Traditional Measures and Rationalism Wednesday, Apr 9 2008

Miss Violet Viola considers numbers:
Measurements as “cold numbers with an abstract unit” are indeed a Rationalistic behaviour. Measurements before this period were less “numerical” and had a lot to do with the essence of things. Length measurements for the Romans and ancient populations were “arms” and “steps”. Liquid measurements were “amphors”. These measurement units were somehow “tangible”, not “abstract”. The metre was established in 1791, in the period of the Rationalistic revolution, and its meaning or reason is something abstract, while the yard is more linked to the tangible physical reality.

Aristasia is a world where things have a deeper link between themselves. The so-called (for and by Tellurians) “invisible world” is not so invisible in Aristasia. There is a relationship between things, between everything.

Lady Aquila expands on these ideas:

The French Revolution, with its aggressive and regicidal this-worldly rationalism, forced the metric system first on France and then on most of Europe. It was a system deliberately conceived to eradicate the “superstitious” (read spiritual and traditional) nature of real measurements.

Traditional Geometry was passed to patriarchal Europe, from much more ancient sources, by Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom were fully aware of its higher significance: a significance still expounded (though rarely understood) by the teachers of the surviving symbolic system of Freemasonry - one of the last West-Tellurian examples of a true traditional generation-to-generation transmission of doctrine.

Your picture of Geometria is very significant. Geo-metria means earth-measurement. And while the earth is strongly represented with its mountains, trees and rivers, Geometria does not touch it. Indeed her lower parts - the legs and feet which would connect her to the physical earth - are missing. She floats in a cloud, signifying spiritual or angelic quality, and yet she inscribes the fundamental shapes on which all earthly things are based.

Contemplating her image, we learn something of the apparent contradiction between true and false measurement.

True, traditional measurement seems on the surface much more concrete. Its terms relate to feet, paces and thumbs - and yet it is based in the higher principles of being.

False, rationalistic, measurement seems purely abstract. Its names mean nothing but “measure” plus fractional numbers. And yet is is bound wholly to the visible world and is entirely ignorant of every trace of higher significance.

Also see The Image of the Cosmos and Aristasian Standards

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The Year of Sai Sushuri Saturday, Mar 22 2008

As this year started on a Friday, it is ruled by Sai Sushuri. This is an edited version of the article on the janya from The Seven Great Janyati.

Sai Sushuri rules every kind of love, as well as beauty. At its root, all love is Divine Love, just as all beauty is Divine Beauty. It is the love of Dea for Her creation, the love of the soul for Dea and of Her creatures for one another. Just as beauty is the beauty of Dea, so love is the love of Dea. When we love Her, we do so with Her own love; hence the prayer to Dea to “Come into us as a perfect love for Thee”.

The Sushuric principle is often taken as the opposite of the Vikhelic. From another perspective, however, the true opposite of the Vikhelic principle is the Sushuri-Thamic. Love, beauty, order and harmony are closely woven together. Under normal circumstances, vikhë too is part of this harmony. Only in the Age of Iron, when the Vikhelic influence becomes disproportionate, is opposition between the principles noticeable (this is natural, since opposition itself is Vikhelic).

In Telluria, the polarity of femininity and masculinity is a polarity between the Sushuric and Vikhelic principles. In Aristasia the polarity between blonde and brunette is between the Sushuric and Thamic principles, which may be seen as a polarity between love and duty or between mercy and severity. However, the true principle of severity is that of Sai Rhavë, and we may see (to borrow a Quabbalistic expression) Sai Sushuri as the Pillar of Mercy and Sai Rhavë as the Pillar of Severity, with Sai Thamë as the central pillar, holding the two in balance.

In terms of spiritual paths, Sai Sushuri rules the Path of Love (or bhakti marga), and thus has a special significance for the Age of Iron. It is not a coincidence that bhakti is recommended as the most natural path for the Age of Iron and that the Sushuric principle is the opposite of the Vikhelic.

Sai Sushuri governs love at every level, from individual love and the love of family to a society bound together by concord and goodwill rather than by competition and the clash of parties and interests. Ultimately all these loves flow from and depend upon the love of the Mother. That love is the spiritual foundation of Aristasia.

