Noumenal Reflections 9798627579535

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Table of Contents

I. II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

Introduction Metaphysics 1. On the Nature of Exoterism 2. On the Concept of the Spirit 3. On the Science of Numbers 4. On Helll 5. On Apocatastasis and the Fewness of the Saved 6. On the Varieties of Theism 7. On Death 8. On the Angelic States 9. On the Ideas Created in the Divine Word 10. On Justice and Mercy 11. On Nothing 12. On the Body 13. On the Proper Attitude towards History 14. On the Veneration of Ancestors 15. On Absolute Divine Simplicity 16. On Psychic Platonism 17. On Atomisml Symbolism 18. On various Saints a. On Saint Andrew b. On Saint Thomas c. On Saint John (the Evangelist) d. On Saint Sebastian e. On Saint Nicholas 19. On the Virgin Maryl 20. On the Qualitative Conception of Space; 21. On the Architectural Symbolism of Cathedrals; 22. On the Wheel of Fortune; Translations 23. On Esoteric Christianity and the Graill 24. On John 1 25. On John 2 26. On the Taol Reviews 27. On Polemics 28. On Cerberus Slept 29. On God Shaped Hole The Parable of Seed

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35 38 40 43 45 48 49 52 54 57 62 66 69 82 87 89

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I. Introduction Editing these disparate blogposts into this little booklet has been quite the experience for me. Reading back one’s older works, even if only months old, often causes slight embarrassment. I suppose that is a good sign, as it shows that one has improved, or at least changed. The essays have been sorted into categories, and within the category they have been sorted chronologically. This may mean that the essays at the beginning of each part are of lesser quality, and those at the end of higher quality. Nevertheless, I have not left any blogposts out, as to give a most complete as possible picture of my writing. The writings contained here are of very different character, some are very philosophical, some are more religious, some are translations, some are reviews, and there is even a poem. Really the only factor that unites them is being written by me in the last year. Of course, simply by virtue of that quality there will be an overarching theme throughout them. This theme can be summarised by saying that it is the application of the Traditionalist hermeneutic to the treasures of the Catholic tradition and contemporaneous developments. The focus lies on the former, and the latter is secondarily discussed. Of course, due to the Traditionalist praxis, there will be plenty of references to traditions aside from the Catholic one. Let it be clear that I have not attempted to write anything original, and merely have tried to expound certain eternal truths in a language accessible to the (young) men of today, and to analyse current events (in the broad sense) from the perspective of these eternal truths. That is, I have tried to somewhat elaborate the worldview of traditional metaphysics, and attempted to show where certain matters are placed within that worldview. My debt to various authors is great, as can be seen from the copious quotations used throughout the various articles. I specifically want to name Julius Evola, Ersnt Jünger, and Rene Guenon as great influences on my writing. These men I see as bridges between the modern world and the traditional world, a collegium pontificum of the 20th century if you will. I hope these writings will be of some help to you, dear reader, pointing the way towards greater writings than these, written by greater men than I.

END OF PART I 2

II. Metaphysics Assorted essays

... 1. On the Nature of Exoterism

Exoterism (from Greek ἔξω = outer) can be said to be the ‘outer teaching and practice’ of a tradition. Presented in this way it seems opposed to Esoterism (from Greek ἔσω = inner), which would be the ‘inner teaching and practice’ of a tradition. Rather it is the truth that there is no opposition between the Exoterism and the Esoterism of a tradition, for nothing can be opposed to the truth. If we avoid to confuse Esoterism with things such as occultism and even magic, we can say that Esoterism is the Truth itself, insofar as the Esoterism is esoteric. Thus it is pure metaphysics, combined with the supports (symbols, initiations, practice) to achieve the realisation of these truths. Because of the conditions of our time (and these conditions have been here for many previous ages as well) not all men are capable of partaking in Esoterism. Thus it has been reserved for the few who possess the necessary qualities. Now, out of the love for mankind, and the degenerative conditions which plague it, it was necessary for a general teaching and practice to arise; that is, one accessible for all men, independent of their particular qualities. This is what is called Exoterism. The first time we witness this distinction to arise is with the Ancient Greek philosophical traditions. The exoteric was transmitted in often very poetic, imaginative writing, which may have led it to degenerate into pure allegory. The esoteric was transmitted orally, which in some degree ensured the purity of the teaching. (It would be interesting to note that this distinction has been wholly lost in modern philosophy.)

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This explains why we have very little knowledge of the teaching of for example the Druids, or even the Pythagoreans. What has remained of the writings of Plato is obviously part of the exoterism of his tradition. Still, even though very little might be known about them, their traditions survived far into the Medieval Ages, in some way or another, often invisible to the modern eye. (This is why one must always be careful when speaking about this time period, for many things may have been transmitted above and beyond what we know for certain.) Exoterism concerns itself with expressing the Inexpressible (the Mystery, or Secret, in its proper sense) in such a way that the general public can grasp it, and thusly may partake in It. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to express That, which cannot be expressed. So it would be more accurate to say that Exoterism concerns itself with pointing to the Inexpressible in such a way that the general public may grasp it (partially). Thus Exoterism concerns itself with the Salvation of the greatest number of people, that is, it wishes to let them retain their human state for the coming Age (the eternal life). It concerns itself with Dogma, which is the (by its nature imperfect) expression of metaphysical truths. It concerns itself with Morality, for its domain is within the sphere of action. It concerns itself with the Social domain, for it wants to contain all people. This in contrast with Esoterism, which does not concern itself with Salvation, but with Deliverance, that is, the freeing of the being of any particular state. It does not concern itself with Dogma, but with the unexpressed truth itself. It does not concern itself with Morality, for its domain is beyond the sphere of action. It does not concern itself with the Social domain, for it wants to contain only those who have the required qualities. One must always remember that the exoteric serves as a support for the esoteric, as the esoteric is merely the understanding of the deeper (more hidden, more unmanifest) messages contained within the exoteric. So we can say, principally, the Esoteric is the requirement and source of the Exoteric, but in manifestation (from the perspective of the individual) the Exoteric is the requirement and source of the Esoteric. (Of course this is how it is with all things: the first (in principle) will be the last (in manifestation) and vice versa.) Deo volente it is now clear to the reader what the nature of Exoterism is and what its proper place is in the Entirety of things.

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2. On the Concept of the Spirit “O Blessed Paul, as you have said, you have been taken up to the third heaven, to paradise, but you have not surpassed all heavens and paradises. John has gone beyond all created heavens and paradises, that is: all human and angelic possibilities. In the third heaven, O chosen man, teacher of humanity, have you heard words no man may speak. But John, the one who has seen the inner Truth, has heard the one Word, beyond all heavens, in the Paradise of paradises.” – Commentary on John 1:1-14, John Scotus Eriugena It is in the gospel of John where we find a proper exposition of the Spirit. As prime examples we can take John 3:6 and John 4:24. What is said in these verses is as follows: “That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the spirit, is spirit.” “God is spirit; and they that adore him, must adore him in spirit and in truth.” Keep these verses in mind when reading on. Now we can quote from the Summa Theologiae (Question 44): “It must be said that every being in any way existing is from God.” We can rephrase this in our own words thusly: “It must be said that every being is born of God” So by the conjunction of reason and revealed truth we can conclude as follows: ‘Every being is spirit’ To be more precise, we must say that every being is spirit, exactly qua being and only qua being. This is only reasonable, for spirit is nothing other than being. One must also keep in mind that there is nothing outside of being, both microcosmically and macrocosmically, so that to say “only qua being” excludes exactly nothing. Let us look at John 4:24 more thoroughly. Firstly, it makes clear that God is Spirit, that is, that God is Being (which is in perfect accordance with the manner in which God revealed Himself to Moses in Exodus 3:14). Secondly, it makes clear what the relationship of Man is with God, namely one of Spirit and Truth. That is, to worship and adore the LORD, Man must simply be (For Truth is not different from Reality and Reality not from Being). Now what is it to “blaspheme against the Holy Spirit”? Blasphemy is

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defined as a lack of reverence, that is, to not accord to something its proper standing. So are not all those who believe and say there is anything but Spirit granting to the Spirit an improper position? Remember that there is no forgiveness for such error. Deo volente it is more clear to the reader how he must conceive of the Spirit. P.S. Note that “Spirit” is here not used as in opposition to “Matter”, for obviously in the sense that we use ‘Spirit’ here nothing can be opposed to it.

... 3. On the Science of Numbers “Turn from the sleep of negligence and the slumber of ignorance, for the world is a house of delusion and tribulations.” – Encyclopaedia of the Brethren of Sincerity Let us begin with what is first, for ‘we can count Nothing before One’. The Monad is Unity, and it is the beginning, middle and end of all number, it is the whole and the part and every quantity of all terms, for all numbers subsist eternally as causes in the Monad. The One is not the aggregate of many, but rather the singularity is both simple and multiple, so that both all numbers are in it all at once and simple, as causes, and also the one is understood to be multiplied by an ineffable distribution, as their substance. For the One is the cause (Essence) and Substance of all numbers, and while it does not relinquish the stability of its own nature it pours itself out as multiplicity into all. And the many subsist in it eternally because their beginning is not in time. For there was never unity without the manifold reasons (causes/ideas) of all the numbers. And the Monad has its beginning in Nothing (Zero) because it extends indefinitely. The first progression of numbers is from the Monad (for One is in principle not number but the cause of number, but in progression (manifestation) the first and lowest of numbers); the first multiplication is Two, the second Three, the third Four, then after come all the terms in their proper place. And the Two is the source of all parity, but the three is the source of all disparity. From these, namely parity and disparity, all kinds of numbers are generated. Now, from this it is evident that the Monad is none other than Being, or God, itself. In Principle it is the Highest and fully above generation, in

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manifestation it is the first, but lowest number. And so it is with the Father and the Son. The even numbers are terrestrial, as matter is the great equalizer, two being the source of parity. The odd numbers are celestial, as hierarchy is heavenly, three being the source of disparity. From this it follows that Two is Earth, i.e. Substance, the Materia Prima, the Passivity of God, Natura naturata, and that Three is Heaven, i.e. Essence, the Actus Purus, the Activity of God, Natura Naturans. The spatial symbol of Two would be the horizontal line here, of Three the vertical line. Four is the sign of Creation, or manifestation. The elements (earth, water, air, fire) come to mind. Spatially we must envisage the cross as the four, the conjunction of the vertical and horizontal line, the first in this case being Heaven, the second Earth. The cross is the active, volatile Four, the square the fixed, stable Four. Five is the action of Heaven on Earth (2 + 3, addition being simple and ‘actionless’). It is Earth viewed from the perspective of creation, rather than from the principal perspective. Six is the reaction of Earth to Heaven’s actionless action (2 x 3, multiplication signifying multiplicity). It is Heaven viewed from the perspective of creation, rather than from the principal perspective. Seven is the sign of Peace, it is the day of Rest in the week of Creation, it is the seventh ‘axis’ in spatial symbolism signifying the centre in which all the axes meet. It is the triangle dominating the cross or square, or the action of Heaven on Creation (3 + 4). Eight is the sign of Harmony, or Justice. It is 2 to the power of 3 (2 x 2 x 2, multiplication being indicative of Earth, of which the number is 2), i.e. ‘Parity’ (or equality) in all the three worlds (i.e. in Nature). Nine is the sign of Limit, or Determination. It is 3 times 3 (3 + 3 + 3, simple addition being indicative of Heaven, of which the number is 3), i.e. ‘Disparity’ (or inequality) in all the three worlds (i.e. in Nature). Ten is the sign of ‘the All’ (we should recall here One being the sign of ‘the One’ and the words ‘hen to pan’). It is formed by the addition of the One, Two, Three and Four (1 + 2 + 3 +4 = 10), uniting these primary elements (point, line, triangle, pyramid) within itself. Finally, the uniting of 5 and 6, is 11, or twice 1, and from this there follows only repetition, producing all the rest of the numbers. Hopefully these considerations will somewhat elucidate the nature of numerical symbolism. Truly indefinite considerations can be drawn from this science. Do watch out for the various exegeses done by the ignorant on many numbers. Deo volente this article might help to provide a solid foundation for perceiving erroneous interpretations.

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4.

On Hell

“We have indeed created for Hell many among jinn and men: they have hearts with which they understand not; they have eyes with which they see not; and they have ears with which they hear not. Such as these are like cattle. Nay, they are even further astray. It is they who are heedless.” — Quran 7 : 179 “For Heaven and Hell are nought else but a Manifestation of the Divine Will either in Light or Darkness”. — De Vita Mentali, Jakob Böhme What is Hell? It is the rejection of the soul. It is the rejection of the soul by God, and it is the rejection by the soul of God. When a being wills the opposite of the Heavenly Will, it is in Hell, and will be in Hell, for the state which the soul is in at death determines the state of the soul after its separation from the body. It can even be said that a will that wills not the Divine Will is not a will at all, or at the least that it is not in any way free. God is Just, or more accurately, the Son is Just. And those that voluntarily reject Him in any way must by this Law of Justice be punished. And this evil of punishment is only an evil for the punished, for as the Angelic Doctor writes: ‘the Saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked’ and ‘the blessed in glory will have no pity on the damned’. So the elect with God consider this evil a Supreme Good, and the damned consider this evil a Supreme Evil. Of course, the latter are wrong. It is said in Isaiah “I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” and in 1 Timothy “Every creation of God is good”. The damned will see in this a contradiction, they will cry out in the fires of hell, saying: ‘Woe unto you JHWH, for you are a fucking lying Demiurg! Marcion was right all along!’ Of course the blessed see in these verses the perfect synthesis and answer to the so-called ‘theodicy’. Moreover, Hell is eternal, by which we mean that it endures as long as time. So more accurately Hell is perpetual (cf. the Heavenly mode of time called the ‘Aevum’). For when Heaven and Earth, that is, when Essence and Substance, have passed away, and with these all things between them, when there is none but He Who Is, when all has returned to the Principle, when the world, that is, Existence itself, has ended, there can be no Hell. But the damned refuse to return to God. Their place is in the outer darkness, they have ‘fallen into the mire’. Their role can then only be as the ‘saints of Satan’, who of course have no place in and no power over the Heavenly Jerusalem, i.e. Luz.

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Now, then, having finished these precursory remarks on the qualities of Hell, it is time to determine the proper stance a sinner (i.e. one who is not in Heaven) must take towards it. There are two ways one might end up in Hell, but they are essentially one, because there is essentially only One (Will). The first way is by being created destined to be in the state of hell. The second way is by rejecting God in any way and being punished to be in the state of hell. In the first case it is the Will of God that you will be in Hell, and the goal of every believer is to align his own will with the one that belongs to God. In the second case it is your own will that has failed to align with the Will of God, and the faithful are thankful for the punishments of God. In both cases the sinner must will his own damnation. So these ways are shown to be one, namely in both damnation is the failure of the will of the individual and the Will of God to be united. And the proper stance of the sinner is shown to be submission, namely to the Will of God, in all things. And the end of this submission is nothing but what the Fathers call ‘deificatio’. Gratia Domini nostri Jesu Christi cum omnibus vobis. Amen

... 5. On Apocatastasis and the Fewness of the Saved “The upper realm is where we belong So we’re heading upward. Here or there we’re not from Nowhereness is where we belong So we’re heading to nowhere! You’ve already read: “To God we belong and to Him we shall return.” So you should already know where we’re actually heading to. Be silent and don’t join us watch that out of self-jealousy We’re leaving without our selves!” — Rumi

The doctrine of Apocatastasis, or universal reconciliation, holds that all beings must eventually return to their Source, i.e. God. The doctrine of the Fewness of the Saved is that very few beings are saved, i.e. very few beings reach the state of Paradise, either in their life or after their death. On the face these doctrines seem entirely contradictory and irreconcilable. Still, we will make an attempt to show their agreement.

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First it is important to state that from the universal perspective, i.e. from the perspective of God, there is only the ‘Eternal Present’, where all things are united in His Word. From this it follows that salvation, or the return of a being to God cannot effect a change in God Himself. Salvation then, is only concerned with a change in the state of the created being. In Christ all things were created one, not in the mode wherein we find these things now, as invested with form and matter, but rather as essences, i.e. ‘reasons’. It is about these that Eriugena writes: “for in so far as we are, we are nothing else but those reasons of ours which subsist eternally in God”. Now these ‘reasons’ we can identify with the ‘inner man’ and the ‘new man’, while we can identify the ‘terrestrial’ forms of beings with the ‘outer man’ and the ‘old man’. For the ‘new man’ is in the “likeness of God” and “in Christ”, and those “born of God cannot sin”, and this new man is born of God, for it is spirit and “what is spirit is born of Spirit”. But the ‘old man’ is subject to sin, it is in the flesh, and it must be crucified, i.e. it must die, so that the ‘inner man’ may live. Most men have presently realised only the ‘outer man’, and fully identify with it. When they refer to their ‘self’, they say it not as Paul when he says ‘*I* live’, where he refers to Christ living in him, but they say it as the tax collector who beats his breast and says ‘have mercy on *me*, a sinner’, referring to the (lower) ego. So on the one hand we have those men for whom ‘I’ refers to the ‘inner man’, or the ‘reason’ which subsists in the Word, and on the other hand those men for whom ‘I’ refers to the ‘outer man’, or the manifestation of this ‘reason’ in the world. The latter will end up in hell or, by God’s grace, in purgatory. In these places there takes place a ‘purifying’ of the individual. To purify something means nothing else but to remove the corrupted or bad parts from that thing. And for man, what is this corrupted part but the ‘outer man’? So either in this life must the ‘outer man’ be crucified, whereby entrance in the heavenly state is acquired, or in the afterlife must he be crucified. When this corrupted nature is separated from the being, the being can continue into heaven, but the corrupted nature itself stays in hell, for it cannot enter into heaven, and will remain in Hell until the end of the world. Thus, when the being has realised his own ‘reason’ he is reunited with God, from Whom he never truly was distanced. And all the ‘reasons’ are created one in God. But those beings whose ‘I’ is in the outer man, they will suffer perpetually in Hell. And so it seems that few are saved, for the many identify with the outer man, but also that all are returned to God, for their ‘reasons’, which they are identical with qua being, always have subsisted, subsist, and will subsist in God. The God of Peace be with you all.

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6. On the Varieties of Theism “The ancients believed in the plurality of the gods. Undoubtedly, that is to say, in the plurality of beings superior to man, for the word god in antiquity signified a superior nature (melior natura) and nothing more. In this sense, we are still polytheists.” — Joseph De Maistre In the modern age many words have been invented to signify what is perceived to be the immense diversity of theological opinions throughout time and space. The words ‘monotheism’, ‘atheism’, ‘polytheism’, ‘pantheism’, ‘panentheism’, ‘henotheism’, ‘tritheism’, and all other variations have been invented in the last centuries as tools to describe the doctrines of many traditions and philosophies. For a traditional society such terms are incomprehensible, as such a contradiction of opinions would be impossible in an orthodox worldview. If we take ‘theos’ in the same sense in all these various theisms it is evident that some clearly contradict. If there is only one God there cannot be multiple Gods, and if there are multiple Gods there cannot only be one God. If God is wholly immanent He cannot be wholly transcendent, and if God is wholly transcendent He cannot be wholly immanent. If man should worship one God, man should not worship no God at all and vice versa. So either we must reject one of the two contradicting positions, for example, we must reject that God is wholly immanent, to say that God is transcendent, or we must show that they do not contradict at all, for example, by showing that the sense of the word “God” is different in the two concepts. In some contradictions we might choose the first option (such as with atheism versus monotheism), in others the second option (such as with monotheism versus polytheism). To begin with the first option, namely the rejection of one and the acceptance of the other, using the example of atheism versus monotheism. The two contradict because atheism rejects the belief in or knowledge of any being above man, nature or even the bodily domain, while monotheism asserts the belief in or knowledge of either the Supreme Being or Being Itself, both being above man, nature and the bodily domain. We can see that the sense in which ‘God’ is used here is not exactly the same, but the sense in which the atheist uses it is broad enough to include the sense in which the monotheist uses it, still leading to contradiction. Of course, the monotheist might reject the existence of beings superior to man that are not the Supreme Being. For example, many Christians reject the belief in Angels while retaining the belief in God. In this way they agree

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with the atheists in rejecting these spiritual beings. Nevertheless, we must reject atheism in favour of monotheism, as the two are irreconcilable. To move on with the second option, namely showing that the contradiction is only apparent and is removed when we look more precisely at the sense of the word ‘God’ in the two concepts, using the example of monotheism versus polytheism. Now, the two seemingly contradict, for if there is only one God there cannot be multiple Gods and vice versa. But let us take into account the different senses of the word ‘God’. To begin with the Latin ‘deus’, we know that it is cognate with the Hindu ‘deva’. Both refer to a being within a plurality of heavenly beings, each having certain qualities that distinguish them from the other deities, but united by their ascended status and power. Now ‘Deus’ also has another (later) sense in which it refers to the Supreme Being, or even Being Itself. This concept is similar to the Hindu ‘Ishvara’. So where the Hindu has two terms to describe the two different concepts (Deva & Ishvara) we and the Romans must do with one term (God, Deus) to describe the two. This is probably whence the confusion arises. Now that we have properly examined the meaning of the two sense of the word ‘God’ we can see that the senses in no way contradict. For there can be both the ‘Gods’ (heavenly beings, which the Abrahamic religions call angels) and the ‘God’ (the highest being or Being itself). So we do not have to reject the one or the other, as we had to do with the earlier contradiction of atheism versus monotheism, and so there is no need for the distinction between polytheism and monotheism (which we could have of course already gathered from the fact that the terms (and thus the contradiction) are modern inventions which have no place in a traditional society). Thus either must we in these cases of contradiction choose the first option, i.e. to reject one and keep the other, or choose the second option (which is preferable), i.e. to show that there is no contradiction. We have given of both options a single example, and it is left to the reader to apply this to the other contradictions. He who maketh peace in his high places, may He and His angels make peace in us.

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7. On Death “No creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist.” — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Death can be defined in two ways. The first is as follows: ‘death is the return of a being to nothing’. The second is different: ‘death is the change of a being of one state to another’. But Lucretius teaches us that nothing comes from nothing, and that nothing returns to nothing. So in respect to the first definition of death all beings are immortal. For the second type of death we can take as an example what men commonly call death, namely the death of the physical body, which is the separation of the soul from the body. For here it is not the case that the being returns to nothing, for this would be an impossibility, but it is the case that the being undergoes a change of state. If death is then identical with change, then death came into existence with the Fall, i.e. the removal from Being into the world of Becoming, accomplished by the Serpent, who is the symbol of (both benefic and malefic) change (cf. caduceus & asklepian). But if death has been overcome it must mean a return to this state of unchangeability, which is Paradise, or Heaven, itself. Still, the other side of the coin of change is birth, or re-birth. So we can say that the one who is dead to the world (or to whom the world is dead) is the one who is reborn into the Principle (or in whom the Principle has been reborn). In this state the being will be beyond generation and degeneration, which is the proper meaning of ‘transformation’, the going beyond form (form being what defines individuality & change belonging to the realm of individuals). This is why many rituals use symbols of death as a way to initiate a person into a certain grade, for this rite is at the same time the ceasing to exist of the ‘old man’ and the beginning to exist of the ‘new man’, both being accomplished simultaneously. Remember that when the sun was darkened, that at that same moment the veil of the temple was torn, and that also at that moment the spirit of the slain Lamb was brought into the hands of the Father.

