the third eye, the abstinence from flesh and from wine all serve to withdraw the initiate from the material. To repent (metanoia) is to purify the nous and unite the inner will with the Eternal Will of God. To atone for sin means to gather the dis-united parts of the self and bring the whole soul under the command of the nous, itself aware of and united to the Will of God.

The initiate, addressed as homo, "human," is reminded that he is dust. What is dust? The human, and everything pertaining to it. The body and the possessions. But also the desires, the habits, the preferences, the thoughts-- all are dust. Only the divine is immortal, and only that within us which participate in the divine can be immortal. Everything else is dust and ashes. The old human was Adam, who died, and descended into the Earth, which is to say, into the material body. The new human is Christ, who will die and be reborn, overcoming death by death. We have all been Adam and Eve. In the Mysteries of Christmas we become Mary, and bring forth the Christ-Child. Now we must become Christ, and follow Him on the road to Calvary. It is not an easy road, but at the end of it is the resurrection, and life eternal.

The ashes, placed on the forehead, are made from the burned fronds of last year's palms. The palms, we recall, were laid at the feet of Christ, will be laid at the feet of Christ, as he enters into Jerusalem. Alive then, they are now ashes, and this year there will be new palms, and next year, new ashes. Thus the cycle continues. As the palms are burned year after year, so many will strive this year, which is to say, this lifetime, and fall short. They will burn, and then they will try again, and again, and again, unto the ending of the age. Until all are saved from the fire.

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