Most of the entries on this page are collected from my Dreamwidth blog.
The demarcation between earth and water is called Necessity by natural philosophers because it is believed to bind and solidify the clay of which bodies are made. Hence when Menelaus, in Homer's Iliad, was invoking evil upon the Greeks, he said, "May all of you be resolved into earth and water," referring to the muddy substance of which human bodies were first made. The demarcation between water and air is called Harmony, that is, a compatible and harmonious union: for this is the interval which unites the lower with the upper, reconciling incongruent factors. The demarcation between air and fire is called Obedience; for whereas the muddy and heavy bodies are joined to the things above by Necessity, the things above associate with what is muddy by Obedience, with Harmony in the middle promoting a union of both.
(Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio VI.)
I find it fascinating how well these names and descriptions—Necessity, Harmony, Obedience—correspond to the natures of the geomantic figures, Fortuna Major, Conjunctio, and Fortuna Minor. Given that Macrobius was one of the main philosophical texts available in the middle ages, one wonders whether it exhibited some manner of direct or indirect influence on the development of geomancy.
I've been pondering the computability thesis and how it relates to Plotinus' metaphysics for quite some time now. I think Enneads VI vi really solidified everything in my mind, but while I was discussing this all with a friend yesterday, it occurred to me that I never wrote up where my thoughts ended up. I figure I'll briefly remedy that.
There are many models of computation—that is, "how can one define an algorithm?"—but it turns out that we've proven all of them that we can actually make equivalent to a particularly famous one called a Turing machine. (You can think of it as a simple kind of computer that can do one thing at a time.) The fact that they're all equivalent led several famous mathematicians to propose that something is computable if and only if it can be computed by a Turing machine (or one of these other, equivalent, systems).
I note that doing one-thing-at-a-time is characteristic of souls, and Plotinus says that this is why time exists in the sensible world (e.g. because it is generated by one-thing-at-a-time souls). Consequently, let us assume that the computability thesis is true for the sensible world.
The next level above souls, Mind, differs from them in that it doesn't operate sequentially: rather, it operates comprehensively, in an everything-at-once manner. The obvious variation on such a Turing machine is that, instead of doing operations one-at-a-time, it does all-operations-at-once. (The reason we can't build such a machine is that the number of operations may become infinite, and one cannot get to the end of an infinite sequence of steps in a finite amount of time. However, we're saying here that the Mind can because time doesn't exist.) Such hypercomputers have been discussed by mathematicians, and unless I misunderstand the literature, this one is effectively equivalent to what's called an Oracle machine (which is just a machine you can instantly get the "right" answer to whatever problem you want). Therefore, I think the psychic world is hypercomputable in the sense of Oracle machines. (I therefore half-joke that heaven, for a computer programmer, is to finally get to solve all those pesky NP-complete problems that have been bugging us for generations.)
The next world up is the mental world, where the Mind itself exists. Plotinus already answered this one for us, since the Mind is the definition of truth. That is, this is simply the world in which computation itself is defined. That is, it is the world in which all questions, all answers to those questions, and all means of finding those answers, are all defined. Therefore it is above computation of all kinds.
Finally, of course, in the highest world, the One itself, computation isn't its own thing because what would you distinguish it from? Everything in the One is just the One.
The Pythagoreans held that the abode of souls is in the Milky Way, and they transition to earthly existence through the intersections of the galactic and ecliptic planes.
I think this simply refers to switching from a greater world to a lesser one. The ecliptic plane is the realm of the solar system, where the Earth orbits the Sun. The galactic plane is the realm of the galaxy, where the Sun orbits Sagittarius A*. If the Sun is a god, and the Sun is an inhabitant of the galaxy, then it stands to reason that the galaxy is the home of gods. Whereas we, here, in the solar system, are less than gods as we are ruled by a god.
So to reascend the planetary spheres to the fixed sphere and to regain residence of the Milky Way is to grow from our very small world, here, to a much larger one, There.
I don't think this is literally what happens—souls don't float around in outer space, I don't think. It is simply a symbol, though a surprisingly sophisticated one indicating understanding of what the Milky Way is and how it works, of the soul growing beyond its need for a bodily crutch.
A little conversation that came up lately where I realized my opinions have hardened further against the mainstream...
A. Wait, that's not what Plato says!
Me. Yeah, but I just don't like Plato very much. He makes me angry.
A. But how are you so into Neoplatonism, then?
Me. Okay, this is controversial but I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I don't think Plotinus was a Platonist. Yeah, yeah, everyone says he was; but in my opinion, Plotinus was something else entirely. To be a Platonist, you have to take up and teach the positions of Plato, but Plotinus didn't do this: he taught his own experiences and reasoning, and willfully read contortions into Plato in order to shore it up. He used Plato as a resource rather than a source. I'll accept that Porphyry was a Platonist, and Proclus super definitely was a Platonist, but I think Plotinus was more like a Socrates than either of them: just doing his own weird thing.
The obvious counterexample to my thesis is that whole Platonopolis business (Life of Plotinus §12). I'm honestly not sure what to make of that, since it's so out of character for our philosopher (at least, per his writings). It seems to me that his daimon did well to keep it from coming off, though; I can't see how it could possibly have worked out well for him.
(It didn't come up in the conversation, but I think it is similar with Neopythagoreanism: Plotinus' mystical take on number is so at odds with the likes of Nicomachus or Pseudo-Iamblichus that it seems to me to be impossible to reconcile.)
I'm moving again soon, and in preparation for doing so I'm clearing out my old notebooks and the like. I found several messages in them (which I had totally forgotten about) from the various angels I'm in contact with, and I thought some might find them edifying.
Angel. Man's capacity for evil is much greater than his capacity for good. This is not due to any inborn, sinful nature, but simply logistics: one may destroy with a single stroke of a sword, but it takes many strokes of a hammer to create.
Angel. Learning to be graceful with a material body is like training for martial arts while wearing weights. Just imagine how you will do when you aren't weighed down any more!
Me. *mope*
Angel. You take too dim a view of your accomplishments.
Me. But what have I accomplished? I worry that all I've cultivated is myself!
Angel. And what is wrong with that? That is all you can take with you!
A common question in philosophy and spirituality is, what are Intelligence and Wisdom, and how do they relate? @causticus posted an essay which catalyzed several thoughts that had been bouncing around my skull, and so here is an attempt to throw my hat into that ring from a Neoplatonic perspective:
Truth, Wisdom, and Intelligence are all related: in fact, each is a reflection of the last.
The Intellect (nous) is the definition of all things and is therefore Truth. Plotinus himself says as much in many, many places.
Wisdom is each soul's reflection of Truth. As such, it is no longer universal, but is specific to each soul's particular nature. (That is to say, what is wise to one is not necessarily wise to another, even in the abstract. To say it another way, every deity is an embodiment of a particular kind of Wisdom. This is contrary to the notion that a particular deity—say, Athena—is a deity of Wisdom in its totality: rather, She is a deity of a particular kind of Wisdom, perhaps practical cunning.)
Intelligence is each body's reflection of its soul's Wisdom. As such, it is no longer timeless and abstract, but rooted in a particular experience of time and place and context. Since different bodies have different souls, what is Intelligent for one body is not Intelligent for another (since they are rooted in different Wisdoms); but what's more, what's Intelligent for a given body may not even be Intelligent to a different incarnation of the same soul, since while both Intelligences reflect the same Wisdom, they do so from different perspectives.
In the same way that I said it would be an error to consider a soul-deity (e.g. an Olympian) as the deity of Wisdom, it would be an error to consider a body-deity (e.g. a planet) as the deity of Intelligence. For example, Mercury is typically considered the planet of intelligence, but I think this is an error: every planet has a kind of Intelligence unique to it's nature. (Mercury is certainly the planet of wit; but Saturn is the planet of study; and just because Mars is better with His hands than His head doesn't mean that He lacks Intelligence, too; and the Moon has an amazing tendency to just "know" things without "knowing" why, is She any less Intelligent for it? And so on.)
We may therefore infer that Intelligence can be acquired with time and effort, but is not necessarily conducive to bringing body in alignment with the soul—it may be, or it may not be. Wisdom cannot be developed, as it is timeless, but it can be tapped into—and, indeed, will be the more a body is aligned with its soul. Truth may not be obtained even in theory, since to obtain it would be to become the Intellect, itself.
He smoked, and when he offered me a cigarette, I refused politely, telling him about my lungs, and that I had to care for my health. He only laughed. "Do you really feel there is something still wrong in your chest, dear Doctor?"
Instinctively I breathed deeply, trying to find the old pain. But it was not there. I was cured? "Yes, my son," he said, "you are cured of your inner faults, so how could the physical ones resist being cured?" He read my thoughts as one reads the lines of an open book.
(Paul Sédir, as translated by Mouni Sadhu, Ways to Self-Realization XLVII.)
By contrast, in Life of Plotinus II, Porphyry says that Plotinus—who Apollo Himself declared to be one cured of his inner faults—suffered from a lifelong intestinal disease (for which, in fact, he would refuse treatment). How can the statement of Sédir's guru and Plotinus' example be reconciled?
I asked my angel about this and They answered, "Sédir was cured because it benefited him. Plotinus suffered disease because it benefited him. Simple as that."
So it is with me. A number of people have kindly asked about praying for my health, and I've refused, since my angel's told me in that past that I wouldn't be healed. Well, there's why.
I recognize that this is very hard for moderns to accept, corrupted as we are by the Christian moral framework, but morals are a human concept. Gods don't have morals. They have natures:
Does Luna grant nourishment only to the meek?
Does Mercury grant eloquence only to the honest?
Does Venus grant pleasure only to the faithful?
Does Sol grant life only to the happy?
Does Mars grant strength only to the protective?
Does Jupiter grant wealth only to the merciful?
Does Saturn grant longevity only to the ascetic?
When I posted this, a reader, confounded, asked me, "How do we know that the gods don't have morals?" I answered as follows:
Let us start by supposing the Neoplatonic axiom that every god is good. (This is because we are connected to Good via the gods: that is, they are our definition of good.)
Let us next suppose that the gods are moral. Morality means that some things are good and some things are bad. (You should do X but you should not do Y, etc.)
Let us further suppose that it is bad to encourage a bad action. (If you encourage bad actions, you will get more bad actions, which is itself presumably bad.)
What do these three mean? Well, if a god encourages a bad action, it would be bad. But a god cannot be bad. So a god cannot encourage a bad action.
Now, let us consider the Sun. We will suppose it is a god on the basis of tradition. (For example, Apuleius says, "there is not any Greek, or any barbarian, who will not easily conjecture that the Sun and Moon are Gods; and not these only, as I have said, but also the five stars.") But the sun shines on both the good and the bad alike. But we have already said that a god cannot encourage bad actions, and the sun is a god, therefore the sun cannot shine on the bad. So we have a contradiction and one of our suppositions must be false.
So what have we supposed so far?
At least one of these needs to go! 1 and 4 seem ironclad (and anyway I have personal experience supporting these), and 3 seems to at least be self-evident (certainly, I assume it when I try to raise my children!), and so it appears that we have to throw out 2, and this is what I was hinting at originally.
A crucial corollary, I think, to my proposed model of Truth, Wisdom, and Intelligence is to demarcate the boundaries of the objective and the subjective.
Does objective Truth exist? Yes, but it is fundamentally inaccessible to individuals—even gods—because individuals are inherently subjective: they have Wisdom, not Truth, and they can only access Truth by giving up individuality. I think, therefore, that Truth is analogous to Time—we all perceive it, vaguely, but at varying rates and in our own ways; this doesn't mean it does not exist, but it also doesn't mean we can pretend that there are things upon which we can all agree even in theory.
This is as damaging to the foundations of Science, with it's assumption of an underlying objective reality which repeatability can access, as it is to, say, philosophies which base themselves on a set of universal Common Conceptions. It is also, however, just as damaging to nihilism—just because we can't access Objective Truth in all its glory doesn't mean it isn't there and that we can't, like the blind men and the elephant, make some kind of limited assessments about it.
What can we draw from this in practice?
Humility is crucial: our truth isn't the Truth and never can be.
One should always be up front about their axioms, since there is no fundamental set of universally-acceptable axioms. Discussions must take these into account if they are to be honest.
We should suspend judgement. There is much—indeed, infinitely much—that we do not know and will never be able to as individuals, whether we are human, hero, daimon, or god.
We should probably teach basic Bayesian statistics in school as soon as children understand arithmetic. ;)
My first deep dive into spirituality came fourteen years ago or so when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching in a bookstore. This was a balm for the injuries sustained in my abusive, fundamentalist upbringing, and I spent the next few years studying Taoism as deeply as I could. For some reason, even though I read quite a bit, I never came around to studying the I Ching—I just wasn't ready for it, I guess, since it took most of a decade for me to open up enough to take up the tarot (which didn't work out very well) and geomancy (which did).
The I Ching has just sorta been sitting there in the background, quietly waiting for me. My family is presently in the middle of moving to Colorado, and my copy of the I Ching is stuffed away in a box somewhere, so I figured it wasn't the time to try taking up anything new... but I suppose there's something in the air, here, since when we visited here last autumn, I was led to a Taoist Feng Shui book; and just yesterday a copy of The Fortune Teller's I Ching jumped out at me at the local library's annual book sale. I took this as a hint that I should go ahead and play with it: not really for anything serious, since I can use geomancy for important questions, but more as an avenue for exploring Taoism more deeply once again.
So I thought I'd start putting the oracle through it's paces by asking the obvious question: "How can I expect my study of the I Ching to proceed?"
䷬
45: To Collect. Success. The king approaches the temple. It is good to see the great man. There will be success. It is good to behave properly. The use of large offerings brings good fortune. To move forward in any direction will also bring good fortune.
Top six moves. He sighs and weeps floods of tears. There will be no mistakes.
I am disciplined, I am committed to the work, and the path before me is easy. I will have success, but what comes easily doesn't last.
Do you know the story of the man who lost his horse? It's an old and famous parable from the Huainanzi, written a bit over two millennia ago. It's about a farmer who has various things happen to him, and the apparently good things turn out to be bad, and the apparently bad things turn out to be good. He simply does his best in the moment, and is successful in a way, since he never suffers any harm... but, on the other hand, neither does he see any material benefit from the "good" things that happen. His true success is the perspective he has to see through the illusion of each occurrence. This reading feels a bit like that to me: what success is to be found is abstract, rather than concrete. Studying geomancy required a lot of effort, and granted rewards commensurate with that effort; but since I've already put in all that work, studying the I Ching will go much easier but not really move the needle in my life, since I already have the tools I need.
Still, though, it's fun. Why not play a game with my angel?
[Note from 7 Sep 2025: I misread this! It's saying that the tool isn't a good fit, but by persisting with it, I can find value in it nonetheless. I have certainly found this to be the case, since the I Ching is not only very socially-oriented, but is of an alien society; I am almost completely asocial (or even antisocial), and so a lot of translation and consideration is needed to make sense of it. A year and a half later, I'm starting to get it most of the time.]
Note to future me: this blog post by Mark Dominus describes a silly math problem which dovetails nicely with my idiosyncratic pseudo-neo-Pythagorean spiritual model:
Zero doesn't technically exist: it's the limit of existence. Now, I'm one of those horrible people who think Cantor was crazy and insist that you can't get to the end of an infinite sequence (grumble grumble unless you're the nous), but the simple end-run around this is that zero is a multiple of all numbers and no number is a multiple of zero, so it must be "below" every other number, regardless of how far you choose to enumerate them (whether "infinitely far" or not).
In addition to my usual, daily geomancy readings, I've also been casting daily I Ching readings so as to gain experience with the oracle. Today, I am very frustrated with the shape of society—buying a house is an exhausting and stressful experience by design, and navigating the process with integrity is difficult (and expensive). Today's I Ching result speaks to this:
䷖
23: Peeling or Splitting. There is nothing to be gained by moving anywhere.
[...] The top trigram is Ken, the mountain, and the lower trigram is K'un, the earth. The mountain will eventually collapse since the earth is not strong enough to support it, just as the top line of the Po hexagram will disintegrate because of the weak yin lines. The world is in the grip of evil and it is a bad time for honest people. It is not wise to try to overthrow the evil ones at this time. Bide your time and let evil run its course. Use this time to plan for the future. [emphasis mine]
I thought I would post it since the situation described sounds like Western society generally these days, and the advice offered appears to me to be generally applicable.
I stumbled across the following (modern) folk prayer the other day:
May the angels walk beside you always, offering wisdom in times of uncertainty, courage in the face of fear, luck in moments of opportunity, and protection in times of vulnerability.
The prayer is fine as far as it goes, even though I have a tendency to be dismissive of modern folk spirituality: my default response is to look down on such things. The reason for this, I think, is that spirituality is and must be descended from mystical experience, and it is difficult to authenticate the mystical experiences of others; lacking better tools, I favor time as a filter to separate the wheat from the chaff, and so the more archaic the belief, the more likely it is to have had merits worth preserving. However, I realized today that I am being rather unfair to this prayer in particular.
As you all surely know by now, I am very fond of my guardian angel, and so, in an effort to understand them (or as an offering to them, which I suppose is the same thing), I have been tracing the doctrines about these kinds of beings for a while. The earliest source I have found so far is Hesiod, Works and Days 121–6 (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White):
αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖ᾽ ἐκάλυψε,—
τοὶ μὲν δαίμονες ἁγνοὶ ἐπιχθόνιοι καλέονται
ἐσθλοί, ἀλεξίκακοι, φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων,
οἵ ῥα φυλάσσουσίν τε δίκας καὶ σχέτλια ἔργα
ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι πάντη φοιτῶντες ἐπ᾽ αἶαν,
πλουτοδόται: καὶ τοῦτο γέρας βασιλήιον ἔσχον—,
[...]But after the earth had covered [the golden] generation—they are called pure spirits dwelling on the earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth; for this royal right also they received;— [...]
