*DAIMoN, Daemon* As stood the sun to the salute of planets Upon the day that gave you to the earth, You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing Heeded the law presiding at your birth. Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be None but yourself, from self you cannot flee. No time there is, no power, can decompose The minted form that lives and living grows."
""Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity." These are Goethe's words with which, as with a boldly expressed ceterum censeo, we may begin our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of history." -Friedrich Nietzsche, at the beginning of the Preface of his Essay "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life"
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Magic is the female correlate to Philosophy. It is because of this, Crowley didn't develop from a fairly young age until his death, as a writer. He rejected all of these forms of ordering, as a complete occultist. It takes masculine ordering in the feminine nature, to establish the higher forms of magic (Philosophy). Why did he not leave it at: "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and added the "love is the law, love under will"!? Was there a judeo-christian influence he couldn't shake off? I assume it was his imbalance towards the feminine, that made his writings rather weak. Though I recommend people to look at it. Have you read the Hubbard Bio "Bare Faced Messiah"? Crowley appears in it too. Wild stories.
Crowley called Yoga the sublimation of Philosophy, and Magic, the sublimation of Science.
"Now what is Magick? Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will. How do we achieve this? By exalting the will to the point where it is master of circumstance. And how do we do this? By so ordering every thought, word and act, in such a way that the attention is constantly recalled to the chosen object."
Magic is basically breaking fetters, the hold of objects/their laws over you. By constant mindfulness, you remove its contingency. The exalted will is appropriating everything in its way and en-fating it to oneself. 'You' give it a fatedness, rather than experiencing it as being fateful to you.
Crowley was a master-satyr, dropping his wisdom for those who had the ears and the eyes. All his decadence and hocus-pocus words were humour at the expense of the lost-crowd. His self-deification and fancies of himself, etc. is him posing, being a Nietzschean artist. Atleast that's how I've taken him - I've granted him Artistic License!
Crowley called Yoga the sublimation of Philosophy, and Magic, the sublimation of Science.
Now, is that genius or hubris?
Quote :
"Now what is Magick? Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will. How do we achieve this? By exalting the will to the point where it is master of circumstance. And how do we do this? By so ordering every thought, word and act, in such a way that the attention is constantly recalled to the chosen object."
L.Ron Hubbard studied Crowley.
Quote :
Magic is basically breaking fetters, the hold of objects/their laws over you. By constant mindfulness, you remove its contingency. The exalted will is appropriating everything in its way and en-fating it to oneself. 'You' give it a fatedness, rather than experiencing it as being fateful to you.
I find the Scientology Axioms quite workable in this regard:
(Took me some time to decipher the technical language, but with a friend together I came around to understand it and it's really useful.)
Quote :
Crowley was a master-satyr, dropping his wisdom for those who had the ears and the eyes
I will have to give him another try one of these days. Any recommendation on what to read of him? (I only borrowed some of his books back in the days and I don't own any.)
Quote :
All his decadence and hocus-pocus words were humour at the expense of the lost-crowd. His self-deification and fancies of himself, etc. is him posing, being a Nietzschean artist. Atleast that's how I've taken him - I've granted him Artistic License!
I have always wondered about his connection to Nietzsche. I just searchengined "Crowley Nietzsche" and there is a text by Crowley on Nietzsche, don't know if it's any good (as a native German speaker I enjoy the Zarathustra, but hate the english Nietzsche Zarathustra translation. With Crowley I hated the german translations, but have great difficulties understanding the originals):
I will not always be here on guard. The stars twinkle in the Milky Way And the wind sighs for songs Across the empty fields of a planet A Galaxy away. You won’t always be here. But before you go, Whisper this to your sons And their sons — “The work was free. Keep it so.” L. RON HUBBARD
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I will have to give him another try one of these days. Any recommendation on what to read of him? (I only borrowed some of his books back in the days and I don't own any.)
No, I'm sorry. I don't read like you, extracting and looking for information; I experience it through and don't analyze myself - I trust my subconscious to take note of things and I voluntarily forget everything I've learnt. And then pick it up after many months to re-read with newer eyes. Whatever was retained, is what was/is sufficient for myself. I never dissect. I read intuitively.
"To participate in the ringing of the ring in order to let things come forth." - Chuang Tzu
"If the moment is to acquire decisive significance, then the seeker up until that moment must not have possessed the truth." - Kierkegaard
"In what circle are we moving here, indeed, inevitably? Is it the eukuklos Aletheie, a well-rounded unconcealment itself, thought as the clearing?" - Heidegger
I read Crowley so many ages ago. I'm thinking of re-reading his 'Book of Lies' and 'Heart of the Master'.