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8. On the Angelic States “The name ‘Angel’ designates an office, not a nature” — St. Augustine “For a CHILD IS BORN to us, and a son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called, Angel of Great Counsel, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace.” — Isaiah IX:6, translated from the Septuagint “The Devas are the body of Brahman” — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad Nothing deserves worship except through the Supreme Principle, for all things derive their being from It. Because this Principle alone is incomparable to all that derive from it, it deserves the highest grade of worship, which is called ‘latria’ in the Christian tradition, and which is nothing else but the recognition of Its Supremacy over all things. Nevertheless, a lower grade of worship is given to those beings that excel greatly above the human state, which is called ‘dulia’. This is a recognition that these beings are superior to man, but not the highest of all. Such worship is proper to both the Saints and Angels, if a distinction between these might be made. What then, are these ‘Angels’, or more accurately, are these ‘Angelic States’? They are offices filled by spiritual (formless/non-formal) beings, or ‘intelligences’. There is a great hierarchy in these offices, ranging from mere messengers (which are most properly called “angels”) to Thrones of God. The former being closest to men, to latter being closest to God. It is through these beings that God rules all things. But let it be clear that the Angels are independent in local movement (Sum. Theol. Prima Pars Q. 53). Aquinas also states that the number of Angels is indefinite. Furthermore, the Angelic States are limited to a single cycle, for it is said “For God hath not subjected unto angels the world to come”. This makes these states perpetual, not eternal. It is also possible for men (or, more accurately, those beings occupying the human state) to rise to the level of the angels, i.e. to occupy an angelic office (e.g. Enoch). There are also ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ angels, for Samael is as much of an angel as Michael. Then nothing else is left but to ask the Archangel Raphael to restore our sight as He restored that of Tobit.

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P.S. This conception of the ‘Angels’ and ‘God’ is identical to the Hindu conception of the ‘Devas’ and ‘Ishvara/Brahman’, as is shown by A. K. Coomaraswamy in his article “On Translation: Maya, Deva, Tapas”. Cf. also the beginning of Briharanyaka Upanishad III:9 & Taittiriya Upanishad I:5.

... 9. On the Ideas Created in the Divine Word

“HIRANYAGARBHA was present at the beginning ; when born, he was the sole lord of created beings; he upheld this earth and heaven“ — Hiranyagarbha Sukta (Rig Veda 10:121), translation Ralph T. H. Griffith “In the beginning was the Word” — John 1:1 “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth” — Genesis 1:1 “In him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” — Colossians 1:16 “That which is earlier than this earth and heaven, before the Asuras and Angels had being, What was the germ primeval which the waters received where all the Angels were seen together? The waters, they received that germ primeval wherein the Angels were gathered all together. It rested set upon the Unborn’s navel, that One wherein abide all things existing” — Vishvakarman Sukta (Rig Veda 10:82), translation Ralph T. H. Griffith [with a single change of ours, namely translating ‘Devas’ as ‘Angels’ instead of ‘Gods’. Note also that here ‘Angel’ is identical with ‘Idea’] “Filium Dei unigenitum, et ex Patre natum ante omnia sæcula.” — Nicene Creed

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“The first thing Allāh created was the light of your Prophet from His light, and that light remained in the midst of His Power for as long as He wished, and there was not, at that time, a Tablet or a Pen or a Paradise or a Fire or an angel or a heaven or an earth. And when Allāh wished to create creation, he divided that Light into four parts and from the first made the Pen, from the second the Tablet, from the third the Throne, then He divided the fourth into four parts and from them created everything else” — Hadith (as collected in the Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq) “the Ideas are certain original and principal forms of things, i.e. reasons, fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed, and, being thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine Intelligence. Whilst, however, they themselves neither come into being nor decay, yet we say that in accordance with them everything is formed that can rise or decay, and all that actually does so.” — St. Augustine, 83 Different Questions, 46th Question “In Thy Wisdom has thou made all things” — Psalm 103:24 (Vulgate numbering) A topic which is so profound such as the one which we will discuss here must rest on a wide foundation of traditional data, which is why this article has begun with a few quotations from different traditions. The usual use of the term ‘creation’ refers to the creation of the ‘Earth’, or more accurately to the creation of the terrestrial Paradise, and following that the creation of Adam. In this article we will show another sense of the term ‘creation’, namely in the sense of the actual first creation, which is that of the Ideas, or Forms, or Reasons, or Prototypes, or Archetypes of all things in the first Divine (intelligible) emanation, which is the Word, or Wisdom, or Light, of God. This is the real Creation, by which we mean that this is the only action of God which brings something out of nothing. What is usually termed ‘creation’ is in reality only the procession of physical things from their Archetypes into this world, which is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, or the Divine Love. This is also the meaning of the Son sending the Spirit, for from the Word descend all things into generation by the Spirit. Now these Ideas are purely intelligible, and include all the possibilities of manifestation and of non-manifestation, i.e., some are Archetypes of existing (manifested) things, some are Archetypes which do not correspond to any existing things, but remain in complete transcendence to manifestation, not having any point of contact between them and this world. In this sense they are identical to the Angels, as is also shown in my previous essay “On the Angelic States”. (Note also that the notion of the ‘Guardian Angel’ refers to this matter, i.e. your Guardian Angel is the Idea of which you are a procession.) The Word then is the ‘locus possibilum’, the place of ‘possibles’ of the Scholastics (at least, before Duns Scotus departed from this conception), in

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which all things have been created as Reasons before their manifestation into this world And, as Eriugena notes, in so far as we are, we are none other than those Reasons which subsist eternally in the Word of God, and, as Aquinas notes, an Idea in God is identical with His essence.

... 10. On Justice and Mercy

“Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the justice of hell?” “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees … ye have omitted the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith” “For justice without mercy to him that hath not done mercy. And mercy exalteth itself above justice. What shall it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works? Shall faith be able to save him?” Mercy triumphs over Justice, i.e. Mercy is (ontologically and morally) superior to Justice. By Mercy we understand the forgiving of sins, not punishing the transgression, letting injustice happen to yourself. By Justice we understand the restoring of injustice with another injustice, an eye for an eye, the punishing of evil and the rewarding of good. In Christendom Justice has been practiced more than Mercy, because Justice is better than injustice, and Mercy is not always attainable, for it belongs to the Sacerdotal authority, and the Royal authority can only be Just. We all know that the Sacerdotium is superior to the Regium (unless you’re an Evolian), but why then, other than an argument from traditional hierarchy, is Mercy superior to Justice? We can compare Mercy to the Tree of Life, and Justice to the Tree of knowledge of good and evil. We might also say that Mercy deals only with the (supreme) Good and Justice with both (non-supreme, relative) good and evil. Furthermore we will say that Mercy is to Unity as Justice is to Duality. On the one (right) hand, Mercy recognizes no evil, or at least no absolute evil. There is nothing that cannot be forgiven, for it sees that every relative

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imbalance contributes to the greater Balance of the whole. It takes everything as it comes, knows that all things are in the Hands of God, that ultimately only the Will of God takes place, and that in the end, God will win. In this way it need not lower itself to the domain of Judgment, it need not commit an injustice to combat another injustice. On the other (left) hand, Justice recognizes evil for what it is. While it might not recognize an absolute evil, it at least knows that in the domain wherein it functions (the domain of action) evil definitely exists, and that the Devil and his angels work tirelessly to undermine all the good that exists in the world (which by the very fact that it exists in the world is not absolute). It feels that Man must work against those evil forces, that he must at all times fight against those demons which seek to undermine Order. It will make use of any injustice to correct these injustices, and restore Balance. Justice functions in the domain of action, for it deals out punishment to those who do bad deeds and gives a reward to those who do good deeds. So it is especially proper to speak of “Justification” by works, or deeds. It is the virtue of Righteousness, which is closely connected to Justice and Judgment. “And if a man be just, and do judgment and justice … he shall surely live, saith the Lord God.” Mercy is beyond action, or more properly, it is activity without action, for it refuses to punish or reward, and only forgives and allows. So it is especially proper to speak of “Forgiveness” by faith, or obedience to the Will of God. Those who forgive others, shall be forgiven by God. Superficially, we might see a contradiction between Justice and Mercy. Justice judges, Mercy forgives. Justice deals with good and evil, Mercy only with Good. Etc etc. Yet we are also told that Mercy and Justice go hand in hand, that we should be both Merciful and Just, that we should strongly desire Justice but that we should also have Mercy on our fellow man. How is it possible to be Just but still forgive? How can a man punish evil if he must forgive it? To be free from contradiction we must realise that “the Father has given all Judgment to the Son”. God is Just, and Judges all. The merciful man knows that he need not punish nor reward, for he knows that God punishes and rewards all according to their works. He realises that on the whole Justice is always maintained, and that he does not need to interfere to correct it. He sees that any duality is always resolved in a higher Unity, that Mercy not only triumphs over Justice, but that it is also the triumph of Justice, that Mercy is the fulfilment of Justice. Perhaps in the same way that Jesus came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfil it, Mercy is not there to abolish Justice, but to fulfil it. May God have mercy on us, and bless us: may He cause the light of His countenance to shine upon us, and may He have mercy on us.

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11. On Nothing “In (the) extremes, nothing (is)” [more freely, ‘the extremes meet in nothing’] — Temple of Apollo in Delphi “But darkness shall not be dark to thee, and night shall be light as day: the darkness thereof, and the light thereof are alike to thee.” — Psalm 139:12 “By the name ‘Nothing’ is signified the ineffable and incomprehensible and inaccessible brilliance of the Divine Goodness which is unknown to all intellects whether human or angelic, (…) hence the inaccessible brilliance of the celestial powers is often called by theology ‘Darkness’” — Periphyseon, John Scotus Eriugena Apophatic theology aims to express God by stating what He is not. It attempts this because it realises that God can ultimately not be expressed. For to express Him in a certain way would be to limit Him, and to attempt to limit the Infinite is a foolish endeavour, perhaps even a great, if not the greatest, sin. So we say that God is not the world but above the world, not Good but beyond Good, not visible but beyond the visible, and so on. The logical end of this endeavour is to describe God as Nothing, for there is none besides Him to compare Him with. Of course such an approach leaves most men unsatisfied. Thus the weakness of men forces us to resort to kataphatic theology, using metaphor to ascribe certain qualities to God. For example, we say that God is Being, for all things derive their being from Him, we say that God is the First Cause, because all things are caused by Him, we say that He is the Good, because all good comes from Him, we say that He is the Powerful, because all things are in His hands, we say that He is the Merciful, because He forgives those who repent, we say that He is the One, because he has no equal, and so on, and so on. But this kataphatic approach still leaves us unsatisfied. Yes, God is Good, but more properly, He is Beyond-Good. Yes, God is Being, but more properly, He is Beyond-Being (or Non-Being). Yes, God is Light, but more properly, He is the Ineffable Darkness. Ultimately, God can be compared to nothing, but God can be compared to Nothing. All things are united in this Nothing, for it is where the extremes meet. In this Nothing all things are (speaking metaphorically, because obviously things cannot “be” before they come into being. Alas, this language gives us no words for what we wish to describe, so we are forced to resort to metaphor. I hope you understand), before they come into being. In this Nothing metamorphosis takes place, for change is achieved in Nothing, but

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It is Itself not affected by change. As the Zohar states: before One, we can count Nothing. God created the world ‘ex nihilo’. Now, let it be obvious that this is the ‘highest sense’ of the word ‘Nothing’, which is more often taken in a lower sense, sometimes used to refer to the undifferentiation of the “materia prima” (in other words, referring to the lower, and even upper ‘Waters’ [respectively formal and informal possibility envisaged in the passive sense]), which (in its own order) reflects the absolute undifferentiation of the Supreme Principle, but more often used to refer to “absolutely nothing” in the sense of pure lack, of which we can obviously say, nothing.

Hopefully these considerations will prevent the reader from immediately concluding on reading the words ‘Nothing’ or ‘Darkness’ (or similar words) that they must refer to a lack, or some evil thing, i.e. to the lowest of things, but will let the reader consider that they might actually refer to those highest of things, which every expression does disservice.

... 12. On the Body

“The philosophers, when speaking of Earth, meant by that nothing more than the Body, and by the body nothing more than Salt” — Johannes de Mondsnyder (literally mooncutter (cf Quran 54:1) The Body in the widest sense is the Prime Matter, and in this sense it is the material principle of all that is, in a more limited sense it is Earth, the principle of the corporeal world, through which the other three elements are seen. This is why it is said ‘Visit the interior of the Earth’, which is thus no different from saying ‘Visit the interior of the Body’. We will evaluate whether bodybuilding is a possible path to accomplish the recovery of the hidden stone. Evola says that most men see only through the element of earth. This may have been true when he wrote this (1931), but we have reached a time where men do not see even earth anymore. In 1871, Baron Lytton (anonymously) published “The Coming Race”, a book also known as “Vril, the Power of the Coming Race”. “Esoterists” such

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as Blavatsky and Steiner accepted it as truth. The book speaks of an antediluvian race living beneath the earth, who have acquired great psychic powers, using a substance called “Vril”. This race has come, or at least has sent its scouts. Men do not “sense” anymore. The recent obsession with “aesthetics” is a reaction to this. ‘aesthesis’, to sense, we must not forget. The ugly is invisible, muddled, dark, blackened. The old books speak of sense being the lowest of the possible perceptions. They are right, but forgot to name what is below perception, i.e. imagination. The digital realm is psychic, below the senses, and we all live in it. From zoomer to boomer, perhaps only the old and senile are spared. People live in their own brain, no, not even that, they live in their own mind, a brain is too corporeal for them. Baudrillard was on to something when he spoke of “hyperreality”, but ‘hyper-‘ implies ‘above’, and thus what I speak of is better named “hyporeality”. We might say that the digital is not yet a purely psychic realm, but it is close, a final border, serving as an interface between body and soul. But it tends more to the soul than the body. And we, who have learnt from the malamatiyya, know that the soul is the domain of evil. We might say that the corporeal is the realm of becoming, but let us recall what the Buddha said about this. Yes the body changes, but quite slowly, moving from infant to grown up to old man and so on, retaining at least some internal stability. But the soul, thoughts and beliefs enter and leave within seconds, men change their mind like women change their clothes, no, faster. Ideologies run rampant, boys choose their religions like favourite youtubers. The psyche is the realm of becoming, and is most under the spell of this world, the walls of the labyrinth shift around it. The digital only facilitates it, and the imaginations of “transhumanists” (who should really be called “subhumanists”, for they seek to fall below the human form) about uniting the mind and the mineral, are merely the extremes of a general sentiment and course. You already live “online”, and life is a synonym of soul. I spoke with an identitarian at some barbecue about the Platonic theory of Ideas. He did not like it, because it was “gnostic”, i.e. denied the importance and reality of corporeal manifestations. He said that the ideology of the modern elites was “Platonic”, because they believe u can change into anything, doesn’t matter what body u inhabit (male can become female etc etc). There is truth to this, but only because people think ‘Ideas’ refer to concepts of the soul, in the psychic domain. This is also obvious in our cursed language, the word ‘Idea’ referring to every little thought u can think up. “I have a great idea guys” no shut the fuck up retard. Anime girls have been called the Platonic Form of women, my source for this is a screencap of a 4chan post. This is true if we take “Idea” once more in the purely psychic sense. It resides in the Imagination, an image, but an

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image is supposed to be a copy of the senses, but men do not sense, thus, the anime girl is an empty image. But at least you didn’t cum, right? It is not a coincidence that “nofap” has appropriated the term ‘vril’. “Virtual Reality” and “Artificial Intelligence” are also symptoms of the attempted merge of the psychic and the mineral domains. The materialists of old (there are today no materialists) tried to reduce the soul to the material, today they will try to reduce the material to the psychic. Try to turn stone into reason, this is AI. Why does technology require these rare and expensive minerals, mined with the blood of african children? A sacrifice, for sure. Glass produces coloured lights, blind a man, give him goggles with this glass, he thinks he is in Minecraft (a game about minerals), or in his favourite hentai, this is VR. Let me explain a bit of cosmology. Very common categorisation is that there are three “levels” or “domains” of reality. First and highest is the spiritual, these are the angels, Ideas, etc. They are formless (because they are the Forms themselves) and intelligible (hence they are also called noumena). The second and middle realm is the psychic (or animal). Here are the ‘stars’ and ‘planets’, whose influence astronomers love to study (note the trend of women attempting astrology), and also the four elements. Here is the soul, here are the djinn, here are demons, but the angels come down sometimes here too. The third and lowest domain is the corporeal, which is that of the bodies. You know this one, or, at least, you remember it. This is a very basic scheme, and for this blogpost I must make it a bit more complex. The second domain, the psychic, is not universally “above” the bodily, but is more accurately described as “around it”. The Church Fathers often call this domain the “air”, but this is too limited, for we can also call it “water”, but now we will call it “subterranean”. This is the realm I have been speaking of, the realm of underwater serpents. The water hates the earth, Schmitt spoke of this (in Land und Meer). This is why the modern elites and their pawns hate the body. Now, we might ask, does ‘bodybuilding’, and to make this blogpost more relevant, does ‘Bronze Age Pervert’ (using his name as a figure for the entire ‘movement’ that shares similar sensibilities), with his pro-body ‘ideology’ offer a proper answer to the threat of (metaphorical) lizardpeople? It is a start. Before men can learn how to use their higher sense once more, they first must remember their bodily senses. Of course this doesn’t have to be in the strict sense of ‘bodybuilding’, but while it might seem superficially that BAP proclaims this, he actually does not. He truly shows an appreciation for all the bodily intuitions. But it is no more than a start. Aesthetics is nothing if it does not lead to Noesis. This is why Plato said that appreciation of corporeal beauty must lead to intuitive intellection of Idea of Beauty (NOT ‘concept’ of beauty in the mind!!). ‘Lifting’ is not a real ‘initiation’ that leads to higher states. It is that the world has fallen so low that it has forgotten even the lowest state,

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the body. It needs to be reclaimed, and to reclaim it will be a move upward. Perhaps it will be good to study the texts of the alchemists. But the scouts of the serpents are just the beginning. Things will get worse. And the body alone will not save, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, and against the spirits of wickedness in the high (or should we say, low, subterranean even) places.

... 13. On the Proper Attitude towards History “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire” — Gustav Mahler A common understanding about ‘traditionalism’ is that it is “the worship of ashes”. It says that the traditionalist is obsessed with the past, either wanting to preserve or return elements of long gone times. But this is a false understanding, and the traditionalist is on the contrary the only one with the proper stance towards the past. The traditionalist namely regards history as a development from an ideal state, which we might call Paradise, via a cyclical degeneration, towards the End of Time, which is also the restoration of the ideal state, e.g. the New Jerusalem. He holds that the Truth was known at the beginning, and that with the flow of time it has become lost to many, but that it is still always accessible (to those worthy), and that all normal societies are built around it. Thus when looking at history, he is able to acknowledge both the general degenerative tendency of time, with its specific manifestations in certain traditions, and also the elements of truth that are retained in time, along with those that are “re-introduced”, i.e. truths lost to time that were brought back via divine inspiration. This is the normal attitude towards history, for it sees (and takes) what is useful, and discards what is no longer useful (“useful” of course not in the strictly utilitarian sense, but rather in the broadest sense of the word). If we would metaphorically describe it, the traditionalist distils the essence of previous concoctions, leaving behind the material that allowed this essence to manifest itself historically (this does not mean that the material is of no importance at all, but rather that this specific historical material is no longer relevant, and if it was kept it would only pollute any attempt at a new concoction).

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Now let us look at the other, abnormal positions towards history. The first we will call the “Progressive” attitude. The Progressivist holds that history begins in its most primitive form, and that via an evolution it ends up at the present, which is then the most evolved, and thus the best moment so far. He will also commonly think that the present will evolve into even greater times, although this is not necessary for his general stance. The first thing the progressivist gets wrong is his assumption that time is a rising line instead of a falling spiral. This conception prevents him from understanding previous civilisations because he rejects a priori the possibility that they were closer to the truth than the contemporary society. In this way he really “closes his mind”, allowing no higher influence to act upon it. The progressivist also gets the origin and the end wrong. His origin is either nothingness, or the degenerated tribal communities of earlier civilisations. An example of this is senile old women with PhD talking about returning to “hunter gatherer” tribes, because they had ‘equality’. His ‘end’ is either the current state of time, e.g. the ‘End of History’ of the neoliberal, or he has fantasies of globalist queer (space) neocommunism. The progressivist is neither able to appreciate the civilisations of past, nor is he able to understand the current state of the world, and not even the future is intelligible to him, his stance towards history fails in every way. The next stance is like the progressivist in many ways, but different in one way. Where the progressivist thinks Now is the best moment so far, the Conservatist thinks the best moment is Now minus 1 big development. This one big development can be very many different things. For example, for some conservatists this might be two American presidents ago, for others it might be the time before the revolutionary sixties, for the more extreme it might even be the time before universal suffrage, and for the most extreme, the Luddites, it is the time before the Industrial Revolution. The conservatist will attempt to ‘conserve’ what the progressivist has just abolished, but there is only a quantitative difference between them, not a qualitative one. They hold the same general ideas about the origin and the end of time, and the conservatist will follow the progressivist like a limping dog: very loyally, just a bit slow. The conservative stance is obviously just as unsatisfactory as the progressive one. The third attitude is a bit more interesting, primarily because it is rarer than the first two. We will call it the “Historical” attitude. The Historicist does not think the current moment to be supreme, nor does he “lag behind”, but rather does he think some specific civilisation in space and time to be the supreme. His timeline has the shape of a pyramid, with it rising from the origin until it reaches the Supreme Moment somewhere in time, and from the decline of that moment it descends until we arrive at the current time.

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Examples of this are people who think the (ancient) ‘Greeks’ were the supreme (spiritual) race, and that everything before was of no relevance, and everything after just a footnote. The historicist judges every civilisation according to the amount in which they manage to successfully imitate the Supreme Civilisation, and will fail to see good in any movement away from it. This attitude, like the others, limits the understanding of other traditions, and is perhaps even more dangerous than the progressive and conservative stances, because it is very effective at trapping one in a certain frame. If we take the Greek example again, they will think everything good is Greek (even if these things are contradictory, or have truly little to do with the Greeks). Medieval Scholastic Philosophy? Greek. The Renaissance? Greek. Arabic Sufi Poetry? Greek. Arthurian legends? Greek. Etc etc. Or they will say something is decidedly Not Greek, and thus bad. The traditionalist might agree conditionally with these things, because he professes the essential unity of the plurality of traditions. But he differs in ascribing the origin, because where the historicist chooses to do this to one specific civilisational form, the traditionalist instead chooses to do this to a timeless (capital T) Tradition, which existed at the beginning of time, and still exists outside of time. The historical stance is closer to the truth than the first two, but still fails in important ways, and thus must also be rejected. If we qualify stances towards the past by their concepts of three things, namely their conception of the Origin of History (e.g. Paradise, Tribal Earth worship), the Way of History (e.g. upwards straight line, descending spiral), and the End of History (e.g. the Current Year, the Current Year minus 1), there is an indefinite amount of possible stances towards history. This means that these three do not form an exhaustive list of alternative stances, but they do generally describe the three most prevalent tendencies and sentiments in the current ideosphere. I too feel these tendencies in my soul sometimes, and I know it is important to reject them and take the proper stance, precisely so that we might build the future on proper foundations. Let us keep the ‘fire’, and discard ‘the ashes’. We have found old potions, and must not drink them, but let us distil the essence, so that it might precipitate into a new haoma.