Translation is treason, and Evelyn-White's is no exception, but as best as I can discern with the help of several dictionaries, Hesiod outlines here the following five tenets:
Guardian angels live on the earth with us (as contrasted with the gods in heaven, the silver generation in the underworld, etc.).
Guardian angels are morally good and guide us in right behavior.
Guardian angels protect us from spiritual harm.
Guardian angels encourage us through difficult situations.
Guardian angels dispense good fortune.
Astute readers will note that these five points are the exact same ones from the folk prayer I mentioned above, merely rearranged. One might be inclined to see Providence ensuring continuity of doctrine over the last three thousand years, and if that is so, then it makes for a good antidote to my conservative tendencies.
I suspect Hesiod's teachings go back further still, either to Egypt or Mesopotamia, but I haven't yet found any textual references allowing me to trace it.
You cast sixteen random numbers (each 1 or 2) to generate the mothers of a geomantic chart. Let's call them A, B, C, D, etc. To generate the daughters, you simply rearrange these. To generate the nieces and the court, you add these together (modulo 2) in a pairwise fashion:
| D H L P | C G K O | B F J N | A E I M | M N O P | I J K L | E F G H | A B C D |
| C+D G+H K+L O+P | A+B E+F I+J M+N | I+M J+N K+O L+P | A+E B+F C+G D+H | ||||
| A+B+C+D E+F+G+H I+J+K+L M+N+O+P | A+E+I+M B+F+J+N C+G+K+O D+H+L+P | ||||||
| A+A+B+C+D+E+I+M B+E+F+F+G+H+J+N C+G+I+J+K+K+L+O D+H+L+M+N+O+P+P | |||||||
What happens if we add each of the lines of the judge together? We would end up with A+A+B+B+C+C+D+D+...: that is, each number appears exactly twice. (This is because one copy comes from the mothers and the other comes from the daughters.)
Now, consider what it means to add X+X in geomancy. An active line has one dot, so 1+1=2. A latent line has two dots, so 2+2=4=2. So if you ever add a number to itself, you always get 2.
So A+A+B+B+C+C+D+D+...=2+2+2+2+...=2, regardless of what A, B, C, D, etc. are. Therefore, your judge will always have an even number of dots. This means it will always be one of Populus, Fortuna Minor, Amissio, Conjunctio, Carcer, Acquisitio, Fortuna Major, or Via. ∎
Let your mind be dispassionate, and your heart, compassionate.
I often wonder about my meditations: am I on the right track, or am I just spouting nonsense? So it's always nice to see independent confirmation:
Wisdom is never a product of man's thinking. To try to translate Wisdom into the language of the mind to make it a little more understandable is the work of the mind, just as typing is the work of a thinking typist. When there is nothing to type, even the best of typists cannot use their ability. Men usually mistake knowledge derived from thinking for Wisdom.
There is no adequate expression that fully explains the term WISDOM, for the effort of translating it into the language of the mind inevitably brings confusion. However, a few attempts can be made and one is: that knowledge which extends beyond relativity and is independent of everything may reflect something of the illimitable Light of Wisdom. Everyone can test this personally. If it is felt that one can see something apart from and beyond all relativity—beyond words and earthly terms—then there may be the dawn of Wisdom in the individual consciousness. If not, then it is best to leave alone what is impossible and to follow the paths of approach until the aim becomes visible.
Therefore, Wisdom may be compared to the absolute silencing of all that is relative in man. Practically, this means the abandonment of the compulsory thinking process. Such Wisdom will be everywhere with a man, in this life and beyond the grave. It is not hard to recognize that such an attainment will be far from easy, for surely the price will be high. But those who are willing to pauy the price consider it as insignificant in comparison to the benefits which they receive.
There is another definition of Wisdom: Seeing everything in its own light, just as it is and not otherwise. For a Sage, everything is equal and nothing affects him because he possesses the trye Wisdom. When looking at old men and women, he also sees their youth. He knows that the film of life can be reversed and then what strange scenes appear on the screen. Likewise, when looking at youthful beauties, a Sage sees them many years later when old age and infirmity have rendered their present short-lived appearance unreal and unattractive.
(Mouni Sadhu, Ways to Self-Realization XLVIII.)
Heaven and earth are indifferent, and regard all things as straw dogs.
[Similarly,] the wise man is indifferent, and regards people as straw dogs.
Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows?
It is empty, but doesn't lack; it moves, but doesn't change for all its coming and going.
Much talk counts for little, and is not in keeping with guarding the center.
(Laozi, Tao Te Ching V, as adapted by yours truly. A "straw dog" is a temporary icon, used in religious ritual and discarded afterwards.)
Many systems—for example, Buddhism and Hermetism—assume as a matter of course that pleasure and pain are opposed extremes, that one cannot exist without the other. This makes not the least sense to me: one may easily have the one and not the other. For example, consider an anhedonic, chronically depressed person: they exhibit a tremendous amount of pain, but have no pleasure (nor, often, even the desire of pleasure) to show for it. The existence of such people seems to me a fatal flaw undermining such systems.
Rather, it seems to me that pleasure and pain are simply independent sensory impulses attached to the various bodies: the physical, the imaginal, etc. This is why, I assume, that the highest beings that humans can interact with—those who have bodies, but are least attached to them, like the higher grades of angels—seem so impassive to us: their sensory experience is minimal, and so they are almost completely unmoved by these impulses.
The soul, I presume, has no such impulse to pleasure or pain, and has only its Eros to guide it.
In the same way, and contra most of the Platonists, I see no meaningful relationship between virtue and pleasure. In many times and places, it is those who are kind and good who are miserable, and the wicked who are happy. The purpose of virtue is not to make one happy, it is to mitigate karma and loosen the bonds which hold a soul to the sensible world [Sentences XXXIV].
All embodied incorporeals are affected by passions, [...].
(Corpus Hermeticum XII, as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. Emphasis mine.)
I would like to remind the reader of the following definitions:
embodied, adj. Possessing or existing in bodily form.
incorporeal, adj. Not having a material body or form.
E. R. Dodds calls the Hermetists "theosophical maunderers," and given contentless statements like the above, one wonders just how serious they were.
Around the sun are many troops of demons looking like battalions in changing array. They are not far from the immortals though they dwell <with mortals>. From on high, they have been assigned the territory of mankind, and they oversee human activity. What the gods enjoin them they effect through torrents, hurricanes, thunderstorms, fiery alterations and earthquakes; with famines and wars, moreover, they repay irreverence. Irreverence is mankind's greatest wrong against the gods: to do good is the gods' affair; to be reverent is mankind's; and the demons' is to assist. Whatever else humans dare to do—out of error or daring or compulsion (which they call fate) or ignorance—all these the gods hold guiltless. Irreverence alone is subject to judgment.
For every kind, the sun is preserver and provider. Just as the intellectual cosmos that encompasses the sensible cosmos fills it by making it solid with changing and omniform appearances, so also the sun that encompasses all things in the cosmos strengthens and makes solid all of them that are generated, as it takes in those that are spent and dwindling away. The sun sets in array the troop or, rather, troops of demons, which are many and changing, arrayed under the regiments of stars, an equal number of them for each star. Thus deployed, they follow the orders of a particular star, and they are good and evil according to their natures—their energies, that is. For energy is the essence of a demon. Some of them, however, are mixtures of good and evil.
They have all been granted authority over the things of the earth and over the troubles of the earth, and they produce change and tumult collectively for cities and nations, individually for each person. They reshape our souls to their own ends, and they rouse them, lying in ambush in our muscle and marrow, in veins and arteries, in the brain itself, reaching to the very guts.
The demons on duty at the exact moment of birth, arrayed under each of the stars, take possession of each of us as we come into being and receive a soul. From moment to moment they change places, not staying in position but moving by rotation. Those that enter through the body into the two parts of the soul twist the soul about, each toward its own energy. But the rational part of the soul stands unmastered by the demons, suitable as a receptacle for god.
Thus, if by way of the sun anyone has a ray shining upon him in his rational part (and the totality of those enlightened is a few), the demons' effect on him is nullified. For none—neither demons nor gods—can do anything against a single ray of god. All others the demons carry off as spoils, both souls and bodies, since they are fond of the demons' energies and acquiesce in them. {And it is this love that} misleads and is misled. So, with our bodies as their instruments, the demons govern this earthly government. Hermes has called this government "fate."
The intelligible cosmos, then, depends from god and the sensible cosmos from the intelligible, but the sun, through the intelligible cosmos and the sensible as well, is supplied by god with the influx of good, with his craftsmanship, in other words. Around the sun are the eight spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six of the planets, and the one that surrounds the earth. From these spheres depend the demons, and then, from the demons, humans. And thus all things and all persons are dependent from god.
Therefore, the father of all is god; their craftsman is the sun; and the cosmos is the instrument of craftsmanship. Intelligible essence governs heaven; heaven governs the gods; and demons posted by the gods govern humans. This is the army of gods and demons.
(Corpus Hermeticum XVI x ff., as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. "God," here, is the same as the Neoplatonic nous (e.g. the being that creates the intelligible world). "The sun" is not the Greco-Babylonian planet in the fourth heaven, but rather the solar logos, the center and fount of all material being. It is much more like the Platonic Demiurge or the Hesiodic Zeus.)
It is noteworthy that the Hermetists, like Porphyry, take a much more negative view of daimons than the earlier Greek philosophers; I consider this obsession with the nous against all else to be a hallmark of the Piscean era, and an argument for a relatively late dating of the Hermetica.
A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her reverence the only land on earth where the gods settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity will be an example of utter (un)belief. In their weariness the people of that time will find the world nothing to wonder at or to worship. [...] People will find it oppressive and scorn it. [...] They will prefer shadows to light, and they will find death more expedient than life. No one will look up to heaven. The reverent will be thought mad, the irreverent wise; the lunatic will be thought brave, and the scoundrel will be taken for a decent person. [... T]hat soul began as immortal or else expects to attain immortality [...] will be considered not simply laughable but even illusory. [...]
How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind! Only the baleful angels [(e.g. wicked dæmons)] remain to mingle with humans, seizing the wretches and driving them to every outrageous crime—war, looting, trickery and all that is contrary to the nature of souls. Then neither will the earth stand firm nor the sea be sailable; stars will not cross heaven nor will the course of the stars stand firm in heaven. Every divine voice will grow mute in enforced silence. The fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will no more be fertile; and the very air will droop in gloomy lethargy.
Such will be the old age of the world: irreverence, disorder, disregard for everything good. When all this comes to pass, [...] then the master and father, the god whose power is primary, governor of the first god, will look on this conduct and these willful crimes, and [...] will take his stand against the vices and the perversion in everything, righting wrongs, washing away malice in a flood or consuming it in fire or ending it by spreading pestilential disease everywhere. Then he will restore the world to its beauty of old so that the world itself will again seem deserving of worship and wonder [...].
(Asclepius XXV, as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver.)
Hermes Trismegistus is speaking here of the fate of Egypt: once the land most beloved by the gods, now a sandy ruin and tomb of the ancient dead. Obviously it is pertinent to our times as well.
I have mentioned my opinion (shared by Pythagoras) that we live in Hades: a gray waste without beauty, where even the greatest delicacies taste of dust. Even those of us who hold to virtue and are desperately pious are too weary to find much purchase, here. Hard though it is to find any joy, we ought to rejoice nonetheless that the time comes when blessed Mars steps in to cleanse the world, that it may be remade anew and Beauty may reign here again, at least for a little while.
There has been a lot of dispute, over the years centuries millennia on whether the guardian angel is the same as, or different than, one's higher self. This disagreement goes back at least as far as Plato himself, who seemingly takes the former stance in the Timæus [90A] and the latter in the Republic [in the Myth of Er, 620E].
I have wondered about this also, and some four or five years ago I asked my own angel about it. They characteristically and cryptically answered (with a wink, no less!) that they are both me and not me. (That is not even an answer, it is a koan! Such a tease.) I have long pondered this and have not made proper sense of it.
I was going back over Plotinus this evening when I came across a line of his in Enneads III iv "On Our Allotted Guardian Spirit" 5: "For that this guardian spirit is not entirely outside but only in the sense that he is not bound to us, and is not active in us but is ours, to speak in terms of soul, but not ours if we are considered as men of a particular kind who have a life which is subject to him [... .]"
I missed this on my first read-through, but Plotinus is saying the same thing as my angel did! I still don't quite understand, but at least I have a trail of breadcrumbs to follow...
The Egyptians think that little children possess the power of prophecy, and they try to divine the future from the portents which they find in children's words, especially when children are playing about in holy places and crying out whatever chances to come into their minds.
(Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XIV, as translated by Frank Cole Babbitt.)
More found Plotinian wisdom, this time from a sketchbook that my little daughter bought somewhere:
Plethon was a Greek Neoplatonist who played a major role in kickstarting the Platonic revival of the Renaissance. He wrote a lot of expository material about Platonism and Neoplatonism which, unfortunately, were mostly burned by the Church after he died. One of his surviving texts is a very brief Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato, which outlines twelve bullet points which form the core of a Platonist religion, much like an even more condensed On the Gods and the World. (Plethon evidently believed that Zoroaster was the original source of Pythagoreanism and hence of Platonism.)
Below is John Opsopaus's summary of the Summary. (The original is not much longer, though.) I thought it might be of interest to those who are interested in dipping their toes into Neoplatonism.
The gods exist, the chief of whom is Zeus.
The gods look after us, either directly or through their subordinates.
The gods are the causes of good, not of evil, for humans and other beings.
The gods act according to an immutable fate emanated from Zeus.
The All, including gods of the second [e.g. supercelestial] and third [e.g. celestial] orders, was created by Zeus and is everlasting.
The All is a unity assembled from many things.
The All was created perfectly.
The All is preserved immutably.
The human soul, being akin to the gods, is immortal and everlasting.
The human soul is always attached to one or another mortal body and, by joining the immortal to the mortal, contributes to the unity of the All.
Because of human kinship with the gods, the good is the goal that suits our life.
The gods, by fixing the laws of humankind, place our happiness in the immortal part of our being.
Thee, mighty-ruling, Dæmon dread, I call,
Mild Jove, life-giving, and the source of all:
Great Jove, much-wand'ring, terrible and strong,
To whom revenge and tortures dire belong.
Mankind from thee, in plenteous wealth abound,
When in their dwellings joyful thou art found;
Or pass thro' life afflicted and distress'd,
The needful means of bliss by thee supprest.
'Tis thine alone endu'd with boundless might,
To keep the keys of sorrow and delight.
O holy, blessed father, hear my pray'r,
Disperse the seeds of life-consuming care;
With fav'ring mind the sacred rites attend,
And grant my days a glorious, blessed end.
(Orphic Hymn LXXII "To the Dæmon," as translated by Thomas Taylor.)
We sing of holy daimons, who are near to us,
to them and also to the other deathless ones,
for daimons serve quite well the gods who're more divine,
bestow the many benefits on our behalf,
disperse them all, which they receive from Zeus himself,
and which descend to us through all the other gods.
And thus they save us, with some purifying us,
and others elevating or protecting us,
and easily straightening our minds. And so, be kind.
(Plethon, Twelfth Monthly Hymn, to the Daimons, as translated by John Opsopaus.)
I'm pretty frustrated with this week's commentary on the Ecosophia Open Post, but I recognize that many over there are not spiritual, so I'll respond over here.
We mustn't fear the acts of god, for the acts of god are beneficent!
You know, the more I dig into it, the more it seems Porphyry is a little bit of an oddball among Platonists. (This is funny, since scholarship seems to treat him as the very definition of orthodox!) A couple examples of this that stand out to me:
Porphyry agrees with the Hermetists and the Chaldean Oracles that some daemons are wicked. (The mainstream Pythagorean and Platonic view is that they are always good. This is because that gods always know the truth and always know the reasons for it, and we know neither, and so in order to mediate, daimons must always know the truth but do not always know the reasons for it. Knowing truth prevents them from making missteps.)
Porphyry considers animals to be possessed of a rational capacity because they are capable of learning and communicating (even if not as well as humans are). (The mainstream Platonic view is that plants have a vegetative capacity; animals have vegetative and animative capacities; and humans have vegetative, animative, and rational capacities. Rational capacities in the soul are what make it capable of immortality. Possibly this is why Porphyry agreed with Plotinus but disagreed with Sallustius, Iamblichus, and Proclus about how unethical humans could reincarnate in animal bodies. Plotinus, for his part, considered all creatures to share in all capacities of soul, as a consequence of their existence in the unitive intelligible realm.)
It occurs to me that our NASA Moon programs match the geomantic figures of their mythological namesakes. The Apollo program is Fortuna Minor, a figure of the Sun denoting swift-but-ephemeral-success; while the Artemis program is Via, a figure of the Moon denoting growth-for-growth's-sake (with completion always deferred somewhere in the future).
Lastly, after essential heroes, an order of souls follows, who proximately govern the affairs of men, and are daemoniacal according to habitude or alliance, but not essentially. These souls likewise are the perpetual attendants of the Gods, but they have not an essence wholly superior to man. Of this kind, as we are informed by Proclus in his MS. Scholia on the Cratylus, are the Nymphs that sympathize with waters, Pans with the feet of goats and the like. They also differ from those powers that are essentially of a daemoniacal characteristic in this, that they assume a variety of shapes (each of the others immutably preserving one form) are subject to various passions, and are the causes of every kind of deception to mankind. Proclus likewise observes, that the Minerva which so often appeared to Ulysses and Telemachus belonged to this order of souls.
(Thomas Taylor, Theology of Plato VII xlv.)
I have long assumed that the Athena of the Odyssey was simply a daimon. Proclus, in fact, considered Her to be a hero (e.g. the category of an ascended human—daimon-like but not inherently daimonic), evidently since She would often change form. I'm not sure I'd go so far—in my experience, daimons, since they speak to the imagination and the imagination isn't fixed, shift form as regularly as doing so would perpetuate communication—but it's interesting to see how the tail end of the philosophical tradition considered it.
Double are the daemons in man—and double are their
tribes: they wander over the ever-flourishing earth
to stand with human beings, by Zeus' rule.