Crowley and Nietzsche - will get back on that when I recall something.
"The esoteric pupil who orientates himself by Crowley equals a child who plays with a blind shell (dud). Crowley was a real esoteric, who always remained in duty to Pan on the deepest level, without ever going the hermetic way leading to transmutation. Not because he wasn't capable to do so. Simply because he didn't want to."
(from Hans-Dieter Leuenberger "Das ist Esoterik", my translation)
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." [Robert Heinlein] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Luxury still determines the rank of the one who displays it, and there is no exalted rank that does not require a display. But the petty calculations of those who enjoy luxury are surpassed in every way. In wealth, what shines through the defects extends the brilliance of the sun and provokes passion. It is not what is imagined by those who have reduced it to their own poverty; it is the return of life’s immensity to the truth of exuberance. This truth destroys those who have taken it for what it is not; the least that one can say is that the present forms of wealth make a shambles and a human mockery of those who think they own it. In this respect, present-day society is a huge counterfeit, where this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme poverty.
The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
“If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked;' but watch the faces, mark the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison." [C.S. Lewis]
"The quantity of money is its quality." [Simmel 1978 [1900]: 259]
"The more money becomes the sole centre of interest, the more one discovers that honour and conviction, talent and virtue, beauty and salvation of the soul, are exchanged against money and so the more a mocking and frivolous attitude will develop in relation to these higher values that are for sale for the same kind of value as groceries, and that also command a ‘market price’. The concept of a market price for values, which, according to their nature, reject any evaluation except in terms of their own categories and ideals in the perfect objectification of what cynicism presents in the form of a subjective reflex. ...Whoever has become possessed by the fact that the same amount of money can procure all the possibilities that life has to offer must also become blasé." [Simmel 1978 [1900]: 256]
"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions." [A. N. Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas]
"HA, HA, HA! Next you’ll be finding pleasure in a toothache!” you will exclaim, laughing.” And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache,” I will answer. I had a toothache for a whole month; I know there is. Here, of course, one does not remain silently angry, one moans; but these are not straightforward moans, they are crafty moans, and the craftiness is the whole point. These moans express the pleasure of the one who is suffering; if they did not give him pleasure, he wouldn’t bother moaning. It’s a good example, gentlemen, and I shall develop it.
In these moans there is expressed, first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not. There is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain; the consciousness that, despite all possible Wagenheims, you are wholly the slave of your teeth; that if someone wishes, your teeth will stop aching, and if not, they will go on aching for another three months; and that, finally, if you still do not agree, and protest even so, then the only consolation you have left is to whip yourself, or give your wall a painful beating with your fist, and decidedly nothing else.
Well, sir, it is with these bloody offenses, with these mockeries from no one knows whom, that the pleasure finally begins, sometimes reaching the highest sensuality. I ask you, gentlemen: listen sometime to the moaning of an educated man of the nineteenth century who is suffering from a toothache – say, on the second or third day of his ailment, when he’s beginning to moan not as he did on the first day, that is, not simply because he has a toothache, not like some coarse peasant, but like a man touched by development and European civilization, like a man who has “renounced the soil and popular roots,” as they say nowadays.
His moans somehow turn bad, nastily wicked, and continue for whole days and nights. Yet he himself knows that his moans will be of no use to him; he knows better than anyone that he is only straining and irritating himself and others in vain; he knows that even the public before whom he is exerting himself, and his whole family, are already listening to him with loathing, do not believe even a pennyworth of it, and understand in themselves that he could moan differently, more simply, without roulades and flourishes, and that it’s just from spite and craftiness that he is playing around like that. Now, it is in all these consciousnesses and disgraces that the sensuality consists. So I’m bothering you, straining your hearts, not letting anyone in the house sleep. Don’t sleep, then; you, too, should feel every moment that I have a toothache. For you I’m no longer a hero, as I once wished to appear, but simply a vile little fellow, a chenapan.
