sdi

[The goddess] turned [...] Teiresias into a mouse, which is why they say a mouse [...] can tell the future (because it is Teiresias). That it can tell the future is clear because [...] it flees a house in danger of collapse.

(Eustathios of Thessolonike on the Odyssey 1665.48 ff.)

But as [when king Laodamas had been killed in battle,] Teiresias told [the Thebaians] to send a herald to treat with the Argives, and themselves to take to flight, they did send a herald to the enemy, and, mounting their children and women on the wagons, themselves fled from the city.

(Apollodoros, Library III vii §3, as translated by J. G. Frazer.)

Sophocles, the tragic poet, in his drama Laocoon represents Aineias, just before the taking of the city, as removing his household to Mount Ida in obedience to the orders of his father Ankhises, who recalled the injunctions of Aphrodite and from the omens that had lately happened in the case of Laocoon's family conjectured the approaching destruction of the city. His iambics, which are spoken by a messenger, are as follows:

Now at the gates arrives the goddess' son,
Aineas, his sire upon his shoulders borne
Aloft, while down that back by thunderbolt
Of Zeus once smit the linen mantle streams;
Surrounding them the crowd of household slaves.
There follows a multitude beyond belief
Who long to join this Phrygian colony.

(Dionusios of Halikarnassos, Roman Antiquities, as translated by Earnest Cary and Edward Spelman, with minor edits by yours truly.)

I have no idea what the Egyptian sphinx represents—best guess is that it was originally just a lion, but some narcissistic jerk re-sculpted his face onto it—but the Greek sphinx, at least, is simply the riddle, the puzzle, the koan personified: it entices you in with it's pretty face and soft breasts, but once you get close, it sinks its claws into you. (In fact, the word Σφίγξ "sphinx" is from the Greek σφίγξω "I will hold tight.") With that image, an entire avenue of sphinxes seems a frightening prospect, and yet here I am, traipsing down just such a path...

A while back I noted that there were two major Greek myth cycles, the "city myth" and the the "hero myth." The first of these (exemplified by the two great cycles of the Heroic age, Thebai and Troia) follows seven generations of kings as they found a city, the city's royal line splits, the main branch fails (due to assaults from foreigners ultimately caused by a divine curse), while the secondary branch moves on to found a new city. On the other hand, the "hero myth" (exemplified by the Horos myth and the Orestes branch of the Epic Cycle), describes the structure of the world that we inhabit and describes what we can do about it; it is meant to be an example to prospective initiates, just like Athenaie says:

ἢ οὐκ ἀίεις οἷον κλέος ἔλλαβε δῖος Ὀρέστης
πάντας ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους, ἐπεὶ ἔκτανε πατροφονῆα,
Αἴγισθον δολόμητιν, ὅ οἱ πατέρα κλυτὸν ἔκτα;
καὶ σύ, φίλος, μάλα γάρ σ’ ὁρόω καλόν τε μέγαν τε,
ἄλκιμος ἔσσ’, ἵνα τίς σε καὶ ὀψιγόνων ἐὺ εἴπῃ.

Or haven't you heard what kind of renown noble Orestes gained
among all men when he avenged his father by murdering
that weaselly Aigisthos, who killed his illustrious father?
Likewise you, my friend—for I see that you are very handsome and well-built—
be courageous! so that even those yet to come may speak well of you.

(Athenaie, in the guise of Mentes, exhorting Telemakhos. Homer, Odyssey I 298-302, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)

This is, in fact, why Horos never goes to Bublos or why Orestes never goes to Troia: they are drawing on the lessons of the "city myth" in order to determine their own path. The city is an abstraction or teaching to them, the stories of those who went before, rather than a lived experience. In fact, it suggests that the city is a place they want to avoid, a source of trouble! Because of this, it seems rather important to make sense of what the city is and what it means, but I've been in difficulty doing so. I hit upon a potential angle on it, though, that I thought might be worth walking through.