Zeus indeed is the giver of all things, both good and bad—
he defines too the time of life for those being born,
mingling mortal bodies with things both foul and fair.
Those daemons—whoever should associate with them by his wisdom,
and achieve an understanding of what deeds they take delight in—
he would surpass everyone in intelligence and noble deeds,
winning noble gifts from a noble giver and fleeing from the foul.
(John Lydus, De Mensibus IV ci, as translated by Mischa Hooker. Lydus attributes this verse to "the oracle," usually assumed to the Chaldean Oracles [cf. 215 in Majercik], but this is doubtful as the Chaldean Oracles are stylistically different; never call Zeus bad; and further call good daimons, "angels," and bad daimons, "daimons.")
I had been meaning to write up the Neoplatonic explanation of various myths, but time (and energy and inspiration and...) has been scarce and I haven't gotten to it, yet. Today, I discover that Plutarch went ahead and did it for me, in §§XXVII–XXX of On the Man in the Moon. (Thanks, Plutarch!) Below is a brief summary of it, though I have replaced Plutarch's Platonic terminology with late Neoplatonic terminology to make it more familiar.
[XXVII] The Eleusinian Mysteries teach a vital lesson about the nature of life and death through the use of the myth in which Hades abducts Kore and Demeter wanders in search of her. This is a story about the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth: Demeter is, metaphorically, the soul and the Sun is the world of soul; Kore is the imagination and the Moon is the world of the imagination; and Hades is the body and Earth is the material world. We mortals are possessed of all three: a soul, an imagination, and a body. Just as the Moon spends half its time in light (with the Sun) and half its time in darkness (with the Earth), we divide our existence between light (when dead) and darkness (when alive): when alive, we exist in bodies on the Earth, but when our bodies die (the "first death") we go to live on the Moon until our imaginations die (the "second death"), at which point our souls either take new bodies and revisit the Earth or else return to the Sun.
[XXVIII] Hades is severe and the first death is generally sudden and violent. Kore, however, is gentle and the second death is gradual, though it is much more pleasant for the good than it is for the wicked.
[XXIX] This is because the wicked, having less strength of soul and able to travel less far, remain on the side of the Moon which faces the Earth, called the "House of Persephone," which is buffeted by violent weather. The good, being stronger, pass on to the side of the Moon which faces Heaven, called the "Elysian Fields," which is calm and pleasant.
[XXX] The imagination does not remain forever upon the Moon, but it, too, eventually dies; just as our body's substance returns to the Earth, so too does our imagination's substance return to the Moon. After this, the now-alone soul, if it is restless, takes on a new imagination and a new body and returns to the Earth (hence why Persephone is said to be snatched away by Hades and why Demeter is said to wander); however, if the soul is impassive, it returns to the Sun. This is because bodies are always confined to the Earth, and souls are always confined to the Sun, but the Moon is a liminal place where the two may come together and mingle and separate again; in fact, this is the hidden meaning of the Fates, where solar Atropos generates, lunar Clotho spins (e.g. binds together), and terrestrial Lachesis measures (e.g. determines form).
Plutarch mentions (in XXIX) that the particular area of the Moon set aside for punishing the wicked is Oceanus Procellarum, which he calls "Hekate's Recess." Plutarch doesn't say so, but I infer that three-headed Hekate, like Kerberos, is representative of what the Greeks called fate and what we call karma: thus that is the place of self-inflicted punishment which the wicked bring upon themselves between lives.
At the purificatory level, "wisdom" consists in the soul's not sharing any opinions with the body, but acting on its own, and this is perfected by the pure exercise of the intellect; "moderation" is the result of taking care not to assent to any of the passions; "courage" is not being afraid to depart from the body, as if one were falling into some void of not-being; and "justice" is the result of reason and intellect dominating the soul with nothing to oppose them.
(Porphyry, Sentences XXXII, as translated by John Dillon.)
Isn't it funny how we spend so much time and effort and pain in mastering the virtues only, once we are with the angels, to never need them again? It is like how we take years of effort to learn language only, once having mastered it, to never think about it again.
For dæmons do not assist all indifferently, but as when men swim at sea, those standing on the shore merely view in silence the swimmers who are still far out distant from land, whereas they help with hand and voice alike such as have come near, and running along and wading in beside them bring them safely in, such too, my friends, is the way of dæmons: as long as we are head over ears in the welter of worldly affairs and are changing body after body, like conveyances, they allow us to fight our way out and persevere unaided, as we endeavor by our own prowess to come through safe and reach a haven; but when in the course of countless births a soul has stoutly and resolutely sustained a long series of struggles, and as her cycle draws to a close, she approaches the upper world, bathed in sweat, in imminent peril and straining every nerve to reach the shore, God holds it no sin for her dæmon to go to the rescue, but lets whoever will lend aid. One dæmon is eager to deliver by his exhortations one soul, another another, and the soul on her part, having drawn close, can hear, and is thus saved; but if she pays no heed, she is forsaken by her dæmon and comes to no happy end.
(Plutarch on the Daimon of Socrates 593F–594A, as translated by Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson.)
I too am now one of these, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, trusting in mad strife.
(Empedocles, fr. 115 (DK), as translated by Brad Inwood.)
Know the male,
yet keep to the female:
receive the world in your arms.
If you receive the world,
the Tao will never leave you
and you will be like a little child.
(Tao Te Ching XXVIII, as translated by Stephen Mitchell.)
In an interesting thread in yesterday's Magic Monday, JMG noted, "The Hopi had a prophecy, going back a very long ways, that someday white people would come to their land, bearing one of two sacred symbols. If they brought the circle, everything would be fine, but if they brought the cross, that meant horrible events and ultimately the end of the Fifth World. As I see it, there was a struggle on the physical and spiritual levels alike to determine which way things would go. We know who won."
My angel had told me something similar, noting that while destruction has been baked into the cake for centuries, the angels have waited a long time and been very patient with humanity, in order to allow time for them to, perhaps, come to their senses and pull back from the abyss, but they have not. As of a moment "very recently"—I got the sense that "very recently" was sometime in the 2010–2020 decade—it was too late to save humanity from its folly. My angel never mentioned the form in which this destruction would take, though I have assumed it to involve violence. I have made mention of blessed Mars coming to cleanse the world, and perhaps this comes across as cruel, but it is meant from a loving place of chastisement for misdeeds: humanity is stuck in a very wicked place, and we are in need of His peculiar powers to loose those bonds, learn our lesson, and try again. Nonetheless, it must be understood that I haven't held to this too tightly, because—as with all divine revelation—it must be treated as suspect until it can be verified somehow, and I considered this message to be unverifiable.
So JMG's little note threw me for something of a loop, since here is some measure of potential verification. (Or, at least, it may move the needle on my Bayesian prior a little!) I spent a while yesterday and today researching the Hopi prophecy. Perhaps due to it's nature as being orally transmitted, there is no one central source for or interpretation of the prophecy, and I've had to piece what I can of it together from disparate sources, many of which are squirreled away on little corners of the Internet Archive. (That said, perhaps the most comprehensive sources I found were From the Beginning of Life to the Day of Purification and The Voice of the Great Spirit.) Here is a brief summary of what I think I've understood, though please understand that I'm a foreigner, may easily misunderstand, and anyway there is no One True Interpretation™ of such a prophecy, so please verify all of this for yourself before taking my word for it:
The Hopi, like the Pythagoreans and the Chinese, consider the cosmos to have a single governing principle (like the One or the Tao) that proceed through two sub-principles (like Love/Strife or Yin/Yang): "this sacred writing [...] could mean the mysterious life seed with two principles of tomorrow, indicating one, inside of which is two." One sub-principle is represented by the meha symbol, "which refers to a plant that has a long root, milky sap, grows back when cut off, and has a flower shaped like a swastika, symbolizing the four great forces of nature in motion," and which is representative of materiality. The other sub-principle is represented by the Sun symbol, shaped like a circle, which is representative of wholeness or divinity ("our Father Sun, the Great Spirit"). The overarching principle is represented by the red symbol, which is drawn as the two superimposed into a sun cross or medicine wheel, representing "setting the four forces of nature in motion for the benefit of the Sun," or cosmic order.
The idea is that when the Great Spirit dispersed men to the four corners of the world, it distributed them this third symbol, but foretold that each people would be corrupted in time. (The Hopi were to remain at the center of the world and were set aside to retain the pure teaching in a wasteland, which would prevent them from becoming greedy.) At the end of the age, the men would return from the four corners of the world bearing sophisticated technology and a corrupted symbol: if it was the Sun circle, then it would indicate that they had become spiritual and would use their technology to renew the world, but if it was the meha cross, then it would indicate that they had become materialistic and would use their technology to destroy the world. (How ironic that white men came literally bearing a cross! And, materialistic indeed they were: the first European contact with the Hopi was by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's men as they searched for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold.)
This destruction would proceed through three events, symbolized by the meha, Sun, and red symbols, respectively, which the Hopi elders associate with three world wars. (These symbols supposedly represent the initiators of those wars, from the perspective of the Hopi: the meha representing Germany, which bore the Iron Cross in WW1 and the swastika in WW2; the Sun representing Japan, which bore a solar emblem in WW2; and the red symbol to represent an as-yet-unknown nation.) The third of these wars is to be fought with nuclear weapons—called "gourds of ashes falling from the sky"—and would usher in a period of great calamity, after which the now-purified world "will bloom again and all people will unite to peace and harmony for a long time to come." The Hopi believed that, after the first two events, there would be an opportunity to return to spirituality and prevent the the third event, but that after a certain point there was no turning back, which is why, after the Second World War, they began to desperately try to communicate their prophecy through any venue they could.
This is all very interesting to me, but as with all prophecies, take it with salt. We cannot turn divinity from Its great purpose, whatever it may be, and the way we should live today is always the same regardless of what tomorrow may bring. Do you as Porphyry says:
We do not worship [God] only by doing or thinking this or that, neither can tears or supplications turn God from His purpose, nor yet is He honored by sacrifices nor glorified by plentiful offerings; but it is the godlike mind that remains stably fixed in its place that is united to God. For like must needs approach like. The sacrifices of fools are mere food for fire, and from the offerings they bring temple-robbers get the supplies for their evil life. But do thou, as I bade, let thy temple be the mind that is within thee. This must thou tend and adorn, that it may be a fitting dwelling for God.
(Porphyry to Marcella XIX, as translated by Alice Zimmern.)
Although I investigated the ages of Hesiod and Homer as exactly as possible, I take no pleasure in writing about it, since I know that other people are captious, especially the appointed "experts" on epic poetry in my time.
(Pausanias, Descriptions of Greece IX xxx 3, as translated by Glenn W. Most.)
Good to see that some things never change.
A. Why can't people just be honest and decent?
B. Because, if they could, they would be angels rather than people.
Every thing pursues that which is good to it. This means that each thing's good must exist prior to the thing itself, since otherwise it could not depend on it. From this basic principle, we extrapolate various levels of being based on what lives there and what qualities they possess:
The World of Matter: Humans lack contentment, and so pursue it.
The World of Imagination: Daimons are inherently content, but not self-sufficient, and so pursue self-sufficiency.
The World of Soul: Angels are inherently self-sufficient, but are bounded by their respective natures, and so pursue unboundedness.
The World of Spirit: God is unbounded, but not universal, and so pursues universality.
The All: Goodness is universal. Being universal, it has no pursuits, and so the process terminates.
One of my best friends told me that he was standing next to a telephone when suddenly an angel walked in through the closed window. It had a nebulous, luminous appearance. The angel said a few comforting words and then disappeared again. That was very important to him for at that moment he feared for his life. This friend said to me: "Now I understand why angels are shown with wings: it is their radiance."
(H. C. Moolenburgh, A Handbook of Angels I, emphasis mine.)
In every version of the Iliad and the Odyssey that I've read, Athena is described as "gray-eyed." I recently came across translations that described her as "bright-eyed" or even "blue-eyed," which is very different, and so I decided to get to the bottom of it.
The adjective in question is γλαυκῶπις (glaukopis), which the dictionary, indeed, gives as "bright-eyed." This is a compound word, but scholarship seems to be divided on whether it is γλαυκός-ὤψ (glaukos-ops, "gleaming-eyed" in early Greek, "having slate-colored eyes" in late Greek) or γλαύξ-ὤψ (glaux-ops, "owl-eyed").
As to which of these we should favor, the latter-most seems obvious to me: as Porphyry and Sallustius tell us, the images of the gods are symbols of their natures, and Homer is simply describing Athena as she always acts in the poems, as as watchful and perceptive as an owl.
In a similar manner, Hera is described as βοῶπις (bo-opis), from βοῦς-ὤψ (bous-ops), which means "cow-eyed." This is usually translated as "large-eyed," but again, as a symbol, I might take it to mean "docile," as Hera presides over the social order and domesticity.
The different ages of men which are celebrated by Hesiod, in his Works and Days, are not to be understood literally, as if they once really subsisted, but only as signifying, in beautiful poetical images, the mutations of human lives from virtue to vice, and from vice to virtue. For earth was never peopled with men either wholly virtuous or vicious; since the good and the bad have always subsisted together on its surface, and always will subsist. However, in consequence of the different circulations of the heavens, there are periods of fertility and sterility, not only with respect to men, but likewise to brutes and plants. Hence places naturally adapted to the nurture of the philosophical genius, such as Athens and Egypt, will, in periods productive of a fertility of souls, such as was formerly the case, abound with divine men: but in periods such as the present, in which there is every where a dreadful sterility of souls, through the general prevalence of a certain most irrational and gigantic impiety as Proclus elegantly calls the established religion of his time, in Plat. Polit. p. 369—at such periods as these, Athens and Egypt will no longer be the seminaries of divine souls, but will be filled with degraded and barbarous inhabitants. And such, according to the arcana of ancient philosophy, is the reason of the present general degradation of mankind. Not that formerly there were no such characters as now abound, for this would be absurd, since mankind always have been, and always will be, upon earth, a mixture of good and bad, in which the latter will predominate; but that during the fertile circulations of the heavens, in consequence of there being a greater number of men than when a contrary circulation takes place, men will abound who adorn human nature, and who indeed descend for the benevolent purpose of leading back apostate souls to the principles from which they fell. As the different ages therefore of Hesiod signify nothing more than the different lives which each individual of the human species passes through; hence an intellectual life is implied by the golden age. For such a life is pure, and free from sorrow and passion; and of this impassivity gold is an image, through its never being subject to rust or putrefaction. Such a life, too, is with great propriety said to be under Saturn, because Saturn, as we have a little before observed, is pure intellect.—But for a larger account of this interesting particular, and of the allegorical meaning of the different ages celebrated by Hesiod, see Proclus upon Hesiod, p. 39, &c.
(Thomas Taylor, footnote to Plato's Cratylus.)
I haven't found an English translation of Proclus's fragmentary commentary on the Works and Days, but it's interesting to me that he (and Taylor) consider it to be an ethical allegory (following Plato) rather than a cosmological allegory. Personally, I disagree (not that their interpretation is wrong, merely that I think it departs too widely from Hesiod's purpose of explaining why the world sucks): I think that when Hesiod refers to Kronos, he refers to the Intellect; and when he refers to Zeus, he refers to the World Soul; hence, the golden race living under Kronos represents the daimons betwixt the gods and man, while all the other races living under Zeus refer to "waves" of the development of human consciousness or civilization, of which we are presently at the tail end of the fourth, which will end when the world is too polluted for humanity to thrive.
I have this vague idea that every civilization, unless it is somehow terminated early (by war or famine or whatever), develops to the same level of sophistication in understanding the universe before it fails. For example, the Egyptians somehow knew how to measure the distances to stars (the Nabta Playa complex allegedly does so to great accuracy) and, of course, were capable of engineering feats that leave us in awe even today; while Greeks knew about such things as special relativity and chaos theory (Plotinus discusses both); but neither got much further than that before they failed. Obviously, I suspect our fate will be similar.
But what is especially interesting to me is that each civilization uses different tools to do so, and it seems that all the other things we think of as central to that culture stem from this. The Egyptians may have well used magic, the Greeks used dialectic, and we use science. By this I assume that the Egyptians had a Saturnine angel; the Greeks, a Solar angel; and we, of course, have a Mercurial angel. But consider the ramifications: the Egyptians took a very long time to get there, but had tremendous cultural longevity (and their solid-as-a-rock monuments persist even today); the Greeks got there very efficiently, needing little resources to do it (and produced remarkable beauty which is still imitated today); we have produced little cultural value of our own, rather favoring to steal from others (and have needed a massive population, massive industrial base, and massive communication and travel in order to accomplish what we have).
Thus, I do not think that the destruction of the environment and the ransacking of the world's peoples is an accident: it is the necessary byproduct of the designs of the Western cultural angel. One must suppose that there is a good (and a Good) reason for it, and trust in Providence.
[Names] are given before the life process [e.g. material incarnation] is begun. Every letter has its own vibratory rate which coincides with the vibration and pattern on which that individual proceeds through his lifetime.
("Yan Lu Su," as channeled by Charles Roberts, and as recorded by Eugene G. Jussek, Reaching for the Oversoul.)
Consider:
There's gotta be something about that "P[l]—t[h]—" combination, since the meanings of their names show no particular coherency, and yet the lives of each of these men all certainly seemed to follow a peculiar arc...
[By considering myths as symbolic of occult phenomena] we shall undertake to deal with the numerous and tiresome people, whether they be such as take pleasure in associating theological problems with the seasonal changes in the surrounding atmosphere, or with the growth of the crops and seed-times and ploughing; and also those who say that Osiris is being buried at the time when the grain is sown and covered in the earth and that he comes to life and reappears when plants begin to sprout.
(Plutarch, Isis and Osiris LXV.)
I disagree with Plutarch a lot, but he's got just so many gems strewn throughout his essays that he's always worth reading and reading carefully. (Here, I'm looking squarely at you, Sir James George Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Gilbert Murray...)