Well, so be it! I’m very glad you’ve gotten to the bottom of me. It’s nasty for you listening to my mean little moans? Let it be nasty, then; here’s an even nastier roulade for you . . .” You still don’t understand, gentlemen? No, evidently one must attain a profundity of development and consciousness to understand all the curves of this sensuality! You’re laughing? I’m very glad. To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone – uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don’t respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?" [Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground]
"And you ask why I twisted and tormented myself so? Answer: because it was just too boring to sit there with folded arms, that’s why I’d get into such flourishes. Really, it was so. Observe yourselves more closely, gentlemen, and you’ll understand that it is so. I made up adventures and devised a life for myself so as to live, at least somehow, a little. How many times it happened to me – well, say, for example, to feel offended, just so, for no reason, on purpose; and I’d know very well that I felt offended for no reason, that I was affecting it, but you can drive yourself so far that in the end, really, you do indeed get offended. Somehow all my life I’ve had an urge to pull such stunts, so that in the end I could no longer control myself. Another time, twice even, I decided to force myself to fall in love. And I did suffer, gentlemen, I assure you. Deep in one’s soul it’s hard to believe one is suffering, mockery is stirring there, but all the same I suffer, and in a real, honest-to-god way; I get jealous, lose my temper . . . And all that from boredom, gentlemen, all from boredom; crushed by inertia. For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms." [Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground]
I found this quote from K. Leontiev--who I'd never heard of before--in the Comments section of Jim Goad's latest piece in Taki's Magazine: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
It nicely describes the trend toward entropy and Chaos represented by modern "Progress."
Quote :
"Development of literacy" among people does not seem to be a very appropriate expression. The *spread*, the *diffusion* of literacy is another matter. The spread of literacy, the spread of drunkenness, the spread of cholera, the spread of good principles, sobriety, thrift, the spread of railways, and so on. All of these phenomena represent the diffusion of something homogeneous, general, simple...
Social science was hardly born when, ignoring the experience of centuries and the examples of nature they respect so much, people refused to see that there was no logical relation between the egalitarian-liberal forward movement and the idea of development. One can even say that the egalitarian-liberal process is the very antithesis of the process of development. In the case of the latter, the inner idea holds the social material in its organizing, despotic embrace and sets a limit to its centrifugal and disintegrating trend. Progress, which is hostile to every kind of despotism - the despotism of classes, workshops/factories, monasteries, even wealth, and so on - is nothing but a process of disintegration...
The phenomena of egalitarian-liberal progress are comparable to the phenomena of combustion, decomposition, the melting of ice (water less free, limited by crystallization); they may be likened, for example, to the phenomena of the cholera process, which gradually transforms originally rather diverse people into more uniform corpses (equality), then into almost completely comparable skeletons (equality), and finally into free elements (relatively so, of course), such as nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on...
In these processes of decomposition, combustion, melting, the progressive movement of cholera, one perceives the same phenomena.
1.The loss of the peculiarities which till then distinguished the despotically formed whole tree, animal, whole texture, whole crystal, etc.
2.A greater resemblance in the component parts, a greater inner equality, a greater uniformity of the structure, etc.
3.The loss of former, strict, morphological outlines,; now everything merges, more freely and uniformly.
Whichever of the states, ancient or modern, we may examine, in allof them we find one and the same thing in common: simplicity and uniformity in the beginning, greater equality and greater freedom (at least de facto, if not legal freedom) than there will be later...glancing at a plant sprouting from the soil, we do not yet know what it will become. There are too few distinct features. Afterwards we note a greater or lesser assertion of power, a more profound or less sharp division of classes, a greater variety of life and diversity of character in the regions.
At the same time, the wealth increases, on the one hand, and poverty, on the other; the resources of pleasure become more varied, on the one hand, while, on the other, the variety and refinement (development) of sensations and needs gives birth to greater sufferings, greater grief, greater mistakes and greater undertakings, more poetry and more comedy; the exploits of the educated - of Themistocles, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Alexander - are on grander scale and more appealing than the simple and crude exploits of Odysseus and Achilles. Then a Sophocles appears, an Aristophanes appears, the ranting heroes Corneille appear, the laughter of a Moliere resounds...Shakespeare or Goethe.
I found this quote from K. Leontiev--who I'd never heard of before--in the Comments section of Jim Goad's latest piece in Taki's Magazine: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
It nicely describes the trend toward entropy and Chaos represented by modern "Progress."
