The English 'Pyramid' - Silbury Hill

There are some striking parallels and contrasts between the civilization of Ancient Egypt and that of Neolithic England - one being the comparison between Silbury Hill (which I visited for the first time this summer - above) -

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/silbury-hill/

Which is the about 100 feet high and nearly 5000 years old and took about 18 million man hours to construct; and was originally probably a conical, stepped, white-ish coloured, flat-topped chalky mound.

(Note Silbury is not unique - there is a nearby and contemporary 'sister' mound in the grounds of Marlborough College http://www.marlboroughcollege.org/about-us/college-history/the-mound/.)


Up until very recently (and stimulated by listening to an audiobook of Rick Riordan's Kane Chronicles teen fantasy books with my family, whilst on car journeys), I never had much interest in the ancient Egyptian culture or religion; but I have found a superb guide in Jeremy Naydler's Temple of the Cosmos (1996) which convincingly gives a phenomenological reconstruction of what religious life was probably like in that strange and wonderful civilization.

Yes, for all the marvels of that most enduring, cohesive and stunningly-well-documented of known high civilizations - its writing, formal and finished art and statuary, refined technology, magic, architecture and all the rest... my heart is with the contemporary English civilization in all its rough-hewn and blurred and partial remnants.


I envisage Neolithic, megalithic England as a kind of twin but polar equivalent of Egypt - standing in comparison and contrast - the two places and spiritual worlds known to each other and drawing on the same roots - but emerging very differently due to the different soil, climate, and peoples.

While Egypt had extreme and (mostly) predictable seasons, and a stark contrast between the Nile and the Desert regions, and clear air and skies and the sun, moon and stars always dazzlingly visible -- England has its skies dominated and blurred by clouds, mists, rain; multiple tiny streams, rivers, ponds and lakes; hills, forests and bogs; wholly un-predictable weather and little seasonality and its earth being earthy rather and sandy or silty.

My inference is that the English religion would have been less celestial and fiery than Egypt's, and more cloudy and wet! Less of a contrast and circularity about its stories, and more gradually transformative and modulatory...

Well, you get the idea...



Movie mini-reviews: Equilibrium (2002) and Gods of Egypt (2016)

Two very good and enjoyable movies - with a bit extra - that you may not have heard about; both of which were panned by 'The Critics".

Equilibrium is a dystopian thriller set in a monochrome, bureaucratic world where feelings have been abolished by a drug; in order to prevent any possibility of war. The movie is 'about' the importance of feelings, emotions, and the senses. It starts quite slowly - with a long set-up - but just gets better and better, with several surprising twists, some great fights; leading to a very satisfying end.

Gods of Egypt was directed by Alex Proyas - whose previous I, Robot and Knowing I had enjoyed; for their extra depth and a religious dimension.

Gods of Egypt is an unusual combination of comedy, action thriller - of the Indiana Jones type; and a surprisingly convincing story of a fantasy version of Ancient Egypt, and its gods. The movie is very fast-paced, with spectacular action scenes - and an unusual, spiritual plot subject, focused on the availability of, and conditions for, life after death.

Some imaginative speculations on English Neolithic/ Early Bronze Age civilisation (?4500-1500 BC)

The hardly-known Ancient English Neolithic 'high civilisation' (which continued into the early Bronze Age) is something that increasingly fascinates me - especially in comparison and contrast with the roughly contemporary but vastly better-documented and far more technologically-sophisticated Ancient Egypt.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Neolithic

I am going to speculate freely on the nature and spiritual life of the Neolithic.

This was a society of magic rather than machines (things were done by magic that were later and elsewhere done by machines) - the obviously 'man-made' was disliked, and complex technology was regarded with revulsion and suspicion.

Since the economy was based on farming, the landscape was of course substantially re-made. There were long, winding or snaking roads and pathways - and these were unpaved - merely short grass, perhaps worn or scraped clear of turf to expose the natural chalk or other stone beneath. Large earthworks were not faced with rock but merely scraped clear of turf to stand-out white, grey or brown against the horizon or green fields.

Monuments were constructed as a matter of primary social activity - yet there was an attitude of minimal intervention. The standing stones and structures were left substantially natural, rough-hewn; various in size, placed according to a sense of rightness and without precise, abstract mathematical placement.

Those who harp-on about 'numerology' and the celestial alignments of Neolithic monuments have made a false emphasis - a society which strives for abstract geometry would, like Ancient Egypt, make monuments from exactly replicated blocks, with straight edges, sharp points, smooth surfaces; precision placed onto stone fixings - not variously sized and shaped, rough stones placed onto grass. There were alignments - but the whole flavour was organic and approximate - the fine interpretative 'tuning' was done on the basis of magic and wisdom - not 'read-off' like a scientific precision instrument.

Indeed, there is no point in attempting exact celestial geometry in England where clouds cover the sun, moon and stars most of the time - that kind of alignment only works under reliably unrelenting clear blue skies.

In Neolithic times, things were arranged in a suggestively symbolic fashion; features were made clearer, more obvious using contrast, colour, accumulations of earth, stone, rocks and wood - but the ideal was that no matter how obvious the features should seem to arise from the natural landscape; as if organic growths.

(Stonehenge is a late, indeed terminal, feature of this society - and marks the onset of corruption with an attempt at precision and a cult of death and sacrifice.)

The Neolithic was organised and literate - but the organisation was in the form of a fluid confederated druidical hierarchy of graded initiates, working individually and informally as mobile masters and apprentices and not organised into static colleges or temples.  The literacy deployed a symbolic and pictorial language - instead of sentences and paragraphs there were complex diagrams - each unique but with standard components - incised on leather and wood, or scraped onto stone; the subtle interpretation of which was an arcane art (so there was no need for secrecy - ordinary people could not comprehend the 'writing').

The pace of life was slow, measured. The focus of life was religious - the primary deity being associated with the Sun, the secondary deities with the Moon and stars. The stars made up a permanent and unchanging eternal basic of life; the wandering planets tracked the linearity of time such that each year was unique; the Sun was the long term timekeeper by the seasons, the Moon phases provided the monthly scale organization of daily life.

Military strength (and this was an internally peaceful society) was directed against invasion - and was achieved by the capacity to assemble and deploy vast armies, unified by religious belief, trained to work together by participation in constructing the vast earthworks and monuments, and impossible to rout or demoralise. They used projectile weapons (probably storms of spears, thrown in coordinated waves) to devastating effect; followed by stone axes wielded by powerful and untiring arms trained in day after day spent earthmoving and stone lifting and shaping.

Hostile invaders, who necessarily came in small groups by ship, poorly supplied, without anywhere to retreat-to, different in appearance, language, behaviours - stood no chance against these massive and cohesive defensive hordes.

The farming, and the villages were a patchwork of shapes, no two the same yet fitted together; all rounded, all curves and bows - no straight edges or lines, no arches, no triangles, squares or perfect circles... Animals roamed with their shepherds.

The arts were of alliterating poetry - always chanted or sung from memory; the instrumental music for accompaniment and dancing was from pipes, percussion and drones. In singing, high clear graceful voices were prized above all; low gravelly voices were for humour and ribaldry.