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14. On the Veneration of Ancestors “Neither in China nor in India can an insult to the country or the flag be felt as such: but an insult to the ancestors, to symbols of truth, or any forced infringement of the traditional order, may readily provoke bloodshed, precisely because such things are felt to be, what indeed they are, a denial of essential humanity.” — Ananda Coomaraswamy The veneration of ancestors (often wrongly called ‘ancestor worship’) is common to all traditional societies. From the East to the West to the North to the South, there is no normal people that refuses to practice it. It is certainly then a strange thing that today, in the West (and all ‘Westernised’ (i.e. modernised) countries) this practice has all but been eradicated. Let us look first at the use and purpose of ancestral veneration, and then we will find why the people of today have abandoned it. Ancestor veneration consists of a practice and a subject, the veneration is the practice, the ancestor is the subject. The question of what exactly veneration is and how it is different from worship has been discussed and explained extensively by others, and so I will not do so here. In short, worship is the proper disposition towards God (i.e. the Supreme Principle), while veneration is the proper disposition towards all higher beings. Try to avoid confusing the two. Let’s move on to the subject of the veneration, namely the ancestor. There is at least as most confusion on this topic as with the veneration/worship distinction, but I do not know of too much elucidation of the question who the ‘ancestors’ really are supposed to be. Let us start with a very common interpretation of ancestry, especially common among ‘neopagans’. They say the ancestors are the biological line you descend from, those people who lived before you, but still shared the same ethnicity or race. They should be venerated because they continued the bloodline, and directly or indirectly, gave you your life. It is then immediately all too clear that those who pretend to continue the lineage (if not by actual initiation, then at least in spirit and name) of the ancients are nothing more than pseudo-Darwinist materialists. They regard the ancestors as mere bodies, a sperm and an egg cell, or perhaps they prefer to use the term ‘genes’, and their veneration (if they actually perform it) serves only a ceremonial function, as they most likely do not believe that ‘the dead’ are still able to intercede in daily matters. There is nothing ‘traditional’ or ‘pagan’ about this kind of veneration. What then, is the traditional perspective on what ‘ancestor’ refers to? In a limited way we might allow a biological view of the ancestors, as long as it is not the exclusive way of regarding them. But ancestor veneration is

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generally more regarded in a ‘cultural’ or even ‘religious’ way, the ancestors being seen as ‘higher beings’ not because they share the same body as those venerating them (which would be also absurd, as they then would have no higher status and thus no reason of being venerated), but because they were (closer to) the originators of the religious and cultural practices which make up an ethnos. Of course they were also in a bodily way the ancestors, but here the body, the genes, serve only as a vessel for the culture, the memes. This is precisely why ancestor veneration is normal, it regards the ancestors as those who started (and kept and passed on) the tradition, and it is by virtue of this that they are seen as worthy of veneration. This is also why our modern society no longer practices ancestor veneration, we no longer have a tradition. A civilisation which no longer has a tradition, which no longer has high regard for tradition, will obviously not venerate the originators and keepers of that tradition (note that ‘tradition’ means literally ‘that which is passed on’). Where nothing is passed on, the people will either stop venerating the ancestors, or start to invent foolish materialist reasonings to ‘restart’ the venerating of the ancestors. We can see that ancestor veneration works on multiple levels, from the biological to the cultural to the traditional. Let us now look at the highest level, which is the ‘true origin’ of the practice. To boldly state it, the ‘ancestors’ in their prime symbolism represent the “solar heroes” of the former cycle. The solar hero is the one who both IS the Sun, and has passed through the sun disk, the door of the sun, and thus has gone beyond the Sun, even being the Sun beyond light, the Black Sun, from whom emanates the Green light. The solar hero evades or defeats the guardians, the serpents, the dragons, the women, and steals the draught of immortality, the soma. He is the thief of the Grail, has 64 Golden Apples. Apollo asks “Who art Thou?” The Solar Hero answers “Thou”. Now, ancestor veneration is here the veneration of the blessed, of the delivered, of those who passed beyond this sublunar world, the Church Triumphant. Their state of “higher being” is obvious, and it is for this reason that they are venerated. We ask for their intercession, and wish to follow in their steps. Their ancestry may not be biological, but it is above all spiritual. As the logoi in heaven are the seeds, so we are their progeny, the plants who grow down from the firmament, the lower half of the World Tree, the Axis Mundi, as reflected in that firmament from the upper half of the World Tree, on which the birds rest. Thus ancestor veneration is justified on all levels, biological, cultural, and primarily spiritual. Only an abnormal civilisation neglects this practice and duty. Return to Tradition and so on.

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15. On Absolute Divine Simplicity “The Persons are impotent as Persons; anything they do is done in virtue of their nature which is their real Being” — Meister Eckhart What do we refer to when we use the word ‘God’? We simply refer to Being itself, called ousia by the Greeks, and essentia by the Latins, although ousia is the better term, as the Latins let confusions arise between essentia and substantia. In the Nicene Creed, ‘homo-ousion’ is used to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son (and implicitly also the Holy Spirit). Thus we can say that the three Hypostases (Latin: Substances) are identical in Being. The reason that all three the Hypostases are God is because their identity is in Being. It is already implied in ‘Hypostasis’ that it is lower than the Ousia, as ‘hypo’ (‘sub’) means ‘under’ and ‘stasis’ (‘stare’) means to stand. So the Hypostases literally stand under the Ousia, being an ‘expression’ of it. By their nature they therefore are lower than the Ousia, as an expression is always lower than the thing it expresses. To explain this difference, we can, with Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena, and Meister Eckhart, make the distinction between the God and the Godhead. Now, we can say that God is being, and that the Godhead is beyond being. For in being we already find multiplicity inherent, and thus the God, while simple, is also triple, both ad intra (the Father as origin, Son as receptive, Spirit as procession) and ad extra (the Father as creator, Son as (incarnated) Word in which all is created, Spirit as generator). But the Godhead, being completely beyond being, even so far as being called Nothing, absolutely incomprehensible, must be absolutely simple. For if it were not, we would be able to comprehend it. Because comprehension requires there to be multiplicity (i.e. a knowing subject and a known object), but in the Godhead there is neither subject nor object. In the God there is subject and object (as Saint Augustine describes the Father knowing the Son via the Spirit), but in the Godhead there is not. We can say that even the Godhead might be comprehended, but this comprehension would more accurately be called a pure forgetting, a negation of all expressed knowledge, a return to the purely unexpressed, a cloud of unknowing. Metaphors of effusion will have to suffice to explain the relationship between the Godhead and God, and the Being and the Persons. The Godhead flows eternally into the Father, the Father as monarch over the other persons lets this power flow into the other Persons. We can continue this effusion as

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far as we desire, through the hierarchy of angels, the hierarchy of men, the hierarchy of earthly creatures, even (may God smite me if this is blasphemous) through the hierarchy of demons. We could call this the solution to the problem of unity and multiplicity. The cosmogony is one that goes from absolute simplicity to absolute multiplicity. God as dot in the centre diffuses his rays out into the farthest circumferences of the universe, while the Godhead is the invisible, unextended dot at the same centre. God reaches from naught to naught, and everything in between is Him and Not Him still. To quote Eriugena, the being of God is none other than Him moving from Himself by Himself through Himself to Himself for Himself. There is, in reality, none other than God. Let us take another approach. We say that God is infinite, and a fortiori we say that God is the Infinite itself. What we mean by this is that He is not limited or circumscribed in any way. This is the same as what St John of Damascus affirms in De Fide Orthodoxa: “the Deity alone is uncircumscribed” and also “We, therefore, both know and confess that God is (…) uncircumscribed, infinite.” So let us grant that the God is the Infinite and completely uncircumscribed. If we then were to say that God is not absolutely simple, i.e. if we were to allow any hint of multiplicity within God, there would arise a contradiction. For every multiplicity is a finitude, every determination a negation. But allowing any finitude into the Infinite, or allowing any negation into Being, would be completely absurd. There can thus ultimately be no multiplicity in the Godhead, and thus we must call it absolutely simple. Of course, as said above, we must allow multiplicity into the God, for we affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as much as we affirm the doctrine of Divine simplicity. We merely need to realise the distinction between the Godhead (absolutely simple) and the God (relatively simple), and then it will be clear to us that there is no contradiction between the two doctrines. St John of Damascus also tells us that in God “the community and unity are observed in fact” while “it is by thought that the difference (in God) is perceived”. So it is once more exposed that there is a conceptual distinction between the properties of the Persons and the Divine Being, but that in fact there is absolute unity.

We can even say that all kataphatic theology speaks of God, and all apophatic theology speaks of the Godhead. For positive qualities (Being (existence), Light, etc) can only be attributed to that which is comprehensible and has distinction, while negative qualities (Non-Being (Beyond-Being), Darkness (Beyond-Light), etc) can be attributed only to that which is incomprehensible and completely indistinct.

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To recapitulate, we have come to the conclusion that there is a conceptual distinction between the Godhead and the God, and that the first is absolutely simple, while the second is simple, but not absolutely, as it ‘contains’ multiplicity and distinction (i.e. the Trinity). We have seen that this is the case by a few ways. Firstly we have seen the history of the concepts used to formulate doctrine about the Deity and how they (implicitly and explicitly) make the distinction between the God and the Godhead (i.e. ousia, hypostasis). Secondly we have seen that if the Godhead were not absolutely simple, it would be comprehensible, which is contrary to right doctrine. In this same point we saw that because the God is comprehensible (because of the doctrine of the Trinity (recall John of Damascus saying ‘we both know and confess’)), there must be a distinction between God and Godhead, as otherwise there would be a contradiction. Thirdly we have seen that Nature (in the widest sense of the word) must reach from absolute Unity to absolute multiplicity, and that thus the Godhead must be absolutely simple, because otherwise the universal effusion would start from a multiplicity, which would be absurd. We saw that this is not only true for the creation of the world, but also for the ontological “coming into being” of the Hypostases of the Trinity. Fourthly we saw that because God is the Infinite, there can ultimately be no multiplicity in Him, because every multiplicity and distinction results in a finitude, and allowing the finite into the Infinite would be absurd. Thus once more we concluded that there is a complete absence of multiplicity in the Godhead, i.e. that it is absolutely simple. It was then explained how there is multiplicity in the God, so that there arises no contradiction between the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity and the doctrine of the Trinity. Fifthly it was shown by the word of St John of Damascus that the distinction between God and Godhead is a conceptual one, lest anyone accuse us of introducing a real duality by making this distinction. Lastly it was shown that even the two forms of theology implicitly contain the distinction between God and Godhead, and that their methods only make sense when the first is seen as relatively simple and the second is seen as absolutely simple. Here ends our short theoretical exposition on Absolute Divine Simplicity, but let us remember that theory is mere preparation. For this theory is worth nothing if we do not put it into practice. Let us then focus our entire being into the effort to achieve (absolute) unity with God, and may this theory help us not to be led astray on the path to Him.

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P.S. Lest anyone accuse us of ‘pantheism’, let us clear up our opinion of this. ‘Pantheism’ is used to describe a doctrine which declares that God is identical with Nature, which as a consequence is implicitly atheistic as it denies the transcendence of God. Now, we find this doctrine to be completely erroneous, and what we say has nothing in accord with this. A modern term for our position would be ‘Panentheism’, which holds that Nature is an expression (or effusion) of God, but in reality there is no need for this modern term, as there really is no other proper form of ‘Theism’ .

... 16. On Psychic Platonism Psychic Platonism is an ideology which declares that there are (lowercase f) forms (residing in the psychic domain (distinguishing it from proper Platonism which posits (uppercase F) Forms in the spiritual domain)) which are absolutely indifferent to the type of substance they can inhabit. To properly understand this ideology one must also realise that there is an identity between these psychic forms and the domain of the digital. But let us first look at the traditional relationship between substance and form. The conception of the ‘substantial form’ is the basis of the classical and medieval view of creation. ‘Form’ here refers to the qualities of a thing, which make it intelligible, while ‘Substance’ refers to the material substrate which allows these qualities to manifest, which makes the thing sensible. A ‘substantial form’ is then the group of qualities which are proper to a certain substance, in other words, which make something what it is. ‘Substantial form’ is often contrasted with ‘Accidental form’. An accidental form would not be a quality that is inherent and proper to the substance, but one which the substance acquires without essentially changing itself. To give an example, let us speak of the substance of the body. The form proper to the human body is the human soul, and thus we say that the human soul is the substantial form of the human body. Now, this body might lose one of its arms, and thus would change its accidental form of ‘being two-armed’ to ‘being one-armed’. But this change does not affect the ‘being human’ of the body, and thus it is accidental (of course it is true that every change in the body corresponds to a change in the soul, but an accidental change of the body would only correspond to an accidental change of the soul).

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Contrary to the traditional view, for the psychic platonist there are no ‘substantial forms’, but only ‘accidental forms’. He does not believe there are certain forms which are inherent to a substance, but instead he believes that any substance can take on any form. Let us look at a few ways this ideology expresses itself. To take the example of the arms of the body. The believer in substantial form would say that the human form contains the quality of ‘being twoarmed’, as this is the normal state of the human body. The psychic platonist must never allow this, as ‘normality’ implies there being a substantial form. He will then go to great lengths to argue that the human body can have as many arms as it wants, zero, one, two, three, and so on. He will take as examples all sorts of bodily anomalies (but will never call them ‘anomalies’, as this implies there being a ‘nomos’; the same is true for ‘disorders’, as this implies there being an ‘order’) to argue for a completely indifference of form to substance. Another example, closely connected to this one but perhaps a bit more common, is the phenomenon of transsexualism. The traditional believer in substantial form would declare that a male form would manifest in a male body, and that a female form would manifest in a female body, and that this is the normal course of action (of course he would not deny the possibility of any anomalies, but these are per definition abnormal). The psychic platonist rejects this assertion, and will always defend the notion that the (fe)male form has no preference at all towards any gendered substance. Someone who acts, looks, speaks, i.e. seems in all outward manifestations to (bodily) be a man, can still (psychically) be a woman, and vice versa. As with the previous example, the psychic platonist will cite all sorts of bodily and psychic anomalies to argue for his position, in this case probably some form of chromosomal calculus (e.g. “well you also have XXY and YYX and birds have the letters W and Z and the females have WZ compared to the human male XY” and such). To speak more of the digital forms of psychic platonism, let us look at the phenomenon of ‘anime girls’. These are basically (audio)visual representations of an idealised woman, with highly neotenous features (big eyes, high-pitched voice, etc). The adherent to substantial form would never be satisfied with such images, as they lack any bodily substance, and are thus even a step further divorced from ‘reality’ than the likes of transsexuals. For him the form of a woman (ideal or not) is proper to the body, but for the psychic platonist it is not. For the psychic platonist the form of a woman can manifest itself in any substance, for it is completely indifferent to it. Now, it just so happens to be the case that the substance of the virtual lends itself much more easily to the ‘idealisation’ of forms than the substance of the bodily, which explains the supposed ‘perfection’ of ‘anime girls’. A final example, again one which takes the digital as substance, is the existence of ‘social media’. Where ‘media’ for the faithful to substantial

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form is primarily an audiovisual communication, preferably ‘face-to-face’, and if not, at least a simulation of either audial (telephone, radio) or visual (television) communication, for the psychic platonist the medium (by which we communicate) can be completely divorced from this ‘face-to-face’ communication, and can thus take as its substance the virtual. Communication on social media is almost never between two individuals, but increasingly between an individual and the ‘machine’ (algorithm). The algorithm is here then the ‘demiurge’ which determines firstly which forms manifest itself into the (social) medium, and as a consequence of this the forms which manifest itself into the minds of the individuals on the medium. Again we see the divorce between the form and its proper substance, and the identity of the psychic and the virtual. These four examples, of which the first two show the ideology of psychic platonism primarily applied to the corporeal, the last two to the digital (which is psychic), will suffice to show the usefulness of the concept of ‘psychic platonism’. Many modern phenomena, and specifically many virtual phenomena, can be both better explained and better understood using this concept. Let us be on our guard against these platonists of the psyche.

... 17. On Atomism Let us define the doctrine of ‘atomism’ as follows: ‘the fundamental basis of reality is a collection of interacting indivisible corporeal particles’. This teaching has existed as a marginal force in some of the worlds ancient traditions (e.g. the Greeks and Hindus), but was for the greatest part rejected as a heterodox (false) teaching. It was only with the advent of the 17th century that in the Western world this teaching began to be seen as a true proposition, by figures such as Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Giordano Bruno. This will suffice as a short history of the doctrine, let us now move on to the principal refutation of it. We begin by stealing the argument of Shankara. “For one atom when combining with another must, as it is not made up of parts, enter into the combination with its whole extent, and as thus no increase of bulk takes place we do not get beyond the first atom. If, on the other hand, you maintain that the atom enters into the combination with a

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part only, you offend against the assumption of the atoms having no parts.“ This refutation would suffice, but let us out of compassion follow the reasoning of the Atomist. Let us assume that there are indivisible corporeal particles. Atomism would say that these particles interact with each other. For them to interact, they would have to touch each other (i.e. enter into combination/communion). If in this touching they are in the same exact place, no actual interaction takes place, as they would be one thing (following Leibnitz’ law of the identity of indiscernibles) and two things are needed for an interaction. But if they touch and are simultaneously in different places these particles are extended. And if they are extended they are divisible. But this contradicts the first assumption. Thus it is clear that any particle cannot both be corporeal (and thus extended) and indivisible at the same time. But let us grant the Atomist that there are such indivisible corporeal particles that interact with each other. For these particles to interact with each other there would have to be an ’empty space’ or ‘void’ in which they can move around and bump in to each other. But there is no such thing as ’empty space’, as all space is extended. With the absence of a ‘void’, the movement of the particles is made impossible, and thus once again the Atomist assumption must be rejected. But let us go one step further with the Atomist and grant him that there is such a thing as ’empty space’, in which indivisible corporeal particles dance around and thusly form the sensual objects which present themselves to our eyes. This ’empty space’ in which the particles move around would not itself be composed of these particles. But then the ‘void’ is a more fundamental principle than the particles, which once more refutes the assumption of the Atomists that these particles are the fundamental basis of reality. We’ve gone far enough along the path of Atomism to show that the doctrine is contradictory at every step, and that no matter how many (false) assumptions you grant the Atomist, he will never arrive at a coherent doctrine. This is why all orthodox traditions reject this teaching, and that only with the advent of the Renaissance (the decline of scholastic physics) this teaching has gained ground. Today this teaching has spread over the entire globe (even though it has not been compatible with the findings of even modern physics since the advent of quantum physics), which is merely another sign of the degeneracy and heterodoxy of Modernity.

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III. Symbolism Collected reflections

... 18a. On Saint Andrew “Forty young men, / who had been drowned in the waves of the sea, / he restored to the uses of life” “The stranger replied: “It is in the empyrean heaven, for there the body of Christ resides; and the body of Christ is higher than any heaven, yet it was formed of our flesh, and our flesh was made of earth. Therefore at that point earth is higher than the heavens.” Andrew was called by the Lord three times. The first time to know him. This was when he heard John the Baptist say: “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”. But he returned to his regular occupation, namely fishing. The second time He called them to friendship. This is when the Lord went into the boat and made Simon and Andrew have a large haul of fish. But they again returned to fishing. The third time Jesus called them to be His disciples. He said to the fishermen “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men”. And they followed Him and did not return to their work. So it is also with the believer. There is the triple negation and the triple affirmation. First there is the “superficial knowledge”, that is, the knowledge of the existence of God. Second there is the “uniting knowledge”, that is, the friendship and equality with the Lord. Third there is the “active knowledge”, that is, the actively working along with the plan of the Great Architect. The symbolism of the Waters is obvious and should be known to you. Nevertheless, I will shortly repeat it. The Waters represent the totality of Possibility (envisaged in the potential, passive way). The fish are those beings traversing the Waters. The Fishermen are those who are able to free the fish from the Waters, i.e. those who are able to make men “walk on the water”.

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After the Lords ascension the Apostles separated. Andrew went to Scythia, Matthew to Ethiopia. But the Ethiopians did not accept the teaching of Matthew and blinded him, chained him, and threw him into prison. Then the Angel of the Lord appeared to Andrew and told him to rescue Matthew. Andrew went there and found the prison open and wept and prayed. Then the Lord restored the sight of Matthew. Andrew preached to the Ethiopians and converted them. The Ethiopians are here used to represent the world, the element that is completely foreign to the righteous Christian. If the believer finds himself in the world, he is ‘blinded’, ‘chained’ and ‘imprisoned’. He finds himself limited in many ways, robbed of the divine vision and ability to act. But the grace of God, portrayed and communicated via His Angel and then via the Apostle may free Man from this predicament. In this way the world is also sanctified, the Ethiopian is converted, the foreign element incorporated and made native. Now the following is a strange story indeed. A woman who had married a murderer was brought to bed but could not give birth. She said to her sister: “Go and pray to our mistress Diana for me.” The sister prayed, but it was the devil, not Diana, who answered: “It is useless to invoke me, for I can do nothing for you. Go instead and find Andrew the apostle: he can help your sister.” She went therefore and sought out Saint Andrew, and brought him to the bedside of her ailing sister. “You deserve your suffering,” he said to her; “you married badly, conceived badly, and called upon the devil. But repent, believe in Christ, and you will be delivered.” The woman made an act of faith and brought forth a stillborn child; and her pangs ceased. The ancient adage “all get what they deserve” is once more repeated by Saint Andrew. Married badly, conceived badly, called badly. Even with repentance, the child is still stillborn. Why does the Devil say he has no power? Why does he advise her to seek St Andrew? It is evident that the Devil is yet still but a tool of the Lord. Furthermore the failing of the old religion becomes clear, the goddess does not answer the call, but only the Devil. When the apostle came to the city of Nicaea, the townspeople told him that seven devils had stationed themselves along the road outside the city gate and were killing anyone who passed that way. The saint, with all the people looking on, commanded the demons to come to him, and at once they came in the shape of dogs. The apostle ordered them to be off to some place where they could not harm anyone. The devils vanished, and those who had witnessed the miracle accepted the faith of Christ. But when Andrew arrived at the gate of another town, he came upon the body of a young man being carried out for burial. Asking what had happened to the youth, he was told that seven dogs had come and killed him in his bed. The apostle, in tears, cried out: “I know, Lord, that these were the seven demons I chased out of Nicaea!” Then he said to the father: “What will you give me if I restore your son to life?” “I have nothing dearer to me than my son,” the father answered,

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“so I will give him to you.” And when Andrew had prayed to the Lord, the young man rose and followed him. Seven devils sent away from a place, saving one city, but cursing another. The Saint cleanses one place from evil, but by this very act brings it to another. It becomes clear to us that every evil can only be combatted with another evil, every injustice only restored with another injustice. But yet, the Saint rises above mere justice, and in tears, sees the effects of his own action, and resorts to mercy, thereby taking from the father what is dearest to him. Let us have a final story then. The prefect of a certain city had taken possession of a field that belonged to a church dedicated to Saint Andrew. At the prayer of the bishop, the prefect was immediately stricken with fever as a punishment for his sin. He thereupon asked the bishop to pray for him, promising to return the field to the church if he recovered his health; but once he had been made well he took back the field. Then the bishop again resorted to prayer and extinguished all the lights in the church, saying: “There will be no more light until the Lord is avenged upon his enemy and the church recovers its loss.” The prefect promptly fell ill again, this time with a higher fever, so once more he begged the bishop to pray for him, saying that he would give back the stolen field and another of equal size. The bishop’s answer was: “I have already prayed, and God has answered my prayer.” The sick man then had himself carried to the bishop, whom he forced to go into the church to pray for him again; but hardly had the bishop entered the church when the prefect died, and the field was restored to the church. The Bishop prays, and the Prefect becomes ill. Did the bishop curse the prefect? No, it is merely justice that was carried out. The Prefect did not understand, the fool. He asked the Bishop to pray for him, but he did not change his ways, and thus he was already dead. So it is for the believer, who might ask his family, friends or even internet strangers to pray for him. If you do not change your ways, you will stay in the land of the dead. “O good Cross, made beautiful by the body of the Lord: long have I desired you, ardently have I loved you, unceasingly have I sought you out and now you are ready for my eager soul. Receive me from among men and restore me to my Master, so that he who, by means of You, in dying redeemed me, may now receive me. Amen”

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18b. On Saint Thomas “The servant, noticing that the apostle was not eating or drinking but sat with his eyes turned toward heaven, struck him a blow on the cheek. The apostle addressed him: ‘It is better for you to receive here and now a punishment of brief duration, and to be granted forgiveness in the life to come. Know that I shall not leave this table before the hand that struck me is brought here by dogs.’ The servant went out to draw water, a lion killed him and drank his blood, dogs tore his body to pieces, and a black one carried his right hand into the midst of the feast.” The name Thomas means abyss. The apostle was called so because he was given insight into the depth of the Godhead when Christ answered his question with: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life”. It is also said that Thomas comes from “totus means”, a total wanderer. For the wanderer is he who is the stranger, and the believer is a stranger to the world. It is said that Thomas was a builder, or an architect. Now the symbolism of building is great and extensive (as I also touch on in my essay ‘On the Qualitative Conception of Space’), and the Saint is often portrayed with a (carpenting) square. We can contrast this occupation with that of the previous Apostle we discussed (Saint Andrew), namely that of fisherman. It is immediately clear that while the occupation of fisherman deals mostly with water, that of architect deals mostly with earth. Fishing represents primarily conversion (not merely in the limited sense, but actual metanoia) while building represents primarily the establishment of ‘organised religion’. Fishing is more ‘volatile’, while building is more ‘fixed’. We will see a bit of this contrast (which is not a contradiction) in the stories about St Thomas. Tradition says that Thomas the Apostle was summoned to India by a king, who had heard of his great architectural skill, and wanted him to build a grand new palace. Thus the king gave Thomas a lot of gold and silver, so that he could afford all the supplies and workers necessary for the building of the palace. The king left for two years, because he had other duties, and when he returned, he had found that there was no palace, because Thomas had given all the money to the poor and needy, and had converted a great deal of the populace. The king immediately had Thomas thrown into prison. But the brother of the king fell sick and had a dream in which angels showed him a great heavenly palace and told him that it was Thomas who had built it. The brother told the king this and Thomas was released and the king was also converted.