"Many do not allow even the thought that an intellectual man of our time could have such a lively and sincere faith as the simple masses do out of ignorance. But this is a great mistake. An educated man, once he gets past a certain [point] is able to believe much more deeply and ardently than an ordinary person who believes partly by habit (following the example of others), partly because his faith, his vague religious ideas are not troubled by any opposing ideas. There is nothing for him to conquer, no intellectual battles to fight. For him, what he must conquer in the spiritual arena are not ideas but passions, feelings, habits, anger, rudeness, malice, envy, greed, drunkenness, depravity, laziness, etc. For an intellectual the warfare is much more difficult and complex. Like the ordinary person he must battle all these passions and habits, but in addition he must also break his intellectual pride and consciously subjugate his mind to the teaching of the Church. Once we get past this mystical threshold, which I mentioned earlier, then our erudition will itself begin to help us in strengthening our faith. Konstantin Leontiev"
What's preventing you from returning? And what do you think is nice or meaningful about the Orthodox way? What does Orthodox Xt. teach or offer that you can say is 'unique' or aesthetically soulful or valuable?
"ALL SPIRIT FINALLY BECOMES VISIBLE. -- Christianity has assimilated the entire spirituality of an incalculable number of men who were by nature submissive, all those enthusiasts of humiliation and reverence, both refined and coarse. It has in this way freed itself from its own original rustic coarseness -- of which we are vividly reminded when we look at the oldest image of St. Peter the Apostle -- and has become a very intellectual religion, with thousands of wrinkles, arrière-pensées, and masks on its face. It has made European humanity more clever, and not only cunning from a theological standpoint. By the spirit which it has thus given to European humanity -- in conjunction with the power of abnegation, and very often in conjunction with the profound conviction and loyalty of that abnegation -- it has perhaps chiselled and shaped the most subtle individualities which have ever existed in human society: the individualities of the higher ranks of the Catholic clergy, especially when these priests have sprung from a noble family, and have brought to their work, from the very beginning, the innate grace of gesture, the dominating glance of the eye, and beautiful hands and feet. Here the human face acquires that spiritualisation brought about by the continual ebb and flow of two kinds of happiness (the feeling of power and the feeling of submission) after a carefully-planned manner of living has conquered the beast in man. Here an activity, which consists in blessing, forgiving sins, and representing the Almighty, ever keeps alive in the soul, and even in the body, the consciousness of a supreme mission; here we find that noble contempt concerning the perishable nature of the body, of well-being, and of happiness, peculiar to born soldiers: their pride lies in obedience, a distinctly aristocratic trait; their excuse and their idealism arise from the enormous impossibility of their task. The surpassing beauty and subtleties of these princes of the Church have always proved to the people the truth of the Church; a momentary brutalisation of the clergy (such as came about in Luther's time) always tended to encourage the contrary belief. And would it be maintained that this result of beauty and human subtlety, shown in harmony of figure, intellect, and task, would come to an end with religions? and that nothing higher could be obtained, or even conceived? " -N
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Cold Weasel
Gender : Posts : 275 Join date : 2012-05-25 Age : 39 Location : East via West
What's preventing you from returning? And what do you think is nice or meaningful about the Orthodox way? What does Orthodox Xt. teach or offer that you can say is 'unique' or aesthetically soulful or valuable?
Thanks for the question. Makes me work a bit.
The impossibility of returning is what prevents me from returning. I'm the product of an irreligious, non-metaphysically-inclined culture. The religion of my upbringing was so laughably senile and ridiculous that it was not difficult to reject it, once I heard it was possible not to be of it. Of course I did so intellectually--not ethically or morally, at first. Therefore I was a "secular humanist" for a long time afterward. The effects of this background and training will always mark me for good or ill.
The Christians where I'm from correspond to Leontiev's "ordinary person who believes partly by habit . . . partly because his faith, his vague religious ideas are not troubled by any opposing ideas." But that does not make them youthful or inchoate ideas. They have run their course. It's the final dissolution of the Protestant diaspora into nutty cults. My religious tradition is now the senile old man lying on his death bed, his form dissolving as he presses the morphine button and sings Happy Birthday to himself.
The reason some American Christians--the more superstitious, uneducated, etc.--are becoming more and more ridiculous and retarded is because recently they've been confronted with people and ideas that contradict their beliefs for the first time. (For generations they were isolated in the vast interior of the N. American continent.) Meanwhile the sheltering and materialism of liberal modernity have made them degenerate physically, psychologically, and in other ways. Their reaction to those who mock them is fiercely emotional and unreasonable, like a child's tantrum, which is why so many people find them amusing, infuriating, or useful idiots. They can't do anything but listen to the Republicans, the neo-conservatives, Steven Spielberg, et al tell them what to do. Their mythology, their metaphysics, their "tradition" is a patriotard, Hollywood-ized, History-Channel Zionist smoothie. There's nothing of value left for me.
