Initial Recognitions and Core Story

This article will no doubt perplex some of our readership and people that share our dispositions, but anyone with a higher orientation towards spiritual principles sees the sacred in all things, and, to think otherwise, is merely reflective of the profane point of view, which is really a privation of a fully realized metaphysical point of view. This aside, the story of The Sandlot has much to show us and allow us to reflect on its esoteric dimension. Whether or not these elements were intentional or unintentional by the writers and makers of the film is completely secondary to the universal aspects that are within.

The story takes place in the San Fernando Valley of California (though, oddly enough, filmed in Utah) in the summer of the year 1962, in the tail end of post-war optimism and so-called “Age of Affluence”. In this landscape of American suburbia, the main character of Scotty Smalls moves in towards the end of the school year, without much ability to make friends, which is exacerbated by his rationalistic and bookish tendencies that hamper his ability to make personal connections with others. His unathletic tendencies prevent him from having the confidence to even catch a baseball, let alone throw one. Smalls also has a tenuous relationship with his step-father, Bill, who loves baseball, but the lack of shared common ground maintains their distance, resulting in a very awkward, and painful, game of catch.

This is where the movie shifts and centers around Smalls relationship with the ring-leader of the Sandlot, Benjamin (Benny) Rodriguez. Benny invites Smalls out to the field, which Smalls tentatively accepts, and, after some relative embarrassment, coaching, and a well-hit baseball by Benny, Smalls comes to be accepted into the group, despite his lack of knowledge about the game, as well as not knowing of the famous Babe Ruth. The other characters of Hamilton (Ham), Michael (Squints) Palladorus, Kenny DeNunez, Bertram Grover Weeks, as well as Timmy and Tommy Timmons provide important and supporting roles in the group dynamic as well, and will be mentioned as necessary.

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the sandlot past the outfield, Mr. Mertle’s junkyard looms with the dangerous and elusive Beast — a dog so large that is rumored to have killed and eaten robbers, as well as children — which is just on the outside of the game, adding a layer of mystery and danger that will be explored in greater detail later. The Beast not only, supposedly, consumes children but mainly baseballs, so any ball on the other side is, naturally, assumed to be lost for good.

Naturally, hijinks ensue in a relatively standard fare of a film centered around coming-of-age mores, and there are many events of note. There’s when Squints, aged 12, fakes drowning at the public pool to have the older lifeguard, Wendy Peffercorn, aged 16, to save him so that he can steal a kiss from her, much to her ire and chagrin. There’s plenty of baseball games in between during the day, and even a memorable game on July 4th under a slew of fireworks illuminating the night sky. The Sandlot gang win a challenge game against the local Little League team, putting the more official “high and mighty” boys in their place, which is followed by a rather embarrassing celebration at the local fair when Bertram gives all the boys chewing tobacco to enjoy on the “tilt-a-whirl” style carnival ride — without a spit cup, mind you, causing them to swallow the tobacco juice — causing them all to throw up on themselves and others in the vicinity of the ride.

This is where we will leave our summary for now, for we must relay the significance of the culmination on the film towards the end of our exposition, which first requires an expansion on important esoteric factors about the movie worthy of consideration for our purposes, as well as to draw a fuller picture of all the elements at play within.

Freemasonry — America — Baseball

Since this is a quintessentially American film, and Baseball is America’s pastime sport, it should be of note that America, in and of itself, was not only founded by prominent Freemasons, of which George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin participated, just to name a few — as well as many others that came after like Albert Pike being of note — but another prominent American Freemason, by the name Alexander Joy Cartwright, was chiefly responsible for formalizing the contemporary structure and rules of modern day baseball. As a result, baseball as a sport heavily borrows from Freemasonic symbolism, imagery, and overall influence. Many prominent Freemasons also came to be major baseball players in the early days of the sport, which is only natural considering this occurred in America, where the extent of Freemasonic influence has already been stated.

Let us say, first and foremost, that there is indeed an esoteric and initiatic character involved in Freemasonry, given that it was founded as a result of the craft initiation of masonry, i.e. “operative masonry”, and what Freemasonry is now is not only “speculative masonry” but also a poor reflection of a more fully realized esoteric organization that existed in earlier time periods. Rene Guenon thought as much when he published his articles that would be compiled into his Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage (a great resource for a more full exposition), as well as being part Freemasonic circles and even founding a Lodge in France by the name Le Grande Triade which still exists today.

The key reason as to why Freemasonry, in today’s day and age, becomes suspect in various discussions and circles is due to the fact that various anti-Traditional influences were absorbed by the Freemasons of various time periods. When the Knights Templar, another initiatic and secret esoteric organization, was outlawed in 1307, much of their membership and influences found a new home in the Freemasons, and the same could be said for the Illuminati, which were disbanded towards the end of the 18th century and also found refuge within the Freemasons. As such, certain aspects of “New World Order” agendas from the latter, as well as some concerning practices from the former, would come to bear out in Freemason’s moving away from their more so higher intentions towards spiritual realization and properly oriented initiatic transmission. This in tandem with the foundation of the English Rite, as opposed to the Scottish Rite, in 1717 would lead to a further falling away from the original principles of both earlier speculative and operative masonry initiation.

Regardless, Freemasonic symbolism is indeed present within baseball. Whether it be with its focus on 3’s, with three major tiers of initiation being formalized into 33 degrees, being evident in the 3 strikes and 3 outs, as well as the 9 innings, with 3 x 3 = 9 (the number 9 was also significant to Dante with regards to his esoteric dimension). The symbol of the diamond is also central to Freemasonry, with their symbol being the intersection of the Builder’s Square and the Compass forming a diamond, both of which being tools of the trade of masonry, with the diamond symbolic of the realization, or crystallization, of higher spiritual states, very similar to the Vajra of Vajrayana Buddhism, with the Vajra being both diamond and lightning, symbolic of divine authority and power.

To go a step further, everything from home plate outward, from the perspective of the umpire, goes outward in the shape of an open triangle, the triangle being of a particularly great significance in Freemasonic symbolism, with the head of the triangle being reflective of the outward emanations from the so-called Grand Architect of All, which is God Himself. The third part of the triangle is missing, similar to the absence of Hiram Abiff, as the legend goes, with three grand architects being needed to transmit the three key initiatic degrees, supporting each other and manifesting the communication of the Tradition.

In the context of the film, these esoteric aspects hold little importance on its narrative. However, architecture implies structure, and structure implies order, and order can indeed be imposed by the act of the game. The game of baseball itself, a a mirror of an ordering principle — just as anything of a divine origin is indicative of order, structure and hierarchy — binds and orients its participants together through the act of sport, just as baseball was the binding principle for the boys of the Sandlot. Further considerations on the significance of sport will be explored later, but the game of sport is not the only “tie that binds” under consideration here.

Chivalry, the Lofty Goal, and Transgressional Lows

The character of Squints and his love for Wendy Peffercorn, though somewhat off-putting to more modern sentiments, has some interesting aspects for our considerations as well. First one must note the age difference between them, with Wendy being 4 years (at least) Squints senior, as well as the fact that Squints himself is on the cusp of manhood, not quite a boy and not quite a man either.

This film centers upon various rites of passage from boyhood into transmuting oneself into a higher state of what can be reflective of a man ought to be. Does the movie actually accomplish the realization of the truly noble spirit of man from a Traditional age? — No. Still, the echoes of what manhood is and ought to be made manifest in more recent ages point to the existence of more fully realized states and inner orientations that existed in forms of man that were closer to the Principle of manifestation in earlier ages.

With regards to the Chivalric Tradition, the longing for the maiden fair, secluded and lofty in her tower, is a key archetype in the Western Medieval world, symbolic of the Divine Feminine, either to be understood as Wisdom (i.e. Sophia), the Cardinal Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity (Love), or even like in Kabbalah as for the feeling of the Creator, Shekinah, symbolized by a beautiful woman in radiant splendor. Love can be a transfiguring influence towards spiritual realization and higher states, and this initiatic disposition is best shown in detail via Julius Evola’s Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex for a fuller treatment for those interested. Similar dispositions were expressed by Dante, especially via his participation in the Fedeli d’Amore, another initiatic group of great import with ties to the Rosicrucians, being of the Rose Cross and extending from Christian Rosenkreuz, with the rose being symbolic of the heart in the West, and the heart being the seat of the intellect and of the supra-human principle.

All this taken into consideration, Wendy Peffercorn in her ruby red lipstick, hair tie and swimsuit, sitting atop a high lifeguard tower, aloof and unapproachable, with her shades obscuring her eyes — the window to the soul — from sight, such an image conjures such esoteric sensibilities to the forefront with regards to the chivalric ideal. Squints, of course, in the context of the film, desires after that which is lofty and higher, and, after some peril, achieves but a glimpse. Although, flashing forward to the end of the film, its revealed that Squints marries Wendy Peffercorn and has 9 children with her, the number 9 not being beyond our notice, the significance thereof as stated above, though I think the choice on part of the writers was more than likely subconscious in this regard.

As revealed in the above scene, the unfortunate element is the nature of transgression within the film, which is only eventual that boys will push the boundaries of what is acceptable. This comes down, to a certain degree, to the modern focus on individuation, borne from humanist principles of the current age, especially in the want to “stand out” or “set oneself apart” from others. The other side of this coin of transgression is to bring forth the will towards what it is that one desires, though not all desires are of a higher orientation, of course.

Part of this element of transgression is evident not only in the scene at the pool but also in the scene with the baseball game against the Little League team. Though the prowess and skill of the Sandlot gang is greater, they also use psychological warfare against the other boys, both insulting them and insinuating suggestive things about their family members, which is, once again, what most boys do. Its no coincidence that this air of transgression is continued in the scene afterward when Bertram gives the other boys chewing tobacco at the fair, which has a distinct carnival-like atmosphere.

The term carnival, derived from the Latin carne vale meaning “farewell to meat”, is reflective of feasting, excess, and relative revelry, though usually in the context in preparation for Lenten season but can also be emblematic of a seasonal decadence that happens in the change of seasons, with larger degrees of excitability taking place in the summer time and the greater heat inflaming the passions. Given the irrationality of the passions, it will naturally bring forth a more chaotic and tenebrous character of thoughts and actions that usually run counter to our higher nature, which can lead to a relative inversion of roles in which children can have supremacy over adults, in which Halloween is a prime example as well.

These thematic elements of the passions, transgression and inversion bearing out in vice bear out in the chewing tobacco, culminating in the scene with the vomiting off of the tilt-a-whirl while the song “Tequila” plays in the background. It reminds one of when St. Augustine in his Confessions relayed how he and some other boys had stolen into a pear orchard to steal the fruit, all to destroy it and feed it to pigs, all for the thrill of the transgression itself. Do note that St. Augustine relayed that he would never have done it if he were alone, revealing the nature of group dynamics predisposing one to vice, because most men would agree that they would do some things “with the boys” that they would never do otherwise.

Omens, Dreams, and Slaying the Dragon

After the revelry mentioned above, the step-father of Smalls goes on a business trip out of town and names him the “man of the house”, a title of relative renown, especially in earlier times. Smalls, of course, quickly squanders such responsibility in the most embarrassing fashion soon to come, but a great event intervenes to lead him to this decision.

One must note that there are always signs of Divine Providence all around us, but one only need the eyes and the intellect (spirit) to see them. Certain events may be portents of greater things to come, but such portents can also be reflective of greater dangers as well. Not too long after Smalls’ step-father goes out of town, Benny hits a baseball at the Sandlot so hard that the cover of the baseball is removed, revealing the inner part, the so-called “guts”, of the ball for all to see.

The husk of a seed, just as the outer cover of a baseball, can be relegated to that which is exoteric or simply the “outer layer” of that which is manifest, whereas the kernel itself is that which is inner or, rather, esoteric, given that it is hidden and not manifest. To bring forth that which is hidden to the light can be recognized as the revealing and realization of something greater, whether it be of truth itself or of higher states of being. So, the removal of the cover of the baseball is analogous to such symbolism.

This event in and of itself is the impetus that drives the Sandlot gang to demand another ball, since it seems that 99 cents USD in 1962 ($10.71 c. 2026) was hard to come by for the average pre-teen back then. Smalls, naturally, chooses to take the prized ball of his step-father’s signed by the legendary Babe Ruth (Smalls still not knowing the significance of who that is) and brings it out to play, all for him to subsequently knock it over the fence to The Beast on the other side.

What follows is a plot to get the ball back, before Smalls’ step-father returns, through various methods of cunning and subterfuge, to retrieve the ball unbeknownst to the beast without physically going over. Just like how logic and reason are entirely of a limited mode of being, just are their efforts to retrieve the ball from the Beast, especially since nothing works. Whether its a complex system of vacuums, using Yeah Yeah as a human retriever and lowering him down, or by using Smalls’ erector set to create a catapult to launch it over, all methods are foiled effortlessly by The Beast, which, as is important to note, is shown in an exaggerated fashion through the use of puppetry, making it seem larger, and more monstrous, than life — they’re still viewing things with the eyes and minds of children, which, like humanity compared to God, are but little in the face of greater reality. Something of a greater order is required to be able to best The Beast, just as that which is truly noble and higher is required to slay the dragon, either in a temporal or in an inner sense within oneself.

This leads to Benny having a dream about Babe Ruth coming to him to give him advice. It’s analogous to the communion of Saints coming down from the Church Triumphant (though, in the film, in a very limited and secular cosmology) to bequeath a teaching or revelation upon us here in the Church Militant, which is similar in some ways to an initiatic dream leading to a change of states. This gives Benny the resolve to recognize that he must go over the fence and test his courage to achieve that which is truly great. As Babe Ruth tells Benny in the film:

“Everybody gets one chance to do something great. Most people never take the chance, either because they're too scared, or they don't recognize it when it spits on their shoes. This is your big chance and you shouldn't let it go by.”

With regards to greatness of a spiritual disposition, one has to not only aspire to such heights but to also have the will to act in accordance with that which of the greatest good. Only then can one achieve the heights of the supernal and eternal. Babe Ruth finishes his discussion with Benny, retreating back from whence he came to say thus:

“Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Follow your heart, kid, and you'll never go wrong"

That which is merely heroic is subject to a man of action, a lesser mode in the context of higher states, but that which is legend exists eternally in blessedness. As should already be obvious, with the heart as the seat of the intellect, if one does indeed follow their heart, one is in accordance with the Supreme Intellect, which is, of course, infallible.

The next day, Benny summons the other Sandlot boys together to witness him go over the fence and “pickle the Beast”, to conquer it and get the ball back with his own chivalric might. Benny even goes so far as to put on a pair of PF Flyers, putting his old pair in the shoebox in the exchange, almost like a burial of sorts for the old Benny, to let go of that which came before and achieve a new self. This in itself is analogous to an initiatic rite of mortification, similar to the famous aphorism:

"If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.”

Benny hops the fence and sees the Beast with new eyes. The Beast is no longer the exaggerated puppet version, but it is simply a dog, albeit a large and imposing one. Benny grabs the ball and hops back over the fence, but the trial is not over. Instead, the Beast chases him around town in chaotic and comedic fashion, all for Benny and the rest of the Sandlot gang to come back to where the chase all started, with Benny returning to the den of the Beast in a desperate attempt to return the dog to whence it came. As such, the Beast charges through the fence, all for it to be destabilized and fall on the Beast itself.

In an act of compassion, Smalls compels Benny to lift to fence and help the hurt animal, which Benny begrudgingly complies. With the Beast freed, it becomes friendly and, pacified, reveals to the boys a treasure trove of lost baseballs, which prompts the comment from Benny:

“Now we can play forever!”

All of this to come and find out that Mr. Mertle is not the “meanest man that ever lived” as Squints claimed, but is blind, as well as a former major league baseball player and former contemporary of “the Babe” himself. Mr. Mertle even trades Smalls’ step-father’s chewed up Babe Ruth ball for one signed by all of the 1927 Yankees Team, Babe Ruth included. As such, a friendship forms, an invaluable one for both Benny and Smalls assuredly, providing much perspective and knowledge for their futures, as will be discussed shortly.

The Beast, as it turns out, is actually named Hercules, the significance of the name not being apparent to the boys, as related towards the end of the film, but to those with a Traditional disposition, all the pieces come to align in spectacular fashion. Heracles, the heroic ideal that achieves blessedness through his various trials of strength — what could be more fitting than this? Just as Heracles conquered the Hydra, just as Gilgamesh and Enkidu conquered the Bull of Heaven, Benny conquered the Beast and achieved his own greatness. One must slay the dragon within as well as without to truly conquer the lesser and bestial nature of oneself and the world, only then does one achieve the True Kingdom Eternal.

Closing Thoughts

Even if the concept of sport is a lesser orientation to the truly heroic and transfiguring nature of combat within the warrior/kshatriya disposition, it is still an echo of that ethos in the current age, despite all its limitations. War, of course, has lost much of its higher nature due to technological brutalism and weaponization of the masses, to borrow from Evola’s recognitions, so sport comes as a compensatory fill-in, for better or worse.

The rest of the boys scarcely achieved the greater heights regardless. Squints, of course, marries Wendy Peffercorn, which suits him just fine, assuredly. Timmy and Tommy Timmins become contractors, Yeah Yeah goes to military school and becomes a high ranking officer, Ham goes on to become a wrestler, Bertram gets into the 60’s counterculture and is lost to the winds, and DeNunez goes into the minor leagues and then settles upon an everyday family life. Meanwhile, Smalls becomes a sports commentator for Major League Baseball, and Benny plays in that very same league and is a master of the craft. The film ends triumphantly in a sentimentalist nostalgia, appreciating the oddly poignant way in which life works out, almost as if by design.

The story of The Sandlot can indeed be viewed purely in its outer elements, and it has been a cultural mainstay for the last 30 plus years on its merits as a result. Still, there is rich symbology and deeper esoteric elements brimming underneath the surface for those willing to delve into the ethos of a Man of Tradition. The same could be said for many other pieces of media, as we have done so with other works as well (see our Esotericism of Spirited Away Pt. 1 and Pt. 2, as well as our Esotericism of Coraline). We hope that these reflections have proven valuable and thought provoking, for both those that are familiar with the film, or for those that might come to watch it with an open mind. Always remember: one might be surprised in what they find in unexpected places, but not if one would look with a higher perspective.

“Out of the ground the Lord God made grow every tree that was delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” [Genesis 2:9]

“Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” [Matthew 7:19]

Traditional Trees — Spiritual Poles — Polar Shifts

That which is an operant and alive Traditional form in the world must be understood symbolically as a tree. A Tradition, just like a tree, is a living thing, which must be maintained, cultivated, and made to feed the generations of people who subsist off of and find shelter in and with that tree. The fruits of that tree must be understood as spiritual fruits, which are the product of that tree (Tradition) and are reflective of its quality. Bear in mind, however, that not all trees are equal with regards to their quality, and what started out as a good tree could turn foul as time goes on, so the same it is with different Traditional forms. The greater context of Matthew 7:19, as seen above, should be taken in reference to Christ’s words when he says thus:

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit.” [Matthew 7:15-18]

There are problems in each Tradition just as there are problems in different nations of people or different countries. Different impulses, from past to present, of an anti-Traditional character, which secular/modern impulses can definitely qualify as such, actively poison the trees of each Tradition and make it bear out bad fruits, i.e. a degenerated form of spiritual practice that does not edify or maintain the Tradition and the people that subsist off of that form.

Before there were the multitude of Traditional forms through the ages, especially during the Iron Age, i.e. Kali Yuga, there is what is properly called the Primordial Tradition, that which is indicative of the Tree of Life, that of emanation of Sephirot, in which man was in mystical unity with God in the first cosmic age at man’s conception. The cause of this Fall from grace was, naturally, as a result of eating fruit of a different tree within the Edenic Garden, that of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree, opposed to the Tree of Life, is that of a dualistic separation from God in principle, compared to a monistic and unitive participating in God’s will and essence. As a result of the freedom of the will, man was allowed to transgress, because it is not truly love, or consequently love of God, if it is forced or coerced. Still, just because one can does not mean one should, and the same comes to our relationship with God in our opportunity to stray from His Will.

As a result, man, in his fallen state, became thrust into exile upon the earth and various other Traditional poles, or spiritual centers, became manifest through time through God’s agency and judgement. Naturally, these spiritual poles manifest and recede and new Traditional, or religious, forms are revealed at different places and times. Everywhere God leaves a witness, and every people, insofar as it is Traditional, have a measure of divine reality. Even though there is a Universality and Transcendent Unity of Traditions, this does not mean all Traditional forms are equal, nor does it imply that certain Traditional forms were extinguished unjustly, for this is in accordance with Divine Law and the Providence of manifestation, with respect to infinite possibility and absolutivity of Cosmic Order.

To explore how these considerations bear out in practice, we must look at the spiritual history of mankind to its most remote origins of what is knowable with certainty and see the progression by which Divine Favor is transferred and Traditions revealed in accordance with these principles. As different peoples stray away from the fullness of Tradition, the trees that do not bear fruit are indeed cut down and cast into the fire to be consumed and sublimated to bear out the seeds of a new tree, or form, that will bear fruit.

Golden Primordial — Silver Hyperborean — Bronze Atlantean: Obscure History

What humanity looked like before the Great Fall during the Golden Age is vague, in terms of perception, and a question of great debate for many. The form of such a manifestation, given the considerations of the current age, are relatively unimportant (in the context of those directed towards salvation at this terminal phase of the final age), for the essence of that primordial humanity is of greater consideration and importance than any focus unduly relegated towards understanding its concrete manifestation. When man was in mystical unity with God, man was in his proper state and engaging in his proper function, blessed and perfected in form and focusing his endeavors on cultivating the earth, in accordance with God’s wishes and Great Plan. Some consider man to have been of a celestial nature in his initial origins and only became more so terrestrial, inhabiting a more gross and less subtle body of flesh, as a result of the fall, the idea of which is latent in Egyptian Hermeticism when referring to going through life in exile and having bodies as “tents”, similar to the Christian precept of being pilgrims in this world, waiting to return back to the Celestial Kingdom of the world to come.

Regardless, it was the serpent in the Garden, understood as Satan, or Lucifer or Iblis, in open revolt against God and refusing to serve humanity, whom instead decided to tempt and pull humanity towards perdition and irrationality by eating of the lesser tree, divorcing the whole of humanity from God’s will, out of deep spiritual pride to think they were separate from God, and, as such, became separate from Him.

As a result of this departure, man fell from this unity and moved toward the Silver Age of humanity, also known as Hyperborean spirituality, which was but a reflection of the Primordial Tradition, just as the moon is the reflection of the sun, which is is why it is called the Silver Age, just as Silver is but a reflection of the Golden element. Conversely, that which is Solar and Golden reflects an active and masculine character, just as that which is Lunar and Silver reflects a passive/receptive and feminine character, manifesting the relationship of manifestation between essence and substance, yang/yin, quality and quantity, and so on.

Before going further, we must consider as to why this Silver Age is directed by that which is called “Hyperborean” and what the character of this word implies. The word “Hyperborean” directly translates to “Northernmost land”, with hyper- meaning “highest”, in the context of “upper” and “excessive”, whereas “-borea” reflects the Greek Traditions conception of the North Wind, coming from above to below. As such, North, taken in its symbolical context, is reflective of emanation, which is best understood by that which is “Hyperborean man” being a spiritual age of man that came from above to below through emanation, understood with respect to the initial fall in spirituality. Given that this term Hyperborean extends from a Tradition in our current Iron Age, especially given the words of Hesiod in his Works and Days with his “men of iron”, that which is Hyperborean is greater than any Traditional quality that what is manifest within our current age, since we are further removed from the principial source in the downward tendency of cosmic manifestation.

What this Hyperborean and Silver Age spirituality looked like exactly is quite remote from our understanding, for reasons we shall expand on later in terms of chronological dating, but this would take us too far afield. Regardless, there was a further fall of this spirituality from its solar and masculine element, moving more so towards what could be called “feminine” spirituality, either through a greater veneration towards substance, passivity, form, or the feminine archetype, or even a predominance of focus on that which is “of the earth” or “of the flesh” than that which is “of heaven” or “of the spirit”.

This understanding of departure is either latent, or explicit, dependent upon one’s spiritual discernment, in the Book of Genesis, which reads as follows:

“The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.” [Genesis 6:4]

First there are the “sons of God”, which must be understood as men of the spirit, who were the repositors of the Primordial Tradition during the Silver Age after the Fall, whereas the “daughters of human beings” (also written as “daughters of men”) are people of the world or flesh, or best understood as people of the “terrestrial city”, as opposed to the “sons of God” that are aligned to the “celestial city”, as per St. Augustine in his City of God (Book XV, Ch. 23). Those of the “terrestrial city” should be understood as lesser than those of the “celestial city”, because, as one ought to remember in Genesis, it was Cain, whom killed his brother Abel, whom founded the first city, named as the land of Nod, or the land of “wandering”, which should be understood in the context of the Hebrew term “galut”, which, of course, is “exile”, both from the celestial city and from the Edenic paradise (which may as well be understood as the same thing, spiritually speaking).

One should also note that it is Abel that is symbolic of higher spirituality, with his pastoral nomadism and sacrifice of meat being more favored in the eyes of God, over the sacrifice of the lower spirituality shown in the practice of sedentary farming and sacrifice of vegetables given by Cain. While the former is in accordance to striving and struggle in exile, living in accordance with wandering and exile while observing the pretexts of God’s Law, the latter focuses on manipulating nature and staying in one place, taking advantage of the seasons and natural processes to cultivate the earth in accordance with the wishes of man over God. These considerations are explored further in Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Ch. 21 “Cain and Abel”).

So, when the “sons of God” laid with “daughters of men”, they made manifest the Nephilim, which should not be understood as literal “giants”, reflective of materialist and evolutionary principles of earlier forms of so-called “giant races of men” (which is interesting for different reasons), without falling into conspiratorial speculation, but should be understood as “spiritual giants”, or those that participate in what I would term as “spiritual gigantism”, which we have spoken of in detail elsewhere (see our Esotericism of Spirited Away Pt. 1, which is also explored in Vectors of the Counter-Initiation by Charles Upton). This “spiritual gigantism” should be understood as “virtue without balance”, or even “privation of certain virtues”, in which the virtues manifest are disproportionate to one another. Instead of the presence of the multitude of virtues, or “divine attributes”, taken in fullness and in tandem, man becomes disjointed and disproportionate with regards to the manifestation of these virtues.

This disproportionality can be best manifest in a movement away from solar and monistic worship towards lunar and paganistic idolatry, in which idols and different attributes of the divine, either in conception or form, take greater precedence than the source of those eternal conceptions or forms. Archeological evidence from the so-called “upper paleolithic periods”, in our opinion somewhere around 35,000 years ago, more or less, manifesting in the various “Venus figures” which are reflective of this principle, not only with regards to idolatry but also to the feminine character of the spiritual focuses of those times, squared precisely within the Silver Age, based on ours and Guenon’s calculations forthcoming.

The Greek Tradition, especially in the “Classical” period from 6th century BC onwards, understands this spiritual gigantism as the rise of “demi-Gods”, which, of course, are men that are a fusion of these divine principles or essences, understood as discrete and limited pagan gods, unifying with human stock to further the creation of these “spiritual giants” or “gods amongst men”, which are reflective of the heroic archetype, subjugating the more contemplative and priestly archetype, the latter of which being hierarchically above and informing the former (see our The Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four and Transcending the Political).

Since this Hyperborean Tradition eventually degenerated in the way just described, this caused the transition from the Silver Age towards the Bronze Age, in which Atlantean spirituality made itself manifest. The best resources for understanding the character of these times continues to be Genesis, but also taken in the context of Plato’s Timaeus, which, naturally, is the best source for talking about Atlantis and Atlantean man and his spirituality.

