Enneads V 6: What Being has Intellection Primarily and What Being has It Secondarily

[sdi]

Several eternities ago, when I was in Sunday School—I must have been nine or ten—the church elder instructing us mentioned that the doctrine of the Trinity was not to be found in the Bible. I raised my hand and, when called upon, asked him, "By what authority do you teach something that doesn't come from the Bible? Also, if the Trinity doesn't come from the Bible, where does it come from?"

Of course, he told me to shut up.

Since then, I've always wondered where the doctrine came from, since it always seemed bizarre to me. I still don't have the "where," but at least Plotinus is good enough to tell us "why" with his usual logical rigor.

V 6: That the Principle Transcending Being has no Intellectual Act. What Being has Intellection Primarily and What Being has It Secondarily.

1. There is an Intellect.

2. Intellection implies duality (of subject and object).

3. Unity precedes multiplicity.

4. Therefore, there is something unitary prior to Intellect, something primarily Intellective (e.g. the subjective Intellect), and something secondarily Intellective (e.g. the objective Intellect; e.g. the Soul).

5. Being prior to Intellect, the First is not intellective.

6. If we consider the First to be Good, the Second is only Good to the degree it is intellective of the First, and the Third is only Good to the degree it is intellective of the Second, and so on.

Point 6, above, is of course why Plotinus considers matter to be evil: something can only be good in participating with that which is above it. Don't look down!

Plotinus gives us a very elegant analogy in §4: the One is light, the Intellect is the sun (something giving off light), and Soul is the moon (something reflecting light).

Incidentally, most modern commentators describe Plotinus as advocating a trinitarian view; I don't believe this is so! While he only proves the top three here, both he and Porphyry frequently refer to the four highest beings: the One, the Intellect, Soul, and Nature. (Unless I am much mistaken, Plotinus likens these to the Hesiodic Ouranos, Kronos, Aphrodite Ourania, and Eros, respectively.) What's more, it's hard not to see the Pythagorean one-two-three-four and the Empedoclean fire-air-water-earth in these. (One might think this sequence can continue indefinitely, but Plotinus explicitly says it does not: beyond this, the creative power is spent and too weak to continue further; all that remains is to play with every possible combination of principles within these.)

While playing around with these notions, I found a neat geometric correspondence. If one wishes to produce a tetractys with circles alone, it takes six circles, to wit:

Note how we are given two points to begin the construction with. We might as well assign these to the dyadic Intellect, right?—since where else would we assign them? But this is kinda like how Plotinus proves the whole structure also beginning with the Intellect.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

The Trinity is indeed a curious concept, but that's how it goes, I guess. Not familiar enough with Plotinus to say one way or another whether you're right on your hunch.

Great geometric association!!

[tunesmyth]

Did you ever notice that if you add the points in each line of a tetractys, it reduces to Amissio?

Stop me if I've told you this one before. I was planning to do a Conjunctio post on the following flight of fancy a long time ago, but I shared the idea in Magic Monday first and JMG was, shall we say, rather less than encouraging about it. So if I recall correctly I never did post anywhere else about it. Still, I still feel there might be something real in there.

So it goes like this. Let's do a little thought experiment.

Let's say it's a few centuries BC, and you're Pythagoras, fresh back from initiation in an Egyptian mystery school where your teacher Hermes Trismegestus had you meditating on the tetractys. And you kind of get to thinking... wouldn't it be nice to have a method of divination which used the tetractys somehow?

You reason that a good divination should, as best as possible, reveal root causes. So the idea would be to start at the level of Nature, where we are embodied, and work our way symbolically back up as far up the branches as we can: Nature/Earth, to Soul, to Intellect, to The One. In a sudden brainstorm, you realize: for any given question, there is a way to use simple mathematics to deduce information about The One purely from the level of Earth! It's just like Hermes T told you: As Above, So Below!

Let each of the four points of the lowest, Nature/Earth, level be its own small 4-level tetractys. In a passionate blaze of inspiration, you realize that it's possible to have sixteen different varieties of tetractys by giving a binary quality to each of the points of "odd" and "even" and adding each row up. In its natural state, a tetractys is, level by level, (The One) odd, (Intellect) even, (Soul) odd, and (Nature) even:

But you see that there are 15 other ways that the tetractyses can turn out, which means: sortilege! By asking a question and randomly pulling out white and black beans from an urn (NOT for eating, these beans), you can generate four Nature/Earth level tetractyses. Call them N1, N2, N3, and N4.