There were no wagons, only beasts of burden; but there were boats everywhere - mostly flat bottomed rafts pulled from the river bank, or paddled canoes that resembled tree trunks on the lakes and inland waters. But the use of boats were governed by Moon and weather, magic and divination.

And they were waiting - spiritually waiting. The whole society was prepared and poised for the coming revelation, and the transformation of earth into Heaven.

England was like two gigantic hands, cupped and waiting to receive.

**

The differences between the two contemporaneous, magical High Civilisations of England and Egypt can be encapsulated by a comparison of Neolithic standing stone 'growing' from the earth into the mist of England (this one from Avebury):

With a precision-engineered Egyptian obelisk against an electric-blue sky:





The significance, or non-significance, of theological heresy: the Coptic example

*

Disputes over theological heresies have plagued Christianity since early times.

Sometimes heresies are lethal, sometimes they seem trivial, sometimes they are very significant in terms of what theology implies about the underlying motivations.

For example, my interpretation of the Filioque dispute which divided the Western and Eastern Churches, is that the Eastern objection was to the act of revising the creed (on whatever grounds - even when, as the Western Church believed was happening, they were simply making it more accurate), rather than to the true theological implications of the Filioque (which are incomprehensible to all but very few).

*

Because theology is almost wholly obscure to almost everybody. C.S Lewis tried never to write anything about theology, and tried not to discuss it, because he considered it too high a matter; and except among the most learned and holy disputants, that such discussions led to arguments led to schisms and weakened the Church.

*

At what I regard as the height of Christian society, within the Byzantine Empire, there were several major theological disputes. One was the 'Monophysite' dispute starting in the AD 400s, an outcome of which was the separation of several North African Orthodox churches including the Coptic church in Egypt. This separation remains.

The point at issue was how to describe the nature of Christ in terms of God and Man - for example, whether He was God and Man separate, or fused, or the one absorbing the other.

Now, although I can read and use the words of this dispute; this is a matter far beyond my real comprehension. I am happy to accept the teaching I have been brought up on; but if I had had another kind of teaching or emphasis or form of words - no doubt the same would apply.

And one and a half thousand years of history have, I think, shown that this was a theologically trivial dispute - since the separated Orthodox Churches (such as the Coptic) have certainly remained Christian by any sane definition; have indeed survived extraordinary persecutions.

(Although this situation has now successfully been destabilized, and it seems possible that we may soon see the end of the Coptic church in Egypt).

*

Presumably there is a correct answer to the Monophysite dispute, but it seems (from what we can perceive) that it doesn't (so far as we can tell) really matter to the business of living a Christian life; which in turn means it was an evil and damaging dispute: that the dispute itself was far more damaging than the heresy (whichever side was heretical: and of course, both sides may have been in error).

This - if true - would not be at all surprising. If salvation hinged upon our correct understanding and precise expression of advanced philosophical, or linguistic, concepts - then this would run counter to what what we read in the Gospels, and counter to the teachings that the poor and ignorant are most likely to attain salvation (due to their humility and love of God).

*

Of course, theology is necessary; yet once there is a theology there will be questions, and these questions will seem to require answers, and these answers will satisfy some and lead to further questions among others...

When Christianity focuses on theology, then trouble is in the offing, unless there is already great faith, humility, inner discipline and love of God within which theological exploration may occur.

But even then, the corruptions of the world, the limits of knowledge and the feebleness of reason will tend to lead us astray.

*

Intellectuals are the worst culprits. Intellectuals love to evaluate others using theological criteria: these are heretical because they believe this - we know they believe it because it is written in their versions of scripture.

Thus intellectuals reason from statements of belief, to the (supposed) implications of belief - which is insecure already; and ignore the actual outcomes in terms of Christian life

*

Surveying the history of the Christian Church it can be seen that some supposed 'heresies' certainly do not look like they are fatal to salvation; while others certainly do look like they are real and fatal heresies.

This distinction between significant and insignificant heresy is not immediately obvious, since a person who adopts what will turn out to be a fatal heresy retains much from their previous state, and their behaviour may not change much immediately - the implications of a heresy will typically become clearly apparent only across the timespan of one or two generations.

For instance, Calvinism in New England was rejected by the heresy of Unitarianism; but Unitarianism only lasted about a generation before it collapsed into Emersonian subjectivist Transcendentalism, which then swiftly (in less than a generation) collapsed into politics (abolition, feminism etc).

*

What I find dismaying is that people so seldom do what I am doing here: look back to see if what actually happened helps us to understand what is essential, and what inessential, to Christianity; and then to learn from this about how to proceed in future.

Why, for example, has the Eastern Orthodox Church not re-united to undo the separation from Monophysite controversy? Why do not Liberal Christians (if such exist) perceive that the fruits of Liberalism in the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Lutheran (and other) denominations has been the destruction of Christianity?

That these things do not happen shows that the damage from theological schism is usually irreparable - that, in fact, theological schism leads to an even greater, and more damaging, focus on theology: such that after a while nothing else seems to matter.

*

And the one thing that cannot be perceived is that some apparent theological differences (such as the Monophysite dispute) are not valid grounds for considerations of heresy; and which side was taken made no real difference to real Christians.

It was the taking of sides that was the main problem. 

*

 

The function of Imagination understood - the faculty providing knowledge of imperceptible reality

I have had a breakthrough in my understanding of the Imagination - which came to me when reading a passage from Jeremy Naydler's essay Ancient Egypt and modern esotericism - from the book The Future of the Ancient World (2009). I now feel I understand the function of Imagination.

Excerpted:

The cosmic being who presided over Ra's diurnal voyage across the sky was the heavenly goddess Nut. It was she who gave birth to Ra each morning, and who received him into herself again in the evening. 

Each evening, when the sun god Ra entered her interior realm, he entered the secret and wholly invisible world that the Egyptians called the Dwat [usually spelled Duat]. The Dwat was conceived as being on the other side of the stars that we see when we look up at night. The stars were imagined as being on the flesh of the goddess Nut, and the Dwat was in some sense behind or within the world of which the stars demarcated the outermost boundary. 

All creatures were believed to return to the Dwat at the end of their lives, and wer born from it again, just as the sun God was born from the Dwat each morning. 

Knowledge of the interior world of the Dwat was considered by the Egyptians to be the most important, most profound knowledge, for people living on Earth to acquire. The Dwat was not only the realm of the dead, but the realm of the gods and spirits, and furthermore the realm from which all living things emerge. All life issues from the Dwat. 

To know this mysterious interior world was to become truly wise, because then one would know both sides of existence - the invisible along with the visible. 

The Egyptians lived with an awareness of a dimension of reality that is best described by the term 'Imaginal'. It is a nonphysical yet objective reality that we become aware of through the human faculty of Imagination. 


In other words, the reason that Men posses the faculty of Imagination, why it is built-into us, is so that we may know imperceptible reality.

That is what Imagination is for.