Though the reintegration of spiritual principles being reaffirmed in the early Bronze Age was greater than the decadence and degeneration of the earlier Silver Age, Atlantean spirituality is naturally lesser in character than the aforementioned Hyperborean spirituality. The cause for this lesser character is due to the spiritual impulses and currents towards idolatry, as well heroism and action over contemplation, were already established within the character of men in that age. Whether this was equal across all men across all peoples or more so pronounced in what would become Western man is a subject for speculation, but the effective and essential source of further degeneration is of greater importance, for our considerations.

Genesis picks back up once more by summarizing this following Bronze Age as such:

“When the Lord saw how great the wickedness of human beings was on earth, and how every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil, the Lord regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved.” [Genesis 6:5-6]

It is inherently notable that humanity takes another departure from the Primordial Tradition evident in previous forms of spirituality, and it is indeed regrettable that such things should come to pass, and though the Old Testament often attributes feelings and intentions to God such as “regret” and “wrath”, such conceptions of the Divine are the purely human and limited perspective and understanding of Divine Providence, for such events were natural to come to pass, in accordance with infinite possibility. The love of God and His compassion for us grieves his heart, for He wishes for all of us to return to Him, with that which is broken being restored, and that which is scattered being gathered. However, when such factors of cosmic manifestation favor such advanced degrees of degeneration and chaos, the reorienting principle requires a transition from one age to the next with a greater reorientation towards Cosmic Order, which can only happen with a collapse of the previous age and the creation of a new one.

The seeds of Divine Favor and transfer are conferred through spiritual representatives, like Noah or the Babylonian Atra-Hasis, i.e. “exceedingly wise”, for each people to carry over echoes of the Primordial Tradition into the next age. The recognition for this need of reaffirming of Cosmic Order being pre-supposed, the only question that remains for the Bronze Age comes to recognizing by what manner of transgression led to the need for such a reorientation?

Plato’s Timaeus tells us the following with regards to the Atlanteans, and the nature of their transgressions, through the mouths of the Ancient Egyptians which retained knowledge of such things:

“For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State (Greece) stayed the course of a mighty host (Atlantis), which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot.” [Timaeus, 24e]

“Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent…” [ibid., 25a]

“…and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down.” [ibid., 25d]

First, we must note that the predisposition towards action and idolatry will naturally lead to materialism over spirituality, and this overt materialism will lead into the perversion of the will towards mastery of the temporal which extends over other lands, people, and their wealth derived thereof. This we can see with the Atlanteans colonizing vast areas of Europe, and Asia, and, more than likely, Africa and the continent of the Americas as well, since the vast island of Atlantis was evidentially situated off the Western coasts of Europe between it and current day North America. For the consideration of the Atlanteans being present in the Americas well before contemporary Europeans, look for the existence of the Labrys in both North America (known there as “Bannerstones”) and Europe, going back to pre-historic antiquity, without any direct causal link.

Second, as for the lack of evidence of the Atlantean continent, it is attested above that it sank into the ocean, as a result of the earthquake and, more the evidently, the subsequent Great Flood that was to follow, this Great Flood, of course, being attested to by all major Traditions, including the Chinese Tradition, as well as various Native American Traditions with no direct connection. Given the situation of where the Atlantean continent was located, the likelihood that Atlantic Ocean currents moving around and under the continent causing tectonic activity and subterranean erosion, which would naturally lead to a terrestrial collapse, given enough time and stress. As for material evidence, earlier peoples made their technology solely out of wood, with the transition towards the use of stone and metal being a deviation from the Traditional Order, and its not certain as to what degree of technological development occurred among the Atlanteans that could be easily found and retained over 6000 plus years ago, calculations forthcoming.

Iron Corruption — Polar Distributions — Traditions in Transition

This leads us into the current age, the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, the last of the Four Ages of the greater Cosmic Cycle — the furthest point of departure from Primordial Spirituality before the reintegration in the new Golden Age and Eternal Kingdom to come, the manner of manifestation of which is subject to speculation. The repositories of Atlantean Spirituality which transferred can best be seen between the Egyptians and the so-called “Indo-European Steppe Peoples”, which are also known as the “Aryan Peoples”, with the consideration that “Arya” directly translates and denotes that which is “noble” and reflective of “nobility”, and not of a discrete biological race of men but, excluding materialistic and biological evolutionary perspectives derived of modern deviation, a “spiritual race” of men, to borrow from Evolian phraseology.

As for the importance of Ancient Egypt from a spiritual perspective, one need only look at the considerations of the Kore Kosmou of the Corpus Hermeticum, the repository of the Egyptian Hermetic Tradition. Not only does this also cover the same initial Fall that is attested to in Genesis, but from a different contextual perspective, the title also translates to “Holy Virgin”, showing the symbological importance of Isis, who gives this dialogue to as well as having given birth to Horus, understood as son of Ra, the creator God of Egyptian theology, the receiver of the dialogue, being similar to the roles filled by Mary, Mother of God and Jesus Christ — not to conflate the two as equals, or with one being a modernistic “inspiration” for the other, but as manifestations of the same principle in the cosmic order at different times and places, with respect to different Traditional forms.

The title Kore Kosmou can also be translated as “Holy Pupil”, with “pupil” in the context of “student”, as being the passive recipient of holy knowledge, but “pupil” can also be taken in the context of the pupil of the eye, being the center of the eye and of focus, not only in terms of what is seen but, also and most importantly, where there is a center. Cairo was this “spiritual pole”, i.e. “spiritual center” for the Ancient Western world, evidenced mainly by the whole of maps from antiquity being centered around Cairo, Egypt, as opposed to anywhere else. The main cause for this, extending from our considerations, is because the Egyptians were the retainers of Atlantean spirituality in our age.

It should also be noted, with regards to material evidence, that the Egyptians received their Tradition from the previous cycle, due to the more recent recognition that the Great Pyramids of Giza, as well as the Great Sphinx, may very well predate the Egyptian civilization, which makes sense when taken in the context that these areas were, more than evidently, colonized by the Atlanteans prior to the establishment of the Egyptian Tradition during this Iron Age. Further evidence of the Atlantean civilization’s spread is not only evident in the aforementioned Labrys/"Bannerstones” but also in the Sphinx of Moroeni, Romania, which, I would argue, people mistakenly consider to be formed as a result of natural processes, since contemporary historians neglect the possibility behind its existence in that place.

Before returning to the Egyptians, the Aryan peoples, originating from the Indo-European steppe, were not sedentary like their Egyptian counterparts, and, instead, travelled around and reposited their Traditional impulses and carry-overs of Atlantean spirituality to form various people groups and Traditional forms in various places. Etymologically speaking, evidence of this is manifest in the multitude of various Indo-European languages having similar roots and stems, all the way from India to Western Europe, the two boundaries of the legendary Two Pillars of Heracles, the boundaries of the Western World. Not only did Hinduism, founded by the Northern Aryan peoples with their chariots, come to be established from this stock, but also the various Traditional forms of the West, before the cosmic reorientations that were necessary via Christianity and later Islam in later ages, as a consequence of the gross paganism that preceded the people of the times before the manifestations of these two religious forms, as is well attested to by even contemporary history.

The existence of these Aryan peoples is even attested to in the Bible during the early time of the Judges — approximately around 1350 BC, following Moses’s liberation to which we shall return — which attests as follows:

“The Lord was with Judah, so they gained possession of the mountain region. But they could not dispossess those who lived on the plain, because they had iron chariots.” [Judges 1:19]

The new Israelites of the Jewish people were able to dispossess those that were heathen people, not bearing forth the fruit of a monistic and fully realized Tradition, whereas those that had their own covenant with God, those that retained the true Traditional spirit, and this was possessed by the Aryan people with their chariots, their chariots made of iron also being quite telling, given aforementioned symbological considerations.

Returning to the Egyptians, it was indeed the people of Egypt that retained God’s favor, being a true spiritual center among other spiritual centers across the world, for a long period of time. However, given that the Egyptian Tradition no longer exists in its original character and is not operant or alive, there must have been a strong precedence as to why that Traditional Form was progressively destroyed, and partially forgotten, as time went on.

Part of the cause to understanding why the Egyptians lost God’s favor is explained by the emergence, and eventual suppression, of Atenism under the Pharoah Akhenaten, translated as “effective of the Aten” or “spirit of the Aten”, with the Aten being understood as the monistic and sole source of the Divine, a monotheistic religious form and conception best reflective of being a manifestation and reorientation of the Primordial Tradition, taken in this context. A couple of excerpts from one of the only surviving documents from Atenism, titled Great Hymn to the Aten, can easily manifest such truths, even in concordance with the Christian Tradition:

“You rise in perfection on the horizon of the sky,
living Aten, who determines life.
Whenever you are risen upon the eastern horizon
you fill every land with your perfection…”

”Since you are Re (Ra), you reach as far as they (the lands) do,
and you curb them for your beloved son…”

“How plentiful it is, what you make,
although they are hidden from view,
sole God, without another beside you;
you create the earth as you wish,
when you were by yourself, [before]
mankind, all cattle and kine,
all beings on land, who fare upon their feet,
and all beings in the air, who fly with their wings.”

[Great Hymn to the Aten]

It should seem evident, for those with discernment, that there was a great degree of spiritual refinement present within Atenism. Despite this Atenism would not be practiced long after the death of Pharaoh Akhenaten around the year 1336 BC., and his successors that would come after, notable the Pharaoh Ramses II, i.e. Ramses the Great, would reinstate the gross paganism of the previous Egyptian pantheon that preceded the advent of Atenism. It should also be noted that traces of Akhenaten, either through the writings on Atenism as well as statues and temples of worship, were systematically destroyed and buildings retrofitted to come back towards paganistic worship. Various other historical stipulations and negative assessments of Akhenaten, often of dubious scholarship, may also be reflective of this rather overt campaign to erase and discredit whatever form of monistic spirituality that may have been present within the Egyptians.

This event, we would put forward, seems to be part of the core cause as to why God’s Divine Favor transferred away from the Egyptians and was given to the Jews through Moses, who, as chronological records seem to show, was a contemporary of Ramses II, and was more than likely the very pharaoh that Moses went against in the Book of Exodus during the 13th century BC. Due to the Egyptians casting off the practice and fruits of Atenism, which developed from within the context of the Egyptian Hermetic Tradition, in favor of lesser spirituality, this was the just cause for the Divine Judgement of the plagues, the eventual destruction of the Egyptian Tradition as time went on, occupation by various different foreign powers, and eventual dissolution of the original Egyptian people to make what is now called contemporary Egypt what it is today, though oriented under Islam with many positive developments, especially in the context of various Sufi orders.

To take this a step further, we will note that the spiritual currents of Judaism are borne from the currents in Egyptian Hermeticism, which, as related above, is but a continuation of the Atlantean and Hyperborean spiritual Traditions respectively, as a result of the movement through cosmic cycles/ages and the transference of Divine Favor that occurred as a result. This is even relayed by scripture, in which the following is relayed:

“Moses was educated [in] all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in his words and deeds.” [Acts 7:22]

This education and wisdom imparted to Moses was no mere “secular education”, for the concept as such never existed in the Traditional world, but was clearly of the great mysteries of the Egyptian Hermetic Tradition. It should also be noted that these mysteries and the fruits of this Tradition were conferred upon the Israelites at large as well, in which the Bible tells us as well:

“The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians.” [Exodus 12:35-36]

This clothing is with respect to physical as well as spiritual clothing, of both the form and the spirit of the Tradition, with the lesser and greater mysteries being symbolically related to silver and gold respectively (take this in the context of the silver and golden keys of St. Peter, i.e. The Keys of Heaven). This plundering is a transference of both Traditional knowledge as well as the Divine Favor derived thereof, and these impulses were further cultivated within Judaism.

However, as many informed readers may know, even the Jewish Tradition was subject to degeneration, and in rather quick fashion, for it was the decadence and the idol worship of the Israelites, well attested to in scripture between Moloch, Baal, Dagon, etc., that led to the necessity for the various prophets to call them to repentance, and prefiguration of the first appearance of the Messiah Himself, Jesus Christ, which was necessary to restore Cosmic Order, and to give a blanket invitation to all the people of the world, not just the Jews, into the light of a Tradition which will bear fruit until the end of the age.

As is well attested, the Jewish people did not accept the Messiah, looking for one that would restore Israel to its former glory, but the focus of Christianity is not mastery of the temporal and rather, instead, the kingdom of the world to come and the salvation of souls, with respect to the Final Judgement and Resurrection of All Flesh. This naturally led to the transference of Divine Favor away from the Jews, their eventual exile and destruction of Israel by the Romans with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.

There are, of course, the centers of Tradition that are manifest in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and other Traditional forms that are not as outwardly expressed or well known, but the pressures of anti-Traditional action have been progressively destroying and erasing operant practice and knowledge of Tradition, in accordance with the downward principles of cosmic manifestation. Still, people are an active agent in these processes, and what may affect one people or nation more so than others is with respect to their participation in anti-Traditional action. In this respect, we get the rulers we deserve, for better or for ill, as well as suffer under certain afflictions, with respect to our collective transgressions. As a result, we must summarize our considerations with some closing thoughts.

Current Affairs and Eschatological Considerations

We are, without a doubt, towards the end of the final cosmic cycle that is the Iron Age, but as to how advanced this process is, and how much further we have to go, is a great topic of speculation. As we mentioned before in a previous work (see our The Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four), of the Four Cosmic Cycles, the delineation of length is with respect to 10 cosmic years between all ages, enumerated as follows:

1. Satya (Krita) Yuga - Golden Age - 4 Cosmic Years

2. Treta Yuga - Silver Age - 3 Cosmic Years

3. Dwapara Yuga - Bronze Age - 2 Cosmic Years

4. Kali Yuga (Dark Age) - Iron Age - 1 Cosmic Year

To take this a step further, we very much adhere to the considerations on how these cosmic years translate into solar years, as per the calculations of Rene Guenon in his Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles. He stipulates that the whole of the 10 cosmic years equates to 64,800 solar years, with which, our prior enumeration listed above can be emended as follows:

1. Satya (Krita) Yuga - Golden Age - 25,920 years

2. Treta Yuga - Silver Age - 19,440 years

3. Dwapara Yuga - Bronze Age - 12,960 years

4. Kali Yuga (Dark Age) - Iron Age - 6,480 years

To interrelate these calculations with what is stated above, the “Venus figurines” fall squarely during the period of the Silver Age of Hyperborean spirituality, whereas the Labrys found in the Americas go into the late Bronze Age of Atlantean spirituality before the Deluge, which we think occurred somewhere before 4,300 BC, roughly around the veil of “pre-history”. We choose not to give precise dating for what is to be related shortly.

This knowledge can also be taken in the context of the so-called “Age of Aquarius”, which holds the premise that every 2,160 years there is a cosmological and astronomical reorientation and shift in human spirituality. Coincidentally, or as if it were by design, if you take 6,480 and divide it by 2,160 the result is 3, separating our age into 3 spiritual eras. I would argue that this first era is dominated by the presence, in the Christian consideration, by God the Father, the Middle era by God the Son, given the presence and prefiguration of Christ during that Age, and the final era by the presence and descent of the Holy Spirit until the end of the age. To take this a step further, if we divide the whole of the Cosmic Age, 64,800 years, and divide it by 2,160 the result is 30. With the inauguration of the creation of man being the first event, plus the other 30 events of every transitional stage within and between each cosmic cycle, plus the Final Battle and Final Judgement (the central event that draws everything back to its center in the Great Cosmic Wheel), this adds to 33 events of cosmic orientation — the spiritual significance of such a number which is not possible to ignore (see our numerological considerations in our On the Necessity of Prayer).

To bring these considerations full circle, if cities like Sodom and Gomorrah did not repent and hold fast to God’s precepts and warnings, other cities and peoples will suffer their self-imposed punishment upon themselves and their hearts hardened against God. However, if a city or people, like that of Nineveh by which Jonah was supposed to prophecy towards repentance, were indeed to repent and choose to have God in their hearts, they will indeed be spared, even without the need of prophetic intervention, just as Jonah refused his calling and ended up in the belly of the whale of the lower waters. We must take these lessons in the context of our times.

If our Iron Age, as calculated above, only lasts approximately 6,480 solar years, that doesn’t leave us with much time remaining. We, as repositors and maintainers of the Tradition, and anyone who wishes to save themselves and others from the calamity that is to come, though not necessarily in this generation, we must do our best to return to that which was given to us by Revelation from above to below, and return from whence we came and to where it is we belong. We must take the signs of the times as a call to repentance, as a call to action to regain that which has been lost from our hearts, and to remember what has been forgotten from our spiritual history.

We refrain, once again, from putting a precise date of exactly when this is to come, for, as it is said:

“But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” [Matthew 24:36]

The dualistic heresy of the Cathars

The medieval suppression of heresies is often perceived as an oppressive struggle between dogma and free thinking, and while there was much violence and suffering, the true ideological background is often ignored. Unlike the relativistic approach to truth that prevails in popular consciousness, the moral order of medieval Christendom was grounded in the unity of faith and works, of contemplation and action. A person’s fundamental beliefs were not a trivial matter, but were understood to inform their ethic, their conduct, their character. Thus, when the Church suppressed the Cathars, a heretical sect of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, it had in mind a threat to the very foundations on which society oriented its understanding of life itself and the standards by which they lived.

The Cathars were no small group of fanatics; their influence spread to towns and major cities across Southern France and Northern Italy. At first glance, their practice may seem to resemble the monastic tradition in their devotion and asceticism. They lived in peace, with little concern for the things of this world. They renounced property, money, fasted with austere discipline, and abstained from any sexual activity. But the grounds and broader vision on which this ascetic practice was based entailed a radically different interpretation of the fall and of creation.

Echoing the earlier Gnosticism of antiquity, the Cathars rejected the material world, positing a duality of principle forces at play identified as two creator deities: a benevolent God that created invisible and spiritual elements, and another malevolent God identified in Satan who presided over the material world and created all tangible things in it. Inherent to the Cathar myth of the fall was a doctrine of ontological dualism between two irreconcilable principles of good and evil, with mankind as a fundamentally spiritual being trapped in a corporeal existence to which he does not belong. To the Cathars, man had not just fallen, but entered a world totally irredeemable, a world inherently evil, and one to which his soul bore no ontological relation as its microcosm.

In such a world as the Cathars envisioned, the only solution was escape. Mankind’s liberation lay in renouncing creation entirely. The asceticism of the Cathars reflected this. They rejected meat and animal products because they came from sexual reproduction, and eating them was to participate in the impurity of the material world. The only exception was fish, which they believed to reproduce asexually. The Cathars also believed that animals contained imprisoned souls that were punished in a cycle of reincarnation; thus avoiding eating them out of compassion. There was no concept of hell in Cathar cosmology. The material world was already a land of suffering, and even the animals were on a path of liberation.

The Cathar belief that corporeal existence was intrinsically evil likewise pervaded the sexual sphere, as sexual intercourse and reproduction were strictly forbidden, as it was not only engaging in the impurity of bodily lust, but brought about greater suffering by bringing more souls into this corrupt world. Cathar anthropology also informed perspectives on the two sexes, the spirit being sexless and capable of reincarnating into either male or female bodies. In their societies, women could assume roles traditionally held by men, and vice versa. This included administering sacraments as ‘Perfecti’, the spiritual adepts and authorities of the Cathars.

It is clear from all these examples that every level of Cathar life was imbued with their cosmic dualism and their aim of rejecting this world. But how did they intend to escape it? Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathars only held one sacrament, rejecting the others as materialistic. This was the consolamentum, a spiritual initiation like baptism, where the Perfecti put the Book of John over the head of the faithful. They were not baptised of water, but in the Spirit, and it was after this that the faithful were reborn. But there were still further ascetic practices to guarantee salvation.

One of these practices was the endura, a ritual fast. It was a necessary act of penance, often given to dying patients, so that they may leave this world and return to their heavenly abode. This involved, in some cases, starving the believer or, in other cases, providing only bread and cold water to them. Regardless, the end toward which this practice was oriented was the same: ritual suicide through a process of starvation. In some cases, death may be hastened by suffocation or poison administered by a Perfecti. But the implication is clear: the fundamental aim of Catharism was death, not as surrender, but as a defiant affirmation of good over evil, achieved through the total annihilation of all that is earthly and created, culminating with the final renunciation of one’s own life.

It was understandable that such a belief would pose a major threat to the Catholic Church - the Cathars necessarily rejected the Church and the whole order of medieval Christendom and its imperial grandeur; understandably so from their point of view - the medieval world was tough, technology was lacking, society was extremely hierarchical, yet the Church, which claimed to preach the virtue of an austere life, had buildings adorned with all sorts of treasures. It is hard not to see this as blatantly hypocritical. Christ called for his disciples to live a life of simplicity, to not love the world, nor the things of it (1 John 2:15). Christians understood that the glory of the beatific vision was not to be found in what we possess in this life, but after death in “the life of the world to come”.

The emergence of Catharism was no mere accident. It was an inevitable boiling point, an act of defiance against the monolithic unity of Catholic Europe by all those disillusioned by it. It is tempting to see pain, hardship, loss, and evil as objective realities in themselves, not as mere “privations of natural goods”, as Plotinus or Aristotle would say. The impressions of suffering are lasting, and the experience of evil seems almost like a power of its own. How many people today are disgruntled with our system at its very fundamentals? How many people feel disdainful of those with power? Catharism thus gathered into itself sentiments found universally throughout history, and yet in its heterodoxy, veered into nihilism, rejecting any possibility of redeeming the world and resolving its errors, condemning not only the materiality of the world, but the very concept of power itself and traditional social hierarchies, opting for total passivity.

However, despite the allure of Catharism to those seeking detachment from the world and its vanities, others still led simple, ascetic lives without rejecting the society in which they lived. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux emphasised simplicity and poverty in contrast to the material extravagance of Cluniac monasticism, while simultaneously writing to Popes, kings, and fellow clergy, mediating disputes throughout the secular and religious world. He even preached against Catharism in Toulouse, among other heretical movements. Saint Hildegard likewise lived a simple monastic life, embracing a life of asceticism and receiving direct revelations from God. But despite recognising the abstinence and austerity of the Cathars, said, “The devil, however, is within these men, revealing himself to them in the obscuring lightning” (Hildegard to the Shepherds of the Church in Cologne, 1163).

Above all, the contemporaries who may have appeared the most like the Cathars were Saint Francis of Assisi and his Franciscan order. They, too, abandoned earthly goods, and to great extremes. They wore only a single tunic with a cord, had no property or fixed dwelling, and often lived as beggars. When sending his followers out to preach, Saint Bonaventure writes (in Life of Francis) that Francis had them “take neither gold nor silver, nor money in their purse; nor carry a scrip; nor take two tunics, nor shoes, nor staff.” It is further recorded that when Francis and his brothers sought the approval of Pope Innocent III for their growing order, many viewed the strict poverty of his order as being “beyond human strength,” with the Pope himself being hesitant to grant it approval. Such was the austerity and discipline of Francis and his brothers, “casting away all worldly cares,” and “shaping his life in all things according to the strict rule of Apostolic poverty” (Saint Bonaventure, Life of Francis, Chapter III.).

Unlike the Cathars, the ethos of the Franciscans conformed entirely to the model of Christ and Catholic doctrine, seeking to evangelise Europe against heresies, hypocrisies, and spiritual lukewarmness. But even more than that, the Franciscan order was an answer to the Cathar heresy, and one which the Papacy rightly promoted as a remedy. It was no mere accident that the Franciscans arose at the very height of Cathar prominence, the very same year that Pope Innocent III called for the Albigensian crusade against the heresy. Catholicism and the spirit of medieval Christendom were based on a metaphysical universality, grounded in the intrinsic unity of creation with the Creator. There was no moral dualism of good and evil: evil was merely the privation of good, possessing no positive existence of its own. There was also no dualism of body and soul: the two were inseparably united in one ‘substance’. The soul was taken to be the ‘actuality’ of the living body, which it animates and ‘forms’ (see Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75). The Franciscans fully accepted these truths, and even more than that, affirmed the possibility that radical poverty could serve the broader evangelical mission of the Church to redeem this world. Where the Cathars saw salvation in flight from the world and hatred of material things, Francis embraced the virtuous mean, seeing salvation in loving the world, in the right way.

The Franciscan response to Cathar heresy

What did Catholic theology entail for the Franciscans? Just like for the Cathars, it begins with the fall. In Mortality in the Kali Yuga, we discussed how with the fall, an entire world, Eden, collapsed and became subject to death. But initially, this was not the case. The breath of life was blown into Adam and Eve out of dust, and creation was an abundant paradise of all the plants and animals. There is also a relation between man and nature in the ends that they both serve. Man has dominion over creation (Genesis 1:26), while creation serves to sustain mankind (Genesis 1:29-30). Creation is thus not opposed to mankind but exists for their sake in a hierarchical chain of being.

It is from this teleology of nature that the Franciscans develop their mystical theology: that, although mankind and nature are in a fallen state, they remain united in solidarity under God. But to understand the Franciscans, we ought to study Saint Francis himself and the mendicant life he sought to model. In contrast to his abandonment of worldly goods, Saint Francis’ life was marked by an enduring preoccupation with knighthood and chivalry. While the Cathars rejected the whole medieval world order, Francis embraced it wholeheartedly. In his youth, he even saw action at the Battle of Collestrada, and although he was never dubbed a knight, he was not dissimilar to other youths of his age, full of zeal, ambition, and inspired by the noble ideals of troubadour poetry. Thomas of Celano writes in his biography of Francis that in a vision of spiritual conversion, he (Francis) encountered “warlike weapons, to wit, saddles, shields, lances, and other accoutrements” which would belong to “his and his knights” (The Lives of Saint Francis). But the knightly ethic of service would take Francis down an entirely different path - one of poverty and prayer. His wars were not against humans, but against lukewarm spirituality. He wandered Europe not with a band of knights, but with preachers. Noble in spirit and virtue, yet humble in status, and indifferent to class.

Francis’ spiritual conversion is told with rich allegories, not unlike Arthurian romances. Francis speaks of having discovered a “hidden treasure”, and when the subject of marriage was brought up, he said, “I will marry a nobler and fairer bride than you ever saw, who shall surpass all others in beauty and excel them in wisdom” - Thomas of Celano explaining that “the spotless Bride of God is the true Religion which he took unto him, and the ‘hidden treasure’ is the Kingdom of Heaven.” In another text, the Sacrum Commercium, Thomas of Celano relates the search for and devotion of Francis and his brothers to Lady Poverty, “Queen of all the virtues”, described as sitting upon a throne on a high mountain but is also disdained and neglected by the people of this world, and of whom upon greeting they say, “Whereupon fallen at thy feet, we entreat thee humbly to deign to be with us, and to be unto us a way of attaining unto the King of Glory.” From this, the mission of the Franciscans becomes all too clear. They are at once monks and heroic soldiers of Christ, devoted to Lady Poverty as the knights of the Round Table were to the virtuous ladies of Arthurian Romance - and like those knights, they seek to restore her to her rightful place in the world.

This chivalric spirit is also visible in Francis’ attitude towards nature. Whereas in much of Christian literature, nature occupied a chthonic dimension to be conquered and subdued, as was the symbolism of dragons, Francis saw in nature a level of nobility bestowed by God in the broader chain of being. A famous example is his preaching to the birds, of which Thomas of Celano writes him saying:

“My brother birds, much ought ye to praise your Creator, and ever to love Him who has given you feathers for clothing, wings for flight, and all that ye had need of. God has made you noble among His creatures, for He has given you a habitation in the purity of the air, and, whereas ye neither sow nor reap, He Himself doth still protect and govern you without any care of your own.”