From those, applying odd/even addition between each adjacent figure, you can generate three Soul level figures N1+N2=S1, N2+N3=S2, and N3+4=S3.

These adjacent figures, you can generate two Intellect level figures S1+S2=I1, and S2+S3=I2.

Finally you reach your One, by adding I1+I2=THE ONE. Or at least symbol of such for the situation, that seems to answer the question posed.

You pat yourself on the back and enjoy experimenting with this form of divination. As it begins from the level of Nature and Earth, you call it "Earth Divination". And yet something doesn't seem quite right here. As you get comfortable with this tetractys form of divination, it seems to you a bit simplistic. It seems to tell you about the surface of your situation very well, but when you use it you keep getting blindsided by things this tetractys divination didn't reveal.

One morning while meditating in a particularly tired state after a night of ecstatic initiation rituals, you find yourself drifting asleep in front of your daily Earth Divination figures. Suddenly you hear your old teacher shouting at you: "As within, so without!" You jolt awake and stare at your daily reading, struggling to get your bearings. You realize that you're looking at the 4x4 grid of odd/even Earth figures from the wrong direction-- but it looks almost exactly the same. In fact, maybe if you turn it around slowly... "EUREKA!" (Archimedes totally steals this from you later.) Yes, by looking at the same 4x4 grid from a different direction, it's like you're building four new Earth level tetractyses out of the same exact materials.

And so you build a second tetractys made of mini-tetractyses, and this one seems to reflect the realities surrounding the outer parts of the question that you can't see easily.

Of course you intuit that these are but two perspectives on the same question; and so, though disturbed by the metaphysical implications of adding The One and The One together to get something even higher than "The One" in this divinatory form's symbolic system, you certainly recognize the pragmatic value of doing so.

As it seems to work rather well, you teach Earth Divination to the initiates of the mystery school you found. Then you die, and due to your high level of spiritual achievement, you ascend straight to a higher plane.

With your new ascended perspective, you discover something that annoys you greatly: some of your students have figured out that mathematically, in order to derive all of the various The Ones at the bottom of the chart, it's completely unnecessary to compute N2+N3=S2, S1+S2=I1, S2+S3=I2, or I1+I2=The One. Due to the way that odds and evens inevitably cancel each other out, it's enough to simply add S1+S3, and somehow that produces the figure for The One for that half of the divination. This annoys you greatly because you had fastidiously worked out, through much divination, prayer, and pathworking, all the various meanings for each position, and the wonderful system of symolism for the tiered structure of the chart; and now your students have gone and wrecked it all in the name of saving a few strokes in the wax.

A couple of millenia later, you've gotten over it, and appreciate that Geomancy has flowered with new forms incorporating astrology and more. Still, it does make you a little rueful when you consider that everyone seems to have forgotten how every Geomancy chart started out as a pair of Tetractys, and that it can in fact still be expressed that way still today, if anyone should happen to rediscover the way.

[sdi]

I hadn't considered that 1, 2, 3, 4 reduces to Amissio! I was just reading Thomas Taylor On the Wanderings of Ulysses, who says that there are three categories of souls: the lowest are those who are selfishly oriented and remain mired in the material world; the middle are those who are spiritually oriented but only have the strength of soul to rescue themselves from the material world (he cites Odysseus from myth, and I might cite Porphyry and most saints from the real world); the highest are those powerful souls who come to the earth only briefly in order to teach others (he cites Heracles from myth, and Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato from the real world, to which I would certainly add Plotinus). Thus the highest philosophers, including Pythagoras, certainly have some association with Amissio :)

I'm a computer programmer, and computer programmers always count in binary starting from zero, so the cutesy association I had found was this: 00, 01, 10, 11. That is, the one's place is 0101 or Acquisitio, and the two's place is 0011 or Fortuna Major. Summing across gives you 0110, Conjunctio. Not sure what use that is, but I always chuckle when I need to sum them when casting a chart.

As for your story, if I'm ever allowed to carry information across the veil, I'll see if I can find out where the Golden Chain of Hermes begins for you :)

[tunesmyth]

Well isn't that something! And once again, we discover a shared coincidence connecting us both to the figures that we chose for our Geomancy sites. I feel like we've been here before. :-)

Regardless of the ultimate truth of the origins of Geomancy, I find it quite amazing that-- as long as one looks at one hemisphere at a time, at least-- a Geomancy chart doesn't just resemble a tetractys. Mathematically speaking, each half IS a tetractys, with the Witnesses each being a top point. It's just that the three figures per tetractys which are not traditionally included in a geomancy chart are the ones mathematically superfluous to the end calculation of the tetractyses' point. *IF* that's the origin of Geomancy, it's quite reasonable that they would get cut out for the sake of simplification.

