As we saw two weeks ago, Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal makes use of most of the same symbols as The Ring of the Nibelung, and thus provides a mordant commentary to the theme of that vast and sprawling work. The magic treasure, the magic spear, the antagonist who wins power by a terrible renunciation of love, the ruler of gods or knights who can’t bring himself to make a permanent choice between love and power and so fails catastrophically, the hero raised in the wilderness who alone can win the treasure, the magic flying horse and its equally magic but profoundly conflicted female rider—they’re all present and accounted for. So is the passion for Germanic legend and myth that inspired so many creative minds in Wagner’s day, of course, for Parzival is as much a treasure of German medieval literature as the Nibelungenlied.
The most obvious difference between The Ring and Parsifal is that the former is set in the world of archaic German Paganism, while the latter takes place in the Christian Middle Ages, and uses a great deal of Christian symbolism and imagery. This led a great many people, Friedrich Nietzsche among them, to interpret Parsifal as a Christian opera. Nietzsche, devout atheist that he was, lambasted Wagner for this, accusing Wagner of abasing himself at the foot of the Cross. A great many other writers praised Wagner for casting off the horrid if aesthetically powerful Paganism of The Ring and affirming the established faith of nineteenth-century European society.
Nietzsche, however, was wrong. So were the critics who agreed with his interpretation while giving it the opposite spin. Parsifal deploys quite a bit of Christian imagery, rhetoric, and music—one of its core themes is the so-called Dresden Amen, a bit of melody that featured heavily as a sort of sung punctuation to the Protestant hymns of the time—but it is not a Christian opera. it would be more accurate to call it a Buddhist opera, but only in the context of the frankly weird Western reception of Buddhism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Somebody with a better mastery of European languages than I have could do much worse than to research and write a history of that reception. It’s a complicated and revealing story. It was in the early nineteenth century that Western scholars first really began to notice that Buddhism wasn’t just one more exotic flavor of Pagan idolatry for Christian missionaries to sneer at—that it was a prophetic religion comparable to theirs, with theological, philosophical, sacramental, and ethical dimensions in no way inferior to those of Christianity. What made this realization excruciatingly difficult for them was that the ethics of Buddhism are very similar to those of Christianity, but its doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings couldn’t conflict more totally with Christianity’s if someone had sat down and worked them out with that in mind.
(Prophetic religion? That’s a term for religions like Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, which were founded by an individual prophet or teacher known to history. It contrasts with natural religion, the term for religions such as Shinto and Hinduism that emerged naturally out of a culture without having a single founder or prophet. Believers in prophetic religions like to call their faiths “revealed religions” handed down directly from divine sources, and sniffily insist that natural religions are just stuff that mere humans came up with. Believers in natural religions roll their eyes and keep on practicing the teachings of their ancestors.)
It’s indicative of the difference we’re discussing that the salvation offered by Christ is confirmed to his believers by their faith that he returned from death, while the salvation offered by the Buddha is confirmed to his believers by their faith that everyone else returns from death but he did not and never will. It’s equally noteworthy that Christian teaching rests on the idea that each human being has an immortal soul that needs to be saved from damnation, while Buddhist teaching insists that the idea that any of us has an enduring self at all is the very source of our damnation. The two faiths are irreconcilable at levels deeper than most people, and even most theologians, are willing to go.
The resulting gap was made considerably harder to cross for a very long time by the lack of competent translations of Buddhist scriptures into Western languages. Buddhism has a much more enthusiastic attitude toward the production of scriptures than do prophetic religions from points further west. While Christianity and Islam established a strict canon of scripture early on and have resisted additions to it, the various denominations of Buddhism each have their own selection of scriptures to study and are generally untroubled when new ones pop up, as they do from time to time. Classical Sanskrit, in which most Buddhist scriptures are written, is by no means the easiest language to master, for that matter, and the technical terminology of Buddhism is as complex and nuanced as that of Christianity, or any other large and highly literate faith. For Western scholars, as a result, getting an adequate set of sources for Buddhist teachings was far from easy for many years.
As a result, until very recently indeed, most of the attempts made by Western scholars to interpret Buddhism set out to try to force it into the Procrustean bed of this or that Western philosophy or ideology, rather than grappling with it on its own terms—understandably, since those terms are still nearly incomprehensible to most Western thinkers. When I was coming of age in the 1970s, for example, the attempt to domesticate Zen Buddhism was still in full spate; one dismally bad book I read in those days titled The Gospel According to Zen (sic!) tried to cash in on the heavily marketed “death of God” business by turning that austere and disciplined Buddhist denomination into a sort of pop-culture existentialism decked out in gaudy trappings ripped off from the Mystic East™. That sort of schlock is still very much in evidence today, and it was also a live thing back in Wagner’s time.
It’s fair to say, in fact, that Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher whose work played a central role in Wagner’s later work, was not immune from this. As I mentioned quite a while back in this sequence of posts, Schopenhauer was one of the first (and still one of the few) Western philosophers to take Asian philosophy seriously; he had, and carefully studied, a copy of the first Western translation of the principal Upanishads, the core philosophical texts of Hinduism; and he read, and carefully studied, every scrap of Buddhist teaching available to him. He did a better job making sense of both traditions than most other thinkers of his time. Yet The World as Will and Representation remains a book of Western philosophy, dependent on concepts that make no sense at all from within a Buddhist worldview.