Then, following after him, the birds stretched out their necks and spread their wings to gaze at him. In his sermon, Francis conveys that his followers should preach not just to people, but to creatures, and reminds us that all of nature was created to serve God. He demonstrates the nobility of the birds by showing that their nature as creatures of flight is pleasing to God and gives him glory through their beauty. To the people of the Middle Ages, the air was seen as a realm between the divinity of the celestial bodies and the ground on which they lived. Thus, although lesser than mankind, God made the birds noble in their very ontology as creatures of the air mediating between two worlds, and in the same way, as we will see, Francis shows us that all of nature is praiseworthy through the role it occupies in the cosmic order.

As such, even ravenous beasts were obedient to Francis, such as a wolf who, according to the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, had caused terror to the people of Gubbio, attacking livestock and killing people. But after Francis, addressing him as “Brother Wolf”, made the sign of the cross and commanded it to cease attacking people, he made a vow to make peace with the people of Gubbio and even lived in harmony with them, being fed daily by them. This story demonstrates that even the chthonic forces of the fallen order can be transmuted towards good, just as through repentance, mankind’s fallen nature can be redeemed. Thus, not only is man a participant in providence and the quest for salvation, but the whole world too.

Wherever Francis went, his affectionate regard towards nature seemed to be reciprocated. Saint Bonaventure records that on one instance, a rabbit that had always fled from other people, “committed itself fearlessly into his hands, and nested in his bosom.” Moreover, just as Francis devoted himself to the service of others and God in knightly chivalry, so too did the animals that were obedient to him, another instance telling of a lamb he kept with him in Rome that was committed to the care of a noble lady and attended mass with her.

The chivalric splendour of Saint Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures

Perhaps Saint Francis’ greatest expression of the chivalric kinship that all nature shares is his hymn, the Canticle of the Sun. Through it, he presents to us a vision of nature’s purposive beauty, both aesthetically in the Kantian sense and visibly real and objective in its teleological relationships. The Canticle begins by praising the Lord:

Most High, all-powerful, good Lord,
Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessings.

To You alone, Most High, do they belong,
and no man is worthy to mention Your name.

Francis thus reinforces the participative unity of being. While nature and God are not identical, they are not antithetical. God is central and through Him come all things eternal and transient, and by virtue of their origin, all things are good in their being. But they are not only good because of their origin; there is a revelatory quality to creation, which Francis expresses by emphasising the emanative procession through which nature and its fruits resemble and show the goodness of God, who is Himself goodness. The Canticle then proceeds with examples of how creation emanates from its source, beginning with the sun:

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures;
especially Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
and bears a likeness to You, Most High One.

With these four lines, Francis introduces the familial brotherhood of creation. Nature does not merely praise God, but is commended with God, together with Him. Where in the previous lines Francis praises God for His blessings, now the Canticle is transformed into a eulogy to all creation, and thereby a celebration of existence in its entirety. While God is the cause, sustainer, and ultimate end of all creation, He gave creation a real identity of its own. Its own essence. A goodness derived by participation in God’s goodness, but analogous, not univocal or equivocal, to His goodness. As written in Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”.

Furthermore, creatures are not just good for God’s praise, nor for its own glory, but for the good of the rest of creation. As the fifth line relates, the sun serves all life by bringing us the day and its light. Crucial to this is how Francis hails the sun as Brother. The biographies of Francis always show him referring to the creatures he encounters (and by creature, we mean a ‘created thing’) as Brother or Sister, much like how he relates to his other friars as Brother or Sister. Far from denigrating his peers, Francis embraced nature in spiritual fellowship. This adds another layer of chivalry to Francis’ urging to preach even to animals. His first vision of arms being delivered to his knights to do battle was a metaphor for his life of preaching, gathering men to live in holiness, a theme that also extended to nature. Like how a sinner may be brought to obedience, “Brother Wolf” was brought into fraternity with others and reconciled with God. Through the Franciscan life of love and active care for all the world, everyone, and everything was to be brought back to their origin, back to their place within the cosmic hierarchy.

But simpler than conferring chivalric titles, we also get a sense of his own personal affection for nature. We see his appreciation for the gifts of nature and its inherent beauty, as he speaks of the sun’s radiance, great splendour, and likeness to God. His poetic eloquence, reminiscent of the troubadours, inspires emotional affection and conveys spiritual depth. The Franciscans, amid the rain, feet in the mud, often sleeping in caves and wandering forests, must have been in awe of Europe’s natural beauty. They were situated there, not just seeing it, but under the pressure of it, taking it in with every sensation. The cold of deep winters, the awful smells of wild beasts, the slightest touch of the wind, and the sun’s light filtering through the trees. Their mysticism was as much aesthetic and sensuous as it was contemplative. If God is praised through nature, then one can praise God through their experience of nature, which becomes clearer as we proceed with the Canticle:

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in heaven You formed them clear and precious and beautiful.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind,
and through the air, cloudy and serene,
and every kind of weather through which You give sustenance to Your creatures.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom You light the night;
and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Descending from the sun, Francis takes us through the cosmic spheres, revealing the various relationships at play between God, nature, and man. He begins the first line of each section with a praise of God and shows how His praise is amplified through His creation. He then describes the character of God’s creations. The winds are cloudy and serene; the stars and moon are precious and beautiful. He also uses personification, referring to Sister Water as humble and chaste. Through his descriptions, he also reminds us of God’s immanence in nature and how he acts through it for the sake of mankind, as he does with Brother Wind by expressing how it gives sustenance to all creatures by changing the weather. In elaborating on the interdependence between the various creatures and mankind, Francis shows us how God remains central in all these relationships. That it is He who ordered them, allocating each purpose accordingly for the fine-tuning of the world’s harmony. Everything is made to serve an inherently good purpose, and there is nothing designed for evil - evil is, in his mind, merely the failure of a creature to fulfil its own natural faculties as a result of the fall. But after this, the frame of the Canticle shifts again to spiritual matters, meditating on the soul and mortality:

Praised be You, my Lord,
through those who give pardon for Your love,
and bear infirmity and tribulation.

Blessed are those who endure in peace
for by You, Most High, they shall be crowned.

Praised be You, my Lord,
through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whom no living man can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin.
Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.

The uniqueness of man as a being with free will brings nuance to our goodness in the light of God. On one hand, mortal sin leads to the second death, while good deeds give praise to God. But this is no different from how the rest of creation gives praise to God, for this goodness comes by acting in conformity with one’s proper nature. To do good is to follow the purpose God made for human nature in the way that the goodness of all things comes from their God given qualities and purposes.

But despite all his praise of life, Francis acknowledges the inescapability of death and even its goodness. However, whereas death is an aim for itself to the Cathars, to Francis it is an inevitable fact. This must be understood in light of Catholic eschatology. Death is not an escape. Rather, the fallen body must die for it to be resurrected in this world. Revelation 22 speaks of the earth itself being redeemed in a renewed Eden. Just as the soul is broken down and mended in true repentance, or ‘contrition’ (meaning to “grind to pieces” in Latin), and just as Francis underwent a spiritual conversion imprisoned in wartime, so must imperfections be shed away through a ‘grinding apart’ before a genuine renewal. Sometimes, something must be taken apart before it can be put back together, and this is especially the case with our imperfect, fallen bodies.

Such is the redemptive quality of the Catholic tradition, embracing all existence and seeking to perfect it through the power of God. Francis’ loving devotion to Lady Poverty must be understood in this context. Such poverty enabled God to perfect the fallen soul. This was not just material poverty, brought forth by circumstance, but a spiritual poverty, deliberately sought. To be without such poverty leads to pride in (and love of) the vain and passing things of this world, not recognising their participation in God’s power nor their beauty, but rather the fleeting pleasures they bring. Poverty leaves the soul pure and clear for God to work within. It allows us to recognise our own fallenness and need for redemption. But most importantly, it enables us to see the truth for what it really is, discarding any false impressions.

The Cathars and Franciscans alike were men of poverty, but their radically different cosmologies led one to reject life and the other to embrace it. Evil is certainly experienced in the fallen world, but it is not an inherent ‘being’ that inheres in any animal, man, or thing. Where one saw good only in immateriality, the other shone light on all things, not just revealing their good, but redeeming even the shadows and transforming them into light.

Much of Saint Francis’ life was spent preaching against the Cathars, who inhabited many of the cities in Italy. His biographies describe how the Franciscans drove demons out of cities who were responsible for civil strife. Works of art, such as the frescoes of Giotto in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, also depict these tales. He was a knight without weapons, defences, and armour, yet he persevered amid the violence of his age. Through words and good deeds alone, he brought peace and conversion. Saint Bonaventure, writing of such moments, says of him that “shining like a morning star in the midst of a dark cloud, he enlightened by the bright rays of his pure doctrine and holy life those who lay in darkness and in the shadow of death, and thus guided them onwards by his bright shining to the perfect day.” This was a life dedicated to seeing the world redeemed, in creatures and persons alike. While the Cathars, in their poverty, sought total passivity, Francis and his friars were driven by an intense passion that led them to radically heroic and self-sacrificial lives.

Saint Francis was Catholic in a total sense, in its original sense “katholikos”, meaning “universal”. Not merely as a denomination, but as an ethos. In his Canticle, he reconciled the cosmos. In his preaching, he reconciled men and other creatures to God. He lived humbly, yet did not despise the wealthy or the noble. He loved the goodness of life, yet did not worry about losing it. His mysticism embraced all, spiritual and material, in the spirit of ennobling the fallen world. In writing of his plans to preach in Morocco, Saint Bonaventure beautifully expresses the heroism with which Francis faced the risk of death. In this moment, we see the fullness of his faith and devotion to redeem even those who may hate him, and to bless those who may do evil to him:

“Francis, the valiant soldier of Christ, hoping shortly to attain the end which he had set before him, determined to undertake the adventure, not terrified by the fear, but rather excited by the desire, of death. Having, then, prayed to the Lord, and being strengthened by Him, he sang with great confidence those words of the prophet, ‘Though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.’”

But for all the good of the world, the ultimate end and good was always God. It was He that Francis sought in nature, it was He that he travelled to preach for, it was He that he lived in humility for the praise of. While the Cathars detached themselves from all worldly things, to Francis and the Christians of the Middle Ages, they were merely temporal goods. Good, but corruptible and passing, and not to be misused or elevated above the eternal goods that God promises. God completes desire. For He is the Good itself from whom all goodness proceeds. Man desires infinitely, and passing goods never satisfy eternally. Only God is infinite, and only in Him can eternity be found. The Canticle ends thusly:

Praise and bless my Lord,
and give Him thanks,
and serve Him with great humility.
Amen.

The Limits of Logic and Reason

As we have noted in another work (see our Transcending the Political), there are indeed limits to action, and action is necessarily lesser in hierarchy than contemplation, the latter allowing for participation in the spiritual dimension, with the psychic dimension of the mind acting as an intermediary. Not only this, but there are indeed limits to the rational mode of contemplation as well, mirrored by the fact that there are indeed limitations to what can be conveyed, with regards to truths, especially of the highest order, with the written or spoken word.

As Rene Guenon notes in his The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus, here paraphrased, every distinction is a limitation, limitation leads to separation, and separation leads away from unicity. Therefore, anything that is conditioned by any degree of limitation, systematization or that which is subject to rules is necessarily limited and lesser than what can be properly qualified as the “unlimited”, “infinite”, or “unconditioned”, which is, in reality, synonymous with the Divine, that which has the highest degree of freedom. As such, by virtue of being human, having a soul conditioned and attached to form and body, with a mind conditioned in tandem through consciousness, we are naturally limited and finite as individual reflections of the Divine Principle as an image of God, though not God Himself. We participate in Universal Man by being connected to God through this conditioning, with the Christian viewpoint having the connection to God the Father through God the Son borne from our hearts, understood as Christ Jesus - the True Man, i.e. ideal man. Thus, as a result of our condition, it is our station to know and strive with God to know Him and become one with Him, which is why the sayings that go as thus exist: “To be man is know”, and also “Know Thyself”.

Even Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason recognized that logic and reason could only take us so far, and that the Categorical Imperative that guides conditioned individuals goes beyond and extends from beyond the individual mode. Logic and reason do not always come to achieve what can only be properly termed as “supra-individual truths”, or, rather, “divine truths” or “divine law”. Much of what is given through Holy Texts, properly so called, is, by virtue of this recognition, not “man-made” but more so “revealed”. Similarly, math was not created but, rather, discovered, simply because truth exists regardless of man’s ability to perceive or know it. Beyond this, as evidenced by Plato’s dialogue Meno with the theory of anamnesis, i.e. “recollection”, being in accordance with the Hindu doctrine of samskaras, all that is knowable with regards to truth is not really “learning” but “remembering” what was forgotten, and that all truth comes from within from a source greater than ourselves. If we are able to know something, it is because it already exists latently within ourselves, and true knowledge is never truly separate from us.

With these factors under consideration, everything in our human conditioned state is limited and has a degree of separation from the fullness of Divine Reality and realization of Divine Truth, as a consequence of the Fall from mystical union with God, and yet, by virtue of the immanence of God, either rationalized as the Holy Spirit or otherwise, nothing is ever really separate from God, since everything extends from God as the first cause, and Truth extends from this as well since God and Truth are the same. So, this begs certain questions. How does the conditioned strive towards the unconditioned? How does the conditioned connect to and receive revelation from the unconditioned? How does one come to know that which is beyond form and is unknowable?

The answer to these questions and more is found earnestly and simply through prayer, and not prayer simply towards achieving some temporal or personal end. The prayer that we’re referring to is “devotional prayer”, though the value of “intercessional prayer” is notable and still of great spiritual value. As such, further treatment of these considerations is required.

The Purpose and Results of Intercessional Prayer

Before getting into the greater core intention of elucidating the efficacy of devotional prayer, we must first consider intercessional prayer. What can be properly qualified as intercessional prayer is a plea to the divine for help, either for one or more individuals or simply for oneself, to one end or another. This is probably the most common understanding of prayer and ubiquitously known and practiced by many. In this life, we find much want and need, as a result of our conditioned and limited existence, and, as such, this naturally results in many petitions to the divine for assistance, since we are clearly not self-sufficient in ourselves — a quality only reserved for that which is truly eternal and unchangeable.

The way in which such pleas and petitions can manifest is manifold. People can pray directly to God Himself, to the Angels and Saints, to Buddhas of the past, to what can be understood as aspects of divine incarnation in “lesser gods” (which can also be understood as angels or “celestial hierarchies” from a higher point of view), and even to ancestors of the past. As to whom the prayer is for, subjects of prayer could vary, including but not limited to friends, family, oneself, possessions, animals, etc. and so on. As to what the prayer desires to achieve for the subject, the prayer could be for health, wealth, favor, providence, guidance, and all other manifold desired results.

Regardless of who is prayed to, insofar as they are of or extend from the divine, the intent is the same in intercessional prayer: to petition that which is supra-human for human causes. Regardless of who the prayer is for, the intent is still the same: that someone can be helped by the divine. Regardless of what is gained by the prayer, the intent is still the same: that help is attained.

Some may wonder if it is just to petition other manifestations of the divine instead of the Source of Divinity Himself, and the simplest answer is yes, but to do so in accordance with balance and recognition of higher spiritual principles. One can petition angels, saints, ancestors, etc., but only insofar as it is done with respect to the recognition of the supremacy and monistic unity of God in the context of the intercession of these eternal beings. Whether it’s a guardian angel or a past sage, these individuated beings, in a closer unity and oneness with God, still have agency with respect to God’s will. So, to issue prayers forth for intercession to that which has agency is blameless, insofar as the devotion towards these beings does not go above the devotion that is reserved for God alone.

Others may wonder if it is just to pray for others, or if prayer from others is even necessary or efficacious, since we as conditioned individuals do not have the means to actuate such favor in and of ourselves. To answer simply, we are all intended to be agents of the Divine Will in this life, and, as such, our actions are not without meaning or consequence, just as existence implies duty and purpose. Just as Christ had his disciples, Krishna had Arjuna, the Prophet Muhammad had his followers, and many more examples — none of these great agents of the Divine Will did anything alone. To share and strive together in the Divine Mission is good and just, for everything extends from and returns to the One, and there is no true separation from one another from a spiritual point of view.

So, to wish another goodwill for one reason or another can only be a good, for it is likened to wishing oneself goodwill, and the love of God is what bears this out in practice. As the Lord Himself tells us in the Book of Matthew in the Two Great Commandments: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’”, and also, “Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law of the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” [22:37-40].

When loving God in the fullness of one’s tripartite being, just as God is tripartite in his Trinitarian unicity, in the image of God by being one with Him, this naturally leads to the love of one’s neighbor who is also an image and child of God. If one would want oneself to be prayed for, how much more ought we to also pray for others in tandem, since we should love them as we want ourselves to be loved by God and others. To do so will lead to loving neighbor and enemy alike, for there will be no true enemy for one that recognizes the fullness of the precepts of these spiritual laws. Also, the lack of enemies not only extends from the shared will of prayer for others and oneself but also from wanting all to achieve salvation, since one should never wish ill will on others, and nothing could be more ill than eternal self-imposed isolation from God in the depths of the reality of spiritual hell and eternal despair. As it turns out, we have a deep responsibility to pray and strive with others to the collective end of being one with God.

We must also add that, even though every prayer in this regard may not be directly answered on part of the exact will of the petitioner, every prayer is heard. There is a great comfort in this knowledge.

The Purpose and Results of Devotional Prayer

In continuation towards achieving the end of the oneness of God, as previously stated, no amount of logic or reason, as well as any experience or temporal good for that matter, can realistically bring one closer to the fullness of spiritual realization of God. This is understood in tandem with the phrase, derived from Christ responding to the Pharisees when they asked Him when the kingdom of God would come, when the Lord said thus: “The kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you (or in your midst).” [Luke 17:20-21, italics mine]. So, not only is the kingdom of God shared between us as people as we strive together in earnest love for one’s neighbor and oneself in God, but also that God is within our hearts through our personal connection and act of sustainment by Him, since nothing exists without God since God is Being, Good, and the source of all Reality.

The only way towards the fullness of the spiritual realization of the Divine is inward — not through any physical technique or practice, not through any degree of intellectual exercise, though each of these things do help towards fostering the path towards God — through the spirit, i.e. the supra-individual intellect, the seat of which is to be understood as the heart. The easiest and universally applicable pathway for everyone to do so is through prayer, specifically devotional prayer, which is prayer towards reaching a closeness with God through love and loyalty to Him.

The way that devotional prayer looks is different across Traditions, naturally, but the core as to how it is performed and what it achieves is unified in principle. For Christianity, there are the 5 decades of Hail Mary’s and 6 Our Father’s prayers of the Holy Rosary, as well as the indefinite number of recitations of the Jesus Prayer of Hesychasm. There is the Om (Aum) of Hinduism, with its repetition fostering oneness with the Divine. There’s the invocation of the names of Allah for the 99 Dhikr beads in Islam. There’s the Mala prayer beads to reflect on the 108 worldly desires of Buddhism. While the latter is an act of devotion towards achieving the purely unconditioned, i.e. Nirvana, the former examples are all invocations of the Divine or the Divine Name towards not only remembrance of the presence of God, but this remembrance fosters love, devotion, and praise of the Creator towards the end of seeking unity with Divine Reality, as stated above.

The sacred science of numerology must be taken into consideration as to why the number of certain beads is important. For example, the 5 decades of the Rosary reflect the 5 aspects of the will, which are also represented by the 5 points of extension of the human body as follows: the will to take possession - right hand, the will to hold possessions - left hand, the will to conquer - right foot, the will to hold land - the left foot, and the will of the intellect - the heart. These 5 points form the upward pentagram, which is symbolic of man, and is also used, in tandem with the 6 pointed Seal of Solomon, for protection from demonic forces, considering the fact that the Rosary is often used for this purpose as well to “seal off” or ward off evil.

All these 5 aspects of the will must be crucified, just as Christ was crucified for our sins, because we must crucify our individual will so that we may align it with the Will of God Himself, the only true actor and Supreme Personhood. Certain aspects of these truths are revealed by the Tarot Trumps IV - The Emperor and V - The Pope. In the former, crucifying the wills symbolized by the hands and feet — evidenced by the Emperor being immobile by crossing his legs and leaning, as well as his hands fixed upon his belt and the rod of temporal authority — allowing for the control of one’s will with respect to the empire of the world around us, but the latter — with the Pope pointing to the heart — reveals the fruit of the full crucifixion of the will leads towards the potency of Divine Authority of the human will unified with the will of the Creator (note the seven pointed cross in his left hand).

Additionally, the 5 decades of the Hail Mary are indeed sets of 10, with 10 being symbolic of temporal order, to be understood in conjunction with the importance of the aforementioned Tarot Trumps above (see our The Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four). The Rosary is also meant to be prayed in three different forms, with the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries meant to be prayed and contemplated to appreciate the different aspects of Christ and the Virgin Mary through the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ respectively — with three being significant for apparent Trinitarian considerations (the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries can also be understood as the process of “descending realization”, “ascending realization”, and the achievement of spiritual realization respectively, in accordance with the three dark nights of the soul, as per St. John of the Cross). As for the 6 Our Fathers, 6 is also a multiple of 3 and 2, with 6 also being reflective of the 6 days of creation which were lead to perfection on the 7th day, the Lord’s Day which is the Sabbath, which is part of the reason why priests move the censer towards the altar 6 times, with 3 sets of 2 motions, with the presence of Christ being the ever-present 7th element of perfection within the consecrated space (note in connection with the cross in the hand of V - The Pope above).

The significance of the 108 Mala beads goes beyond our realm of expertise, but the 99 beads of the Dhikr in Islam do provide some insight. In particular, 99 is a multiple of 3 and 33, with some Dhikr bead sets only having 33 beads as well, or also of 9 and 11, with 9 being a product of 3 times 3, and 9 having significance not only for Dante Alighieri with regards to Beatrice and other factors (see his Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy, in tandem with Rene Guenon’s The Esotericism of Dante for more information). With regards to the significance of 11, it is just short of 12, with the latter symbolic of celestial order, evidenced by the 12 disciples, 12 knights of the round table, 12 astrological symbols or archetypes, and so on, with the additional 1 added to 11 being of the Divine Element. We will also note that Christ was 33 at the time of his crucifixion, and that there are 33 vertebrae in the spinal column of man, a natural sign to be taken in tandem that man also has 12 ribs to add for his support, reflecting the sign of the cross in the Divine vertical dimension in conjunction with the horizontal dimension of heredity. As for why 99 is significant from the specifically Islamic point of view can be explored another time.

Returning back to our primary objective, all devotional prayer is indeed unified in principle, simply as a result of constant spiritual direction of the will towards that which is “above”, in a spiritual sense. Without any further equivocation, it’s really as simple as that.

If one cannot achieve a certain action, or ascertain a certain contemplative pursuit that fosters spiritual practice, prayer is the way for these truths to be revealed over time. No amount of dialectic or reasoning will convince anyone who is opposed to such precepts that this is the case, as it is more so reflective of the lived experience of all the saints and sages that are, have been, and will come to be. If one does not have faith in what cannot be witnessed, then no work can follow, and work without faith is meaningless. Faith can also be understood as “philosophy”, in its original etymological understanding extending from the Greeks, simply as the “love of wisdom” or the disposition to want to know. If one doesn’t know but wants to know, that is all that is necessary to come to know. If one does not wish to know and simply to critique, then one may never come to truly know what is to be achieved through spiritual discipline.

Prayer is to that which is supra-individual, and it is with that which is supra-rational that one achieves this, because the Divine is the source of all that is and, as a result, is also above all that which is. One does not achieve the unconditioned by the conditioned, but can only achieve the unconditioned by the unconditioned. Conversely, the only way to truly know God is to become Him, and the patience and humility fostering the presence of the other virtues within the soul of the individual through constant devotional prayer is the best way to achieve this.

For additional considerations of the unknowability of God through conventional means, one only need look at the Mystical Theology of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (psuedo-Dionysius for the moderns), which refers to the One True God as hiding in “Divine darkness”, and to the process of “ascending realization”, by which one denies all names attributed to God, because God is the source of these names and is beyond them in his Transcendence. There is also the anonymously written The Cloud of Unknowing by a Christian monk that refers to “the God that hides in darkness”, and that one needs to use their prayers as “arrows upward” in chanting the Divine Name unceasingly to arrive at a state of the eponymous “cloud of unknowing”, by which one forgets everything and sits in silence with God. This is similar in tandem with St. John of the Cross and his Dark Night of the Soul (see our Solitaire, the Tarot, and the Three Dark Nights of the Soul) with reference to the second dark night, by which one goes into profound spiritual darkness, experiencing the unknowability of God and having to go by faith alone, as the unknowability of God becomes fully realized inwardly, transitioning to the third dark night in which God is revealed to the heart. Take this in consideration with the three stages of initiation as well, with purification, illumination and perfection being achieved inwardly through the rites of baptism, confirmation and communion respectively, also with respect to the significance of three numerologically.

The Methodology of Prayer and Conclusions

Repetition is key. Through reflexively and constantly praying, one achieves a harmonious inner state that is free, or freer, from distraction. As Thessalonians 5:17 tells us, the key focus of The Way of the Pilgrim which focuses on the efficacy of devotional prayer, one must “pray unceasingly”. This has been a conundrum for many, including the anonymous author of The Way of the Pilgrim, for to do such a thing runs counter to the lived experience of people in the world with so much to draw their attention away from prayer. Therefore, we must explore what it means to pray unceasingly.

Everything one must do to devote oneself to the Divine must be with respect to mindfulness of the ever-presence of God, within and without, is the constant remembrance of Him at all times. This can be through the act of intercessional prayer, devotional prayer especially, but this can also be through actions that are in service to this mindfulness of God. Even the act of writing on Him or speaking of Him — in accordance with His Will, with the actuation of Divine Magic or “Thaumaturgy” — can be considered prayer in this context. Reading inspired texts, like the Bible or works of Saints, is also valid and necessary in this context for the fullness of spiritual practice towards the end of this remembrance.

Similar considerations can be seen in Hinduism and Buddhism with the use of mantra in contemplation and the concentration necessary for asceticism in prayerful meditation. In the Pali texts of Buddhism in particular, certain phrases and discourses of the Buddha are purposefully repetitious towards the end of fostering this mode of supra-rational meditation. The same can be said for the Vedas, which often repeat certain phrases or actions in the recitation of various portions, especially for fostering connections of esoteric doctrines evident in the Upanishads (Upanishad = “hidden connection” = esoteric, with translational and etymological considerations taken, with that which is esoteric naturally being obscure and “inward”).

Even though quality is superior to quantity, quantity of prayer is important to foster quality of prayer. Through an indefinitude of quantitative actions, quantity ceases to be important with respect to the quality derived from the actions themselves. It may seem dry and unimportant as to how often certain prayerful actions must be taken to those with a lower, limited point of view, but to those whose eyes are on the eternal such actions are of paramount importance towards remembering the True Self.

With prayer revealing God within the heart, a story from the Kabbalistic Tradition comes to mind in this context, that of the King in the Center of the Castle. In the story, there is a King who is in the center of the castle, but there are many walls and corridors built around him so that he is inaccessible by his servants. The servants search in vain throughout the castle, unable to find and serve their King. However, the Prince intervenes (understood as the Messiah, specifically Christ from the Christian point of view) and shows the servants that many of the walls of the castle are false, and that the separations between them in the King are not only truly few but, ultimately, illusory — the King was never truly separate from them. For our purposes, our understanding should be thus: only through inward prayer and devotion does Christ within us reveal all that can be revealed by illuminating us to God’s presence within.