I recently mentioned the Ra Material in reference to Teiresias (himself a part of the Thebaian city myth), and while pondering this, I realized that "Ra's" metaphysics dovetails neatly with the city myth, with "Ra's" seven degrees of consciousness corresponding very well with the seven generations of kings; under this interpretation, the city myth describes the unfolding of the Cosmos from Source to Source, while the hero myth, situated at the end of it, tells us what we can do about it right now, today, and what we can expect to happen to us if we try.

As a disclaimer and a reminder, I'm pretty skeptical of channeled texts (and doubly so of anything "New Age") for a few reasons: first, I have a pretty strong anti-modernity bias; second, most people are incapable of reaching up to the aither to channel angels, and even if they can, it can be very difficult to tell since daimons "know how to tell many convincing lies;" third, the channelled material always reflects the biases of the person doing the channelling, and if one isn't personally close with them, it can be very difficult to correct for these; and fourth, the "New Age" seems to largely presuppose a worldview I don't adhere to, and involve wish-fulfilment fantasies which I'm not interested in. So this material needs to be taken with salt; please consider this post merely an attempt to expand upon my prior exploration of Teiresias in order to make a more comprehensive evaluation of the model possible.

Perhaps I should start by describing "Ra's" view of the development of consciousness. (Or attempting to, it is not perfectly clear to me, so take this as a sketch.) Consciousness is analogized as a vibration, and this continuum of vibration is discretized into seven degrees of consciousness, just like how we break up all the possible vibrations of the air into a scale of seven notes or all the possible vibrations of the visual spectrum into seven colors. Since souls are just a vehicle for consciousness, we inherently possess the capacity to vibrate in any harmony of frequencies, at least potentially; but in practice, one has to "climb the scale" a bit at a time, from lowest vibration to highest vibration:

1. Red, which relates to being, and is the consciousness of "inanimate" objects.

2. Orange, which relates to growth and movement, and is the consciousness of plants and animals.

3. Yellow, which relates to social identity, and is the consciousness of humans. Being the vibration of identity, it is the first properly "individual" degree: red and orange are "herd" or "group" consciousness, while yellow consciousness is individual (at least once sufficiently developed).

4. Green, which relates to love, and is the consciousness of lower daimons. Love is polarized: one may give love (compassion) or take love (selfishness), and thus green consciousness is dual in nature.

5. Blue, which relates to communication and wisdom, and is the consciousness of higher daimons, though it is also (being the lowest vibration not subject to mortality) where we resonate with after death. Blue retains the polarized nature of green; the positive pole is the collective search of understanding (collaboration), while the negative pole is the individual search of understanding (hoarding knowledge).

6. Indigo, which relates to universality, and is the consciousness of angels. Unlike green and blue, indigo is not meaningfully polarized, because of the nature of universality; negatively-polarized individuals, having mastered wisdom, come to understand this and reorient themselves positively as they endeavor to comprehend the All.

7. Violet, which is related to transcendance and unity. This is, in a sense, rejoining the All and moving on to a new "octave" of existence, in which one co-creates the universe as and with God. (At least, apparently: "Ra" claimed to be of indigo consciousness, themselves, and claimed only secondhand knowledge about violet consciousness from its own teachers.)

Apparently souls usually ascend as groups: that is to say, the group of what we now call "human souls" all passed through the red stage more-or-less together, then the orange stage more-or-less together, and are now working through the yellow stage more-or-less together. ("Ra" says the reason why the earth is such a mess is that, apparently unusually, humans aren't developing consistently: a few are polarizing positively, a few others are polarizing negatively, and the vast majority aren't polarizing at all. Evidently conditions are much smoother in the common case where the group develops together.) There are uncommon exceptions to souls developing as a group, however: some people are souls of a higher degree, who incarnate as humans in order to teach and guide; while, conversely, some few human souls "jump the tracks" and, through spiritual practices or divine support or sometimes even by accident, behold God naked and become able to ascend separately from the rest of their group.

I think that's enough about "Ra's" metaphysics to get on with. So far so good, and other than the emphasis on soul-groups, isn't too distant from Empedokles or Plotinos.