It was from Schopenhauer, in turn, that Wagner got his Buddhism. Wagner being Wagner, he also read as much European literature on Buddhism as he could find, but he interpreted it through a Schopenhauerian filter. His immersion in the subject was deep enough that he sketched out an opera, Der Sieger (The Victors), which would have been explicitly Buddhist—the Buddha would have been a character in the drama, along with his favorite disciple Ananda—but it would have been a thoroughly Schopenhauerian Buddhism. Genuine Buddhists, if they’d had the chance to see it, would have scratched their heads in perplexity
A glance back over Schopenhauer’s central themes is called for, then. To Schopenhauer, what we experience in ourselves as will is our one point of contact with unfiltered reality; everything else—our sense perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, the whole kit and caboodle—consists of representations of reality at second, third, or umpteenth hand. This thing we each call “I”? In his view, it’s just another representation. What’s behind all these representations is pure Will, a Will to existence pressing forever into manifestation.
This Will isn’t God in any sense Christians would recognize. It’s not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. In its basic form, in fact, it’s amoral, unthinking, and in constant conflict with itself. (All things are forms of the Will, after all, and we experience conflict; where else would that conflict come from?) It doesn’t even become conscious until it slams face first into obstacles—and these obstacles, of course, are yet more manifestations of the Will. Thus the Will is a will in torment, and in Schopenhauer’s view the constant frustrations, annoyances, and agonies of human life are reflections of the ultimate truth of existence.
There are, however, ways out of the trap. The most complete of them is mysticism, through which the individual expression of Will turns against the Will itself, negates itself, and is freed from existence. This is a path possible only to very few, of course. The arts provide another escape from the torment of the Will: the reader engrossed in a novel, the listener caught up in a piece of music, the viewer contemplating a painting or a play, or any other person experiencing art sets aside his or her own Will for the duration of the experience and contemplates the world from a standpoint free of the Will’s torment. This is more accessible than mysticism, but not everyone has the ability to get lost in a work of art.
The third of the ways to overcome the Will, however, is open to everyone. This is compassion. By this Schopenhauer didn’t mean the instinctive, biologically based sense of other people’s feelings that most people have hardwired into them, and autists like me have to get by without. That’s best called “empathy,” from Greek en-, “in,” and patheia, “feeling.” What we’re discussing here would better be called “sympathy,” a word which replaces en– with syn– “with.” (Interestingly, Latin and German both have exactly the same structure for their comparable words: compassio, mitleid.) It’s not something that takes place inside you automatically; it’s something that has to be learned through experience—and the opera Parsifal is the story of how the title character learns it.
Follow him across the landscape of Wagner’s music and libretto and this is easy to see. When Parsifal first appears on stage, he’s just shot one of the swans that live on the lake near the Grail castle. For him, it’s just another target for his archery skills, no different from the wild animals he’s shot in self-defense on the road from his mother’s home. Gurnemanz, who here as elsewhere in the opera functions as Parsifal’s teacher and initiator, makes him realize that the swan was a living creature like himself, as fond of its own life as Parsifal is of his. Parsifal responds in a spasm of grief and guilt by breaking the bow he’s made for himself.
This leads Gurnemanz to jump to the conclusion that Parsifal might be the one predicted by the Grail’s prophecy, the one who will heal Amfortas, the pure fool made wise through compassion. In Wagner’s German that’s more lyrical: Durch mitleid wissend, der reine Thor. (English translations inevitably turn mitleid into “pity,” which fits the meter and the music, but that’s not at all what Wagner meant; we feel pity for our inferiors, while we feel compassion for our equals.) As it turns out, Gurnemanz is right in principle but wrong about the time frame. When Parsifal witnesses the sufferings of Amfortas in the Grail ceremony, he stares without the least shred of understanding. No doubt he felt bad that the man who had to pick up the cup was having such a bad day, but that wasn’t what Gurnemanz hoped for, and the old knight sends Parsifal on his way as soon as the ceremony is over.
That’s the best thing he could have done, though he had no way of knowing it. Parsifal, who is much less of a fool than he seems, may not have understood Amfortas and his suffering but he remembers both very well. His wanderings duly bring him to the magic castle of Klingsor, where Kundry sets out to seduce him the way she seduced Amfortas. Remember the scene in The Twilight of the Gods where Hagen, using Gutrune as a lure, traps Siegfried? Replace Hagen with Klingsor and Gutrune with Kundry and the similarities are hard to miss.
This time, though, the trap fails. Instead of falling for it, Parsifal understands what happened to Amfortas, and climbs up the step at which Amfortas tripped and fell. More, it was because Amfortas failed that Parsifal could learn from his failure, and triumph. That’s one of the secrets of compassion, after all: to feel compassion for others is to define them as your equals, and that makes it possible for you to see yourself in their place and themselves in your place, and learn from their failures and their successes, their sufferings and their joys.
Lacking that, you’re stuck in the same place as Amfortas. Amfortas has pity but not compassion. He didn’t see the knights who’d fallen to Klingsor before his time as equals, so he couldn’t learn from their examples and avoid their fate; he doesn’t see the remaining knights of the Grail as equals, and so he treats his own pain as the only suffering that matters and leaves the entire Grail order to go to rack and ruin. In the usual way, his pity morphs into self-pity and devours him. Here again, though, it’s because of his failure that Parsifal can succeed, regain the holy spear that he lost, and take his place as head of the Grail knights.