So this will undoubtedly bring a question from many: how can the average lay person achieve such a thing, with all the difficulties, duties, and considerations in everyday life that take us away from the fullness of this prayer? The answer is that every person must make their own choice as to how they choose to live with regards to spiritual practice. Not everyone can be a celibate priest, nun, monk, or person of high religious station, but as the Lord tells us in Matthew 19:11 - “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it has been given.”

Everyone can pray, but not everyone has the capacity to live the celibate lifestyle of a true saint, though we are all called to be as holy as our capacity and devotion allows us to be. With regards to spiritual practice, always remember: forgo that which is good for that which is better. Though reading texts in devotion to the Divine is good, just as intercessional prayer is good, devotional prayer is better, for what the latter achieves is greater than the two former, since devotional prayer is supra-individual in its goals and achievements. Everything must be in balance with respect to one’s person, in the context of who they are to others and the world around them. It is easy to speak in generalities with respect to universal truth, it is another thing to tell every discrete individual how best to apply that universal knowledge to themselves and their vocations. The discernment of the individual and their spiritual director are best to consult, with the grace and guidance of God, should be first and foremost in this respect. So, if one has the opportunity to pray, or has the ability to make time for prayer, considering how important it is and ought to be to the individual, one should always do so when able.

Still, to quote 2 Timothy 2:19 - “The Lord knows those who are His.” God knows what is in our hearts, for He is there. God is not only the Transcendent Good and Source of Being, but he is also the Transcendent Justice, and He can never do anything that is not in accordance with Justice which is Himself. Insofar as one knows that they are right and just with their connection to God, one will naturally turn away from that which is sinful and unjust, and one will do that which is best with respect to themselves and others. To discern and know what is best, to foster that connection with God in the heart, all one needs to do is pray, bringing our considerations to a close.

The Necessity of Hierarchy

Before we digress into the fullness of this topic, we will mention that we draw heavily upon Rene Guenon’s work here, especially his Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, with regards to the relationship between the Metaphysical and the Political positions respectively. To make this more apparent, we must assess such factors in detail.

First, we must make evident the Traditional Doctrine of the Four Estates or Castes (see our The Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four), of which there is the Priestly (Brahmin) which is the sacred authority, the Warrior Elite (Kshatriya) which is the temporal power, the Merchants and Craftsmen (Vaishyas) which provide materially for the realm, and the Worker (Shudra) which provide only their bodies for labor. The hierarchy between them operates from the top to the bottom respectively. It is important to note that all of humanity is unified in the spirit, and that this often predisposes people to focus on the equality of humanity with respect to this notion, but true equality does not exist with respect to hierarchical organization in physical manifestation, and the same is true with regards to ontological levels of reality, as well as the beings within them. Each hierarchy is necessary to either support or direct others beneath them, but one clearly must inform the other and claim superiority with respect to its own domain. The supremacy of any estate above the sacred authority only leads to consequences and the degeneration of political manifestation.

With respect to the Four Estates, with the Priestly having supremacy in the organizational hierarchy, whose domain is the sacred and spiritual in the mode of contemplation, this will naturally lead to a Theocratic government, since the focus of a Traditional civilization will be with respect to its religion, in accordance with esoteric non-opposition and true spiritual vitality, and these metaphysical truths will bear out in practice in the application of its government. If this relationship begins to be inverted by putting the Warrior Elite, whose domain is the temporal powers in the mode of application and action, above that of the Priestly, this causes the manifestation of a more so Monarchial government, in which temporal affairs take supremacy over eternal focuses and principles. However, the temporal power is heavily dependent and receptive upon and towards the universal knowledge obtained through the spiritual disciple of the sacred authority, that which has measure and knowledge of eternal truths of a higher order. If the temporal authority is receptive and of a lower hierarchy to the priestly, they will better know how to use this knowledge in the domain of application in politics and government, whereas the absence of this universal knowledge will necessarily lead to imperfections that predispose it to being usurped by the lower estates or degenerate into a state in which the lower estates predominate. Conversely, only the Merchants and Craftsmen are adequately able to provide for the realm, without the predisposition to push the masses towards purely economic, or, rather, secular focuses, insofar as the Temporal Powers are carrying out their proper duty, and the Worker class can only be properly provided for, physically and spiritually, and add to the maintenance of the realm if such hierarchy is maintained. It is clear, stemming from the modernized West and corrupting the East away from its Traditional character, that such hierarchical organizations no longer truly exist in their proper orientation.

This devolution is in accordance with the Traditional Doctrine of downward cosmic manifestation, in which the course of humanity is progressively stepping away from Tradition in which spiritual authority and universal truth is supreme, moving towards materialization and then dissolution, the latter of which is the current state of affairs in most of the world. This process can indeed be noted in the political domain as well. The revolt of the Warrior Elite against the Priestly naturally leads to the revolt of the Merchants and Craftsmen against the Warrior Elite, which causes the transition from Monarchy to Democracy. It should be no mystery to many that the neo-liberal and democratic mindset goes hand in hand with capitalistic activity and speculation, i.e. economics divorced from higher principles. This gives rise to the importance and predominance of banking, corporations, and, by association, the Merchants and Craftsmen being in control of temporal affairs by proxy, which is well evidenced by the practice of lobbying and special interest groups, on top of corporations heavily being involved with the governmental organizations and politicians within democracies across the world.

This democracy will, naturally, devolve into the creation of Tyranny, in which the lowest estate of the Worker will assume supremacy, either by having a tyrant at the top that extends from this milieu, having an inversion of metaphysical principles of governance, or by having the workers, i.e. proletariat, taking charge and abolishing all hierarchy of social order, through which a tyrant will naturally take charge. This Tyranny can only be understood as the manifestations of Fascism and Communism respectively, though there can indeed be manifestations of Tyranny outside of these ideological frameworks, and this is perhaps why Julius Evola in particular was so critical of both Fascism and Communism for similar, yet divergent, reasons, and that the two are very much “two sides of the same coin”.

It is evident that the 3rd Estate, i.e. the Merchants and Craftsmen, have had the lion’s share of global control in the macrosphere of human activity since the colonial and imperial Western eras, stemming from the impulses that caused merchants to focus on greater international trade leading into the Renaissance, another symptom of modernity well noted (see Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. 5 “Individualism”). It stands to reason then, evidenced by the emergence of Communism, Fascism, and other totalitarian regimes that have emerged in the last 100 years, that a time very well may come where Tyranny via the 4th Estate becomes the predominant global force before the End of Days, and we all very much may be pushing in that direction over time, progressively marching towards the eventual conclusion of the lesser possibilities of cosmic manifestation that is most indicative of the reign of the Anti-Christ. We leave these speculations here, and progress towards furthering the core element of this work.

The Symbol of the Sphinx

The Traditional symbol of the Sphinx confuses and mystifies many of the current age, due to their incomprehension of sacred symbols and esoteric symbology, subject to purely profane points of view that are evident of the signs of the times. To best understand the significance of such a symbol, certain considerations must be taken to elucidate such truths as clearly as possible.

We must first start by considering the evidence shown by the Great Sphinx of Giza, one of the most impactful artifacts from the ancient world. It is a reclining creature with a lion’s body at rest, all with the head of man looking outward towards the world, upright and stoic, gazing into eternity. The head, in this instance, is reflective of the sacred authority of man fully realized within the divine order with knowledge of universal truth, reflecting his divine nature in his ideal mode. In contrast, the animal nature of man in the physical is symbolized by the lion body, a lesser nature that is subject to mastery by man’s higher nature, while also simultaneously being symbolic of potency and being the apex of the creatures of the wild, and this is also symbolic of the temporal power of man’s application of divine knowledge in the domain of the political. Do note that, given that the sphinx is the fusion of the divine man and human animality, when divine knowledge is properly applied in the temporal that the sphinx is indeed at rest — man is effortlessly able to maintain political mastery without the need for action, though the potential for action is still there.

We will also say in passing that the symbol of the sphinx is manifest from spiritual impulses that extend from the previous cosmic cycle of the spiritual Bronze Age, in the domain of contemporary pre-history, and a vestige of certain aspects of Atlantean spirituality. The greatest cause behind such considerations for some is that, through recent research and speculation, it has been noted that the Sphinx of Giza, as well as the Pyramids of Giza, very well may actually pre-date the Egyptian civilization entirely. Though for those with more Traditional considerations this may not be all too surprising, considering that in Plato’s Timaeus, the core text that speaks about the existence of the Atlantean civilization before the Great Deluge that ushered in the current Iron Age of spirituality, it was the Egyptians that retained the knowledge of Atlantis and their period of colonization, and the Egyptians very much viewed the Greeks “as children”, with the latter possessing the same gods as the former but simply with different names.

Such evidence of this Traditional symbol can also be seen in the Major Arcana of the Tarot - X - The Wheel of Fortune:

At the top of the wheel is the sphinx, evidencing the supremacy of divine animality, with the wings added in tandem to emphasize this upward tendency, at the height of the cosmic order which is symbolized by the wheel (take, for example, the Wheel of Dharma in this context, or the consideration of “celestial spheres”). The fact that the sphinx is also holding a sword, a symbol of temporal authority, should also further solidify the concordance of the lion’s association with temporal mastery. Regardless, it is obvious to many, however, that man in general participates in a fallen state as a consequence of the Great Fall, as attested to especially within the book of Genesis as well as the Kore Kosmou (i.e. Holy Virgin, or “Holy Pupil”, with “pupil” taken in the context as both student and as the part of the eye, the pupil taken as the center of focus or center of the world, a true “spiritual center” - of which Egypt was considered, given the fact that most ancient maps center themselves around Egypt).

The downward tendency of cosmic manifestation is shown by the monkey on the left, with primates being symbolic of a degenerate form of humanity. For example, St. Augustine refers to Satan as the “Simius Dei”, the “ape of god”, a poor imitation of the Imago Dei, i.e. the image of God — of which man is a reflection. Conversely, the upward tendency towards the ideal of divine animality is the dog on the right, with the canine not only being “man’s best friend” but also cultivated from the wilderness as wolves and wild animals into the companions of man, just as man is the companion of God (see Meditations on the Tarot).

The wheel turning in the constant flux of these downward tendencies, best understood as “chaotic” or “centrifugal” forces, and upward tendencies, best understood as “order” and “centripetal” forces, is symbolic of the great drama of cosmic manifestation with respect to divine law. It should be noted that this Major Arcana of the Wheel of Fortune is the 10th, with 10 being the sum of all the divine years of the four cosmic cycles added together, and 10 being symbolic of temporal order (see again our The Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four). We will also note in passing the “Fortune” understood here should be identified as “Necessity” which extends from the Providence of God’s Divine Plan, since that which is natural is, by convention, necessary.

If only were humanity to rise back to its divine station, through contemplation and remembering of the fullness of supra-human wisdom, would the spiritual sphinx of humanity be restored and allowed to be at rest.

Contemplation over Action and Against Duality

To further emphasize the importance of hierarchy, with respect to the Sacred Authority having a necessarily higher station than Temporal Power, contemplation is and needs to be superior to action, since the former is reflective of the activity of the Sacred Authority and the latter with Temporal Power. Just as essence is superior to substance, quality over quantity, purusha over prakriti, etc. — the same must be with respect to contemplation over action, since the former informs and is superior to the latter. Just as pure substance without essence is an illogical impossibility and more so symbolic of a tendency towards “matter”, pure action without contemplation would be meaningless agitation and chaos, a veritable flailing about of ineffectual seizing (see Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. “Knowledge and Action”).

As such, action within the temporal, i.e. the secular domains of the social, political and economic, cannot be the prime aim of human activity. Instead, focus on contemplation ought to be the primary focus of the collective whole of the modern man going forward, so that contemplating the eternal truths and deep mysteries of being and life borne from Tradition will draw us back upwards to attaining that which has been lost to us since the Fall, and will likely only bear itself out as being fully manifest towards the end of the age. The focus on the purely temporal can only lead towards dispersion and dissolution, as a result of its association with change and becoming, as well as chaos and centrifugal force. Therefore, contemplation on the supra-mundane can only allow for a proper reorientation and centrality of spiritual intuition to draw us back to the proper station to properly allow for application, ideally within the new Paradise that will be borne from the age to come. We will emphasize that this is not a purely passive process, that our agency, both with respect to contemplation and action that is informed by it, is required, for as the Lord’s prayer tells us: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done/On Earth as it is in Heaven”.

Despite the fact that existence within the physical necessitates duty and action, with respect to Dharma in Hinduism especially as the Bhagavad Gita tells us, we must rescind our attachment to the outcomes of such action and plant ourselves firmly within the eternal, and this simply cannot be done without reestablishing the supremacy of contemplation. Contemplation, the activity in and of itself, also leads towards the process of progressive spiritual realization of purely esoteric truths, regardless of faith, that are beyond opposition since they all extend from the same One, since all extends from and is within the One True God — Being is synonymous with He, and, since He is eternal, so Being is eternal, as is Truth.

“I am that I am.” [Exodus 3:14]

Note: 3.14 is the first 3 digits of π, necessary for the calculation of the circle, an eternal symbol of that which is without beginning or end, with God being a Trinity.

With a reintegration into the unicity of universal truths in complete concordance with Traditional Metaphysics, all opposition and duality disappears, since duality is reflective of multiplicity and divergence within manifestation. Wherever we look in this day and age there is nothing but disintegration in secular, and arguably some religious, spaces. From a purely cosmogonic point of view, God is the fusion of subject and object, since He is the primary object of all real knowledge, as everything extends from Him, and He is the only true subject, with the concept of the individual “self” being but an illusion, which the Advaita Vedanta school of thought in Hinduism of Sri Shankaracharya shows by identifying the self (atman) with the supreme reality (Brahman) — note the etymological association with Brahmin (priest) and Brahman here — best symbolized as the individual being but a virtual reflection of the sun, the symbol for the divine reality which illumines all, in a mirror.

We will further the truth of this symbol by noting that Kant recognized that the Categorical Imperative of the Self is supra-individual and beyond pure logic, as evidenced in his Critique of Pure Reason, because the self extends from and is identified with divine reality. We must also relate that St. Augustine identified the original sin of man with the transgression of man viewing himself as separate from God, by the effect of divorcing man’s will from God’s Will and defying Him. Even though it is universally possible, via the existence of the Freedom of the Will, through God’s gift to transgress against Him, it is never and will never be truly desirable for one to do so.

As such, duality in the domain of application, without adherence to Traditional Metaphysics, is not only eventual but also leads to a greater degree of multiplicity. The reason why dualism is the primary mode of such factors is that the focus in the domain of action and application leads to the natural consequence of focus on the natural, i.e. secular, domains, as previously stated, and this naturally leads to division via an adversarial, i.e. “us vs them”, mentality, emblematic of the way in which people view the world purely through physical factors of outward manifestation, i.e. appearance and the exoteric alone. It’s no surprise that Nationalism, a decidedly modern ideology, is the key impetus that creates a focus on physical mastery, i.e. dominion, which causes competition for physical resources, which only leads to the oppositional force of stripping resources away from others. It should be noted that this leads to an exceedingly materialistic mindset, and that there may be no ideology more materialistic than Communism and Fascism, since their primary focus is the acquisition and allocation of resources with respect to some perceived equity and state supremacy. Additionally, this dualism steeped in heterodoxy and modern principles causes fracturing, both within Traditional and modern spaces, and the break-up of various sects and denominations within religious and political orders.

We need only cite the examples of the plentitude of Protestant churches that exist today, many of which have split off into various factions and are even subject to dissolution entirely, perhaps not surviving past this century when demographic principles are taken into consideration, and similar impulses may be seen in Islam with the Salafi movement going forward. The political domain is also decidedly fractured. Despite the fact that many two party systems emerge to form compromise and consensus, to achieve a majority in the electorate, these parties are also ideologically fractured and turn into different factions, with the greatest mutability being present in the parliamentary, multi-party democracies of the world. There are even many parties that form for a specific purpose and then subsequently dissolve when that end is achieved, purely focused on seeking a temporal goal without adherence to any higher principle, even of a lesser, profane modern ideology.

Therefore, to transcend the political we must also transcend the dualistic mode that subjects humanity, both in the microcosm and macrocosm, to division and dissolution, or else run the consequences of being used to ends that are against our best interests, either physically, mentally or spiritually. For example, in the Book of Revelations [20:7-9] it states that the Satan will be loosed upon the world to usher in the age of the Anti-Christ, and the latter will bring the nations of Gog and Magog from the Four Corners of the Earth to participate in the final battle. The same process is mentioned in the Qur’an as well in Surah Al-Anbiya [21:96] when Al-Dajjal (“the deceiver”, taken as Anti-Christ in the Christian Tradition) will release the nations of Yajuj and Majuj for the final battle as well.

It is important to note that these nations of Gog and Magog, Yajuj and Majuj, are global, and that they are opposed to one another. They’re not localized from a particular part of the world but are present throughout it, and that all these people are anti-thetically separate from one another, even inside their own local nations. People in their own places are made to hate one another by participating in the worldliness of the world, in the modern deception of secular politics, and this causes divisions that would have family kill family, child kill parent, and all other manner of atrocities. What could this not be more emblematic of than the current divisiveness in global politics between Left and Right, Democratic and Totalitarian, and West and East? Additionally, both parties serve as controlled opposition, bearing out the same ultimate goal, that is the creation of the reign of the Anti-Christ.

Etymologically, it must also be noted that these aforementioned peoples are very similar, and that they very well may be seeds for the other, and that their opposition is the fuel that feeds the fire of the hatred that maintains the reason for their existence. Gog and Magog, in particular, and by association Yajuj and Majuj, were associated with barbarian peoples, at the time period in which the respective works were written, that did not have their own Traditions, putting the Traditional world under threat of destruction and separation from God (see Charles Upton’s The System of Anti-Christ). What could be more reflective of this than those that participate in a purely secularized worldview, divorced from anything and everything eternal and universally true?

People can choose to identify and separate themselves for all manner of reasons, in accordance with secular identity politics or otherwise. However, as Guenon states, every identification is a limitation, and this limitation separates the contingent from the universal, due to closing oneself off from that which exists and extends beyond the individual mode. The more that one identifies with one aspect of identity — whether national, political, racial, ethnic, linguistic, etc. — the more one is separate from that which is beyond all opposition. If one engages in opposition, one participates in an adversarial mode, and there is none more adversarial and causes adversity than that which is the Great Adversary, Satan himself.

Time and Space — Seeing the Eternal —Against Utopianism and One World Governance

In Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times, Ch. 23 “Time changed into Space”, the idea of how Traditional and modern societies deal with time and space is fundamental to our understanding here. Traditional societies, especially those that were nomadic and travelled over great expanses, before the degeneration into sedentary agriculture that focuses on the aforementioned mastery of the physical (a veritable stepping away from the fullness of the Primordial Tradition), necessarily had their focus on the great expanse of the space before them. The Traditional focus on space, by association, consumes time. Conversely, with modern societies focusing so much on time, the economy of time and culture of economics focusing on the hyper-quantification of all metrics, the inverse is true for this profane point of view. The modern focus on time, by association, consumes space.

This is a refined and nuanced position of metaphysical truth recognized here. Due to the fact that peoples and civilizations that are Traditional focus on that which is eternal, focusing on traversing space and not trying to control it, time is consumed with regards to the permanence of such spiritual influences. For example, the Egyptian, as well as many other Traditional civilizations, have the greatest staying power in the context of human history, with both monuments and spiritual impulses that extend from ancient spirituality manifesting and prolonging into later generations. In contrast, modern civilizations of a more than limited character are incredibly ephemeral and have very little lasting impact on different aspects of current era contemporary society, which extends from the fact that the ideological precepts of a modern character from earlier time periods are not the same as they are today, subject to further becoming and degeneration as time goes on. Not only is humanity vastly different in organization and mentality today than even 100 years ago, but the gap of separation between modern man and Traditional man from 1000 years ago is vastly greater, without even taking into consideration earlier forms of man that existed in the pre-historical spiritual Bronze Age 6,300 years ago and beyond. Much of this is due to a gradual and progressive process of collective “forgetting”, but to explore this in detail would take us too far afield.

The contrary effect for modern civilization is the creation of impulses that foster globalization, since, with the focus on time, space is consumed. Take for instance the technological components created in the domain of application to improve quality of life and save time, with each of these serving to increase the rapidity by which tasks can be done, only to further accelerate the tendency towards more confused activity. The natural outcome of such “innovation” is a contraction of the perception of space, due to its relative lessening of barriers that separate different peoples across the whole of the earth. The internet, of course, is the primary facilitator of this, with regards to financial liquidity, as well as the transmission of worryingly large amounts of psychic information of rather dubious origin (see our The Demonic Nature of Memes, the Internet and AI). It’s akin to the symbol of a boulder going down hill, getting faster and faster until it reaches the bottom by which it meets with a calamitous crash, which can only be understood as the end of the age.

This consumption of space leads to a false and inverted sense of unity. These modern forces of globalization serve to destroy and force unity in all domains. Whether its corporations growing by acquisition and taking over other firms, nations invading other nations for land and resources, destroying biodiversity in favor of larger numbers of a few species of plants and animals to consolidate and use for consumption, or in the destruction of Traditional cultures, peoples and languages in favor of modern popular culture, the outcome is the same — a Luciferian inversion of false unity. From a purely ontological point of view, since everything extends from the One and returns to the One, true unity can only exist at the highest ontological domain which is Beyond Being, and any attempt to manifest unity through these modern processes in the physical is an inversion of this truth.

It is a natural law that diversity exist within the physical, since the physical and substance are inherently adhered to multiplicity in manifestation, regardless of the spiritual unity that is to be striven towards. Therefore, it is natural law, and by association Divine Law, that there should be a multiplicity of life, peoples, languages, and even Traditions, taken into the context of the Transcendent Unity of Traditions (see our Metaphysics - Esotericism - Universality). With this recognition, this is why it indeed is true that the modern world is anti-thetically opposed to the Traditional and outwardly anti-Traditional by association, by virtue of the fact that it transgresses against natural law by association.

Even further, the modern world participates in utopian tendencies, with its “myth of progress” creating evolutionary theorizations that posit the supposition that, as time progresses, contemporary life and the world at large will naturally get better and improve dramatically. This is a fundamental inversion of the Traditional doctrine of the downward tendency of manifestation and just goes to show the complete incomprehension of the moderns. Perfection cannot exist within the purely physical domain of activity, because that which is physical is a mixture of quality (essence) and quantity (substance), and the latter necessarily implies limitation, and anything that is limited and not self-sufficient in itself is necessarily imperfect. As stated elsewhere, essence can exist without substance, but substance cannot exist without essence, just as the temporal cannot exist without the sacred — essence, just like truth, is eternal, while substance is contingent and limited in the domain of becoming and constant change.

The natural conclusion of such globalist utopianism is a one world government, in which everyone is drawn into a false unity and fully divorced from universal truth, under the yoke of a uniform standardization of all secular domains. It is said that the reign of the Anti-Christ and his victory will occur, but that it will last only for a day, for that which is purely divorced from the eternal must only lead to dissolution and ephemerality. Evil, by association, is really only the privation, i.e. absence, of good, since that which is good is indicative of presence, just as vice is the absence of virtue. Therefore, evil has a tendency towards non-existence and cannot be subject to its own destruction. Comparatively, Eternal Truth shall always reign supreme forever and always everywhere, for truth cannot but exist wherever it may be found, and there is nowhere where truth is absent, since wherever there is Being there is also Truth because the two are the one and the same.

Therefore, transcend the political mode — go beyond dualism, application, and the temporal. Seize eternity through contemplation of the mysteries of Tradition, so that only then the Truth can be manifest from the mountaintop once more for all to see, and no longer hidden within the cave.

We shall leave off here with a quote from the Book of Isaiah to see how the temporal shall be when the world is set aright once more:

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse (the father of David),
and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Creation of the Christianity)
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, (Christ, descendant of David)
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; (Esoteric Wisdom)
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. (Sacred Authority)
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins. (Temporal Power)

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. (Geniality of Spiritual Oneness)
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain; (Beyond Opposition)
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea. (Truth Manifest over the “Lower Waters”)

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Isaiah 11: 1-10 (parenthesis mine).

Background and Initial Considerations

Fantasy is one of key genres of artistic exploration within the contemporary modern era. Much could be said of its general cultural impact, whether in the medium of fiction writing, art, film, and so on. We touched on such considerations of the spiritual implications of fantastical imaginings in another work of ours (see our “The Spiritual Dangers of Anime and Manga”, Pt. 1, and Pt. 2), but we wish to expand here with regards to a culture that has been cultivated more so over the last 50 years. We speak of course of the realm of Fantasy RPGs.

Whenever there is an impulse or imaginative process that pulls one away from some aspect of our reality, there is always the risk of an individual to lack proper apprehension as to what our reality, and even more so realities higher than the physical, truly is. Certain assumptions or cosmological systems in fantasy detract away from greater realities and truths, especially when there’s a strong emotional or general mental attachment to these lesser imagined realities. There is certainly an intoxicating element to fantasy, and fiction in general, but it is another thing entirely when one controls the narrative and how it interplays with others.

There is a certain demiurgic quality to being the arbiter of imaginative worlds, either as a writer, or a scenario director referred to as the “Dungeon Master” (DM) especially. Even though the world one may be inhabiting is created by another, it gives rise to creating one’s own worlds and one’s own entities within these worlds that take on a life of their own, either in the context of the narrative or even outside of the game as well. The same is true with regards to readers and players as well, either the reader inserting oneself into the role of the character, or, with the game, imagining a character as themselves, even if in a limited and purely imaginal capacity. Still, this lesser reality is real, since the effects of it are real to the participant, and this is the key to our discussion that we must now delve into with greater depth and care, so as to not be misunderstood or thought too puritanical, but with all proper considerations taken into place to maximize the importance of the spiritual end to which we ought to all be directed.

The Formation of Fantasy as Genre

Fantasy as a genre began in the Romantic period of art and literature, with the popularization of the fiction novel hitting an apex of popularity, to the point of being called a craze and being recognized as a potential societal threat by many of the religious revivalists of the time period. Fantasy wouldn’t really come into its own without a series of key works: Phantastes and The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, The Well at Worlds End by William Morris, and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It is important to note that not only do all of these authors hail from Great Britain, carrying on certain aspects of the British literary tradition, but that all of the major worlds that these stories participate in are either completely separate or partitioned realities separate from our world - the realm of fantasy.

The major themes focused on in these works have to deal with chivalry, virtue and exploration in the former three works, whereas in Alice in Wonderland the fantasy takes on a decidedly nihilistic and nonsensical character in its complete indulgence in the fantasy narrative. The important thing to note here is that the former three examples, the works of MacDonald and Morris, reflect an championing of higher ideals and truths of a supra-human character, and would go on to inspire the works of J.R.R Tolkien via the writings within Middle Earth, as well as the writings of C.S. Lewis with regards to his Narnia and Screwtape narratives. The same cannot be said for Lewis Carroll, taken in consideration along with his personal struggles and controversies, which betray a lesser expression of the fantasy genre that devolves into lesser, infra-human territory of a more pernicious character to the imaginal worlds that can be created.

The former three examples, and works that extend from it, also make use of imagery and cultural information that extends deep into European folklore, with regards to goblins, faeries, dwarves, gnomes and other fantastical creatures of a deeply symbolic value, either reflective of subtle spirits or symbolic of, like dragons and unicorns, that which is to be conquered or achieved as an ideal.