As for the city myths, there is, unfortunately, no one good source remaining for either of them. I'd like to look at Troia today, partly because I looked at Thebai last time and partly because the Epic cycle is by far the more familiar to me. The outlines of it's history can be more-or-less cobbled back together from bits and pieces in the Iliad and Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (which I trust) and the Library (which is my preferred fallback when a reliable source isn't available). Here is a sketch at describing the seven generations, with citations:

1. Dardanos, the favorite mortal son of Zeus, founded Dardania at the foot of Mt. Ide. [Il. XX 215-8, 301–5.]

2. Erikhthonios, the son and successor of Dardanos, "became the richest of all men" with a herd of three thousand mares. Boreas mated with some of these mares in the form of a black stallion, adding twelve semi-divine horses to Erikhthonios's herd. [Il. XX 219–29.]

3. Tros is the son and successor of Erikhthonios, renaming the kingdom (but not the city) of Dardania after himself. [Il. XX 230, Lib. III xii §2.]

4. At this point the royal line splits three ways, as Tros has three sons: Ilos, Assarakhos, and Ganumedes. All three are described as faultless. Ilos goes to Phrygia; he wins a prize of fifty men and women; following an oracle's instruction, he follows a dappled cow to the hill of Ate; he asks Zeus for a sign; he is given the Palladium; and he founds Ilios on the spot. Assarakhos, meanwhile, simply succeeds to the throne of Dardania. Ganumedes, finally, being peer of the gods and most beautiful of mortals, is spirited away in a whirlwind to be the immortal, ageless cupbearer of Zeus; Tros is grieved by his son's disappearance until Zeus sends Hermes to tell him what has become of him and give him divine horses. [Il. XX 231–5; HH 202–17; Lib. III xii §3.]

5. Laomedon is the son and successor of Ilos, and also described as faultless. Kapus is the son and successor of Assarakhos. [Il. XX 236, 239.]

6. Priamos is the son and successor of Laomedon; he is the final king of Ilios, since while Zeus loves Priamos and his city, he withdraws his favor from Priamos's line and gives it to Aineias. Ankhises is the son and successor of Kapus; he was seduced by Aphrodite, but not made immortal; and he secretly bred his mares to the divine horses of Laomedon (descendants of those ransomed for Ganumedes), thereby stealing their bloodline. [Il. IV 44–9, V 265–72, XX 236, 300–8; HH.]

7. Hektor is the son and heir apparent of Priamos, but is killed in battle by Akhilleus. Aineias is the son and successor of Ankhises; he is the son of Aphrodite; he is most pious and beloved by the gods; and he escapes Ilios and refounds it after it is sacked. [Il. II 819–21, XX 293–308, XXII; HH.]

Now, let's synthesize these two models. I don't think this is too difficult! The seven kings can obviously be linked to the seven degrees of consciousness, with the line of descent showing the progression of consciousness (e.g. orange follows red just as Erikthonios follows Dardanos), and with the split among the sons of Tros showing the split in polarization at the green level of consciousness (e.g. just as, after Tros, the Troad has two kingdoms, Dardania and Ilios, so too does consciousness have two polarities after yellow). Everything else falls out naturally from there.

Mt. Ide (traditionally from ἴδη "woods," as in a place of material to harvest and work with) is the world-axis or ladder of consciousness, which is why Zeus sits atop it and watches all. The hill of Ate (Ἄτη "blindness, recklessness") is presumably where Zeus threw her after Hera tricked him into recklessly making Iphikles king rather than Herakles (cf. Il. XIX 91–136), clearly a place where a lack of foresight makes one deviate from the intended course. Dardania (apparently related to the onomatapoeic δάρδα darda "bee," like "bumble" in English, and an appropriate name for cooperation, as a hive of bees work together for the good of all) is the positive polarization of consciousness, while Ilios (which Ilos, of course, selfishly named for himself) is the negative polarization of consciousness, distant from Ide but still in sight of it (as one can never really escape divinity).