So, Man knows perceptible reality via his perception - the senses of vision, hearing, smell touch and taste - that is why we are born with eyes, ears, noses, tongues and skin receptors; and Man knows the imperceptible reality via the faculty of Imagination: that is why we are born with the faculty of Imagination.

Of course the Imagination can err - but so can the senses. But to deny the reality of Imagination as a source of knowledge - of real, objective, necessary knowledge - is akin to denying the reality of everything we get from our senses.

Yet, of course, that is what mainstream modern public discourse does assume - that Imagination is a mixture of hallucinations and refers to nothing real. We are in the position of someone who assumes that everything he sees, hears, tastes, touches and feels is a hallucination.

Which neatly explains the strange psychoticism of our Imagination-denying society - its gross and yet systematically un-noticed pathology.

It is is a difference which goes far to explain why Ancient Egypt was so adaptive as to persist for 3,000 years, why The West will not reach 300.

The esoteric occult focus: From Far East, through Middle East, to Celtic

The Occult Revival in the West (esepcially the UK, spreading to Europe and the USA) began with Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society in the late 1800s which led to the Golden Dawn magical societies. 

This regarded the fount of secret wisdom and magical power to lie in the Far East of India, China, Japan - but especially India in the early 20th century. 

Theosophy also gave a structural emphasis to the Qabalah/ Kabbalah; with its Hebrew origins in the Middle East, and a fascination with Ancient Egypt. 

The favoured religions were Hinduism, and later Buddhism and (Islamic) Sufism - with a selective and much-subordinate interest in mystical Christianity from the Neo-Platonic tradition. A uniting feature was belief in progressive reincarnation towards deity.  

The second phase, which regarded itself as "Western" is most associated with Rudolf Steiner and later Dion Fortune, and was most active in the early decades but especially the era between WWI and WWII.  - but their idea of the West was relative. 

They discarded the Far East focus, but retained a basis in the Qabalah; instead were interested by Egypt and the Middle East of Palestine. Steiner was much interested by the specifics of native European "folk souls" but Anthroposophy never developed an explicit magical practice, nor was it regional in practice or aspiration - being much focused on the power centre of the HQ in Dornach, Switzerland. 

This era of magic is Christian, or at least pro-Christian (depending on interpretation) - at any rate, many of them (including Steiner and Dion Fortune) regarded themselves as strongly Christian in essence. However, progressive reincarnation (rather than salvation and resurrection) remained at its heart. 

From the post WWII era (e.g. Robert Graves's The White Goddess) but especially from the 1960s and 1970s; the magical tradition began to focus on genuinely Western sources, and especially on the (supposed) Celtic aspects of Britain and Ireland before the Roman conquest. 

This led to the various manifestations of Neo-Paganism such as extremely popular Witches/ Wiccans, Druids; and the modern magical societies and groups (including much of the broad "chaos magic" tradition.  

Modern occultism and esoteric actuiivity has retained the idea of progressive reincarnation towards divinity. 

However, in contrast with the early 20th century occultism of Steiner and Dion Fortune; post millenial occultism is, and increasingly, essentially anti-Christian/ "anything-but-Christianity" - usually actively and vehemently so. 

Indeed, 21st century occultism typically embraces the Christianity-inverted values of mainstream Western culture - especially with respect to morality; which among Neo-Pagans is often explicitly and deliberately transgressional in its ideals and actuality. 

The magic of the ancient Egyptians

Ancient Egypt was a civilisation that lasted 3000 years, which is astonishing - most astonishing is that for more than a hundred generations they did not self-destruct.

The answer lies not in The System, but in the cohesion of the spirit of the people; in a word the religion. Religion kept the AEs cohesive - and the religion was headed by a god and priest-magicians.

It was a religion based-upon magic: magic that worked.

How do we know Egyptian magic worked? 3,000 years - and the surviving artifacts, which are of a greater scope, finish and precision than was again attained until the Renaissance.

Ancient Egyptian technology is literally incredible by mainstream historical understanding - therefore a vital explanatory factor is missing. And that factor (since there is no survival of technologies that could plausibly have made the artifacts) was presumably magic.

Even the Old Testament acknowledges that there was real magic:

Exodus 7:

⁸ And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying,
⁹ When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent.
¹⁰ And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.
¹¹ Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments.
¹² For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods.

The account in Exodus takes it for granted that the Egyptian priests could do magic, and turn their 'staffs' into serpents - the difference between Aaron and the priests was that Aaron's rod made a more powerful serpent that consumed the others.

In other words; the Egyptian civilisation could only survive three millennia because it was (overall) reality based; therefore its essential knowledge claims were essentially correct: Pharaoh was a god (or demi-god), the Egyptian gods were real, and their priests really were magicians.

The account of Aaron's rod tells us that all these were subordinate to the One God, the creator and Father of the Hebrews - and the Ancient Egyptians knew that fact only implicitly and imperfectly; yet they knew a great deal about ultimate spiritual realities, and apparently fulfilled their destiny with great integrity.

Naydler-fest

I have just finished reading (pretty much but not quite) everything written by Jeremy Naydler - a contemporary gardener philosopher whom first I encountered on a video talking about Rudolf Steiner - and whose work on Ancient Egyptian religion I started reading when investigating that subject. So, since August, I have read


Temple of the Cosmos: The Ancient Egyptian Experience of the Sacred 
Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt 

• These books are only of interest if the religion of Ancient Egypt is of interest - but Naydler really brings this to life; in the sense that it becomes possible empathically to inhabit the thought world of that religion. 

Future of the Ancient World: Essays on the History of Consciousness 

• This is the book of Naydler's that I would recommend most strongly for most people. The essays cover a range of topics on ancient and modern religion and spirituality - with a strong Steiner influence. There are many important insights and observations. Indeed, Naydler here assumes the mantle of the Owen Barfield of our age - and anyone who has been impressed by Barfield will want to engage with these ideas. 

Goethe on Science: A Selection of Goethe's Writings

• An excellent little book comprising a selection of paragraphs from Goethe with a commentary. I wish I had encountered these ideas many years ago - since it took me a couple of decades to (more or less) rediscover them for myself. 

Gardening as a Sacred Art 
Soul Gardening

• Naydler made his living as a gardener for most of his life. The first is a history of the evolving concepts of what a garden is for, with a look towards the future - fascinating. The second is a pleasing and unpretentious book of verse on themes suggested by gardening - much in the style of Stevie Smith (including naive drawings).

The Advent of the Wearable Computer
The Quest for the Pearl: Technology and the Crisis of Contemporary Culture
The Struggle for a Human Future
Technology and the soul (part one): Living in the Shadow of the Machine
Technology and the soul (part two): The Inhuman in our Midst 
Technology and nature (part one): The Unquenchable Thirst to Live in Gratitude: Digital Technology and the Afflicted Soul of the Earth
Technology and nature (part two): Synthetic Biology: The Assault on the Realm of Life

• These booklets, some of which are available as free downloads, can be found at: www.abzupress.co.uk/webcat.htm . Naydler opens-up a important and neglected subject here - the effects of digital technology, the invention (and purpose) of the computer, the development of personal mass media etc on human thinking. I would regard this as work-in-progress - because at present Naydler's analysis is stronger in its diagnosis and descriptions of the nature of the problem, than in its (rather imprecise and uncertain) suggestions for treating (and perhaps solving) the problem. 