The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus [e.g. circa 300 BC]. They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.
(Plutarch, Life of Theseus XXIII.)
You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.
(Heraclitus, fragment XCI.)
Speaking of Plutarch, the "ship of Theseus" paradox is such an interesting one to me, since I think it's surprising that people actually argued about it. A river never contains the same water moment-to-moment, and yet we always say it's the same river, right? The cells in your body are replaced, on average, every seven years (to speak nothing of the molecules!), and yet we always treat you as you, don't we? Bodies aren't fixed objects, they're continuous happenings.
It's for this reason that I think the traditional argument for the existence of the soul holds water. (I mean, besides having some minor personal experience of it.) If the river's water is always changing, what is the thing that makes the river the river? If your cells and molecules are always in flux, what is the thing that makes you, you? There must be something that doesn't change, and that something is what we call the soul.
Theopompus records that the people who live toward the west believe that the winter is Kronos, the summer Aphrodite, and the spring Persephone, and that they call them by these names and believe that from Kronos and Aphrodite all things have their origin.
(Plutarch, Isis and Osiris LXIX.)
The season of the ritual is evidence to the truth of these explanations. The rites are performed about the Vernal Equinox, when the fruits of the earth are ceasing to be produced, and day is becoming longer than night, which applies well to Spirits rising higher. (At least, the other equinox is in mythology the time of the Rape of Kore, which is the descent of the souls.)
(Sallustius, On the Gods and the World IV.)
Cold Kronos is pure intellect (hence the winter solstice holidays—Saturnalia, Christmas—and the symbol of gift-giving). Warm Aphrodite is pure sensuality (hence the summer solstice holidays—Aphrodesia—and the symbol of purification). Persephone is soul, who descends from intellect into sensuality and back again as the "seasons" shift (hence the equinox holidays as representative of the way down and the way back up).
Certain things he declared mystically, symbolically, most of which were collected by Aristotle, as when he called the sea a tear of Saturn; the two bear (constellations) the hand of Rhea; the Pleiades, the lyre of the Muses; the Planets, the dogs of Persephone; and he called be sound caused by striking on brass the voice of a genius enclosed in the brass.
(Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras XLI, emphasis mine.)
And before [the halls of Hades and Persephone] a dreaded hound, on watch, who has no pity, but a vile stratagem: as people go in he fawns on all, with actions of his tail and both ears, but he will not let them go back out, but lies in wait for them and eats them up, when he catches any going back through the gates.
(Hesiod, Theogony 769–, emphasis mine)
The sensible world is Hades, and the planets are the guardians of it. But Hesiod says that they don't keep the living out of Hades, but rather they keep the dead in. The natures the planets bequeath to us, then, aren't the way out, but they're the very thing holding us back! Maybe that's why Plotinus was so ambivalent about them.
I think, also, that this is why meditation is so crucial. What is beyond the planets? Being. Therefore, to move beyond them is simply to be—not to be something in particular, but merely to be. Walk back your bodily senses, walk back your chattering mind, and simply observe.
Can you coax your mind from its wandering
and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
supple as a newborn child's?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from your own mind
and thus understand all things?
(Laozi, Tao Te Ching X, as translated by Stephen Mitchell.)
| hypostasis | element | cardinality¹ | computability² | vehicle³ | temporality⁴ | sufficiency⁵ | veracity⁶ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good | fire | transcendent | transcendent | transcendent | transcendent | transcendent | ||
| Intellect | air | uncountably infinite | definition | immutable | providential | definition | ||
| Soul | water | countably infinite | hypercomputable | soul | eternal | self-sufficient | truth | |
| Nature | earth | finite | Turing-computable | { | imagination | immortal | content | right opinion |
| body | mortal | insatiable | variable opinion | |||||
Hekate is the symbolic representation of Fate (or, as we would say in modern terms, karma). That's why She's triform, just as the Moirai are; that's why She's associated with the Moon, since karma only exists in the sublunary region; that's why Hesiod says She rewards those who work hard, for they have earned their success; that's why Plutarch assigns those who are punished between the first and second deaths to Hekate's Cave. Even Her name, Ἑκάτη, means "far-reaching" (in the masculine, the term is an epithet of Sniper Apollo): there is no escaping one's karma.
But is She not also associated with magic? Why? I was pondering this today and it occurs to me that magic is the means of messing directly with the threads of fate, making it a way of racking up karma either for good (e.g. theurgy) or ill (e.g. witchcraft).
But that made me realize we have an excellent myth about the pitfalls of magic—Arachne! Here is an example of a magician (weaving the threads of fate by her own design) who, rather than co-create with the gods, instead gratifies her own ego; Athena Herself comes in the shabby guise of philosophy to try and teach her wisdom, but Arachne hears not, commits suicide, and is reborn as less-than-human, forced to relive her failure in a lesser way...
My spiritual path in life has, to date, wandered near or through each of the following:
Christianity: Earth is a test for sorting beings into good and bad.
Taoism: Earth is. (What more do you want?)
Buddhism: Earth is a nightmare from which one ought to awaken.
Occultism: Earth is a kindergarten where beings learn the basics of how to live.
Neoplatonism: Earth is a borderland where exiled divinities eke out a meager subsistence.
While each of these has a fragment of truth to it, none of them have been entirely satisfactory to me. I was pondering, today, what I might say if somebody asked me to describe my religion in a single sentence. This is what I came up with:
Earth is a womb where baby angels gestate before birth.
A soldier named Nobushige came to Hakuin, and asked: "Is there really a paradise and a hell?"
"Who are you?" inquired Hakuin.
"I am a samurai," the warrior replied.
"You, a soldier!" exclaimed Hakuin. "What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? Your face looks like that of a beggar."
Nobushige became so angry that he began to draw his sword, but Hakuin continued: "So you have a sword! Your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head."
As Nobushige drew his sword Hakuin remarked: "Here open the gates of hell!"
At these words the samurai, perceiving the master's discipline, sheathed his sword and bowed.
"Here open the gates of paradise," said Hakuin.
(Nyogen Senzaki, 101 Zen Stories LVII "The Gates of Paradise.")
Alone in immunity from magic is he who, though drawn by the alien parts of his total being, withholds his assent to their standards of worth, recognizing the good only where his authentic self sees and knows it, neither drawn nor pursuing, but tranquilly possessing and so never charmed away. [...] Thus this universe of ours is a wonder of power and wisdom, everything by a noiseless road coming to pass according to a law which none may elude—which the base man never conceives though it is leading him, all unknowingly, to that place in the All where his lot must be cast—[but] which the just man knows, and, knowing, sets out to the place he must, understanding, even as he begins the journey, where he is to be housed at the end, and having the good hope that he will be with gods.
(Plotinus, Enneads IV vi "Problems of the Soul (2)" §44–5.)
If you're losing the game, try instead playing the different game that is one level up.
(Mark Dominus.)
Have you ever played Nicky Case's little explanatory toy The Evolution of Trust? If you haven't, you should.
I think Case makes an error, by equating the Golden Rule with the "tit-for-tat" strategy; the Golden Rule isn't about treating others the way you are treated, it is rather about treating others the way you wish to be treated. Therefore, the Golden Rule is more of a mirror: if one is kind, then the Golden Rule is the "Always Cooperate" strategy, while if one is cynical, then the Golden Rule is the "Always Cheat" strategy.
As Case demonstrates, "Always Cooperate" never seems to survive. (And is destroyed all the more rapidly in times like these where "Always Cheat" is on the ascendant!) And yet, we try to be good and kind anyway. Why is that?
Is it because "Always Cooperate" is the strategy of angels? If one wishes to be among them, it makes sense to practice in preparation...
Heavenly justice, even while exiling [souls] from the abodes of the Blessed, treats them as their nature befits. When, then, O my son Horos, the ministering angels and genii appointed are warlike, the soul in their charge takes that character, forgetting its own, or rather laying it aside until some future change of condition. If the guardian angels are of a gentle order, then the soul follows its path in peace; if they are friends of judgment, the soul loves to judge; if they are musicians, then the soul sings; if they love truth, the soul is that of a philosopher. Thus the souls necessarily follow the teaching of their guardians; falling into human bodies they forego their proper estate, and while exiled from it they approximate to those intelligences by whom they have been embodied.
(Kore Kosmou ["The Daughter of the Cosmos," that is, "On the Soul"] II, as quoted by Stobaeus, Anthology I xlix §45, as translated by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland.)
The Hermetists seem to agree with the Neoplatonists that the personal daimon falls under the rulership of some of the planets or other. This makes sense, since the daimon can speak to the imagination, which means it must have an imagination-body, which exists at the level of the planets and must fall most greatly under the sway of some of them or other.
There are in the universe, four regions, governed by a fixed and immutable law: heaven, the ether, the air, and the most holy earth. Above, in heaven, dwell the Gods, ruled as are all the rest, by the Maker of the universe; in the ether are the stars, governed by the great fire, the sun; in the air are the souls of the genii, governed by the moon; upon earth are men and other animals governed by the soul who, for the time, is their king. [...]
This expanse, my son, is divided into four provinces, and into sixty regions. The first province from the earth upwards comprehends four regions, and extends as far as certain summits or promontories, which it is unable to transcend. The second province comprises eight regions in which the motions of the winds arise. Be thou attentive, my son, for thou hearest the ineffable mysteries of the earth, the heavens, and of the sacred fluid which lies between. In the province of the winds fly the birds; above this there is no moving air nor any creature. But the air with all the beings it contains distributes itself into all boundaries within its reach, and into the four quarters of the earth, while the earth cannot lift itself into the mansions of the air. The third province comprehends sixteen regions filled with a pure and subtle element. The fourth contains thirty-two regions, in which the air, wholly subtle and diaphanous, allows itself to be penetrated by the element of fire. Such is the order which, without confusion, reigns from depth to height;--to wit, four general divisions, twelve intervals, sixty regions, and in these dwell the souls, each according to the nature thereof. They are indeed all of one substance, but they constitute a hierarchy; and the further any region is removed from the earth, the loftier is the dignity of the souls which dwell therein.
(Kore Kosmou ["The Daugher of the Cosmos," that is, "On the Soul"] II–III.)
The material world has, of course, its four elements; Isis is saying as you go up the hierarchy, the scale of each world doubles. This smells suspiciously similar to the notion of Flatland: four elements is, of course, the number of quadrants in a two dimensional world; doubling this is equivalent to adding a dimension, comprising the octants in a three dimensional world; doubling this is equivalent to adding another dimension, comprising the sixteenth parts in a four dimensional world; etc. It touches nicely, I think, on how we are bound by time; how angels exist in time but may freely traverse it (that fourth dimension, a prison to us, can be walked back and forth by them); etc.
Obviously, as the Absolute comprises all that exists, the dimensions must go infinite as one gets high enough, so this repeated doubling must be a mere model rather the reality of the matter; nonetheless, it points at the notion that the divine worlds are far, far more vast and interesting than the dusty, gray wastes which we are equipped to inhabit.
I can't believe I missed this one!
The first men on earth to receive knowledge of the gods, and to build temples and shrines and to summon meetings for religious observances are said to have been the Egyptians. They were the first, too, to take cognizance of holy names, and to repeat sacred traditions. Not long after them the Assyrians heard from the Egyptians their doctrines as to the gods, and they reared temples and shrines: in these they placed statues and images.
(Pseudo-Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess II.)
Okay, this is wild-eyed speculation, but hear me out.
The original mystery cult was that of Isis and Osiris. This cult got around, but everyone interpreted it differently, and consequently you ended up with multiple competing chains of transmission, and by the time they all got to Greece, prospective initiates had quite an array of Mysteries to choose from. This was itself mythologized in the Judgement of Paris: the golden apple is the soul, but the three goddesses contending for the apple are representative of the ways in which the cult teachings were interpreted, and how a prospective initiate (Paris) would have to select between them.
The first line of transmission focuses on devotion and participation in mythic relationships, hence is symbolized by Aphrodite. The initiate would gain "the love of the most beautiful girl in the world," that is, the consideration of some divinity who would remain mindful of the them and support them after death. (I think, here, of how Aphrodite is always whisking Her own from the killing fields of Troy.) Cults and myths in this line of transmission include:
The second line of transmission focuses on understanding reality and using that understanding to transcend human existence, hence is symbolized by Athena. The initiate would gain knowledge which would allow them to navigate the after-death world in such a way as to avoid reincarnating. Cults and myths in this line of transmission include:
The third line of transmission focuses on overcoming one's limitations through the development of one's inherent (but latent) divine powers, hence is symbolized by Hera. The initiate would gain power and mastery over the world (by gaining power and mastery over themselves). Cults and myths in this line of transmission include:
Finally, there are a great many myths that touch on these themes and so are part of the general framework, but don't explicitly teach a way out and so are more basic, introductory, or universalizing:
I just noticed something funny about how I characterize the Intellect as 1, gods as prime numbers, and all other souls as composite numbers.
Do you remember how, in the first book of the Iliad, Hephaistos urges Hera to reconcile with Zeus by saying that He is as strong as all the other gods put together? Well, let us suppose a being's "strength" consists of how many souls participate in it: all souls participate in the Intellect, half of souls participate in the greatest god, a third of souls participate in the next greatest god (some of which also participate in the greatest), a fifth of souls in the next greatest (some of which also participate in the two greatest), etc.
As the greatest god, Zeus would correspond to the number 2, and so half of all souls participate in Him. The other half, therefore, participate in all the other gods put together. Thus, Hephaistos' statement is literally true under my model!
If we limit ourselves to the first twelve gods (e.g. first twelve primes), then 50% of all souls participate in Zeus; ~35% participate in at least one of the other Olympians (but not in Zeus); and ~15% participate only in gods not among the Olympians. So unless Hera managed to get Thetis on her side, along with all the other Oceanids, Naiads, Nymphs, and so on, She and the other Olympians wouldn't stand a chance!
𓃧
woof woof
I've mentioned before that the second-greatest Cynic [κυνικός, "doglike"] philosopher was Crates, who was nicknamed "the opener of doors" for his habit of barging into people's houses and lecturing them on philosophy (and somehow getting away with it).
While pondering over the Isis and Osiris myth today, I remembered that there is an Egyptian deity called Upuat, whose name translates to "the opener of ways." He is also doglike—depicted as a jackal or wolf—and, just like philosophy itself, he opens the way into Duat (the intermediate world between heaven and earth). I am curious if there's a connection or joke there, but alas, I suspect it's not possible to know.
(Fun fact, Upuat's cult center was Lycopolis [Λυκόπολις, "wolf-city"], which is where Plotinus was born. He was also an "opener of ways," wasn't he?)
What gods are there? Are there, for example, gods (or perhaps daimons) ruling over, say, dogs, pear trees, races, places?
I should think that the traditional answer is, "yes, of course," but then, where does one draw the line? Is a dog different from a wolf? Well, sure, dogs are domesticated, right? But is a dog or a wolf different than a coywolf? Not really, but if a dog isn't different from a coywolf, and a coywolf isn't different from a wolf, then can you really say a dog and a wolf are different? Difference becomes more a question of degree than a yes/no question, but then how different necessitates a different presiding deity? Is a human different enough from a neanderthal? a chimpanzee? a macaque? a rodent? a lizard? Who could say? I certainly couldn't.
But I jump back to distinctions being a material thing, while unity is a divine thing. Presumably, then, a "species" is a human concept. So I hesitate to think that gods work that way.
I wonder, rather, if the difference between a dog and a man is more like the difference between the numbers 30 and 42: both participate in 2 and 3, but only the former participates in 5 while only the latter participates in 7. That is to say, they share some gods in common, but not others. Maybe dogs are "man's best friend" because we share a lot of gods in common, and that presumably gives us many ways in which we can interact; perhaps a mushroom is more like 38, with which we have only 2 in common and thus few means of interaction. Perhaps there are beings which, like 55, a dog can interact with (having 5 in common) but we humans can't (being relatively prime). Perhaps there are beings like the number 41 which neither can interact with at all.
These numbers are very small and simple to reason about, but presumably the numbers properly analogous to a dog or a human would be mind-bogglingly large, involving many prime factors and many gods. In such a case, very fine distinctions are possible, admitting us to say that, while maybe there isn't a single god of "dogness," there are a collection of gods which, all together, constitute more-or-less the "fingerprint" which we generally recognize as a dog... but the pattern recognition and the label "dog" are both human: they come from within us, and are not part of any real ontological structure at all.
𓃣
woof woof
Okay this is dumb, but speaking of dogs, did you know Socrates is fond of swearing by Anubis? "μὰ τὸν κύνα τὸν Αἰγυπτίων θεόν," he says: "by the dog, the Egyptian god!"
Don't believe me? SEE FOR YOURSELF
As a side amusement in studying Isis and Osiris, I felt it worthwhile to read the rest of Apuleius—I think it very likely that he was initiate of Isis and of Osiris, but even if not, he was certainly an initiate of Demeter and of Dionysus and knew enough Plutarch to connect the dots—and I'm glad I did. He's a peacock and no mistake, but there's meat beneath those feathers.
What reason have you for regarding three slaves as a mark of my poverty, rather than for considering three freed men as a proof of my wealth? Poor Æmilianus, you have not the least idea how to accuse a philosopher: you reproach me for the scantiness of my household, whereas it would really have been my duty to have laid claim, however falsely, to such poverty. [...] Had Pudens come across these facts in his reading, he would, I think, either have omitted this particular slander or would have preferred to reproach me on the ground that three slaves were too large rather than too small an establishment for a philosopher.
(Apuleius, Apology XVII.)
Those [who have died and are of sufficiently pure character] that have got up [to the Moon], however, and have found a firm footing there first go about like victors crowned with wreaths that they call "the feathers of the faithful" [πτερῶν εὐσταθείας], because in life they had made the irrational or affective element of the soul orderly and tolerably tractable to reason.
(Plutarch, On the Man in the Moon XXVIII.)
A. Why is Dionysus the god of wine?
B. Because understanding of the mysteries causes one to forget their sorrows: the revelry of the Mainads is the freedom from the fear of death. As Socrates says [in the Phaedo], "He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world."
