Our journey into the deep places of Yeats’s A Vision now leads us further into the realm of the Principles. To recap, the Faculties—Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate—define each individual incarnation. The Principles—Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body—are the foundations on which the Faculties are built; they belong to the Daimon or immortal soul, not to the temporary mortal personality. The Faculties predominate during life, the Principles during the half of human existence that takes place after death and before rebirth.
It’s important to understand the Principles to make sense of the state after death, which our text will discuss in quite some detail in a later chapter. In the course of his exposition in the present section, however, Yeats passes on a good many details that will help the reader make sense of the intricacies of his philosophy. Some of those come into play immediately as we proceed; we’ll pick up the reading at section VI of Book II, “The Completed Symbol.”
Here Yeats veers suddenly in what seems like a baffling direction, assigning the phases of the Moon from the earlier discussion to the twelve months of the year, in a very counterintuitive way. The four phases that mark the quarters of the lunar wheel—the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd Phases—each get one month, while the other phases are assigned three to each month. Nor does the year begin where one might expect, at the New Moon. Instead, the winter solstice is at the 8th phase, the spring equinox at the 15th, the summer solstice at the 22nd, and the autumn equinox at the 1st. Then there are the signs of the zodiac, which begin halfway through each month (and thus halfway through a phase); Aries begins in the middle of March and the 15th phase, Taurus in the middle of April and the 17th phase (the middle phase in April), and so on around the wheel.
It’s important not to read too much into these connections: as Yeats says, this is classification, not symbolism. The point is that the solar cycle and the lunar cycle are out of sync with each other, and the solar cycle consists of two interweaving patterns (months and zodiacal signs) that are also out of sync with each other. It’s as though Yeats described a footrace on a single circular track, but no two runners start at the same point around the circle or have their finish line in the same place. Unexpected though this is, there’s a point to it: in contrast to the views of ordinary religion in Yeats’s time and ours, there is no beginning to the process and no end to it either.
Underlying all this, furthermore, is the basic scheme of two complementary forces, each “living the other’s death, dying the other’s life,” that runs through the whole system of A Vision. The solar or primary cycle runs from sunrise to sunrise, full moon to full moon, or spring equinox to spring equinox, depending on the classification you choose. The lunar or antithetical cycle runs correspondingly from sunset to sunset, new moon to new moon, autumn equinox to autumn equinox. Depending on the scale chosen, the alternation of these two can be traced in an event, an incarnation, a cycle of 28 incarnations, the great cycles of history, or anything else.
At this point in the discourse Yeats follows the habits of his unseen instructors and turns to geometry. In earlier parts of the book we have explored the geometry of the Faculties, which is mapped out by two interpenetrating cones. The Principles have their own set of cones, differently arranged. The interplay of Husk and Passionate Body is shown by two cones (or, in schematic forms, triangles) drawn point to point, the interplay of Spirit and Celestial Body by two cones or triangles drawn base to base.
This is one of the few places where the influence of Yeats’s studies with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is hard to miss. All these interconnected triangles are derived from a specific set of Golden Dawn symbolism, the four forms of the hexagram, which relate to the four elements of magical tradition. Yeats or his instructors have modified two of them slightly, but the two forms assigned to the Principles are straight out of a Golden Dawn knowledge lecture: the cones of the Husk and Passionate Body are the fourth form, assigned to the element of water, and the cones of the Spirit and Celestial Body are the third form, assigned to the element of air. The cones of the Faculties are a slight modification of the second form, which corresponds to earth; the only change is that the equilateral triangles are turned into longer isosceles triangles, so that the base of each is touched by the point of the other.
The first form also appears in modified form a little later, when Yeats discusses the geometry of the relationship between the Faculties and Principles. Here he uses another diagram, made from the cones of the Faculties with another cone added to one end. The right hand triangle plus the dotted triangles makes the first form, again with the point of one moved to touch the base of the other. Yeats says very little about this diagram at first, but it will become of great importance later on. It symbolizes the relationship of the half of existence lived in incarnation with the hidden half that takes place after death and before birth; it also hints at the secret of the Thirteenth Cone, which gives release from the cycles of life and death.
Before we begin tracking that beast to its lair, though, it’s worth taking a little while to talk about the enigmatic cones of the Principles. In expressing the meaning of these, Yeats was handicapped in that he didn’t have computer animations as a medium; they would be much easier to follow here, for that matter, if I knew enough about that complex art to make some animations myself. As it is, you’ll have to use your imaginations instead.
Take the pattern shaped like an hourglass, the cones of the Husk and Passionate Body. This is a static image of a moving process. The Husk begins Phase 1 at the center, where the two cones touch, as a single point. It moves to the right, forming a line that slides out to the base of the right hand cone, lengthening as it goes.
Once it touches the base—the 8th Phase, by the way—it reverses direction and slides leftward, shrinking as it goes, until it becomes a point again at the center, where it has reached Phase 15. Then it keeps going further left, all the way to the base of the left hand triangle, where it reaches Phase 22. At this point the movement reverses once again and it slides right, returning to Phase 1 at the point where the two triangles touch. Spend a little while imagining this double pulsation, out to the right and back, then out to the left and back: it will make the rest of Book II much easier for you to follow.
The cones of the Spirit and Celestial Body work the same way. Start at the right hand point of the diamond shaped figure. Spirit begins there at Aries as a single point, and then sweeps leftwards as a line until the middle is passed at Cancer. It then continues all the way to the left hand point, Libra, where it reverses direction and sweeps back, reaching the midpoint at Capricorn. Again, spend a little while imagining this.
If your imagination is clear enough, you can combine these movements. Imagine the two sets of cones superimposed on each other—they can be at any angle, so long as they have a common center, and the different angles represent different phases. The example shown below is Phase 17. Imagine this pattern overlaid on the wheel of the phases, so the cones of the Spirit and Celestial Body touch the wheel at the positions of Creative Mind (Phase 13) and Body of Fate (Phase 27), while the positions of Will (Phase 17) and Mask (Phase 3) are indicated abstractly by the middle of the wide part of the cones of Husk and Passionate Body.
Now the movement begins. When the Husk is at the center, moving leftward through Phase 15, the Spirit sets out from the point representing Aries on the lower right. Both move left at the same speed, so the Husk reaches the base of the cone at Phase 22 when the Spirit reaches the widest point at Cancer. The Husk then moves right, reaching the midpoint at Phase 1 as the Spirit reaches the far point of its paired cones at Libra; the Spirit then begins moving to the right, reaching the center at Capricorn as the Husk reaches the base of its cone at Phase 8; the Husk then begins moving left, reaching the center at Phase 15 when the Spirit returns to Aries, and the cycle renews itself.
You can do the same thing, by the way, with the pattern that places the cones of the Faculties on one half of the cones of the Husk and Passionate Body, as explained by Yeats at the beginning of section VII. This is left as an exercise for readers who want to give their imagination a good workout. Let’s move on, because in this brief section Yeats also sets out some of the framework of the central theme of Book III, the experiences of the soul between lives.
Every life, as regular readers will remember, completes the whole cycle of the 28 phases in miniature. It does this while the movement of Husk and Passionate Body completes half its cycle, the cycle from Phase 1 to Phase 15, and the movement of Spirit and Celestial Body moves at the same pace through half of the zodiac from Libra to Aries. Death comes when the Husk is at the 15th phase, the full moon, and the Spirit reaches the spring equinox, the beginning of Aries. At this point, as explained last month, the Faculties disappear, returning to their sources in the Principles, and the Principles then dominate during the afterlife.
Birth comes when the Husk reaches the 1st phase, the new moon, and the Spirit reaches the autumn equinox, the beginning of Libra. Notice the opposition here. From the lunar standpoint, the standpoint of the Husk and the antithetical tincture, incarnate life is the waxing moon from new to full, and the existence after death is the waning moon from full to new. From the solar standpoint, the standpoint of the Spirit and the primary tincture, incarnate life is autumn and winter, and the existence after death is spring and summer. Once again, each lives the other’s death and dies the other’s life.
Conventional religion, which is solar and primary in the age now passing, portrays life as an autumnal and wintry valley of tears, and the afterlife as salvation and joy. It thus balances the ordinary popular belief that sees things the other way around. The conventional religion of the lunar and antithetical age that preceded ours, and that of the antithetical age Yeats expected to dawn in the century or so ahead of us, celebrated and will celebrate life as joy and death as sorrow; this will again counterbalance the opposite view, which will take center stage in the popular imagination of the age.