Dardania is founded by Dardanos at the foot of Ide since red consciousness is foundational, inherently positive, and where everything begins; while Ilios is founded by Ilos on Ate since green consciousness is the first that can be negatively polarized (though doing so is short-sighted). Nonetheless, each of Tros's three children are described as ἀμύμονες "without blemish," because all is one, so to love others and to love self are both to love God. However, Tros has a third faultless son: Ganumedes; Xenophon's Socrates (Symposium VIII xxx) makes the case that Ganumedes was beautiful in soul, and I likewise think that Ganumedes is a mythic representation of how peculiarly virtuous souls can short-circuit the usual path of growth through intensive self-development and/or devotion to divinity. Zeus withdraws his favor from Priam because negative polarization halts at the indigo level (thus ending the line of Ilos), and Hektor dies in battle because it is not possible for a negative polarization to transcend. Aineias refounds Ilios because the result of returning to the One is to co-create the next "octave" of consciousness.

Homer goes to particular lengths to talk about horses (maybe they should have called him Φίλιππος Phillip "horse fancier"), so these must be noteworthy for some reason. I suppose that while the kings represent the levels of consciousness in general, the horses must represent their property; that is, specific individuals or groups of individuals within those levels of consciousness. Perhaps the wealth of Erikhthonios indicates the vast speciation of the natural world, while the offspring of Boreas ("the North Wind") indicates that only some of the many species of animals are judged desirable enough to become vessels of the yellow level (e.g. are imbued with "breath" or "wind," that is, individual soul); perhaps the horses Zeus gifts to Ilos indicate that while some beautiful souls may leave the group, the group is not neglected, but is in fact given support in recompense for their loss in order to maintain balance; that Ankhises breeds his horses with the descendents of these perhaps suggests that these beautiful souls join groups of the indigo level ("go to be with the angels"). These kinds of things aren't really discussed in the Ra Material so far as I recall, though, so this is all not-terribly-deep guesswork based strictly on the symbolism in the myth.

A few miscellaneous notes from while I was working my way through all this:

• I have long wondered why Homer is so very down on Aphrodite; she seems to me to be among the nicest of the gods. One nice thing about this interpretation of the city myth is that it makes sense of this. Aphrodite is love, and loving mode of consciousness—green—is where polarization takes place; since Ilios is the negative polarization, which is ultimately incapable of returning to the source, this is the reason for the city's downfall. In fact, that Zeus refuses to adjudicate the apple to any of the goddesses indicates that God has given us free will to choose our paths; that Paris has to choose between Aphrodite (= love​ = green?), Athene (= wisdom​ = blue?), and Hera (= universality = indigo?) indicates that these are the levels affected by choice of polarization; that Paris chooses Aphrodite for reasons of self-gratification reinforces the recklessness (ate) of the negative polarization in general.

• I'm not really prepared to do a deep-dive on the Thebaian myth yet, but while we're talking about sphinxes, it's worth noting that Oidipous, being of the fifth royal generation, would, by this theory, be of the blue, or wisdom, degree of consciousness. This makes his solving of the sphinx's riddle—a test of wisdom—pretty appropriate!

• If you'll recall in the Horos-myth, I likened Thoth to "experience," the reason or purpose behind climbing the ladder of consciousness: so God-in-part can come to know part-of-God. Thoth is married to Maat, the "necessity" of this occurring. It is noteworthy that the child of Thoth and Maat is Seshat "scribess," who is depicted with two cow horns and a seven-petalled flower above her head. It is plausible to me that "scribess" is a reference to consciousness being that which observes and records (cf. Od. XI 223–4) and the seven-petalled flower is indicative of the seven modes of consciousness here described:

  𓋇

  This would, of course, presuppose that "Ra" is correct in saying that they influenced the development of Egypt with their teachings.

When Ts'ui-wei was asked about the meaning of Buddhism, he answered: "Wait until there is no one around, and I will tell you." Some time later the monk approached him again, saying: "There is nobody here now. Please answer me." Ts'ui-wei led him out into the garden and went over to the bamboo grove, saying nothing. Still the monk did not understand, so at last Ts'ui-wei said, "Here is a tall bamboo; there is a short one!"

(Shi Daoyuan, The Transmission of the Lamp XV ccclxiii; as retold by Alan Watts, The Way of Zen II i.)

"Seijo, the Chinese girl," observed Goso, "had two souls, one always sick at home and the other in the city, a married woman with two children. Which was the true soul?" [...]

The clouds and moon are the same.
The mountains and valleys are different.
Each is blessed in its own way.
One is. Two are.