That, in turn, was Wagner’s answer to the tremendous challenge he’d set out for himself in the final bars of The Twilight of the Gods. Did he think that compassion could keep the Valhalla of nineteenth-century capitalism from collapsing? That’s far from clear, since the resolution of the plot in Parsifal affects the Grail castle rather than the entire world. In a historical sense, however, the solution he proposed turned out to be astonishingly prescient.
It needs to be remembered that until well into the twentieth century, liberal politics didn’t include compassion for the downtrodden among its values. Liberals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries favored roughly the same things that conservatives favor now—that is, less political interference with the capitalist system, limited government, and whatever Christian moral crusades were popular at the time, provided that those didn’t interfere with the economy. (The crusade against slavery is a good example—the nations and states where it was embraced most enthusiastically by liberals were precisely those that didn’t have slave-dependent economies.)
Conservatives in those days had a completely different set of agendas, which mostly focused on preserving what was left of the old aristocratic system and the agrarian society that supported it. That was a losing battle all along, and finally collapsed completely with the Great Depression. It was then, at the hands of populist figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, that liberalism lurched unsteadily in the direction Wagner had predicted for it, leaving conservatism to pick up the pieces by embracing the viewpoints that had been abandoned by the liberals.
It’s fascinating, at least to me, to poke at the historical amnesia that resulted. How many people nowadays remember that William Jennings Bryan, the passionate liberal Democrat who set the agenda of the American left for most of the late nineteenth century, was also a devout fundamentalist Christian who spoke for the prosecution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial? How many people nowadays, for that matter, remember that environmental conservation used to be one of the core planks of conservative platforms? (In the United States, the National Park system, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all became under Republican administrations.) For that matter, plenty of Americans seem incapable of remembering that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican president and his great opponent Jefferson Davis, before he became president of the Confederacy, was a Democratic senator. Such is the weight of the learned ignorance we have to deal with these days.
Behind that dramatic shift, in turn, was the solution that Wagner foresaw and proposed. Since the revolutions championed by Marxist and pre-Marxist socialists alike either didn’t happen or failed completely to change the conditions of the poor, people of good will turned to putting pressure on the triumphant capitalist system, hoping to make it at least a little more compassionate. No, I don’t think Wagner made that happen; I think he caught what was already beginning to stir in his own time, and decided that it made more sense than any of the other options. Many other people came to the same conclusion in the century or so that followed.
Did it work? Yes and no. At their zenith of power, the gods and giants of liberal twentieth-century capitalism were a great deal less brutal toward their own Nibelung classes than their nineteenth-century equivalents had been. Women, people of color, and other categories which had labored under explicit legal inequalities were freed from some of those burdens, and social welfare programs benefited some of the poor and vulnerable. In effect, Alberich was bullied into using his whip a little less enthusiastically, and the Nibelungs had the chance to enjoy a little more of the products of their labor. The basic problem of commodification remained intact, however, and (to switch operatic metaphors) there was the further challenge that the Grail castle of the new order was always in danger of falling into the hands of an Amfortas.
Another influential nineteenth-century cultural figure, G.K. Chesterton, recognized that danger when it was still nascent. In his poem “The Secret People,” speaking for the common people of England, he wrote:
“They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.”
The load of that loveless pity has become an immense political fact in our day. Wagner’s operas offer no answers in response to it; brilliant as he was despite his flaws, he wrestled with the challenges of his own time, not those of ours. Can we expect some other wandering youth raised in the wilderness to arrive with a new answer that will meet the hard needs of our predicament, or are we just waiting for fire and flood to overwhelm the Valhallas of the modern industrial world? The curtain falls, the lights come up, and the opera is over; if there is an answer, we must find it somewhere else.
*******
I have just been reminded by one of my readers that April this year has five Wednesdays. According to a longstanding tradition on this blog, when this is the case, my readers get to nominate and vote on the topic of the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want to read about? Inquiring Druids want to know.
“The Gospel According to Zen?”
Good heavens. The mind boggles.
I’m guessing that the theology in “The Gospel According to Peanuts” was more in tune with Christian thinking and the comic strip than the Gospels and Zen could be.
JMG,
An interesting thing about the significant environmental legislation that was put in place by republican governments is that much of it has significant teeth in place prevent them being sidestepped by politicians, businessmen and government managers.
The modus operandi of the Left is to have regulations that are part virtue signaling and part load shifting to the underclass. This type of “progressive legislation” leaves the Elites and PMC free to bumble about without fear of repercussions.
In contrast the clean water act has strict permit regulations that are not politically negotiable and involve huge fines or even jail time. Each significant source of discharge to a water body must have a permit specifying exactly what can be discharged and must identify a ” jailable official”. This official ( who signature is on the permit) is on the hook if the permit is violated negligently or willfully and can be imprisoned, my wife has been such on official at many times in her career.
Imagine if most of the folks in other government agencies ( federal, state and local) could be held to such standards for failure. This lack of accountability is perhaps one of the unwanted side effects of misplaced compassion.
“She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.”
JMG, if we feel pity for our inferiors, which of these two, Othello or Desdemona, saw the other as an inferior?
Thank you for this essay, and this series. They have been tremendously enlightening for me. I hadn’t had any reason to encounter Parsifal before in any capacity.
I don’t know how we can get out of the shadow of loveless pity and dead alien eyes without the destruction of everything. For a long time, I thought cultivating the virtues of fortitude and humility could offer an escape route – but so far it seems nobody agrees in practice, and I think I was wrong, too.