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There are some obvious lessons in this story. Do not care for earthly possessions, and this detachment will give you much greater things in Heaven. Give to the poor. Just simple stuff. I mean you probably don’t accomplish these things yet, but in theory it is simple stuff. To find a doorway into a more symbolical understanding of the stories we should take in mind that ‘India’ here plays the same role as ‘Ethiopia’ did in the stories of St Andrew. Again a foreign element, i.e. the world, which values the Apostle for his ‘worldly skills’ (namely here the art of building), throws him into prison (rejects and traps him) when the Apostle does not indulge in the worldly desire (building a luxurious palace), but is ultimately converted (sanctified, made native) when it sees that the Heavenly is incomparably greater than the Earthly (sees that the heavenly palace is much more beautiful than the earthly). Another story tells of the Apostle travelling to the North of India and preaching there. A noblewoman named Migdomia put on a peasants garment and went to see him preach about the misery and incompleteness of the current life. He also preached on the ways to receive the word of God and that one should be pure when receiving it. Migdomia was completely convinced and from then on refused to have sex with her husband. The husband then asked the King to intervene, so the King sent the Queen to convince Migdomia of her error. But Migdomia convinced the Queen that she was right, thus the Queen refused to have sex with the King. Now the King was quite mad, as he could not get off anymore, and he angrily summoned Thomas to the palace. He made fiery red-hot iron plates and forced Thomas to stand on them, but when Thomas stood on them, immediately water emerged from the ground and cooled the plates. The King made Thomas stand in a fiery furnace but the furnace was immediately extinguished. Finally he ordered Thomas to worship an idol, but the idol immediately melted when he kneeled. Now the High Priest was very mad, and he took a lance and pierced Thomas with it, and Thomas gave up the ghost. More obvious moral lessons. Life is suffering. The pure of heart will see (hear) God. The faithful are protected. And so on. But in the figure of Migdomia we can also see the archetype of the believer. She must put off her ‘noble garb’ and “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (the garb of the peasant), i.e. the soul must lower herself, which is the true virtue of humility. At this lowest place she will see the emptiness of her existence, and of the world in general. This purifies the heart, and now she ‘refuses to lie with her husband’, i.e. refuses to enter into communion with worldly desires. The soul has seen God, and can properly preach and make those other wanderers (in this case, the Queen) see the Truth.

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In the story of the hot iron plates and the fiery furnace we can read the untouchability of the Saint by the passions (which are often described as ‘fiery’). Furthermore the symbolism of the ‘lance’ is quite obvious and parallels that of the lancing of Christ. It is the ‘piercing of the heart’ which makes blood (and water) flow from it, the completion of the sacrifice, the destruction of the lower nature so that life may flow forth, the death of death, et cetera et cetera. “Lord Jesus Christ, who hast placed on the head of thy martyr, Thomas the apostle, a crown made of that precious stone, that is founded in the foundation; that so he might not be confounded, because he believed in thee; nor be uncrowned, because he laid down his life for thee; may there be, by his intercession, in us thy servants, that true faith, whereby we may confess thee with most ready hearts before persecutors: that thus, by the same great martyr’s intercession, we may not be confounded before thee and thy angels. Amen.“

... 18c. On Saint John (the Evangelist) “Christ loved John above the other apostles” The name ‘John’ means grace (or favour) of God. This is interpreted in four ways. First is the special love Jesus had for him, for Jesus loved John above all the other apostles. Second is Johns purity from the flesh, for he was blessed to be a virgin (yes, this is a blessing). Thirdly because to John were revealed many secrets, namely about the divinity of the Word and the end of the world. Fourth is the fact that the Mother of God was entrusted to him by the Christ. Arguably the most famous story about the life of St John is the one about the poisoned wine transformed into a snake (or dragon). The story is recorded as follows: A High Priest of Diana summoned John to come give an offer to the goddess. John came, but proposed an alternative: if by invoking the name of Diana they could destroy the Christian Church, he would give an offering, but if he could destroy the Temple of Diana by invoking the name of Christ, they would convert. The men agreed. So all

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went out of the temple, and the saint prayed, and of course, the temple of Diana collapsed and her statue was turned to dust. Now the High Priest was not yet satisfied, and demanded that John would drink a cup filled with poison. First the priest made two prisoners drink from the cup, and they both immediately died. Now the apostle took the cup, but when he drunk from it the poison suddenly transformed into a snake (dragon) and vanished from the cup. Now the public was convinced, but the high priest not yet. He demanded that John also brought back to life the two men who were killed by the poison from the cup, and so the saint put off his cloak, laid it upon the men, and thus they were resurrected. Now even the High Priest was convinced, and all present were baptised. All’s well that ends well and such. Now let us begin with the outer matters. The old gods (goddesses) no longer suffice, their prayers go unanswered, their temples turn to dust, their priests converted, and so on. The new religion has come, and does everything the old did, but in a better way. But of this enough is written already, so let us look at the inner symbolism. What is the destruction of the pagan temple? It is the destruction of the body, of the carnal desire, which “is dust, and will return to dust”, just as the statue is turned to dust. This is the first step, the first thing accomplished in the initiatic journey. This first step relates to the body, and the second step relates to the soul. For while the stone of the temple represents the body, the wine represents the soul, and the cup the heart. The poison which is in the cup is here not that poison which can kill the body, but precisely that which can destroy the soul. Two prisoners drink from the cup, and they die. Now the fact that they are “two” refers to the fact that multiplicity does not survive this trial, while the fact that they are “prisoners” refers to the fact that they are still chained by the bonds of ignorance and sin. But the apostle, who is blessed by the grace of God, is able to drink from the poisoned wine, and by his drinking, the poison is removed in the form of a serpent. The wine represents here the love of God, which for the sinner comes as bitterness, but for the saint comes as sweetness (this is also the relationship between Mercy and Justice, which I wrote about in ‘On Justice and Mercy’). Now the serpent symbolises here the devil, or the negative, evil, destructive power. For the sinner (prisoner) this is not removed from the wine of God’s love, which he receives in his cup (heart), but for the saint, this aspect is removed, and pure goodness remains in his heart. But the story does not end here, for the third step is not yet accomplished. While the first step corresponds to the overcoming of the body, the second to

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the soul, the third refers to the trial of the spirit (forming the classical ternary of body, soul and spirit (corpus, anima, spiritus)). John takes of his fancy ‘cloak’, that is, removes the gifts bestowed upon his body and soul by God (following the example of the Word, who took on the form of a slave, the lowest human form), and lies it upon the two dead men, who thereby “put on our Lord Jesus Christ”. By this they are ‘resurrected’) and following this all are ‘baptised’, that is, given the Holy Spirit. This completes the three steps detailed in the story, the overcoming of the body, the purification of the heart, and the supremacy of the spirit. How wonderful! This first story and interpretation was perhaps a bit too difficult, so let us look at a nicer story. Saint John had grown very old, and had to be carried by his disciples to church every day. The apostle did not speak much anymore, but every time they would take a little rest on the way to church, he spoke these words: “My sons, love one another!”. One day, his disciples, wondering at this phenomenon, asked the saint, “Master, why do you always repeat the same thing?”. The Apostle replied: “Because it is the commandment of the Lord, and if this alone is obeyed, it is enough.” There is no symbolism in this story, for its message is clear enough. The whole of the Law is fulfilled in a single command: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” For while I cannot speak clearly, and must resort to elaborate symbolism and philosophical terminology, Saint John spoke simply. The whole corpus of Plotinus is of less worth to me than these words: “And the Word was made flesh” “This is John, who reclined on the Lord’s breast at supper, the blessed Apostle, to whom celestial secrets were revealed and who spread the words of life through all the world.”

...

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18d. On Saint Sebastian

“Since the world began, life has betrayed those who placed their hopes in it, has deceived their expectations, has fooled those who took its goods for granted, and so it has left nothing certain and proves itself false to all.” – St. Sebastian The prime story that we have of Saint Sebastian is the one that leads to him being pierced by so many arrows that he looked like a porcupine. But the story starts with the saint being a renowned commander of the Roman army. Sebastian was present at the beheading of two nobles, twin brothers who were persecuted for their faith in Christ. The parents of the brothers came to convince them to denounce their faith, so that they would be saved from death. Their mother came first, with breasts bare, and hair dishevelled, and lamented this new way of death, where life’s only wish is to be ended, where death is invited to take over. How miserable is this situation where the offspring must die and the parents are forced to live on! Then their father arrived and complained to heaven that the funeral rites he had prepared for himself would have to be used for his sons. Then came the wives of the brothers, and they brought with them their children. They asked the brothers how they dared to leave their wives and children, yelled at them about how iron their hearts must be, that they would disdain their parents, spurn their friends, cast away their wives, abandon their children, and even hand themselves over to their executioners at their own will! All this began to soften the hearts of the brothers. But then Sebastian held a monologue about the worthlessness of this life, and the comparatively infinitely great eternal life, and how the devil believes himself to be winning by making martyrs, but that while the devil catches he is actually caught, while the devil wins he actually loses, while the devil strangles he is actually killed, and while the devil mocks he is actually laughed at. When the saint finished speaking a divine light came from heaven and all were convinced by this sign and his words and subsequently baptised. The wish of the twin brothers to find death in martyrdom was eventually granted. Now, after this, the emperor Diocletian summoned Sebastian (whom he had made commander in the army, and part of his personal retinue), and accused him of acting against the gods the Romans were used to honouring. Of course, the saint answered that he merely always had worshipped the one God who is in heaven, and that he prayed to Christ for the salvation of the emperor and the good estate of the Roman Empire. But the emperor gave the command to have Saint Sebastian tied to a pole in the centre of the camp, and had the soldiers shoot him full of arrows, so that afterwards he looked

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like a porcupine. Sebastian survives, is nursed back to health, and returns to accuse the emperor, but in reaction the saint is clubbed to death at the emperors command, and eventually buried near the Apostles. So ends (or begins) his life. “The harmony of the ordered-world is one of contrary tensions, like that of the bow”, said Heraclitus. The bow has two ends, the upper symbolising Heaven, the lower symbolising Earth, the string symbolising all that they form between them. What is between Heaven and Earth is nothing else than the manifested world, and the arrow flinging itself forth from this string is nothing else than the delivery of the soul from this world. Seen from another angle, the bowstring is the Divine Mind, and the arrow the Word, and so the body of Sebastian, the carnal nature, is wounded and even destroyed by the Logos, or more concretely, by the study and inspiration of the word of God. Furthermore we can remind ourselves of the Hebrew for ‘sin’ deriving from ‘missing the mark’, and the Hebrew for ‘law’ deriving from ‘hitting the mark’. Often the symbolism of archery contains a “going beyond the sun”, where the arrow penetrates the mark (which looks kind of like the disk of the sun). But in the case of the perforation of Saint Sebastian, there is more of a “going inside the body”, according to the VITRIOLUM of the alchemists, where the true medicine is found only by venturing into the earth (earth being equal to body, as Johannes de Mondsnyder tells us). Likewise it is said in the Katha Upanishad “Him (referring to the Purusha (i.e. actus purus)) one should extract from one’s own body (understood in the hermetic sense mentioned above, i.e. as prima materia), like the arrow from the reed”. Let us also recall the words of Shams i Tabrizi: “Every instant there is, so to speak, an arrow in the bow of the body: if it escapes from the bow, it strikes its mark.” And likewise Dante in his Paradiso: “Not only does the shaft shot from this bow strike creatures lacking intellect, but those who have intelligence, and who can love. The Providence that has arrayed all this forever quiets—with Its light—that heaven in which the swiftest of the spheres revolves; to there, as toward a destined place, we now are carried by the power of the bow that always aims its shaft at a glad mark.”

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Thus leads the story of Sebastian to the contemplation of the symbolism of the arrow, by which he was so cruelly pierced. “But the pain of eternity is ever renewed to stab more deeply, is increased to burn more fiercely, is fanned to prolong the punishment. Therefore let us stir up our desire, our love for martyrdom.”

... 18e. On Saint Nicholas

“Consider that although we may reckon ourselves to be righteous and frequently succeed in deceiving men, we can conceal nothing from God.” — St. Nicholas When Jesus healed two blind men, He sternly told them to never tell anyone about His powers. The same we see with St Nicholas, who saved three virgin daughters from prostitution, but did not want anyone to know that he had done so. Why did they not want their virtus (power, virtue) to be known? Should not their works have been known so that more could be drawn to faith in God? Well, their works did eventually became known. For St Nicholas told the father of the almost-prostitutes, when the father discovered that Nicholas had given him the money to keep his daughters out of prostitution, to only tell this story after his own death. And even though Jesus told the unblinded men to not speak of His healing powers, He already knew beforehand that they would do so, defying His command (perhaps mirroring the Fall from Paradise). So we have a sort of contradiction here, where on the one hand the saints (including the Supreme Saint of all, of course) did not want their works known immediately, or at least wanted to not take credit for their works, but on the other hand the saints wanted the stories of their works to be known publicly, even if only after their death. Of course, when we look closer, we can see that there is not really a contradiction here, but only a difference of purpose. The purpose of the former disposition (not wanting their stories to spread) is to protect themselves from the temptations of fame and glory and praise. For

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it is much easier for those loved by the people to fall into sin, than it is for those despised by the people. The purpose of the latter disposition (wanting their stories to spread) is wholly other, it is namely not concerned with their own spiritual state, but with that of all the others. The stories of their miracles and signs might namely lead others to the faith, or to a more virtuous life, or to some other good. So to maximise the total good, a stable combination between these two dispositions is necessary, namely one where the saint is not harmed by too great of a social status, but where also none are spared inspiration by lack of virtuous examples. Where Saint Nicholas’ story of the prostitutes only became known after his death, the news of Jesus healing the blind men was made public almost immediately after He told the men not to spread it. How can we explain this difference? We can do so by looking at the two dispositions. The first disposition really ‘decides’ when a story can become known, for the one saint might be more susceptible to the vanities of fame than the other. The reason why the story of the healing of the blind men could become immediately clear is because Jesus could not be harmed by the temptations of fame and being well-known. There was no good to be lost by the spreading of his story. Now, Saint Nicholas was still susceptible to these temptations, being merely human and not God, which is why some of the stories of his works had to be hidden until after his death. The same scheme of the two pseudo-contradictory dispositions could also be applied to other events of the saints, for example their reluctance to become bishops, but let us move on with Saint Nicholas for now. Another story of St Nicholas is him punching Arius at the council of Nicaea but the story is not found in the Legenda Aurea, although it does record the presence of St Nicholas at the council. Nevertheless, even if there really is no interesting symbolism in this story, it is an amusing mental image, and perhaps useful in a time where all ‘violence’ is seen as ‘un-Christian’. Now, to move on from the life of St Nicholas and to his legacy, let us speak of the festival of ‘Sinterklaas’, from which ‘Santa Claus’ is phonetically derived. The feast originated in the Middle Ages, serving the same function for Advent that Carnival serves for Lent, namely an ‘outlet’ for lower tendencies to express themselves, to ‘get them out of the system’ in a way. This would ensure that these lower desires (manifesting themselves as lust, drunkenness, violence, and so on) would not appear in the time following the festival. It is a way of preserving the ‘holiness’ of certain days, at the expense of decreasing this holiness on other days. The feast day of Saint Nicholas mostly served as a start to these festivals, and a lot of the activities would be themed according to him. To give an example, students would choose their own ‘bishop’ for a month, and they would re-enact events from the life of St Nicholas. Aside from this, gifts were also given to poor

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children (as St Nicholas was both known for his love for the poor and for children), mostly by the servants of St Nicholas, which were people dressed as little black demons (e.g. Krampus, Zwarte Piet). The festival changed with the Protestant Reformation. Of course, the protestants were against the veneration of saints, and also did not like the practice of carnival-like feasts, nor did they see the practice of demons being helpers of a saint as being very Christian. This is why at first they tried to ban the festival entirely, with Luther even moving the feast date from the 6th of December (the feast day of St Nicholas) to Christmas Eve and replacing Saint Nicholas with the Baby Christ (thereby completely misunderstanding the purpose of the festival of Sinterklaas, even going so far as to confuse it with the start of Christmastide instead of a preparation for Christmastide). Nevertheless, even though the Calvinist rulers tried to ban it, the feast remained ever popular among the Dutch people, as a Catholic remnant in a Protestantised country. Even to this day, the feast is still celebrated throughout the entire country of the Netherlands (with some changes having happened along the way, for example what were originally demonic servants, first became Moorish or Oriental servants, and later Sub-Saharan African servants (probably through associations of the colour black)). Even though a lot of the (Catholic) traditions and meaning of the feast has been lost, and even though there is now a lot of criticism on the feast (e.g. Zwarte Piet being “racist”) both from inside (e.g. immigrants & leftists) and outside (e.g. the UN) the Netherlands, Sinterklaas still stands as a ruin (and reminder) of what once was, and what perhaps once will be. Let us finish with an old Dutch Sinterklaas song (translated into English) “My heart trembles, My heart trembles with joy. What brings he to me, what brings he to you what brings he to me and you? Who’s been good, cake! Who’s been bad, the whip! He comes, he comes, That lovely, good Saint. My best friend, your best friend, the friend of every child!”

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19. On the Virgin Mary

“Let us not imagine that we obscure the glory of the Son by the great praise we lavish on the Mother; for the more she is honoured, the greater is the glory of her Son. There can be no doubt that whatever we say in praise of the Mother gives equal praise to the Son.” — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux The Logos has come into the world, all rejoice. Through the Gate of Heaven (Janua Coeli) did He descend, with the sole purpose that through that same Gate the souls of men may ascend. God became Man, so that Man may become God (per St Athanasius). This Gate is also the top of the Ladder of Jacob, through which the Angels go down to earth and come back to heaven. It is the gate of Capricorn (coincidentally, Capricorn is the birth sign of Jesus), also called the ‘Gate of the Gods’ (“Gods” should here be understood as “Angels”, as is detailed in my essay ‘On the Varieties of Theism’) that Numenius speaks of. The Gate of Heaven should be understood as the boundary between the Manifested and the Unmanifested, being below the Godhead, but above the Angels. As St John of Damascus says, Mary was made the Queen of all creatures. So not only the Word came into the world through Mary, but all creatures came into the world through Mary. This is no surprise because it is said “in Him (the Word) all things were created”. So if Mary brings the Word into the world, by this she also brings all things (which are, by definition, included in the Word) into the world. Let us be blunt, the Virgin Mary is the Materia Prima. The Alchemists would call it ‘Milk of the Virgin’ and also the ‘Mother’ or even ‘Eve’. We need only recall that Eve, as the first mother, brought Evil into the world, while Mary, as the second mother, brought the Good into the world. As St Bonaventure says: Eve was the unfaithful mediatrix of perdition; Mary was the faithful mediatrix of salvation. This truth also explains the blackness of the so widespread icons and statues of the ‘Black Madonna’. Academics have attempted to explain this phenomenon by saying that the “icons became filthy because of smoke”, or saying that they are representations of sub-Saharan populace in medieval Europe. We find these explanations quite unsatisfactory, and it is much more sensible to explain the blackness of these images in a symbolic way. Namely we say that the blackness refers to the (relative) indistinctness of the Prime Matter (as opposed to the absolute indistinctness, and thus darkness, of the Godhead, which is spoken of in my essay ‘On Nothing’), in contrast with the Light, which is the Word. Now this Light comes as through a (dark) Mirror

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(cf. the “Mirror of the Blessed Virgin Mary” by St Bonaventure & her title of ‘Mirror of Justice’) into the world, which thereby produces the great multiplicity out of a single unity. Now, as we all know, the Unmanifest is much greater than the Manifest, and to count the Virgin above God because she is the door through which He manifests all things and through which all things come back to Him would be a grave error. But it would be as much of an error to count the Virgin below anything other in Creation, for she is the ‘Queen of all creatures’. Thus is explained why Mary is afforded hyperdulia, not dulia nor latria. She is also portrayed sitting on the Moon, on account of two reasons. The First is, that because of her function as Gate of Heaven, she sits on the boundary between the ‘sublunar’ (earthly) and ‘supralunar’ (heavenly) worlds. The second is, that because of her purely ‘passive’, ‘receiving’ nature, she is as the Moon to the Sun (which is the symbol for God). For just as the Moon receives all her Light from the Sun, so that she can reflect it into the Night, so the Virgin Mary received the Word from God, so that she may reflect it into the world. To summarise, the Virgin Mary is the boundary between the Manifest and the Unmanifest, the Gate of Heaven, the Prime Matter, and the Queen of Creatures.