As a result of this recognition, Fantasy can indeed be a medium that achieves and points to greater truths of a Traditional order, with The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia being champion examples of great quality, each having deep esoteric truths being hidden within, much of which escapes many of the fandoms and individuals that enjoy participating in such media (which is a topic we could return to at another time). Fantasy as a genre mainly falls short by not being as overt with its message and relying more on the narrative and symbolism to communicate certain aspects at a subconscious or more covert pathway.

Despite this, Fantasy can also lead into a large “stepping away” from universal truths and more so pushes towards a veritable madness and abyss. Not only can this present as absurdism, but this can also lead to both confused conceptions of the temporal and spiritual histories of mankind as well. The works of Robert E. Howard and his Conan writings reflect a confused nature of what early Iron Age peoples looked like, with his so-called “Hyborian” Age after the fall of Atlantis during the tail end of the spiritual Bronze Age, whereas the true Hyperborean man existed during the Silver Age which preceded the Bronze. Similar impulses can be seen in the works of H.P. Lovecraft as well, with the imaginations of early humanity in times past, going against certain modernistic and scientific trends that denied the existence of civilizations that went before the pre-history of roughly 4300 BC, even going so far as to consider anything before the year 600 BC as “legendary” history. Even though their intuition, with regards to the existence of a higher states of man in times past, was well founded and reflective of the truth of the matter, the way in which these manifestations presented in their imaginations was more so a reflection of certain modern biases and impulses that led to relative incomprehension to the truth of such matters.

H.P. Lovecraft, however, took things a step further to create a seemingly anti-Traditional cosmology, that has been termed the Cthulhu Mythos. The existence of a Cthulhu, as well as other “cosmic” deities, which could only appear as demonic to anyone with a degree of sensibility, either in the subterranean depths of our words of in the cosmos beyond, creates a despairing and nihilistic view of reality, in which humanity is but an aberration and unlikely participant within the greater cosmos, in the context of great and horrific beings that originate beyond conventional time and space — malefic beings that not only do not wish us well but drive humanity into madness upon viewing them.

This latter point is a relative inversion of supranatural states of consciousness into which one comes into contact with the Divine ineffable through spiritual practice. This offers the supposition that anything “supernatural” is both dangerous and solely of an infernal or demonic persuasion, which prefigures certain impulses towards the forwarding of the potential for superior “extraterrestrial” forms of life, in comparison with which humanity seems relatively insignificant, which may be a partial reaction of the movement away from a more human centered geocentric cosmology towards a, though scientifically correct, unmoored heliocentric cosmology that makes humanity lost among the stars.

All of these aspects of fantasy, both positive and negative, either through more refined high expressions of the medium or through the aptly named “weird fiction” or low presentations, coalesce, more or less, into the major presentations of fantasy in the various Fantasy RPG systems that exist in the world today, which brings us to our next focus.

The Popularization and Effects of Fantasy RPGs

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them”.

-Frodo, The Lord of the Rings

These Fantasy impulses within the collective unconscious of the post-modern age only naturally would come to manifest beyond just the imaginings of particularly influential individuals within the literary sphere and would transition towards other individuals making their own fantasies on a much more personal and localized scale. The gamification of fantasy via the Table-top RGP (TTRPG) is the most natural form of progression, and Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), created in 1974, fills that void. The successes of this game would lead to the creation of a greater plethora of other games, including the Call of Cthulhu in 1981 (to make evident the influence of the aforementioned mythos of H.P. Lovecraft), Warhammer in 1983 (followed by Warhammer 40,000), which took a turn towards more science fiction impulses like Shadowrun in 1989, then in other tenebrous impulses via Vampire the Masquerade in 1991 (the topic of vampirism popularization a topic for another potential article), and then returning back to the domain of fantasy proper with Pathfinder in 2008.

The game of DnD heavily borrows from much of the aesthetic and creations present within Tolkien’s Middle Earth, whose influence on greater fantasy is undeniable, as well as certain pagan influences, with the presence of various “gods” by which one can be aligned or non-aligned, on top of the recognition of celestial and demonic beings, the latter sometimes coming under the guise of the Lovecraftian influences. Many other properties, Pathfinder and Warhammer included, would not be as successful without the initial influence of this particular game.

What is positive about these games is the fostering of the recognition and participation in archetypes, which are emblematic of the core presentations of the human personality and the vocations that extend from these identities. Take for consideration that the original DnD had 12 classes to pick from: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock and Wizard (with Artificer being added later, reflective of certain industrial modernistic deviations). Compare this to the 12 signs of the Zodiac, both in Western and Eastern Traditions respectively, which are reflections of archetypes emanating from a Divinely ordered cosmology. The number 12 is associated with Celestial Order (compared to 10 which is Temporal Order, see our article on The Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four for more numerology), which is why there are 12 Disciples that follow Christ, just as there are 12 Knights of the Round Table, amongst other reflections of the same esoteric truth.

These archetypes are key dispositions that one can foster towards achieving certain outcomes via spiritual practice, with the Kshatriya, or “warrior elite”, mindset being most evident with classes like Fighter and Barbarian, whereas the vocation of the ascetic can very well be reflected by the Monk. A Brahman, or “priestly”, disposition is well evidenced by the Cleric, and arguably the Druid, even if little is known about the Celtic Tradition by the masses today, and the fusion of the warrior and priestly is seen easily in the Paladin archetype.

Archetypes are a major part of the esoteric interpretation of the Tarot as well, with the Hermit being reflected by the solitary nature of the Rogue (though in a negativistic interpretation), but even more so by the Ranger, and the spirit of what a Hermit truly is can easily be reflected by many of the other classes as well, if properly considered. The same can be said for the archetype of the Fool, in which the Bard may be most emblematic of, unless a Holy Fool is considered, in which the other classes could easily more so apply. For the archetype of the Magician, or Magus, this is reflected especially by the Wizard, in its positive representation, and in the negative for the Sorcerer and Warlock. Similar Traditional archetypes could, of course, be undertaken, even if latently and unconsciously, in other RPGs beyond DnD as well.

Each of these Archetypes could warrant a discussion in their own right (which may be a task for another time), but suffice to say that there can indeed be transfiguring and positive outcomes from strongly identifying and bearing out these archetypes in practice, even in play, but even more so if that play predisposes towards truly operant spiritual practice. The issue with Fantasy RPGs, tabletop or otherwise, is that this rarely manifests in this manner. In fact, we would argue that everything else to the contrary is what is experienced by the lion’s share of players.

Firstly, we must note that the majority of players do not take any transfiguring intentions with their style of play. Instead, most players make their games into an exercise in unrestrained will and fancy, using this virtual world to do all the things they wish they could do in their everyday lives - not literally of course - such as be heroic, take initiative, to be adventurous, charming, aggressive, and so on, as opposed to conditioning themselves to actualize these dispositions in the real world. Their fantasy runs wild and even detracts from the importance of their real life experiences. Arguably, one could take the experiences of the game and view them in the context of real life, in such a way as to gain perspective and improve one’s own personal attitudes, and by extension experiences. The issue, however, is that this is rarely what happens, and, instead, players often take their “wild flight” of the will to see how much they can get away with without consequence, and even go so far as to do things they would never do in real life. Naturally, one’s real life suffers when the virtual world takes precedence in one’s mind, especially when these experiences are more satisfying than any aspect of one’s real life. It is a dangerous distraction, from both salvation and realization.

We need only harken to one piece of media, a documentary called The Dungeon Masters released in 2008. It follows the lives of three seemingly ordinary people, dealing with real life struggles and difficulties, going about, admittedly, commonplace existences, but what unites them thematically is that they all participate in being avid players of DnD. Much of these players’ identity and focus is on their hobby, and its evident, based upon where their priorities lie, that such levels of devotion are not present in their real life endeavors. Whether it comes to finances, career, or orienting oneself to that which is higher, little to none of this is present within the lives of these documentary subjects. The documentary barely even focuses on the game itself, just more so about their life experiences on the outside of the game, which probably explains the film’s poor performance and reviews, but we found it to be a rather sympathetic and thought-provoking watch. No doubt many players of DnD could easily sympathize and identify with such individuals, whether it be an uncomfortable view in the mirror or not.

Second, we must harken to a decidedly tenebrous character latent within such RPGs, which is the occult influence of participating in such games. Many both scoffed and took seriously the accusations that players of DnD in the 1980s were participating in witchcraft and demon worship in the act of playing the game, under the guise of the Satanic Panic of that era of American History. This claim warrants rebuke from many, the players especially, because it seems so outlandish on its face, plus those that participate with the game do not acknowledge consciously participating in any degree of demonic or satanic worship, whereas the stereo-typical “Bible-thumping” Conservative Christians of the era were quick to decry anything that broached upon what could be termed demonic, as well as not being able to adequately articulate their reasoning as to why it was so, due to their lack of occultic theory or intellectual refinement. We will say in passing, that Julius Evola once remarked that the American mentality is reflective of an inversion of the famous maxim of Descartes, “Cogit Ergo Sum”, and were more indicative of a state of mind that could be summed up as: “I don’t think, but I still am.” There are many issues present in American Christian intellectual spheres, and this is but another symptom.

We, however, hold the same claim as these Conservative Christians, but do so with a more fully realized view into the phenomenon. We spoke previously on the nature of the demonic in media previously (see our The Demonic Nature of Memes, the Internet, and AI), and we will say that much that we have said before applies here as well. The nature of unseen spiritual warfare against thought-forms and ideological superstructures, which can be properly termed demonic, is completely ignored or misunderstood by post-modern man, having no basis of understanding of spiritual or psychic reality and even going so far as to posit that there is no objective reality at all — and even that physical reality is subjective! People don’t even realize that they are being arrested mentally, in the act of being oppressed or possessed by subtle forces, and its rather troubling the level of illusion that seems to be over the eyes of the public in so many domains, with this subject being no exception.

When people create and recognize a character, either the player character or non-player character (NPC) within the game, as an idea and conception with its own agency, this entity takes on a life of its own independent of its creators. These egregores, collective thought forms, have a definite effect upon the psyche of those that engage with it, especially if they’re immersed within the fantasy of the game, eliciting emotion, mental activity, and engagement. People become devoted to these characters, they view experiences inside and outside of the game through the context of the experiences derived from these characters, and the same is true for games as it is for television and films. Such matters lead to a confusion of the highest order, with the virtual world having greater importance than the physical — a veritable psychic prison, where the prisoners would rather be inside than outside.

Though most people engage in this process unconsciously, we can guarantee to you, dear reader, that there are others out there that do indeed engage in conscious demon creation and worship through the use of the RPG, indicative of the Left Hand Path persuasion of “counter-spirituality”. If you should not believe us, we need only point to the existence of one work by the name of The Book of Antithesis, which outlines this entire philosophy and mode of praxis, and we will note in passing that the author of this work is also an avid writer of RPG scenario manuals, even those officially released under the DnD name! We could speak more on this here, but choose not to divulge too much in this format, and we should caution others from looking too deeply into such subjects and circles.

To bring all these pieces together, even if the RPG could be indicative of certain transfiguring possibilities and possess a certain Traditional character, if properly oriented, the dangers of such a thing far outweigh the potential benefit. These infra-human impulses ultimately pervert and invert anything possible about it and turn it into something less than positive for the whole of humanity. To take this a step further, we shall take into account another dimension of the RPG that we have not brought into frame yet that will make these concerns more evident.

From Tabletop to Computer: RPG Video Games and the Rise of the MMO Format

Consider for a moment the amount of time that people, as a collective, have spent on TTRPGs since their inception. Whatever figure you have in your mind, I can guarantee you that an exponentially greater amount has been devoted to video games. At least with TTRPGs, people have to all be present to have a cohesive play session, which is difficult enough to achieve in times like these with the economy of time in the world at large, though arguably, with the advent of the internet, this has been easier to achieve in recent memory. By association, though video game RPGs (VRPGs) have been around for a while, since at least the 1980s with text-adventure games and more, integration into the online sphere has opened up a dizzying horizon of possibilities for this style of game. The potential for distraction in our day and age is unparalleled when compared to any other time in human history, with so many trenches to fall into that bring us facing down towards the earth, all to be so easily covered up within it.

Much of the VRPGs that are influential today stem from the same fantasy impulses that exist in TTRPGs. Games from the Elder Scrolls, and by association Fallout through the output of Bethesda, come to mind, as well as Baldur’s Gate, an offshoot of DnD, along with many others, with the Dark Souls, and so-called Souls-Borne series of games from FromSoftware of which Elden Ring also participates, being a somewhat return to form of high fantasy (a topic for another time). The important factor to note here is that the majority of these games are exclusively single player, which is ideal with regards to immersion, game design, and for the experience to be consolidated and finished more easily. If these VRPGs are, instead, multiplayer then often these elements are not the primary game focus, and if they are then the number of players often does not exceed 4 or 8 simultaneous participants. The issue comes when there are technological “innovations” that allow thousands of participants to participate in the same virtual “game world”, all predicated upon this fantasy mythos and system of interface, all achieving ends of a rather concerning nature. We of course are alluding here to the popularity and existence of Massive Multiplayer Online RPGs (MMORPGs).

The internet age has many unintended side-effects, some of which we have already touched upon elsewhere, but the same effects can be seen in the realm of Fantasy, and the advent of the video game facilitates these impulses. The desire for greater immersion and for interactivity, as well as a lessening of the imaginations of contemporary western society, have led to the creation of these MMORPG virtual game worlds, by which people devote countless hours of their lives. Much of the early popularity began with games like Everquest in 1999, followed by the successes of Runescape in 2001, but the real growth wouldn’t be until the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, along with the various expansions and “classic” servers that are released progressively up until time of writing, with no sign of stopping, creating many other expressions with names such as Final Fantasy IX and XIV, Ultima Online, and Guild Wars all in the domain of Fantasy, and even Star Wars and EVE Online in the realm of science fiction.

Without getting into too much minutiae, these MMOs are incredibly pernicious for the sole fact that there is no end goal in them, allowing for an indefinite escapism of the participant that is further facilitated by a collective participation by countless others in the same imaginal realm. Of the various aspects of modern gaming that are dangerous for the contemporary individual, this one deserves special attention. Though the best versions of gear can be sought, progression through various in-game experiences to completion, professions and so on for a singular character, this can simply be done for and indefinite amount of other characters as well, and for a multitude of servers as well. If one finds oneself addicted to such mania of activity, one could find no end to such quests, insofar as one doesn’t burn out on the experience, but the flame can just as easily be rekindled as it is extinguished for many, creating a system of comfort and dependency to wish to engage in such endeavors, either purely for self-enjoyment or to recapture some degree of sentimental experience from times past.

We must also note that these MMOs also predispose many to a certain mindset that we could call “virtual materialism”. Despite the items and money in the game not being physically tangible, people hoard large amounts of both towards the end of capitalistic endeavors, both inside and outside the game itself. People spend countless hours “farming” in game currency and items towards the end of dominating markets or participating in gross speculation, like one would with trading stocks and bonds in the secondary market. Not only does this trap individuals within this cycle of constant maintenance of their habit of playing the game, it even enslaves them to it even further by being a source of income for some. People will even create AI-bot programs to play the game for them on several devices simultaneously towards the end of profit and progressing characters, a hyperquantification of the experience towards purely quantitative value, without any respect to the quality of the game to be played (and we should add that many companies are permissive of this practice, insofar as the game as a whole is not disrupted and it gains them more money via subscription based service models). People go so far as to trade this virtual money for real life money as well, especially for those in lesser developed countries where the in-game currency is more valuable than their real world country’s legal tender. Just another instance by which people become enslaved to the machine can easily be found in the MMO, to where Fantasy, in any positive or negative presentation, is lost entirely from the spirit of the being within the medium of the game.

We must confess some personal experience on our end: we have indeed participated at length in MMOs in the past, and video games in general, for more time than we care to admit. Our need for spiritual development has put much of this behind us, though it is easy to backslide into such hobbyist tendencies if vigilance is not maintained. We more than likely have much first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of such games — their communities, and the culture that is borne of such spaces — more so than the average individual, and we have no doubt put in thousands of hours into a single game alone. Our experiences are surely similar to that of many others, but the outcomes of such experiences are so varied that it leads to the realm of morbid speculation. We felt the need to escape from such fantastical prisons, or else be consumed by our own desire for escapism and fun, but there are greater things in life than the hedonism of such activities.

There are many horror stories that extend from such communities: parents neglecting children, people losing their livelihoods, suffering medical conditions, destruction of marriages, and all as a result of being a slave to a fantasy world that doesn’t really exist — yet still has such a hold over the real world. If such unfortunate circumstances can be so easily made manifest, imagine how much worse the psychic and spiritual casualties of such activity that is unseen comes as a result.

Conclusions

The chasm of vice is wide and deep indeed, easier than ever to fall into in this day and age — and all it takes is temptation and a momentary lapse to slip along the way.

Imagination, just like wisdom, is a passive process, and it’s also easy to fall prey to having one’s imagination run away into all manner of directions as a result of the will, either of oneself or another’s. Imagination, just like thought itself, runs away with itself, following its own path and logic, making it hard to pin down and control, let alone to try and master. If one lets one’s imagination run wild in its uncontrolled flight, we ourselves might find ourselves controlled.

Just like when we spoke previously, when cautioning about spiritual dangers, not everyone will fall victim to the extremes of such influences, but those that do either fall into ruin or take much time to climb themselves out from the pit they’ve made for themselves. Still, if one cannot stay away from such influences without suffering the worst consequences, we must remind the reader:

“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” [Matthew 5:29]

If one cannot transfigure experiences into a positive spiritual development, then it may very well be better not to engage in them at all, no matter how enjoyable they may be. Just because something is pleasurable does not mean it is good for us, whereas, more often than not, things that are displeasurable are often to our benefit toward cultivating virtue that leads us upwards (see Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy). We will leave this discussion at that with one final thought, and we leave it up to the reader to decide which is greater — what is more important, what is in the moment or what is in eternity?

“Games are fun, but just because they are fun does not mean they are good.”

The Issue of “Ghosts”, “Aliens”, and “Cryptids”

There have been a plethora of shows and interests, as well as videos and channels on social media, dedicated towards investigating, recording, and sharing supposed “ghostly” phenomena. Whether it’s Ghost Adventures, Ghost Hunters, Paranormal State, and others, the scenario is the same: there are some paranormal phenomenon, assumed to be “ghosts” more often than not, that needs be investigated to prove the existence of unseen psychic forces that operate in the shadows of modern scientific perception. The methods are dubious, and one could argue even dangerous, to elicit and draw such phenomenon for people to view, or stories are recorded that retell such happenings to draw parallels, and to discern some aspect of understanding as to why these things happen across the world.

The same can be said for interests in supposed “aliens” and “alien-contactees”, that are also a worldwide phenomena, especially after WWII. Talks of UFOs, abductions, visitations and implants left in test subjects, as well as theorizations of alien involvement in early civilizations - all are fair game for various forms of media that explore such topics. Whether its Ancient Aliens, the X-Files, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, the scenario is the same: beings from beyond our world, entering our atmosphere with sometimes benevolent and often sinister intentions, meddling in our affairs to orchestrate their own mysterious ends. The reasoning in such circles interested in this phenomenon is often conspiratorial, drawing upon knowledge that is both speculative and decidedly scientific, considering political motives and trying discern what it all means, as well as trying to figure out why the truth of such phenomena is not disclosed in its fullness.

Similar phenomena are discussed in other media involving the “cryptid” phenomena, which also has a worldwide scale. All manner of “cryptids” have been investigated in all shapes and forms, such as Destination Truth, Expedition Bigfoot, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and the Missing 411 series, among others beyond these. One might imagine that such outcomes are the same for this variety of investigation as well: elusive creatures that lurk at the fringes of society or in the wilderness, either some ancient specimen or misapprehended organism waiting to be discovered and understood.

Let it be known, dear reader, that these phenomenon are not a mystery to those with Traditional knowledge, and that the incomprehension comes from a lack of understanding of ontological reality. These phenomena are indeed real, though there is doubtless some fakery involved in many cases, but people don’t understand what they’re experiencing, what they’re investigating, or what they’re interacting with. We will pose a claim that is, from our view, undeniable, but will likely elicit some degree of rebuke, ridicule, or laughter, but this is an issue of chief importance for those that truly wish to understand.

The common link between these phenomena is the same: demonic activity.

Demons and the “Unified Paranormal Theory”

Sometimes these various types of investigators stumble onto aspects of truth, but they don’t have the proper orientation to make sense of it. In reality, much of “ghost”, “alien” and “cryptid” activity are really just demons, or, to be more neutral, subtle spirits, of a higher ontological level in the realm of subtle manifestation, still in the physical domain but of a more rarefied and partially psychic character.

Often many ghost investigators consider and even acknowledge the factor of the demonic in their knowledge and expertise, many times trying to differentiate between “ghosts”, often in the form of unintelligent or “residual” hauntings, and demons. The same could be said for alien investigators, especially when focusing on the phenomena of “sleep paralysis”, with the supposed abductees and the concordance of their stories reflecting striking parallels, such as the lingering and persistent visitations that occur for those that suffer such phenomena. Likewise, cryptid investigators often focus on the shapeshifting capabilities of cryptids, their ability to make themselves malleable in form, size, or the way they express their voice (this is true for “Skinwalkers” especially).

There was a show called Hellier that we watched a fair amount of in a time prior to our Traditionalist endeavors, and they mentioned this wider recognition referred to as the “Unified Paranormal Theory”. The theory stipulates that all manner of paranormal phenomenon - whether it be ghosts, demons, cryptids, or aliens - seem to happen in similar places at the same time, and that the different phenomenon are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, influence one another. As a result, they conclude that there must indeed be some common tie as to why these phenomenon are associated with one another.

More than likely this is not due to the existence of a plethora of different paranormal types of beings and, as will be evidenced, is because the demons, or subtle spirits in general, are the sole source of all these phenomena. Our purpose here is the draw further parallels between these different “paranormal” designations, to effectively show that these are indeed caused by demons, as opposed to any other “rational”/empirical explanation, which could only explain things of a purely physical order, which does not capture the essence or even existence of psychic reality in its fullness.

Demons as “Ghosts”

Much of what we will be pulling from here has been well articulated in Rene Guenon’s The Spiritist Fallacy, which I would highly recommend, as it gives a great historical and metaphysical perspective of the phenomena under discussion here.

To sum up in broad strokes, people have communed with subtle spirits across large periods of human history, but this was properly designated as witchcraft and necromancy, transgressions in the context of many Traditions. When certain occultic knowledge began to become more obscure and misunderstood by the greater whole of the Modern West, having abandoned Traditional Metaphysics since roughly the early 1300’s, this incomprehension gave birth to the Spiritist, i.e. Spiritualism, movement of the 1800s. The interest in mediumship, seances, and communing with “departed souls” increased dramatically in the US and then Europe as well. Much phenomenon was recognized and experienced by many, despite the inherent charlatanism that such circles attract, which Guenon would argue is due to some aspects of infra-human, i.e. demonic, auto-suggestion, which is a fancy way of saying that people often felt compelled to mimic the phenomenon of their own volition if certain legitimate visitations did not occur organically. This auto-suggestion would be in the form of seances via Ouija boards (which I would never recommend using), automatic writing, mediumship in the form of allowing the spirit to possess the suggestive medium, and so on. Regardless, people legitimately believed that they were communing with departed souls in the “spirit” or “astral” world. This, of course, has progressed to the deviations in New Age “spiritualism” that often misapprehends this phenomenon as well. The major cause behind this is the confusion of psychic and spiritual levels of ontological reality, mainly due to much of the modern world denying both psychic and spiritual domains.

The important thing to recognize is that the majority of “ghost” phenomenon is not as a result of dead people. When people die, certain “psychic residues” can be left behind on places or objects, which can indeed result in residual hauntings reflective of that individual, true eidolons, in the context of the Greek Tradition, or, rather, vague reflections of the departed. Conversely, these psychic residues can and do attract parasitic subtle spirits that feed off of such energies, and they may even feed off of the energies of those that they oppress, and even possess in more advanced stages, as well. This is why places, objects and people can be considered as “haunted” or “cursed”, as a result of having attachments to such subtle spirits. Do note that many Traditionalists, Guenon included, did not like visiting museums for this very reason, because excavated relics retained certain psychic energies that attracted subtle spirits to them, which could have negative effects if one were to take a subtle spirit home with them via a transference of attachment. Take this idea in the context of the infamous Mummy’s Curse of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb causing many individuals who were responsible for the excavation to die in short order, which moderns will no doubt say is simply coincidental and completely explainable, but such aspects of psychic reality are lost on them.

In accordance with maintaining a presence near these psychic residues, demons will indeed masquerade as “ghosts” of humans, altering their appearance of apparitions, their voices and their size (which, as stated previously, is what is done with “aliens” and “cryptids” as well) to maintain their deception. Many people will indeed feed into such delusions readily, hoping to contact lost loved ones, people unjustly killed in the past, or try to investigate people they imagined might have existed in a certain place and time, even going so far as to give them names of their own suggestion. Keep in mind that subtle spirits also inhabit physical space in the same way living creatures do, but in a different mode, a phenomenon well recognized by the Islamic world with regards to djinn (subtle spirits) engaging in the same behavior. They especially like graveyards, due to much psychic residues being left behind on corpses, so we don’t recommend people linger there too long, especially since certain black magic occultism encourages spending time in graveyards to cultivate such psychic energies for their purposes.

I will take this a step further and recognize that psychic phenomenon, being of the mind, has an electromagnetic property about it, which explains why psychic residues, and subtle spirits as well, set off electronic equipment and tools that measure such readings. The reason why this is stems from the fact that everything physical is also psychic, but, with subtle spirits being ontologically higher than the gross physical in which we as humans participate, they are able to move and act in ways that defy the laws of modern physics because of their more so psychic quality, not being able to have material effects without the expenditure of great degrees of psychic energy, with moving objects via so-called “poltergeist” phenomena or otherwise.

More often than not, “shadow people”, a distinct phenomenon of ghostly apparitions, are assumed to be ghosts pure and simple, when, in reality, these are the manifestations of demons. If one has seen many videos of these “shadow people”, note how fast they move, how their shapes vary wildly, and how they can sometimes be seen and not seen either by the eye or by video recording equipment, also reflecting this psychic quality in practice. Also note that people who have sleep paralysis also see these “shadow people” in their quasi-sleep state, the time in which the mind is more susceptible to psychic influence via the dream state, and that similar phenomenon can be experienced by taking certain substances, like Benadryl, as well.

Supposedly, most militaries stopped using rudimentary infrared sensing technology, because it made it possible for many people to see people and phenomena that were not visible to the naked eye. Given the infra/lesser nature of the demonic mode of manifestation, is it not surprising that this is indeed the case in which these phenomena present?

Suffice to say, do not invite these subtle spirits into your lives and homes, because if people really knew what they were interacting with they would indeed reel in horror! Still, to develop this idea of the “spirit world” and “astral realm” we must take this idea further still into our next development.

Demons as “Aliens”

We are again indebted to the work of key Traditional thinkers, namely Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, as well as Charles Upton’s Cracks in the Great Wall: UFO’s and Traditional Metaphysics, which we would also highly recommend, due to showing that the “alien phenomenon” is really nothing but demonic deception par excellence.

We must first note that demons appear in different forms, dependent upon the culture, time and place in which they manifest. The shapeshifting capabilities of subtle spirits has already been well noted, so this begs the question: why would demons want to appear as supposed extraterrestrials and to what end? To effectively answer this question, we must recognize several factors at play.