If you ever do that Sci-fi epic retelling, I hope you’ll advance the clock past Parsifal and take it to his fall, when his compassion extends so far that it mostly concerns people from outside the castle to the neglect of its inhabitants, where the knights quest long and hard to correct the errors of the world but are not themselves able to rest, where the noble forest beasts are allowed to be slain, but only for feasts given to outsiders, perhaps.
The animated show “Dragon Prince” featured a “good king” who was willing to let 500,000 of his own people starve to death to save a neighboring kingdom that had mismanaged its own resources into famine, and no, the series did not see anything wrong with that king’s actions – the villain was his court scientist/wizard who found a way to keep the people from starving. To me, that seems an excellent representation of the excesses of overly empathetic rulers.
If I figure out a solution, I’ll probably make a comic about it, but I’m no artistic or philosophical genius. I’ve been stuck on a fantasy story for years because I can’t think of a third act that doesn’t end up in effective suicidal failure for the protagonist.
I’m not sure what it says about certain iterations of Christianity that they are NOT associated with compassion. That said, the sense of the will deliberately choosing love…er, compassion, one can see how it could be construed as cutting against certain versions of “pagan” thinking.
A fitting coda to this series. One thing that seems to stand out is Wagner’s use of individual actors to represent groups, masses of people, per these interpretations. It’s as if things operated only at a macrolevel, the will of the various multitudes militating against each other, than at the level of the individual will.
As aside, brought on by that rather-emaciated image of the Buddha: one thing that’s always struck me as funny is that the Buddha, as I understand it, was a rich guy who apparently chose to vanish himself out being, whereas Christ was a poor guy who graduated to king of the universe. Go figure.
Axé
The Mahayana Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna said that ‘nirvana is samsara.’ The suffering and misery that we experience in samsara is because of our obsession with escaping to somewhere else. When we learn acceptance, samsara disappears and we realize that we were in nirvana all along. There is nowhere that we need to escape to, we are already right where we need to be. I think that this is related to the path of compassion and affirmation.
This meme kind of gets the point across as well:
https://img.ifunny.co/images/91c1e3f589b5ad78a32591c74321f16d69ae8fd427331ab556b444d7a4c7100c_1.jpg
>William Jennings Bryan, the passionate liberal Democrat who set the agenda of the American left for most of the late nineteenth century, was also a devout fundamentalist Christian
He should’ve colored his hair blue. I wonder, did he like to scream as well?
—
Do you know for sure that Wagner was using Buddhism as his template? He does seem to wear these old symbols as skinsuits, putting them on when it seems convenient and then taking them off or stretching them to fit his agendas. I get a sense of cynicism from the guy when you outline Wagner’s stories.
Chesterton nailed it with that ditty. Well except for the pity. I don’t think Hilary was expressing pity when she called us all deplorable, speaking for her class. What emotion was she expressing?
Teresa, The Gospel According to Zen had nothing to do with the Christian gospel and even less to do with Zen. It really was pretty lame.
Clay, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Mary, what a fine theme for meditation!
Sirustalcelion, if I ever do that science-fantasy epic, it won’t use Wagner’s political and economic concerns as its central theme. I’ll use the mythos instead to talk about technology, power, and individual liberty, which the story’s also very well suited to explore. As for your fantasy story, well, if the suicidal failure is the right ending for the story, let it happen!
Fra’ Lupo, yes, Wagner was always interested in the macro level. He wanted to talk about the destiny of whole societies, not about individuals. As for the opposing destinies of the Buddha and the Christ, that’s another good example of the difference!
Enjoyer, it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that European thinkers had the least clue about the Mahayana, and let’s not even talk about the Vajrayana/Mantrayana paths! (Manly P. Hall played an important role in the belated recognition of these — he had contacts with the Japanese Shingon sect, and was apparently initiated into it.) In Wagner’s time, half-understood takes on the Dhammapada were about the best you could find.
Other Owen, the radical left still had some traces of dignity in Bryan’s time. They didn’t throw soup on artworks, either. As for Wagner’s Buddhism, as I noted, it was Schopenhauerian philosophy in a Buddhist skinsuit anyway.
Well, this was… at once fulfilling, interestingly revealing and disappointing. Fulfilling because I was hoping for an ending of this sort, but at the same time if the solution has already been implemented, has run its course and we can catalogue the results. It is over.
I was hoping for something to be used today. But yes we face different problems just now.
I hope I am not to intrusive in pointing to the fifth Wednesday this April. My intention was to remind of the topic of Islam envy.
Best regards,
Marko
Wow…
…the whole aspect of compassion woven into the opera and your analysis, is, uh, hard hitting (ironically).
I just wrote about the “Priesthood of Prestige and the Hatred of the Uneducated” here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-priesthood-of-prestige-and-the-hatred-of-the-uneducated
It seems to me compassion would be well worth cultivating by those who are afraid of a rising specter of anti-intellectualism (i.e. the intellectual class).
Ah, I wasn’t implying that Schopenhauer was aware of Nagarjuna or the deeper complexities of Buddhism in general. I was just saying that Schopenhauer and Buddhists dealt with similar problems and came upon similar conclusions.
Also here’s a relevant comic that I must drop here:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/269
“Conservatives in those days had a completely different set of agendas, which mostly focused on preserving what was left of the old aristocratic system and the agrarian society that supported it. ”
Did America even have that kind of Conservatism? It’s very familiar to me from Europe (and Russia, if not seen as part of Europe), but of course there it was connected to a formal hereditary aristocracy and monarchy (or its memory where it was overthrown). In America it must have been quite different, even if there was a de facto landowning aristocracy of sorts in the South.