This, I tell you, was for [Pythagoras] the first axiom of wisdom: "Meditation is learning, speech is unlearning."
(Apuleius, Florida XV.)
I just noticed something pretty interesting.
The planets, in order of brightness, are Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, and Mars. Of these, the first and third have a dual aspect as morning and evening stars, while the others do not.
The stars, in order of brightness, are Sirius, Canopus, Alpha Centauri AB, Arcturus, and Vega. Of these, the first and third are binary stars, while the others are solitary.
For a couple years now, I've been trying to figure out what the Homeric shade is—you know, those pesky ghosts that Odysseus summons when he visits Hades—within the context of Neoplatonism. I think it just clicked!
So you have a soul, an imagination, and a body. When your imagination withdraws from your body, that's the "first death." The body is still there, but it no longer has a connection to its life-giving principle, and so it decays. We call this dead body a "corpse" and it's more-or-less like the living body except it no longer grows or changes, it just falls apart. You can still interact with it, but doing so is one-sided and kinda icky.
After your first death, you still have an imagination and a soul. If your soul is strong enough, this is sustainable, but for most of us, it isn't, and so your imagination will eventually die, too, which is called the "second death." Just like with the body, the imagination is still there, but it no longer has a connection to its life-giving principle, and so it decays. We call this dead imagination a "shade" and it's more-or-less like the living imagination except it no longer grows or changes, it just falls apart. You can still interact with it, too, but doing so is one-sided and kinda icky.
This is why both Homer's shades and modern ghost sightings have a repetitive or mechanical quality to them—the things being interacted with are stuck the way they are until they decay completely.
I woke up with this thing spinning in my head. I know nothing of the Tree of Life and have no idea whether or not there's anything to it. I suppose I'll need to study it one of these days...
Fun fact: the first we know of to argue that light has a finite speed is our good old friend Empedocles:
Empedocles, for example, says that the Light from the Sun arrives first in the intervening space before it comes to the eye, or reaches the Earth. This might plausibly seem to be the case. For whatever is moved [in space], is moved from one place to another; hence there must be a corresponding interval of time also in which it is moved from the one place to the other. But any given time is divisible into parts; so that we should assume a time when the sun's ray was not as yet seen, but was still traveling in the middle space.
(Aristotle on Sense VI.)
Aristotle, by the way, disagreed, believing that light was a static phenomenon. Funny how much of modernity vindicates the mystics and mages and castigates the scientists.
䷝
30: Clarity. [...]
Third nine moves. The setting sun shines as it goes down. The old either sing and beat their drums or else bewail their lot. Either way is ill-omened. (The best attitude to cultivate at this time in your life is a general acceptance of fate. To totally lose yourself in the happiness of the moment is as bad as to bemoan the passing of time. Such folly of the mind and the emotions leads to a loss of inner freedom.)
(I Ching.)
Socrates, when condemned to death and thrown into prison, asked some one who was playing a song of the Greek poet Stesichorus with great skill, to teach him also to do that, while it was still in his power; and when the musician asked him of what use this skill could be to him, as he was to die the next day, he answered, "that I may know something more before I die."
(Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History XXVIII iv §15. Stobaeus, Florilegium III xxix, tells a nearly identical story concerning a very elderly Solon, but there are no English translations of Stobaeus and, alas, my Greek isn't up to it yet.)
I received the above I Ching reading (30–3) today. I couldn't imagine what it referred to until I found myself telling somebody the above little story. It is why I study philosophy so assiduously: life has been very difficult and I haven't managed to figure out how it might be enjoyed, but I have managed to develop the skill of study, and I hope that my use of it makes a satisfactory offering to Divinity.
There's a very famous geometric pattern inscribed on the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, called the "Seed of Life," which looks like this:
Nobody really knows the formal significance of the shape, but I noticed something interesting about it while I was pondering the mysteries this evening.
Pythagoras was famously the first Greek to formally be initiated into the mysteries of the Osiris cult (though, of course, there must have been prior transmission since the Demeter and Dionysus mysteries are related). A generation later, Empedocles was initiated into the Pythagorean brotherhood, but later expelled for revealing the mysteries in writing. I conjecture that Empedocles' poem was derived from the Osiris cult, since it concerns the same phenomenon (the descent and reascent of the soul) and features the four gods:
τέσσαρα γὰρ πάντων ῥιζώματα πρῶτον ἄκουε·
Ζεὺς ἀργὴς Ἥρη τε φερέσβιος ἠδ' Ἀιδωνεύς,
Νῆστις θ' ἣ δακρύοις τέγγει κρούνωμα βρότειον.First, hear of the four roots of all things:
shining Zeus and life-giving Hera and Aidoneus
and Nestis, who wets the springs of mortals with her tears.
It seems pretty reasonable to equate Osiris with Zeus, Hera with Isis, Set with Aidoneus, and Nephthys with Nestis. Now Empedocles talks about how the roots begin united in Love, but peel off one at a time as Strife begins to intervene: first fire, then air, then water, then earth; this is the same as the first part of the Isis myth, where Osiris (fire) is killed, sealed in Set's box (air), dumped in the Nile (water), and encapsulated in a heather stalk (earth). We have a geometric symbol for the same thing: Pythagoras's tetractys, showing the progression of unity (1) into completion (10). It fits very nicely onto the Seed of Life:
Now, the second part of the myth has Osiris chopped into fourteen pieces, but his penis gets eaten by a fish and is never found, so Isis has to make do with the thirteen remaining pieces. Guess how many intersection points the Seed of Life has?
Finally, the last part of the myth has Horus (in place of Osiris) defeating Set and becoming king. This is a myth about the re-ascension of the soul back to its source: the three battles between Horus and Set are the rise from earth to water, water to air, and air to fire. (Diogenes Laertius tells us that Empedocles's Hera is earth, which makes sense to me in a roundabout way since Hera is Isis is Demeter is earth. Notice how, after the first battle, Horus deposes Isis by taking her crown, indicating the soul rising above earth.) Empedocles talks about that, too, since as Strife gives way to Love, the elements re-collapse into themselves in reverse of the way they separated. We might suppose that Pythagoras would have symbolized the regression of the cosmos from completion (10) back into unity (1) with a reverse tetractys, which, too, fits nicely onto the Seed of Life:
So if Pythagoras and Empedocles are (as I conjecture) faithful interpreters of the Isis, Osiris, and Horus mysteries (or if they aren't but my crazed speculation is at least somewhat valid anyway), then the Seed of Life is a nice little mnemonic for the exploration and contemplation of them. Hopefully that's helpful, since I continue to have a lot of contemplation ahead of me...
I grew up on the Internet. Back in the 90's, it was a great place for hobbyists—you could search for all sorts of things and learn and learn and learn. Nowadays, it's so cluttered up as to be useless: the signal is drowned in noise.
This bit me hard this weekend. I was doing another pass over my summary of the myth of Isis and Osiris, relating the various pieces of the myth to its Greek equivalents, and trying to use alternative sources to fill in Plutarch's prudish gaps:
These are nearly all the important points of the legend, with the omission of the most infamous of the tales, such as that about the dismemberment of Horus and the decapitation of Isis.
Ultimately, I managed to accomplish my goal, but, tellingly, had to do so, painstakingly and by hand, using the books in my own library. (Gold stars go to the Loeb editions of Diodorus Siculus and Manetho, and to E. A. Wallis Budge's Legends of the Gods.) It is obvious in hindsight, but perhaps should have been obvious beforehand, that searching the internet for anything remotely related to "isis beheading" was inadvisable.
The days of the internet being a useful tool are coming to an end in general, but this weekend marks when it ceased to be a useful to me, personally. If you want to know something, endeavor to become a human encyclopedia on some topic, and try to cultivate friends who do similarly on others.
I just noticed something interesting about Hesiod's ages of man.
So, Hesiod tells us mankind is descended from the gods, and there was a descent through five ages:
It is well-known that these relate to the astrological ages of Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, and Aries.
Well, Manetho in his History of Egypt tells us that the gods ruled Egypt before mortals did. (Diodorus Siculus puts a date to this, saying it mortals began to reign around 5000 BC, which was in the age of Taurus.) The gods who ruled Egypt were, in order: Hephaistos (Ptah), Helios (Ra), Sosis/Agathodaemon (Shu), Kronos (Geb), Osiris, Typhon (Seth), and Horos.
There's a nice connection, there. If we assume the gods refer to astrological ages, then righteous Horos was king during the similarly-righteous age of Taurus before handing off kingship to the pharaohs; before him, violent Seth was king during the similarly-violent age of Gemini; before him, benevolent Osiris (e.g. Zeus) was king during the age of Cancer (remember how Plutarch says the people were as beasts and Osiris taught them how to live civilized lives and honor the gods?); and before him, Geb (e.g. Kronos) was king during the age of Leo. It smells like Hesiod got his ages of man from Egypt—certainly, he got a lot of his other myths from there! (By the by, nobody knows the etymology of the Greek word ἥρως ("hero"). It certainly sounds a lot like heru ("Horos")... is the Heroic Age literally named after its king?)
Plato says that, according to the Egyptians, the fall of Atlantis was around 9000 years before his time, which corresponds to the end of the last glacial period and to the age of Leo. I would not be a bit surprised if the "golden age" is an echo of a memory of that once-great civilization; after it fell, a dark age ensued, after which the gods slowly reintroduced civilization to men... plausibly, in Egypt. (Certainly, Plato and Diodorus say that the Egyptians thought so.)
If that's so, then it suggests that the myth of Osiris could be a good deal older than the fifth dynasty (e.g. the Pyramid Texts, which are our first references to it). One wonders how much. Even predating the age of Aries would be an impressive accomplishment, but I've seen references (which I have not yet managed to track down) to myths very similar to Osiris's being found among South American cultures, on the other side of the Atlantic. Does it go back to Atlantis, itself?
If the grace we see in bodies is due to a seeming ease or effortlessness in complex transitions in space, is the grace we see in minds due to a seeming ease or effortlessness in complex transitions in thought?
Is one who is training to easily switch between models or modes of thought, then, training to be graceful in their mind?
Is combining the "left-brain" and "right-brain" into a cohesive and fluid whole, then, under the domain of Venus?
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47: Oppression. Fifth nine moves.
To those who yearn for life, the great sacrifice is to die for an ideal.
To those who yearn for death, the great sacrifice is to live for an ideal.
Weapons are ominous tools.
They are abhorred by all creatures.
Anyone who follows the Way shuns them.
(Laozi, Tao Te Ching XXXI.)
So, in times where the use of money is weaponized...
Lest you think conceptualist art is a unique plague upon modernity, I hereby present to you a Roman copy of Sosus of Pergamon's renowned masterpiece, ἀσάρωτος οἶκος "Unswept House:"
It is, quite literally, garbage.
Sometimes I wonder if the reason we have so little of interest recorded between, say, 200 BC and AD 100 is because it corresponds to our civilization after AD 1900 or so: as much was made as ever, but all of it was trash.
Empedocles writes,
All the potions which there are as a defence against evils and old age
you shall learn, since for you alone will I accomplish all these things.
You shall put a stop to the strength of tireless winds, [...]
and again, if you wish, you shall bring the winds back again, [...]
and you shall bring from Hades the strength of a man who has died. [...]
For if, thrusting [my words] deep down into your crowded heart,
you gaze on them in kindly fashion, with pure meditations,
absolutely all these things will be with you throughout your life,
and from these you acquire many others, for these things themselves
will expand to form each character, according to the nature of each.
That is, if you learn the true nature of things, you will gain all manner of magical powers and other things besides. Personally, I find the pursuit of power uninteresting, but the old magus isn't wrong: meditating on his poem has, indeed, given me other things, to my mind of far greater worth than mere magic. I'll be talking about some of these once I get my next Isis and Osiris post together, but in the meantime, let me share one of them with you that's tangential to that myth.
Empedocles's four roots are not mere elements; in fact, I think:
I've mentioned that I think this model is Egyptian in origin and imported to Greece several times; we see versions of it used all through classical philosophy, from Plato to "Hermes Trismegistus" to Plotinus. One of these imports was by Pythagoras, from whom Empedocles got it. I think another was by "Orpheus" (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History I xxiii), from whom Hesiod got it, and I would like to consider my favorite statement of theology, Hesiod's Ages of Man (Works and Days 106–201) in light of it. The poet says that his story is about "how gods and mortals come from the same source," and so I think he is speaking of the nature and placement of beings in the cosmos in the above model.
If you wish, I shall recapitulate another story, correctly and skillfully, and you lay it up in your spirit: how the gods and mortal human beings came about from the same origin.
Let me give some preliminary keys first. Remember that Zeus is Fire, Hades is Air, Nestis is Water, and Hera is Earth. The Cyclopes gifted Zeus his thunderbolts, which are the rays of Light emitted by Fire (e.g. souls). They also gifted Hades his cap of invisibility, which is the incorporeality of Air and its denizens. When Hesiod speaks of "the immortals who dwell on Olympus," he is referring to the gods (e.g. roots) collectively. When he speaks of Zeus, he is referring to Fire specifically; the "time of Zeus" is the world subordinate to Fire; e.g. the material world of Water and Earth. When he speaks of the "time of Cronus," he is referring to the world of Zeus; e.g. the spiritual world of Fire and Air.
Golden was the race of speech-endowed human beings which the immortals, who have their mansions on Olympus, made first of all. They lived at the time of Cronus, when he was king in the sky; just like gods they spent their lives, with a spirit free from care, entirely apart from toil and distress. Worthless old age did not oppress them, but they were always the same in their feet and hands, and delighted in festivities, lacking in all evils; and they died as if overpowered by sleep. They had all good things: the grain-giving field bore crops of its own accord, much and unstinting, and they themselves, willing, mildmannered, shared out the fruits of their labors together with many good things, wealthy in sheep, dear to the blessed gods. But since the earth covered up this race, by the plans of great Zeus they are fine spirits upon the earth, guardians of mortal human beings: they watch over judgments and cruel deeds, clad in invisibility, walking everywhere upon the earth, givers of wealth; and this kingly honor they received.
The immortal, happy, and carefree golden race are Empedocles's δολιχαίωνες δαίμονες "daimons with lives a mile long." These are the beings that natively inhabit Air and never needed to descend into the material world at all to actualize their purpose. They are immortal since Fire and Air are spiritual substances. (They "die as if overpowered by sleep" if they violate the oaths of Necessity and thus fall into the material world.) They are "clad in invisibility" because they are made of Air. They are happy because Air is the substance of emotion; they are carefree since, without a Watery or Earthy component, they do not have appetites or needs. The overall description of the race is, presumably, what life is like in the world of Air (at least to the degree we can comprehend it).
Afterward those who have their mansions on Olympus made a second race, much worse, of silver, like the golden one neither in body nor in mind. A boy would be nurtured for a hundred years at the side of his cherished mother, playing in his own house, a great fool. But when they reached adolescence and arrived at the full measure of puberty, they would live for a short time only, suffering pains because of their acts of folly. For they could not restrain themselves from wicked outrage against each other, nor were they willing to honor the immortals or to sacrifice upon the holy altars of the blessed ones, as is established right for human beings in each community. Then Zeus, Cronus's son, concealed these in anger, because they did not give honors to the blessed gods who dwell on Olympus. But since the earth covered up this race too, they are called blessed mortals under the earth—in second place, but all the same honor attends upon these as well.
The long-lived but foolish silver race are those beings that natively inhabit Water and never needed to descend into Earth to actualize their purpose. They are long-lived since Water is much more mobile than Earth, but are mortal since Water is material. They seem unaging until just before they die since, not having an Earthy component, they have no fixed form. People who have near-death experiences report that beings appear to support and assist them and that these beings always conform to one's expectations or beliefs: Greek pagans might meet Vestal daimons, Christians might meet Jesus or St. Peter, Buddhists might meet a Boddhisatva, etc.; this is presumably because these beings are members of the silver race and because Water always takes the shape of its container. Similarly, the overall description of the race might be what our sojourns are like in the world of Water.
(Regarding those Vestal daimons, note that Latin Vesta is Greek Hestia, who I have hypothesized is Egyptian Nephthys and Empedocles's Nestis, who is Water. Thus Vestal daimons are precisely the ones we should expect to meet when we die.)
Zeus the father made another race of speech-endowed human beings, a third one, of bronze, not similar to the silver one at all, out of ash trees—terrible and strong they were, and they cared only for the painful works of Ares and for acts of violence. They did not eat bread, but had a strong-hearted spirit of adamant—unapproachable they were, and upon their massive limbs grew great strength and untouchable hands out of their shoulders. Their weapons were of bronze, bronze were their houses, with bronze they worked; there was not any black iron. And these, overpowered by one another's hands, went down nameless into the dank house of chilly Hades: black death seized them, frightful though they were, and they left behind the bright light of the sun.
When the earth covered up this race too, Zeus, Cronus's son, made another one in turn upon the bounteous earth, a fourth one, more just and superior, the godly race of men-heroes, who are called demigods, the generation before our own upon the boundless earth. Evil war and dread battle destroyed these, some under seven-gated Thebes in the land of Cadmus while they fought for the sake of Oedipus' sheep, others brought in boats over the great gulf of the sea to Troy for the sake of fair-haired Helen. There, the end of death shrouded some of them, but upon others Zeus the father, Cronus's son, bestowed life and habitations far from human beings and settled them at the limits of the earth; and these dwell with a spirit free of care on the Islands of the Blessed beside deep-eddying Ocean—happy heroes, for whom the grain-giving field bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing three times a year.