I am not well-read on the history of the Church. Anyway, I see in Orthodox Christianity the Traditional hierarchy, structure, inspiration and high culture that I always felt lacking in my confusing working-class American life, the vulgar culture surrounding me. As if "this is how it used to be." More dignity, rootedness/foundation, a place for the contemplative ascetic life. An esoteric, hieratic dimension, an upward direction for the intellectually curious to develop itself along. It may allow connections to be made to ancient cultures such as the Egyptians who developed the Cross symbolism. Maybe even a heroic dimension.
Aesthetically I like it too. I especially like the music produced by a few composers who are inspired by Orthodox or Traditional Christianity and Christian mysticism (Arvo Pärt, John Tavener). Watched a documentary on Arvo Pärt recently and envied his lifestyle and culture, the quiet discipline, directness, and simplicity of the man and his delight when composing.
I was interested in Sufism and G. I. Gurdjieff for awhile, still am really, watched some documentaries and films, read some of the books. Here's one of the Gurdjieff dances:
I have the impression that appreciation for philosophy and contemplation was endemic in the pre-modern Near Eastern culture he was a part of. This also has to do with my fascination and attraction to Russian folklore (like in those Bilibin paintings) and the survival of pagan traditions there even post-Christianity. [Recently hosted a Russian Couchsurfer and abashedly told her about this. She obligingly entertained my questions and matter-of-factly said she doesn't consider herself "Western" which also fascinated me.]
I can imagine the post-industrial vulgarity of my American culture is foreign to the world of these symbols. I feel my talents and personality would've had a ready-made niche in such an "Old World" culture that they don't have in mine. There is a kind of "pull" which I find difficult to articulate. Maybe it's Romantic escapism. But I like to think there is something genuine to feed on there.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I still don't get you. What would signal a 'return' for you when you are mentally, philosophically, spiritually already into orthodoxy? Orthodox Xt. is a mutation of the Gnostic's neoplatonic One, which Plotinus' school of neoplatonism was vehemently against...
Quote :
"...the most important polemic against the movement of Gnosticism derives from Plotinus’ Ennead II.9, Against the Gnostics. Plotinus strongly attacks the Gnostics for taking the doctrines of Plato and other Greek philosophers and misinterpreting them according to their own deceptive doctrines. For Plotinus (II.9.6), the Gnostics are lying when they speak of the divine creator as an ignorant or evil Demiurge who produced an imperfect material world. They are also completely false when they regard the creative activities of the Demiurge as the result of a spiritual fall in the intelligible hierarchy (II.9.10–12). They are melodramatic and wrong when they speak about the influence of the cos- mic spheres (II.9.13); they are blasphemous when they lay claim to the higher powers of magic (II.9.14); and completely misleading when they believe in immortality achievable through the complete rejection of and abstention from the material world. Even worse are their denial of the divinity of the Word Soul and the heavenly bodies, the rejection of salvation through true virtue and wisdom, the unphilosophical support of their arguments, and the arrogant view of themselves as saved by nature, that is as privileged beings in whom alone God is interested." [Stamatellos, Plotinus and the Presocratics]
Orthodoxy simply affirms that the demiurge-Creator is not evil or inferior, and has both a divine [Father] as well as a human nature [Christ].
From there, you see, the secularization of orthodoxy is but communism.
You say,
CW wrote:
I see in Orthodox Christianity the Traditional hierarchy, structure, inspiration and high culture that I always felt lacking in my confusing working-class American life, the vulgar culture surrounding me. As if "this is how it used to be." More dignity, rootedness/foundation, a place for the contemplative ascetic life. An esoteric, hieratic dimension, an upward direction for the intellectually curious to develop itself along. It may allow connections to be made to ancient cultures such as the Egyptians who developed the Cross symbolism. Maybe even a heroic dimension.
I'll just say its not the presence of a Hierarchy itself but what does this Hierarchy amount to when its origins are of a transcendentalist nihilism? With Evola or Gurdjieff, one can claim on the esoteric plane, Islam's anti-modernist belief of the external and internal Holy War is life-affirming 'high-culture'. What made Guenon take to Sufism too. A.K.Coomaraswamy and Evola or even Spengler can conflate across the spectrum and interpret the 'heroic plane', the 'olympian solar principle', in Orthodox Xt. as equally as Islam as equally as Rome, India, Greece, Japan, etc. only because their comparative observations are from within the heavily abstracted framework of a (traditional)Order vs. (modern)Chaos, only from a negatively defined 'collective anti-modern' stance.