And I remember that Chesterton poem well. Interesting to think of it as prescient. The new unhappy lords of his time did do some real good, as you point out. But with the change of generations, most of their initial merit ran out. I tend to think of it in terms of them abandoning the spirit of public service for increasingly unrestrained self-interest, but pity and self-pity as an agent of that change seems plausible. If you can’t help those wretches anyway and fixing the world is such a thankless task, you may as well start thinking more about your own golden treasure (which can take the form of a golden parachute, but there are others too).
“Each significant source of discharge to a water body must have a permit specifying exactly what can be discharged and must identify a ” jailable official”. ”
We called it the “designated felon.”
What a wonderful way to wrap up the discussion. I have to admit that while I enjoyed the Ring Cycle, it was Parsifal that’s had a profound effect on me. The way it reworks Arthurian legend captivates me, and seems like it’s hinting at a lot of potential that was missed by the tradition that switched to Galahad as the hero.
One thing that I wonder: is there a hint in your essay this week that maybe Wagner was right the first time, just overly dramatic? That while the introduction of compassion into political economy was overall a good thing, it is only delaying a reckoning that still remains to happen, albeit not in one apocalyptic moment as Wagner originally imagined?
To my mind, compassion is still not love, and the Parsifal at the end of the opera is still rejecting the latter almost as much as Klingsor and Amfortas, just less dysfunctionally. I’d have preferred to see him marry, as he does in the original tales, and have children where the impotent Amfortas could not.
Going back to political economy, compassion has not actually made the land whole or the fields fruitful/sustainable again. It has only given us a reprieve to the elite, and even then it depends on the continued self-sacrifice, at least in small part, of the elite, which they seem increasingly unwilling to continue doing.
JMG,
I was reading some of your comments last week about Trump and authoritarian leaders becoming more common in times of hardship, teetering on failure. It made me wonder if the same could be said of authoritarian religions, that they are formed of times when spiritually people/culture has become weak and are searching for leadership. This kind of made sense to me personally, since when I feel spiritually weak it feels comforting to think there is a Divine, Omnipotent being who is there to guide me, or discipline me as needed. It certainly helps with guilt tripping one into action as well! I’m not sure though if this idea of an authoritarian religion is accurate though…
Your explanation for how natural religions formed makes a lot of sense, and I could see those developing more in times of spiritual stability. It’s fascinating this divide between East and West, what has lingered on culturally, and how it has manifested today.
Archdruid,
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but i’ve noticed a stoking of the war between the sexes the past decade or so and it seems to be at a peak currently or peaked in early 2020. I wonder if you’ve noticed something similar yourself? Part of it seems like its being done on purpose. Perhaps a vector of population control? Would be interested in what you think, thanks!
Big changes ahead, with the Wagner series ending and the Levi series too. Following up on my postings at the tail-end of the open post, I suggest “Little, Big” as a topic for the 5th Wednesday. Perhaps it’s timely.
Marko, good heavens — you’re quite right about the fifth Wednesday, of course. I’ve added something on that to the post, and have tabulated your vote.
Justin, I’ve just added your essay to my to-read list. You’re quite correct, of course — if intellectuals don’t want to feed the risng flames of anti-intellectualism, cultivating a little more compassion and a little less snotnosed arrogance would be a very good idea.
Enjoyer, funny. I’m pretty sure that Schopenhauer was autistic — he had the hypersensitivity to noise that many of us have — and I know he didn’t practice meditation, which is the key to turning ideals like the ones he shared with the Buddha into practical action.
Daniil, you betcha. Our not-quite-titled aristocracy of planters once extended all the way up to New York State, where it took the form of the patroon class; George Washington and a great many other leading figures in the early Republic belonged to the shallow-south expression of it. By 1860, it had been overthrown everywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line, and as you may know, we had quite a robust little war between the planter aristocracy and the rising industrial entrepreneur class almost immediately thereafter. The aristocrats lost, and American conservatism thereafter had a long and difficult struggle to redefine itself.
Slithy, that’s certainly my take. Compassion certainly made the lives of a lot of Nibelungs easier, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of commodification, and the flame and the flood are still waiting.
Prizm, yes, very much so. Any period of hardship and uncertainty tends to send people fleeing to authority figures, whether those be sacred or secular.
Mr. House, I see the gaping chasm between the sexes as the natural working out of patterns set in motion by the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s; no, I don’t think it was done on purpose, though overcrowding caused by sky-high population levels certainly helped drive it. Just as first wave feminism was followed by a swing of the pendulum in the other direction, I expect the current wave to recede in the years ahead, and in the resulting period of reassessment some of its excesses will be trimmed off and some of the tension between sexes will resolve.
Phutatorius, so noted! Your vote is tabulated.