These vaster perspectives take center stage as we proceed to section VIII and IX. A complete cycle of 28 incarnations, Yeats suggests, takes “some two thousand odd years”—the traditional figure is 2160 years, or the length of an astrological age. The full set of twelve rounds thus takes 25,960 years, the Great Year of the ancients, the time it takes the point where the sun is located at the spring equinox to move all the way around the zodiac, driven by the slow wobble of earth’s axis that causes the precession of the equinoxes. These traditional figures, however, are averages. As noted in an earlier post, souls can get stuck at Phases 8 and 22, and require as many as four repetitions to get past those phases and move on; Yeats hints that it is possible, though apparently less common, to run into similar problems at any of the other phases as well.
Thus human souls move through their incarnations at various rates. Yeats or his instructors are borrowing imagery here from Theosophy. In Theosophical writings, the swarms of souls that descend from the highest planes start out moving in unison, but gradually sort themselves out over vast abysses of time into a vast jumbled mass of souls spread out over entire ages, with the leading edge of the souls in any given swarm mastering the lessons of each of the later globes and rounds before the laggards have quite finished arriving there. This may be why there is such a broad overlap between astrological ages at this point—why, to cite the current situation, some souls are still very firmly settled in a Piscean mode of consciousness while others are ranging forward into the Aquarian mode.
This is typical, and plays an intriguing role in Yeats’s system. As we’ll see later on, the birth and death of religions happens at the high point of civilizations, and the birth and death of civilizations happens at the high point of religions, with one or the other happening every thousand years or so. Once again, they live each others’ death and die each others’ life. This one of many expressions of that alternation of solar and lunar periods discussed above.
Next we get another of Yeats’s occasional references to the work of another philosopher: in this case, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose Philosophy of History was still wildly popular in Yeats’s time. Hegel gained his reputation as the 19th century’s premier philosopher by way of wild overgeneralizations so simplistic and so silly that most intellectuals assumed there had to be something really cryptic and profound underlying them—the great Hegel couldn’t actually have been spouting utter nonsense, could he? His characterizations of Asia and Europe are typical: to Hegel, Asia is Nature and Europe is Civilization. I can only assume that this seems to make some kind of sense if you happen to be an unusually ignorant European.
It interests me that Yeats takes this fatuous idea and does something useful with it. He starts by redefining the two as abstractions, symbolic Asia and symbolic Europe, and assigning them to the primary and antithetical tinctures respectively. The two symbolic forces are inseparable, and they alternate roles in European history. At a certain point—symbolically, the full moon in March, the 15th phase of a great historical cycle—the antithetical tincture (the symbolic West) fathered Christianity on the primary tincture (the symbolic East), and the child took after its mother, making primary Asian themes predominate in European culture. The next such cycle will see the primary tincture father a new religion on the antithetical tincture, giving rise to a new religion that will give antithetical themes from European sources the predominant role.
A bit of profound symbolism appears here, borrowed from another source that shows the falsity of Yeats’s pretense of ignorance. Leo Frobenius, the great German anthropologist and explorer, noted in his journeys in sub-Saharan Africa a pair of symbols, the cave and the altar. Those African peoples who migrated eastward in historic times, he claimed, tended to use religious symbolism based on an altar at the center of twelve radiating roads; those that moved westward instead used a symbolism in which the sacred cave is central. I don’t happen to know if this is true, but it was an influential claim among anthropologists a century ago and Yeats was familiar with the paired symbols. They served him as another set of emblems for the primary and antithetical cycles, and the fact that some traditions placed the birth of Christ in a cave made it a useful pairing for him, placed (as he believed) just before the birth of an alternative religion which would center on the altar and its roads.
This was not the limit of Yeats’s anthropological knowledge, for that matter. He also draws on another theory of his time, a proposal by Flinders Petrie and Hermann Schneider. Petrie and Schneider argued that every new civilization was born of interracial marriage. In their scheme, a people that has lived in isolation and developed a distinctive ethnic and cultural identity cannot give rise to a civilization until it unites, by migration or conquest, with a different people. Five centuries or so pass after the union, a new ethnic group arises from the union, and this gives rise to a conquering civilization under the leadership of an aristocratic class. Then comes revolution, the aristocracy falls, and a second flourishing takes place under the leadership of bureaucrats and functionaries; this ends in stagnation, decline, and depopulation. Only when another people immigrates or invades does the cycle begin anew.
I’m certainly not going to argue for the truth of this scheme, though examples aren’t hard to find in the historical record. I admit, though, that it amuses me no end to think about just how incandescently irate the Petrie-Schneider theory would make both the racists and the woke antiracists in today’s world, were either group literate enough to find out about it. Still, it’s one of the tragedies of life that a theory can be amusing without being true! Its relevance here is simply that Yeats used it as yet another symbolic expression of the way that, in his system, everything is born from the union of opposites.
Two final points round out the sections we’ve explored this month. First, early in section X, Yeats hints at a Great Wheel on a scale much vaster than the ones he’s discussed so far, in which all human history and late prehistory as well fits on a single wheel, and the invention of agriculture came at Phase 4 or 5 of that wheel. Egypt and Sumer fall in Phase 16 of that wheel, where Unity of Being first becomes possible. In that scale, to gauge roughly by the millennia involved, we are in Phase 27 or so, facing the guttering-out of the long process that began when gatherers in the Middle East decided to plant edible grasses in more convenient locations.
No, Yeats does not expect the cycle to lead us onward and upward. The last part of section X goes out of its way to dismiss the modern belief in progress. Even the gap between “civilized” society based on agriculture and “savage” society based on hunting, fundamental to the social thought of Yeats’s time, is deprived of either of its usual moral spins in our text: the invention of agriculture, to Yeats, is neither an upward leap on the road to the stars or a fall from grace. Each cycle, he suggests, is morally equal to every other; societies can be different, even radically different, without one being superior to another, and the modern world is included in this. It’s no less challenging a suggestion today than it was when Yeats wrote it.
Assignment:
Next month we’ll finish up Book II, “The Completed Symbol.” Read through the remaining sections, XI to XVIII, to make the next stage of our adventure a little easier.
I’m not actually surprised that the winter solstice would be phase 8, judging by Yeats’ description of phase 8.
“Conventional religion, which is solar and primary in the age now passing, portrays life as an autumnal and wintry valley of tears, and the afterlife as salvation and joy. It thus balances the ordinary popular belief that sees things the other way around. The conventional religion of the lunar and antithetical age that preceded ours, and that of the antithetical age Yeats expected to dawn in the century or so ahead of us, celebrated and will celebrate life as joy and death as sorrow; this will again counterbalance the opposite view, which will take center stage in the popular imagination of the age.”
Considering the Age of Aquarius is going to be an age of catastrophes, I’m not surprised that the ordinary popular belief will end up being that life is a valley of tears and that the afterlife is the salvation and joy.
“This may be why there is such a broad overlap between astrological ages at this point—why, to cite the current situation, some souls are still very firmly settled in a Piscean mode of consciousness while others are ranging forward into the Aquarian mode.”
There’s also the notion of a cusp between two signs in astrology which I think is relevant here. We’re on the Aquarius-Pisces cusp in terms of astrological ages.
Does the idea of us being in Phase 27-ish of the great cycle of civilizations (not that I believe that) lend credance towards the view of collapse over decline (more specifically that the dark age trough coming in a few centuries will be so universal that thousands of years of culture and knowledge will not be transmitted to the civilizations that will eventually rise)? Alternatively, the hypothesized Russian & tamanous high cultures might rise on schedule but develop in radically new directions compared to previous high cultures, in ways enabled by the recent Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
(PLEASE NOTE: I have removed a large number of out of date prayers from the Ecosophia Prayer List. If this affected your prayer, I invite you to update it. The full list of removed prayers is in the comments section here.)
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 9/10). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Brother Kornhoer’s daughter Katharine have strength in acknowledging her situation, total honesty with others as she works her way out of it, fortitude so that she can put in the work necessary to get out of her situation, and divine guidance on how to proceed. May she face her problems squarely and not hide from them, and may her anxiety be dissolved through trust and acceptance of divine assistance.
May Matthew Jussaume be granted healing and relief from his Multiple Sclerosis. May the Divine guide him to health, as well as grant him guidance for dealing with the condition.
May Trubujahs’s mother-in-law, Helen, who is currently recovering at home after gastrointestinal bleeding related to stage 4 pancreatic cancer, be filled with vitality and be healed of all cancer and any ailments relating to it; may she and her family find the strength and support they need throughout.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin continue to make progress in her healing toward full mobility, and prayers for strength and support for her family.
May Atmospheric River’s gall bladder full of gallstones heal and be filled with such vitality that her current stones diminish, her comfort increases, and her gall bladder remains free of new stones.