To a more discriminating mind within a more discriminating context of the 'pro-what?', of the 'quality' of masculinity, hierarchy, etc., there can only be Gulfs amongst these groups of anti-modernisms.
If everything can be traced back to pagan symbols and pagan structures, and if that is what you appreciate, I wonder why you would not call yourself simply as a pagan or pro-pagan instead of pro-orthodox?
The nihilistic origins of the belief of Allah or Christ can, from the 'abstract symbolic' dimension and from hindsight, easily be re-interpreted as cases of anamnesis and esoterically life-affirming - pagan christ, aryan christ, solar christ, the 'retrieving of the holy grail' or sophia-perennis is an interpretive act. Perennialism amounts to turning this interpretive activity as a spiritual path in itself - a quest for eternal Truth, self-liberation, union with the divine, higher consciousness of pure bliss.
Its what makes Dugin, embrace Evola and Guenon as pro-Orthodox. In one of his [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], its easy to see how he uses Tradition - with a capital T.
When you define the modern problem as a battle for the 'human' spirit, then one remains such a Traditionalist, with a capital T.
Perennialists say a rose or God or Truth by any other name... smells the same... From a Human point of view, Heraclitus can be cited saying the Logos is common to all. But to what degree can two interpretations of that shared logos be the same? Knowing your past must be about an honest, discriminative encounter. It depends on how wide you draw the circle, where comparative mythology can say Thor's slaying of the serpent, or Indra's slaying of the dragon, or Apollo's slaying of the snake, or St. George who slayed a Dragon are all the 'same' events and hold the 'same' wisdom or heroism of imposing Order upon Chaos.
I define the modern problem as a battle for the 'Aryan'/'Hyperborean' spirit, and even further for the Innocence of that tragically disposed plutonic spirit.
I am not concerned with Humans or the human spirit like even Kazantzakis was. I am only concerned with that kind of select Aryan type with a certain Cleanliness of heart.
How you define your battle reveals the quality and nature of wisdom you'd tend to value. To one more discriminating, simplistic conflations appear more as an obfuscation, than wisdom. I suggest the book mentioned here before - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] which pauses at a great, critical point of asking how did paganism or religion or tradition or sacred come to be defined historically?
"My genius is in my nostrils." [N.] !
I therefore would not call myself a 'T'raditionalist. But, the exceptions thrive on the rule, and in the broader war, the more discriminating will find themselves inevitably alligned with with the unexpected in humourous irony. Many years back, I was debating someone on abortion issues [I am anti-abortion] and funnily, the people supporting my side were Orthodox Xts. but for all the wrong reasons like 'Jesus said so...'
I too find Russian pagan folk-art inspiring; it resonates with my deeper feelings for nobler sentiments. I approach this kind of art as a treasurehouse of beautiful cultural metaphors, shape-forming powers. I glean from them, a knowldege of a style of alertness to the world... Contemplation on art is a kind of martial-art to me.
Can empathize with the rest of your reply. Thanks for the links, but I am contemptuous of perennialism.
What would signal a 'return' for you when you are mentally, philosophically, spiritually already into orthodoxy?
It would be really presumptuous for me to say I'm into it, because I actually know very little about it. I think I should have said rather, "If I was still a Christian, I would look into it." The only reason I don't regret my hasty remark now is that you've taken it seriously and given a lot in return.
Lyssa wrote:
Knowing your past must be about an honest, discriminative encounter. It depends on how wide you draw the circle, where comparative mythology can say Thor's slaying of the serpent, or Indra's slaying of the dragon, or Apollo's slaying of the snake, or St. George who slayed a Dragon are all the 'same' events and hold the 'same' wisdom or heroism of imposing Order upon Chaos.
Yes. I would have called myself a Perennialist for a number of years and it was this kind of vagueness/universality that eventually tired me. That comparative mythology often is used to trivialize Western civilization seemed to suspicious even then. But I was unaware of--sheltered from--any alternative views. This was during the time when I was steeped in a leftist environment, absorbing what I thought I should, and trying to digest it all with an honest narrative of my own origins and statement of my interests.
You're right that it is irresponsible to promote anti-modernisms all in one package, indiscriminately.
So to be clear, "pro-pagan" over "pro-Orthodox" definitely, understanding that it's a non-specific term. I think the only philosophical solidarity I have with Christians now is in the same sense you say, when in the "broader war" you find yourself allied with them sometimes.
Anfang
Gender : Posts : 3989 Join date : 2013-01-23 Age : 40 Location : Castra Alpine Grug