(Wumen Huikai, The Gateless Gate XXXV. The case is adapted by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, while the verse is adapted by myself.)

Ζῆνα δέ τις προφρόνως ἐπινίκια κλάζων
τεύξεται φρενῶν τὸ πᾶν,
τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-
σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος
θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν.
στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας
μνησιπήμων πόνος: καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-
κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν.
δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βίαιος
σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων.

But whoever willingly sings a victory-song for Zeus, he shall gain wisdom altogether—Zeus, who sets mortals on the path to understanding; Zeus, who has established a fixed law that "wisdom comes by suffering." But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drops over the mind in sleep, so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods enthroned upon their awful seats.

(The chorus of Argive elders speaking. Aiskhulos, Agamemnon 174–83, as translated by Herbert Weir Smyth.)

δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει
δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων:
ᾧ μέν κ' ἀμμίξας δώῃ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος,
ἄλλοτε μέν τε κακῷ ὅ γε κύρεται, ἄλλοτε δ' ἐσθλῷ:
ᾧ δέ κε τῶν λυγρῶν δώῃ, λωβητὸν ἔθηκε,
καί ἑ κακὴ βούβρωστις ἐπὶ χθόνα δῖαν ἐλαύνει,
φοιτᾷ δ' οὔτε θεοῖσι τετιμένος οὔτε βροτοῖσιν.

For two jars sit on the floor of Zeus's house,
one full of curses, the other blessings.
To the man Thunder-Loving Zeus gives of them mixed,
his luck changes with the times—here good, there bad;
but to the man he gives only of the bad, abuse is his lot:
evil misery harries him over the divine earth,
and he wanders respected by neither gods nor men.

(Akhilles speaking. Homer, Iliad XXIV 527–33, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)

But Zeus never gives of his jars unmixed—if it seems so, it is only because of the temporal mist on our eyes; so if there is only trauma here, there must be some recompense for it, either in the past or in the future; so either karma is your fate, or blessings are your destiny. The inability to see this is, I presume, why Akhilles's shade sat in Hades, still bemoaning his lot long after.

I too am now one of these, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, trusting in mad strife.

[Empedocles, fr. 115 (DK), as translated by Brad Inwood]

Know the male,
yet keep to the female:
receive the world in your arms.
If you receive the world,
the Tao will never leave you
and you will be like a little child.

[Tao Te Ching XXVIII, as translated by Stephen Mitchell]

In an interesting thread in yesterday's Magic Monday, ecosophia noted, "The Hopi had a prophecy, going back a very long ways, that someday white people would come to their land, bearing one of two sacred symbols. If they brought the circle, everything would be fine, but if they brought the cross, that meant horrible events and ultimately the end of the Fifth World. As I see it, there was a struggle on the physical and spiritual levels alike to determine which way things would go. We know who won."

My angel had told me something similar, noting that while destruction has been baked into the cake for centuries, the angels have waited a long time and been very patient with humanity, in order to allow time for them to, perhaps, come to their senses and pull back from the abyss, but they have not. As of a moment "very recently"—I got the sense that "very recently" was sometime in the 2010–2020 decade—it was too late to save humanity from its folly. My angel never mentioned the form in which this destruction would take, though I have assumed it to involve violence. I have made mention of blessed Mars coming to cleanse the world, and perhaps this comes across as cruel, but it is meant from a loving place of chastisement for misdeeds: humanity is stuck in a very wicked place, and we are in need of His peculiar powers to loose those bonds, learn our lesson, and try again. Nonetheless, it must be understood that I haven't held to this too tightly, because—as with all divine revelation—it must be treated as suspect until it can be verified somehow, and I considered this message to be unverifiable.

So ecosophia's little note threw me for something of a loop, since here is some measure of potential verification. (Or, at least, it may move the needle on my Bayesian prior a little!) I spent a while yesterday and today researching the Hopi prophecy. Perhaps due to it's nature as being orally transmitted, there is no one central source for or interpretation of the prophecy, and I've had to piece what I can of it together from disparate sources, many of which are squirreled away on little corners of the Internet Archive. (That said, perhaps the most comprehensive sources I found were From the Beginning of Life to the Day of Purification and The Voice of the Great Spirit.) Here is a brief summary of what I think I've understood, though please understand that I'm a foreigner, may easily misunderstand, and anyway there is no One True Interpretation™ of such a prophecy, so please verify all of this for yourself before taking my word for it.