May Northwind Grandma’s husband Jeff, who passed away unexpectedly on July 22, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination; may he be healed of the “wound in his heart” that he held in life.
May Jeff’s cat Henry accept, twice a day, Northwind’s giving him his Flovent inhaler dose and pill, and let her take him to the veterinarian once a month for an injection.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Lukeszy’s father’s post-surgery swelling be healed.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, who is still undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgery, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment; may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
It occurs to me that the surge in suicides over the past few decades, as well as in the support for euthanasia, may be a sign of the new popular attitudes toward death.
Death has always held both the terror of the unknown and a promise to escape from your troubles into a world of spirit, and the latter is clearly taking over the popular imagination. Boomers seem to be the last generation to be solidly in the terror camp.
Hello JMG and commenters:
This week John post has touched on Yeats Wheel again. Well. I can tell you it’s more difficult for me to understand and think about this occultist topic than usual mundane topics here, but I’ll ensure pains to write about it, after having read and thougt about it…
Anon, I think things are already beginning to move in that direction.
Patrick, it’s an interesting speculation. I don’t think Yeats is right about this, for what it’s worth.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Slithy, I could see it.
Chuaquin, I know — it’s very complex and challenging stuff.
“The next such cycle will see the primary tincture father a new religion on the antithetical tincture, giving rise to a new religion that will give antithetical themes from European sources the predominant role.” If the new religion also favors its mother, will it be based on the nominally Christian Europe of Yeats’ time (and ours) or on the Islamic Europe you expect to supplant it over the next century or so?
“in contrast to the views of ordinary religion in Yeats’s time and ours, there is no beginning to the process and no end to it either.”
This idea challenges, IMHO, usual “common sense” in mainstream religious views and secularist people alike. Maybe “common sense” isn’t very common, so it’s more like shared biases about everything. This topic is making me to think in a deep sense…
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“At this point in the discourse Yeats follows the habits of his unseen instructors and turns to geometry.”
I think in old times, geometry (and to some extent, mathematics) had an occultist side, which was erased since some centuries ago, as politically incorrect. Current sciences materialism finished that wiping recently (in historical terms). Elephant in room was, at least in ancient Greece times, Pythagoras. It’s interesting to realize that René Guénon (in spite of their nasty ticks) pointed geometry and maths were useful to esotericism/occultism…
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“In expressing the meaning of these, Yeats was handicapped in that he didn’t have computer animations as a medium; they would be much easier to follow here, for that matter, if I knew enough about that complex art to make some animations myself. As it is, you’ll have to use your imaginations instead.”
He was a man of his time, and I think nowadays computers have been very useful for some things, and very bad for another things (I’m thinking now in most of current LLMs babbling). So I’ll try to follow your advice and imagine the whole thing now…I mean, Yeats was a bit limited by lack of hi tech in his times, but we maybe are limited due to our technology (ironically). Every time has its own miseries…
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I’m afraid I haven’t understood very well the cones thing, but I think I must be patient, to understand it…
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“Conventional religion, which is solar and primary in the age now passing, portrays life as an autumnal and wintry valley of tears, and the afterlife as salvation and joy. It thus balances the ordinary popular belief that sees things the other way around. The conventional religion of the lunar and antithetical age that preceded ours, and that of the antithetical age Yeats expected to dawn in the century or so ahead of us, celebrated and will celebrate life as joy and death as sorrow;”
Mmmm…”Virtus in medio”, methink (virtue is in the middle ground).
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“Hegel gained his reputation as the 19th century’s premier philosopher by way of wild overgeneralizations so simplistic and so silly that most intellectuals assumed there had to be something really cryptic and profound underlying them—the great Hegel couldn’t actually have been spouting utter nonsense, could he? His characterizations of Asia and Europe are typical: to Hegel, Asia is Nature and Europe is Civilization. I can only assume that this seems to make some kind of sense if you happen to be an unusually ignorant European.”
Oh, Hegel: my favorite nightmare during my high school Philosophy classes…You’ve summarized very well how overvlued has been this thinker. Borges, the Argentinian writer, wrote a lot of time ago he thought Hegel was the biggest fraud (and dishonest man) in recent times of European philosophy (well, it was something like this phrase what I remember from him). Unluckily, Hegel gave his “bear hug” to a lawyer and joutnalist named Karl Marx. You can guess the rest of that story until the present time…For example, Marx dared to depict every Asian civiliziation, outside Europe “high culture”, as “eastern despotism”, if I remember well some Marx writings (likely due to Hegel nasty influence). It’s a very narrow minded way for “understanding” non European cultures, methink.
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“Leo Frobenius, the great German anthropologist and explorer, noted in his journeys in sub-Saharan Africa a pair of symbols, the cave and the altar.”
“He also draws on another theory of his time, a proposal by Flinders Petrie and Hermann Schneider.”
All these guys were under my radar until now, so I can tell you I’m less educated than I thought (ahem), which I can explain partly because to some extent, I’ve been a self-taught man…Thank you, John, for having learned a new fact I didn´t know.
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“it amuses me no end to think about just how incandescently irate the Petrie-Schneider theory would make both the racists and the woke antiracists in today’s world”
Very good…White supremacists and wokesters share to some extent their fear and hatred against race/cultures mixing. For example, woke doctrine is an ally to some South Americans and Mexicans nationalists who hate the spanish Conquista…I tend to think they despise and deny current Hispanic America mixing, so they miss the old good times when natives where “pure Indians” (ahem), before Conquistadores times. It’s a pity, because the clock cannot go backwards (it’s the same situation than White supremacists against European mixing with non Europeans people. in an inverted image).
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“the invention of agriculture, to Yeats, is neither an upward leap on the road to the stars or a fall from grace. Each cycle, he suggests, is morally equal to every other; societies can be different, even radically different, without one being superior to another, and the modern world is included in this.”
Oh, oh, bad news for Harari cult-like ideas and anarcho-primitivist ideology alike, though I very much doubt these current thought frauds have never heard about that Yeats corrosive idea against his “progressive” History view…
Too bad Harry Smith didn’t use this as the basis for one of his alchemically animated films.
Anonymous # 2:
“Considering the Age of Aquarius is going to be an age of catastrophes, I’m not surprised that the ordinary popular belief will end up being that life is a valley of tears and that the afterlife is the salvation and joy.”
Well, why are you sure of that claim? I don’t think seriously in New Age rosy depiction of the Age of Aquarius like an utopian dream, but I don’t think it’s going to be surely only an age of catastrophes. Please, I need you explain better, at least for me.
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JMG # 8:
“I know — it’s very complex and challenging stuff.”
Yes, I agree. And it’s more complex when you’re a non mother tongue English speaker/reader; so let’s have some patience…
Also, I really love the idea of the alternation between the peks and troughs of civilization and religion. As well as the notion of solar / lunar religion. We do seem to be in that liminal zone between the piscean and aquarian.
Hey JMG
I am intrigued by this theory that Petrie and Schneider proposed, even though I know it’s only partially correct. Do you know where they proposed this theory? Is it in a specific book, or something they suggested here and there throughout unrelated books?
Oh I was so excited when I caught up w last month post a few days ago and spent time preparing for this one. I had been so busy. I also started rereading the introduction now with the hindsight of having gotten to know the book some and it made that so much more fascinating. Also I had a run in with a tricky cat-type lady the same day as I was reading in yeats vivid detail about how put upon and low cats are. My favorite bit of the new material, again this birth out of opposites and deep-time scale gathering of wisdom, “The Saint suffers like impediment; the love he brings to God at his 27th phase was found in some past life upon a woman’s breast, his loyalty and wisdom were prepared perhaps a thousand years before in serving a bad master, and that is why the Indian minstrel sings God as a woman, husband, lover and child.” It helped give me some more feeling too for the more local level of a single incarnation, and the tensions and mutual supporting energies among the four faculties all together of that incarnation….. Happy to be here. Starting to promote our Nov 6-9 Heritage Food Fest gathering. Those in (or near!) ohio river valley, COME!
Hi, JMG:
I apologize if this isn’t on-topic enough; if not I will wait for the next Magic Monday.
This past Magic Monday I asked a question about getting oneself out of a rut:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/379957.html?thread=61563701#cmt61563701
You made reference to ‘the guardian before the portal’, which one must defeat.
I am absolutely positive I remember you talking about this ‘portal guardian’ at greater length in the past, but in spite of my having saved copies of virtually all of your writings since 2006, a search through these files on ‘guardian’ does not turn it up. Can you suggest an appropriate search term? I’d really like to review what you advised us about it.
Thanks!