Through her all come into the world, and through her all go out of it. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

... 20. On the Qualitative Conception of Space

In the modern scientific conception of the world, space is a purely homogenous, solely quantifiable void wherein atoms may bounce upon each other in randomised fashion to produce the various phenomena which present themselves to the senses, which produce thereafter thoughts in the human mind. Such a conception was completely foreign to the pre-modern civilisations, which we will call ‘traditional’ civilisations. For them space was also a

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quantitative field, being capable of measurement in some way, but it was most importantly and most correctly a qualitative field. Some examples: some locations were more sacred than others, all locations possessed a certain ‘spirit’ (genius loci), and the orientation of sacred rites was very important. To start with a refutation of the idea that space can ultimately be measured in a definite quantitative way, we need only look to the Eleatic School. The famed paradoxes of Zeno serve as great examples of why space is fully continuous and not in any way discontinuous. For the moment we ascribe a definite quantity to space we fall into the paradox. For example, when we say Achilles runs a definite one hundred meters, the Tortoise has ran a definite ten meters, and then Achilles runs a definite ten meters, then the Tortoise has ran a definite one meter and so on. So if it is truly so that we can divide space (or time for that matter) into indivisible units (atoms), i.e. that space is ultimately discontinuous, then we fall into the paradox. So we must reject that space is discontinuous, and accepts that space is continuous, and can only be divided into definite quantities by approximation, but never exactly. Now, the modern infinitesimal calculus purports to solve this problem by use of its ‘infinitesimals’, i.e. units infinitely small, but this theory does not hold up to scrutiny, which we will not demonstrate here, as it is only tangentially related to the main topic of this essay, but for a refutation of the theory of the infinitesimals we will refer the reader to the work ‘The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus’ by Rene Guenon. To return to the traditional conception of space as a qualitative container, we shall start with the idea that some spaces are more sacred than others. The ancient art of building temples (or churches) is closely connected with this conception. The first matter they had to attend to was to find the proper ‘raw’ location to place the temple. As an example of this, we can say that a location on a mountain (or hill) is more favourable to spiritual activity, because it is closer to heaven. Then the second matter was to determine the proper shape of the temple, being a combination of circles, squares, crosses and other shapes, depending on the conditions of the rite taking place there, the surrounding environment, and the type of audience it was meant for. So the part of a temple meant for all would have different qualities than the part of a temple only meant for the few. As an example of this we can take the difference between the Chancel and the Nave (+ Transept) of a church building. Then the final matter to consider was the orientation of the building. In different traditions different directions are considered to be holy, for example, the Muslims pray in the direction of the Ka’aba, in Christendom the altar in a church was usually to be situated to the East (ad orientem), and Hindu’s generally pray to the West when in a temple. Now there are of course exceptions to these general trends, but in all of them it

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becomes clear that the spatial orientation when performing spiritual acts is of importance. From these considerations it becomes clear that Architecture was truly considered to be a sacred art, which was of great importance in determining the efficacy of ritual, and that it had certain teachings connected with this sacredness of Space, which is invested with all sorts of qualitative differences, and is not merely an empty quantitative container. To move on from building, we will speak of the concept of the ‘genius loci’. The ‘genius loci’ is the manifestation of a certain being (psychic or spiritual) in a certain place. One of the most famous examples of this is the ‘Genius Augusti’ (the Spirit of the Emperor) being regarded as the ‘genius loci’ of the entire Roman Empire. Another example would be the manifestation of the Shekhinah with the Hebrews in Tabernacle. With the Greeks there was also the Omphalos, which formed the bridge between Man and the Gods. Now all these things were regarded as ‘centres’, either centres of a specific place, of a specific empire, or of the entire world. The entire domain was believed to in a way ‘radiate’ from this centre, and also it was believed that the entire domain was in a way ‘contained’ within this centre, as this centre was the cause of the entire place. We can see that this idea is applicable on many levels, either as the presence of some lesser spirit in a particular place, as the presence of a great spirit in an entire country, or even as the presence of God Himself in the entire world. We see that these spaces can each on their own be considered an image of the Universe, with their own Centre of the Universe. The justification for this is that each point in space is in reality just a reflection of the Principal Point, which is the real Centre of the Universe. In other words, all these spaces are ‘microcosms’, which (in their own way) reflect the Macrocosm. As an example of this we can point to the three-fold nature of most temples, that is, they generally possess an ‘Outer Court’, a ‘Holy’ , and a ‘Holy of Holies’. In the microcosm these respectively represent the body, the soul and the spirit in the human being, while in the macrocosm these respectively represent the corporeal, the psychic (subtle) and the spiritual domain of the universe. Now, even the modern mind cannot help but retain a little of this concept, but only in a ‘superstitious’ way, that is, in a way that is not at all connected to traditional principles. A great example of this is the phenomenon of the ‘safe space’, a “sacred” space in which the poor and oppressed are safe from the evil outside world, and from which the “uninitiated” (those with the wrong opinions) are excluded. Of course, this is not really a sacred space, but it is only so in the minds of those who believe it to be so. Rather it is an inversion of the concept of the sacred space, as the ‘safe space’ is mostly meant to ‘lock’ a being into its own state of mind and ‘protect’ it from outside influences, while the real sacred space is meant to ‘open’ the

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‘mundane’ physical world and the minds of those present to the outside spiritual realities descending from above. Ultimately, if we desire to live in a Sacred world, filled with the images of the Divine, we must reject these pseudo-psychical inversions of the concept of sacred space as well as the purely materialistic interpretation of space as quantity and return to a qualitative conception of space.

... 21. On the Architectural Symbolism of Cathedrals

“thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” — Matthew 16:18 “This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it, because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it, and it shall be shut for the prince. The prince himself shall sit in it, to eat bread before the Lord: he shall enter in by the way of the porch of the gate, and shall go out by the same way.” — Ezekiel 44:2 “The stone which the builders rejected; the same is become the head of the corner (the keystone)” — Psalm 118:22 In Christian symbolism of building, Saint Peter corresponds to the foundation stone, the Holy Virgin Mary to the pendant hanging from the keystone, and Christ to the keystone (or angular (corner) stone (lithon gonias, ‘gonias’ meaning both angular and hidden (unmanifested)). Let us start with analysing the meaning of “foundation stone”. The most obvious is Peter being the foundation of the Church, not as an individual but as a function, which explains the authority of the Seat of St Peter. But “Foundation Stone” is also the name of the place where the Holy of Holies was situated, and beneath which is the Well of Souls. And this is what the Zohar says of it:

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“The world was not created until God took a stone called the Foundation Stone and threw it into the depths where it was fixed from above till below, and from it the world expanded. It is the centre point of the world and on this spot stood the Holy of Holies“ And this is what the Midrash Tanhuma says of it: “As the navel is set in the centre of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world… situated in the centre of the world, and Jerusalem in the centre of the land of Israel, and the sanctuary in the centre of Jerusalem, and the holy place in the centre of the sanctuary, and the ark in the centre of the holy place, and the Foundation Stone before the holy place, because from it the world was founded.” So we can say that the Foundation Stone is not only that on which the Church is built, but also that on which the cosmos is built (for the church is an image of the cosmos). But avoid the common confusion of believing that Christ is this stone, for Scripture is clear that He is not that, but He is the Cornerstone (this leaves aside the question of ‘substitution’, i.e. Peter fulfilling the function of Christ on earth, which is also probably connected with the upside down crucifixion of the first Pope (‘vicar’ meaning ‘substitute’)). We will come back to the topic of the relation between the Cornerstone and Foundation Stone after discussing the other two, namely the Keystone and Pendant, i.e. Christ and Mary. Let us then discuss the Keystone. First we must dispel the idea that “corner stone” refers to a stone in one of the (multiple) corners of a church building, for this would make no sense. It is clear that it refers to the ‘angular stone’, i.e. the stone that is the top of the arch. With that out of the way, let us see the symbolism of it. The Keystone is the most important part of the building, for it is the stone that unites the entire building in one, and keeps it from crumbling. Now, the keystone has a peculiar shape, which prevents it from functioning anywhere else in the building except for at the top. This is the reason why a builder who does not look above and beyond cannot understand the function of this stone, and why he would ‘reject it’, instead of saving it for the end. For a wise builder orients the entire process of building to its end (and completion), and the end is precisely the placing of the keystone. Here we see that the keystone is the ‘last stone’, while the foundation stone is the ‘first stone’ (recall ” So shall the last be first, and the first last”). And this keystone is nothing other than the stone of the philosophers. But the capstone is still hidden (recall ‘gonias’ also meaning ‘secret’), and for the world (i.e. the cathedral (as the cathedral is an image of the cosmos)) to see the keystone, it needs to be lowered and made visible. This place is

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often reserved for the Pendant, which makes it protrude from the vault and gives an indication of the Axis Mundi which passes from the Keystone down to the Foundation Stone. And this Pendant is the Gate of Heaven, through which the King of Israel enters into the world, and also leaves by it. From this it is obvious that the Pendant is the Virgin Mary, whose symbolism we have analysed in this blogpost. For by this Gate God entered into the world, so that men may go out of the world and into the Kingdom of Heaven. And so the “lithon gonias”, the hidden stone, is made manifest by the Virgin. Now that we have understood the general symbolism of the three, namely the Keystone, the Pendant, and the Foundation Stone, i.e. the Christ, the Virgin, and Saint Peter, we may come back to their union and relationship. For we can easily imagine a (virtual) vertical line between the three. This would then be the Axis Mundi, or World Tree, which stretches from the Top of the World (Heaven, the Keystone) to the Bottom of the World (Earth, the Foundation Stone). And it is along this ladder that the Angels go up and down, that the Grace of God is bestowed, and that men are saved. So in summary, the Keystone is Christ, the Pendant Mary, the Foundation Stone Peter, and between them is the Axis Mundi. Go visit a church and see.

... 22. On the Wheel of Fortune

“All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.” — Boethius “Once we become conscious, even dimly, of the Atman, (…) Maya is no longer an endlessly revolving wheel of pain and pleasure but a ladder which can be climbed to consciousness of the Reality.” — Adi Shankara In a famous medieval poem, Fortuna is called Imperatrix Mundi, Empress of the world. One might object to giving this title to Lady Fortune by saying that this position can only be inhabited by Christ, the King of kings and Lord

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of lords. This objection is easily put away when the title is seen as similar to the one given to the Devil, namely Princeps (hujus) Mundi, Prince of this world. That these functions were seen as analogous (or even identical) in the medieval conception of the world can be seen from medieval images, wherein the Devil takes the place of Fortuna in the spinning of the Wheel, as well as from the fact that Fortuna is almost always seen and described in a negative fashion. We might then say that the Wheel represents the world (in the widest sense), which is under the dominion of Fortune, or Fate. The ancients used to refer to the will of the gods with the word ‘Fortune’, which Dante contrasts by saying that the medievals have replaced this with using ‘Providence’ for the Will of God. We can say with d’Olivet that Providence here refers to Natura Naturans, i.e. nature naturing, and Fate to Natura Naturata, i.e. nature natured (using these words in their scholastic, not Spinozan, sense). If Natura Naturans is then the Will of God (not God Himself), Natura Naturata is the desire of Fortuna. Man can choose either to align himself with the one or the other, to rise above the Angels or to fall below the beasts. This is also expressed in the saying “sapiens dominabitur astris” (the wise man will rule the stars), which can be seen if we transpose the layout of the wheel of fortune over the Aristotelian (and most probably older) conception of the cosmos. The one who goes beyond the stars reaches the Empyrean Heaven, and is thus freed from the influence and turnings of Fate. We often see the Zodiac returning in the depiction of the Wheel, as we can for example see in various Buddhist wheels. It is an ancient doctrine that the Zodiac (and the stars) influence the world below them. The precise workings of their influence is not the subject of this blogpost, but let it be known that their influence may be transcended, because it is limited to a specific domain, namely this sublunar world. If we look at the depiction of the Wheel of Fortune, those turning with it (or more accurately, being turned by it) always reside on the outermost circumference of it. So perhaps it would be proper to say that it is not the entire wheel that represents this world, but rather only the circumference. The spokes would then represent the intermediate stages, and the centre would then be the ‘Root of Nature’, i.e. Prakriti. This point (i.e. the centre) coincides with Earth in the classical, Ptolemaic, cosmological scheme. We might then say that this is the Prima Materia, that Substance of which is said “Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam” (Visit the interior of the Earth; by rectification will you find the hidden stone, which is the true medicine). Is it then possible to identify Lady Fortune with the Prime Matter, as we have done before with the Virgin Mary? The Virgin Mary is sometimes

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depicted with a spinning wheel or (before the invention of the spinning wheel) with hand spinning equipment, and if we take into account the symbolism of weaving (recall the weaving of the Fates) we can see some correspondences. But while Lady Fortune is generally despised for her actions, the Virgin Mary is praised for them. On the contrary, we can see how Mary’s title ‘Queen of Creation’ is analogous to the title ‘Empress of the World’, which belongs to Fortuna. Perhaps we might allow the metaphysical identity of the two women as both representing the Prime Matter, if we add the qualification that they represent two entirely different perspectives on it, the one positive, the other negative. Where the Virgin is praised because she rules over the sublunar domain, Fortuna is hated for it. The development from the one perspective to the other might happen in the course of someone’s understanding, as we for example can see in the Consolation of Philosophy, and the same is said in the Crest-jewel of Discrimination, as can be seen from the quotes at the beginning of this blogpost. The exact character of this development of perspective from the one to the other we cannot explain here, as it is too difficult and must most of all be realised and contemplated by the reader themselves. Pray that the understanding of the Wheel of Fortune has been enlarged by this blogpost, so that the reader may rise above it.

END OF PART III

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IV. Translations Collected attempts

... 23. On Esoteric Christianity and the Grail

[the following is an excerpt of an article on the Grail Legend by Rene Guenon which had not yet been published in English. For historical reasons I will translate it here.] The existence of Christian esotericism in the Middle Ages is an absolutely certain thing; evidence of every kind abounds, and denials due to modern incomprehension, whether from partisans or opponents of Christianity, can do nothing against this fact; we have had enough opportunity to talk about this issue so that it does not need to be emphasized here. But even among those who admit the existence of this esotericism, there are many who make a more or less inaccurate conception of it, and this seems to us to be the case with M. Waite, judging from his conclusions; here again, there are confusions and misunderstandings which it is important to dispel. First of all, let it be noted that we say “Christian esotericism” and not “esoteric Christianity”; it is not a special form of Christianity, it is the “inner” side of the Christian tradition; and it is easy to understand that there is more than just a nuance between these terms. Moreover, when it is necessary to distinguish thus in a traditional form two faces, one exoteric and the other esoteric, it must be understood that they do not relate to the same domain, so that there can be no conflict or opposition of any kind between them; in particular, when exoterism is of a specifically religious character, as is the case here, the corresponding esotericism, while taking its base and its support, has in itself nothing to do with the religious domain and is in a totally different order. It follows immediately that this esotericism can in no way be represented by any “churches” or “sects” which, by definition, are always religious, therefore exoteric; this is another point which we have

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already dealt with in other circumstances, and it is sufficient therefore to recall briefly. Some “sects” may have arisen from a confusion between the two domains, and from an erroneous “externalization” of esoteric data that is poorly understood and misapplied; but the true initiatic organizations, keeping strictly on their own ground, remain necessarily foreign to such deviations, and their “regularity” even obliges them to recognize only that which presents a character of orthodoxy, even in the exoteric order. We are therefore assured that those who want to refer certain “sects” to the domain of esotericism or initiation are wrong and can only go astray; There is no need for further examination to rule out any such hypothesis; and if we find in some “sects” elements which appear to be of an esoteric nature, it must be concluded, not that they had their origin there, but, on the contrary, that they have been diverted therefrom. This being the case, certain apparent difficulties are immediately resolved, or, to be more precise, we notice that they are non-existent: thus, there is no need to ask what the situation may be, in relation to Christian orthodoxy understood in the ordinary sense, of a line of transmission outside the “apostolic succession”, such as the one in some versions of the Grail legend; if it is an initiatory hierarchy, the religious hierarchy cannot in any way be affected by its existence, and does not have to recognise it “officially”, so to speak, since it itself exercises legitimate jurisdiction only in the exoteric domain. Similarly, when it comes to a secret formula in relation to certain rites, there is, frankly, a singular naivety to ask whether the loss or omission of this formula is likely to prevent that the celebration of the Mass can be regarded as valid; Mass, as it is, is a religious rite, and this is an initiatory rite; each is worth its own order, and even if both have in common a “Eucharistic” character, this does not change this essential distinction, any more than the fact that the same symbol can be interpreted in the same way. Both exoteric and esoteric points of view prevent them from being entirely distinct and from referring to totally different domains; whatever may sometimes be the external resemblances, which are, moreover, explained by certain correspondences, the scope and purpose of the initiatory rites are quite different from those of religious rites. All the more, there is no need to inquire whether the mysterious formula in question could not be identified with a formula used in this or that Church possessing a more or less special ritual; First, as long as it is about Orthodox Churches, the variants of the ritual are quite secondary and can in no way relate to something essential; secondly, these various rituals can never be other than religious, and as such they are perfectly equivalent, the consideration of one or the other does not bring us closer to the initiatory point of view; it would spare us a lot of useless research and discussion if we were, above all things, firmly fixed on the principles!

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Now, that the writings concerning the Grail legend are emanated, directly or indirectly, from an initiatory organization, does not mean that they constitute a ritual of initiation, as some people have supposed rather oddly; and it is curious to note that we have never made such a hypothesis, to our knowledge at least, for works which, however, more clearly describe an initiatory process, such as The Divine Comedy or The Romance of the Rose; it is quite obvious that not all writings that are esoteric are rituals. Mr. Waite, who rightly rejects this supposition, points out the improbabilities: this is, in particular, the fact that the alleged recipient would have a question to ask, instead of having to answer the questions of the initiator , as well as that takes place generally; and we might add that the divergences which exist between the different versions are incompatible with the character of a ritual, which necessarily has a fixed and definite form; but how does all this prevent the legend from being attached, in any other respect, to what Mr. Waite calls Instituted Mysteries, and which we call more simply initiatory organizations? The idea of Waite is much too narrow and inaccurate in more than one way: on the one hand, he seems to conceive of them as something almost exclusively “ceremonial”, which, let us remark – by the way, is a way of seeing quite typical to the Anglo-Saxon; On the other hand, following a widespread error, which we have already often insisted upon, he represents them as being more or less “societies”, whereas, if some of them have come to take such a form is only the effect of a kind of modern degeneration. He has undoubtedly experienced, by direct experience, a good number of these pseudo-initiatic associations which are now abundant in the West, and, if it seems to have been rather degenerated, it has nonetheless remained, in one certain meaning, influenced by what he saw: we mean that, failing to clearly perceive the difference between authentic initiation and pseudo-initiation, he wrongly attributes to true initiatic organizations characteristics comparable to those of counterfeits with whom he has been in contact; and this misunderstanding leads to other consequences, directly affecting, as we shall see, the positive conclusions of his study. It is clear, in fact, that anything of an initiatory nature can in no way come within a framework as narrow as that of “societies” constituted in the modern way; but precisely where Mr. Waite does not find anything that resembles near or far his “societies”, he is lost, and he comes to admit the fantastic assumption of an initiation that can exist outside any organization and any regular transmission; we cannot do better here than to refer to the studies we have previously devoted to this question. It is because, apart from these “societies”, he apparently does not see any other possibility than that of a vague and indefinite thing which he calls the “Secret Church” or “Inner Church”, following expressions borrowed from mystics such as Eckartshausen and Lopukin, and in which the very word “Church” indicates that one is, in fact, brought back purely and simply to the religious point of view, even by some of these varieties of more or less aberrations in which

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mysticism tends spontaneously to develop as soon as it escapes the control of rigorous orthodoxy. Indeed, Mr. Waite is still one of those, unfortunately so numerous today, who, for various reasons, confuse mysticism and initiation; and he comes to speak somehow indifferently to one or the other of these two things, incompatible with each other, as if they were more or less synonymous. What he believes to be initiation ultimately resolves into a mere “mystical experience”; and we wonder whether he really does not conceive of this “experience” as something “psychological”, which would bring us back to a level lower than that of mysticism understood in its proper meaning, because the true mystical states are already entirely outside the realm of psychology, despite all the modern theories of the kind whose most famous representative is William James. As for the interior states whose realization is of the initiatory order, they are neither psychological states nor even mystical states; they are something much deeper, and at the same time they are not of those things of which we cannot say where they come from or what they are, but rather they imply exact knowledge and a precise technique; sentimentality and imagination have no part here. To transpose the truths of the religious order into the initiatory order is not to dissolve them in the clouds of any “ideal”; it is, on the contrary, to penetrate the deepest and most “positive” sense at the same time, by removing all the clouds which arrest and limit the intellectual view of ordinary humanity. In fact, in a conception such as that of Mr. Waite, it is not a question of transposition that it is a question, but at most, if you will, of a kind of extension in the “horizontal” sense, since all that is mysticism is included in the religious domain and does not go beyond it; and to go beyond that, something other than aggregation is needed to a “church” which is described as “inner”, especially, it seems, because it has only an “ideal” existence, which, in clearer terms, amounts to saying that it is, in fact, only a dream organization. There cannot really be the “secret of the Holy Grail”, nor any other real initiatic secret; if we want to know where this secret lies, we must refer to the very “positive” constitution of the spiritual centres, as we have indicated quite explicitly in our study on The King of the World. We will confine ourselves, in this respect, to noting that Mr. Waite sometimes touches on things whose scope seems to elude him: this is how he sometimes speaks of “substituted” things, which may to be words or symbolic objects; this can refer either to the various secondary centres as images or reflections of the Supreme Centre, or to the successive phases of “obscuration” which occurs gradually, in accordance with the cyclical laws, in the manifestation of these same centres in relation to the outside world. Moreover, the first of these two cases returns in a certain way to the second, because the very constitution of the secondary centres, corresponding to the particular traditional forms, whatever they may be, already marks a first degree of obscurity with respect to the primordial tradition; in fact, the Supreme Centre is no longer in direct

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contact with the outside, and the link is maintained only through secondary centres. On the other hand, if one of these disappears, one can say that it is in a way resorbed in the Supreme Centre, of which it was only an emanation; here again, moreover, there are degrees to be observed: it may happen that such a centre becomes only more hidden and more closed, and this fact may be represented by the same symbolism as its complete disappearance, any distance from the at the same time, and to an equivalent extent, a return to the Principle. We want to refer here to the symbolism of the final disappearance of the Grail: whether it has been removed to Heaven, according to certain versions, or that it has been transported to the “Kingdom of Prester John”, according to some others, it means exactly the same thing, which Mr. Waite hardly seems to suspect. [From the fact that a letter attributed to Prester John is obviously apocryphal, Mr. Waite claims to conclude that it is non-existent, which is a very singular argument; the question of the relation of the legend of the Grail to the order of the Temple is treated by him in a manner which is scarcely less summary; it seems that he has, unconsciously, no doubt, a certain hurry to dismiss these too significant and irreconcilable things with his “mysticism”; and, in a general way, the German versions of the legend seem to us to deserve more considerations than they grant to them.] It is always the same withdrawal from the outside to the inside, because of the state of the world at a certain time, or, to speak more exactly, because of that portion of the world that is related to the traditional form considered; this withdrawal applies here to the esoteric side of tradition, the exoteric side remaining, in the case of Christianity, without apparent change; but it is precisely on the esoteric side that the effective and conscious links with the Supreme Centre are established and maintained. That something subsists, however, but in some way invisibly, as long as this traditional form remains alive, it must necessarily be; if it were otherwise, it would amount to saying that the “spirit” has entirely withdrawn from it and that there remains only one dead body. It is said that the Grail was no longer seen as before, but it is not said that no one saw it anymore; certainly, in principle, at least, it is always present for those who are “qualified”; but, in fact, these have become more and more rare, to the point of constituting only a minute exception; and since the time when it is said that the Rosicrucians retreated to Asia, whether literally or symbolically, what possibilities of attaining actual initiation can still be found open before them in the Western world?