Altogether, it has been a very cheering experience for me to discover that Naydler has been quietly working away on important topics, living in England (near Oxford).

Since the beginning of 2015 I have therefore made two significant personal discoveries of important, contemporary English people of around my own age who have been doing important work unbeknownst to me; the one other being Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Since I did not know them, there presumably are others I have yet to discover - which would be nice!

The year's reading in review

While I read much less than I once did - I am delighted to have made some significant 'discoveries' both in fiction and non-fiction through 2015.

1. In fiction the main discovery was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004) which was certainly one of the best novels I have ever read - and within my favourite adult fantasy genre. I was put onto this by a BBC TV adaptation which was significantly flawed, but whose first two episodes conveyed enough of the novel's virtues to get me to read it.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=norrell

2. The other discovery was another fantasy-genre writer Brandon Sanderson. This is very recent - I read the teen-fantasy The Rithmatist a few months ago

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/book-recommendation-rithmatist-by.html

And just a few days ago finished a very long and extremely enjoyable audiobook version of the first version of a projected ten-volume adult fantasy called The Way of Kings.

Sanderson strikes me as an exceptionally deep and knowledgeable writer - he is also highly prolific and only about forty years old, which is particularly pleasing.

3. After many years of trying and failing to get onto his wavelength, the writing of Owen Barfield was unlocked for me by The Fellowship, a new group biography og The Inklings

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/review-of-fellowship-literary-lives-of.html

Since then I have had great benefit from reading some of Barfield's philosophical books and individual essays.

4. Barfield was an Anthroposophist which again pointed me at Rudolf Steiner, which led to the discovery of Jeremy Naydler - a modern English writer on spiritual and philosophical themes who has particular expertise on Ancient Egypt. Convergently listening to an audiobook of teen-fantasy writer Rick Riordan's Ancient Egyptian Gods series The Kane Chronicles with the family (as in-car entertainment) led me to want to read more about Egypt.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Naydler

5. I have also continued to read slowly, and reflect considerably upon, the writings of William Arkle - but strictly speaking, that was a 2014 discovery...

http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/


 

The 'sacred landscape' of England is the opposite of geometric!

We took a rail trip out to Hexham yesterday - a favourite place. The Abbey, in an earlier version built by St Wilfrid during Northumbria's 'golden age' was once the largest building in Europe, north of the Alps.

The views of the River Tyne and its valley, seen from the train window, are evidence of the wonderful strength of beauty that remains, waiting; and it is delightful that the buskers (i.e. street musicians - a melodeon player in one place, and two fiddlers in another) were playing folk music - including this (first) tune:

Anyway, as I travelled out I was reading a collection of John Michell's essays (Writings and rants of a radical traditionalist - recommended by this site's sometime guest blogger John Fitzgerald: Thanks!) - and reflecting on Michell's popularisation of the idea of the sacred landscape of Britain.

But Michell was a 'geomancer' and described the sacred landscape in terms of straight tracks, roads and Ley Lines of energy force - the ancient sites along along such alignments - and the detailed geometric/ astronomically-oriented  diagrams of monuments such as Stonehenge - this kind of thing:

Michell also painted geometric designs, e.g.:

But, I am struck by exactly the opposite!

That the sacred landscape of England - in large and in microcosm is extremely irregular, asymmetric and un-geometric - and this applies to Neolithic/ Bronze Age - Celtic or Anglo Saxon designs, sites, roads etc - I see little in the way of straight lines, sharp points, repeating patterns:

So, although I am pleased that John Michell drew attention to the subject of sacred landscape - I feel he was barking up the wrong tree in discussing it in terms of geometry and numerology.

This would, indeed, be appropriate to somewhere like Ancient Egypt, with its stereotypical obelisks, pyramids, right-angles - sharp edges, smoothed and polished stone - all silhouetted against a plain blue sky...

But England is all mists, rugged rocks, and wavy lines - it was an English painter (Hogarth) who said the line of beauty was a curve - and English literature prizes its array of unique characters (not 'representative' 'types') which fill Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens... Harry Potter.

John Michell was a Christianised (but not actually Christian) Platonist - with a strong element of the Pythagorean number mystic. This is alien to my temperament! - I find it a mystery why anyone would want to 'explain' spiritual beauty with mathematics!

Why would so many people want so much to describe everything as ultimately a matter of geometric shapes, or of 'fractals'!

Yet to regard mathematics as the underlying truth or reality - the archetypal world of 'forms' - is a deep and powerful urge among many, probably most, Western intellectuals since Ancient Greek times. So they see nothing absurd or contrived about covering the British landscape with abstract lines, angles and shapes drawn on maps, and aligned.

Although I reject this approach, I don't have any equally comprehensible and depict-able alternative for the sacred landscape - so me it is a miracle of intuitively sensed but undescribable rightness - like an unique character from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Shakespeare's plays, the 'design' can be shown and felt, but not made into a formula.

A monastic education - John Senior writes

*

Excerpted from The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior (1923-1999) [re-punctuated]:

*

"For the training of the body there is the ascetic life - the habit, the fare, the manual work; and for the soul - the liturgy (the Opus Dei as St Benedict called it), the continuous immersion in a very few texts.

"The Psalter [i.e. Book of Psalms] learned by heart in the first year of the novitiate and finally the whole of the Old and New Testaments in St. Jerome's Vulgate Latin.

"Beside the Bible were the Rule (of St Benedict] and a few select commentaries.

"No single monastery had anything like the bulk of the Patrologia. The monks read very little of their own tradition and still less of the liberal arts.

(...)

"Few in those days read the Greeks at all, or even any classical Latin other than some schoolboy books for learning grammar.

"As soon as Plato was taken up by St Augustine, there was no longer any need for Plato.

"As the children of Israel took vessels of Egyptian gold and silver with them into the wilderness, so Christendom took some of this and that - but not very much. As with Buddha's raft across the Ganges, it would be absurd, once having used the classics to get to St Augustine, to strap them on one's back and continue studying Virgil and Cicero on the dry land of Christendom.

*

"Old GG Coulton was right, I think: they were a narrow, antiliberal lot, if you measure them by the world's standards.

"Even the most learned of them, such as Alcuin, was no Socrates or even a Flaccus, as they jokingly called him; and when you consider the millions of monks in all the monasteries across the Dark Ages for a thousand years from the bitter Western Isles of Britain to the deserts of Egypt, those ages really were dark.

(...)

"[Yet] In what sense is the mind narrow that has not studied so much as become the substance of the Psalms?

"Day after day, hour upon hour, summer, winter, through the watches of the night, humming with a resonating sound that buzzes in the skull and bones, the long, slow-balanced verses and antiphons in the singular, sonorous silence of the Gregorian tones.

"We have confused simplicity with impoverishment and poverty with destitution."