I’m very much under the weather at the moment (coming off three days of being bed-ridden), so this will have to wait until I can think straight. In the meantime I did publish on my dreamwidth (https://k-a-nitz.dreamwidth.org/46676.html) a rough working out of the pop science idea of the four stages of learning (unconscious incompetence etc) as a four quarter model ala A Vision to help me think through the mechanics of the faculties – some of the viewership may find that of help for thinking through the earlier posts on the faculties, though they should not take it as entirely correct (I’m sure I have screwed up somewhere in there, but am in no state to verify).
I think I can say that I am OFFICIALLY lost… When I saw the diagram with the rhombus inside the circle, I AUDIBLY swore…
The difficulty curve of A Vision seems to be the inverse of the Cosmic Doctrine. CosDoc started off with a brick wall that leveled out as you went, making more and more sense as you trudged forward. A Vision made a surprising amount of sense from the get go, but picked up in difficulty, like missing a couple classes before trying to catch up. With A Vision, it feels like Yeats is trying to make the Swiss Army Knife of metaphors, if that makes any sense. Some of the uses of his metaphor make my brain light up, other uses make my head spin.
As an aside, I’ve spent a lot of my slower moments thinking about phase 16. I could be completely wrong, but I think I’m going somewhere regardless. A phase 16 that is out of phase acts like your average ideologue, desiring to shape the outer world to their idea of perfection. (Rarely a good idea.) A phase 16 that is in phase seems to take “the kingdom of heaven is within” to its logical conclusion. They shape their inner world to resonate with the beauty inherent in the world. Out of phase, they’ll tell how perfect the world could be. In phase, they’ll show you how perfect it already is. The pessimist does not hear the bird song, the pragmatist knows the bird sings for other birds, but enjoys the song regardless. But an In-Phase 16 knows the bird sings for him and all those that would listen, not because it’s scientifically true, but because its the most enchanting way of thinking about it. Shaping the inner world is the task for this person. Maybe that’s why the following phase shows artistic talent. They already know how to perceive the world to perfection. All that is needed is to get others to understand.
Hi John Michael,
I’ll pass on the geometry. Having no visual recall puts a halt to forays in that direction. Oh well, probably karmic, actually most certainly karmic. 🙂
“gives release from the cycles of life and death.” Such thinking bothers me, for surely it is our lot to face as best we may, the challenges before us, and accept those with which sweep us away? Agreed, that is an uncommonly motivated perspective, and admittedly on a large enough time scale it all does not matter, but all the same there is equal joy and anguish to be had from exercising ones will.
The more I began to write about this topic, the larger the binding knots and descent into fallacy got, so I deleted the excess words and left it as per the paragraph above. Is it Gnosticism which harps on about ‘the tragedy and suffering of life’? Of course it’s tragic and hard, what did they expect? You’ve said it before that there is: no such thing as a free lunch. Ours is to navigate those choppy waters.
Hmm, as to the last sentence, I’d offer the suggestion that superior is an abstract concept which can best be measured using time as a marker. Industrial civilisation is only a few centuries old, and is facing some serious challenges which it may not survive. Hardly suggestive of ‘superior’ is it? 🙂
Cheers
Chris
@12 Chuaquin
Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, planet of the individual, revolutions, eccentricity, technology, and out-of-the-blue crises. Putting the astrology aside, we should be expecting areas hitting climatic tipping points and meltwater pulses from collapsing ice sheets in the decades and centuries ahead.
Roldy, I have no idea — I’m far from sure I take that idea of Yeats very seriously, for that matter.
Chuaquin, the first time I read Hegel’s Philosophy of History my immediate response was “this is astonishingly stupid.” My considered response, after watching generations of scholars desperately trying to extract something worthwhile from Hegel’s word salad, is “yes, this is astonishingly stupid.” Borges, bless him, wasn’t the only one to draw that conclusion — Arthur Schopenhauer, my fave German philosopher, made the same argument. He claimed, to be precise, that Hegel wanted to be a Big Name Philosopher but recognized that he didn’t have what it takes, so he set out to fake it, relying on the effect that Gilbert and Sullivan lampooned in their operetta Patience:
“If this young man expresses himself in words too deep for me,
Then what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
For what it’s worth, I encountered Frobenius, Petrie, and Schneider for the first time in this book.
Justin, that would have been seriously cool!
J.L.Mc12, no, I never took the time to chase it down. Sorry.
AliceEm, delighted to hear it — and yes, this is a book that really benefits from repeated reading.
Cicada, please do repost that on Magic Monday or this month’s open post. Thank you!
KAN, thank you for this. May your recovery be prompt and complete!
Sean-Luc, you’re doing better than you think — that description of Phase 16 seems spot on to me. As for the rest, I doubt anyone will ever be able to figure it out on the first reading. This is the kind of book that requires multiple rereadings and a lot of reflection to unpack.
Chris, the release from the cycles of birth and death comes, in Yeats’s view (and that of occult tradition generally), when the lessons of those cycles have been learned. You don’t stay in elementary school once you’ve finished taking in what it has to teach; you go on to other things and other lessons. As for “superior,” it’s always and only a personal value judgment. It’s like “efficiency” in Retrotopia — superior at doing what, in terms of what variable?
These races mixing and producing a civilization in five hundred years resembles your observation that an area gets two pseudomorpheses before it births a High Culture. Two cultures mingling and becoming “indigenous” to the area fertilizers the hidebound civilization with new ideas.
Hi Cicada,
The Guardian may be yourself. No, I’m being serious. Please excuse my geeky foray into Star Wars, but in the Empire Strikes Back film, whilst training with Yoda, Luke had to enter a cavern and was advised not to take weapons (but couldn’t be told) where he discovered, himself, in a darker form.
Know thyself, is perhaps today’s lesson. And please correct me if I have erred here Mr Greer.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Oops, cloudflare got me, and I only spotted your reply to Cicada after I’d posted my observation on that subject. This interweb stuff isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Thank you for the reply. Hmm. Cogitating upon the matter further I’d have to suggest that: we see what we are able to. If the view is occluded, and I believe that is the correct word, then perhaps an individual has somewhat further to journey upon the great path.
You know man, I grew up around people who were turbulent to an extreme which may be incomprehensible to folks who’d been raised in warm and welcoming families, but the experience only made me calmer, which is the other end point. Again karmic, oh well. I reckon the mid point is knowing when to act, and sadly I don’t always get that right, although sometimes do. But, the fictional expression of Luke facing his own personal demon in that cave, left quite the impression upon me. The mystic may ask: what is it you seek my son? And what a question to face, the cheeky scamp.
Cheers
Chris
I am not very familiar with most of the influences on Yeats which you mention (maybe a little bit with the references from anthropology), but there are other influences here with which I am more familiar, and not in a literate way, but in a more folky way, if that makes sense.
It seems that there is a profound difference between the Christian idea of an “afterlife” and the Irish (Celtic) idea of an “otherworld” which was here already, and which, eventually, made its peace with the Christian idea by remaining rooted in folk practices. Yeats is clearly speaking this more folkish “otherworld” language when he speaks of a person’s lives stepping into THIS world and then into THAT world in a never ending dance. It is not an “afterlife” unless you can also talk about a “beforelife” and a “beforethatlife” and etc. Easier to think of as the Otherworld.
Also there is the idea that the Otherworld is an opposite reflection of this one – when our sun sets it is rising in that world. When we are living in high summer and plenty, it is living in deep winter and scarcity and vice versa… naturally denizens of both worlds may fall into envy if they can manage to open a channel enough into the other world to see a plenty to match your lack. Many tales of the fae, and of visits to Tir na nOg follow this kind of pattern, and the envy (and regretful acts) can go both ways.
The subtle influence of Irish mythology and folkways is strongly felt here in these themes, although I will have to do a re-read, and a bit of drawing to begin to sense the way the “dance” goes, and how its rhythms are. It strikes me that a group of people might work on choreographing this AS a dance, assigning roles of Creative Mind, Mask, Celestial Body and etc to different dancers, and putting them through the moves that Yeats is describing.
No, I’m not volunteering for this since I do not know enough people interested in Yeats or dancing to make it happen. Still, I throw it out there – perhaps the next ecosophia gathering might attract someone with the creative chops to set it up. 🙂
The mention of Hegel made me reflect on how a lot of his best known ideas are indeed simple categorization schemes, which would fit nicely on a corporate PowerPoint slide. Like the famous thesis vs anti-thesis = synthesis. Or the Europe = civilization, Asia (and presumably everything non-Europe) = nature.