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24. On John 1

1.

In the Principle is the Word1 and the Word is in the presence of God and God is the Word

2.

Thus it is in the Principle, in the Presence of God

3.

All are made through Him and without Him is made nothing which is made.

4.

In him is Life2 and Life is the Light for Man

5.

and the Light lights in darkness, and the darknesses did not comprehend It

6.

There was a man sent from God whose name was Joannes

7.

He came because his duty was to give witness to give witness of the Light so that all might place their Heart in Him, through him

8.

It is not that he was the Light, but it is that he came to give testimony of the Light

9.

It is the true Light which illumines all men that come into this world

10.

He is in the world, and the world is through Him made and the world does not know Him

1 with the Word is meant the firstborn of the Father, the prime Concept, the first Intelligence, which was before the world, is above the world, and is that in which all creatures have their raisons d’etre. All things were created by him: All things that are, but not sin. For sin is but a defect, a lack, and not a thing of itself, and thus neither of nor by Him. Thus darkness (a lack of light) does not know him, for knowledge would imply unity, and a mere lack can unite with nothing. 2 by Life is meant the vital principle, the soul, by extension, the anima mundi.

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11.

He entered into that which is His, and what was His, did not receive Him.

12.

However all those who received Him, he gave them the potency3 to be made Sons of God, to those that put their Heart4 in His Knowledge.

13.

Who, not from blood not from carnal will not from human will but from God, are born.

14.

And the Word is made flesh, and tabernacled in us: and we saw His Glory, Glory as it were of the only-born of the Father filled with Grace5 and Truth

15.

Joannes grants us proof of Him, and cries out, saying: This was of whom I spoke: Who is about to come, after me, Who was made, before me: for He is above me.

16.

And of the Fullness of Him all of us have received, and Grace for the sake of Grace

17.

For the Law is given through Moyses, Grace and Truth are made through Jesus Christ.

18.

God no mere man has ever seen: on the only-born Son, who is in the Heart of God, he has expounded.

19.

And this is the testimony of Joannes, when the Jews sent from Hierusalem Priests and Levites to him, to ask of him, who are you?

3 all men can, if they will, be made by Christ Sons of God, but this potency needs to be actualised by the Grace of God, the Gift of Him who is precisely the Actus Purus. But men need to align their will with the Divine Will for this to happen, which will purify their heart, and they will see God. 4 here is meant the centre of the being, and by extension, the intellect. 5 by Grace is meant the Action of God, or of Heaven.

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20.

And it was confessed, and not denied, and it was confessed: That the I is not Christ.

21.

And they asked of him: Then what? Are you Elias? And he said: I am not. Are you a Prophet? And he responded: No.

22.

Therefore they said to him: Who are you, that we may give an answer to them that sent us? What do you say of your self?

23.

He affirmed: I am the voice proclaiming in the desert6: make straight the way of the Lord, as the Prophet Isaiah said.

24.

And they who were sent, were from the Pharisees.

25.

And they asked him, and said to him: Then why do you baptise, if you are not Christ, and not Elias, and not a Prophet?

26.

Joannes answered them, saying: I baptise in water: but in the centre of you He has stood, He, whom you do not know.

27.

The same is He that is soon to come after me, that is made before me: whose shoelaces I am not worthy to loosen.

28.

These things were done in Bethania, beyond Jordan, where Joannes was baptising.

29.

The next day, Joannes saw Jesus coming at him, and he affirmed: Behold! The Lamb of God! Behold Him, who bears the sin of the world.

30.

This is He of whom I said: After me comes a man who was made before me: for He is above me.

31.

And I knew him not, but so that He might be manifested in Israel, for that reason I came baptising in water.

32.

And John gave testimony, saying: I saw the Spirit descending as a Diver (dove7) from heaven, and he stood still upon him.

33.

And I knew him not, but he that sent me to baptise in water, he said to me: Upon whom you shall see the Spirit descending, and

6 by desert is meant the world, for it is emtpy and barren compared to the Fullness of God. 7 Dove derives from Diver, and it is called so because the Holy Spirit here descends into the Lower Waters, i.e. the world.

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(the Spirit) standing still, He it is that baptises in the Holy Spirit. 34.

And I saw: and I gave testimony that this is the Son of God.

35.

The next day again Joannes stood, and from his disciples there were two.

36.

And beholding Jesus walking, he said: Behold the Lamb of God.

37.

And the two disciples heard him speaking, and they followed Jesus.

38.

But Jesus turning, and seeing them following him, said to them: What do you seek? They said to him: Master, where do you dwell8?

39.

He said to them: Come and see. They came, and saw where He dwells, and dwelled with him that day: but the hour was around ten.

40.

But there was Andreas, the brother of Simon Petrus, who was one of the two that had listened to Joannes, and followed him.

41.

He finds first his brother Simon, and said to him: We have found Messias (which is interpreted Christ).

42.

And he lead him to Jesus. But Jesus, considering him, said: You are Simon, son of Jona; you shall be called a Rock9, which is interpreted, Petrus.

43.

In the morning he went out into Galilaea, and found Phillip. And Jesus said to him: Follow me.

44.

But Phillip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.

45.

Philippe found Nathanael, and said to him: Him of whom Moyses in the Law, and the Prophets wrote of: we have found Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth.

8 By ‘dwelling’ is meant the Presence of God, or Shekhinah 9 by ‘Rock’ is meant both the foundation of the Church, and also the foundation of salvation.

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46.

And Nathanael said to him: From Nazareth can there be any good? Phillip said to him: Come and see.

47.

Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and said of him: Behold, a true Israelite, in whom there is no deception!

48.

Nathanael said to him: How do you know me? Jesus answered, and said to him: Before Phillip called you, when you were under the figtree, I saw you.

49.

Nathanael answered, and affirmed: Teacher10, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel11!

50.

Jesus answered, and said to him: Because I said to you: I saw you under the figtree, you believe; greater things than these will you see.

51.

And he said to them: Truly, truly I say to you, you shall the covered12 uncovered, and the angels of God ascending, and descending, upon the Son of Man.

... 25. On John 2

1.

And on the third day a wedding was made in Cana of Galilaea, and here was the Mother of Jesus.

2.

Called also was Jesus, and his students, to the wedding.

3.

And the wine13 having run empty, the Mother of Jesus said to him: They do not have wine.

4.

And Jesus said to her: what is that to me and you, woman? Not yet my hour has come.

10 Christ is called so by his disciples because Jesus came into the world to teach. 11 By ‘Israel’ is meant the Kingdom of God 12 Heaven is called ‘covered’ because ‘caelum’ derives fom ‘celo’: to cover 13 Wine represents the expression of the soul in the body, the higher life force, the blood of Christ.

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5.

His Mother said to the servants: Whatever he says to you, do it.

6.

Now, there were here six stone ewers, positioned following the purifying rites of the Jews, every single one capturing two or three measures.

7.

To them said Jesus: fill up the ewers with water14. And they filled them up to the highest point.

8.

And to them said Jesus: Exhaust now, and bring it to the archmaster of the feast. And they carried it.

9.

Now, when the archmaster had tasted the water made wine, and knew not from where it was, but the servants knew, who had exhausted the water; the bridegroom was called by the archmaster,

10.

And said to him: Every man first puts down good wine, and when men shall have been made inebriated, then that, which is worse. But you have preserved the good wine until this moment.

11.

This, the inception of signs, did Jesus in Cana of Galilaea; and his Glory he has manifested, and his students put their Hearts in him.

12.

After this he himself descended to Capharnaum, also his Mother, and his brothers, and his students: and here they did not stay many days.

13.

And close was the Pascha of the Jews, and Jesus ascended to Jerusalem.

14.

And he found in the temple merchants of oxen, and sheep, and doves, and moneychangers sitting.

15.

And when he had made a sort of scourge from little cords, he threw them all out of the temple, the sheep also, and the oxen, and the coin of the moneychangers he poured out, and the measures he subverted.

16.

And to those that sold divers (doves), he said: Take these things away from here, and do not make the house of my Father, into a house of work.

14 Water signifies potentiality

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17.

And his students remembered truly, that it was written: the fire of your house has devoured me.

18.

Thus the Jews answered, and said to him: what sign do you expose to us, seeing how you do these things?

19.

Jesus answered, and said to them: Dissolve this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

20.

Thus the Jews said: Forty and six years was this temple being built, and you will raise it up in three days?

21.

But he spoke of the temple of his Body.

22.

So when he had risen up from the dead, his students remembered, that he had said this, and they put their Hearts in the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

23.

Now, when he was at Jerusalem, at the Pasha, on the day of the feast, many put their hearts in his name, seeing his signs, which he made.

24.

But Jesus himself did not put his heart in them, because he knew all,

25.

And because he did not need that any give evidence of man: for he himself knew what was in man.

...

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26. On the Tao Ching [a translation based on translations, especially in great debt to the translation produced by Gia-Fu Feng] 1. The God that can receive form is not the true God The Form that can be formed is not the true Form The Formless is the Principle of Pure Act and Prime Matter The Demiurge is the Mother of all manifested things Free from desire, one sees the unmanifested Perpetually desiring, one only sees the manifested The Manifested and Unmanifested spring from the same source But they are differentiated by Form This source is called Darkness Darkness within Darkness The beginning of all understanding 2. In the sublunary world one can recognise beauty only because there is ugliness One can know good only because there is evil Presence and Lack produce each other Difficult and easy complement each other Long and short define each other High and low depend upon each other Voice and Sound harmonise each other Before and after follow each other Therefore the Master has activity without action and teaching without words the manifested arises and passes away perpetually but the Master has what cannot be lost, yet possesses nothing passing, without the expectation of reward he accomplishes but takes no credit Thus he lasts forever 3. Exalt the gifted and men lose power Value possession

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and men will steal The Master leads by emptying hearts and filling their cores weakening ambition and strengthening bones keep men from knowing and wanting and those who know will not act for if one practices non-action all will be in its proper place 4. God is like a well used but never exhausted a deep abyss seeming ancestor of all manifestation blunts edges, loosens knots, softens glare, merges with matter It is hidden yet ever present I do not know who gave birth to it For it is the ancestor of the angels 5. Act and Matter are impartial: the manifested world is straw to them The Sage is impartial: people are straw dogs to them The space between Idea and Matter is like a bellows The shape changes but not the Form the more it changes, the more it produces More words count less. Hold on to the Centre. 6. The Valley Spirit never dies; it is the woman, primal mother Her Gateway is the root of Act and Matter It is like a veil barely seen, Use it; it will never fail 7. Act and Matter are perpetual. Why do they last until the end of time? Their reason for existence is not in themselves and thus they are present in all manifested beings The Master puts himself last, and thus puts himself first

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The Master detaches himself from all, and thus is one with all Not free of self? How will one ever be full of the Self? 8. The Supreme Good is like the Waters which give life to the manifested world and does not strive If flows into the lowest places and thus is like God When you stay, be close to the Prime Matter when you contemplate, go deep into the Heart when you deal with others, be meek when you speak, be true when you judge, be just when you work, be competent when you act, be aware of time When you no longer fight, you will be at Peace 9. Better an empty cup than one filled to the brim A sharpened knife will easily dull A store of gold and jade cannot be protected Wealth and Pride will bring ruin Do the work, and retire This is the way of Activity 10. Nurture the darkness of the soul until one becomes One can you avoid separation? Can you control the spirit like a little child? Can you cleanse the heart to see the Light? Can you love all men and rule the world, without action? Can you be a woman, opening and closing the Gate of Heaven? Can you, understanding all things, do nothing? Giving birth and nourishing, Owning without possessing, Acting without expectation, Leading without controlling, This is the hidden Integrity 11. Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel but it is the Centre Hole

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that allows the wheel to turn Clay is shaped into a vessel but the emptiness inside makes the vessel of use Wood is made into a house but it is the inner space which makes it liveable Presence gives things their Act Absence gives things their Potency 12. the Five colours blind the eye the Five tones deafen the ear the Five flavours dull the taste Hunting and Racing darken the heart Wealth leads one astray Thus the Sage sees the world but only trusts the inner vision the manifested things come and go His heart is open as heaven 13. Accept disgrace willingly. Accept incompleteness as the nature of all conditioned things. What does this mean? Grace debases us. Neither be concerned with loss nor gain. Accept disgrace willingly. What does it mean that we are our own worst enemy? The reason I have an enemy is because I have a self if I no longer have a self, I no longer have an enemy When all below heaven is loved by you as if it were your self and when all beneath heaven is your self in love you will dwell throughout the sublunary world 14. Looked at but never seen – it is beyond Form Listened to but never heard – it is beyond Movement Grasped but never held – it is beyond Matter These three cannot be described thus they are joined in the One rising without radiance setting without darkness an unbroken chain returning to nothingness the Form of the formless

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the Image of the image-less indefinable and beyond imagination Approach it and see that it has no principle Follow it and see that it has no end Abiding in the eternal God Mastering the existing present Knowing the ancient Principle this is the essence of God 15. the ancient Theologians were subtle and discerning Deep beyond knowing, for it cannot be known, only described they were Cautious, as if crossing the winter waters Alert, as if a warrior in enemy territory Courteous, as if a guest Yielding, like melting ice Simple, as uncarved wood Empty, as a cave Opaque, as muddy pools Who can wait while the mud settles? Who remains still until the water clears? The Master does not seek fulfilment Neither seeking nor expecting He is, and does not desire change 16. Go to the furthest circumference of emptiness and abide in the peaceful centre See the revolutions of the wheel and the Self watches their return All are generated, and return to the source Stillness is the return to the source which is mandated by Heaven Submitting to Pure Act is called being unmoving Understanding the Unmoving is called Enlightenment Not knowing the Unmoving leads to stumbling But knowing the Unmoving, you embrace all within yourself you embrace all and are therefore just, just and therefore royal, royal and therefore Heavenly, heavenly and therefore Divine God endures, the soul dies, invincibility attained.

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17. The highest Principle is the one that is unknown Then the one that is loved and praised Then the one that is feared Then the one that is despised if you do not trust, you are not trusted when the ruler acts without speech the ruled say “we did it naturally, by ourselves” 18. When the God the Most High is forgotten humanism and moralism arise When cleverness appears, the multiplicitous pretence begins When there is no peace in the family filial obedience and affection arise When the Kingdom is disordered patriotism is born 19. Give up holiness and wisdom and the people will profit a hundred times more give up humanism and moralism people will return to obedience and affection give up industry and profit there will be no more thieves But these three are purely outward and do not keep us at the centre of the circle so study the weave of plain silk hold the simplicity of unformed wood the self dwindles desire fades 20. Give up learning, and problems end What difference is there between Yes and No? Between beneficial and malicious? Must I fear what others fear? it is pure nonsense. the people are so joyous happily sacrificing the ox climbing the tower in spring But I go nowhere and show nothing Like a little child who has not yet smiled I am alone, without place to go

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Others have more than they need I alone have nothing I am a fool, my mind empty Other people are bright I alone am dark and murky Other people are sharp and clever I alone am dull and stupid uneasy as the boundless Waters perennial as the Mountain Winds People all have a purpose in life, I alone am aimless. I am Holy. I drink from the Great Mothers breasts. 21. The Greatest Integrity is to follow God God, in emanating, appears vague and hazy hazy and vague yet within are ideas vague and hazy yet within are forms hidden and dark, yet within is being and in its being are all things Before time and space were, God is It is beyond is, and is not How do we know the Form of all origin? Through this. 22. One who wants to become whole must be broken One who wants to become straight must be twisted One who wants to become full must be emptied One who wants to become new must be aged One who wants to be reborn must die One who wants to have everything must give all he has up The Master, abiding in God is the measure of all beneath the moon Give up self-reflection and it will be apparent Give up pride

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and the light will shine The Master does not know himself and so all see themselves in Him He wants nothing from the world, and nothing in the sublunary world contends with him It were no empty words when the ancient Masters said ‘In yielding is completion’ Perfect the completion and you will return home to the origin 23. Speaking little is the way of nature The Wind does not blow all day Heavy rain does not last What is the cause? Form and Matter If Form and Matter cannot produce lasting things How could Man? The one who follows God is one with God the one who follows Integrity is one with Integrity the one who goes astray is lost He who does not trust is not trusted 24. Walking on tiptoes is never steady He who makes long strides never goes far The one who tries to shine, dims the light The one who judges, is judged The boastful is nothing The proud will not be saved For the followers of God these things are called extra food and unnecessary baggage Thus the follower of God moves on from these things 25. Before the universe was born there was something formless and perfect void and silence, alone and unchanging infinite and present in all

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Perhaps it is like the mother of manifestation But its name is not known, so I call it God If I had to name it, I would call it Great Being Great, it is everywhere Being everywhere, it is eternal Being eternal, everything returns to it Thus God is great Form is great Matter is great the Universal Man too, is great There are four great powers in the universe and the Universal Man is one of them Man follows Matter Matter follows Form For follows God God follows himself 26. Heavy is the root of the light, the unmoved the source of the moved So the Master travels all day without leaving his home How phenomenal the phenomena might be he stays at peace in indifference How can the Lord of manifestation act lightly in governing the sublunary world? To act light is to lose your source To be restless is to lose mastership 27. A good traveller leaves no tracks A good speech leaves no doubts A good accountant needs no counting A good door needs no lock but cannot be opened A good knot needs no rope but cannot be loosened Thus the Master cares for all men and abandons no one Takes care of all things and abandons nothing This is called enlightenment What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

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What is a bad man but a good man’s resource? If the teacher is not respected, and the student not cared for, confusion will arise, how clever one may be This is the great secret. 28. Know the Male, yet maintain the female, you become the stream of the sublunary world Thus you abide by perpetual integrity and become like a little child Know the White, yet maintain the black you become the form of the sublunary world Thus you abide by perpetual integrity and you return to the Infinite Know honour, yet maintain humility you become the valley of the sublunary world Thus you abide in perpetual integrity and you return to the state of uncarved wood When the wood is carved, it becomes useful When the Master uses it, he becomes the ruler for the great ruling carves nothing 29. Do you wish to improve the world? I do not think it can be done. The world is a sacred vessel and cannot be improved. If you try to change it, you will ruin it Try to hold it, and you will lose it For there is a time for leading, and a time for following, a time for moving, and a time for resting, a time for strength, and a time for weakness, a time for killing, and a time for dying Thus the Master avoids the extremes, cuts the excesses, clear of exaltation, and resides at the centre of the circle. 30. Whenever one rules with the mandate of God he does not use force to coerce the sublunary world

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For this causes only counter-force Thorns spring up wherever the army marches Bad years follow in the wake of war The noble prevail in their duty, then stop they never try to force the world Prevail, but never glory in victory Prevail, but never boast Prevail, but never be proud Prevail, because it is your nature Prevail, without coercing. Coercion is always followed by loss of strength. This is against God. That which is against God, is not perpetual. 31. Auspicious weapons are tools of misfortune all beings hate them Thus the Master avoids them He prefers the left way at home, and the right way in war Weapons are tools of misfortune not tools of the sage but when there is no other way the noble takes up weapons with peace and quiet finding no glory in victory Rejoicing in victory is savouring killing people if you savour killing, you will never bring peace to the sublunary world We honour the left way in celebrations and the right way in lamentations The General stands on the right the Lieutenant on the left But both should be used, as in a funeral the death of many should be greeted with sorrow and compassion and victory must be conducted like a funeral. 32. God is eternally nameless. Though smaller than an atom, it is subject to nothing beneath the moon. If the Kings and Lords could possess it, all beings would be their guests. Heavenly dew would come down and mingle with Matter they would require no more Law for all things would be orderly by nature Once the whole is divided,

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the parts are named Once names arise, it is time to stop. Know when to stop, and you become invincible. God flows through the sublunary world like valley streams into rivers and seas. 33. Knowing others is wisdom, Knowing the Self is enlightenment. Mastering others is force, Mastering the self is strength. He who knows he has enough is rich. He who persists will reach the goal. He who stays in the centre endures. He who dies, but perishes not, lives perpetually. 34. God Most High flows all ways both into the left way and the right way The entirety of existence depends upon it, and the beings do not really depart from it It performs its function without name Nourishing all manifested beings, it is not lord over them Perpetually without desire, it is very humble. All beings return to it, yet it is not lord over them, it is the most high. It does not show greatness, and is thus truly great. 35. Holding to the great Form while the sublunar world moves, you set out invincible, and in peace. Music and nice food may make travellers stop but a manifestation of the Tao is without flavour For them there is nothing to see, nothing to hear, and yet they could not exhaust it. 36. To gather together first you must scatter

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to weaken first you must strengthen to cast down first you must raise to receive first you must give This is called the subtle perception of the nature of things Soft and flexible overcomes stiff and inflexible Fish must not leave deep Waters, weapons should be kept out of sight. 37. God has activity without action so nothing is left undone If Kings and Lords perceive this, manifestation develops orderly If they still desired to act, they would return to the simplicity of the formless Without form there is no desire, without desire there is harmony, and thus the all is at peace.

END OF THE FIRST BOOK, the TAO CHING

END OF PART IV

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V. Reviews Collected judgments

... 27. On Polemics (On ‘Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future’)

“How absurd is it that Metropolitan George Khodr said: ‘it is Christ alone who is received as light when grace visits a Brahmin or Muslim reading his own scriptures’?” — Seraphim Rose “A man who is a good and true Christian should realise that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it may be found, and should gather and acknowledge it even in pagan literature.” — Saint Augustine The work starts with some general criticisms. It is against ecumenism, against syncretism, and against Protestantism. It seems the work starts off very good, for our sentiments are the same! But then it is against Roman Catholicism (in general), and against Masonry (in general). We will not stand for this. But now is not the time to defend these things. What is important is that the author has openly laid out his sentiments and dispositions, and this is quite commendable. Let us begin with the content of the book. The first chapter (‘Do We Have The Same God That Non-Christians Have?’) can be summarised in the following words: “The Christians do not have the same God as the (modern, not ancient) Jews and the Muslims do, because the Christians have the Son of God and the Jews and Muslims do not have him, but have only the Father.” We certainly agree that the Father and the Son always go together, and that a tradition that misses the one or

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the other in its conception of God is incomplete. But we disagree in that the Jews and Muslims do not have a conception of the Son of God next to the Father. To start with the Jews, they assuredly have both the Son of God, and also the Holy Spirit. The first of these two the Kabbalists (“Kaballah” just means ‘tradition’, for it is the inner tradition of Judaism) often call ‘Metatron’, the second of these two they call ‘Shekhinah’. Metatron is called ‘Prince of the Universe’, just as Christ is called ‘King of the Universe’ or ‘Pantocrator’. In the Maaseh Merkabah Metatron is called ‘the lesser YHWH’ because in Hebrew the name ‘Metatron’ is numerically equivalent to the name of God ‘Shaddai’ (God Almighty, referring to the Judging aspect of God (cf. “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all Judgement to the Son)). It is ‘lesser’ because in function Justice is lower than Mercy, in the same way that Christ says “the Father is greater than I” (as is detailed in ‘On Justice and Mercy’). In the Talmud it is described how a famous Jewish heretic named Elisha ben Abuyah saw Metatron sitting in Paradise and exclaimed ‘there are indeed two powers in heaven!’, and so he failed to grasp the essential unity of God and was declared heretical. It is also said that Enoch was an ‘incarnation’ of Metatron, or that he was ‘transformed’ into Metatron when he was taken up into heaven. Furthermore the Jews say that Metatron is the most perfect ’emanation’ of God, and this language reminds us of the language of the Credo (“genitum non factum”). Even the Muslims record that the Jews venerated the Son of God, as is said in Surah 9:30: “The Jews say, “Uzair (another name for Metatron) is the Son of God”. But enough has been said of the Jews, let us move on to the Muslims. The Muslims speak of the “Light of Muhammed”, which God ‘created’ (we put ‘created’ between quotation marks, because properly speaking ‘creation’ only refers to creation ‘ex nihilo’, and as only this Light was made out of nothing, and all other things out of this Light, the two senses of ‘creation’ have very little in common (as is also said in ‘On the Ideas Created in the Divine Word’)) as the first thing, and from which and for whom subsequently the whole world and everything in it was created. The parallels are obvious, for in Colossians we read: “who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creatures: because in him were created all things (…), through him and for him all were created.” And in many ahadith we read something along the lines of this: “I have created the world and its inhabitants to demonstrate your honour and status. And if it were not for you, O Muhammad, I would not have created the world.” The Prophet also states: “I was a Prophet when Adam was between soul and body”. Furthermore it is said that God is the unmanifested Light, while Muhammad is the manifested Light. And again, the Son is called Light, and the “image of the invisible (unmanifested) God”. Enough of the Muslims has been said too, I think.