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Beauty and Civilization Monday, Mar 10 2008

Modern scholarship, often to its own surprise and consternation, finds itself continually making discoveries that undermine the evolutionist prejudices with which it approaches its task, and confirm again and again the wisdom handed down from the earliest times: that Primordial Maid represented not a lower, but an immeasurably higher state of humanity and that her increasing involvement with the world of matter, the progressive ‘consolidation’ of herself and her environment, while leading to ever greater developments on the horizontal plane — from language to art, from art to cities — was bought at the cost of a steady decline on the highest plane of all: that of pure Intellect and spiritual vision.

But let us recall that in these relatively early times — let us say, the period of maid fully acclimatised on earth in the first Silver-Age cities — we are still speaking of a state of spiritual refinement, of subtlety and beauty almost inconceivable from our position toward the dark end of the historical cycle. The life of maid, as all traditions agree, was much longer than the hundred years or less enjoyed by the people of the Iron Age, and her wisdom, though descended from its primordial pinnacle was yet majestic. Her vision, while now fixed upon ‘things’ rather than the Principle, was far subtler than ours, seeing always, though at an ever lower level, the immaterial essences behind material manifestation. Much of what later ages achieved by material force, she accomplished by subtle means which a later age might call ‘magic’; and the essential harmony of her being with nature as a whole (being at one with the essence behind it) allowed her to live with but minimal “struggle for existence” and great concentration upon the higher things.

What might strike a modern visitor most about life in these early times would be its beauty — especially if she were enabled, as the people of those times were, to see the subtle forms as well as the outward physical shell of such a civilization. Beauty has always been considered primarily a feminine quality, and as the patriarchal age progressed has been more and more relegated to the position of an inessential and trivial part of life: increasingly the first thing to be sacrificed when ’serious’ practical or economic considerations conflicted with it, yet, until very recently, preserved carefully and at times fiercely by the female sex, in her surroundings, her home and her personal appearance.

Plato, so often the spokesman for the traditional consciousness to the early patriarchal West, by no means thought beauty trivial or unimportant. He used to kalon — the Beautiful — as a term for the Absolute, expounding the primordial knowledge that all earthly beauty is such only because it participates in the absolute Beauty of the Divine. Beauty is not, as the modern dogma would have it, a mere subjective product of the human brain, but a universal quality that predates the very existence of earthly humanity.

From Primordial Maid

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The Question of Evil Sunday, Mar 9 2008

Miss Annya Miralene wrote:

The Question of Evil is a decidedly Western question. Not because it does not exist elsewhere, but because it tends elsewhere to be formulated in other terms. The post-classical Western mind has had an increasingly “moral” orientation, tending to formulate questions in moral terms.

Where Christianity speaks of the Problem of Sin, both the Hindu and the Platonist would tend to talk of the Problem of Ignorance. A bad person, essentially, for both traditions, is one who is ill-instructed.

The Filianic strand in Aristasian thealogy identifies Khalha as the personification of evil. Others would identify the separation of beings from Dea, which is manifestation, as the source of what is termed “evil”, while again others would point out that evil things that happen are the results of werde (karma). None of these explanations contradicts the others - they are all complementary perspectives. All would also agree with St. Augustine that evil is privatio boni - that is a void or negative: the absence of the Good.

That the principle of evil lies in matter might seem to be an extension of the idea that “evil” is inherent in manifestation itself, but it is a rather unsubtle one, and can lead to dualism of the Manichaean sort. Actually there is an ambiguity in manifestation that can be seen in much orthodox thought (cf. the commentaries on the Angelic Hymn). Manifestation is both delusion and mercy - a conundrum that cannot be resolved wholly in discursive terms (which themselves belong to manifestation) but only from the point of Enlightenment beyond manifestation.

This is only a very brief canter over a highly complex subject, but I hope it gives food for thought.

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What is Myth? Monday, Mar 3 2008

Sushuri Novaryana wrote:

Some members of a Western Hindu group recently raised objections to the teaching of Hindu sacred stories as “myths”. This was presumably because the word “myth” in modern Tellurian terminology is often used as a synonym for “something untrue” - truth being here defined as correspondence to material or factual realities.

Sri Ananda Coomaraswamy, on the other hand, begins his essay “The Vedanta and Western Tradition” with the words: “There have been teachers such as Orpheus, Hermes, Buddha, Lao-tzu and Christ, the historicity of whose human existence is doubtful and to whom may be accorded the higher dignity of mythical reality.”