You’ve expressed your disdain at some of his ideas previously, so that question is answered already. It did occur to me though that aside from Hegel many ideas (including interesting ones) do sometimes boil down to these categorizations. Is there a specific reason Hegel categorization schemata fall short? What would the attributes of a good system of categorization be, if such a thing exists 🤔
@Sarhaddon #26 (if I may)
A good system of categorization allows for useful lines of morphological reasoning or useful rules for action. For example, the biological categories of bird, reptile, mammal, etc. allow you to reason from external anatomy to broad predications of behavior and internal anatomy. The culinary categories of vegetables and fruits can help you decide what to mix together and what not to: as the saying goes, intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a (botanical) fruit but wisdom is knowing not to put it in a (culinary) fruit salad.
To apply this to Hegel: every use to which Hegel’s system has been put has been somewhere on the spectrum between intellectual onanism (Fukuyama’s “The End of History”) and world-historic catastrophes (the various flavors of 20th century totalitarian ideology). You can find a few decent uses of various parts of his system taken out context, but that’s just because he repackaged others’ ideas into high-falutin’ language.
I have been unable to find any publication by Petrie and Schneider together, but this freely accessible article summarizes the currents of thought around migration and mixture in the early 20th century. Short version: many scholars in that period thought that the mixture of certain peoples was beneficial for civilization. The author specifically discusses Hermann Schneider.
Thanks for the post as always. I read it once. Gotta find the time to read again and catch up on the book reading for the last two months.
I just took a few minutes to look for a Flinders-Schneider Theory on a couple of non-Google search engines. Nothing; though wikipedia says that Flinders Petrie was a believer in eugenics who believed in the superiority of the northern races. I found nothing about a collaboration with Hermann Schneider. So, the alleged theory, if it exists, would be surprising coming from a eugenicist. FYI.
Wikipedia also said that Petrie’s preserved head got lost after he died in 1942. Shades of “That Hideous Strength”?
Sean-Luc # 18:
“With A Vision, it feels like Yeats is trying to make the Swiss Army Knife of metaphors, if that makes any sense.”
A good metaphor IMHO to depict Yeats metaphors, ironically. Well, I think the Swiss Army Knife seems to some extent, a good example of Yeats Vision from my own view (not perfectly polished yet). Thanks for your comment!
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Patrick # 20:
OK, I understand your view on Aquarius Age. I knew Uranus was the Aquarian planet, so more and more radical changes (including big crisis) can be awaiting us and people who will come after us, in the future. However, I also think a crisis can be a hard and deep catastrophe especially for people too identified with current order of things (“conservative” in a wider sense than usual politics), but a crisis can be an oportunity to improve an individual person or human groups, if you’re ready to sail through the storm, avoiding the worst of it.
Of course, I don’t deny climate change is going to give more and more problems for a lot of people in the future (nowadays, we’re beginning to suffer its first effects, methink). However, I don’t share usual radical ecologism doomerist view, “á la Greta Thunberg”; even I tend to think future dramatic disasters you’ve pointed won’t be a sudden end of the world, but part of a context (gradual decline).
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JMG # 21:
“Arthur Schopenhauer, my fave German philosopher, made the same argument. He claimed, to be precise, that Hegel wanted to be a Big Name Philosopher but recognized that he didn’t have what it takes, so he set out to fake it,”
Well done, Arthur… The big German grumbler, wasn’t IMHO a perfect guy, in his philosophy nor his personal liefe, but I admire very much him, because he easily noticed fraud in thinking, as he pointed against Hegel.
I can also remember than Kierkegaard made his own criticism against Hegel as a “sacred cow” in Philosophy, too; but in his way. On the short form, this Danish thinker thought Hegel rejected true life in favor of abstractions, but real personal life was the Truth…(maybe he was the first Existentialist). He didn’t like great closed systems which apparently explained everything.
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Chris # 23:
“in the Empire Strikes Back film, whilst training with Yoda, Luke had to enter a cavern and was advised not to take weapons (but couldn’t be told) where he discovered, himself, in a darker form.”
I bet George Lucas learned something before thinking in this iconic Star Wars scene, from Joseph Campbells “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”…and I also bet Campbell read some Jung writings before wroting his own famous book.
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Sarhaddon # 26:
“Like the famous thesis vs anti-thesis = synthesis. Or the Europe = civilization, Asia (and presumably everything non-Europe) = nature.”
Well, those summarized Hegelian ideas make me remember how I survived in my high school times studying Introduction to Philosophy, against Hegel apparent (apparent?) nonsensical writings, so I thank people who managed to understand enough his blah blah blah to give non-esoterical students (like me) a port in a storm, to pass that awful exam about that German philosopher…In spite of Hegel complex writing style, I understand well he despised too much non-European cultures, and I see his megalomaniac wish to build a theory about everything in the world (and maybe the universe!); he seemed to think human personal freedom isn’t worth a damn (oops, he seems being a subeterfuge to later totalitarisms); and of course, his dark pose in his writings often can mean he’s disguising nonsense and arbitrariety with “deep” thoughts.
In the positive side, in spite of his “heavy” writings, I wouldn’t throw directly Hegel to the dogs. I can say Hegel saw human History and life worked in a cyclical way, according a dynamical and dialectical sense; so I think he deserves attention with a lot of caution for not suffering Hegel lethal and pedantic “bear hug”.
As a thought experiment, if Yeats’ conjecture in section X is correct (and he admits up front it’s speculative), that would suggest that the present great cycle began around the time of the end of the last glaciation. Considering the dates involved and some of the other esoteric lore we have discussed in the past, that might imply that the end of previous great cycle corresponds to the fall of Atlantis and the end of the cycle before that might correspond to the Lemurian Deviation…
@Chuaquin
Global sea level rose in pulses after the last glacial maximum, on top of a baseline rate.
~5500 years ago, the Sahara region dried out into desert. Thereafter, the Nile Valley and Mediterranean area could develop civilization but not the desert interior. Climate shifts like that will happen in the decades and centuries ahead, causing famines in the short term and extreme depopulation in the long term, while other areas switch staple crops and manage to survive and other areas flourish. With population so high, climate shifts in this decade will impact more people than in earlier eras.
Patrick, yes, there’s some similarity there.
Chris, I recall a bit of snark from Robert Anton Wilson: “This book is a mirror. If a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.” The same principle, as you suggest, applies tolerably well to all of life.
Scotlyn, that’s quite correct — Yeats at one point in his life, while recovering from a nervous breakdown, used to accompany Lady Gregory on her visits to country folk in Sligo when she was collecting folk tales, and those had a huge influence on his thought; he realized that everything he was reading about in Swedenborg and other occult sources was a living tradition in the Irish countryside.
Sarhaddon, oh, granted, all human thinking is categorization — every word and mental image is a label for a category of some kind. What makes Hegel’s categories (i.e., thoughts) fatuous is that they’re word salad with only the most arbitrary connection to the world we experience. Let’s take the “Europe = civilization, Asia = nature” business for example. Given that Asia had cities millennia before transalpine Europe, how does that work? Is he saying that the Taj Mahal is a product of nature while the Alps are a product of civilization? Or what?
I could as well say that Europe is acid and Asia is alkaline, or that Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia are respectively Charm, Persuasion, Uncertainty, and Bloody-Mindedness, the four forces that sustain the universe in the cosmology of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. These would make no less sense than Hegel’s scheme, and doubtless earnest academics could spend the next couple of centuries coming up with bad economic theories on the basis of these instead. A useful set of categorizations, by contrast, results in analyses that make sense of the phenomena they describe, and allow for accurate predictions; Hegel fails on both counts.
Aldarion, thanks for this. Our text doesn’t say that they published together. They may each have published on it separately.
Phutatorius, nah, it got recovered; the Royal College of Surgeons has it, though no doubt they’ll be selling it any day now to the National Institute for Controlled Experiments. As for eugenics, that’s a more complex field than many people realize — wrong, but complex. Not all of it was the simplistic sort of racism.
Chuaquin, Kierkegaard was in fact the first existentialist, and is credited as such in the better grade of histories of philosophy. Good catch.
Gerbil, hmm! That’s quite plausible.
Yep, we’ve come a long way from Huddon, Duddon, and Denise. Though the theme of ‘creation through union of opposites’ was very much on the surface in that early section as it is here, and provides a useful entry point for thinking through these deeper ideas.
I’ve been keeping up with the readings (barely) but missed out on last month’s discussion due to some much-needed electronics-free vacation. Sean-Luc is right that the learning curve has steepened as we’ve progressed through the book, and frankly, I love that it does so.