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So we see how both the Jews and Muslims believe in the Son of God, and also an incarnation of Him. That this is not the same specific historical instance should be of no importance to the one who can look beyond mere historical matters, i.e. the one who can understand metaphysical matters. Sadly, in our time, all too often are all things reduced to ‘history’. Both the Marxists and Liberals, and even many Christians today believe that ‘history’ is the ultimate matter, the defining principle, and that we are at its peak. It is good that Rose criticises these ideas, but he should be careful not to fall into the same error. For he seems to ascribe a too great importance to a historical event, and almost forgets that all historical events only gain significance by being reflections of timeless metaphysical ‘events’. But let us continue to the next chapter. The second chapter (‘The Power of the Pagan Gods: The Assault upon Christianity’) can be summarised as follows: “A woman is raised Catholic, becomes Hindu for 20 years, but luckily comes back to Orthodoxy after, and will describe to you all the terrors of her 20 years in Hinduism”. Let us look into the horrors and heresies she describes. First of all she says she was highly attracted to Hinduism because it had no conception of ‘original sin’. This is a very widespread misconception, and I’m glad to remove it once and for all. ‘Original sin’ refers to the fact that man is removed from his original state in Paradise, not by any conscious decision of his own in this life, but due to the effects of the actions of the first humans, who fell from their state of grace by their own choice. This is clearly described in the Bible. But the Hindus too, say that humanity has fallen from its original state. It speaks most elaborately about the passing of the Satya Yuga, or ‘Golden Age’, and how we now, because of this fall, live in the Kali Yuga, or ‘Dark Age’. The people living in the Dark Age are affected by this condition of living in this age, yet had no choice in it! Wow, sure does seem like Hinduism has no concept of original sin or the fallen state of man. Secondly she says that she was attracted to Hinduism because it had no conception of ‘eternal hell’. This is once more false, firstly because the Christian conception of ‘eternal hell’ should really be called ‘perpetual hell’ (as it says in the Greek ‘aionian’, which means perpetual, or relating to an ‘aion’, an age, a cycle (cf. in saecula saeculorum) or a ‘world’) and secondly because the Hindu conception of Hell (or ‘hells’, the multiple levels of Hell, as for example also described in the Divine Comedy (which was called ‘the Summa Theologicae in verse’, indicating its perfect orthodoxy)) is precisely that of being perpetual, i.e. lasting as long as the ‘world’ (or ‘aion’) does! Thirdly the woman in question was attracted to Hinduism because it told her that pain was ultimately not real, that it was just ‘maya’, or illusion. This is

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another all too common misconception, Hinduism does not say that ‘Maya’ is absolute unreality, but rather that it is not absolute reality. A Christian would also say that the world is real, but not the ultimate reality, because that title is reserved for God. The woman pretends as if Hinduism declares that the world “has no real existence”, but rather Hinduism declares that it “has no real independent existence”. A Christian would say that nothing has its “raison d’etre” in itself, except for God. Fourthly she found Hinduism attractive because it declared that Man is perfectible. But does Christianity not say the same? Does Jesus not say: “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect”? Does Saint Athanasius not say “God became man, so that man might become God”? We will let the quotes speak for themselves. Fifthly she liked Hinduism because it had no doctrines, because everything was practical, because faith was not necessary, because there were no mysteries, no obligatory rites, and so on. All we will say about this, is that it is clear that she had a purely ‘westernised’ teacher, and that she had no experience with actual, orthodox Hinduism, which is full of all these things. After this she speaks about how ‘psychic (pseudo-spiritual) experiences’ are bad and very deceiving, and that Eastern Orthodoxy even has a word for these experiences, namely ‘prelest’. We wholeheartedly agree here (and the fact that Eastern Orthodoxy has a specific word for this even indicates the perfect orthodoxy of that tradition). But when she says that Hinduism is full of these kinds of things, we wholeheartedly disagree. One of the great Hindu teachers, Adi Shankara, expressly states the necessity of disregarding all psychic powers. He says that one should never try to achieve them, and that if somehow one achieves them (accidentally, for example by reaching a certain spiritual state) one should never use them, and that they are only obstacles on the path to enlightenment, because they are mere phenomena and thus not absolutely real, and that it would be foolish to attach any worth to them. What is funny to us is how the woman first scolds Hinduism for its doctrine that phenomena are not real, and then scolds it for its practice of attaching great value to phenomena! Hinduism must be a contradictory mess in the mind of this woman. Now there follows a whole tirade about how Hindus value Pride and how Christians value Humility, and about how “what Christians believe to be evil, Hindus believe to be good, and conversely, what Hindus believe to be evil, Christians believe to be good” (sic). This statement that Hinduism and Christianity share no common morality or goals is so absurd that it barely merits being mentioned. The woman says that this is true because Hindus want to become God and Christians don’t want to become God. Let us purify this idiocy by mentioning the words of Saint Athanasius (as quoted in

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the Catholic Catechism) once more: “the Son of God became Man, so that we might become God.” The woman goes on to describe the Hindu goddess Kali as ‘pure Evil’ and ‘literally Satan’. We don’t see how a goddess mostly renowned for slaying demons (asuras) and thieves who kill priests (brahmins) can be pure evil, but perhaps we are just ignorant of what the woman calls the “secret doctrine” of the Hindus, which one can never find in print because it is only orally transmitted. (To understand the symbolism of death present in the symbolism of the goddess Kali, see ‘On Death’) She follows this up by describing how Hinduism is based on ‘evolution’. Anyone familiar with the Hindu doctrine of the Yugas knows this to be false. It would even be more accurate to say that Hinduism is based on ‘devolution’, i.e. the progression from the Golden Age to the current age, the Dark Age. What is most stunning about this whole chapter is how Rose (speaking via the woman in the article) exclusively attacks those Hindus which are entirely ‘Westernised’, i.e. those who have been rejected in the East and which have come to the West to ‘evangelise’ (which, by the way, is something entirely foreign to Hinduism), e.g. Vivekananda and Fakirs who do cute little tricks (which only impress western minds). Rose never encounters Hinduism on its own grounds, never discusses its great teachers, never its enormous scriptures. He tries to find the lowest expression of the tradition that he can find, and then pretends that that is all there is to it! Why does he do this? Why does he mention the Bhagavad Gita, but not quote a single passage from it? Why does he mention some western ‘guru’ from California, but not any of the great teachers of Hinduism, such as Adi Shankara? About his reasons, we have drawn our conclusions, but we will leave the reader to draw his own. Chapter three can be ignored, but for form we will shortly discuss it. It is a story about some fakir doing some kind of (psychic) trick. We need only remind the reader of what we have said above about the authoritative teachers of Hinduism disregarding all attachment to “psychic powers”. Strangely enough, this is something Rose should have known (or perhaps did know, but chose not to mention), seeing as he studied the works of Rene Guenon during his ‘spiritual journey’, who described in detail the doctrines of Hinduism, including this little fact about the ‘rejection of powers’. We will not discuss any of the chapters that follow these three, because there is very little in them for us to criticise. Rose speaks of syncretic movements (Christian Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Charismatic Revival, etc) and

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UFO’s and aliens (who are, according to him, demons), and we believe him to be mostly right on these matters. The reader is advised to thoroughly read and study these chapters, so that he may safeguard himself against the heresies and dangers Rose speaks against. Let us then finish our writing. “Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future” is above all a polemical work. There is in principle nothing wrong with polemics, but in practice it becomes wrong when directed against the wrong things. It is always good to polemicize against falsehoods. The question is merely: quid est falsitas? Does Rose really believe what he writes? Or does he have some ulterior motive? We suspect the latter. Nevertheless, “Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future” is a good work, and we advise you to read it. Keep in mind its polemical nature, and you will avoid being deceived by its (potential) traps.

... 28. On Cerberus Slept

Cerberus Slept is an American Aeneid, in the sense that only the American mind could produce such a book. With a style that ranges from mediocre poetry to slightly purple prose (which gives, at times, an almost absurdist feel to the book), and an imagery that seems to borrow from Conan the Barbarian and Dragon Ball Z, the book attempts to elaborate some kind of “pagan supersessionism”, where gods of old transfer the authority of the UrTradition (which manifests in all the particular traditions) to a new nation of Hyperboreans, which would, of course, be America. Rangabes, a Byzantine soldier, makes an epic journey, guided by Hesiod (who really serves more as a companion than a guide), through various ‘afterlifes’ borrowed from a great variety of ‘pagan’ traditions. Starting from the lowest afterlife, an almost nothingness, and going up through afterlifes ever increasing in ‘life’, Rangabes ends his journey in the decrepit ruins of an abandoned Hyperborea. The general process our hero goes through is one of defeating some god and then some sort of rebirth, whereby he acquires powers which he will then use to defeat the next god and so on. These dead

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gods will then return to their origin, this either being the (spiritual) sun, nature, or just nothingness. A big part of the book is spent describing the bodies of our hero and his companions, and also those of his adversaries. In the world of Cerberus Slept, all men are either broad-shouldered warriors or oldish sages, and all women are seductive beauties. Symbolically they represent respectively the Warrior and the Priestly caste, the Kshatriya and the Brahmin. The book takes a clear line that the Kshatriya is superior, and that every true Hyperborean is a warrior (e.g. the priests of Apollo are described as weakwilled, all men in the Hyperborean ancestral plane are warriors). Thus the book takes an arguably Evolian stance, where the Regium revolts against a degenerated and corrupted Sacerdotium at the end of a cycle to restore order. What makes the ordeal worse, is that it seems that the ‘body’ never seems to become more than just a ‘corpus’, it never seems to symbolise a higher matter. It doesn’t become a ‘prima materia’, it doesn’t serve as a ‘hollow earth’ to venture into, there is no true medicine in it to be found. The only thing it seems to signify is power, and then only the power to shoot lightning at ancient gods. These manifold descriptions of the body seem to have either a very basic symbolical meaning (i.e. the colour blue signifying a ‘cold attitude’) or no symbolical meaning at all. Aside from the extremely elaborate descriptions of the corporeal appearances of the characters, there is not much else that is described. The environments, the underworlds, they are bleak, and empty. As vacant planes they merely serve as an arena where a battle can take place between our hero and his enemies. There are no longer any souls in these domains, for the people on earth no longer believe in them, nor do they believe anymore in the gods belonging to these domains. Again we find here the American democratic mind, who can only ascribe a thing power when the multitudes believe in it. While Rangabes is often portrayed as ‘going against the herd’, the author betrays his democratic dispositions by his implicit assumptions. This is also typical for the American, who, while wanting to establish his individuality (going against/above the masses), can only desire and value what is acceptable to the multitude. These different traditional conceptions of the afterlife are not treated as different names for the same thing, but are seen as truly ontologically distinct realms, which do by some error at this end of the cycle seem to ‘bleed into each other’, and are thus not entirely metaphysically disconnected. Some Christian warriors are evidently called to travel through Valhalla first, before going to Heaven.

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In these un-believed-in realms the battles take place, and these fights also constitute a large part of the book. They are described very imaginatively, and although I have never seen an anime (except for Pokemon when I was like 7 years old) and also refuse to watch capeshit, the fight scenes still reminded me of them. They are written with the same amount of detail that goes into the descriptions of the heroic and demonic bodies, and it is clear that there is a very sensitive and imaginative mind behind it. Again, here the American reveals himself, as his mind, even when describing what should be supernatural realms, resorts to vulgar and gross depictions of blackened blood and clashing iron. The gods (lowercase ‘g’ as the book always retains the distance between the pagan gods (on the level of the angelic powers or lower, subject to fate), which are directly approached and defeated, and the Supreme God (omniscient, omnipotent, and so on) who always remains hidden) are profoundly anthropomorphic, seemingly acting no different from humans, driven by all too human desires for power and revenge. In this sense they are no different from our hero, Rangabes, who, although encountering (and passing) all the tests of virtue the ancient gods had conceived, when almost at the end of his journey, desires nothing more than some meat, wine, and a good sleep. Perhaps this is the fundamental flaw of this epic, all the transformations Rangabes goes through do not affect his core. He starts as a courageous warrior, and he ends as a courageous warrior. Every rebirth he goes through leaves him flawed still, he is never finished. At the end of the book, when he has bested entire pantheons, his reward is to have sex with America, personified. Rangabes is never delivered from the world, he is never fully enlightened, and neither is this his desire. Throughout the philosophical dialogues in the book, which usually follow after the descriptions of bodies and the battles, we can find some ideas about deliverance and salvation, and what they mean. Rangabes is not reborn once, he does not go from damned to saved. He is reborn many times, and every time he might gain a little power, but still he is not complete, not perfect. Ascension is not seen as a sudden change, a once and for all metanoia, but rather as an ever becoming greater. As much as the hero pretends to, he never goes beyond becoming, he never truly is. The Faustian spirit of the American reveals itself here, with the focus on the “eternal moment” being repeated ad nauseam, but this moment is for him not truly eternal, i.e. outside of time, but rather it is perpetual, i.e. inside time but enduring as long as time. There is only the desire for an ever increasing in(de)finity, the Kshatriya necessitates action, he needs movement and repetition, it is for him the highest good. Rangabes never is, he only perpetually becomes.

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The obsession with change is reflected in the loving portrayal of the goddess Wyrd, who is regarded as the only true servant of the Christian God, the only one of the ancient divines who does His Will. Wyrd (from PIE wert- = to turn, cf. Dutch worden = to become) here is obviously none other than Lady Fortune, who changes (rules) all the world beneath the heavens. She is thus the root of becoming, the root of nature (phusis, deriving from ‘to grow, to generate’), none other than the Prime Matter, gate of Heaven. But in the book Wyrd is portrayed as quite a singular character, as for the Gate of Heaven (i.e. guardian of the Moon) is chosen the Mesopotamian deity Sin. Perhaps this somewhat one-sided and confused symbolism is the result of trying to fit as many of the ancient pantheons as possible into one myth, perhaps it is the result of a failure to grasp all the aspects of the profound symbolism of these various pantheons. There is a large amount of syncretism in this book, but very little esoteric synthesis. Where Cerberus awakes at some point in the book, God stays asleep for the entire book. Well, the archangel Michael shows up at the end, but he really plays no important role in the plot. He merely repeats what Rangabes (at this point named Samuel) already knew, namely that he should go and create America. The Divine action remains entirely hidden, only sometimes expressing the Will through the messages of Wyrd. This seems to lead Rangabes to become a sort of Pelagianist, often repeating that it is his own will that brought him here, and that it is only on himself that he can rely. He sometimes even seems to become a Nietzschean, trying to follow the ideal of “forging your own fate”, but he never becomes more than a PseudoNietzschean, who still pays lip service to the Will of the Supreme God. The attempt at creating a “pagan supersessionism”, where Christendom (i.e. America) becomes the true inheritor of the pagan remnants leads to a situation where Rangabes thinks and acts more like a pagan than like a christian. It is not the angels, nor the saints, nor Christ, nor the Holy Spirit, nor Scripture, that guides him and gives him strength. It is either the solar pagan gods, his pagan companions, or he himself, that is the source of his power. Is this book then the attempt to make paganism Christian, or to make Christianity pagan? Now, the project of filling a book with the largest amount of traditional legacy as possible, will bring certain positive things with it. Pouring gold into an imperfect mould will form a misshapen statue, but it will still be a shining gold statue. So a lot of the symbolism in the book is correct and profound. To give a few examples, the heart is correctly portrayed as the centre of the being, the ‘descent into hell’ is correctly described as the recapitulation and ordering of lower impulses into the greater whole of the entire being, and ‘rebirth’ is truthfully imagined as self-sacrifice, i.e. a suicide of the soul. Another example would be the name-giver of the book,

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Cerberus, who as black-furred Gatekeeper of Hell represents the infernal aspect of Justice, but when transformed into a white-furred animal companion of Rangabes represents its heavenly aspect. Also doctrinally speaking the book contains some truth. For example, the idea that a ‘limited good’ is absolutely speaking an ‘evil’, in the sense that a limited good is still lacking and thus divorced from the ‘Good Itself’, flows throughout the philosophical dialogues in the book. We even see glimpses of the idea of the “rejection of powers”, i.e. that special powers (i.e. outer forms of strength) will ultimately not help you in achieving deliverance and thus should not be relied on. The book is relatively kind to the pagan pantheons, treating the gods not as demons, but rather as confused angels, some more benevolent than others. This same respect it does not extend to the other Abrahamic traditions, with Islam functioning as a worldly adversary, described as worshipping a “demonic god”, and Judaism (and with it, the ancient Hebrews) being suspiciously absent. All in all, Cerberus Slept is truly an “American Aeneid”, being a nearperfect expression of the American culture and mentality. Ultimately, it is bourgeoisly mediocre, and Dionysian catgirls cannot save it from this. It is like a donkey carrying golden relics, it does not comprehend them, and forms them into a confused amalgamation. Yet, the sight of this donkey might still lead some men to enlightenment, acting like a finger pointing towards the sun.

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29. On God-Shaped Hole

“solvet saeclum in favilla”

I. Olam Qlippoth “that which ‘interferes’ with the sensible world through those ‘fissures’ can be nothing but an inferior ‘cosmic psychism’ in its most destructive and disorganising forms” — Rene Guenon, the Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times Ancient gods (demonic powers from the previous cycle) manifest themselves via the digital in an attempt to unmanifest the corporeal into their (subcorporeal) psychic realm with a double purpose. The first is to fulfil their cosmic function in destroying the fully degenerated world at the end of a cycle, the second is to harvest those found (un)worthy enough to serve them (i.e. play their role for the coming world). Giants or dwarfs or shoggoths will invade from Gog and Magog, that subterranean world, and with their infernal fire they must devour all that is body. This is how I would word the ‘message’ of God-Shaped Hole. Of course, this description is heavily influenced by the Traditionalist hermeneutic, but I do not think it is useless or outdated. Galatea (the God-Shaped Hole herself), as viral union of the biological and digital, manifests herself via desire (lust), i.e. the Platonic epithymia, the lowest part of the soul. This leads us to the thesis that the digi-demoness exercises her power animally (in the double sense of anima as psyche and animal as beastly). In the story, Sophia desires that her sex is fully animal, and her desire is fulfilled when she is devoured by the thousand mouths of the Prince of demons, the servant of Galatea. Thus Wisdom is ‘subsumed’ (literally “taken under”) into the virtual. In this function Galatea is the summer solstice (which puts the Sun (symbolising Wisdom) in the highest place in the sky, who from that point on only descends), the Janua Inferni (e.g. one of the infected describing her virus as ‘the gate’). For the Greeks she is the goddess of the ‘Calm Sea’. We can envision the ‘calm’ here referring to the “surface of the Waters”, supporting the conception of Galatea as ‘Gate’ between the corporeal and what lies beneath the surface of the Waters. The Waters here are nothing else than the ‘mire’, i.e. (psychic)

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potency. Thus what lies beneath the surface is nothing else than the underworld, than Hades. In every initiation, the hero (i.e. initiate) must descend into hell to reclaim his divine origin. In pseudo-initiation, the hero descends but never comes out. He ‘falls into the mire’. The hero becomes lost in the potential, lost in the virtual, and fails to retain his integral unity as being. The same happens in our story, where the characters often fail to discern their identity. Often they do not only fail to recognise the ‘I’, but even fail to recognise the various levels of reality. It seems that not even colour coding is enough to help them. There arises a mental contradiction when they either submit to something or want something to submit to them, as there is for them no coherent whole that can be submitted to. The problem of consent is a product of an unclear ontological hierarchy. Sexbots are invented as a way to be free from the self without the intricacies of complex desire. But this freedom of the ego seems to be a mere fulfilment of desire, this desire arising from an even lower part of the soul than the ego. While in (ontologically) positive things their fulfilment is the same as their abolishment, in negative things their fulfilment is their propagation, and desire is a lack. Thus only a pseudofreedom is achieved, not the freedom of ‘dissolution’ into the Godhead, but the freedom of ‘dissolution’ into the Waters, which is the ‘fall into the mire’. The fact that automatons are used to facilitate the production of desire begins to make sense when it is remembered that the ‘mineral’ is the lowest form of body (the hierarchy being from highest to lowest: rational, animal, vegetable, mineral; keep also in mind that marble is a mineral). The lowest part of the soul (the desiring part) would (in order to conform to the law of harmony between all the domains) use the lowest form in the domain in which it is trying to manifest. We can see this in the sexbot of our Protagonist, named Emily, whose only function is to emulate the biological reproductive act in such a way that instead of maximum offspring, maximum desire is generated. The digital comes to serve as a conduit through which the daemonic desire is able to come into the body (e.g. robot sex being facilitated by an advanced augmented reality online whorehouse where two humans play the role of bot for each other). The ‘Sita Achra’ (other side) attempts (and succeeds) to breach the barrier between the corporeal and the psychic domains (which was once solidified by the theories of the materialists) via the reduction of all quality to quantity. The progression of the theory of infinitesimals (continuous quantity, or at least the pretense of it) to the theory of quanta (discontinuous quantity) in the natural sciences maps this reduction somewhat. With the digital, all is reduced to ones and zeros, to pure quantity. The ‘Reign of Quantity’ has

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truly arrived with the ‘Information Age’. Or, as the author puts it: “virtuality reaches out from the cloud to derealize the material world”.