If only then I did not have to live among the fifth men, but could have either died first or been born afterward! For now the race is indeed one of iron. And they will not cease from toil and distress by day, nor from being worn out by suffering at night, and the gods will give them grievous cares. Yet all the same, for these people too good things will be mingled with evil ones. But Zeus will destroy this race of speech-endowed human beings too, when at their birth the hair on their temples will be quite gray. Father will not be like-minded with sons, nor sons with their father, nor guest with host, nor comrade with comrade, nor will the brother be dear, as he once was. They will dishonor their aging parents at once; they will reproach them, addressing them with grievous words—cruel men, who do not know of the gods' retribution!—nor would they repay their aged parents for their rearing. Their hands will be their justice, and one man will destroy the other's city. Nor will there be any grace for the man who keeps his oath, nor for the just man or the good one, but they will give more honor to the doer of evil and the outrageous. Justice will be in their hands, and reverence will not exist, but the bad man will harm the superior one, speaking with crooked discourses, and he will swear an oath upon them. And Envy, evil-sounding, gloating, loathsome-faced, will accompany all wretched human beings. Then indeed will Reverence and Indignation cover their beautiful skin with white mantles, leave human beings behind and go from the broad-pathed earth to the race of the immortals, to Olympus. Baleful pains will be left for mortal human beings, and there will be no safeguard against evil.
The remainder of the races all refer to those beings who descended all the way to Earth (e.g. incarnated as humans). The brazen race are the unrighteous, who after they die live in the world of Water for a time before reincarnating: they are thus, in a sense, the non-native inhabitants of Water, living beside and under the guidance of the silver race. The heroic race are the righteous, who after they die transition through the world of Water and go on to the Blessed Isles ruled by Cronus (e.g. the world of Air): they are thus, in a sense, the non-native inhabitants of Air, living beside and under the guidance of the golden race. The brazen race precedes the heroic race because it takes many lifetimes for one to develop and grow. Finally, the iron race are those who are presently living in the world of Earth. Their hard labor is because of the density and rigidity of Earth. They grow gray at a younger and younger age as the soul grows more and more world-weary every time it reincarnates. That they seem abandoned by the gods and must seek their own justice may be seen all around us: it is an injunction to accept the labors of this world and become as a hero from it.
Per Plotinus and Proclus, I presume some of us mortals have tutelary daimons of the golden race, while others of us have tutelary daimons of the heroic race. Whichever they are, may we follow them whole-heartedly...
Some miscellaneous addenda to my synthesis of Hesiod and Empedocles:
The Styx is the Milky Way, separating the world of immortals (e.g. Air) from the world of mortals (e.g. Water and Earth). The Acheron is the horizon, separating the world of the dead (e.g. Water) from the world of the living (e.g. Earth). (Nobody knows where the name "Acheron" comes from, but I wonder if it is from Egyptian 𓈌 Akhet, which is place where the Sun comes from at sunrise or goes to at sunset: the entrance to 𓇽 Duat, the underworld. Cf. Arabic الْآخِرة al akira, "the afterlife," and the Odyssey XXIV where Homer says that the dead "pass through the gates of the Sun and the land of dreams."
The denizens of both Air and Water are called daimons by the Greeks. Those of Air are always-good (this is enforced by the "broad oaths" sworn by the Styx). Those of Water may be good or bad.
Earthy beings have a fixed form; Watery beings are formless (e.g. may take on any appearance); Airy beings are invisible (e.g. are non-spatial); and the single Fiery being transcends appearance (since there is nobody else to look at it). In the same way, Earthy beings have a fixed sex; Watery beings have a fluid sex (e.g. adapting as needs require); Airy beings are of every sex; and the single Fiery being transcends sex (since sexuality is relational and no relationships are possible when there is only one being).
Persephone's name, we are told, was taboo; this is why she is usually referred to as ἡ Κόρη "the Maiden" or ἡ Δέσποινα "Milady" or the like. But this makes no sense. In the Demeter myth, Persephone is you: her generic name is because there are as many Persephones as there are initiates. And if I'm right in synthesizing the Isis myth with Empedocles, and if Persephone/Nephthys is, in fact, the dread queen of the dead, then she is nonetheless the nurse of Horus (that is, you) and one of those who supports and aids you on your upward way.
Death is no evil; indeed, it is the gift which Zeus, in his infinite pity, bequeaths to us. Why fear that which is good? Is it because we do not wish to be rid of our illusions?
Once upon a time there was a lamb who was being chased by a wolf and fled into a temple. The wolf stopped short of entering and called to the lamb, saying, "You know the priest will sacrifice you if he catches you in there, don't you?" The lamb replied, "Better sacrificed than eaten!"
(Æsop, "The Lamb and the Wolf.")
Suppose you are wronged: need that trouble an immortal? Suppose you are put to death: you have attained your desire! From the moment that your citizenship of the world becomes irksome, you are no longer bound to it!
(Plotinus, Enneads II ix "Against the Gnostics" §9.)
This universe of ours is a wonder of power and wisdom, everything by a noiseless road coming to pass according to a law which none may elude. The base man never conceives though it be leading him, all unknowingly, to that place in the All where his lot must be cast. The just man knows and, knowing, sets out to the place he must; understanding, even as he begins the journey, where he is to be housed at the end, and having the good hope that he will be with gods.
(Plotinus, Enneads IV iv "Problems of the Soul (2)" §45.)
You know, I've been bumping into a number of modern Gnostics lately, and I realized that thinking about the levels of reality per Hesiod and Empedocles has clarified my problem with their belief system.
Let us suppose they are right and there are wicked "gods" that farm humans and eat them. Then so what? Those "gods," being more subtle than us (and therefore not Earthy) but self-serving (and therefore not Airy), must be Watery beings. Water is a kind of matter; therefore these "gods" are material beings; therefore they are of a lower order than the soul; therefore they are not meaningfully different from abusive parents or a corrupt government or a spiteful witch. If you cultivate the purificatory virtues, their wickedness can act only as catharsis, speeding you on your way Home.
That is, the problem isn't necessarily that the Gnostics are wrong, but that the scope of their vision is too narrow. Aim higher!
When Plotinus died, his protege, Amelius, traveled the long road to Delphi to discover what had become of him. Apollo Musegetes replied that he was with the heavenly consort, where the great brothers of the golden race, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Æacus, sit in counsel, and where "stately Pythagoras" and "Plato mighty in holy virtue" dwell.
It is no surprise to see Plotinus canonized alongside Pythagoras and Plato. But the omission of Socrates is a little surprising, is not it?
I see three possibilities, here.
Apollo tailored his examples to those who Plotinus personally valued. Plato is mentioned in the Enneads by far more than any other philosopher (2223 times!) so his inclusion is expected, but Pythagoras is hardly mentioned at all (3 times), far less than Socrates (50 times) and less even than Aristotle (8 times). Consequently, I don't think this is likely.
The literary Socrates is an idealization of the actual Socrates—those virtues he seems to possess are really those of Plato. I'm not sure how likely this might be: on the one hand, Xenophon's Socrates seems no less lofty than Plato's, turning even drunken jokes into an excuse to lecture on virtue; but, on the other hand, Socrates's own household was a disaster.
Socrates is up to as much mischief in death as he ever was in life.
I'm pretty slow, but I think I finally realized why consciousness is likened to light. Empedocles says,
We see Earth by Earth, Water by Water,
Aither by divine Aither, Fire by destructive Fire,
Love by Love, and Strife by baneful Strife.
This implies that Empedocles, like Plotinus, assumes that one has a body composed of each and one's experience is mediated by each body. But Fire is sharp and pierces more-or-less easily through the other roots, and so:
When you have an air body, a water body, and an earth body, light passes through the first two and impacts on the third, which is why you experience having an earth body.
When you only have an air body and a water body, light passes through the first and impacts on the second (having nothing further to impact upon), which is why you experience having a water body.
When you only have an air body, light impacts on it (having nothing further to impact upon), which is why you experience having an air body.
That is, light travels as far from Fire as it can, reflecting or scattering itself on whatever is furthest away from it, and it is the reflection or scattering which finally returns to Fire itself that we finally experience.
Fun fact: the English word celery is from French celeri, Latin selinum, Ancient Greek σέλινον (selinon). It is evidently named after the city-state Σελινοῦς (Selinous) in Sicily, which was founded upon a spot abundant with wild celery, and from there the plant became widely associated with the city: its coat-of-arms was a celery leaf, its coins were stamped with the image of a celery leaf, and Plutarch tells us that they once presented the temple of Apollo at Delphi with a solid-gold statue of a celery plant as thanks for victory in war.
Endure all so that you might be an acceptable offering to divinity.
(Sextus, Sentences.)
Some lovely reconstructions by Hermann Schenck of the paintings of Polygnotos, which were previously unknown to me. (All are links because they are very large.)
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8: Unity. [...]
First line moves. When there is confidence in his ruler, accord is blameless. When there is sincerity filling a plain vessel, ultimately there will come other blessings.
(I Ching.)
[Socrates said to Euthydemus,] "Do you know that to the inquiry, 'How am I to please the gods?' the Delphic god replies, 'Follow the custom [νόμος] of the state;' and everywhere, I suppose, it is the custom that men propitiate the gods with sacrifices according to their power. How then can a man honor the gods more excellently and more devoutly than by doing as they themselves ordain? Only he must fall no whit short of his power. For when he does that, it is surely plain that he is not then honouring the gods. Therefore it is by coming no whit short of his power in honoring the gods that he is to look with confidence for the greatest blessing."
(Xenophon, Memorabilia IV iii.)
Alas, to live in such times that the νόμος ("habit, law") of the state is blood-sacrifice upon the altar of Avarice! Surely that is not what the god means, and perhaps this is what the myth of Osiris is talking about: without a societal example, one cannot please the gods the way they ordain, and one has to cast about in darkness for any means they can. Everyone doing so on their own does not promote societal unity, and so it prevents the expression of divinity (which is characterized by unity).
Still, as Socrates says, the god is honored by one doing their best. Even if the most one can offer is brackish water in a waterskin, if one offers it sincerely, they are without fault.
(A very brief restatement of my interpretation of Hesiod's "Ages of Man" (from the Works and Days) and Empedocles on Nature:)
Above all are the eternal gods: bright Spirit, clear Heaven, the dark Abyss, and twilit Earth. Spirit pervades all, but the others are inhabited by five races: the immortal, good Golden, native inhabitants of Heaven; the long-lived, ambivalent Silver, native inhabitants of the Abyss; the wicked Bronze, guests of the Abyss; the righteous Heroic, guests of Heaven; and us, the weary Iron, native inhabitants of Earth. When one of the Iron race dies, if they too are righteous, they join the Heroes in Heaven; otherwise, they join the Bronze in the Abyss for a time before being reborn to Earth.
ὤ μοι ἐγὼ τί πάθω; μέγα μὲν κακὸν αἴ κε φέβωμαι
πληθὺν ταρβήσας: τὸ δὲ ῥίγιον αἴ κεν ἁλώω
μοῦνος: τοὺς δ᾽ ἄλλους Δαναοὺς ἐφόβησε Κρονίων.
ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός;
οἶδα γὰρ ὅττι κακοὶ μὲν ἀποίχονται πολέμοιο,
ὃς δέ κ᾽ ἀριστεύῃσι μάχῃ ἔνι τὸν δὲ μάλα χρεὼ
ἑστάμεναι κρατερῶς, ἤ τ᾽ ἔβλητ᾽ ἤ τ᾽ ἔβαλ᾽ ἄλλον."What to do? It'd be a big disgrace to run,
afraid of so many; but it would be worse to be captured
alone, since Zeus scared off all my men.
But why am I arguing with myself?
I know better than anyone that losers wimp out,
but whoever would be a hero must
stand firm, win or lose."
(Odusseus speaking. Homer, Iliad XI 404–10, as loosely translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
Remember that Odusseus had eleven more long years of "standing firm" as a hero (ἀριστεύῃσι μάχῃ "to be the best at fighting") before he became a Hero (ἥρω "ascended human soul"). Nobody said it would be easy, but what's the alternative?
Thence the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, at the first zone surrendering the energy of increase and decrease; at the second evil machination, a device now inactive; at the third the illusion of longing, now inactive; at the fourth the ruler's arrogance, now freed of excess; at the fifth unholy presumption and daring recklessness; at the sixth the evil impulses that come from wealth, now inactive; and at the seventh zone the deceit that lies in ambush. And then, stripped of the effects of the cosmic framework, the human enters the region of the ogdoad; he has his own proper power, and along with the blessed he hymns the father. Those present there rejoice together in his presence, and, having become like his companions, he also hears certain powers that exist beyond the ogdoadic region and hymn god with sweet voice. They rise up to the father in order and surrender themselves to the powers, and, having become powers, they enter into god. This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.
(Corpus Hermeticum I "Poimandres" xxv ff., as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver.)
Nor was Mercury negligent in the performance of her commands; for, running every where, through all nations, he cried her in the following words: "IF ANY ONE CAN SEIZE IN HER FLIGHT, OR DISCOVER WHERE A FUGITIVE PRINCESS, A SERVANT OF VENUS, AND OF THE NAME OF PSYCHE, LIES CONCEALED, LET HIM OR HER BRING WORD TO MERCURY AT THE TEMPLE OF VENUS MURTIA, AND RECEIVE, AS A REWARD OF THE DISCOVERY, SEVEN SWEET KISSES FROM VENUS HERSELF, AND ONE MORE SWEETLY HONEYED BY THE THRUST OF HER ALLURING TONGUE."
(Apuleius, The Golden Ass VI, as translated by Thomas Taylor with edits by yours truly.)
I always thought the reward of Venus for the capture of Psyche was cute, but I recently realized that it is actually brilliant and my estimation of Apuleius continues to increase. Psyche turned herself in and Venus (eventually) gave her the promised reward: sweet release from the dominion of the spheres of the seven planets and the more-honey-sweet-by-far contact with the eighth sphere of the fixed stars.
If you're interested in reading Homer, my favorite translation for pleasure reading is W. H. D. Rouse's: The Story of Achilles and The Story of Odysseus. (The latter was even suitable for reading to my then-seven-year-old daughter so long as I explained things as I went along.) Those are hard to find in hardcopy, but don't let that stop you: even if all you can get locally is Samuel Butler's translation, it's stodgy but it's fine (for example, I have a really nice leather-bound, gilt-edged edition from Barnes and Noble, which I got while traveling for maybe $20 and is pretty hard to complain about).
Alexander Pope's Iliad is exquisite but I can't read heroic verse for more than a couple pages before my eyes bleed.
If I need a very precise translation (if I'm trying to understand the Greek line-by-line, say), I've been very impressed with Andrew Lang's Iliad and Odyssey every time I've looked things up in them (but I haven't read them cover to cover).
My daughter liked the Odyssey so much that she begged me to read her the Iliad, but even with an easy translation (and my skipping over large sections), it was too much for her. She enjoyed Rosemary Sutcliffe's retelling for children, Black Ships Before Troy, though.
Simonides, when asked which was the greater, Homer or Hesiod, said, "Hesiod was born of the Muses, but Homer was born of the Graces."
(Vatican Collection of Greek Sayings.)
In the same way, Hesiod extols the virtues of the hard-working, but Homer extols the virtues of the rich.
For all the time I've spent lately on the deeds of Akhilles and the cunning of Odusseus, it is worth noting that the only Homeric example of avoiding Haides (besides Ganumedes and Tithonous) is the love of Menelaos:
σοι δ᾽ οὐ θέσφατόν ἐστι, διοτρεφὲς ὦ Μενέλαε,
Ἄργει ἐν ἱπποβότῳ θανέειν καὶ πότμον ἐπισπεῖν,
ἀλλά σ᾽ ἐς Ἠλύσιον πεδίον καὶ πείρατα γαίης
ἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν, ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυς,
τῇ περ ῥηίστη βιοτὴ πέλει ἀνθρώποισιν:
οὐ νιφετός, οὔτ᾽ ἂρ χειμὼν πολὺς οὔτε ποτ᾽ ὄμβρος,
ἀλλ᾽ αἰεὶ Ζεφύροιο λιγὺ πνείοντος ἀήτας
Ὠκεανὸς ἀνίησιν ἀναψύχειν ἀνθρώπους:
οὕνεκ᾽ ἔχεις Ἑλένην καί σφιν γαμβρὸς Διός ἐσσι."But it is not ordained for you, blessed Menelaos,
to die and meet your end in pastoral Argos,
but to the Elusion plain at earth's end
the immortals will send you, where auburn Rhadamanthus is,
where life is easiest for men—
neither snow nor heavy storms nor rain,
but always gusts of Zephuros's whistling breezes
Okeanos sends up to refresh men—
because you have Helene and they consider you Zeus's family."
(Proteus speaking. Homer, Odyssey IV 561–9, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
Like many, I suppose, my first experience with divination was the Tarot, probably a decade ago by now. I learned from it that particular oracles don't work for everyone—even now, I struggle to get almost anything from it, but I've had readings done for me which have shocked me with the detail that could be pulled from even a single card.
I met Geomancy back in 2019 by stumbling across Greer's books on the subject (which have issues but are the best available on the topic). It took maybe six months to get acceptable at it, and I still cast a chart every day, month, and year, since no other oracle does so well at giving me a bird's eye view of a situation. Its main downside is that it is so abstract and impersonal, which makes it difficult to pull out a course of action from it. I used to use it for specific inquiries, too, but it has lately been supplanted at these by other oracles.
I have been playing with the I Ching seriously for about eight months. True to its name, I have found it to really excel for trying to understand how a situation will evolve, and consequently for what strategy to adopt: not so much "should I do X?" but more "given X, what should I expect?" The main difficulty I've had with it is the culture barrier: the I Ching is deeply concerned with material well-being and the correct ordering of society, and, erm, neither of those are of much interest to an ascetic hermit like me.
But around the same time as I picked up the I Ching, I came across a couple ancient Greek oracles. Both are described in John Opsopaus's The Oracles of Homer and the Bones (which is how I discovered them), though—you know me!—I've dug up and use the original source material for both as best I can.
The first of these is the Astragalomanteion ("Knucklebone Oracle"), which we've found inscribed on a number of columns dug up in various places in Asia Minor. The idea is that you roll five knucklebones (which act as four-sided dice), and look up an answer related to some divinity from the column. I have found this to be quick, simple, and excellent for questions of the "should I do X?" variety. Curiously, when I ask a question, the responding divinity is always related to the question at hand (e.g. a question about my house might be answered by Zeus Ktesios, "protector of the household"), and when the divinity is unexpected, this gives interesting nuance into unseen factors affecting what I want to do.