A few months ago I attempted to describe the dance of the Faculties using the metaphor of a funnel-shaped wishing well with coins rolling in spirals down to the bottom, some clockwise, some counter-clockwise. But since everything in this system is doubled AND inverted AND mirrored, but at a ninety-degree angle, I now need to expand my metaphor from a funnel to an hourglass, with some coins spiraling downward and others spiraling upward, somehow crossing paths at the centrepoint and continuing on their trajectories, then reversing direction and returning. And maybe there needs to be a second hourglass positioned at right angles to the first, but sharing a centrepoint. I think this could all be mapped onto the triangles and rhomboi Yeats provides but I will need to take a lot more thought to actually figure it out.
@27, 31, 32
It is fun to think about this. Another idea I had is that you could divide most of philosophy onto a spectrum, with somber philosophers focused on clarity (like e.g. Schopenhauer, who was mentioned) on one end and fuzzy-brained philosophers focused on fashionability (like Hegel) on the one end. I remember Greer made a similar distinction once.
In this scheme, the Schopenhauerists would be philosophers who emphasize clarity and verifiability of their arguments. They are usually written with a serious style that allows you to follow their argument. The philosophers also tend towards seriousness in temperament. In contrast, Hegelians would put their focus on fashion. Their content and logical structure would be sub-par, but their one true achievement would be the clever PR strategy behind the theory. Whether by design or accident they seem to have some component pieces – an easily comprehensible viral idea that can get chattering classes excited, meticulously thought-out maneuvering of their talking points to balance the needs of fashion and political safety, and clever social engineering and self-presentation, sometimes taking the form of intellectual “cults” centered on the fashionable philosopher.
To test this scheme out on a few modern thinkers, someone like a Noam Chomsky (or e.g. Orwell, for an older one) would fit on the Schopenhauerist end – you might not agree with their arguments, and they overreach in places, but at least you can follow their logic from their starting axioms to their conclusions. You appreciate that they aren’t trying to obfuscate their views, even when they are arrogant or wrong. By contrast, the Foucaults, Derridas and Lacans would be on the Hegelist end – it’s all fashion, posing, clever positioning that balances fashionability and politics, ingeniously constructed PR and academic cult formation.
Admittedly, there are some thinkers who resist this dichotomy though, and challenge the underlying assumption of the “good” Schopenhauerists and “bad” Hegelists. For instance, the beloved Nietzsche, although he definitely didn’t set out to obfuscate, he writes in a creative style reminiscent of poetry or parables – he is more vague. He certainly isn’t a dry character and will use a symbol instead of an ironclad argument at times. He would probably fall in the middle of the dichotomy. Nevertheless, he is valued by many people who would despise Hegel. Probably the crucial argument here is that Nietzsche’s vagueness is better-intentioned – it adds value rather than confusion.
And on the other end, maybe one could make a philosophical argument too “dry”. Kant’s mathematical precision comes to mind. The human experience is so complicated that even the finest logical arguments crafted by an actual genius cannot come close to containing all of it.
I see that a lot when I talk to the more intellectual end of the centre-left end of the political spectrum. They understand their world-view with rational precision and even with some more-or-less decent arguments. I respect that some of them resist the resort to memes and at least in theory (often not in practice), emphasize the importantce of sources and facts. But they don’t get that that rational comprehension of a narrow window of human experience can never be enough – one has to be open to black swans and the unexpected, non-rational signals from that huge part of human experience outside of our comfort zone. That seems to be very hard for them to understand.
Slithy T. # 27:
“every use to which Hegel’s system has been put has been somewhere on the spectrum between intellectual onanism (Fukuyama’s “The End of History”) and world-historic catastrophes (the various flavors of 20th century totalitarian ideology). You can find a few decent uses of various parts of his system taken out context, but that’s just because he repackaged others’ ideas into high-falutin’ language.”
I agree. There’s been too many polarized arguments about Hegel philosophy real value between Hegelian cult-like lovers and angry philosophers who wanted to erase all his thoughts forever in History of Philosophy. If you’ve read my last comment, you can say I think not everyting in Hegel work deserve to be thrown to the compost heap. However, it’s difficult to read him with a serious critical sense for understanding his good side. Sometimes he uses a fake mystic language (the spirit and blah blah blah) and an arrogant pretension for knowing everything with his closed system, to haunt unwary readers. Ironically, Marx tried to get beyond Hegelian closed total system, making up his own infallible system (taking advantage of some parts of Hegel which he liked), but he ended surrendered by Hegel “bear hug”. For example, he claimed for a revolution and asked for it to all the workers to join it willing freely, but he also said revolution and future communist paradise would be a fatalist fate for mankind (?). Yes, it’s a violation against the principle of not contradiction between human freedom and determinism, thanks to Marx fondness for Hegelian fatalism, methink…
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Phutatorius # 30:
“though wikipedia says that Flinders Petrie was a believer in eugenics who believed in the superiority of the northern races.”
Indeed, eugenics were very common within thinkers until 1945 (well, guess what happened a few years before that year, ahem…), even in left writers. For example, a famous leftist feminist here (Hildegart Rodríguez) was in favor of eugenics to raise stronger and smarter working class children, during ’30s. So I’m not puzzled by this nasty picture about Mr. Petrie. However, I’d be more cautious before checking a lone Wokepedia claim as the Truth, because it’s well known this online encyclopedia suffers usually some nasty biases…It isn’t strange, because its claims about being “democratic”, thanks to its anonymous writers, have an ugly disadvantage: they hide and protect lies and disinformation thanks to prevent knowing who lied or gave not exact information in Wokepedia…Indeed, some Universities (at least here) don’t allow quotes from Wikipedia in Academia works.
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JMG # 33:
“Let’s take the “Europe = civilization, Asia = nature” business for example. Given that Asia had cities millennia before transalpine Europe, how does that work? Is he saying that the Taj Mahal is a product of nature while the Alps are a product of civilization? Or what?”
Yes, Hegel isn’t an honest thinker when he disguises his own personal and cultural biases with a thick layer of binary oppositions, with his dialectical subterfuge. It’s an arbitrary choice. This poison went on working with Marx and his followers.
“Kierkegaard was in fact the first existentialist, and is credited as such in the better grade of histories of philosophy. Good catch.”
Thank you…Existentialism cannot be mixed easily with Hegel, IMHO, because its philosophers usually are more interested in real individual deep problems than in abstract historical cathegories. Well, there was the strange case of Sartre, a Marxist Existentialist (some another mixed monster made up by another thinkers was Marx and Nietzsche hybrid, but that’s another sad story), but let’s draw a veil about his problematic philosophy, to not bore you…
Sarhaddon #26: I would say that bad systems of categorization basically consist of ‘putting things in boxes’, hoping they stay in those boxes, and either ignoring them or violently stuffing them back in when they don’t stay in the boxes. Good systems of categorization are more like ‘putting things in window frames’: you cut a hole in the wall to provide a viewpoint that wasn’t there before, a viewpoint that can be adjusted by changing your own position rather than the thing itself. I do appreciate Slithy Toves #27’s criteria that such a system of categorization can be tested for ‘useful lines of morphological reasoning or useful rules for action’ and JMG’s criteria that it ‘results in analyses that make sense of the phenomena they describe, and allow for accurate predictions’. I think we’ve developed a pretty useful categorization of categorizations here 😉
As for your spectrum of philosophies (comment #35), I have become persuaded that the line between poetry and philosophy is fuzzier than most people would suppose. If you revise your spectrum with those two labels at either end and add a y-axis for ‘quality of categorization and/or symbolism’, you can comfortably fit the eloquent but inexact Nietzsche, the precise but dry-as-dust Kant, and the deconstructionist posers all on the same graph. When JMG called Yeats a sloppy thinker, he wasn’t at all suggesting that A Vision isn’t worth reading. Yeats is proving here that a skilled poet can be as precise in their evocation of new intellectual vistas as can a skilled philosopher. You can tell by my window frame metaphor that I lean toward the poetic, metaphoric, symbolic, analogical mode of expression rather than the analytic, descriptive, categorical, logical mode. Plato and Aristotle are both brilliant, but they’re not operating at the same end of this spectrum.
Scotlyn #25: If I recall correctly, Yeats does use dancing as a metaphor in the Michael Robartes story, when he talks about the desert tribe whose young people traced the trajectories of the Faculties and Principles in the sand with their footprints. I think this thread gets a fuller treatment in the original printing of A Vision, but I haven’t read it so couldn’t say for sure. I think it would be quite possible to reverse-engineer that ancient art from the cryptic notes in our present section of the text!