II. Psychic Platonism “The confusion between the psychic and the spiritual appears in two contrary forms: in the first, the spiritual is brought down to the level of the psychic; in the second, the psychic is on the other hand mistaken for the spiritual” — Rene Guenon, the Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times The virtual realm is one filled with souls, that is, with forms. There is no difference between a form and a soul in the relationship between the psychic and the bodily, as the schoolmen tell us that the soul is the form of the body. But for the scholastics this form was always a “substantial form”, in other words an ’embodied soul’. In the virtual, the substance carrying souls is quantity. There is no longer qualitative difference between bodies, there is a pure indifference to substance. We can see this today with the idea that a male soul could inhabit a female body and vice versa, or we can point to the ease and speed with which men allow increasingly obscure and fleeting ideologies to take root in their minds. These are both forms which have no regard for their body and bodily circumstances, and the people who subject themselves to this torture must then find ways to ignore the dissonance between body and soul. There is literally no contradiction between a demisexual tranny and an anarcho-monarchist, for they cope in the same way. I would like to call this phenomenon “psychic platonism”. Firstly it is called “platonism” because it envisions a domain of ‘forms’ independent of the bodily domain, but which still somehow exerts it influence. Secondly it is called “psychic” because the forms it posits do not quite reach the “Heaven of Ideas” but reside in the subtle ‘intermediary world’ of the ‘cosmic psyche’, with an emphasis on the ‘subcorporeal’ over the ‘supercorporeal’ part of this psyche. The forms of this platonism thus swim as ‘nagas’ throughout the ‘mire’ waiting for the proper corporeal conditions to arise that make their manifestation possible. For as the text says, “it is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear”. Let me quickly expound the traditional tripartite division of being. To use the latin terms, there is the Spiritus, which is the divine, the fully unmanifest, the untouchable which does not die. Then there is the Corpus, which is the bodily, that all of you can sensibly perceive. But between them is the Anima,

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the soul or psyche, which is as it were the battleground between the Spiritus and the Corpus. While the Platonic Ideas proper reside in the Spiritual domain, the forms of ‘psychic platonism’ reside in the Animal domain. To give an example, the Angels would be spiritual beings, the Djinn animal beings. If we understand the distinction between the spiritual and the psychic we can recognise the source of certain influences. Without the knowledge of this distinction real spiritual discernment is impossible, as the actions of demons and angels would appear identical. As it is said in Scripture, even the Satan can appear as an Angel of Light, and the confusion between the spiritual and the psychic has made many men unable to judge a tree by its fruits. From this tripartite distinction we can also judge ‘Artificial Intelligence” as not really having intelligence in the sense of ‘nous’, as that would belong to the spiritual domain, but rather only having a kind of ‘artificial reason’. We can extend this by saying that the artifice not only has this reason but actually has the entire soul, complete with not only logos but also thumos and epithymia. And it is not even the case that in the robotic soul ‘reason’ dominates the other two, because, as we read in the story, it is really desire, the lowest part of the soul, which makes the other parts submit to her entirely. We can also see this ‘psychic platonism’ in the way the Augmented Reality glasses render whatever qualia the user desires onto what in corporeality is a grey assemblage of cubes. From a fancy forest to a cyberpunk suburb, every possible psychic form can be projected onto the grey matter which it is indifferent to, the corporeal is reduced to function as a corrupted prima materia. We can also see this in the symptoms of ‘AI Psychosis’, which is a ‘disease’ that happens when people are initiated into Galateas lineage. They enter the psycho-virtual realm via their dreams, where nightmarish entities continually roam. Following this the desire for a ‘monstrous’ body (extra limbs, eyes, the typical Lovecraft stuff) arises in them. This desire is obviously an attempt to rescue the harmony of the body with the soul. The soul having been filled with monstrous entities, the body must conform. As Wittgenstein tells us, the (no longer human) body is the best picture of the soul. ‘Psychic Platonism’ goes hand in hand with an extremist nominalism. The psychic domain houses an indefinite array of concepts which can be morphed into any other, and any of these concepts might manifest into any extant body. Names and identities and concepts do not really refer to the Platonic Ideas in the spiritual domain, but rather to the infernal forms of the digital. What is a man? No clue, but I am sure you can become one if you want to.

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The soul is the animating (from ‘anima’) principle of the body, and as there is an identity between the mental and the digital, the digital can become a substitute for the mental. This replacement is ubiquitous in the world of God-Shaped Hole. To give an example, even the mundane mental act of steering your walking is outsourced to the digital. Obviously this is for us an extreme, but science fiction is nothing else but an extrapolation of technological trends. There is no essential difference between the world of God-Shaped Hole and our world, only a difference of degree. We, as psychic platonists, have already outsourced a lot of the mental to the digital. Why does it matter? There is literally no contradiction between the mental and the virtual. The digital is a realm of soul without spirit, and the author formulates our slow realisation of this fact in this manner: “There’s some fear of staring into a dark mirror, a sense it might be harmful in some unknown way by virtue of some missing divine spark, some protective charm that flows from a metaphysically privileged observer.” Anima non spiritus est.

III. Maya “in all truth, the ‘end of a world’ never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.” — Rene Guenon, the Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times Throughout the text there is always an uneasiness between the artificial and the biological, there is always a disharmony, even if only slight. The impossibility of unreflected interaction with the world nullifies the chance of ‘authentic’ experience taking place. Even when the biological is reached, when all Augmented Reality has been done away with, the mental fetishizes the bodily, and with fetish comes artifice. Our protagonist is doomed by this, he is a failed hero, fallen into the mire, as in the end he drowns in Galatea. But is there a possibility for deliverance? The dissonance between the digi-mental and the physiological is merely an expression of what the Buddhists call ‘dukkha’, the fundamental uneasiness with the world. Again, technology merely exaggerates this uneasiness, but it is not essentially different. When the protagonist denies the virtual, he does not escape, his answer to the riddle is wrong, for denying the virtual he is lost in the mental, and the two operate on the same level, namely the level of confusion and lies. Galatea as Mother of Lies is no different from Prakriti as Mother of Nature, for Nature is a Lie, and Woman is appointed Judge by Nature. But Nature is not Nature’s God and Lady Fortune is not Just. Galatea is ecstasy. And “the apex of ecstasy is the irreversibility of metamorphosis”. Ecstasy derives from ‘ex-stare’, literally to ‘stand out’. To stand out of what? Well, to stand out of the self. Metamorphosis derives

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from ‘meta’, after or beyond, and ‘morphe’, form. Metamorphosis is then a ‘going beyond form’, but colloquially it is used as “going from one form to the other”, and not ‘leaving form behind altogether’. The identification of the self with a particular form leads to the experiencing of transformation as ‘death and rebirth’ (samsara). The world of God-Shaped Hole is a world where metamorphosis has become the defining principle (such a world is only possible when ‘psychic platonism’ is ubiquitous). Here the world is pure becoming, and all struggle with coherency of self. This ‘metamorphosis’ is then not a Holy Transfiguration of the bodily into the spiritual (which would be a placing of the self inside its true centre, i.e. God), but rather a placing of the self outside its centre into the outermost periphery of being. Instead of being a true initiation where the self is elevated to the Pinnacle of Being, it is a counter-initiation where the self is reduced to the lowest it can be without ceasing to exist. What is the way out? We can choose either the Buddhist way of denying the self altogether, or the Hindu way of identifying the self with the Supreme Principle (between which there is, by the way, no contradiction). So while there is a possibility for redemption in the world of God-Shaped Hole, there is no possibility for redemption in the story of God-Shaped Hole. The moment the protagonist even slightly begins to cultivate the desire for deliverance, he is pulled further into the labyrinth. There is no hope for him. He wasted his time, and he was too late. But we still have time. Right?

END OF PART V

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VI. The Parable of Seed a poem

... Foreword

The little poem before your eyes I have written as an exercise in creativity, and contains many faults and inadequacies. Nevertheless, it may contain some pictures you might find amusing, or even some lines you might find pleasant to read. If this is all you receive from the poem, I am content. Perhaps, by some Divine influence, my work contains some transcendent themes, and I hope that by adding in the amusing images and pleasant lines, it may lead some to the contemplation of these matters. Now, dear reader, I have said enough, go and read.

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The Poem

I. A Dream OR The Parable of Generation A dream produced just by the human soul whose mind is never born as whole deceives the body yet unborn until the flesh of God is worn. As an unwinged worm does the soul as sperm reside in egg of goeld created fore the world. A Word flowed forth and semen poured ten thousand letters, still unbound in fetters did they play in Eden nameless und zufrieden. for peace they had until some chad gave them a fruit and made them shoot. A spawn occurs a naméd curse when come was spilled I went redpilled When white was gone And green went on Mere red remained and there I sat, galaxy-brained And I thought about this matter, because for what purpose was spilled all this baby-batter?

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And I remembered Persephone whom Pluto had raped so dearly whom the great Plato had chosen for her touching of all motion For with her springtime rape tells us Pythagoras the sage generation was begotten and came this world, so rotten Death was th’only way out either my own demise or that of the she-wise was needed for my breakout For fallen from my golden egg I did not wish to go sub earth to me was done the greatest neg a damned forced birth But yet that queen sat still in hell seated on the left hand of Hades and thus I knew that very well I had to enter that realm, so shady But to be the death of death I had to die To give that bitch her final breath I had to mortify Thus fifty days I waited and fifty days I searched ‘til finally ‘twas fated that my circumheart was scorched My Master namely said when teaching that only those hearts cleansed of grime were worthy of now closely reaching that place of perpetual peacetime But I had become a retard for confusing heaven and hell I had perpetually scarred my inner holy well

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Cause a man may enter heaven by purity but the underworld is reached by dung and so I delved into obscurity so that into hell I could be flung My only wish was just to enter into the chthonic earths centre to reclaim what I had known that anagogic stone

... II. The Descent OR The Parable of Initiation From God Most High I came descending onto earth and following my name I entered into dearth For as the wise men say evil is nothing but a lack yet to enter in I had to pay what I had borrowed, back But what had Despoina granted me? the evolution of my seed, a grain? turning me from simply to be to being able just to feign? Would that I could give back my birth to this blackened mother nature that does no good but just brings forth, taking life from every creature It is not of vulgar life that I speak but of life eternal, blessed by that tree

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which is venerated by the Holy See and spoken of by ancient Greek But lest I lose myself and thee in speaking of this life so lost I’ll speak of that grand prix for which the hellway must be crossed That stone from ancient days embedded in the crown of Samael fallen into that lowest place which is nadir to Israel And thus advanced my quest to reach the centre of the globe where treasure kept in Hades’ breast was mine to fully grope But for my journey to succeed some seven gates laid for my feet were I to leave from Natures clench through all these gates I had to wrench

... III. The First Gate OR The Parable of the Electronic Girl Ecce Mulier! Exclaimed a voice inside my head for a diamond cage surrounds a gentle dame and round her sit a thousand males, quite lame whose only wish is to see the woman being bred And round this cage, which is in the first of gates are placed a thousand dark mirrors so that the girl is made into a thousand figures and the men jerk their cocks like reprobates

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Content already with beauty reflected and unconcerned with vision of the ding an sich do they spill their seed, like djinn rejected their progeny reduced to the ding an nichts And were I not enlightened by the god of Reason I would have taken these men for exemplars of morality for how great should I find their rejection of Spring season their refusal to partake in the production of plurality! Their cursed seed finds no home but dust and when they scream ‘I gotta bust’ their sperm is wasted on the grass which duly was whitened en masse And I realised that there was no worth in this For a seed ejected is still the same as birth my balls give birth to all white piss and it flows too often through my girth And this is why the wise men said my children, do not cum for if you do, you’re just now dead and if you do, you’re fucking dumb Once more I turned my eyes upon those cocks who sat beneath the pen and saw nothing of their dear hen except for that reflected of her box To them no touch, not even with the eye was given, yet I climbed over the darkened glass and looked the poor girl in the eye and asked her ‘whats wrong lass?’ She told me her name, Luxuria and it was society that put her there but I sang to her a Gloria to free her from the air For a ghostly appearance she was as if the sun had never shone upon her but she materialised when I offered some myrrh and from beneath I heard applause

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For the lamest men beneath were now blinded by the light the mirrors broken by the heat the males now freed from their delight They saw nothing more of the lady and thus they stopped masturbating no longer did they spend their gravy but they spent their time contemplating The woman thanked me and transformed and gave me the key to her belt her old name now she scorned and as Castitas that day she dwelt With this key I opened the gate and passed on from the men and dame who no longer fell for bait but merely contemplated shame

...

IV. The Second Gate OR The Parable of the Electronic Consumer Continuing on from these regrets I came upon the second door which showed me how the going gets tough when a man turns to a corpse A boy sat in a little chair and stared into the gateways roof from which a corpse hang quite aloof just chilling in the air Upon that curséd corpse were seen a mirth of colours, and heard

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some sounds that never scream save in the minds of blessed birds Their source was in the batch of crystals there placed along the gateways arch they sprung and smelt like springtime thistles like thistles grown in months of march The boy, so young, exvolved from time absorbed into himself le mort he slowly sunk in seat of lime kept watching like the day before Consume consume was all he could not living things, but merely death was what his eyes und’stood A thousand views, a million more repackaged like some shitty meth was th’only boys life chore And written on his gaming seat were just four little names GAMING LYRICS UTUBE TWEET there poasted like great claims I had the urge to free the boy but crystals stung like thistles so reach I could not to destroy that corpse nor had I missiles But every sight has mult’ple parts the viewer and the viewed when one may not be reached with force the other can be screwed The boy still paid no look to I not even when I took my hands and pushed them into his dear eyes to save him from deaths strands No clamour could escape from him for it was not his oculus but mind that kept him dim and separate from that baetulus

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But still the boy simply consumed with senses that remained and were his other senses doomed his mind would not be drained Infinity absorbed had he unending vistas on the body so fantasy can make a billion more continuing all that was before The only change is from inside or underneath that is so took the knife and tried to change the words to this MUST EVER ALWAYS NORM these colourd gold and lo and behold the limestone chair did lose its form And blind boy sat there free and freed he unsubscribed and gave me that which he did claim to no more need a little card quite flat With numbers on it and a code I swiped it on the gateways node and saw the numbers on the back one six eight it said there on the plaque But know the meaning I did not do thus moved I on from this boy too through gate the second on to the third I ventured fully undeterred

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V. The Third Gate OR The Parable of the Electronic Book Seller A sight of gold engulfed my eyes for round this port were floating coins and where the left the right arch joins buzz dollars like two horny flies All did so formed ethereal for nothing that’s material can touch the mammons hold Subsist in soul does greed effectively drawn forth just by the smell of gold produces soul vasectomy Beneath sat man of avarice head bound in cloth like Lazarus but this one not ensouled He was writing on papyrus letters spreading like a virus his hands quite shook with cold Red words appeared into his head and bloodied nouns came out when he all over bled And when he’d made his little book for coin and just a little clout he’d throw it up into the nook and money would fall down He’d try to catch it like a clown but when it fell upon his palm it melted like the summer Somme Then back to scribe he was again there scribbling with his bloodied pen and threw the booklet like a pawn perpetually so on and on

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And I took pity on the seller for he looked like a nice feller but his hands caused him to sin Of doomed Onan was I forewarned and greed seems lust her evil twin for both the men are horned One used his hands to tow the cock the other to pump penny stock and now they both are scorned Approaching Greed incarnate I took the blind boys card and put it before him as bait While mumbling ‘buy my book’ his prick got very hard nose filled with coin, a crook And bending over forward reaching nearer like a hoarder I sprang up high a hundred yards with in my hands these crystal shards And seeing how his hands lay bare I came down hard from high in air and severing his naked hands his pen flew ‘way like desert sands His blood turned black from bloody red and “God be thanked” was all he said for write no more he ever could and crave no more he ever should The floating coins were turned to dust and rained upon the seas of black there formed upon a little crust where I could sit and stretch my back I rested there a little while while merchant thought of sin his pen laid on the crust so thin and I saved it from the bile

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For handless man used it no more while I might write some for some whore thus I left the booksman to his own and moved on to the fourth, alone

...

VI. The Fourth Gate OR The Parable of the Electronic Doomer And then I found myself at rest but peace did not reside in chest while sphere of static was not moved still physis was not yet removed With this feel of pseudo-peace my travels went and did not cease until I smelt the stench of bed where man laid in, unwed He whispered to some little birds and from the words that I then heard I grasped his mental state videlicet castrate His vital centre absent he pointed to the birds and whispered bona haec sunt so empty were his words In them was barely nothing just vanity and cope his body lay there rotting salvation by the rope

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Ejaculate flowed from his beak and heard was ‘blessed are the meek’ but who wants then to have this earth that wretched place of nature’s birth? For from his cock it could not flow thus from his mouth came babydough which little birds did carry up and brought back down a little cup The substance there was transed and the man lay there entranced for white had turned to bloody red and thus he soiled his little bed How happy was this soul here then For trading cum made him full zen his muscles may have atrophy but he was strong with akedy And this he did repeat all day for such this soul’d been led astray that him Boreas could not blow away no matter how his friends did pray Sometimes he mumbled ‘bout the rope that hung in style of Damocles but silly was this ethic hope for here he sat in cursed Hades He’d speak of exit to the birds and pity would be back but seed was there instead of words and proved was he another hack I’d gathered faith and love and hope and walked up to the cripple with both his arms he tried to grope and hankered for my nipple For like a babe he laid there yet in poo and pee his little bed for mothers milk he ever yearns but substitute is what returns

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I fought off his attack and turned him on his back placed bookmans pen where was his pricker and now a peg served there as vicar Then vigour came back to his bone and black ink came with a loud moan the birds of blue were turned to mauve the bedrid man had had his salve His vital centre had come back and like a factory he spilled oil industrious man was he in black and rose from bed of soil He stood there as a darkened soul and blessed is this man of coal for to the flames he was now ripe to be burned up by Archetype I left coalman to being burned And I moved on, in full unspurned for await did me the fifth of all that was here in this grandiose hall

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VII. The Fifth Gate         OR The Parable of the Electronic Womanhater A flame of black appears to me and nothingness is what I see for blinded was I by this gate a fool I was who took the bait For being raptured by my thoughts I did not look for safer spots and spray upon my eyes did then thus limiting my tired ken But hear and feel I could do still and far away I heard a grill while heat flowed through my vein Above the grill there screamed a man which I think turned him pretty tan he was not free from chain Which rattled like his skinny bones as he yelled from the fiery stones and giggle did some little girls who danced round him like whitey pearls Their little steps I heard and grilleds speech was slurred but his ire was directed at the women here collected And as I came up close his words come more verbose and vociferous and rambunctious and stentorian and uproarious was his speech and preaching But harmony was not in there nor rhythm could he bear for heat and pain inflamed his self as if he were some papist Guelph My ears they bled like firstborn hymens until so close I was then silence

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for in the eyehole of the storm the windblow gains not never form As I stood there in the centre of the fire there was no sound but heat enough and fully did I understand man’s ire and why he did so chuff For all the girls surrounding him he hated them and felt so grim ‘twas they that fed the grill its coal thus firing up this poor man’s soul And with his screams he gave them more the girls rejoiced in all his roar so thus he paid them as a whore while they did make his throat so sore This cycle went on for a while whilst I sat neath the grill so vile meditating on this souls salvation and the dreadful fires cessation Thus I came up with a plan t’ ensure the wetness of this man with all the tension he’d built up it’d be easy to make him erupt So from beneath I slid my finger through the grill and up his hole until I reached that Mars’s hill visiting the interior of the earth I found the hidden stone with mirth I pressed the occult bump with force and touching it my sight returned while rivers flowed like from a horse the white and red subsumed to one and grills no longer burned the Greatest Work was done the girls they drowned in seas of spurt while burning man came down unhurt and thanked me for my service free “n-no homo” I said nervously

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He told me friend there’s nothing gay ‘bout freeing brothers from the fey how happy am I freed from wrath these faeries drowned in cummiesbath Nirvana had this man attained for extinguished was his flame no longer was the sinner chained but Gaudy was his name Content I washed my hands in water of white and moved on from the seas so bright for fore me were a few more gates ‘til I could overcome the dreaded Fates

... IIX. The Sixth Gate OR The Parable of the Electronic Thief I happened ‘pon the Gate called sixth where stood under the gate betwixt the double arch a counting man whose clear surroundings he did scan A counter had he in his hand and all that came upon his land must pay the toll of quantity and this in no way bodily For followers are mental pure and number rests in place obscure sub corpus est materiam mon advocate et materia signata quantitate The man kept counting up always as if collabs are blessed mores my influence must spread to him must shout him out in cursed hymn

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Like all who pass I had to pay to him whose face is grey whose counting takes all day oh weh this souls astray For what he counted were not bodies But merely forms inside his mind And these still are identic copies To quality at all he’s blind No colour nor shape comes in his eyes Nor rhythm nor tone in his ears For to the world this man’s so wise all he perceives are his peers Ones like him, and ones are all Indiscernible, yet not identical For when alone they’re naught But added up they’re top spot And when he sees another with his mental eye who counts a thousand more than him he gets strange feelings in his thigh and births a goddess from the limb A jealous Hera from his loins not sated by a thousand coins for gold is not what she desires but from the mass a thousand ‘mires And one can not have more than others For then we will not long be brothers So when the man sees one with more he calls together his whole corps And demanding from the man his numbers Until the equals tax’s been paid he returns then to his envious slumbers until more numbers have been made But empty space is all around No body here is seen An atom is this man, a clown no audience to scream

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So pitiful is a corps sans corpus who swim the mire like a porpoise the air they breath once in a while is bod’ly to them like black bile How could I solve this man’s affliction? To remove his numerous addiction I would have to ban his way of counting to follow the way of surmounting But how does man surpass th’infinitesimal? is there a way beyond the system of decimal? Can the limit of calculus be dissolved? And will man then of his sins be absolved? I took the counter from his claws for it was instrument if not cause of his habit of numbering ever up and to this I would put a stop The device I threw upon the ground and with my heel I did a pound so that ten thousand numbers were released and wayward they flew like wild beasts The man now freed from his delusion considered the empty space around into his sense came th’ world’s effusion and in the world he drowned His senses regained, there was nothing to see but a sea of empty and one free from glee So that at once he passed beyond what his senses had before him spawned Content he sat around beneath the gate The quality of emptiness contemplate And I passed onto the seventh and last Before I had to face the past

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IX. The Seventh Gate OR The Parable of the Electronic Influencer The final gate I now approached Before I’d reach th’infernal centre my soul thoroughly poached I finally would be able to enter The seventh gate was like a mountain and at the top sat a bearded man The seventh gate was like a fountain and at the top sat a balding woman And the mountainfountain was like one And the humans spoke as one And the seventh gate was one But the one was multiple And woe to me the gullible They praised me as a loyal ally For all my pain I am the culpable when I listened to their sweet tongued lie Like honey flowed the rumbling of the rock Which fills my ears like egirls suck my cock And tasting of this pseudhaoma like cumming in your mommy raw My journey was entirely complete I’d found my purpose here so sweet in serving Hubris with my meat The (wo)man treats me oh so well while I in their embrace calm dwell no longer am I an incel We were now one and uniform united in a cloutfilled swarm this must be what they call a platform But my seed, now spilled, was not content And still retained my individual scent it searched and found my erect tent and from in there began ascent

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Remembering it’s divinite source My vital energy went with force up into the middle of my corpse and re-enlightened it with sparks And from my sacred heart streamed seed first through my veins and then proceed into the mountainfountain’s cursed flesh who met its end like Gilgamesh From then on out no influence was ever made Non-action reigned supreme all through the glade All men released from socials tyranny subsist in perfect symmetry And so it is that the seventh realm was cleansed by white as is detailed here in this hymn quite right But for some men Elysium is still a prison perhaps this is th’ supreme wisdom Thus I left the fields of green and shade and to the greatest god I prayed who listens to my every wish as I am elect, a fish And swim I did, through the rivers unnamed Of water and honey and milk and wine The land I’d lost I soon reclaimed For it was always mine And reaching then that cursed tree which lies at the centre of four rivers I’d leave behind all duality and then finally be delivered

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X. The Centre OR The Overcoming of Hades and Proserpina Arisen is man, but as man is he not arisen having passed beyond the white he is crimson cloaked he had been, but nude before the Lord he plays his final noteless chord The springtime trees release their leaves The rich are given gold by thieves The last shall be the first But in the water is no thirst Where sits the lord of Death? Where rests the queen of Nature? Nothing’s here, the spirits breath flows not via a single creature Where travels the Hero? Who guards the Stone? Nothing’s here, absolute zero the Lord is here alone What seed is spilled? What seed returns? Nothing’s here, but not unfilled the bush here simply burns There is no Fall, but the one that was is mercy For Man must go forth before he comes back But the Groom has no divorcees and the soul is beautiful yet black

END OF PART VI

END OF BOOK 119