At the very least, it's a rock-solid answer to the Geomancy beginner's question of "Why don't you add Mothers 2 & 3 also?" But it might mean much more than that.

(I must admit I'm still sore at JMG's response. He'd gotten several Magic Monday questions over the years asking if there was any relationship between the tetractys and Geomancy. I actually demonstrated an actual mathematical equivalence... and he said all I did was insert a whole bunch of extra figures.)

[sdi]

And once again, we discover a shared coincidence connecting us both to the figures that we chose for our Geomancy sites.

Precisely! :) If I wasn't used to synchronicity being so damned creepy by now, I'd be creeped out!


I must admit I'm still sore at JMG's response.

Eh, don't be! On the one hand, he's a very by-the-book, Saturnine personality—always talking about preserving and conserving and following the tradition exactly as written—and you're throwing a Lætitia-ish flight of fancy at him. On the other, the whole point of a meditation isn't that it's objectively true, but that it's subjectively valuable! If nothing else, you've learned something that programmers need years to grasp—how to simplify boolean formulae in Algebraic normal form—and who knows how that'll come in handy down the line?

[tunesmyth]

That's true-- JMG just Carcered all over my Laetitia, leaving me with Tristitia. Don't worry, I forgive him, he's certainly as human as the rest of us!

So if you are "Amissio" and I am "Conjunctio", then I guess the nature of our relationship is... Fortuna Minor??? Can someone out there make a website called "Via" who we can join forces with? Or a "Caput"? Or even "Rubeus"?

With your geometric presentation of the Tetractys, I notice that even if one is inclined to add a seventh and eighth circle for symmetry's sake, one would only end up with a single point more at the very bottom. In line with Plotinus, this development is hardly generative, perhaps it could even be seen as degenerative. The Subnatural Realm?

[sdi]

Can someone out there make a website called "Via" who we can join forces with?

Is Fortuna Minor—the figure of assistance—unsatisfactory? It seems rather on-point to me!


I notice that even if one is inclined to add a seventh and eighth circle for symmetry's sake, one would only end up with a single point more at the very bottom.

This is, in fact, true of almost every construction (and, indeed, almost every mathematical or logical proof): the elegance of a construction, I think, is a measure of how much you get divided by how much it takes to get there and how much superfluous matter you are left with. For example, in the case of the construction you mention would be more elegant by first removing the large circle, since the it is wholly redundant (add no new intersection points to the construction). As another example, the construction I made above has a couple wasted points... but there's actually no way to construct just the ones we want without some waste, and so the tradeoff I made was to use as few circles as possible.

To compare to philosophy, consider Plotinus who manages a remarkably sophisticated and useful metaphysics out of very, very little—a few core concepts and a few simple proofs. The elegance of it is, in fact, why it's so difficult: every piece fits so perfectly into all the other pieces, you mostly have to "get it" all-at-once, rather than being able to start with a base and add to it piecemeal.

This is the exact opposite approach taken by, for example, Euclid: he almost never uses the simplest or most elegant way to prove something, and the reason for it is that he's not trying to build a system—he's trying to teach! So he introduces concepts one-at-a-time in order to make it easier to follow in the long run.

I might say that Plotinus' way is more Intellectual and Euclid's way is more Psychic (that is, "of the Soul"). Euclid is easier to learn (because it has a linear ordering) but is less beautiful (because it's complicated), while Plotinus' is harder to learn (because it's nonlinear and diffuse) but is more beautiful (because it's simple).

This is part of why I'm curious to tackle Proclus—at first glance, the Elements of Theology seems to be attempting to Euclid-ize Plotinus. That is either extremely misguided (e.g. Proclus is unaware of the tradeoff he's making) or an attempt to make Plotinus more accessible (e.g. Proclus recognizes the tradeoffs he's making and accepts those limitations). I'm very interested to try and get a sense of which it is.

But that's all to say that yes, it's something akin to the subnatural realm you reference. To Plotinus, the more complicated something is, the less it participates in the One (which is absolutely simple), and thus the less Good it is. The Neoplatonists wouldn't go so far as Steiner as to say it's evil: they're pretty firm on positive evil not existing.