The second of these is the Homeromanteion ("Homer Oracle"), which we've dug up in a few ancient books of magic (there is a copy, for example, in the famous Greek Magical Papyri). The idea is that you roll three dice (of the normal, six-sided variety) and get as an answer a line from the Iliad or Odyssey. I would have thought that the context in the story matters, but at least for me, the text of the line itself has been paramount and what the line refers to in the story doesn't matter so much. It gives the feel of a line spoken directly from the divinity to answer your question; in that sense, it is like a Magic 8-Ball that is actually useful. It's a versatile oracle which can be used for many kinds of questions, but I find myself reaching for it when I don't really know exactly what I'm looking for; "what should I know about X?" is, I suppose, as good a way to put it as any.
All of these systems have their quirks, and, odd as they are, I have learned that "when in Rome, do as the Romans:" those quirks are there for a reason. In Geomancy, for example, one should never conduct a reading during a thunderstorm, since if you do, the answer won't be accurate. The Homeromanteion requires observance of lucky/unlucky days and the use of a specific prayer to Lukian Apollon before casting it, which is drawn (creatively) from the Iliad and Odyssey. I wanted to understand it better, so I spent way too long translating it for myself:
κλῦθι ἄναξ ὅς που Λυκίης ἐν πίονι δήμῳ
εἲς ἢ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ: δύνασαι δὲ σὺ πάντοσ' ἀκούειν
ἀνέρι κηδομένῳ, ὡς νῦν ἐμὲ κῆδος ἱκάνει·
καί μοι τοῦτ' ἀγόρευσον ἐτήτυμον, ὄφρ' ἐὺ εἰδῶ,
ὅττι μάλιστ' ἐθέλω καί μοι φίλον ἔπλετο θυμῷ.Hear me, Lord, whether you are in the rich land of Lukia
or here in Troia, for you are able to listen in all directions
to a man in distress, as I am now:
tell me truly, so I may know well,
whatever I want most which has endeared itself to my heart.
The first three lines are from the Iliad XVI 514–6: Patroklos kills Sarpedon, captain of the Lukians; Sarpedon's injured lieutenant Glaukos prays to Apollon for healing and strength so that he might defend his captain's corpse. The fourth line is from the Odyssey I 174: Athenaie comes to the house of Odusseus in disguise; Odusseus's son, Telemakhos, asks the stranger who they are and why they have come. The last line is from the Odyssey XVIII 113, except that the sentence has been modified from the second-person ("you"/"your") to first-person ("I"/"my"): Odusseus returns home in disguise; the suitors welcome him with grand, empty words.
It is reasonable for the prayer to say "here in Troia," since the Neoplatonists, beloved of Apollon, considered Troia to be the material world (e.g. it is as far from home as Odusseus, the soul, could ever get).
δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει
δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων:
ᾧ μέν κ' ἀμμίξας δώῃ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος,
ἄλλοτε μέν τε κακῷ ὅ γε κύρεται, ἄλλοτε δ' ἐσθλῷ:
ᾧ δέ κε τῶν λυγρῶν δώῃ, λωβητὸν ἔθηκε,
καί ἑ κακὴ βούβρωστις ἐπὶ χθόνα δῖαν ἐλαύνει,
φοιτᾷ δ' οὔτε θεοῖσι τετιμένος οὔτε βροτοῖσιν.For two jars sit on the floor of Zeus's house,
one full of curses, the other blessings.
To the man Thunder-Loving Zeus gives of them mixed,
his luck changes with the times—here good, there bad;
but to the man he gives only of the bad, abuse is his lot:
evil misery harries him over the divine earth,
and he wanders respected by neither gods nor men.
(Akhilles speaking. Homer, Iliad XXIV 527–33, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
But Zeus never gives of his jars unmixed—if it seems so, it is only because of the temporal mist on our eyes; so if there is only trauma here, there must be some recompense for it, either in the past or in the future; so either karma is your fate, or blessings are your destiny. The inability to see this is, I presume, why Akhilles's shade sat in Hades, still bemoaning his lot long after.
Socrates. Do you remember who Hesiod says the daimons are?
Hermogenes. No, I don't.
Socrates. Not even that he says a golden race was the first race of men to be born?
Hermogenes. That I remember.
Socrates. Here is what he says:
But since Fate has covered up this race,
They are called holy spirits under the earth,
Noble, averters of evil, guardians of mortal men.Hermogenes. And?
Socrates. Well, I think what he means is not that the golden race was made of gold, but that it was good and beautiful. And I regard it as a proof of this that he further says we are the iron race.
(Plato, Cratylus 397E–398A.)
Gold is valuable, but it cannot equal iron in its multiplicity of uses.
(Yoshida Kenko, Tsurezuregusa.)
Pondering more on Hesiod's races of men:
Gold is extremely nonreactive ("incorruptable"), which is why the angels are called gold: they do not fall into matter. (Each of the other metals mentioned by Hesiod readily tarnish or corrode.)
Silver is extremely thermally and electrically conductive (that is, it allows energy to pass through it very readily), which is why the daimons are called silver. (Gold and silver are also very shiny and beautiful compared to bronze and iron, which is why Hesiod treats them as first-rate.)
Bronze is an alloy, of mixed characteristics, and in properties, intermediate between silver and iron: while it can be put to many uses, it maintains silver's high conductivity; in the same way, the shades could have accomplished anything, but were too readily "heated" by the passions and so tended towards silver.
Even though a 𓅃 heru "falcon" lives on the earth, it soars upwards into the high air, which is why the heroes are called heroic.
Iron is extremely versatile and can be put to a variety of uses, which is why men are called iron.
What use will you be put to?
Osiris is Fire itself, but his symbol is the "eye of Ra," the Sun, which is a reflection of Fire in the material world.
Set is Aither itself, but his symbol is a dragon or serpent (cf. the serpent chasing Tewaret, the Python, etc.) as representative of the Eclipse, which is a reflection of Aither in the material world (since shadows can only exist in the material aither, e.g. in "empty" space).
Horus is the prototype of the ascended individual soul (and thus a Platonic Form or Idea existing within Osiris). While not being a god in the same sense as the others, he too may be symbolically or virtually reflected within the material world, and hence he may be considered to be symbolized by the "eye of Horus," the Moon, which is an illuminating rocky body and thus the reflection of both Fire and Earth (e.g. the child of Osiris and Isis). (Apollo is the equivalent in Greek, and his "silver bow" is the crescent moon.) While the "true" Horus is an Idea rather than a being, he exists representationally at all levels of being, and these are what we interact with (e.g. a saint might be an Earthy Horus, a venerated ancestor might be a Watery Horus, a hero might be an Airy Horus).
Anubis is another Idea existing within Osiris, that of transition between levels of being, and his symbol is the dawn or dusk (the meeting point of the Firey Sun and the Watery horizon, e.g. the child of Osiris and Nephthys). (Artemis is the equivalent in Greek, which is why she presides over both childbirth in her role as midwife and death in her role as huntress, and her "golden darts" are the reflection of the rising or setting Sun over the sea, which looks like a shaft tipped by the Sun itself pointing upwards.) He, too, exists representationally at all levels of being (e.g. a seer or shaman might be an Earthy Anubis, a spirit guide might be a Watery Anubis, etc.).
ὦ φίλος, οὔ σε ἔολπα κακὸν καὶ ἄναλκιν ἔσεσθαι,
εἰ δή τοι νέῳ ὧδε θεοὶ πομπῆες ἕπονται.
οὐ μὲν γάρ τις ὅδ᾽ ἄλλος Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἐχόντων,
ἀλλὰ Διὸς θυγάτηρ, κυδίστη Τριτογένεια,
ἥ τοι καὶ πατέρ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἐτίμα.My friend, I can't imagine your becoming base or weak
if a guiding god attends you in this way even in your youth!
For this one is none other of those who have houses on Olumpos,
but the daughter of Zeus, most great Thrice-born,
who also so honored your noble father among the Greek host.
(Nestor speaking to Telemakhos after the disguised Athenaie turns into an eagle and flies away. Homer, Odyssey III 375–379, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
It seems almost too much to ask for in such degraded times, but if I had any wish for the world, it would be that our angels attend to all of us from our youth in such a way that it would be inconceivable for any of us to become base or weak.
(As a side note, I was quite intrigued to see Athenaie called κυδίστη Τριτογένεια "most great Thrice-born," an epithet so reminiscent of Ἑρμῆς ὁ Τρισμέγιστος "Thrice-greatest Hermes" that I can't believe it to be a coincidence; it is noteworthy that the Pythagoreans called the equilateral triangle Athenaie (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris LXXV), just as I linked it to Hermes. For whatever reason, translators always seem to translate this term in far-fetched ways...)
You have four parts to your being: the Fiery consciousness that infuses all, an Airy soul, a Watery imagination, and an Earthy body. I sometimes often almost exclusively like to talk about guardian angels, but the Neoplatonists didn't consider you to have just one of these: rather, each part of your being has a guide set over it, and the one you interact with is of the degree immediately higher than whatever part of your being consciousness reflects off of.
When you are focused on your body, your goal is to master the civic virtues, and in this you are aided by the natal daimon, a being of Water who is set over the body, tending it and keeping it whole. Since this being is set over your body, it only persists with the body for the length of a single life; this is the daimon which Socrates (quoting Er) talks about in the Republic as going with a person when they enter into life, and it's the being which astrological mechanisms relate to and identify.
When you are focused on your imagination, your goal is to master the cathartic virtues, and in this you are aided by the guardian angel, a being of Air who is set over the imagination. This being is immortal and persists with a soul through all its incarnations, shepherding it back up to the spiritual world. Few people, it seems, energize at the level of Water, and this is why the Egyptian priest found it remarkable that Plotinus's guiding spirit was a god and not a mere daimon.
When you are focused on your soul, only one being remains above you, and that is Fire itself: so heroes (those of us who no longer require bodies but live in the spiritual world) no longer have a guardian angel, but are guided by God (which is why Proclus says, "as souls we are dependent upon the Intellect alone, but as souls using a body we are in need of the guardian spirit").
What happens to those guiding spirits as we ascend the ranks? As beings of Water, natal daimons aren't immortal; they outlive the body they tend, but not indefinitely, and I presume it is they who meet us after death and help us to process our life's experiences. Guardian angels, on the other hand, are immortal and persist indefinitely: I presume that even if they aren't our guardians any more in the spiritual world, that they help us acclimate to that world when we first return there, and after that remain our good and close friends.
I have been wondering about this in the context of the Odyssey. As I have said, if Odusseus is the individual soul in the process of reascent, then Ogugia is the limit of the world of Earth, Skheria is the limit of the world of Water, and Ithake is "home," the world of Air. It is noteworthy that Hermes aids Odusseus on Aiaia (giving him moly to protect him from Kirke) and on Ogugia (conveying Zeus's will that Kalupso release Odusseus), but thereafter he is aided by Athenaie (advising him on Skheria, helping him to reclaim his house on Ithake). So in that sense, Hermes acts like Odusseus's natal daimon, while Athenaie acts like Odusseus's guardian angel.
(It is amusing to me that these two deities are the two Olumpians which are described as children. Athenaie in particular is not often depicted this way in modern times, but that is exactly what "Pallas" means: "pre-pubescent girl." Presumably their depiction as children reflects their minor status as compared to other daimons or angels (or gods, like Zeus and Demeter). Certainly, Athenaie's fiery outbursts at Zeus make more sense when she's seen in this way—"daddy, you don't even care about Odusseus!" as she stomps her feet—and I would love to see people draw Athenaie as swimming in an aigis much, much too big for her!)
ἐχθρὰ δέ μοι τοῦ δῶρα, τίω δέ μιν ἐν καρὸς αἴσῃ. [...]
οὐδ' εἴ μοι τόσα δοίη ὅσα ψάμαθός τε κόνις τε,
οὐδέ κεν ὧς ἔτι θυμὸν ἐμὸν πείσει' Ἀγαμέμνων
πρίν γ' ἀπὸ πᾶσαν ἐμοὶ δόμεναι θυμαλγέα λώβην.I hate his gifts, and I've no respect for the man himself. [...]
Not even if he gave me as many gifts as there is sand or dust,
not even so would Agamemnon yet appease my anger
until he has paid me for his bitter outrage in full.
(Akhilles ranting. Homer, Iliad IX 378, 385–7, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
I often tell people that half the battle is to identify which myth you're in. Sometimes you're the little billy goat gruff, and the solution is to foist the troll off on your older brother; other times, you're the youngest prince, and the solution is to be brave and follow the advice of the troll's captive princess; other times, you're the youngest princess, and the solution is to sing the troll to sleep and make good your escape. Knowing which littlest-of-three you are tells you what approach you should take.
With all the horrors going on in the world, people keep wondering why my stance is that positive evil doesn't exist, and I think it comes back to identifying what myth we're in: when I look at the CIAs and CEOs of the world, I don't see great and powerful demons working towards cosmic Chaos, I see spoiled and petulant children who can't even tell right from wrong. The solution isn't to defeat them in battle—indeed, to do so is to play to their strengths and our weaknesses!—it is to educate them in their folly.
And, oftentimes, the simplest way to educate them is to let them see the consequences of their actions first-hand.
Okay, this is strictly silly and has nothing to do with spirituality.
Book II of the Iliad tells us that Odusseus came to Troia with twelve ships. It doesn't say how many men those ships had, but it does say the Boiotian ships had six score men apiece; if we assume the same figure for the Kephallenians, then Odusseus initially commanded 1440 men.
Odusseus still had all twelve ships by the time he reached the island of the Circle-Eyes. For sake of argument, I'll assume that he divided his remaining men—however many they were—evenly among his remaining ships when they left Troia, but didn't redistribute them afterwards as they took casualties (all of which came from Odusseus's ship).
When Odusseus reached Aiaia, he divided his men into two halves, one half commanded by himself, and the other by Eurulokhos, his brother-in-law. Eurulokhos's group had 23 men; I presume, therefore, that Odusseus's either also had 23 or else had 24 (with Odusseus taking the odd man out due to seniority). This means that at Aiaia, Odusseus had either 46 or 47 men.
Prior to Aiaia, seven of the men from Odusseus's ship got eaten (one by Antiphates, the king of the Laistrugons; and six by Very-Famous, the Circle-Eye), meaning he had 53 or 54 after the counter-attack by Ismarians; since they killed six men from each ship, the ships presumably had 59 or 60 each when leaving Troia.
If we assume 60 each, then things are too nice and neat to be a coincidence: this would mean that the Troians halved Odusseus's men, while the Ismarians decimated them, which is very convenient from an authorship perspective. If we accept that, then the voyage looks like this:
Odusseus left Ithake with twelve ships of 120 men each (1440).
Odusseus left Troia with twelve ships of 60 men each (720).
Odusseus left Thrake with twelve ships of 54 men each (648).
Odusseus left the island of the Circle-Eyes with eleven ships of 54 men each and one ship (his own) of 48 men (642).
Odusseus left the island of the Laistrugons with one ship of 47 men.
Odusseus left Aiaia with one ship of 46 men.
Odusseus left Skulla and Kharubdis with one ship of 40 men.
Odusseus left Triangle Island alone.
How harrowing! On the other hand, Odusseus was the only eyewitness and a notorious liar, so who really knows?
κείσομ’ ἐπεί κε θάνω: νῦν δὲ κλέος ἐσθλὸν ἀροίμην,
I can rest when I'm dead; for now, I must win a good name,
(Akhilles whining. Homer, Iliad XVIII 121.)
This line is so me that it's funny. (Thetis's reply, "but you don't even have any armor," is also apposite.)
Ἑρμείας ἀκάκητα κατ’ εὐρώεντα κέλευθα.
πὰρ δ’ ἴσαν Ὠκεανοῦ τε ῥοὰς καὶ λευκάδα πέτρην,
ἠδὲ παρ’ Ἠελίοιο Πύλας καὶ δῆμον ὀνείρων
ἤϊσαν: αἶψα δ’ ἵκοντο κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,
ἔνθα τε ναίουσι ψυχαί, εἴδωλα καμόντων.Beneficent Hermeias led [the souls of the suitors] down the moldy ways:
they went past the currents of Okeanos and the white rock,
past the Gates of the Sun and the land of dreams,
and soon they came to a meadow of asphodel,
where souls live, the reflections of worn-out men.
(Homer, Odyssey XXIV 10–4, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
I much prefer the Hesiodic map of the end of the world, but Homer's seems to me to be no less valid:
Okeanos is the night sky and the white rock is the Moon, demarcating the end of the material (e.g. "sublunary") world.
(Translators don't usually seem to know what to do with λευκάδα πέτρην: I've seen "white rock," "rock of Leukas," and "Lefkada," this last being an island in the Ionian sea, and the birthplace and namesake of Lafcadio Hearn. But the last is silly, since Lefkada isn't even in Okeanos, and anyway we're speaking here of εὐρώεντα κέλευθα "the moldy ways," which are beyond earthly sight.)
The Gates of the Sun are 𓈌 akhet (cf. Hesiodic Akheron), that place immediately beyond the eastern and western horizon where the Sun comes from at dawn and goes to at dusk, the threshold between Earth and Haides (cf. Egyptian 𓇽 duat).
Haides itself consists of three locations: the land of dreams is closest and refers to that part of the world of Water which is densest (e.g. the lower part of the astral world, between the Moon and Saturn) and which mortals go to when they sleep; the meadows of asphodel is moderate and refers to that part of the world of Water which is least dense (e.g. the upper part of the astral world, between Saturn and the sphere of fixed stars) and which mortals go to when they die; and finally, the Elusion fields is distant and refers to the world of Air which mortals go to when they apotheosize (whether by love, cf. Menelaos; by virtue, cf. Rhadamanthus; or by deed, cf. Herakles).