Okay I have a somewhat ignorant question about Hegel and what I perceive to be one of his main ideas. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis seems very similar to the formula of the Tetragrammaton except with the fourth step cut off. I can’t quite square this circle because my astral body tends to “like” the Tetragrammaton and “dislike” Hegel. Do they share similar deficiencies or are the contexts completely different? I’ve never read about Hegel’s idea besides in a Philosophy 101 book in college. I definitely find the Tetragrammaton and Axiom of Maria useful in analyzing my life and thought; maybe Hegel’s triad is useful in a personal context but not analyzing societies?
A bit off-topic, but for the fifth Wednesday of this month, I would like to read about your view of “DMT machine elves” (as those entities are commonly called). Maybe also about The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis, if you have any definite opinion about it, for example, how that would fit into the traditional Druidic worldview? (Disenchantment / Re-enchantment?)
Chris at Fernglade #24 and 25: Thanks for this. I have been pondering along similar lines myself; I will go into more detail on the next MM (nods to JMG). The scene with Luke in the cave was indeed a heavy hitter. Especially since this was before Luke went and confronted Vader personally, discovering that [spoiler redacted]. =80
Scotlyn #25: This clicked something into place for me– Christianity, wherever it goes and is adopted by a culture, gets imbued with undertones (and even overtones) of that culture. In Ireland, it’s the older Irish cosmology. In Mexico, Mesoamerican ways and deities come into play, often with only the merest nod to Christian forms. The doctrine of insta-judgement right after you die– off you go to either heaven or hell– owes much to Zoroastrianism and almost nothing to the Bible itself. Does Calvinism/Presbyterianism have Manicheism (somewhat derived from Zoroastrianism) at its root? Augustine of Hippo, from whom Calvin got his ideas, was a Manichee for ten years before he came into Christianity. Finally, as JMG has pointed out before, the “new wave” Christianity in the U.S., as expressed in “contemporary Christian music” (CCM), presents a ‘tamanous’ (Native American) style of direct, personal, individual interaction with God and Jesus.
Chuaquin #31, esp. re Hegel: I love the way you write! I laughed out loud at ‘Hegel bear hug’.
Orange Oblivious Gerbil #32:
Fascinating!
Dylan #36: Awesome. This looks like poetry/philosophy’s answer to “The Political Compass”, which spreads politics out onto two axes– economically loose or strict, and at right angles, socially loose or strict.
Hi John Michael,
Ooo, the gentleman has a rather sharp tongue. You’ve long recommended the trilogy too, although I prefer my absurdity along the lines of say Douglas Adam’s, Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, which has a dash of crazy English, err, amusement. 🙂
If I may say so, the larger problem with philosophers is whether they regularly use dental floss, or not. Certainly the benefits outweigh the costs, and that was the core issue with Hegel. He may not have gotten the basics right before moving on to more advanced topics, and it kind of shows.
Philosophy is one of those subjects which does my head in. 🙂
The weather down here is glorious, just really quite delightful. We’re getting runs of warm, sunny, and calm, then rain – rinse and repeat. Of course as they warn, past performance is no guide to the future. Still. Thought you might enjoy this article: Best wet season in decades gives life to Barkindji people’s living medicine cabinet.
You often talk about a lands underlying energy, and I reckon nature magic is boss down here.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Cicada,
Thanks for the laughs. Good stuff! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
@Cicada Grove #42
“as JMG has pointed out before, the “new wave” Christianity in the U.S., as expressed in “contemporary Christian music” (CCM), presents a ‘tamanous’ (Native American) style of direct, personal, individual interaction with God and Jesus”
Yep, this influence can be seen in the history of American Christianity since before 1640 and there has been repeated creative eruptions of it ever since to the discomfort of various forms of organized Christian orthodoxies and institutions. I could give quite a list of examples but I forebear. Let freedom ring! and a favorite NT quote “where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty”.
Dylan, yeah, we’re in the middle of a n-dimensional Plutonian steam hockey tournament, with all eight teams going at it simultaneously in Riemann space! This is as bad as it gets, though; from this chapter on, Yeats gradually moves from theory to application, and my job and yours will both get easier.
Sarhaddon (if I may), mine was less a spectrum than a test of honesty. When Heidegger said “clarity is the enemy of philosophy,” he branded himself as a deliberate fake. Any writer who cares about his work discovers fairly early on that the main cause of unclear writing is unclear thinking; if you’ve thought through something deeply enough to understand it, you can write clearly about it. For all his poetry, Nietzsche was a great example — he may have been crazy but he was always clear, because he cared about ideas. Hegel, by contrast, produced absolute slop, and I think the most likely reason for this is that he was clever but shallow, and could string together words at great length but didn’t go to the trouble of thinking about them.
Luke, one of the liveliest areas of recent Hegel scholarship has been the uncovering of places where he borrowed stuff from 19th century European occult philosophy. Glenn Magee’s Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition is a good intro here. The basic principle is sound; the problem, of course, is that Hegel didn’t understand it very well and so left out the fourth letter of the Name. Or the fourth and fifth — I wrote an essay on that a decade ago…
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-fifth-side-of-triangle.html
A. Karhukainen, sorry — the election was last week. The next month with five Wednesdays is December; if you get your vote in the first week of that month, it’ll be tabulated and voted on by the rest of the commentariat.
Chris, dental floss, or mental floss? 😉
Sarhaddon & John (If I may):
Clarity is the enemy of tenure and the academy.
Dylan # 35:
I like your metaphor to describe the dance of the Faculties, though I’ve needed to imagine it for a while before seeing and understanding it in my mind. It would be interesting to see it in a computer animation for people with not much imagination (like me, to some extent), but I’m too clumsy with computers to try one (ahem) by myself. Thank you for your metaphor.
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Sarhaddon # 36:
“Nevertheless, he is valued by many people who would despise Hegel. Probably the crucial argument here is that Nietzsche’s vagueness is better-intentioned – it adds value rather than confusion.”
I tend to think a heck of Nietzscheans really despise Hegel, and the own F. Nietzsche seemed not having a good opinion of Hegel. Nietzsche was a very individualist man, so Hegel historicism maybe was poison for him…If you also remember the big moustache philosopher claims in favor of Dyonisos, who was the ancient Greek god of chaos, creative madness, drunkenness and irrational instintcs, well, let’s compare them with the very systematic and apparently intellectualism in Hegel work…
However, I can remember there’s been some (risky) attempt to mix Nietzsche with Marx (who to some extent was an errant Hegelian).
On the other hand, according a philosopher named Eugenio Trías, Nietzsche near managed to free himself from the Hegelian “bear hug” with his individualist and caustic criticism against all previuous systematical thinkers, but…Trías also wrote Nietzsche didn’t escape from Hegelian dialectical idea, to some extent: the myth of eternal recurrence means (in a very wide sense) that there are continuous cycles in the world, so eventually Hegel ghost embraces poor Friedrich, acording Trias.
Here, an essay about these two German philosophers arguments, centered in the dicotomy between a supposed “end of the History”(progress) and “eternal recurrence”; if you’ve got time and patience enough to read it:
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/302754
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Dylan # 38:
“When JMG called Yeats a sloppy thinker, he wasn’t at all suggesting that A Vision isn’t worth reading. Yeats is proving here that a skilled poet can be as precise in their evocation of new intellectual vistas as can a skilled philosopher.”
Well, a good poet knows all human languages aren’t 100% exact, so the same word can mean different things in several contexts, and no language fits in a 100% rational logic like it could be tha case of mathematical language. This “problem” for a skilled poet, isn’t a true problem, but an advantage to suggest more things than literal words mean at first sight…like Yeats did in his work.
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Luke Z. # 40:
“Thesis-antithesis-synthesis seems very similar to the formula of the Tetragrammaton except with the fourth step cut off.”
I can’t answer your doubt, because I’ve studied only Introduction to Philosophy, so I don’t have a Philosophy university degree…
However, I’d like to clarify you another sub-topic about Hegel. My high school Philosophy teacher told us the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” dialectics resume is a good tool to begin understanding Hegel thought, but the map isn’t the territory. Indeed, my teacher told all students that ironically, Hegel never wrote explicitly nowhere in all his work his most famous idea about how dialectics and historical cycles work, according him, with those three magical words.
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Cicada G. # 42:
I’m glad you like so much how I’ve written in that previous comment of mine. Well, I’ve always thought in Hegel ideas like a strong fierce animal, who embraces (and eventually eats) even the most brave philosophers after him (maybe a fatal embrace…). It’s a personal metaphor, but I’m not sure I’m the first one in imagining it, I say it humbly…
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Your previous idea, dear commenters, about Christianism different “flavors” according different local previous influences, has made me to remember a fictional character in last Shuseku Endu novel he wrote in 1994 (“Deep River”), a man who wanted to become a priest, but he was a Japanese guy, so he had to study in a French Seminar (there are few Christians in Japan). He thought he believed strongly in Jesus, but he ended puzzled and disappointed with his studies to be a future Catholic priest. Why? He learned soon that modern France (maybe during ’60s and ’70s), was a very Carteasian rationalist culture. Ironically, this tendency had influenced even Catholic French people too. And he was a Japanese: Although he was baptized in his childhood, even in modern Japan you can feel the Animist Shinto-Buddhist substrate, who affects even Japanese Christians. Well, “si non é vero, é ben trovato”. By the way, S. Endo was a Japanese Christian, so he likely grasped this cultural shock in himself, including his religious views.