No doubt this was intentionally provocative to his Western readers. Its aim is to challenge them to consider an important truth. Myths are not mere factual inveracities. To quote from The Feminine Universe:

“We may say that history tells of events that might or might not have happened, while myth tells of ‘events’ (or rather transcendent Realities couched in the form of events) that cannot not be.”

A pupil recently asked me “But why do we need to be told things in the form of myths? Why don’t traditions come right out and say what they mean?”

Now this question really brings us to the crux of the whole question, and to the problem of modern (i.e. Rajasic) rationalism. The question firstly confuses myth with allegory, or parable. An allegory is a story which tells us - in narrative and parabolic form - things that could just as easily have been stated by discursive explication. It has its uses and has been used by great teachers, including those mentioned by Sri Coomaraswamy, but it is something quite different from myth.

Allegories and parables are of human creation. Myths are not. Allegories and parables put into story form things that can be paraphrased in “plainer” words. Myths tell of things that cannot be paraphrased. Things that are not prehensible to discursive reason.

The reason that the modern world finds this so difficult to understand is because of its underlying doctrine of rationalism. When one criticises rationalism, people sometimes suppose that one is speaking against reason. Quite the contrary. Reason is of the utmost importance, and we can do little without it. But the doctrine of rationalism goes much further than this. It states - or assumes that only those things that can be grasped by the reason exist. That anything we can know must be possible to be stated in discursive words. Hence the assumption that if myths tell us something, we should be able to “come right out and say” that something.

Myths and Archetypes are, as Plato taught, and as every tradition teaches, pointers toward the Truth that lies beyond the sensible world: and even such a statement as that risks being undervalued by the modern mind. Until we are realised beings, until we reach final Enlightenment, Myths and Archetypes are the closest approach we have to Truth. And even when we are Enlightened we shall not cast aside those Myths: we shall see them in their true Reality.

Thus, when patriarchal religions return to the Vision of the Mother in the precise forms in which She has always manifested Herself (for example, when Mary is hailed by the title Queen of Heaven - the very name against which Jeremiah inveighed against the Hebrew women for honouring with prayer and ritual), we are seeing the inexorable return of names and forms that are in the very fabric not only of our consciousness, but of the cosmos itself: and ultimately are the name and form of She from Whom the cosmos proceeds and to Whom it will return in the fullness of time.

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The Feminine Universe Monday, Sep 17 2007

The Feminine Universe by Alice Mary Trent is the first systematic exposition of the Perennial Wisdom. It is an attempt to express in the clearest possible terms and in the smallest possible space the Primordial Philosophy accepted and understood in all times and in all places before the aberrations of the modern world. It gives this philosophy in its feminine form - that being the earliest known on this earth.

Ananda Coomaraswamy described traditional societies as “unanimous societies”: that is societies not fragmented by conflicting factions and opinions, but united by a single, essential Truth. And this unanimity exists - though often unrecognised—not only within all traditional societies, from the red Indian medicine lodge to the Chinese temple, from the Siberian shaman to the Indian guru, from the Platonic West to the Confucian East, but between all traditional societies. Each one is founded upon the same essential, unchanging truths, even though they may express these truths in superficially different ways. Each one is a unique expresion of the Sophia Perennis, the primordial, changeless and eternal wisdom that is the common heritage of all humanity.

While many books have been written about this Primordial Tradition, this is the first one to expound it systematically in its salient features. That alone would make it a book of the greatest significance, but, within an extraordinarily short space, this book does much more than that. It also discusses the essentially feminine nature of the earliest traditions and shows the importance of this in the development of the historical cycle and its special relevance to the developments of the last few decades.

Writers such as René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy have expounded the Sophia Perennis in many volumes. They have done so from a purely metaphysical and Traditional perspective (which is necessarily the highest and truest). While this book certainly expounds metaphysical Truth. which is indeed its very core, it also examines the consequences and ramifications of traditional thought from a lower, more ‘human’ perspective. It takes a fresh look at post-Enlightenment culture, analysing both its faults and its virtues, and shows how, even up to the earlier 20th century, the Traditional spirit remained vital in the aesthetic and cultural life of the Western world. What is necessary is to distinguish between those ‘modern’ developments that are legitimate Final Fruits and those which are truly malignant aberrations.