On the topic of Nietzsche, he had a pretty damning takedown of Schopenhauer’s view on art in Twilight of the Idols, namely that it is incoherent as a method of denying the Will, and in fact is born out of the opposite impulse:
“He values it especially as redeemer from the ‘focus of the will’, from sexuality—in beauty he sees the procreative impulse *denied*… Singular saint! Someone contradicts you, and I fear it is nature. To what end is there beauty at all in the sounds, colours, odours, rhythmic movements of nature? What *makes* beauty appear?—Fortunately a philosopher also contradicts him. No less an authority than the divine Plato (—so Schopenhauer himself calls him) maintains a different thesis: that all beauty incites to procreation—that precisely is the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual regions up to the most spiritual…”
I’d like to cast my vote for Wilhelm Reich for a 5th Wed… Though I did read three of John Crowleys novels last year. I liked Little Big quite a lot, but Engine Summer: the lyrical power of the novel, its language, its striking vision of the future. That was my favorite. The Lions in Beasts could use some compassion too… Id welcome a discussion.
“Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it.”–Wilhelm Reich
Hi JMG,
For this month’s fifth Wednesday, I’d like to learn about Neptune’s ingress into Aries and its repercussions.
I never thought of that before, but you’re right, he probably was autistic! It’s sad that Schopenhauer didn’t practice meditation, because I have high-functioning autism and meditating has been very helpful to deal with the difficulties that come with that. Been practicing meditation every day for almost 2 years now.
At this link is the full list of all of the 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. 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 and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May 1 Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties, and may she quickly be able to resume a normal life.
May Ron M’s friend Paul fully recover from the debilitating illness that has rendered him bedridden as well as recover from the spiritual malaise/attack that he believes is manifesting the illness.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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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.
“Classical Sanskrit, in which most Buddhist scriptures are written…”
The major canonical collections are in Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese. (The Newars do have one written in Sanskrit, but it took some time for Buddhologists to get ’round to them, and it is still under-studied..) Monk-scholars would sometimes learn Sanskrit, and texts in that language (often inherited from no-longer-extant Buddhist schools) did circulate, much as ancient Greek texts do in universities now. I’m not sure how the sheer size of these collections compare. These days, Buddhist Studies people have to learn a couple of European languages, Sanskrit as a kind of lingua franca, and then whatever language they plan to focus on (which could be a living language like Khmer).
Fra’ Lupo: “Christ was a poor guy who graduated to king of the universe.”
Christ was always the king of the universe. “Kenosis” is Greek for “slumming”!
@ Sirustalcelion #4
If that’s the way the story wants to go, write it that way!
Thanks to the miracle of indie publishing, you can publish it as it needs to be.
Finding an audience is a whole nother issue.
We don’t seem to understand tragedy anymore and so our stories don’t reflect the fact that life can be tragic and sometimes, every choice is poor. It’s how you bear up that matters.
I’d never heard of the Dragon Prince before.
Good Lord. Talk about the cruelty inherent in sentimentality.
As for a fifth Wednesday post suggestion, I would be absolutely delighted to read anything you had to say about Manly P Hall which you have still left unsaid, whether it about his relationship with Buddhism, the secret methods he occasionally hinted at in his materials, the relationship between occultism and conservatism, or anything else at all that strikes your fancy, really, which might start with Manly P Hall’s work, teachings, or life as its jumping off point.
JMG, I think I was one of the first to request an essay elaborating your remarks about the Protestant Reformers being greatly influenced by Islam. I still do hope for such an essay for you, so that is my vote.
I believe I can see a goodly amount of Islam envy among the Christian (so-called) nationalist movement today. If the Taliban can get away with keeping women secluded and uneducated, our homegrown incels appear to think they should be able to do the same. Why any sane adult would want to share life, home and bed with a person who does not like them, never mind love, I still cannot understand.
Oh, fifth Wednesday? You’ve done posts on several modern occult figures, such as Steiner and Jung,. I would love to see others like that. As a vote-maximization strategy, I propose the following:
I nominate, and vote for, a post on Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” as the next fifth-Wednesday post, since he’s one of my favorites. For everyone thinking of some other such figure (Gurdjeff, for example), I implore you to rally behind Cayce this time. Then, for the *next* fifth-Wednesday post, let us agree to rally again behind the next such figure. (Who hasn’t JMG discussed yet?)
Is this wicked of me? This is kind of like the strategy used by that guy who won season one of Survivor…
A couple of additions to the prayer list that I missed earlier, from private messages:
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
Thank you for this series. I was hoping Wagner had a better solution than compassion (since there really isn’t a long term safeguard against Amfortas figures gaining power).
My Fifth Wednesday vote is for Islam envy.
JMG, I have a feeling that if Wagner couldn’t see a resolution and saviour from Valhalla, it’s because there isn’t one. Not for the Faustian superstructure. Seems like the Divine would have to hurry up timetable to overlap a renewal just in order to save the chestnuts. But by all appearances renewals come precisely when the old house catches fire and burns, after that has cleared stuff away for new growth. I suppose it’s possible to pull off, just not very likely and would truly be a gratuitous event. The eucatastophe is more likely, maybe by essential nature, to involve the fall of sun, moon and stars, the ruling powers, which it would provoke anyway no matter the timing. (Trying to read Tolkien compatibly here)
My vote for Fifth Wednesday is for Gnosticism.
Hi John Michael,
It’s an intriguing question the one you posed in the conclusion of the essay.
Hard to say really where things will go in relation to that, however, I fully expect to find out.
I’m very much enjoying your political astrology. Have you ever considered going back to producing the annual prediction essay?
Cheers
Chris
Oddly enough, I only knew about Bryant because of the Scopes trial – for some odd reason it was part of the history teaching in my last year at high school here in New Zealand (for some reason one of the topics was US politics during the 1920s – the only other names I can remember from it were Coolidge and Harding).