First, recognize, dear reader, that demons do not wish us well, and, rather, want to hasten our spiritual destruction by any means necessary. This phenomenon happens in any capacity possible, and we have written on this extensively elsewhere (see our “The Demonic Nature of Memes, the Internet, and AI” article). Second, demons are masquerading as “aliens”, using their own psychic manipulation and possibly even their own technology - a topic that would take us way too far afield - to appear as creatures from outer space with dubious intentions. Third, the key intentions of these “aliens” is to spread chaos and confusion, psychically attack the vulnerable into delusions about said “extraterrestrials”, and, most importantly, cultivate a counter-tradition centered around the reign of the Anti-Christ in the end of days. We will remind the reader that we are toward the terminal stage of the last cosmic cycle, the Iron Age, i.e. Kali Yuga.

The culture of science fiction and general scientism has cultivated a psychic suggestiveness towards the existence of various forms of supposed “alien” life that either wish us well or ill, whether its Greys, Reptilians, Nordic, or Little Green Men (note that some cryptids are even considered to have a supposed “extraterrestrial” origin, such as the West Virginia Mothman - a synchronicity that is not lost on us). It should be no surprise that these “alien” phenomena were not present until the tail end of WWII with the “Foo Fighter” UFOs over Germany.

For more information on using mediumship to commune with demons as “aliens”, see Maria Orsic, who was supposedly contacting these “aliens” to learn how to make new technology for the Third Reich. It should be noted that Aleister Crowley also communed with such subtle spirits, with strikingly similar results of manifestation, even before the UFO phenomenon went on in full force, and representations of such beings are quite telling, in the context of what is culturally understood as to what these “aliens” look like.

Along this thread, Aleister Crowley’s organization, OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), had many members that had ties to US Intelligence agencies, the NASA space program, and even influenced certain individuals within film and television, with media such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, E.T. (1982) and Roswell (1994) being reflective of such influences, further meant to confuse and manipulate the public as to what the true nature of “aliens” are.

Keep in mind that demons have been referred to as “powers of the air” within scripture and exist above us, both in the physical and ontological sense. As such, when people astral project, i.e. separate their psychic and spiritual bodies away from their corporeal body, or have near death experiences they can experience phenomena from beings in this sphere of manifestation and see all manner of things that are but illusions of a demonic nature. The work of Fr. Seraphim Rose called The Soul After Death is indispensable with regards to this explication of Traditional knowledge.

So, we know the ends as to why these “aliens” are trying to achieve these ends of showing themselves as such, but this begs the question: why is the phenomenon so widespread since the WWII era? To answer this, we must harken back to our previously noted eschatological framework, the fact that we draw closer to the end of days. To pull again from Charles Upton’s work, we have been experiencing the 5th Trumpet of the Apocalypse, referencing, of course, the Book of Revelation, for the better part of 80 years at time of writing. This process is described as follows:

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

Revelation 9: 1-4 KJV

To be able to take this scripture into consideration, Rene Guenon in his The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times explores how the Western world, via the modern derivation from Traditional doctrine, broached upon the development of gross materialism, evidenced by the colonial and imperial ages, which led to the height of materialism that created a “great wall” around the hearts of humanity, i.e. the spiritual/intellectual dimension of mankind, which could only lead to a rupture - though not from above, but, instead, from below, with regards to infra-human/demonic impulses. The bottomless pit is opened, the abyss of infra-human psychic energy, which is then loosed upon the world, symbolized by the smoke rising from the pit, to the point in which the sun, the divine and illuminating principle of universal truth, is obscured by such darkness, reflecting obscurity and ignorance of higher principles. The demons that come thereof are reflected by the locusts spreading about, with a stinging power like that of a scorpion, not hurting the natural world but solely afflicting men that do not bear the knowledge of the Divine, i.e. Traditional Metaphysics, in their minds and wills, symbolized by the forehead. Do note that the Mark of the Beast is also either on the forehead or the hand, both symbolic of the will in this context.

It should also be noted that these locusts/demons are also described, between Rev. 9:7-11, as being “like unto horses prepared for battle”, reflecting their adversarial mode, as well as “faces of men … hair of women … and teeth as lions”, appearing like humans, being alluring in beauty and having the ferocity and appetites like that of lions. They also had “breastplates of iron”, which should be taken in the context of the Iron Age of spirituality, as well as the demonic/malefic nature of metals not properly transfigured, and with “their wings of the sound of chariots” implying their speed and their capability of travelling across the greater expanse of humanity, either physical or psychic.

This last concept above can very much reflect the speed at which demons move, not being tied to the full laws of physics. If one has seen “UFO” videos and phenomenon, one would note here that they move with incredible speed, as well as in directions and trajectories that would kill any human inside the vessel. However, with demons being more psychic than physical, being part of subtle manifestation, this not only explains this phenomenon but gives more credence to its validity.

We shall also say in passing, that the idea of “Anunnaki” as “aliens” from space directing the course of human development is also a fallacy. Demons have existed in all ages, and demons were even created in large degrees by the Egyptians, as evidenced by the Corpus Hermeticum that describes the “Opening of the Mouth” ritual, which ensouls daemons into statues, with a similar process also being done with talismans as well. These demons would even go so far as to masquerade as “gods” of pagan religions, with the falling into gross paganism being a demonic deception of the highest degree, as evidenced in the first books of St. Augustine’s The City of God, detailing the deceptions of Roman Paganism, which often predisposed to “earth worship” and feminine spiritualty, with reverence of the “mother earth”. Keep in mind the Heaven’s Gate Cult also worshipped “aliens” from outer space that were to save them by taking them on the “mothership”. Similar “cosmologies” have also been formed in Scientology with the so-called “Lord Xenu”, with Scientology being more so reflective of a scientistic religion of the Anti-Christ more so than anything.

Suffice to say, demonic deception happens in all domains, and the “alien” presentation, as well as all manner of modern and post-modern egregoric conceptions proliferated on online spaces, are reflective of such phenomena. Still, these demons do indeed “psychically abduct” people as well, and they do cause psychic and physical effects on the abductees. As such, there is indeed a physicality to it as well, since subtle spirits can corporealize and have effects on the physical world in an unfortunate way, as evidenced above by the aforementioned “poltergeist” activity. The same is true for other incarnations of demonic activity, which brings us to our next point.

Demons as “Cryptids”

If demons can indeed so easily masquerade as “ghosts” and “aliens”, then it follows that there can be a manifold presentation of various different creatures that they could disguise themselves as that suit their situation and intention. Though, one has to wonder, what would the purpose be to appear as “cryptids”, as opposed to “ghosts”, with regards to psychic parasitism, or “aliens”, with regards to spreading chaos and trying to create a religion of the Anti-Christ? To better explain this, we must note one key understanding of subtle spirits understood simply as nature spirits.

We have spoken about some of these topics elsewhere (see our Esotericism of Spirited Away, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) with regards to subtle spirits, and we have also spoken about this in the context of the Four Traditional Elements (see our Esoteric and Cosmological Significance of Four), but there are four types of nature spirits: salamanders/efreets (Fire), sylphs (Air), undines (Water) and gnomes (Earth) (see the work by Paracelsus called A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits). Each of these varieties of nature spirits carry out their functions of facilitating natural processes in their respective domains. The important thing to recognize is that many of these nature spirits can operate in accordance with their proper functions, but many can diverge away from this and decide not to do so. Fallen from their intended position, many can decide to abandon their intended function and operate of their own perverse wills, very similar to humanity in this context.

There are many factors as to why this could happen, and this goes further into the realm of speculation, and there are doubtless some intellectual elite out there that could better provide clarity on this issue. Regardless, nature worship can sometimes pervert the will of these subtle spirits, pushing them towards acting as quasi-deities for worshippers, who ought to only worship the Monistic God alone and not any other aspect of creation. Subtle spirits can indeed show favor on individuals, but their attitudes are very tempestuous and subject to change.

Using the previous factors under consideration, it follows that these “cryptids” can be just as predatory in nature as the “aliens” and “ghosts”, reflecting different modes of demonic manifestation with the same outcomes. Many of these “cryptids”, for example, occupy many rural, wild, or abandoned places (take “ghosts” in the context of this latter locale). As such, people often experience many unexplainable phenomena in these places and come into contact with beings beyond their conventional and secular understanding (take note that “alien” abductions have been noted to occur in the wilderness, much like the Travis Walton incident that inspired Fire In the Sky).

It should also be noted that, in the US especially, many people have gone missing in US National parks without a trace, and many times, if their bodies are found, remains can be located in illogical and impossible places and in odd conditions, which is often written off as “animal attacks” but its hard to discern this to be the case in every circumstance. It should be noted that these supposed “Skinwalker cryptids” also try to lure people out to remote locations, make them victims of their deception, and then assume their form for an even greater deception.

It should be noted that similar factors can be seen in many Traditional pieces of folklore, especially in Europe, with talks of “goblins”, “gnomes”, “faeries”, and “gnomes” underground, protecting and hewing precious metals within the earth. They vary in shape and size, but they are forces that ought not to be meddled with, for the dangers greatly outweigh any benefit, especially since many might find themselves “spirited away” by such forces, never to return.

This should sufficiently make evident the risks with regards to these “cryptid” manifestations.

Important Considerations in Summation

With the existence and influence of subtle spirits in multiple domains, it is good to know how to properly identify them, but it is doubly important to not engage with them at all. Even though some subtle spirits could be considered good, it is spiritually dangerous to have much if any interaction with them. Any sort of investigation or exploration is best reserved for the domain of the spirit, to put one’s devotion and attention to that which is Truth, God, the Unconditioned, or whatever one would wish to call it - to focus on what is Higher.

We wanted to make apparent the current state of affairs, to remove any confusion on the issue of these phenomena, to allow people to recognize the dangers in meddling with forces that the lion’s share of people can neither properly understand nor identify with certainty, to leave speculation and opinion aside, and to see with clarity instead. People have no doubt suffered as a result of their vain experimentation into the “paranormal”, the occult, and that which is scarcely apprehended from a modern point of view. Where there is speculation and experimentation on the one hand, on the other there is truth and certainty. One can firmly have certainty on these factors expounded here when all illusion and deception is removed. See clearly the forces that exist at the fringe that wish to corrupt and destroy humanity, and be resolute against that which would rather stand in opposition to the Will of God.

Preface

It has come to our attention that some readers, either from our writings or those of other Traditionalist authors, have some confusion as to the nature of the terminology that has been used by us and others in the past. One could hope that this would be ubiquitously understood information for those willing to engage with works such as these, but this is by no means the state of affairs, for even we ourselves had to do much work in our earlier years to arrive at the positions we have today. As a result, we wish to provide this article as a resource for people to help understand the implications that extend from the terminology under discussion here, as well as appreciate some of the fundamental underlying recognitions and positions that those of the Traditionalist School of thought participate in.

The three terms under consideration could be approached in multiple different orders, but we feel the best method is to assess these terms in order from start to finish: metaphysics, esotericism and universality. Some other terms may be necessary to fill in some gaps in between, but these are the three core terms that, while having different focuses, may even be used synonymously in some cases, as the object of their focus is the one and same Truth of the highest order. Once understanding of these terms is achieved, deeper truths may very well have themselves more readily manifest. So, without any further delay, we must delve into these necessary terms to facilitate and broaden understanding.

Metaphysics - Cosmogony vs Cosmology

That which can be properly termed metaphysics is the study of first principles, the fundamental aspects of existence. This often includes dialectic and considerations of the topics of being, knowing, cause, essence and substance, as well as time and space. These concepts warrant their own digressions, and, as such, merit their own delineation as to why such factors are of chief importance and interrelate with one another. Before such considerations can be undertaken, we must first note a bifurcation of focus in the realm of metaphysics.

The first and primary focus of Metaphysics is on issues of cosmogony, which is the science of understanding the cause behind the origin of creation. For moderns this is relegated to the existence of the physical universe, but for the world of Tradition this also investigates the existence of the spiritual and psychic domains of existence as well, also taking into consideration the source of all being ontologically which is Beyond Being.

Nothing can be made manifest unless it is from the unmanifest, just as that which is created cannot come from anything unless it is uncreated. Just like one can’t engage in movement unless one pushes off against that which is unmoved, the same is true for the universe. This principle is reflected by the idea of the “Unmoved Mover”, or the hollow center of the axis of the wheel, the one that turns the wheel but does not participate in its movement, also referred to as the Primum Mobile, or “first mover”. This doctrine, though well understood by the Greeks, is also key behind the symbol of the Wheel of Dharma and the swastika in Hinduism, and it should be noted that the swastika shows up latently in all other major Traditions, in one form or another, as well, a key reflection of a topic that will be explored later.

The use of cosmogonic principles into specific applications goes into the realm of cosmology, which deals with the nature of the universe and under the purview of what Aristotle would have called physics, which is the study of nature and natural law, which later became indefinitely separated into all the various profane, or modern, sciences which exist today. It should be noted in passing that, since creation and existence is a result of God’s divine influence, all natural law is really an extension of divine law, since the latter extends from the former, though do note that there are higher laws than the cosmological factors behind our existence in the purely physical.

Due to the factors of modern degeneration, many people in the domain of “philosophy” will claim that not only is there no objective reality, as a result of post-modernist influences, but they go on to deny metaphysics entirely. This is a reflection of the paucity of their “intellectuality”, which is really nothing more than the domain of logic and reason, whereas true intellectuality is from the domain of the spirit, supra-rational and supra-individual, by which we mean divine in origin (see Rene Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. 2 “The Opposition Between East and West”).

Despite these modern considerations, cosmology, grounded in Traditional Metaphysics, allows for the application of universal knowledge in practical domains, better termed as Sacred Sciences, which are grounded upon eternal principles that are always immutable, as opposed to the profane science, i.e. modern sciences, which - either empirical or applied - extend from ever changing and mutable hypothesis, without any stable grounding, principles, or universal truths that would allow for its mode of praxis to have more efficacy and consistency. This lack of universal character within the profane sciences is also reflected by its multiplicity in focuses, indefinitely descending into a multitude of specializations and focuses that draw away from a more integrative whole of knowledge and more towards particularizations and erudition for erudition sake (see Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. 4 “Sacred and Profane Science”).

In all domains in which we live today in the modern/post-modern world, it appears that everything is founded upon that which denies the metaphysical, which of course is of the highest, or first, principles of all of existence, and, as such, much knowledge is disjointed and divorced from that which is higher than itself, and it is only metaphysics which can bring all knowledge and wisdom into an integrative and synthetic whole of eternal and immutable (universal) knowledge, which allows us to achieve a higher esoteric domain of truth. To expand upon such factors, we must continue further.

Esotericism - Esoteric vs Exoteric

That which is properly termed esoteric is that which is not easily knowable or is, by the nature of the degree of knowledge, obscure and not easily manifest. Etymological considerations will point this since “eso-” as the root word connotes that which is “inner” or “hidden”, and may even make evident a certain degree of secrecy inlaid within the designation of that which is properly esoteric.

To truly appreciate that which is esoteric, we must recognize that which is exoteric as a launching off point, since the latter is that which is lower and the former higher. Exoteric, properly speaking, is that which is outwardly manifest, popular, and understandable to the laity of society, evidenced by the root of “exo-” connoting “outward”. That which is exoteric is teachable and easily approachable knowledge, which of course leads to its popularization amongst the masses. One must first achieve a degree of exoteric knowledge before one is able to ascend to a higher mode of esoteric knowledge via realization, because that which is esoteric cannot be generally taught, communicated, or learned - which is why it must be realized inwardly via the individual’s supra-rational intellect, which, of course, is of a spiritual order.

The exoteric is often connoted by not only the color of silver but the silver key of the lesser mysteries par excellence, whereas the esoteric is connoted by that which is golden, the golden key of the greater mysteries. The same is true with the Janus Mask, with the older face relaying the exoteric and holding the silver keys facing towards what is past via reflection, whereas the youthful face, connoting the vivifying nature of the spirit, is symbolic of the esoteric and holds the golden keys that face towards the future and to eternity. The third face of Janus is, of course, hidden, that which is the present and is eternally so, since the present always and forever exists.

Relaying such esoteric symbology will obviously not be understood by all, just as Christ also spoke through parables with their own hidden symbols, but the Lord often said, “for those that have ears, let them hear”.

To take this a step further, that which is exoteric is reflective of the religious mode of the Traditional faiths, whereas the esoteric is the higher oriented spiritual practice within that faith that contains higher, hidden truths of a vivifying spiritual dimension. For Christianity there is Hesychasm, for Hinduism the Advaita Vedanta, for Judaism the Kabballah, for Islam there is Sufism, for Buddhism there is Vajrayana, the Chinese Tradition has Taoism and so on. Without the esoteric domain, the exoteric has no vivification, greater degree of presence, or ease of maintenance through transmission, which only leads to dissolution of the Tradition through time. Such sentiments are echoed when the Bible states the following:

“Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
[2 Corinthians 3:6, KJV].

That which is esoteric is that which is metaphysical, since both deal with the same degrees of the highest of truths behind existence and being and, as such, must be universal everywhere, which brings us to our next point.

Universality - Eternal Being vs Contingent Becoming

That which is properly universal is that which is manifest everywhere and always true. By virtue of truth always being true, it is eternal and unchanging, immutable and of the highest order of Being, since it always is. Such a simple recognition reveals the superiority of the Universal, i.e. the Esoteric or Metaphysical, by virtue of its eternal presence, whereas any degree of knowledge in the realm of application, which is naturally contingent in the physical domain only and, as such, relegated only to the realm of becoming and change, is subject to change, revision, and dissolution.

We say that which is in the physical is in the realm of becoming, because things are always subject to change when they are limited by quantity/substance, whereas that which is eternal is pure quality/essence; the former is not self-sufficient, while the latter is self-sufficient, by virtue of its eternality. As such, this reveals the universal truth the essence is superior to substance, or quality is superior to quantity, and, to take this a step further, the non-material is superior to the material (see Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times).

This reveals the universal, esoteric and metaphysical truth of the hierarchical nature of ontological existence, since essence can exist without substance, but substance cannot exist without essence. Essence and Substance are poles of manifestation, but the former necessarily is superior to the latter, just as Order is superior to Chaos, Love superior to Strife, and that which is Centripetal is greater than that which is Centrifugal.

The only way something exists is by participating in presence or Being, since, if it has no presence, it would have no being at all, physical or otherwise. This is why we must always view things in positive terms, as opposed to privative, since, for example, that which is evil is that which lacks presence or being, especially with regard to virtue, since vice is the privation of virtue. Just as substance only has presence with regards to its participation in essence, that which is modern only has truth insofar as it participates in the Traditional, and only insofar as we recognize that the Traditional is that which is Universal, Eternal, and Truth of the highest order.

There is nowhere where the truth is not manifest, and no place or people has a monopoly on truth of the highest order, for, as it has been said, “everywhere God leaves a witness.”

The Transcendent Unity of Traditions

For this section, we must heavily borrow from the work and phraseology of the Traditionalist Frithjof Schuon and his work The Transcendent Unity of Religions. In this work, it is recognized that, at the esoteric domain, all religions are not only true but that they also all agree with one another, because they participate in the same truths borne from revelation from above to below. They participate in some apparent contradictions at the exoteric domain, since all religions forms adhere to the culture and people of a specific time and place, but at the esoteric domain there is no conflict, since the source of all revealed Tradition cannot oppose itself. Although, it must be noted that some conflict can, in the present, and has, in the past, arisen, since every religion naturally strives to be the best that it can be, even at the expense of other Traditional societies, though concordance is found the longer these societies have communication with one another, and there is no greater point of connection and communication now than at any other time in human history. It is only natural that certain truths will become more manifest of this order over time.

For an example of how Tradition’s cannot truly contradict one another, there is the Trinitarian God in Christianity, whereas Islam focuses on only Allah. The latter focuses on the Divine Simplicity of God and His connection with all things, whereas the former does the same but in the understanding of the three modes of God, the Father, who gives all and receives nothing in His Absolute nature, the Son, the pathway to the Father and Ideal Man in His Universal nature, and the Holy Spirit, which makes all things happen through God’s imminence in his Relative nature. Despite any apparent contradiction, all exoteric recognitions are true from the esoteric point of view, but become limited when relegated to the purely exoteric of dogma of doctrine alone, the letter of the law.

To take this a step further, though the Trinity of Christianity is very much onto itself in the exoteric domain, there are Trinities in other Traditions as well, which relay the esoteric significance of the Trinity and three from a spiritual point of view. In Taoism there is Heaven - Earth - Man, with the former being the essence, the middle being the substance, and the latter being the reflection of both. There is also the Trimurti of Hinduism with Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Vishnu the Destroyer - the former like the Father, the middle like the Son who maintains but is also the Supreme Personhood, and the latter is like the Holy Spirit, though not understood in His purely immanent mode but more so in the mode of being the force behind all change.

All religions, i.e. Traditions, are absolutely relative, given that they are absolute, with regards to their participation in esoteric truths, but they are also relative to one another, with regards to their application to the religions forms they undertake to be understood as means of support towards helping achieve the esoteric domain.

One must imagine the esoteric as the peak of the mountain, the highest state that allows the ability to gaze upon all the vistas and sides of the mountain, the plurality of Traditions, that share in its apex. The peak looks the same from every side at the bottom, but only at the peak is the body of the mountain united, despite the apparent differences of each face of the mountain. It’s no surprise that the mountain serves as an esoteric symbol in multiple Traditions, due to these considerations (see Julius Evola’s Meditations on the Peaks).

We must recognize the esoteric as what is called the Primordial Tradition, that which was practiced by man in his unfallen state, in mystical union with God, and this is naturally the source of all other Traditions. It can be symbolized by the trunk of a great tree (consider the Tree of Life in this context), being the root for all the other Traditions which are its branches. One must note here, despite the essentiality of the esoteric over the exoteric, that one cannot live off of the bark of the tree (i.e. the esoteric alone), but, instead, off of the fruit of which the tree provides and sustains us from its branches (religious Traditions), which brings us to our next point.

Orthodoxy vs Syncretism - Tradition over All Else

By virtue of our last recognition, it becomes apparent that one must arrive at the esoteric from spiritual practice, extending from an orthodoxically oriented fidelity to only one of the plurality of Traditional faiths that exist. The fruits of the Tradition can only truly be enjoyed and harnessed at one of its branches, and from one branch only. So, not only can one not sustain oneself off of the purely esoteric without some degree of exoteric grounding, but what must also be recognized is that one should only practice one faith and not a multitude of them at the same time, as this would lead to what is referred to as syncretism, a blending of multiple orthodoxies of different faiths simultaneously in practice.

Syncretism is a spiritually dangerous endeavor. It’s one thing to have a depth of one’s faith that allows for the esoteric domain and to use this obscure spiritual knowledge to see concordance and non-opposition in other faiths, and it’s another to blend the faiths together into some amalgam of spiritual practices outside of their proper context. Imagine aligning your chakras while also praying the rosary, or increasing your devotion to Shinto kami while doing the Muslim call to prayer - it’s a veritable madness.

To blend one or more Traditions together is to make something new, divorced from Revelation from above and, as a result, it is a purely human creation, which is necessarily of a lesser and non-inspired, or, even worse, of a counter-inspired nature. This would be properly termed a psuedo-religion, a false conception of spirituality, like the Theosophy of Mme. Blavatsky, for example (see Guenon’s Theosophy: The History of a Psuedo-Religion). Voodoo and Santeria can also lay claim to this designation as well, on top of the Cult of Santa Muerte, among other concerning infra-human, i.e. demonic, tenebrous impulses which could lead towards that which is counter-traditional or counter-initiatory. Satanism/Luciferianism, Scientology, various other cultic movements trying to create a religion of the Anti-Christ - such are the issues at stake if Orthodoxy, Hermeticism (proper interpretation), and spiritual fidelity are not maintained in our times (see Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future).

Not only does syncretism lead to these darker impulses, but it leads one to one’s own spiritual destruction. To base oneself on syncretism is akin to building one’s house’s foundation on shifting sand - with no solid cornerstone (orthodoxy) or grounding (faith in one Tradition) to orient oneself, falling beneath the sands or into the mire of the abyss. Conversely, if one keeps fidelity and practice to one faith, the opposite is true, that one can find stability, safety, and surety in the operation and Orthodoxy of one singular house of faith. If one is grounded in what is eternal - universal, esoteric, metaphysical - one can never go wrong.

It should be noted in passing that even though knowledge is good, faith is better, since faith is essential towards not only fostering a disposition for the Truth, but it is also necessary to achieve gnosis, knowledge of higher spiritual reality, in the first place, which is the highest degree of true knowledge.

Just as water is the source of life and, with regards to Christian symbological language, extends from above to below in an unending fount of inspiration and sustenance. Such truth sometimes may not be readily manifest as well, like a source of water underground. Hermeticism is the key to achieving depth in spiritual practice, so this vital elan of spiritual water can be achieved, both at the root and at the height. So, to go along with our previous focus on the essentiality of fidelity and orthodoxy, we will provide one further point to emphasize its importance:

“One does not gain water by digging ten wells ten feet deep, but by digging one well one-hundred feet deep.”

The Synonymity of Terminology at the Highest Point

With all these recognitions, despite all appearances, Truth is one and extends from the One. That which is esoteric is necessarily metaphysical, and that which is metaphysical is necessarily universal since it extends from the One. All of these divine names of Truth, One, Good, Being, and Love are all really names for the same Reality - God. Even so, God is even beyond these conceptions since He is the source of all conception, since all that is knowable is made manifest from the unknowable, all that is manifest comes from the unmanifest, and so on.

If one is a Traditionalist, in the proper oriented sense, with respect to these definitions above, one is necessarily a Perennialist as well. As perennial plants are always so, such is a Perennialist focused on that which is true, always and everywhere, and what could be truer than this than the Traditions themselves? So, a Traditionalist is a Perennialist and vice versa, though we don’t doubt that some will disagree with our reasoning, but such opposition and distinction is meaningless to us.

From the highest point of view, despite their specific focuses, Esotericism, Metaphysics and Universality all signify the same thing - knowledge of Divine Principles which are always and forever true. Once one achieves the height of spirituality, one cannot find opposition anywhere, since everything is unified to the One by emanation, and to the One everything returns. A circle is eternal, with no beginning and no end, and all the radii are equidistant and unified by the central point which is unmanifest.

We are certain that our words have fallen short, for some things cannot easily be communicated with language, but we hope that our distinctions have led to some degree of clarity, or at least a fascination and interest in the depth that exists within the realm of Tradition. The reader too can engage in such endeavors, but only if they put pride aside, distinguish that which is ephemeral from that which is eternal, and focus on that which is most essential above all else.

(Pt. 1 Linked Here)

“Anime fans, in a narrow sense, do not change. I resigned myself to the fact that their understanding would probably not change in my lifetime. Of course, they are conforming to a single standard. As long as they are alive, they only like the same things. They’re not looking for change. They endlessly seek the same pleasures. Even if you say that other interesting things exist, they can’t be bothered. It’s something they didn’t ask for and don’t care for.”
- Hideaki Anno, co-founder of Gainax and founder of Studio Khara.

“Almost all Japanese animation is produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku.”
- Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli.

The Realization of Anime and Manga’s Dangers

We rarely provide personal anecdotes in our writing, but we choose to do so here, because the realization that led to the impetus behind this set of articles is something that extends from our personal experience. There was a point in our life where all we did was consume media, often to the detriment of our personal, educational and professional obligations. These factors are behind us now, but we may still provide the opportunity of communicating these aesthetic and lived experiences without having the reader subject themselves to the same outcomes, and without running the risk of making the same mistakes.

We must first start by relating one major experience in our progressive realizations, that being the watching of the film End of Evangelion for the first time. Various memes and discussions of Neon Genesis Evangelion drew us to watch it by ourselves in early 2014, and it cultivated certain expectations and sentiments towards the show’s themes and its characters, as well as the plot that operated these factors in tandem. Suffice to say, if the reader knows anything about End of Evangelion and its cultural impact, it was an eye-opening experience. Most people that participate in the more degenerate aspects of anime and manga fandom detested this movie in its initial release back in the mid-90’s, as many still don’t like it today, but I was floored by the plot and imagery on display, in all its aesthetic and eschatological glory and horror.