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JMG # 46:
“When Heidegger said “clarity is the enemy of philosophy,” he branded himself as a deliberate fake”
Oh, this reckless and dishonest phrase isn’t the only one “funny” idea he said/wrote. This German jerk also wrote somewhere that “science doesn’t think”(?), so only philosophers think?(during a lesson at Friburg, 1951). And his most (in)famous phrase, praising his friend Hitler during his embarrassing stage as a Nazi Party fan (ahem) “Culture doesn’t matter. Look at his hands”(during and argument with his former friend and also philosopher K. Jaspers in 1933). Let’s draw a veil…
Saturday, 12 Sept 2026
Sidebar
The first,—the very first,— leaves, from trees, falling near my house. Only a few leaves here and there, with virtually no breeze. Teasers. I have been waiting for obvious signs of autumn.
Clouds wispy. Winter is coming.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
“Hegel, by contrast, produced absolute slop, and I think the most likely reason for this is that he was clever but shallow, and could string together words at great length but didn’t go to the trouble of thinking about them.”
Sounds like what large language models do today.
On the Uranus thing in the age of Aquarius. While Uranus can be very disruptive and that inevitably will play a part in things, just in my experience the influence isn’t disruptive to things that are already free, tends to build and reinforce on that rather than disrupt it although the concept of boundaries for freedom might take a few head clashes for group minds to figure out ha.
Anyway carry on, I haven’t much to say about Yeats as I only seem to be able to compute it enough to get a mild gist of it although I think my life somewhere in the second quarter as I fail my way to freedom and my own dreams but I could blame Uranus for that too lol.
Hi John Michael,
Very funny! 🙂 Sometimes when I encounter people bragging about their highest of educations, I slip in a casual seeming question: So what was your thesis about? Some of the word salad replies have even ended up with a most impolite thing to say to another person: You wouldn’t understand it! A conversation stopper if ever there was one, but being made of sterner stuff and thoroughly undaunted, the best reply to that is: Go on. Try me.
Candidly speaking, experience suggests that approach never ends well, and I get avoided afterwards, but hey, at least I don’t have to listen to the bragging.
Philosophy perhaps has the same issues facing science: There are diminishing returns as to what we can know.
I reckon that is a clear and unambiguous statement! 😉
Cheers
Chris
In addition to another comments about typical Hegel babble…errr…work, there are some unwary people who tend to think that Hegelian “spirit” is a synonymous for “God”. However, I think it’s a wrong interpretation of Hegel idea of it. Part of this mistake is caused by the own obscure philosopher, whose “spirit” idea can me think with malevolence, that Hegel is pretending a fake mysticism (ahem). Actually, Hegel “spirit” it’s not the Christian God. There’s a Hegelian idea which points the “spirit” needs to be thought by human beings to know itself, thanks to human self-conscience…Well, this “god” seems so weak that needs certain upper mammals brains/minds to know itself! (at least according some direct paragraph I had to suffer in my high schooll times).
@JMG; Thanks for the link to that old essay…. it hits the nail on the head!
@ JMG and Justin
I think it is indeed the case that almost everyone here seems to broadly dislike or disagree with Hegel, with the only question being the details. To keep the discussion interesting, I wanted to present an argument that partly defends Hegel but also criticizes the phenomenon he represents.
To start, let’s say a philosopher is someone who brings latent unexpressed ideas into full expression, by using logical arguments and axioms derived from his culture. Clarity is important for him, because his role is to be understood by the intellectual elite, who he will convince by pointing out that what they believe logically leads to what he will claim. Examples of this might include Thomas Aquinas, Kant or John Stuart Mill.
As a counter-concept to this, I propose the philosopher-mimic. The philosopher-mimic can not really be understood intellectually, but can much better be understood ecologically and economically. For the philosopher-mimic, one needs a niche in the marketplace of ideas. This niche would be the demand for a politically useful ideology, that has to strike a difficult bargain between being respectable (to middle-intelligence people) but also obsequious to political realities (either to avoid censorship or to avoid angering the political patrons).
This complicated niche cannot be filled by an honest philosopher, because if you possess clarity, you will not fit this niche. You will either anger the political patrons or the censors. Hence, the philosopher-mimic moves into this niche. The philosopher-mimic thrives on strategic vagueness. His mission is to create the ideology according to demand, to sound “philosophical” to gain credibility with the midwits and to not anger the power players. All this is served best by being vague and theatrical.
In the case of Hegel, the case is somewhat sympathetic. If I remember correctly, many philosophers of Hegel’s generation and arguably Hegel sympathized with the ideals (if not all the bloody details) of the French Revolution but lived in authoritarian states, where expressing such ideas was not allowed. I have heard the theory that his Hegelianism is hence a way to make a pro-French Revolution (or a broad pro-liberalism) case, but to mask it under so much obfuscation and vagueness that it could still be seen as safe by the Prussian authorities (which was the censor state that controlled Hegel). Hence why clarity is the enemy – you cannot make this argument logically, but if your entire ideology is an ink cloud with a few marketable talking points, it is doable. The philosopher-mimic fits this niche.
To pick a less sympathetic case, one could think of the modern day woke race hustlers, like Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nahesi Coates. In their case, the market demand is for an ideology that LARPs at being revolutionary and radical while also not stepping on the toes of the power-brokers who need this ideology to suit their interests, the Democratic Party. Again, vagueness and illogic is of the essence here. This is because it is logically impossible to make a genuinely revolutionary and radical case that also concludes that the cause is best served by the Democratic Party as it exists currently. Hence, there is the niche, which demands vagueness and spurious, emotional argumentation. And hence, there is the philosopher-mimic, who moves into this space.
@Dylan & Chuaquin
I definitely agree that there’s value to symbolic writing. I have heard it expressed from multiple sources that an image, whether it’s conveyed verbally or visually, can actually contain much more information than people normally think. The reason is that an image can mean many things depending on the context, whereas a carefully crafted analytically rigorous argument is all about reducing itself into one highly polished meaning. Hence why many find Nietzsche to be a very rewarding philosopher – he uses many images, so he gets across a lot of content. And since it is image-based, the content can even be adapted to your interests, since that adaptability is there for an image-based philosopher.
Sarhaddon # 55:
“Hence why many find Nietzsche to be a very rewarding philosopher – he uses many images, so he gets across a lot of content. And since it is image-based, the content can even be adapted to your interests, since that adaptability is there for an image-based philosopher.”
I agree, that Nietzsche, like another thinkers who were fond of images instead rigorous arguments, are very interesting, because images are usually suggestive, when they’re well used. However, image-based philosopy has IMHO, a disadvantage. Too different interpretations of the same image and philosopher can be contradictory, and even can become dangerous. For example, it’s said Nietzsche was Mussolini favorite philosopher. Indeed, Nietzsche wasn’t the first fascist before fascism (an absurd claim that fortunately, hasn’t become majority within Academia), but a biased interpretation of his images-thoughts can lead into that nasty ideology (whose human consequences are well known by everybody nowadays). In another extreme, Georges Sorel understood Nietzsche in his own Marxist frame, and he was popular until the ’30s within Communists across Europe. If you disguise the Overman as proletariat, this idea explains partly how Stalin, the Great Man, was so revered by the Left until the ’50s. Big Man was above Goodness and Evilness…Of course, violence was cool, when it was commited by the Good People (working class people) against Evil People (cough). There are more Nietzschean interpretations, but I’ve chosen the most opposite and extreme in past century ideologies, to show you how different they can be.
@Chuauqin
That occured to me too. I think one approach would be to see a philosopher using imagistic language as someone who chooses a high-risk but high-reward strategy. By removing the guardrails of rigorous Kant-style analysis, and arguing with images, you can fly freer and further, but you also incur more risk of misinterpretation and misuse by bad actors. Also, unless you are as talented at crafting and molding images as Nietzsche, you would probably have an elevated chance to make a mess that people don’t even respond to.
Sarhaddon # 57:
No argument here…Image symbolism is a poweful tool, but it can be misused by some readers in a “mind DIY” mood to favor dangerous agendas…