My fifth Wednesday vote: the extent to which Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam
Okay, everyone’s votes have been tabulated.
Ben, as usual with Nietzsche’s arguments, that works only if you accept Nietzsche’s presuppositions and ignore those of the person he’s attacking. From Schopenhauer’s point of view, the origin of beauty is irrelevant; the question is the use to which the individual puts it. Is it just one more way to stir desires? Then it’s yet another expression of the Will. But it’s possible to contemplate beauty for itself, irrespective of what the Will intends for it, and then the Will turns on the Will and negates itself.
Enjoyer, you’ll get no argument from me. I’ve been practicing daily meditation for almost forty years now and it’s been the single most beneficial practice I’ve ever done.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Ambrose, so noted. My exposure to the literature is mostly via Japanese sources, and that may well have given me a false impression.
Patrick, I’m not sure there is a solution; Wagner may have settled for compassion because that’s the best of a bad lot.
Celadon, I’ve come to disbelieve in eucatastrophes. They occur tolerably often in fairy tales, political theories (but I repeat myself), and the theologies of prophetic religions, but they don’t generally happen in real life; instead, you get ordinary cyclical change punctuated by the stray plain old ordinary catastrophe. But most people don’t want to hear that!
Chris, nah, my political astrology now goes to my SubscribeStar and Patreon platforms. A guy’s gotta pay the rent somehow!
As a side mote, there’s an interesting resonance between the swan-killing on Parsifal and an early episode in George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie, in which Curdie shoots at, and wounds, a dove (which turns out to belong to a very strange old woman). In both cases, the killing of injuring of the bird is a trigger for the development of the story, and the central character.
MacDonald’s story was published in 1883. Parsifal debuted in 1882. Although MacDonald was well-read in German (especially Romantic) literature (and German), it seems unlikely that he would have been able to be influenced by it, though at the time he was living in, I think, Italy. The end of MacDonald’s story also resonates with your reading of Parsifal, and Wagner.
For the fifth Wednesday, my vote is for him to talk about the antichrist, and the time period in which we find ourselves today(see the link>
https://simonsheridan.me/covid-19/the-coronapocalypse-part-37-finale/
As for the question of whether art can serve as a way to ameliorate the blind strivings of Will, it’s useful to remember the very old idea that the aim of art is to lead to “contemplation” — not the enactment of desire, but its recognition and resolution in awareness.
James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus remark that the difference between propaganda and pornography, on the one had, and art on the other, is that the aim of the first two is to provoke action, while the aim of the third is to give rise to contemplation., a suspension of the impulse to action. In another terminology, in the first two the beholder “enjoys” the energies evoked, identifying with them, and in the third the beholder “contemplates” them, stepping back from them.
Yes, M.P. Hall! I had forgotten him.
Since Quin got in with that suggestion before mine–and to give my vote-maximization strategy a better chance of succeeding–I now switch my vote to M.P. Hall, and urge potantial co-conspirators interested in Cayce, Gurdjieff, etc. to vote for Hall as well.
Again, the idea is to avoid dividing support for various modern esoteric figures JMG hasn’t discussed yet. (If this works, we can make him write about Cat Kerr!)
PS. This is nit-picking, but you may need to know this in case you publish the Wagner stuff as a book:
There is something called “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit” which is different from classical Sanskrit, although there are Buddhist texts in both languages. Some wits now speak of a Buddhist Hybrid English (e.g. talk of “dependent arising” or “the Perfection of Wisdom” or other things no normal English speaker would say or even understand),
I’ll vote for Reich for the fifth Wednesday post. I enjoyed this post but nothing is jumping out at me to comment at the moment., so thank you, and that’s all now for now.
Another side-note. As for canonical Buddhist languages, one can’t forget Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.
(I once heard an Indologist remark, with some exasperation, that there was no such thing as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit — only bad Sanskrit. One does not want to get between an Indologist and a Buddhologist when terminology is on the line!)
It’s also useful to remember the Korean Buddhist Canon (Tripitaka Koreana), which is still regarded as one of the most complete & accurate collections of Buddhist scriptures, treatises, etc. (I remember going to the library to scan items from one volume or another for a friend who lived hours away, and whose vision made scanned texts the only workable way to read the material.) The Korean Canon has been used to supplement defects in the Chinese canon, and as a basis for the later Japanese canon.
This is a beautiful essay, Reminds me of Edmund Wilson at his best. Thank you.
Once again, all votes have been tabulated.
LeGrand, hmm! Fascinating. Thanks for all these.
Ambrose, Hybrid Sanskrit sounds entertaining. Having seen and heard the mess that Japanese speakers make of Sanskrit mantras, very little would surprise me.
George, you’re welcome and thank yo
JMG, oh granted. You probably know I read Tolkiens word as I think he intended it, which is not literally or allegorically, although it’s a fair discussion whether he falls a foul if his own semantics and gets into the usual weeds. Even taking as spiritual and spiritually discerned, that’s plenty of room for cycles and surprise and none of the usual rationalizations. I’m still wrestling w his ideas but the charitable take is that that term should be regarded as placing its valuation outside human ken, discerned if at all by a few who work, as a gift, and leading to the end of an age and the loss of much. You’ve definitely set limits to how I view and interpret Tolkien, or helped set them. Cheers
I vote for an analysis of Trump’s trade policies and how they might unwind the American empire and still save the American heartland.