***

John Senior, whose career was mostly as a Classic professor in the University of Kansas, is probably (in two books: The Death of- and then The Restoration of- Christian Culture) the clearest, most eloquent, most rigorous, and most convincing recent expositor of the nature of traditional Roman Catholic Christianity that I have yet encountered.

And yet, for me - at the end of all this - I felt (rather than perceived) something missing from the vision of an ideal full Roman Catholicism: a dryness, an incompleteness.

And this prompted me to keep looking, and to explore Eastern Orthodox Catholicism (mostly via Seraphim Rose), where I felt (rather than perceived) exactly that warmth and wholeness which I had felt was missing from the vision of ideal Roman Catholicism.

*

Nonetheless, John Senior is a marvellous writer, with acute insights into modernity.

 And his point about the benefits of immersion in relatively few texts is one which has always appealed to me - despite the fact that I have read such a lot!

I tend to regard my wide reading as more of a compulsion and a shallow search for distraction, rather than any sign of wisdom.

And I am a great re-reader (as my Tolkien blog demonstrates) - I am only really happy reading a book which I know (even during the first reading) that I will be re-reading; otherwise I feel the time is probably being wasted.

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NOTE ADDED:

I have unfortunately under-sold John Senior in the above, by my excess emphasis on autobiography: his books on Christian culture are very good indeed, and very well worth reading.

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Review of Jeremy Naydler's In the shadow of the machine: the prehistory of the computer and the evolution of consciousness

Published in the current issue of Oxford Magazine – by Bruce G Charlton

Review of: Jeremy Naydler. In the shadow of the machine: the prehistory of the computer and the evolution of consciousness. Temple Lodge Publishing: Forest Row, Sussex, 2018 pp xi, 373.

Oxford residents might have come-across Jeremy Naydler; since he often guides tours of the city and has given lectures to a wide range of local groups over recent decades. He is also a Fellow of the Temenos Academy, and teaches at their London headquarters. Or perhaps you have come-across him looking after flowers and vegetables in the suburbs? Because Naydler’s main lifetime job has been as a gardener.

He read PPE in the nineteen seventies and then pursued scholarly interests independently before completing a PhD in middle age; on the subject of the pyramid texts of Ancient Egypt. Since publishing books on this subject and on Goethe’s science in 1996; Jeremy Naydler has become, in my judgment, one of the most interesting and original living writers in Britain.

Naydler’s central concern is the interaction between human consciousness and human culture; and he is of the opinion (which I share) that changes in human consciousness have been a driving factor in cultural evolution; as well as cultural evolution having affected human consciousness. Hence the subtitle of this book: The prehistory of the computer and the evolution of consciousness.

What makes this book distinctive is that it is a prehistory of computers. In other words, it is about the stepwise change in human thinking and technology that led, over a span of thousands of years, to the situation in the late 20th century in which - suddenly – computers became first possible, then developed with astonishing speed, and then swiftly took-over first the material world and, increasingly, human thinking. For this progression to happen in just three generations from the first electronic computers until today, was possible only because all the necessary pieces were already in-place.

In the Shadow of the Machine is thus a work in the genre History of Ideas, and as such it is exceptionally thorough and carefully argued. The argument is broadly chronological, describing many steps in the development of each significant component necessary for the computers of today. And as well as describing the specifics of the technological changes; these are related to the necessary conceptual change in the people involved, without which the technological progression could not have happened, and would neither have been understood nor implemented.

Naydler starts with some of the most simple of technologies from the oldest societies of which we have record; such as the Ancient Egyptian methods for raising water; or, as another example, medieval clocks and renaissance calculating devices. He explains why there were periods when apparently-valuable technologies were known-about but not used; then quite rapidly, something changed and the technologies became widespread.

But computers are software as well as hardware; so Naydler also lists and discusses the changes in symbolic notation, language, numbers, logic and so forth – and how these were implemented in physical form – via cogs, punched cards, switches etc.

Then there is electricity; without which computers would have remained exceedingly simple and slow. One of the most fascinating themes of this book is the discussion of the mysterious nature of electricity (and electricity turns-out to be much stranger, and much less well understood, than commonly realised); and the way that its ‘reputation’ began as something dark sinister, alien, inhuman – but later took on increasingly positive connotations until it became so pervasive as to be all-but invisible.

In the Shadow of the Machine takes us right up to the early years of modern computers and the threshold of our current era, and concludes with some wise words about the implications of computers for the way we think – and the established and increasing degree to which our own thinking is entrained to being computer-compatible; such that we habitually think like machines, and tend to disregard any thinking that does not conform to this reduced mode.

In sum; this is a book of ancient history that is of crucial importance for the present and future.

The Hieratic Society and Original Participation

Our little local museum has a good section on Ancient Egypt, which I have visited a few times recently. As I stood there yesterday, I suddenly felt a sense of what it was like to live in that kind of society - in which the gods were near and one was immersed in Life, with little sense of being a separate individual.


It was a Hieratic society - a life of Temples, priests, mysteries, formality, glory, ritual, worship and therefore Original Participation - as Owen Barfield termed this type of consciousness.


Then I recognized this as being very similar - in terms of consciousness - to the Eastern Roman,  Byzantine Empire - how that type of Christian society was aimed at the same immersive, absorbed un-individualized participation. Life was laid-on - and the job of each person was to accept, participate, play his assigned part with joyful obedience.


Then I realized how this form of consciousness is past, irretrievable - and not intended to be the final shape of Christianity. Any society which primarily conceptualizes life in terms of obedience and immersive participation is inevitably a society which - to some significant extent - is failing to achieve that distinct individuality of responsibility and perspective which is surely part of the Christian ideal.


Christianity is about personal relationships - not immersive loss of the self; about spiritual development in unique and unprecedented ways, about personal responsibility and choices.


God wants us as friends, not as servants - and we want friends to be individuals not versions of ourself, nor identical 'clones'. The essence of Christ is not, after all, as our King (or Pantocrator - ruler of all) - but as one whose greatest wish is to enable us to rise to his own nature and level.


I do find myself drawn, perhaps nostalgically, towards a child-like immersion in life; but that is not the situation we find ourselves in in this world.


This is not a matter of salvation (there are many, many paths to salvation - Christ made salvation as easy as possible for us) - but of theosis - and a theosis aimed at becoming Sons and Daughters of God - which means (I understand) becoming more like friends than servants; more like adults than children.


God the Father will always be God and our Father, and we will not; however, Jesus Christ is our Brother - and the difference between us is truly vast - but not qualitative. We are of the same 'natural kind' and the ultimate goal of mature spirituality (when we have 'grown-up' and are no longer spiritually child-like) is to live as family and friends - not as Emperor and subjects.


So I think ultimately, in The New Jerusalem - and despite much of the monarchical symbolism of the Bible including Revelations, suitable to early stages of theosis - life will not therefore be Hieratic; but something more and better.

A handy monocular

Looks much like the above

For Christmas I got a neat little monocular - which is basically half of a binoculars - but set-up to look like a stubby telescope about 5"/ 25 cm long; with rotary disc focusing like binoculars.