The Hopi, like the Pythagoreans and the Chinese, consider the cosmos to have a single governing principle (like the One or the Tao) that proceed through two sub-principles (like Love/Strife or Yin/Yang): "this sacred writing [...] could mean the mysterious life seed with two principles of tomorrow, indicating one, inside of which is two." One sub-principle is represented by the meha symbol, "which refers to a plant that has a long root, milky sap, grows back when cut off, and has a flower shaped like a swastika, symbolizing the four great forces of nature in motion," and which is representative of materiality. The other sub-principle is represented by the Sun symbol, shaped like a circle, which is representative of wholeness or divinity ("our Father Sun, the Great Spirit"). The overarching principle is represented by the red symbol, which is drawn as the two superimposed into a sun cross or medicine wheel, representing "setting the four forces of nature in motion for the benefit of the Sun," or cosmic order.

The idea is that when the Great Spirit dispersed men to the four corners of the world, it distributed them this third symbol, but foretold that each people would be corrupted in time. (The Hopi were to remain at the center of the world and were set aside to retain the pure teaching in a wasteland, which would prevent them from becoming greedy.) At the end of the age, the men would return from the four corners of the world bearing sophisticated technology and a corrupted symbol: if it was the Sun circle, then it would indicate that they had become spiritual and would use their technology to renew the world, but if it was the meha cross, then it would indicate that they had become materialistic and would use their technology to destroy the world. (How ironic that white men came literally bearing a cross! And, materialistic indeed they were: the first European contact with the Hopi was by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's men as they searched for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold.)

This destruction would proceed through three events, symbolized by the meha, Sun, and red symbols, respectively, which the Hopi elders associate with three world wars. (These symbols supposedly represent the initiators of those wars, from the perspective of the Hopi: the meha representing Germany, which bore the Iron Cross in WW1 and the swastika in WW2; the Sun representing Japan, which bore a solar emblem in WW2; and the red symbol to represent an as-yet-unknown nation.) The third of these wars is to be fought with nuclear weapons—called "gourds of ashes falling from the sky"—and would usher in a period of great calamity, after which the now-purified world "will bloom again and all people will unite to peace and harmony for a long time to come." The Hopi believed that, after the first two events, there would be an opportunity to return to spirituality and prevent the the third event, but that after a certain point there was no turning back, which is why, after the Second World War, they began to desperately try to communicate their prophecy through any venue they could.

This is all very interesting to me, but as with all prophecies, take it with salt. We cannot turn divinity from Its great purpose, whatever it may be, and the way we should live today is always the same regardless of what tomorrow may bring. Do you as Porphyry says:

We do not worship [God] only by doing or thinking this or that, neither can tears or supplications turn God from His purpose, nor yet is He honored by sacrifices nor glorified by plentiful offerings; but it is the godlike mind that remains stably fixed in its place that is united to God. For like must needs approach like. The sacrifices of fools are mere food for fire, and from the offerings they bring temple-robbers get the supplies for their evil life. But do thou, as I bade, let thy temple be the mind that is within thee. This must thou tend and adorn, that it may be a fitting dwelling for God.

[Porphyry to Marcella XIX, as translated by Alice Zimmern]

A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her reverence the only land on earth where the gods settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity will be an example of utter (un)belief. In their weariness the people of that time will find the world nothing to wonder at or to worship. [...] People will find it oppressive and scorn it. [...] They will prefer shadows to light, and they will find death more expedient than life. No one will look up to heaven. The reverent will be thought mad, the irreverent wise; the lunatic will be thought brave, and the scoundrel will be taken for a decent person. [... T]hat soul began as immortal or else expects to attain immortality [...] will be considered not simply laughable but even illusory. [...]