Even now Evangelion is still talked about and culturally impactful nearly 30 years later, with the waifu wars between Asuka and Rei (and even Misato) still raging on - people are very much hung up on such fandoms, for better or worse. Regardless, we must note the boldness to have such an uncompromising artistic vision to go against anime trends, especially with regards to “mecha” anime conventions, and subverting established tropes to make something much more reflective, mature, and intellectually engaging - something to contemplate over. It made me reflect on my own connection to the characters and that, on the cosmic scale of the human drama that plays out in End of Evangelion, its all rather insignificant, and that any sentimental attachment to any character ultimately closed off my awareness to what was really going on in the background of the narrative the entire time. I had broken free of the meta-narrative prison.

Hideaki Anno, the major show runner for all of NGE, has been notoriously critical of fandom and otaku in general, anime and manga or otherwise, so he often makes a penchant of going against convention and expectation to “go against the grain” so that people think more about deeper questions. If people always received a happy ending, or if the narrative was easily wrapped up, then people wouldn’t think about more important questions or mysteries of life, and, therefore, they wouldn’t seek out any answers. Anno and the works of David Lynch, especially with regard to Twin Peaks, have many similarities in this regard.

Conversely, Hayao Miyazaki, is equally if not more so critical of such otaku, not wanting to contribute to certain anime trends, and even going so far as to foster the creation of the so-called “Ghibli style” which elevates the elements of anime and manga artistic conventions to a higher level, as well as trying to craft stories with uplifting and important themes. The stories are beautiful, but they also don’t purely just show the viewer what they want to see, much in the spirit of Anno, or vice versa.

To show viewers only what they want to see would liken the creator to be more so of an entrepreneur that only cared about profit, or, even worse, relative to a pornographer of sorts, showing lascivious material to the detriment of the viewer and society at large. As such, this warrants a further in-depth consideration through a piece of media that shares in such themes.

The Psychic Prison of Me!Me!Me!

The short and music video by the title Me!Me!Me! released to much fanfare and attention towards the end of 2014 for the Japan Animator Expo, a combination project mainly spearheaded by TeddyLoid, the composer of the track, and Studio Khara of NGE fame. When I first saw it around the time of its release, it was tantalizing yet confusing as to what the desired end of the artistic venture was. We will warn the reader that this piece of media is explicit, so view it at one’s own discretion. Regardless, it gained much attention, meme status, and the dance iconography became easily adapted to many other female anime characters, and it seemed that the intention of the work was lost somewhere in the shuffle.

Me!Me!Me! is an elaborate music video that tells a story of a nameless male character lying in his room, the beginning frame frozen on a still image of his face resting horizontal on a pillow, surrounded by figurines of anime memorabilia, cigarettes scattering the room in a light characterization of vice and general slothfulness. A flickering screen draws us in to a female anime character with a cheerful and exuberant affect, bouncing all around in scantily clad fashion, striking kawaii poses while also displaying her overt sexualization; it’s as if the character screams, “Look at me!” or “Love me!”, demanding attention and facilitating distraction away from the real world; she even holds her hand out as if to profess love to the viewer, going so far as to make a heart symbol with her hands over her cleavage. The male character, in simplified artistic fashion, looks blissfully lulled into a state of complacency, a cigarette smoking as it loosely hangs from his mouth.

The female anime character dances in tandem with more that look just like her, with bright colors and cheery sounds, whilst showing her panties (another major trope in anime and manga), her thinly veiled breasts and buttocks on full display. There are a plentitude of the anime girls just as there are the multiple senses that pull one towards vice, as well as there are a plentitude of different objects of vice themselves that operate towards the same end, facilitated also by the memory, fantasy and imagination which are passive in nature. Plurality and multiplicity, passivity and receptivity - these things are the metaphysical nature of femininity, whereas the singular and active is the properly oriented masculine. The female anime character is made to be an object of both devotion and sexual arousal, transitioning from a light dress to a lingerie bikini, while the male character, half interpolated to be the viewer themselves as a result of the video perspective, watches uncritically, his intellect dulled and senses overwhelmed, his potency removed. The upbeat music and Japanese lyrics reflect this:

“Tell me now, tell me now
How you felt when we were always together!
Tell me now, tell me now
Why my mind is always stuck on thinking of you?
Your company, all your times with me”

However, things will take a quick turn in a darker direction, prefaced by these lyrics:

”My feelings for you integrate
But besides all that, but besides all that
Come and share with me; I’ll display your throbbing dolor (pain)…”

The scene quickly transitions towards darkness, revealing a nude feminine figure, singular and prominent as she sits in a chair, as if on a throne or pedestal, her face covered by a mask with many red eyes, her pink hair in a tight ponytail. The previous anime girls become essentially nude as well, covered only by thin circuit-like lines, with piercings on their nipples and genitalia with a small thread fed through each to connect them to collars around their necks like slaves, very much reflective of veritable “ties that bind”. Vice, understood in this context, enslaves the will and delimits the freedom of the will entirely, as one cannot truly make free decisions if they are slaves to vice. Moving on, the anime girls’ dance becomes less elegant and more crude in its sexuality, downward feminine triangle symbols swirling about, the linework designs like red lasers, making the scene connote a sense of danger and imprisonment, in vice or otherwise. The female on the throne walks to the male character confidently, knocking him out of his stupefaction with horror, all to be smothered by the throne female’s breasts until the male can no longer be seen within them, punctuated by blood oozing up from inside the fleshy mass. The lyrics of note that accompany the more tenebrous music are as follows:

”You told me, I’m all yours;
I will become your special little one
(I feel) all the pain, all of the hate;
its building up, could I (just) be a (dream)?
Are you sure that you have not
Created and molded an idol out of me?
What you see, is it me?
Seems coincidence, baby,
I live your mind’s own fantasies…”

We soon find the male character wake up in his room, as if it was a dream, but the throne female launches out the screen, crawling along the walls in the room with our main character, much to his horror. He sprawls away onto the floor on his back, all for the throne female to creep up to him between his legs, revealing a pink-haired girl behind the mask, all while the NGE female figurines come to life and crawl onto him, followed by the throne female vomiting a thick, white liquid down the male’s throat (insert your own suggestions here).

What we find here is a character possessed by an unreal idealization of feminine sexuality, to the point that he doesn’t even realize how much he is beholden to it, but, when the fullness of such manipulation is revealed, he reels in disgust away from it. If only people knew what forces they were subject to in this post-modern age in which they live, because, if they actually saw the forces they were communing with face-to-face, the knowledge of what they were interacting with would cause the same reaction as the male character in Me!Me!Me!

The video goes on to have the male’s reality fractured, his sense of scope and scale all discombobulated - tunnels, labia-like eyes, female mouths open wide like Kali, ready to consume with an insatiable appetite for the material - to the point where it seems the throne female is his entire world, existing only on the tip of her nipple, but our character finds himself in a dilemma. The throne female looks like another female character, this one seeming to extend from the real world. We’re meant to intuit that this new female is an ex-girlfriend of the male character, and that she was upset at their breakup, the male sheepish and annoyed as he casts the girl aside, all while the girl cries on the ground begging, seemingly as if the male is in favor of the virtual experience of the unreal anime girl that possesses the forefront of his mind. The character has a choice: the girl in the real world or the one of fiction? Obviously, he chose poorly, which is the entire emotional impetus behind this piece. The lyrics reflect this as well:

”Nothing left but disappointment of the life
that you lived, that you had, its true
All it took was just a blow to divide all of our days apart,
and I’m crying, “Love me, feel me, please come back to me!”
I’m here, I’m wishing to reset it all.”

His ex-girlfriend calls out to him, but he doesn’t answer, though, since this is his mind, he clearly still heard her but just didn’t want to listen. Oftentimes we, in our worlds, deny the petitions of those we ought to hear in favor of our own selfish desires, many of which weren’t even real in the first place, or, even worse, reflective of vices that draw us closer to our own perdition.

It’s clear the male character regrets this state of affairs, however, with thoughts of the joys of his past relationship coming to his memory, all while the throne female thrashes a representation of his corpse, consumed from the bottom up and bloodied, feasting on his entrails before running away like an animal. The ex-girlfriend tries to kiss the male back to life to no avail, and the scene fades to darkness.

The male cries out in deep emotional pain, reintegrated into the form of a mech-like battle suit with rockets and guns, reflective of certain aspects of the male power fantasy that extends from shonen, ready to do battle to retrieve his lost love in his heroic mode. He goes on, like in an FPS style video game, gunning down the demonic anime girls, each exploding into green goo and crying out in ecstasy as they’re shot. However, he’s not fully in control, as the throne female seems to control this world of the mind, hurting the male and even taking off a limb, all while his ex-girlfriend is pulled away from him in a tumultuous scene, very much like the winds of lust from Dante’s Inferno. The lyrics cry out:

“Miles and miles away, you are still
the number one thing on my mind
Ever since then, from that moment
when I had a dream;
The flower that I saw, brought you to me.

So please, please remember everything
that we once upon a time had in our fairy tale dream
Thought it hurts a little more than you thought
I’ll be waiting for you.”

The male finds himself floating through space in front of the throne female’s “mother-ship” which is part light-show, concert stage, and weapon of war. The open chasm of the front is like a mouth, the anime girls in their demonic mode lined up like soldiers inside, the walls made of flesh and textured like the birth canal, a large circular light in the back like a cervix, all for the throne female to stare from the back with a sense of command and ire against the protagonist. Though he is there to confront them, the male seems like he feels powerless. The anime girls shoot bullets from their breasts like turrets, and, no matter how many missiles the male shoots from his back to mitigate the barrage, he succumbs to them, being ripped apart until there’s nothing left but his head, the throne female and anime girls caressing what remains of his flesh. All of this culminates into his head coming to fall down gently upon a white ground. He opens his eyes, and the video loops right back to the beginning where we started, for all the events to play out again ad nauseum until the video is closed. The lyrics throughout echo such realities:

"This is your chance now to change your whole life.
But will you?
Cause now’s the time to make decisions count.
But will you?”

”Anything you do to try to change your life is a waste,
you’re a loser and you won’t go far.”

“Trying your best isn’t always enough;
what’s the plan for you, can I call your bluff?
I await the day that you will realize that it’s all in your head;
you’ve nowhere to hide.”

So, not only is this experience a deep spiritual hell, but, like hell itself, it appears to be eternal, stuck in a constant loop of suffering and torment, and, what’s worse, is that both are self-imposed. It is more than likely that many men in the world are stuck in such vicious cycles of possession and unreality, and women are certainly no different, though maybe to a lesser degree of quantity, with the phenomenon of fujoshi (腐女子), i.e. “rotten girl”, being well recognized. Suffice to say, both male and female otaku are stuck in their own obsessions. It’s clear that TeddyLoid and Studio Khara have a strong sense of this societal issue, as evident by the art speaking for itself.

The Otaku to Hikikomori Pipeline

Multitudes of people are found to be in rather isolating experiences as a result of their hyper-fixations, and otaku are no exception, in the anime and manga field and beyond. This is a phenomena that we have recognized in many other domains as well.

With regards to media specifically, people used to have more shared cultural experiences in the past, due to the fact that culturally understood information was experienced through limited channels. First there was only oral tradition and folk tales, then print media had people reading the same books and periodicals, and the same thing was true as media moved from radio to television as well. However, with the internet age being as it is, its much easier for people to gain access to a wide deluge of information, but the opposite side of that coin is that people will be able to find their way into hyper-specialized subsets and subcultures of information that alienate them away from others. Nerds and fanatics, otaku, thrive with regards to their interests in this sort of environment, more often to the detriment of their social connections with others. They have little common experiences with the multitude as a result of their special interests, and have fewer shared interests with the people around them, which then predispose people into small online communities with little connections to the outside world, which we say with a certain degree of self-awareness in this regard.

This phenomena predispose many in Japanese society to become what’s referred to as hikikomori (引きこも), i.e. “pulling inward” or “shut-in”, in which people retreat from society, mostly stay at home, and even refuse to leave the house, which has become an alarmingly familiar trope in certain anime and manga works. The reason this has become more popular of a concept is due to the fact that, over the past 35 years in Japan, increasing numbers of people have transitioned into becoming hikikomori, often living off of their parents or relatives for financial support. There are a multitude of cultural reasons as to why this phenomena has become more widespread, mainly due to crushing societal expectations, unhealthy work-life balance, as well as anxiety and autism-spectrum disorders, with the former two being more so from a Japanese societal context, whereas the latter are ubiquitous across all cultures. This behavior is seen especially in youth, but many have aged into their 50s while still maintaining this condition.

This phenomenon has been studied extensively, and we don’t intend to offer a full purview of the factors at play here, but some factors of note must be mentioned. The hikikomori severely dislike social interactions, presumably due to either negative prior experiences which could give rise to anxiety, this causes the withdraw into becoming a hermit-like individual, but there’s one important distinction: true hermits recede from greater society because being alone with God is better, as it extends from a properly oriented spiritual practice, whereas these hikikomori are marked by extreme emotional distress and not being able to function as fully realized people, hence the stigma associated with the condition. We have nothing but compassion for such individuals and do not wish to stigmatize them further, and we more so wish to provide information and opportunities by which to understand such a condition, using the issues as stated above.

Not all otaku become hikikomori, as this would be ludicrous to consider as a possibility, but the majority of hikikomori are otaku, due to all the the factors listed above by which anime and manga, with their fostering of hyper-fixation, has the tendency towards otaku obsession, then to progressive social isolation, and then, of course, to potential societal withdrawal and the emergence of the hikikomori lifestyle.

It should be noted in passing that this phenomenon is not exclusive to Japan, as this can also be seen in Western countries as well, and, we would argue, in all most-developed countries that have the material and cultural decadence that could result in such individuals’ existence. In the US alone, there are supposedly 7 million men, not including the women which more than likely exist but at a much smaller proportion, that have just “checked out” of society and refuse to work, partially because they see no benefit in doing so and don’t feel invested in the greater society at large, but also because they find no pleasure in it, which reflects certain hedonistic principles in which vice further dulls the intellect away from struggle that would rather seek to improve it. The hikikomori lifestyle seems to then present itself in unique manifestations in different cultural and national groups, but the core of the phenomenon is still the same: people are trapped in a state of arrested development as a result of deep psychic dysfunction. To reflect this in praxis, we must go on further to assess another work of interest for our purposes.

The Insights of Welcome to the N.H.K.

The series entitled Welcome to the N.H.K, based off of the book by Tatsuhiko Takimoto from 2002, and later became a manga in 2004 and then anime in 2006, with the work containing many auto-biographical elements, since the author has stated that he was a struggling hikikomori as well.

The series follows a 22 year old young man named Tatsuhiro Sato who is a hikikomori, believing himself to be as such due to a conspiracy (which we will note is a delusion resulting from his isolation) perpetrated by a group referred to as the N.H.K., which stands for Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai (日本引きこもり協会), i.e. “Japanese Shut-In Society/Association”. Kyokai can also mean church, guidance, and even admonishment, which is interesting for a couple of narrative reasons. The N.H.K., in this delusion, operates in the shadows to manipulate the media and cause the hikikomori phenomenon to occur and to further imprison the sufferers in this perpetual state. The reader may find there to be more truth here than meets the eye, despite the lack of true conspiratorial and organizational control in the real world.

Thankfully, the young female lead of Misaki Nakahara, a concerned neighbor who found Sato while spreading fliers for her aunt’s Christian church (Christianity has been deeply unpopular in Japan over several centuries, especially during the Tokugawa Shogunate), who wants to help Sato out of his hikikomori ways, though she too has many issues that are explored and developed through the series as well. Meanwhile, Sato tries to be more outgoing with the help of his younger friend that he knew from high school, Kaoru Yamazaki, who facilitates Sato into all manner of ill-conceived ventures and hijinks that push the story forward.

We remember watching this series as an anime in our early college years, and we, at the time, deeply empathized and identified with Sato’s plight, as the intense academic rigor in an unfamiliar city definitely gave us hikikomori-like tendencies, though, thankfully, we never delved too deeply into such a lifestyle. Still, we recognized that Welcome to the N.H.K. was a meta-cultural assessment containing a deep and biting critique of societal issues that alienated many young men and women into succumbing to such forces.

Sato, if he wasn’t an otaku at the start of the series, definitely becomes an otaku of various different interests as the story progresses. Both Sato and Kaoru seek to make an eroge, and erotic hentai game, together, which leads Sato to become addicted to playing eroge, as well as downloading explicit images online, to the point where he deletes system files to gain more storage space. Sato is evasive towards Misaki initially, not wanting to reveal that he’s a hikikomori, but they soon enter a contract in which she helps him with regular counseling sessions, even going to far as to pose as his girlfriend to prevent Sato’s mother from accosting him further or thinking less of him.

However, Sato eventually reconnects with a former female older classmate named Hitomi Kashiwa, who he idolizes and has a romantic interest for, and, as the series implies, very well may have been the person Sato lost his virginity to. Sato’s lack of true emotional grounding causes him to continue seeking Hitomi, despite her drug dependency and depression, even to the point of accidentally joining a suicide pact that Hitomi inadvertently drags him into as a result of her online group that formed for that explicit purpose. Suicide also continues to be a recurring theme in the show, due to the deep depressions and societal alienations that the characters experience.

Thankfully, the suicide plot is foiled and all members go home, only for Sato to fall into an MMORPG addiction (which is a topic we look forward to exploring later), under the guise of trying to earn money through the game via real-life trading. Sato remains in this virtual world for a long while, until Kaoru catfishes Sato by pretending to be a girl player character that Sato likes, all to break the hold that the game has on him. His illusion shattered, Sato goes on to find other business ventures, only to get pulled into a pyramid scheme by another former classmate, Megumi Kobayashi, who is trying to support her hikikomori brother, whom Sato played with in the MMO, through various other schemes and quick ways to make money. This furthers the theme of being taken advantage of others that one once shared an emotional tie with in earlier life, the isolation not fostering new personal connections by which to bridge out, but also the shared experience and trauma of hikikomori struggles.

Unfortunately for Sato, Kaoru has to leave to go back home to his family farm due to his father’s illness, causing them to finish the eroge in a rush, though their sales at the Comiket festival are lackluster. Defeated, Kaoru leaves and Sato is left with no prospects and alone with Misaki once more, who wishes to deepen her relationship with Sato by furthering their contract, deciding to put Sato's social progress to the test and go out on a quasi-date with him on New Years Eve, only for Sato to lose sight of Misaki and find his previous love interest, Hitomi, instead.

Misaki seeks Sato and Hitomi together and spirals into a deep depression. Sato investigates Misaki’s whereabouts later, only to find out about from her uncle about her mother’s suicide and abusive step-father. Sato then goes in search of Misaki to find her trying to jump off the same cliff where her mother committed suicide. Sato saves her only to try to kill himself in the same fashion shortly after, his delusion of the N.H.K. making him think that his self-sacrifice will save Misaki, though, serendipitously, an anti-suicide fence was installed into the cliff and his attempt fails, bringing Sato crashing back to the reality of the situation he’s found himself in. The two later reconcile and sign a new contract, agreeing to stay alive so that they can suffer together, hoping to move forward to a brighter future.

We can firmly say Welcome to the N.H.K. has quite the encapsulation of all the issues that contemporary Japan, as well as the world in general, faces, with regards to interpersonal issues that extend from society’s ills, and the show is not ashamed to relate all the major influences from the anime and manga world that facilitate such a worldview. The more we become isolated from others, the more our relationships become strained and we make decisions that are not in ours or anyone else’s best interests, either via distractions or obsessions or whatever, and the reader will note that works like these do not even approach the fullness of any realization that involves a true spiritual perspective. Most of the world seems very much “lost in the winds” these days, and we ourselves were no different until we started along the path we have chosen, or, perhaps, the path chose us instead.

Bringing Anime and Manga Full Circle - Full Conclusion

Anime and Manga have negative reputations with many for a reason. Despite the good stories that can be told via such mediums, the dangerous content that exists within them draw the ire of those that view the artwork from the outside. Anime and Manga can be weird, hypersexual, fantastical in its representations, and reflect cultural trends that are deeply concerning to society at large, and the reasons as to why the situation is this way have been succinctly explored.

Creators have a deep responsibility to those that view their art, and the same is true for those that produce anime and manga. If profit were the only important thing in society, people would only strive towards that which was in their own best interest financially, and the sad fact of the matter is that much of globalist society is predicated on principles based on valuing quantity solely without respect to quality - people will suffer as a result of these choices, just like in antiquity. In Scripture, whenever someone sought to count the people it always resulted in catastrophe and Divine Judgement. The more we value quantitative issues, the more we warrant and bring about our own ruin.

Creators have culpability for what psychic information they put out into the world, since words, and even images, possess a magical quality that effect the outside world, but the effect of the magic is dependent upon the intent of the magic. So long as people create works and images that display dangerous themes and images, without respect for their audience’s well being, there will be otaku and hikikomori, and there will be issues in anime and manga culture.

The key recognition is that the issues that the viewers of anime and manga possess are also possessed by the creators themselves, and they produce this sort of feed-back loop that forms a closed circle of influence, an ouroboros of generation and consumption. This closed system of feedback lends to Anime and Manga’s degenerative nature. One could even call the scene itself incestuous since it reproduces off of itself and within itself, which may explain partially the subconscious emergence of incest as a recurring theme in both anime and manga in general.

Both creators and consumers of such media have it in their best interest to broaden their horizons and to seek higher truth that the world has to offer. We ourselves sought upon the quest for truths and found Truth in the exchange, but if people can’t see themselves out of the prisons that they create for themselves - then they may never escape. However, people don’t recognize they’re in a prison if they can’t see the cage.

Always remember, find connection to others, find connection to community, and find connection to God, and, if one finds it difficult to find connection with those around you, seek God first and everything else shall follow.

(Pt. 1 Linked Here)

“Anime was a mistake. It’s nothing but trash. Those who identify as ‘otaku’, they sicken me deeply.”
- Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli.

(Pt. 2 Continued Here)

Background and Initial Considerations

Intellectual intuition is the key to sobering realizations, especially about subjects that are inconvenient with their respect to higher truths. We came to such a realization recently with regards to modern and post-modern media in general, but some special considerations must be explored to put forward recognitions of principles from the Traditional perspective, mainly with regard to evaluating the phenomenon of Anime and Manga, as well as the cultures that participate and extend from such a medium.

The reader should know that we have watched a fair amount of anime and read an equivalent amount of manga, from the period of our childhood through middle adulthood, as a result of the influx of media from the East becoming more readily available to Western audiences. We make these recognitions not as an outsider to the medium but as a person who in the past actively participated in consuming such media, as we now only do so in a passive capacity. We would like to think that we’re more than familiar with certain trends, discussions, and culturally understood information that extend from this subset of cultural interest. We also don’t want to suppose that anime and manga reflect the fullness of the culture of the Japanese people, as this is incongruent with how more Traditionally oriented Japanese feel about their own culture, whereas anime and manga are more so reflective of modern trends than they are of any aspect or facet of properly oriented Traditional information or knowledge that extends from Shinto or Buddhist Japan.

With this all being said, we have had an acute realization of the spiritual dangers that anime and manga predispose viewers and readers toward, and, given the influence and popularity of such a medium of expression, such considerations cannot be ignored. As such, one finds it needful to require a thorough investigation and explication of such factors to identify the concerning elements, so as to best guard against their influences, especially if one is focused on cultivating spiritual practice towards the end of salvation or, ideally, spiritual realization, either via initiation or mysticism. This will more than likely confuse and perplex those with no concept of these topics, but the importance of such pursuits have greater supremacy over those who are ignorant of such factors (see Rene Guenon’s Perspectives on Initiation and Initiation and Spiritual Realization).

As someone who has thoroughly enjoyed the subject matter of anime and manga over much of one’s formative years, we say much of this with a heavy heart, but the truth takes precedence over any sentiment, so we will now digress towards achieving a thorough assessment of how anime and manga ought to be viewed with respect to what it achieves, both in the microcosm and macrocosm of human experience.

Anime and Manga as Medium

Manga historically, as an artistic medium, began around the 12th century in Japan in its earliest forms via emakimono (絵巻物), i.e. “illustrated scrolls”, which communicated artistic works that retained a Traditional character, as it presented tableaus of historical and theological vistas, though most historians would not consider this as manga par excellence.

It would not be until the 18th century until the term manga (漫画), i.e. “whimsical/entertaining drawing”, became popularized, as a result of more artistic experimentation with the types of stories that could be told with the medium.

There would be further development of this art through the pre-Meiji Restoration era, moving into Imperial Japan’s cultural changes, but the real formalization of manga norms would not come until the situation that Japan found itself in in post-WWII occupation, especially as a result of the greater Western influence working its way into the Japanese nation. Its no doubt that Western animation held a certain sway and influence, with regards to how stories could be told through images and film, but the same considerations did not hold for aesthetic choices necessarily, especially when adapted for Eastern attitudes.

This naturally coincides with the development of anime, especially since Eastern animation techniques were heavily developed from Western ones, starting from the 1910’s and becoming more developed into where it could be consumed via television broadcasts via shows like Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, which was instrumental in popularizing contemporary manga as well, which fosters the recognition of the relationship between manga and anime with regards to influence, aesthetic, and story-telling conventions.

The progression of manga into anime is furthered by those like Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame, with regards to series, whereas stand-alone films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell pushed the limits as to what could be animated.

The true heights of development in the anime aesthetic, some could argue, have been realized in the works of Studio Ghibli, co-founded by the directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, which could be a digression in and of itself (see our work on The Esotericism of Spirited Away Pt 1. and Pt.2 for a partial exploration). Many manga becomes anime, and often stand-alone anime becomes manga, and now there’s the use of light novels which lead to manga and become anime as well. Suffice to say, many other creators have filled in all the gaps in all genres and domains in between.

All this background aside, manga and anime are drawn media. As such, there are certain aesthetics, stories, and techniques that can be employed with drawings that simply cannot be shown through live action photographs or video representations. As time has progressed, the lines have become blurred with this distinction via the use of 3DCG in both animated and live action media, but one could argue that the techniques with 3DCG were fostered by the innovations made within the animation sphere, as a result of the want to incorporate certain aesthetics and visual techniques along with real-life actors and settings. Regardless, the drawn aspect of these media allow for the imagination to be unbound and unconstrained by physical limitations. This allows for all manner of fantastical possibilities, evidenced by the plethora of stories created by the anime and manga sphere, for better or for ill, since there are many stories that are inspiring and communicate truth as there are those with falsehoods and spiritually dangerous information built in. As such, one must assess the major trends established within these mediums of expression.

Genre and Audience - Norms and Conventions

The most popular genre in these spheres is no doubt shonen (少年), i.e. “boy/youth”, which has the greatest market appeal, geared more so towards the young male audience, but it can be enjoyed easily by men and women of all ages. Still, the genre conventions of action and fighting, as well as having a focus on friendship and shallow understandings of honor and other virtues, betray a certain lack of maturity and naivete, which is natural given the target audience. Despite this, this predisposes many to a reductionistic and infantilized view of complex issues that should be understood within the context of more refined positions.

Beyond this, the overt focus on action over contemplation leads to the viewer valuing the former over the latter, which is an inversion of metaphysical, or universal, principles and truth (see Rene Guenon's Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. 4 “Knowledge and Action”). This naturally results in the so-called “power fantasy” that most shonen anime participate in, with super-powerful men, women, and other beings having the ability and agency to surmount any challenge and accomplish any and all physical feats, often diminishing the importance of the psychic and spiritual aspects of one's journey, if not negating these two primary domains entirely.