It cost only about £10, bottom of the range. I'm not sure what is the degree of magnification, since no relevant information is provided - not massive, maybe 12X?

A monocular is good for me because my eyes are significantly-differently short-sighted - and binoculars can't usually compensate, so I end up closing one eye anyway. Whereas a normal telescopic-telescope - of similar price, has a small viewing field and is difficult to focus.

This little device is used during daylight for getting a closer view of wildlife; and at night it provides exactly the degree of magnification and extra light gathering that I need for stargazing. I can see all three stars in Orion's belt in the same view and all the 'seven' sisters of the Pleiades; and many stars too faint to show against the light pollution of the city centre are brought into visibility...

In general, with the monocular, I can probably see in the night sky (albeit only in a small circle) what somebody with perfect vision could see in the deserts of Egypt. If I spent more, I would presumably get something better; but anyway this is a valuable addition to the window sill.

Rudolf Steiner - where is God?

I had a bad migraine day yesterday and was grateful for Dale Brunsvold's audio versions of Steiner to give me an enlightening distraction from the state.

I found much to appreciate in the lectures, which focused on Steiner's intellectual and spiritual history of Man since the time of Ancient Egypt including the work of what he terms the Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses.

These represent the false ideals of losing individually into a primal will-less consciousness and the will towards a consciousness, rationalist, materialism. The Luciferic yearns for the immersive spirituality of childhood or Hunter gatherer animus; the Ahrimanic for science, control, order, mastery. Each has some good, both are ultimately fatal.

Anyway, I found many sharp insights and understandings but also something very important missing. Then I realized it was God who was missing - specifically the recognition of divine providence... of the purpose and phases of history as the product of a personal Creator God.

Everything about Steiner's scheme describes history as unfolding towards a purpose and according to a scheme, and a scheme that is relevant, indeed unavoidable, for every person as an individual. This only makes sense, and carries a moral imperative, if it is a divine scheme - and if the divine scheme comes from a God who has our best interests at heart. If the scheme Just Is, then there is no reason except expediency to embrace it.

I then recognized that this unsaid presence of God, the Christian God, is necessarily implied by Steiner's system - the lack of explicit mention of which is confusing. And it has been profoundly distorting to Steiner's legacy - which has been broken and dispersed and assimilated into mainstream New Age and Leftist political movements.

But if the reader fills in this explanatory gap, and restores God at the head of Steiner's universe - which he personally would have agreed with - things suddenly become considerably clearer and more coherent.

The Book of Mormon as literature: unexamined implications of its authorship

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Excerpted from Joseph Smith: Rough stone rolling, by Richard Lyman Bushman (Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus, Columbia University) - 2005: pages 84-88

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The Book of Mormon is a thousand-year history of the rise and fall of a religious civilization in the Western Hemisphere beginning about 600 BC... A briefer history of a second civilization, beginning at the time of the Tower of Babel and extending till a few hundred years before Christ, is summarized in thirty-five pages near the end...

Contemporaries thought of the book as a "bible," and that may be the best one-word description...

The table of contents has a biblical feel. It lists fifteen books with titles like "The Book of Jacob," "The Book of Mosiah," "The Book of Helaman," and so on through Nephi, Enos, Jarom, Alma, Mormon, Ether, and Moroni, just as the Bible names its divisions after Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and Micah. But unlike the Bible, these books are not divided into histories and prophetic books. History and prophecy are interwoven, sermons and visions mingling with narrative.

The Book of Mormon tells the story of a family founding a civilization. The main story opens in Jerusalem on the eve of the Babylonian captivity. 4 Lehi, one of many prophets foretelling the city's doom, is told to flee the city with his wife and children and one other family. Drawn by the lure of a promised land, they are led into the wilderness of the Arabian peninsula. Like Abraham leaving Ur and Moses departing Egypt, Lehi is told God has a place for them. Lehi's band wanders in the wilderness for eight years (not forty like the children of Israel), until somewhere along the seacoast (seemingly the Arabian Sea) they are told to construct a ship. After a protracted voyage, they reach their promised land. The name America is never used, but readers universally thought Lehi's company had arrived in the Western Hemisphere...

The book explains itself as largely the work of Mormon, a military figure who leads the Nephites, from about 327 to 385 CE, in the twilight of their existence as a nation. Mormon is one of more than a score of powerful personalities to emerge in history. Precociously eminent, he is appointed at fifteen to lead the Nephite armies. (He gives no reason for his elevation except that "notwithstanding I being young was large in stature.") In the same year, "being somewhat of a sober mind," he is "visited of the Lord," making him both prophet and general. From then until the Lamanites cut him down, still fighting in his seventies, Mormon and his people are swept this way and that by the tides of battle...

Mormon undertakes to compile a history... One gets a picture of Mormon surrounded by piles of [inscribed historical] plates, extracting a narrative from the collection, and not completely aware of all there is. At various points while hurrying through the records, he interjects a comment about how much he is leaving out, as if overwhelmed by his abundant sources. Mormon makes no effort to hide his part in constructing the book. The entire Book of Mormon is an elaborate framed tale of Mormon telling about a succession of prophets telling about their encounters with God. Read in the twenty-first century, the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text.

Mormon introduces a large number of characters and places into his saga. Nearly 350 names are listed in the pronunciation guide at the back of modern editions -- Paanchi, Pachus, Pacumeni, Pagag, Pahoran, Palestina, Pathros. Quite out of nowhere, Mormon describes a system of weights and measures in senines, seons, shums, and limnahs, following a numerical system based on eight rather than the conventional ten. He moves the armies, the prophets, and the people about on a landscape, taking time to sketch in the geography of the Nephite nation. Naturally, Mormon the general gives special attention to armaments, military tactics, and battles. Architecture, animals, and trade are dealt with. Although the book is above all a religious history of prophesying, preaching, faithfulness, and apostasy, Mormon evokes an entire world...

A writer in 1841 commented that "it is difficult to imagine a more difficult literary task than to write what may be termed a continuation of the Scriptures." Yet Joseph Smith dictated the bulk of the Book of Mormon from early April to late June 1829. When forays for food, travel from Harmony to Fayette, and applications to printers are deducted, the amount of time available for translating most of the book's 584 pages was less than three months.

**

I have been interested in Mormonism for about six years, since before I converted to Christianity and rejoined my baptismal Church (of England). I have (co-) completed three small research projects on Mormon fertility http://mormonfertility.blogspot.co.uk/ with another ongoing and further planned.

Naturally, just about the first thing I did when I got interested in Mormonism was to try and read The Book of Mormon. It was not at all what I expected, and left me completely bewildered.

Since I knew that missionaries gave out this book to prospective converts, I expected that it would set out the Mormon religion, but it does not. It was mostly (so far as I could tell) what purported to be historical annals - and it was hard to see what this had to do with Mormonism as I understood it.

I put the book aside and looked instead at Doctrine and Covenants - which was much more the kind of thing I expected: a setting-out of the religion in terms of a series of revelations.