In the light of this, the book examines phenomena which Guénon and Coomaraswamy did not live to see and comment on: the cultural collapse of the 1960s with its complete inversion of normal values, and most terrible of all, the destruction of femininity and the creation of an unbalanced world in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman herself. This book explains the traditional value of femininity and its essential superiority. It exposes the modern attack on femininity and the absurd doctrine that this cosmic Reality is the result of ’social conditioning’. It shows how what is being lost by the totalitarian imposition of an all-masculine culture is something of immeasurable importance to our spiritual health and our very survival.

The Feminine Universe, a 128-page paperback, can now be bought via PayPal for $19.99 (approximately £10) including postage. See The Ancient Wisdom

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Sai Raya and the Sun Wednesday, Jun 13 2007

Sai Raya is the Sun: the Great Luminary. As such, she is the Janya most immediately assimilable to Dea Herself (though all the Janyati may be seen as Her Aspects). Her Aristasian name means simply The Lady, as well as The Radiant. Raya is the Aristasian word for Lady (in the Lord sense —
there is no such specific word in English). Dea is sometimes addressed as Raya (Lady) even when
the specific Aspect of Sai Raya, the Sun, is not intended. Her ancient Greek name is Theia, which is simply the feminine form of God, equivalent to Dea.

Very much might be said about the Sun. She is the Primordial Light, and it goes without saying that the physical luminary that represents Her in the material solar system is but an outward body or symbol of Her, just as the Sacred Mountain may be incarnated in some particular mountain on earth. The modern mind, with its shallow rationalism, finds it hard to grasp how very real is the incarnation of the Sacred Mountain in, say Mount Sinai, Mount Meru or Mount Olympus, how for their respective Traditions they are the one Sacred Mountain. But the Sun is a little simpler to understand, for there is only and can only be one Sun for the whole of terrestrial humanity.

And so materialism can fall into the opposite error — that of confusing the Supernal Sun with Her outward body (and so ludicrously imagining that traditional peoples worship “what we now know to be a ball of gas”). Sai Raya was before there was an earth to light or a Sun to light her. The same may be said of the Moon, and of each of the planets. They are Eternal Principles: principles that existed before our cosmos came into being and that will exist when all the worlds are dust.

As a principle governing terrestrial life, Sai Raya’s influence (the word “influence” means, originally and literally, a “flowing-in” from the “stars”, or celestial beings) is the most expansive and positive of all. Among the attributes of this influence are generosity, wealth, health, radiance and pride (pride in the negative sense is also the earthly perversion of the Stream of Sai Raya).

The Sun, as symbolic centre of the macrocosm, is equivalent to the heart in the microcosm of the human body and the hearth-fire in the microcosm of the house. Thus it is that Intelligence is situated in the heart (governed by Sai Raya) and reason in the head (governed by Sai Candre). Needless to say, we are speaking of subtle centres, not of the mere bodily heart and head.

See also
The Seven Great Janyati
Sai Candre and the Moon

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Aristasians vs. “Science” Tuesday, Jun 12 2007

A lot of Aristasians object to the use of the word “science” pure and simple (which means simply “knowledge”) to describe a purely material discipline which was formerly known more accurately by such names as physical science” or “natural philosophy”.

Aristasians oppose the rationalistic doctrine which states that our only sources of knowledge are the five senses and the action of the brain on the data provided by them. Some ill-educated people believe that this doctrine is “scientific” or even that it is the basis of “science”. It is not. It is a creed or dogma professed by people known as rationalists or positivists. The only thing it as in common with material science is that that discipline (or group of disciplines) restricts itself to the sense-data and the workings of the reason upon them. No serious philosopher of science would claim that this in any way proves that the sense-data tell us all that exists, any more than an anatomist would claim that there is nothing outside the human body.

Unfortunately, a large number of semi-educated people - including some unphilosophical scientists - believe that “science” proves that there is nothing beyond the material: which is rather like believing that plane geometry proves that there is no third dimension.

Aristasia has no quarrel whatever with the claims of “science” within its own domain (always remembering that, according to the empirical philosophy on which this “science” is founded such claims can only ever be provisional and based on varying degrees of probability). We do deny all claims of “science” to pronounce on matters beyond its domain - as would any serious philosopher of “science”.