ἠδ᾽ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,
λυσιμελής, πάντων δὲ θεῶν πάντων τ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.and Love, who is the most beautiful of the deathless gods,
who relaxes the limbs; of every gods' and mortals'
hearts, minds, and careful plans, he conquers.
(Hesiod, Theogony 120–2, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
κάλλιστος is a tricky word, here; it is generally translated "most beautiful," but my dictionary seems to give the sense of "most good" in general—most good in form (hence "most beautiful"), most good in disposition ("kindliest"), most good in worthiness ("noblest"), etc. I'm not really sure in which sense it is meant, if indeed those of Hesiod's day would have distinguished them at all. Plotinus, at least, considered all superlatives (beauty, truth, etc.) to coincide in the Intellect.
I fear making sense of this is beyond my present capacities, but that doesn't make it any less worthy of a topic for meditation. Similarly, it is worth considering why Hesiod and Empedocles place Love at the top of their hierarchies, above even kingly Zeus.
Since I started working with geomancy, I have consistently found Acquisitio, the figure of abundance, to be the most inauspicious figure by a mile: always a signal of extreme stress. This has been a source of great confusion to me, since every textbook I've seen considers it to be, generally speaking, the most favorable figure of all.
Today I noticed Nigel Richmond's commentary on I Ching figure 28, "Excess," which says, "We recognize excess by the stress it creates: without stress excess is felt as abundance."
Oh. Well, then.
Well, shit.
While Agamemnon is away, Aegisthus usurps the throne of Mycenae. When Agamemnon returns, Aegisthus invites him to a feast, whereupon he murders Agamemnon. Years later, Agamemnon's son Orestes returns and kills Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, but the Furies prevent him from taking the throne. Athena holds a trial in which the role of each parent in procreation is central and rules in favor of Orestes, who becomes king of Mycenae.
Compare to:
While Osiris is away, Set makes plans to usurp the throne of Egypt. When Osiris returns, Set invites him to a feast, whereupon he murders Osiris and usurps the throne. Years later, Osiris's son Horus defeats Set and kills Isis, but Set prevents him from taking the throne. The gods hold a trial in which the role of each parent in procreation is central and, on the advice of Thoth, rule in favor of Horus, who becomes king of Egypt.
| Fire | actively | static |
|---|---|---|
| Air | actively | changing |
| Water | passively | changing |
| Earth | passively | static |
That is to say, Osiris-Zeus and Set-Aidoneus are male because they act upon, while Isis-Hera and Nephthys-Nestis are female because they are acted upon. Osiris-Zeus and Isis-Hera are married and king/queen of the golden age because they are static; Set-Aidoneus and Nephthys-Nestis are married and always trying to topple and/or put back together the golden age because they are mutable.
Thus, without soul acting on bodies, they simply fall apart. With soul acting on them, they grow on their own, requiring no special effort. The higher mental faculties, however, require effort in order to grow and develop. Consciousness itself is already at its peak capacity and is ever-illuminating.
The goal of the Mysteries is to overcome Earth and Water, and so they enjoined silence on their followers in order to force them to make effort, because that is the only way one's Airy part can grow.
It seems that in the Egyptian myth, Shu separates his married children Nut (Heaven) and Geb (Earth); in retaliation, Geb kills Shu (his father), marries Tefnut (his mother, since his wife Nut remains inaccessible to him), and usurps the throne. This is, of course, related to the myth of Kronos, but I suppose it's also the source of the Oidipous myth. The sphinx, then, is a reference to the source of the myth (Egypt) and its riddle is meant to say that the story is to be interpreted mythically rather than literally.
History is a way of flattening out and making sense of the infinite complexity of happenings in nature, and so is necessarily a narrative. (Indeed, it a political propaganda narrative: we say that "history is written by the victors.") Nature itself doesn't deal in narratives, only humans do; so narratives are an artificial, social construct. Being a narrative, history therefore belongs to the realm of myth, not to "objective" "fact."
It is as if history was invented for propaganda purposes a few thousand years ago and we lost the thread, and have been for generations blindly obeying the propaganda of states that no longer exist. Much better, I think, to regard it for what it is so that we are not enslaved to it.
Hades is the material world. Orpheus is Horus's bones (his Osiris part). Eurydice is Horus's flesh (his Isis part). Far from being Orpheus's great mistake, Eurydice was never supposed to leave Hades, just as it was only Horus's bones which ascend to rule Egypt.
My favorite climate change myth is that of Erysichthon (which we know from Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII 725 ff.). The original is worth reading, but the gist of it is as follows:
Once upon a time, there was a massive and sacred oak tree in the grove of Ceres ("Mother Earth"), used as a holy site and wreathed in prayer tablets and thanks-offerings. King Erysichthon ("Earth-Plunderer") wanted this tree's timbers to build a palace. When his men refused to fell it, he took an axe himself and chopped it down. The dryads of the grove went grieving to Ceres, who sent her sister Fames ("Famine") to curse Erysichthon with insatiable hunger.
Erysichthon ate all the food in the palace. Once his storehouse was empty, he drained the treasury to sate his hunger. Once the treasury was empty, he sold everything he possessed to feed himself, even selling his daughter Mestra ("Crafty?") into slavery.
Now, Mestra had been raped by Poseidon, but the gods give even as they take, and she had been blessed with the power of transformation. When she had been sold a slave and was being led away to a ship, she transformed herself into a fisherman and so escaped back to her father's house. But Erysichthon simply sold her into slavery again and again, and each time Mestra would escape by transforming into something innocuous.
Even the income from his daughter was insufficient to feed his hunger, and at last, in extremity, Erysichthon ate the only thing left to him: himself.
Now, it must be remembered that myths are things that never happened but always are: it's not a history, but a lesson. Ovid tells the story merely to entertain, but myths exist in order to teach us by asking us to reflect upon them, and I find that once one has the key to unlock a myth, it falls open easily.
The key to this particular myth, I think, is that King Erysichthon represents a society that commodifies nature: once he begins to consume it, the consumption becomes insatiable and must be sustained at an ever-increasing rate. Once the natural world is despoiled of its goods, the society begins to consume itself, to its eventual destruction. In our case, Erysichthon's food is oil, and as it runs out we see our society consuming itself with financialization in order to keep the game going. Despite appearances, society is hollowing out and falling apart, and soon enough even financial tricks will not be enough to stave off destruction.
Mestra, though, tells us what those of us who are under the governance of such a society, but who want nothing to do with it, can do about it. Just as Mestra was sold into slavery, so are we also forced to prostitute ourselves for the benefit of others. Just as Mestra was raped, so also are we forced to become shapeshifters. But if we stay nimble and are willing to transform ourselves however circumstances require, we can survive. There's no real happy ending—Mestra, in the end, is merely left alone to fend for herself—but she has developed her resourcefulness and is no longer bound to her wicked father, which is a victory, even if only a modest one.
In ancient times, the Nile had seven branches to the sea: the Pelusiac, Tanitic, Mendesian, Phatnitic, Sebennytic, Bolbitine, and Canopic. In myth, the Nile is the Milky Way and the sea is the material world. The seven streams by which the influences of the spiritual world empty into ours are, of course, the seven planets. Perhaps this is where the notion that every guardian angel's influence resonates most greatly with some one or the other of the planets comes from.
Homer usually calls Apollon ἑκάεργος "sniper," but Artemis ἰοχέαιρα "arrow-pourer," which suggests that Apollon specializes in accuracy while Artemis specializes in firing speed. This is a point worth contemplation.
Ζῆνα δέ τις προφρόνως ἐπινίκια κλάζων
τεύξεται φρενῶν τὸ πᾶν,
τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-
σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος
θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν.
στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας
μνησιπήμων πόνος: καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-
κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν.
δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βίαιος
σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων.But whoever willingly sings a victory-song for Zeus, he shall gain wisdom altogether—Zeus, who sets mortals on the path to understanding; Zeus, who has established a fixed law that "wisdom comes by suffering." But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drops over the mind in sleep, so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods enthroned upon their awful seats.
(The chorus of Argive elders speaking. Aiskhulos, Agamemnon 174–83, as translated by Herbert Weir Smyth.)
At Eleusis, there were two sets of mystery festivals: the Lesser Mysteries (which occurred around the spring equinox) and the Greater Mysteries (which occurred around the autumn equinox). It is the latter of these that are mythically recorded in part as the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (and which I talked about as the Mystery of Isis). Thomas Taylor (Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries I) says that "the Lesser Mysteries occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in subjection to the body, so those of the Greater obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual vision."
That is probably all historically factual; but be that as it may, I think the distinction is mistaken. The Mysteries of Isis/Demeter aren't the true Greater Mysteries; neither are those of Osiris/Dionusos or even those of Horos/Apollo. All of these are Lesser Mysteries in the sense that they are preparatory; learning to reflect upon them and discern what they mean is meant to give you the tools to unpack the Greater Mysteries.
Even if the Lesser Mysteries should not be spoken of—and this is for good reason; those of you who have been following my Horos series have been taking them with salt, right?—it is possible to speak of them. The Greater Mysteries are those which cannot be spoken of even in theory: these are the mysteries of your soul itself, that which is strictly internal to you. Only you can experience that myth and explore that terrain, therefore only you can master those mysteries.
Hearing the Lesser Mysteries makes you an apprentice. Mastering the Lesser Mysteries means you know how to use the tools of the mysteries; in a sense, you become a journeyman, capable of work but not yet having constructed a masterpiece. Mastering the Greater Mysteries is constructing your masterpiece, and that masterpiece is your Soul.
Having mastered them, you as Kassandra are both blessed with Illumination and cursed with being unable to communicate it. Still, one should have the good hope of joining the ranks of those who, too, have Seen...
Δαναός. ἁγνόν τ᾽ Ἀπόλλω, φυγάδ᾽ ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ θεόν.
Χορός. εἰδὼς ἂν αἶσαν τήνδε συγγνοίη βροτοῖς.
Δαναός. συγγνοῖτο δῆτα καὶ παρασταίη πρόφρων.Danaos. Pray also to holy Apollo, a god exiled from heaven.
Daughters. Knowing our lot, he may well pity us mortals.
Danaos. May he indeed pity us and so be kindly disposed to us.
(Aiskhulos, The Suppliants 214–6, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly. "Danaos" means "ancient," by the way, a fitting name for the Perseus myth's equivalent of Atum.)
τόσσον ἔνερθ᾽ ὑπὸ γῆς, ὅσον οὐρανός ἐστ᾽ ἀπὸ γαίης:
τόσσον γάρ τ᾽ ἀπὸ γῆς ἐς Τάρταρον ἠερόεντα.
ἐννέα γὰρ νύκτας τε καὶ ἤματα χάλκεος ἄκμων
οὐρανόθεν κατιὼν δεκάτῃ κ᾽ ἐς γαῖαν ἵκοιτο:
ἐννέα δ᾽ αὖ νύκτας τε καὶ ἤματα χάλκεος ἄκμων
ἐκ γαίης κατιὼν δεκάτῃ κ᾽ ἐς Τάρταρον ἵκοι.
τὸν πέρι χάλκεον ἕρκος ἐλήλαται: ἀμφὶ δέ μιν νὺξ
τριστοιχεὶ κέχυται περὶ δειρήν: αὐτὰρ ὕπερθεν
γῆς ῥίζαι πεφύασι καὶ ἀτρυγέτοιο θαλάσσης.as far beneath the earth as heaven is above it,
that is how far it is from earth to Tartaros:
since a bronze anvil falling from heaven to earth
for nine days and nights would land on the tenth,
and a bronze anvil falling from earth to Tartaros
for nine days and nights would land on the tenth.
Around it runs a bronze fence, beyond which night
pours in three rows like a collar, while above it
grow the roots of earth and the barren sea.
(Hesiod, Theogony 720–8, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly. Note that the translation is, alas, not line-for-line due to word order considerations.)
ἤ μιν ἑλὼν ῥίψω ἐς Τάρταρον ἠερόεντα
τῆλε μάλ’, ἧχι βάθιστον ὑπὸ χθονός ἐστι βέρεθρον,
ἔνθα σιδήρειαί τε πύλαι καὶ χάλκεος οὐδός,
τόσσον ἔνερθ’ Ἀΐδεω ὅσον οὐρανός ἐστ’ ἀπὸ γαίης:or I will pick him up and throw him into murky Tartaros
very far away, where the deepest abyss lies under the earth,
surrounded by iron gates and a border of bronze,
as far beneath Hades as heaven is above the earth;
(Zeus speaking. Iliad VIII 13–16, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)
Ἔστι μὲν οὖν ἡ πορεία διττὴ πᾶσιν ἢ ἀναβαίνουσιν ἢ ἄνω ἐλθοῦσιν· ἡ μὲν γὰρ προτέρα ἀπὸ τῶν κάτω, ἡ δέ γε δευτέρα, οἷς ἤδη ἐν τῷ νοητῶ γενομένοις καὶ οἷον ἴχνος θεῖσιν ἐκεῖ πορεύεσθαι ἀνάγκη, ἕως ἂν εἰς τὸ ἐσχατον τοῦ τόπου ἀφίκωνται, ὃ δὴ τέλος τῆς πορείας ὂν τυγχάνει, ὅταν τις ἐπ' ἄκρῳ γένηται τῷ νοητῷ.
There are two stages of the journey for all, one when they are going up and one when they have arrived above. The first leads from the regions below, the second is for those who are already in the intelligible realm and have gained their footing There, but must still travel till they reach the furthest point of the region; that is the "end of the journey," when you reach the top of the intelligible.
(Plotinus, Enneads I iii "On Dialectic" §1, as translated by A. H. Armstrong.)
The poets describe three worlds: heaven, earth, and Tartaros. We see three worlds in the mysteries, too; heroes always descend twice and reascend twice:
Therefore I think the poets' "heaven" is the Intellect; "earth" is the world of Soul, the abode of angels and purified souls; and "Tartaros" is our material world, the haunt of daimons and men and beasts, a dark prison surrounded by walls of bronze and gates of iron. Indeed, Homer's shades are insensate because most of us, the inhabitants of Hades, are passive, sheep-like. Teiresias alone among them has his wits because, by the gift of Persephone (that is to say, having mastered the mysteries), he is awake to his seven lives (his reincarnations) and has learned from them, becoming a purified soul, a saint, a hero; he sits in Hades merely waiting for his sentence to be commuted.
So, the heroes' two falls are the emanation from the Intellect and the fall into matter; their two returns are their waking up from the material world (which is relatively brief, if one makes the effort, but very unpleasant) and their efforts to master of the spiritual world (which takes long ages of time but is nicer).
But this also explains another thing that's always bothered me. After Zeus deposes Kronos, he and his brothers share power amongst themselves: Zeus became king of heaven; Poseidon, king of the sea; and Hades, king of the underworld. Since I've mostly followed the four-fold Empedoclean model, the three divisions confused me. The poets' model, however, fits it nicely: Zeus ruling (and being) the Intellect, Poseidon ruling the spiritual world (being Soul), and Hades ruling the material world (being Nature). This explains their traditional attributes, with Zeus being the strongest (because the Intellect has power over all existence), Poseidon being a shapeshifter (because spiritual things are without form), and Hades being wealthy (containing all material things); further, the gifts of the Circle-Eyes are the representation of an individual each at each level: Zeus's lightning-bolts represent the ideas held within the Intellect (hence is a symbol of intuition), Poseidon's trident represents the souls held within Soul (hence is a symbol of reason—a trident grabs a fish much better than a spear, just like reason helps us hold onto intuitive insights—and is, perhaps, why Plato insisted on a tripartite soul), and Hades's dogskin represents the bodies held within Nature (hence is a symbol of sensation and is why Apollodoros says that "it allows one to see while not being seen," a riddling way of describing how a body grants sense-perception while also hiding the soul). This last amuses me: what is a body, after all, but a beast skin wrapped around the soul?
Here's a question I've been pondering.
I'm pretty convinced that many of the hero myths and mystery cults in Greece are derivative of those of Horos: they line up too nicely to be a coincidence, in my opinion, and the Greeks themselves say they came from Egypt. There's just one outlier, and to my mind it's such a huge one that it dismantles much of my thesis that the Greeks got all this from Egypt.
Apollon.
While all of his symbolism is identical to Horos's, and while (early, Delian) Apollon's family relationships match up with those of Horos (Zeus=Osiris, Leto=Isis, Asteria=Nephthys, Artemis=Anubis), that's about it: Apollon's myths don't have a Seth-equivalent and don't form a coherent story-arc like the hero myths do (rather, telling a variety of disconnected stories, somewhat like the early Gilgamesh tales before they were compiled into the Epic).
There is also the insistence that Apollon came to the Greeks from Hyperborea, far to the north, this being the birthplace of Leto, the winter home of Apollon, the home of Abaris (his favored priest), etc. etc. (Diodoros of Sicily, Library of History II xlvii)
So while all the Greek heroes seem to be Horos, the Greek hero-in-chief conspicuously does not and seems to come from somewhere to the north. Supporting this, there are rumors in channeled and alternative-history sources that say that the Iliad took place in northern Europe and came to the Aegean along with "the sea peoples" who displaced the Mycenaeans, and these same sources are ones that indicate that what we know as Egypt began as an Atlantean colony or refugee settlement. This is notable since I have speculated (on the basis of the symbolism) that the Horos-myth could be a reaction to the Atlantean civilization; if that's so, it's of course noteworthy that Egypt isn't the only place with literally monumental religio-scientific structures beyond the capability of neolithic societies.
So what are we to make of this? Did the Egyptians get Horos from somewhere else? Is Hyperborea a strictly mythical (rather than historical) location? Are Horos and Apollon two parallel branches of some third source, now lost and/or obscured? What, if anything, does all this have to do with Atlantis?
I guess if there's any takeaway, it's humility: we know so little, and that even if I have pretty convincing evidence of all these hero-myths being related, correlation is not causation...
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