How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind! Only the baleful angels [(e.g. wicked dæmons)] remain to mingle with humans, seizing the wretches and driving them to every outrageous crime—war, looting, trickery and all that is contrary to the nature of souls. Then neither will the earth stand firm nor the sea be sailable; stars will not cross heaven nor will the course of the stars stand firm in heaven. Every divine voice will grow mute in enforced silence. The fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will no more be fertile; and the very air will droop in gloomy lethargy.

Such will be the old age of the world: irreverence, disorder, disregard for everything good. When all this comes to pass, [...] then the master and father, the god whose power is primary, governor of the first god, will look on this conduct and these willful crimes, and [...] will take his stand against the vices and the perversion in everything, righting wrongs, washing away malice in a flood or consuming it in fire or ending it by spreading pestilential disease everywhere. Then he will restore the world to its beauty of old so that the world itself will again seem deserving of worship and wonder [...].

(Asclepius XXV, as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver)

Hermes Trismegistus is speaking here of the fate of Egypt: once the land most beloved by the gods, now a sandy ruin and tomb of the ancient dead. Obviously it is pertinent to our times as well.

I have mentioned my opinion (shared by Pythagoras) that we live in Hades: a gray waste without beauty, where even the greatest delicacies taste of dust. Even those of us who hold to virtue and are desperately pious are too weary to find much purchase, here. Hard though it is to find any joy, we ought to rejoice nonetheless that the time comes when blessed Mars steps in to cleanse the world, that it may be remade anew and Beauty may reign here again, at least for a little while.

He smoked, and when he offered me a cigarette, I refused politely, telling him about my lungs, and that I had to care for my health. He only laughed. "Do you really feel there is something still wrong in your chest, dear Doctor?"

Instinctively I breathed deeply, trying to find the old pain. But it was not there. I was cured? "Yes, my son," he said, "you are cured of your inner faults, so how could the physical ones resist being cured?" He read my thoughts as one reads the lines of an open book.

(Paul Sédir, as translated by Mouni Sadhu, Ways to Self-Realization XLVII)

By contrast, in Life of Plotinus II, Porphyry says that Plotinus—who Apollo Himself declared to be one cured of his inner faults—suffered from a lifelong intestinal disease (for which, in fact, he would refuse treatment). How can the statement of Sédir's guru and Plotinus' example be reconciled?

I asked my angel about this and They answered, "Sédir was cured because it benefited him. Plotinus suffered disease because it benefited him. Simple as that."

So it is with me. A number of you have kindly asked about praying for my health, and I've refused, since my angel's told me in that past that I wouldn't be healed. Well, there's why.

I mentioned Thrasymachus before, how it introduces grammatical concepts and mythology together. The section I'm presently working through jokingly references the myth of Eris in order to teach superlatives (e.g. white, whiter, whitest):

Hera: How white is my robe!

Aphrodite: But mine is whiter.

Athena: But mine is the whitest.

Aphrodite: But I am rich.

Athena: But I am richer than Aphrodite.

Hera: But I am the richest of the gods.

Athena: (She gets huffy.) But I am sitting in a lofty chair!

Hera: (She gets huffier.) Of course, but I am in a loftier one!

Aphrodite: (She gets the huffiest.) But I am in the loftiest!

Athena: (She speaks arrogantly.) But I am lovely!

Hera: (She speaks more arrogantly.) But I am lovelier than Athena!

Aphrodite: (She speaks the most arrogantly.) But I am the loveliest of the gods!

"The loveliest," of course, being "καλλίστη," which was written on the golden apple. (Well, almost, there's a case difference, but whatever.)

Of course, one cannot get their theology from a grammar textbook, but the way I was raised, this would be considered blasphemous in the extreme—how dare one make light of the gods for being so petty! But, I was thinking about it, and rather than being blasphemous, I actually think that it makes a lovely little offering to Them. It made me laugh, and does not laughter honor Aphrodite? It is helping me to learn, and does not learning honor Athena? It made my wife glad to see me enjoying something (a rare occurrence, frankly), and does that not honor Hera?

I think blasphemy, then, is perhaps a misguided concept. By living (even living badly, if that is all we are capable of), we participate in the gods. By participating in them, we honor them.