We may also analyse “scientific” questions from the standpoint of traditional philosophy and metaphysics, asking how they fit into the larger picture of the universe, physical and non-physical. And we do ultimately assert the primacy of metaphysics over science - the former being based on First Principles and the latter being only a series of provisional hypotheses based on our very limited human senses.

In the last analysis, if “science” contradicts metaphysics, then “science” must clearly be wrong. But in fact much of the time it is right, as one would expect from a precise observation of the workings of the material world. When it is wrong, the errors often spring from confusing genuine perception and analysis with the doctrinal statements of rationalism and the emotional and mythologising needs of a rationalistic society. The theory of evolution is a case in point here. The story-picture provided by “evolution” is crucial to the modern world-myth, which is why the theory has resisted the radical overhauls that took place in other scientific spheres during the 20th century, adhering rigidly to a 19th-century model despite the overwhelming evidence against it. But here we are in the realm of pseudo-theology rather than “science”.

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Werde and the Power of Maid Saturday, May 26 2007

Aside from the major distinction between being born into an Axial or a non-Axial state, are there differing degrees of opportunity for spiritual progression according to the precise nature of the Axial state one is born into?

Hindu texts speak of the rarity of the opportunity for liberation - not only the rarity of the human state itself, but then the rarity of being born into a brahmin family and of having other opportunities for liberation.

Applying this to our current situation, one may say that not only the Axial state itself, but the type of society we are born into, the level of intelligence we are born with, our natural propensity for spiritual endeavour; all these are factors determining the level of opportunity we actually possess.

And each of these factors is determined by our werde (to use the Aristasian term) or karma. In other words, our level of opportunity is not simply a matter of luck, but is the result of our actions and choices in previous existences.

Maid is defined as “she who has the power of choice”. The term “maid” is connected to the words “may” and “might” — “might” in particular being a word that emphasises the close relationship between choice and power — a thing might or might not happen, and one has the might to choose. Among Latin-based words the close relation between potency and potentiality expresses the same thing. So, by definition, even the maid with the least opportunity still possesses some power of spiritual choice, which the animals and other non-Axial beings do not.

So take the maid who is born in the Pit — perhaps in a very unpropitious part of the Pit (for example, one with little recognition of God) — and with very little intelligence, so that her ability to criticise the Pit is virtually nil. Even so, she may choose to lead a good life, to do good deeds rather than bad ones; she may turn toward whatever form of God she encounters.

All these actions may ensure her not only an Axial birth, but a more propitious one in her next existence.

And let us also realise that actions which for another might be downward steps might for her be upward steps.

We can never judge the actions of another, nor can we make judgements based on her circumstances. Werde is a subtle and intricate matter, a weaving of many threads, of which we can see only the tips that touch our world.

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Aristasia and the World Axis Monday, May 21 2007

Miss Alice Trent wrote:

At the heart of the question of what Aristasia actually is lies the concept of the World Axis, common to all traditions and integral to the most fundamental traditional symbols, such as the wheel, the pyramid, the fireplace and chimney, the bridge and so forth.

The World Axis passes through all levels of being, linking the lower levels to the higher and eventually all to the Divine. In Telluria human beings are the central or Axial beings. Because they are on the Axis, they are capable of rising above their human state or of falling below it. Animals, fairies and other non-axial beings - including “titans” - the inhabitants of temporal paradises - cannot rise or fall; they can only conform to the laws of their particular being.

My argument has essentially been that Aristasians, like humans, are Axial beings. Therefore their world is a higher plane of being than ours, situated upwards on the World-Axis. Its superiority is evidenced in the various points brought forward by Miss Lovatt.

Telluria, since the patriarchal revolutions of the Iron Age (I use this term as meaning the fourth and lowest point of an Historical Cycle, not in the modern archaeological sense), has been increasingly governed by the masculine principle, traditionally symbolised by the planet Mars. In other words, conflict and discord, as opposed to concord and harmony. Aristasia continues to be governed by the feminine principle, symbolised by Venus - love and concord.

Of course, all seven “planetary” principles exist in all worlds and all are necessary - though obviously in Aristasia the Martial or Vikhelic principle is not associated with masculinity, since masculinity does not exist there.

This in our view is a greater perfection than that of Telluria. While war and violence have been at the centre of most Tellurian history in its Iron Age, this has not been the case in Aristasia.

Aristasia is nonetheless in its own Iron Age, and is less perfect than it was in earlier times, though still much more perfect than Telluria.

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