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But I have returned to the Book of Mormon from time to time, and now feel a bit clearer about it; or rather, I am now clear that it is qualitatively unlike any other book.

In terms of its literary quality, it is good. Not, of course, in the same league as the Authorized Version of The Bible - but then what is? Nothing approaches anywhere near the AV in terms of non-fiction English prose - but The Book of Mormon is vastly superior to most modern translations of the Bible.

Of course, it is hard to read, and I have not read it all - but then again the Old Testament is hard to read and I have not read it all.

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But The Book of Mormon is a remarkable book, qua book.

What it most resembles in my experience is JRR/ Christopher Tolkien's 1977 The Silmarillion. The BoM presents an extremely intricate and self-consistent world across a large historical timescale presented as Annalistic history in an uncompromizing and unmediated fashion.

Another superficially plausible comparison would be Ossian (1760 onwards) compiled by James Macpherson (probably) from numerous oral sources of song and stories in the Scottish Highlands. This became a foundational text of romanticism and nationalism - with an influence stretching across Europe and the Atlantic, and lasting a couple of generations.

So, considered as a work of subcreative invention, as the depiction of 'a world' - and from an agnostic perspective as to its provenance - The Book of Mormon is of world historical stature - or, at least, it should be thus considered.

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Adding to this fascination is the circumstances of its production - given in great detail by Bushman. It seems clear that The Book of Mormon was produced by Joseph Smith, dictated by him, in a single and seemingly unrevised draft, in the space of just a few months and with no apparent sources.

Joseph Smith dictated the bulk of the Book of Mormon from early April to late June 1829... the amount of time available for translating most of the book's 584 pages was less than three months.

When it is taken into account that Joseph Smith was no Tolkien, nor even a Macpherson - being uneducated and uncultured, having a rather chaotic personality, and with no access to educated and cultured people, or to literary and scholarly resources - this was, to say the least of it, an absolutely amazing, unprecedented, and unrepeated feat.

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The usual ways of dismissing the significance of The Book of Mormon do not remotely hold water; or, at least, if the kind of explanations used to explain-away the Book of Mormon were accepted in mainstream literary history, then nothing would be left standing!

I personally am quite happy to accept that - in some way and at some level - Joseph Smith was genuinely divinely inspired (an inspiration not necessarily complete, and not necessarily without error) - and that of course explains the whole thing.

(I believe that the idea of the Book of Mormon as having been demonically-inspired, is decisively refuted by the subsequent history of the CJCLDS Church.)

But for those who do not acknowledge the reality of divine inspiration as a possibility; the 'case' of The Book of Mormon is, or ought to be, a matter of extreme interest - rather as if The Silmarillion had been serially dictated, off the top of his head, by a semi-literate rustic gardener such as Sam Gamgee.

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How Jesus Christ enabled Heaven (with its exclusion of evil)

The religion of the Ancient Egyptians - which is massively documented - provides a detailed picture of how the world of God's creation was before the work of Jesus Christ. 

Creation was made by the pushing aside of chaos; civilization was like a clearing in the wild forest; and the chaotic forest was always trying to take back the world of religion, agriculture and the domain of the creating Gods. 

Most of the Gods were Good, but the representatives of chaotic evil remained - such as Set (or Seth) who dwelt in the deserts around the fertile and civilized state of Egypt; and Apophis the primal world-serpant who, every night, attacked the ship of the sun, to try and prevent dawn. 

Thus light/ life/ goodness/ order was engaged in a continual and eternal battle to hold-back the chaos/ evil that surrounded on all sides; and which would otherwise return the world to its primal disorder. 

 

This may be taken broadly to represent the situation of divine creation on earth before the work of Jesus. And Jesus's work can be seen as the additional creation of Heaven, as a New Place to be inhabited by resurrected Men who have first been temporarily incarnated onto earth as mortals. The mortal state is that from-which each Man must choose Heaven - or Not.

 

By this understanding, Heaven is - and for the first time - a place that free men can inhabit where evil has been excluded - permanently.

By 'free men; I mean Men who are agents; operating-from their own distinctive divine selves; generating their own thoughts - mini-gods. In other words: In Heaven Men are secondary creators (operating within God's primary creation) - who can fully participate with God on the continuing creation of God's ongoing, expanding world. 

 

Jesus gave Men the possibility of resurrection to eternal life. Resurrection means eternal bodies; and bodies can only be eternal in an eternal environment - which is Heaven. In other words, Heaven in a world without death.

By contrast; this mortal life we know, here on earth, is ruled by chaos (or 'entropy', dis-order). All changes and decays, nothing lasts unchanged; there degeneration and disease are everywhere and death is the inevitable terminus. This mortal world - taken in isolation - is therefore the same as that described by the Ancient Egyptians.

However, since Jesus Christ; we have the chance to opt-into Heaven; which is an everlasting world without evil - without chaos or entropy.  

And at the same time, when resurrected into Heaven, we remain our-selves; indeed we become even more our-selves and able to participate in the ongoing work of God's creation. 

So, our mortal lives on this earth give us all lived experiences of chaos, entropy and evil; and the opportunity to learn from these experiences in order to make a final, irreversible commitment in favour of Good. 

In other words; mortal life on earth is what enables us to understand what is being offered by Jesus: eternal resurrected life in Heaven. And knowing (by contrast and implication) both sides, both possibilities... our free choice may be informed.   

 

My understanding of this new possibility of heaven; is that it is due to the possibility of each Man making a permanent commitment to Goodness, to creation, to the work of God. Because Heaven is composed only of Beings that have made this permanent commitment - then Heaven is a place without evil. 

All the inhabitants of Heaven (Men and others) are on the side of God and creation; and everything they (we) do in Heaven is in-harmony-with God and creation. Thus, In Heaven there is no tendency towards chaos, entropy, evil...

In another description; Heaven is based on the principle of love. The harmonious working of many free agents is possible by their mutual love. It is therefore love which is the principle of cohesion in creation - which 'organises' the work of many free individuals into a coherent, ongoing, creativity. 

 

The 'process' by which any mortal Man from earth was made able to be resurrected-into Heaven was made possible by Jesus Christ; and the 'method' made simple and accessible. Since Jesus; anyone who wants Heaven merely has to 'follow' Jesus, who will lead us through resurrection and into Heaven (a path which he himself has taken) as The Good Shepherd. 

It seems that (here on earth, in this mrtal life) not everyone knows-about Heaven, not everybody wants Heaven; and among those who do want to go onto Heaven, there are some who do not want to follow Jesus, or do not believe Jesus can or will lead us to Heaven. 

But we can trust that God the creator will ensure that everybody will have the fullest chance to know such things sooner or later; and before each needs to choose between a commitment to Heaven - or Not.

How can individuals make a difference?

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The fact that all large modern institutions are thoroughly corrupted by political correctness and secularism (including all major churches) implies that pursuit of The Good is now restricted only to individuals (or small - probably informal - groups) - which in turn leads to a consideration of how individuals can - potentially - 'make a difference'.

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1. There is a 'fake' way in which individuals can be argued to make a difference, and that when an individual is arbitrarily taken-up by a large and powerful interest group and used as a propaganda weapon.

