Continued from page 1
By those wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood Themselves obedient, Knowing not evil or good.
A decadence will descend, by perpetual moral improvement, upon a community which may seem like some woman of New York or Paris who has renounced her rouge pot to lose her figure and grow coars of skin and dull of brain, feeding her calves and babies somewhere on edge of wilderness. The decadence of Greco-Roman world with its violent soldiers and its mahogany dark young athletes was as great, but that suggested bubbles of life turned into marbles, whereas what awaits us, being democratic and primary, may suggest bubbles in a frozen pond—mathematical Babylonian starlight.
When new era comes bringing its stream of irrational force it will, as did Christianity, find its philosophy already impressed upon minority who have, true to phase, turned away at last gyre from Physical Primary. And it must awake into life, not Dürer’s, nor Blake’s, nor Milton’s human form divine—nor yet Nietzsche’s superman, nor Patmore’s catholic, boasting “a tongue that’s dead”—the brood of Sistine Chapel—but organic groups, covens of physical or intellectual kin melted out of frozen mass. I imagine new races, as it were, seeking domination, a world resembling but for its immensity that of Greek tribes—each with its own Daimon or ancestral hero—the brood of Leda, War and Love; history grown symbolic, biography changed into myth. Above all I imagine everywhere opposites, no mere alternation between nothing and something like Christian brute and ascetic, but true opposites, each living other’s death, dying other’s life.
It is said that primary impulse “creates event” but that antithetical “follows it” and by this I understand that Second Fountain will arise after a long preparation and as it were out of very heart of human knowledge, and seem when it comes no interruption but a climax. It is possible that ever increasing separation from community as a whole of cultivated classes, their increasing certainty, and that falling in two of human mind which I have seen in certain works of art is preparation. During period said to commence in 1927, with 11th gyre, must arise a form of philosophy, which will become religious and ethical in 12th gyre and be in all things opposite of that vast plaster Herculean image, final primary thought. It will be concrete in expression, establish itself by immediate experience, seek no general agreement, make little of God or any exterior unity, and it will call that good which a man can contemplate himself as doing always and no other man doing at all. It will make a cardinal truth of man’s immortality that its virtue may not lack sanction, and of soul’s re-embodiment that it may restore to virtue that long preparation none can give and hold death an interruption. The supreme experience, Plotinus’ ecstasy, ecstasy of Saint, will recede, for men—finding it difficult—substituted dogma and idol, abstractions of all sorts, things beyond experience; and men may be long content with those more trivial supernatural benedictions as when Athena took Achilles by his yellow hair. Men will no longer separate idea of God from that of human genius, human productivity in all its forms.
Unlike Christianity which had for its first Roman teachers cobblers and weavers, this thought must find expression among those that are most subtle, most rich in memory; that Gainsborough face floats up; among learned—every sort of learning—among rich—every sort of riches—and best of those that express it will be given power, less because of that they promise than of that they seem and are. This much can be thought because it is reversal of what we know, but those kindreds once formed must obey irrational force and so create hitherto unknown experience, or that which is incredible.
Though it cannot interrupt intellectual stream—being born from it and moving within it—it may grow a fanaticism and a terror, and at first outsetting oppress ignorant—even innocent—as Christianity oppressed wise, seeing that day is far off when two halves of man can define each its own unity in other as in a mirror, Sun in Moon, Moon in Sun, and so escape out of Wheel.” (1)
When he says ‘the Christian brute and ascetic’ is he making reference to family of stoic philosophers or Bruttii including Admiral who accompanied Julius Caesar when they met Keltic fleet and invaded what is called Britain today after them? This same family includes another Brutus we learned about from another Hermetic named Shakespeare. That family was still standing up for Keltic egalitarianism when it killed Julius Caesar or when Rome was founded. Did he know history of Milesian Stuarts from before various influxes to Emerald Isles as they returned many millennia after leaving due to glacial effects? There is so much code in this prose and poetry. The sun and moon surely make a wheel and this ancient knowledge probably pre-exists coming of white men through whatever adept mutation or happenstance that allowed it. I implore reader to spend a lot of time with this one sentence—“This much can be thought because it is reversal of what we know, but those kindreds once formed must obey irrational force and so create hitherto unknown experience, or that which is incredible.”
Guest expert at World-Mysteries.com Columnist at The ES Press Magazine Author of Diverse Druids