I find Mary Bennett’s angle towards the Islam envy conversation entertaining and relevant, we can see a case of Islam envy happening before our eyes, even if most intellectuals will scrupulously deny any direct connections. If my topic doesn’t get enough votes then I might switch.
One idea I can’t get out of my head is what if Parsifal, after redeeming Kundry, had married her? Then perhaps he would truly have succeeded where Siegfried failed.
I vote for Islam envy please.
A suitably sobering conclusion to a great series!
For 5th Wednesday, I vote for your take on Little, Big.
The Gospel According to Zen? 1500 years too late!
https://earlychurchhistory.org/beliefs-2/the-ancient-chinese-jesus-sutras/
For fifth Wednesday I’d like to vote for a Gnostic related topic as well. Those first two centuries of Christianity were much more diverse than I suspected. Irenaeus of Lyon vs Valentinus and all. But as unorganized as the Gnostics were even if they had won in the short term would the religion have survived in the longer term?
For recruiting purposes splash some water on them, then feed them wine and crackers followed by Amen is lot faster than telling someone that salvation is out there and a few years of study should suffice to find it.
OK I’m exaggerating a bit, but we still have assembly line conversions vs individual apprenticeships.
@JMG and @Teresa Thanks for the advice. In this case, oddly enough, everything within the story is screaming at me to go some other way – not that I’m afraid of tragedy or sacrifice, but there’s some more satisfying answer I just haven’t thought of. At the same time, easy positive solutions have all proven just as inauthentic. Into the drawer it goes until I can figure it out, I suppose, like the first three Ring Cycle operas.
As for the Dragon Prince, yeah, that’s just the tip of the iceberg in the moral incomprehensibility of that preachy series. The creators are very liberal, in the colloquial sense.
So what are we to make of this no new books policy for the New Testament? The last one was written a really long time ago in human terms and a whole lot transpired since then. You’d think that at least some of what happened would have inspired someone to write something momentous enough for at least a footnote.
No more prophecy? No more prophets? Why? Did God stop talking to us or did we stop listening? Did we lose the perceptual faculties required to tune in on Heaven’s wavelengths? Was such an ability on balance a maladaptive trait culled by natural selection? Or were prophets squelched – cancelled – by temporal hierarchies jealous of their power?
Didn’t it say in the Bible that Jesus would come back like a thief in the night? Did we miss it? Were we too distracted by our cell phones? His return would surely necessitate the addition of some new writings.
I would love to see you write that article about how Protestant theology was influenced by the Islamic world. It came in second last time.
Yes, Buddhism and Christianity are not saying the same thing in the different ways and they do not offer the same results. Usually the argument is saying that whatever the differences they have the same mystical experience in the end as do all religions and spiritual practices. I beg to differ.
Years ago I was reading about the states of consciousness that can be attained or constructed through diligent Buddhist practices. And by the way I don’t doubt they can be attained. I paused and said to myself I wonder what the Christian equivalent to this is. Suddenly a personal awareness of the love of a personal God for me as an individual flooded me. As it says in The NewTestament “we love because He first loved us” “ and “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit He has given us” To put it in a simple way I get to hitch a ride with Jesus into the loving presence of God in the here and now and more deeply when I die. There is no way you can squeeze this into a Buddhist understanding of reality. I am open to your metaphor of the world as valley surrounded by different mountain peaks, the peaks being different paths you can follow with different results, instead of the more common metaphor of all the paths going up the same mountain peak.
So noted about old American conservatism. It seems like an example of convergent evolution, arising more or less independently in somewhat different conditions from Europe and dying out sooner, but still substantially similar due to representing a similar set of interests and preferences.
I find it interesting to note that the turn towards compassion in Europe was driven in no small part by conservatives of this sort. Disraeli in Britain with his One Nation Conservatism, aiming to unify working-class radicalism and aristocratic traditionalism against the new rich and doctrinaire liberalism, may have expressed it especially clearly, but Bismarck in Germany was of similar mind and more influential in practice. After all, he created the German social state that others, including the British with their welfare state, would later copy. This was driven… maybe not by compassion per se, but by a combination of political calculation (this was the best way to undermine revolutionary socialism in Germany) and a set of conservative notions including scorn towards liberal economic dogma and old-school feudal paternalism towards the population that simply needed to be adapted to new realities.
Likewise, our Alexander III is usually remembered as a hidebound archreactionary, an image he himself gladly embraced, but he also introduced what may have been his time’s most generous labour legislation. In his view peasants must know their place, yes, but they also mustn’t be abused by some upstart dwarves. Unfortunately for all, his son would let most of those policies lapse, but they were supported by many Russian conservatives on similar grounds (though others were already starting to move towards pro-business and social darwinist stances). Liberals and socialists (who, for the most part, very much did not want to make capitalism more tolerable at first) often found themselves playing catch-up with the conservatives and reactionaries in this regard.
I’ll vote for Gnosticism.
So… No miracles, then ? *wailing sounds*
The apparent anticlimaticness keeps it real (as rappers used to say) and mature, I reckon.
Remains commodification. Some would say it began with agriculture but is it really a practical idea ? When reading the previous installments, I don’t recall if you explicitly made the link yourself, but I couldn’t help seeing the ring leaving the rhine as part of the transition between what Spengler would later call the Age of Faith and that of Reason. So we’ve got an Age of Memory to look forward to ! That’ll do the trick.
Of course, back to square one : the transition betwixt Reason and Memory, without burning down the whole casa.