This applies especially to designated victims (real, or contrived - it does not matter much) - of whom Rosa Parks is perhaps the best known example in the USA; although there have been many others throughout the West.

Clearly an individual becoming a tool of establishment power is not really what is meant by an individual 'making a difference'.

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2. Individuals who truly make a difference do so by their example, which changes the lives of many other individuals.

Examples might include the Holy hermits of 'the desert' such as St Anthony of Egypt, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne or St Seraphim of Sarov - people who sought and attained ascetic isolation for many years during which they developed their spirituality to an extremely high level, before returning to the world to teach and inspire.

While of course these figures can be (and are) later used for propaganda purposes (with all the selection and distortion this entails) - they are primarily examples, and individuals who were originally sought-out (rather than promoted) by people recognizing their special intrinsic qualities and responding to word-of-mouth outside of 'official channels'.

Other examples can be found in less perfectly-achieved  forms, and also among types of non-religious 'creative genius' - albeit many/ most creative geniuses in the arts and sciences were bad examples in many/ most ways other-than their specific creative gifts.

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So, yes indeed, individuals can 'make a difference' - and the real examples of individuals making a difference are usually quite easy to distinguish from the fake - at least in the early stages of their making a difference.

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Of course, there are also individuals who make a difference-for-the-worse - and there are plenty of these, and some have made a truly enormous difference for the worse: quantitatively far-outstripping and of the measurable effects of Saints, and operating with extraordinary rapidity.

But while building is slow and incremental, destruction is swift and facile - evil geniuses are pushing at an open door.

One sure way to discern the difference between real/ good and fake/ evil individuals-of-influence, is that the real and good individuals who make a difference only do so after many years of disciplined struggle. This is necessary - albeit not sufficient.

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As a rule; any individual who makes a large and rapid difference without prior years of struggle is either a fake tool-of-propaganda or else 'demonically-inspired'.


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What is "The West" for? From William Wildblood

Any civilisation worth that name must be organised around spiritual principles. 

From ancient Egypt to Greece to India, and even Rome when it began, God or the gods were at the centre of life, formed the culture and gave meaning to the civilisation. 

For the West that organising principle was Christianity which was the greatest expression of spiritual understanding there has been. In fact, all the other expressions might be said to be from the outside looking in. 

Only Christianity really comes from the inside. That, of course, is the meaning of revelation. Christianity or, better put, Christ is the greatest revelation of and from the spiritual world. 

There really is no doubt about this. Christ is the only religious personality utterly without flaw or limitation. 

The West existed for the expression of Christianity. 

That is what gave it its greatness. Not uniquely for there were many tributaries but the main river into which all these tributaries fed was Christianity. 

Some people think the West is defined by science and has reached its greatest state following that pursuit but even science arose in a Christian context with natural philosophers seeking to understand God's creation. And whether it has reached its apogee pursuing science or sunk to a spiritual nadir is a question worth pondering. 

When the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself.

From William Wildblood's blog - Read the whole thing.

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In this post, William W encapsulates the nature of our current situation. The West has declined profoundly, and is dying before our eyes and in real time. 

And the West has become, overall and by motivation, the main force for evil in the world today. 

Why? In a nutshell; because the West exists for the expression of Christianity, and when the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself. 

Consequently, our rapid and comprehensive decline is both inevitable and necessary - necessary because without its reason for existence, the West has become a dreadful monster; destroying the world by striving to impose its suicidal "Western values" everywhere, even as it consumes itself through self-hatred. 

For the West now, as always and at root, it is all about Christianity. Only in Jesus Christ can there be valid and sufficient answers; and there can be no good excuses for avoiding this topic, no matter how un-promising it seems. 

The question is not whether or not Christianity, but yes Christianity and then to discover and create what Christianity truly means for us personally, here and now. 

Avoiding the catastrophic errors of the past: finding the means of an experienced living faith, a strong faith - the possibility of a Christian life among pervasive corruption. 

This is not idle speculation: we must have an answer - for our-selves if not for our society. 

Otherwise, the default continues to be willed-annihilation, on a global scale. 

Gods under the ground, in the sky, in consciousness...

There are many prehistoric monuments in England - the earliest seem to be under the ground - such as West Kennet Long Barrow of some five and half thousand years ago, perhaps the centre of the religious landscape of that time...

While somewhat later are the more famous stone circles such as Avebury (near to West Kennet, and part of the same 'ritual landscape')

In general, through human development it has become more and more difficult to contact the divine. And this may be related to the assumed whereabouts of the divine.

Probably (there are no records), the earliest humans lived always 'in' the divine world - there was no separation between divine and mundane. Later, among the recorded simple hunter gatherers - contact with gods and spirits was more difficult; only attainable intermittently by a minority of specialist 'shamans' - who had to undergo some training, or else learn to use altered conscious states.

I would guess that the next stage - after the development of agriculture, and corresponding to the early Neolithic as at West Kennet - involved a professional priesthood, each of whom would experience a prolonged initiation. And also sensory deprivation and isolation - hence the underground sacred places.

(The Pyramids of Ancient Egypt are likely a highly developed version of this - the inside of the pyramid being the sacred space.) 

Under-ground was also the place of the divine - corresponding to the intuition that the divine was 'within' everyone and every-thing.

The monument Seahenge had an upside-down oak tree at its centre - roots above the surface, trunk and branches projecting deep into the earth - perhaps linking the divine underworld with this mundane surface world...

In the later neolithic, and into the bronze age - it seems likely that the contact with the divine became even more difficult - such that the gods were no longer experienced 'inside' - but in the sky, far away, imperceptible - and only indirectly and abstractly contactable by such methods as divination.

Hence the great stone circles (and pyramidal 'mounds' such as Silbury) were 'sky temples' - astronomically-shaped and aligned. I also assume that there was a supreme single god, by this time (henotheism); corresponding to centralised priestly government. 'Heaven' also means sky.

(The gods-under-ground, and god-in-the-sky temples seem to have co-existed for a long time - perhaps catering to different types of person; but the distinct impression is that the sky temples to the supreme god had the highest status, at least among the ruling group - since the greatest efforts were put into these structures.)

By this point, the kind of knowledge-based, abstract, priest-led religion was established which survived (gradually changing, becoming more theoretical and less direct) right through to the Reformation, and (somewhat modified) into modernity - after which it declined.

Until, from the advent of modernity (?1500s) increasing up-to nowadays, most people cannot contact the divine at all, under any circumstances - and deny its reality.

The idea of Romantic Christianity is that - starting with a few people from about the middle 1750s, and increasing, modern people are implicitly aware of the divine in a different, and individual, way; but which is not recognised as divine contact.

This is the process of conscious intuition, which I have often tried to describe on this blog. My understanding is that it happens to many (or most) people - but that nearly-always its validity is denied, and it implications ignored.

The modern sacred space is each Man's consciousness.

Note: If you are interested by the above line of argument, although not the specifics, you can find it superbly explored in Jeremy Naydler's The Future of the Ancient World, 2009.