One could argue that shows like My Hero Academia have been most guilty of fostering these trends referenced above in the recent past, Naruto even more so, with shows like Dandadan being an even more hyperbolic example; one might doubt if anyone outside of this culture of viewers that is not a young child or teenager would find any these series thought provoking or engaging, particularly on an intellectual (by which we mean spiritual) level. All that’s left is purely aesthetic and artistic considerations with regards to the artwork and how the stories are told at a technical level.

The same could very well be said for the genre of shoujo (少女), i.e. “young girl”, as well. This shoujo genre more so focuses on romance, interpersonal relationships, and drama considering its more female based audience. This genre, one could argue, often predisposes the viewer to a certain degree of “over-sentimentalization” and idealization of relationship expectations, romantic or otherwise, which can only gear one up for disappointment in one’s real life relationships. This is the opposite of properly oriented spiritual practice that operates to foster equanimity and emotional balance internally, because two extremes know each other - with extreme joy comes extreme sorrow (and if the reader doesn’t believe me, be sure to watch the infamous School Days). Popular series such Sailor Moon, Ouran High School Host Club, and Fruit's Basket are most reflective of this phenomenon in general.

These issues become further compounded as we move from more juvenile stories to the more adult with the seinen (青年), i.e. “young man”, and josei (女性), i.e. “woman/female”, genres. The former moves more towards brutality, hyper-violence, and sexuality being it’s core focuses, with Berserk being the most popular example, whereas Golden Boy is also worth mention, but we would also argue that the works of Inio Asano, in particular the manga Goodnight Punpun, are most emblematic of the darker considerations of the genre.

These themes are less extreme in the latter josei, in which there are more mature themes with a focus on characterization that is more grounded, but the sentimentalization is even more pronounced, with works like Nana, Usagi Drop (with the manga being especially polarizing due to its ending), and Sakamichi no Apollon being the front-runners for consideration in this regard.

The issue of genre distinction into these four subsets becomes more confused as time goes on, with many shonen having shoujo themes and presentations blended together, Inuyasha being the classic example, and even shonen blending with seinen, with Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood being the more refined of this phenomena, and even going to the extremes such as works like Mushoku Tensei.

Naturally, josei and shoujo even become fused, with My Dress Up Darling being a good example, since Gojo, the insecure but talented, honorable male protagonist, is interpolated with the lively girl Marin, who is more-so meant to be the supposed “self-insert”, the character that the viewer is more so inclined to identify with and view the work as a proxy for oneself. Many other blends and examples could be given, but this would take us rather far afield.

Aside from those gender considerations for genre, the major genres of fantasy, science fiction, drama, horror, and beyond have their own unique considerations which may very well require their own treatment. We will remind the reader in passing that, in previous generations, particularly in the 1800’s, Western society collectively decried the popularization of fiction novels, especially due to the popularity of adventure and fantasy literature during the Romantic period, saying that it would corrupt the youth and cause them to read the Bible, and other Traditional literature, less. People no doubt spoke up, and in some cases continue to speak out, against the use of radio, film, television, contemporary music, video games and social media in the same context, and their arguments may very well have merit from a purely spiritual point of view. Engaging in certain types of media does not overtly cause one to transgress against the spirit, but they do create a mental disposition that pushes one towards transgression for one reason or another. Much like how the Western world suffers under the yoke of modernity, as does the East, and Japan is most reflective of this (see our Esotericism of Spirited Away for such considerations). Such factors will always exist in media likely until the end of the age.

Aesthetic Considerations

Anime and Manga have a particularized style and conventions. There have indeed been changes over time, with anime and manga pre-1970’s having a more simplistic portrayal, with the following decades having their own distinctive aesthetic patterns. Large eyes, angular features, overly-emotive facial expressions, idealized body-types for men and women, with muscles and curves for shonen and seinen respectively, though not always, and with hair and fashion made immaculate in shoujo and josei - all of these patterns and conventions to form create a decidedly small spectrum of presentation as to how the human form can be expressed in the greater scheme of manifestation. Of course, people enjoy what is beautiful because beauty is a good. However, this causes some issues for consideration.

If one values what is beautiful or is pleasing to the senses first and foremost, one becomes especially predisposed to vice and to not cultivating the virtues, which dulls the intellect and prevents one from achieving higher Truth of a divine order, preventing spiritual impressions upon the soul that may act upon it. From a purely metaphysical point of view, taking in consideration principles of cosmogony, God is the source of all things and, as such, is transcendent above all things. Good, Beautiful, Truth, Love, Justice, and so on - all are Divine Names of God, and yet He is above all such conceptions and names. All that is truly Good is beyond all conception, and anything in which good can be found, creatures or images, is but a dull impression of the good and not the Highest Good in and of itself. This is especially well shown in the Advaita Vedanta school of thought in Hinduism, with the symbolism of the mirror reflecting the Sun, the latter symbolic of the Divine Principle, of which man is just a virtual reflection of.

All of this is to say that beauty is a good, but it is not the Supreme Good, and it is not a good achieved by spiritual perfection. The greatest evidence in favor of this is that beauty can be possessed by those who are both good and evil, and not solely by those on which have been conferred divine favor through spiritual practice and devotion to the Divine, and, even so, those that receive that favor may very well possess very little physical beauty. Also, a primacy of valuing beauty and the senses will reduce one’s charity towards others, either by dislike of people or things that don’t possess beauty or are not pleasing to the senses, and, as such, does not foster humility and emboldens pride, the source of all ills.

This pride in valuing beauty also instills a pride that emboldens lust as well. This is reflected not only by the large amount of anime consumers sexualizing the characters from their favorite narratives but also by creators sexualizing their own creations in an overt fashion, through “fan-service” or otherwise. Beauty can be inspiring, but it can also be the source of counter-inspiration, a push towards that which would pull us to perdition and a love of that which is not God. With this in mind, we must now tackle the most pernicious of factors that are within the anime and manga sphere.

Kawaii, Moe, and Progressive Sexualization

To build off our aesthetic considerations, the phenomena of anime and manga fostering a kawaii (可愛い), i.e. “cute/adorable”, aesthetic, which is usually the contrast to more masculine considerations more evident in the male genres, but even the latter are not immune to such forces. The propensity for anime and manga creators to make their characters or aesthetics kawaii is high, which builds upon the aforementioned focus on beauty. Although, with anime and manga being drawn and virtual, just like with philosophies and other experimental and speculative fields, the potential for idealization is also high.

That which is ideal is that which is perfect, and, from a metaphysical point of view, perfection cannot exist in the physical domain, since the physical is a mixture of quality (essence) and quantity (substance), and the latter, by association, is necessarily limited. Quality can exist without quantity, especially at the higher ontological level of the spirit, but quantity, which is relegated to the material/physical, cannot exist without quality. As such, nothing purely physical is self-sufficient or perfect in and of itself, so any idealization of any temporal conception or thing is fundamentally impossible.

Despite this, that which is kawaii fosters the like of that which is moe (萌え), an idealized feeling of cuteness, which creates a strong attachment towards the virginal feminine as well, especially due to the culturally understood want in this culture to protect such cuteness and purity, through characters and aesthetic forms representative of such phenomena . Not only this, moe can not only lead into idol worship of people and characters but also the idealization of aesthetic formation, and this creates hyper-fixation towards people being recognized as otaku (おたく), i.e. “nerd/geek”, which we will return to later (in Pt. 2).

However, with the one side of the coin being the idealized purity of moe, the other side can only naturally lead to perversion borne from the prideful lust of attachment to beauty as a polar opposite in tandem with the former as extremes. This is what causes the sexualization that we have harkened to in this culture in essence. This leads to the idealized feminine sexuality, and male as well, seen in multiple spheres, to the point where such forms are not congruent with reality, especially with regards to physical proportion and personality . This incongruous lack of conformity with physical and psychic reality is most symbolic of the “tomboy” vs “femboy” phenomenon, with the former having the ideal of the masculine female with muscles and physical hardness on the one hand contrasted with the latter with a male with soft curves and feminine features, two extremes of the non-bifurcated androgyne. This leads to not only a confusion of biological sexual reality, but also of the confusion of sexual roles from a metaphysical point of view (see Julius Evola’s Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). One could even argue that such incongruent aesthetic idealizations lead to transsexual ideation in various communities, and for those truly paying attention to such spaces they would find much to agree with here. It should be noted that transsexual leanings often stem from “autogynephilia”, extreme attachment and arousal from sexual forms, and from sexuality in general.

This process is even seen in tandem with the major anime and manga convention of most stories happening with school-age children, as low as elementary and up to high school, which manifest in the creation of loli and shota material, which we shudder to talk about longer than we need to. Instead, we choose instead to move on.

Synthesis and Primary Conclusion

With all this being said, it is not our direct or overt intention to tell people what to do with their personal actions or hobbies. We do not seek to demonize or disparage any person or group that participates in creating or consuming anime and manga in general, as it is such a ubiquitous media in today’s day and age, but more so because doing so goes against the spirit of charity and love for one’s fellow man. People garner and continue to enjoy positive experiences from artistic expressions, and we ourselves have been spiritually affected by various works: Neon Genesis Evangelion, and in particular End of Evangelion, Perfect Blue, Death Note, Spirited Away, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, Welcome to the NHK (the latter to be discussed in Pt.2) - all of these have had profound effects upon our worldview in the past.

Still, there is much in this sphere that serves to distract and dull the intellect from higher pursuits, and yet there is some value to be found here, insofar as one does not fall prey to these negative forces referenced above. Here we shall quote the words of the Lord Jesus Christ who spoke in the Sermon on the Mount thus:

“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” [Matthew 5:29]

If anime, manga, or anything else should cause one to transgress and fall away from that which is truly essential, cast it away from you without a second thought. Some will be able to consume this media without issue, but there are clearly some that are more impressionable and, as a consequence, more subject to negative influences, regardless of medium.

As a result of all that has been said, we implore the reader not to allow one’s imagination to get the better of them, not to allow oneself to fall into losing sight of what is essential, and to not become sentimentally attached to form or objects of idolatry, all so one’s sense of intellect and morality are not perverted away from Truth.

Much of anime and manga can be considered good, and if they didn’t have any good within them then they simply would have no presence and not exist at all. Still, when it comes to spiritual practice, one must forgo that which is good for that which is better. It is good to enjoy things, but it is better to enjoy God.

(Pt. 2 Continued Here)

Initial Recognitions and Core Story

As a result of our previous article on Spirited Away, as well as being within the Halloween season at time of writing, our attention has become more pointed towards a work of particular cultural importance, which we were familiar with in the past but feel that now is a good time to focus on and expand on the work as a whole.

If the reader has not viewed the film Coraline, we recommend that they go and do so and then read this article, as it is an enjoyable viewing experience, though a bit darker in general than most children’s media, and for a good reason. We will not go into a full digression into the plot note for note, but the core of the plot is essential to allow for recognitions to come forth. We will mainly be discussing the film and not the book by Neil Gaiman, the major differences being that the film is set in America, that Coraline makes multiple visits to the Other World instead of just one long one, and the character of Wybie being added in to allow for additional exposition and comic relief, as the book is decidedly much darker in tone than the film.

The story begins with the Jones family including Coraline, a name that is meant to seem bizarre on purpose to add to the tone of the story, moving with her family to the Pacific Northwest into an apartment within a subdivided house referred to as the “Pink Palace”. Coraline and her parents, Melinda “Mel” and Charles “Charlie” Jones, occupy the downstairs portion of the house, as well as part of the upstairs. Mr. Sergei Bobinsky, a Russian acrobat and mouse enthusiast, occupies the upstairs sublet, while Forcible and Spink, two elderly and ex-theater/burlesque actresses which often contradict each other and seem to be opposites (the former being bottom heavy and the latter having large breasts), occupy the basement with their three dogs.

While Coraline is out exploring she finds an old well, dark and deep, potentially even almost falling in, connoting a sense of descent and danger, but is enlightened by a new friend, Wybie. Wybie, full name Wyborne, another purposeful odd name, is the grandson of the woman who owns the “Pink Palace”, but states that the house is not safe for children and that his grandmother is superstitious about it without saying why. Wybie soon gifts Coraline a doll that has her exact appearance and clothing, something that was crafted in the title sequence of the film (unbeknownst to the characters, of course) by an odd creature with needle-like hands, changing and retrofitting an old doll, a small black girl with braids, to align with Coraline’s aesthetic. Meanwhile, a lone black stray cat roams the property watchfully.

The crux of the drama extends from the family just moving in and getting settled. The weather is dreary, frustration is high, and the Jones parents are focused on meeting their publishing deadline, being writers for a gardening magazine though supposedly disliking dirt and going outside, all while Coraline is left largely ignored, the unaddressed poison oak rash on her hands leaving an itch, with even the neighbors consistently getting her name wrong. The mother furiously types in the kitchen on her laptop, while the father types via the chicken peck style at an old desktop in a cramped room of moving boxes. The environment is muted, banal and gray, as well as aged and dirty. The contrast of Coraline’s blue hair and quirky attitude makes her seem out of place, with a strong will to be seen and acknowledged. This strong will brings her to find a wallpapered small door, a portal the inanimate doll supposedly moves to of its own accord. Coraline begs her mother to open it, using a key with a button on the handle, only to find it bricked over. With Coraline refusing to eat what her father prepares for dinner, her mother refusing to cook, the family finishes their first full day there. Coraline goes to bed alone, missing her old friends from back home in Michigan, their picture upon a mantis-themed stand.

Eventually, Coraline goes to sleep and is awoken in the night by little mice that guide her to the newly opened door to find a long and extending, ethereal tunnel that leads to the Other World, an alternative version of their Pink Palace home. There, Coraline explores and finds a version of her mother there, called the Other Mother, cooking delicious smelling and looking food, while her Other Father is introduced shortly after in his lavish study, having a player piano control him to play a fun and jaunty tune while he sings along; there is one detail that is off, however - both her parents, as well as anyone else in the Other World that extends from there, has buttons for eyes, a detail that makes them seem inhuman. The parents are joyous, attentive, encouraging, and willing to bend to Coraline’s every whim, though the Other Mother does tap her fingers on the table in a seemingly impatient fashion. The food they prepare is exactly what Coraline wants, and both the Other Mother and Father putting her to bed, even using mud to fix Coraline’s rash - leaving our heroine beyond contented.

Coraline awakes back in the regular world in her bed, dissatisfied that she’s left the Other World, wondering if it was all a dream. Our protagonist goes about her routine, after telling her parents about her adventure, with Bobinsky warning her that his mice had a message for her “not to go through [the] little door”, while Spink and Forcible read her tea leaves that portent great danger, though the two women contradict each other and have a poor sense of sight and hearing. Shakespearian posters of their work line the walls, along with their taxidermized dog collection, with old salt-water taffy on the coffee table. Wybie also provides another warning, saying that he’s never been allowed in the Pink Palace because his grandmother’s twin sister supposedly disappeared inside.

Nevertheless, Coraline goes to the Other World for a second time. She falls asleep to find her Other Father gardening, riding a mantis lawnmower while the snapdragon flowers kiss Coraline, all to make the garden look exactly like Coraline’s visage from above. After having a nice brinner, the Other Wybie is introduced that can’t speak (Coraline thinks the real Wybie’s talking is annoying), and they go to view a fantastical mouse circus upstairs, put on by the Other Bobinsky, with even the mice having the button eyes as well. Afterward, Coraline goes to sleep again in the Other World.

Our main character awakes again to tell her real mother more of her fantastical adventures, while they run errands around town during the Shakespeare festival, much to her mother’s disdain. The father goes off to finish publishing their work, while the mother-daughter duo go buying school uniform clothes, where a child is heard saying “my kingdom for a horse!”, and Coraline’s mother refuses to buy the expensive gloves her daughter wants. Dissatisfied, they return home for Coraline to find that her mother has locked the door to the Other World, claiming Coraline’s dreams to be dangerous. The mother tries to reach out to Coraline but is met with a cold shoulder, offering to get her something at the grocery store, but, met with her daughter’s refusal, the mother leaves the house alone.

Defiantly, Coraline steals the key to the little door and opens it to find the tunnel to the Other World on the other side even during the daytime, confirming that this is indeed a real occurrence and not a dream. Coraline goes inside for the third time willingly. She’s met with a note to see a performance put on by the Other Spink and Forcible’s. Coraline also puts on a new set of clothes being left for her by her Other Mother that she changes into quickly. However, when she goes outside, she’s met with the stray cat that can apparently talk in the Other World, evidenced that he’s the real one since he doesn’t have buttons for eyes. The cat warns her that this place is not what it seems and that Other Wybie can talk to him, since cats have “far superior senses than humans”. The cat eventually runs off, scared by something, all for Coraline to go to the basement to find the older ladies’ apartment turned into a grand theater with the dogs as attendants, along with Other Wybie.

The performance has Other Spink as a siren, using the Odyssey as motifs, while Other Forcible is in the style of the Birth of Venus painting, contrasting one another with a shared nautical theme, all for the silly display to devolve into absurdity. Afterward, they move to high-dive into a bucket of water, but shed their old-woman shells to become their younger selves, as seen in the portraits in the real-world apartment, and engage in a high-flying trapeze act, even incorporating Coraline into the mix, all while quoting a section of Hamlet which is of great narrative importance. All of these Shakespeare quotes will be returned to later.

Coraline goes back inside with her Other Mother and Father, leaving Other Wybie dejected outside (though the Other Mother tries to correct him, motioning for him to smile). When they all sit at the table, the Other Mother offers a proposition to Coraline: sew buttons into your eyes and you can stay in the Other World forever. In horror, Coraline refuses and goes up to her Other bedroom to hide, all while her toys, and even her picture of her friends, begging her to stay and sew the buttons in. She eventually falls asleep, but, when she awakes, she’s still in the Other World. Let it be noted in passing, that her changing of clothes, both symbolically and literally, is why she can’t leave.

Temptation, Deception of the Senses, and Appearance

We will now take the opportunity to expand upon certain Traditional considerations of the film and its narrative. Coraline is progressively tempted by her sense experiences throughout the first half of the film. From a spiritual point of view, the senses are the lower part of Man’s nature, the bestial part, whereas the purely intellectual/spiritual dimension is the higher part, of a supra-human character, even beyond logic and reason that distinguishes Man as human (“man is a rational animal”). As a result, temptation for sensory experiences is a pernicious thing, as it emboldens us to seek even more experiences that provide pleasure or general satisfaction, but, if left unchecked with regards to virtue, this will always push us towards vice, even predisposing us to not make use of our higher-natured intellect and intuition - blind, and Coraline is definitely no exception. However, the Other Mother isn’t tempting Coraline purely to get her to fall into vice, as she is doing this for other ulterior motives not yet revealed to the narrative.

Still, the Other Mother appeals to Coraline’s senses by creating a world suited to our protagonist’s wants, with regards to all the senses in practice - but, obviously, everything is not what it seems, both in the Other World and in our own world as well, and if it seems too good to be true it usually is. This motif is very similar to the folk tale Hansel and Gretel especially, with hungry children going off to find a Gingerbread house, only to find a witch that wants to eat them inside instead. Obvious parallels can be drawn here, as well as with regards to The Pied Piper, with regards to luring children away through the sense of sound, as well as the danger of the mysterious other that is not well understood or motives comprehended. These motifs were further accented by the use of the siren and Venus in Spink and Forcible’s little stage play.

Coming back to the story - with Coraline realizing that she can’t leave, she finds her Other Father looking depressed and dejected, now looking creepy in appearance, and it becomes apparent that the Other Mother is in full control of him and Other Wybie as well, some aspects of the illusion falling away. Coraline runs away to outside and tries to find an exit, the cat joining her along the way for exposition, and they come to find that the world becomes empty and void of detail as they walk away, all for them to circle right back to the same Other Pink Palace and grounds as before. The cat even dispatches with one of the faux circus mice sounding an alarm, revealing it to really be a rat and agent of the Other Mother. Everything is indeed not as it seems.

This is where ontology is useful in this aspect of the story. As referenced previously in our other writings, and very similar to Spirited Away in particular, Coraline going from her world to the Other World is likened to moving from the plane of Gross Manifestation, the lowest aspect of the physical world, to the plane of Subtle Manifestation, where subtle spirits dwell. Often only seen through near-death experiences, astral projection, and certain spiritual experiences - this realm of manifestation is very malleable in appearance, often taking the form of what people expect to see or want to see (see The Soul After Death by Fr. Seraphim Rose). Coraline has been “spirited away” here and abducted, similar in aspect to so-called “alien abductions”, to be manipulated to the ends of what the Other Mother wishes to achieve. As such, what Coraline knows, understands, and wishes to see is what the Other Mother makes appear using heavy amounts of psychic energy and influence, using the outward manifestation of mere appearance to push Coraline to stay in the Other World, a dangerous notion indeed.

Going back inside to try to leave through the small door, the pathway is blocked by furniture all in the style of bugs, a decidedly Kafkaesque motif, while the Other Mother eats literal chocolate beetles. After Coraline refuses to acknowledge her Other Mother as her actual mother, the Other Mother shapeshifts into a tall, lanky, spiderlike, and more horrifying version of herself, guiding Coraline by the nose to a “time out” zone by being phased through a mirror. While there, Coraline encounters three ghost children that refer to the Other Mother as the “Beldam”, a creature that lures children to steal their eyes and eat their life force within the Other World, the fate that these three children suffered. One child is a tall girl, a short farm-boy, and a little girl that matches the description of Wybie’s grandmother’s missing sister - their faces all frozen in horror and despondency, trapped in the Other World until their eyes are freed from it.

The Beldam Understood as Demonic Entity

The Beldam is indeed best understood as a demonic entity, both inside and outside of the narrative. All the pieces are there:

1. The deceptive nature of subtle spirits.

2. The use of temptation as a mode of deception.

3. The lying and misrepresentation of truth.

4. The manipulation of appearance, both of the entity itself and the subtle plane of manifestation.

5. Psychic parasitism, with the Beldam consuming the essence of the other children.

6. Contempt for humanity as a mode of being.

7. The infra-human aspect of the demonic as fallen entities.

These last three points have not been properly addressed and shall be expanded on in earnest.

Demons latch onto and either oppress or possess human hosts, often to their collective perdition, since demons, in their purely adversarial mode, are meant to divide humanity from itself, and even the will from the intellect for individuals or society as a whole, all to drive humanity into the same fallen state the demons are in. They leech psychic energy from living hosts, just as they can also subsist on psychic residues left behind in physical places or on objects (see “shadow people” in cemeteries or “cursed objects” phenomena). It should be noted that this is similar to how C.S. Lewis conceives of demons in The Screwtape Letters, in which its mentioned that demons consume the essence of fallen men and women in hell and the suffering borne from them, likening it to food and confection, and that the only way demons can conceive of connection to others is by eating them. It should be noted that the Other Mother claims to love all of the children she consumes, but its obvious to any viewer that this is no sense of true love, and that she is more like the female mantis that consumes the heads of those she shares a close bond, to build on the prior mantis motif in the film earlier. The Beldam’s “love” is predatory.

As for contempt for humanity, its a cosmological talking point that Lucifer, in his unfallen form, when seeing humanity and being told to serve it by God, he quickly rebelled, along with many other angels, and this was the impetus for fallen-demonic beings. This is attested to especially within the Qur’an, mainly in the Surrah Al-Baqarah 2:34 and Al'-A’raf 7:11-12, where Iblis (Lucifer) refused to prostrate to Adam, stating that he was made from fire, whereas Adam was made from clay, and, as such, became one of the disbelievers. As such, demons do indeed view humans with contempt to be manipulated to their ends.

To go along with this aspect of manipulation, we will remind the reader about the sequence in the opening title sequence involving the creation of the Coraline doll. The Beldam views the children the same way as she does the dolls: as something to be controlled and manipulated. The Beldam does not view humans as ends in themselves, but, rather, as a means to an end for its own satisfaction, as one would view a doll as a toy. The Beldam meticulously deconstructs and reconstructs the doll to how she sees fit, giving the appearance of humanity to thread and filling but, regardless, treating it and viewing it as an object in and of itself.

The one quote from the Other Spink and Forcible from Hamlet, as mentioned previously, goes especially well with this motif, which is quoted as follows:

“What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty.
In form, in moving how express and admirable!
In action like an angel.
In apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world!
The paragon of animals!”

Coraline obviously doesn’t know the fullness of the quote, though the Beldam certainly does, more than likely overhearing it from the real Spink and Forcible, and the remainder of the quote, that’s no doubt purposely omitted, reveals the true perspective of the Beldam:

“And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither;
though by your smiling you seem to say so.”

The Beldam and the Other alternates are always made to smile, to “put on appearances” despite all falsehood to the contrary, just as Other Wybie is forced to smile, which is revealed whenever the Other Wybie helps Coraline escape the Beldam’s clutches, though the alternate can’t follow or else he would turn to dust; this allows Coraline to escape back to the real world past the bug room through the little door.

Still, to expand on this quote further, its apparent that the Beldam puts on the appearance of lauding humanity, singing its praises and capitulating to it, but, in reality, the Beldam thinks very little of humans, considering itself to be superior.

It should also be noted in passing that Shakespeare wove many esoteric themes into his works and was rather enlightened to higher aspects of spirituality, as attested to by the works of Martin Lings (see The Secret of Shakespeare and The Sacred Art of Shakespeare), as well as by Rene Guenon, who noted elements of Freemasonic influence in his works (see Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage).

To borrow from Rene Guenon again here, the term “infra-human” reflects demonic entities in their lesser mode as being fallen, a lesser form of being as a result of their transgression (see The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Ch. 25 “The Fissures in the Great Wall”), just as man is fallen as a result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, separating Man further from God. This is best reflected by the bug imagery, showing the lesser character of the Beldam and its creations being as lowly, creeping things.

The act of Coraline sewing buttons into her eyes would also reflect an even greater fall as well. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, and if one’s eyes are removed, then not only is one’s humanity removed with their removal but access to one’s soul as well. This may be very well as to why the eyes being kept in the Other World is the cause as to why the children’s souls cannot leave, the buttons sealing their souls away - but it was their choice to do so, plunging them into a living hell of torment with no sign of ending.

Trials, Tribulations, and Love

Once Coraline makes it back to the real world, she realizes she’s been gone for at least a day, her mother’s groceries left on the kitchen table to rot. After using her parents cellphone and talking with Spink and Forcible, the two gifting her a Ouija Board planchette to find “lost things” (a topic that can be expanded upon later), it turns out that Coraline’s parents are missing. She confirms this through the use of a mirror in the hallway (in the same place she was imprisoned in the Other World) which shows that her parents have actually been kidnapped by the Beldam! So, now Coraline must venture back into the Other World to save her parents.

Coraline goes back and challenges the Beldam to a game: she must find the eyes of the three missing children and her parents to escape, though the Beldam has no intention of letting her leave. Coraline retrieves one pair from her Other Father, who reluctantly tries to stop her and even helps her, reflecting the control motif once more. She then retrieves another from Other Spink and Forcible, who are intertwined as taffy monsters on the stage (for candy as temptation, see C.S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe via Turkish Delight), and even from Other Bobinsky, who is a hollow representation puppeted by the rats, she retrieves the last set of eyes with the stray cat’s help.

This aspect of a noble quest and trials is reflective of the initiatic journey in various forms of tales across Traditional spaces, similar to the Grail Legend, the story of Wukong from Journey to the West, as well as The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the protagonist must retrieve what was lost and/or attain what is precious. Earlier, Coraline would have given up what was precious for what was most desired for from her own selfish wants, harkening to the “my kingdom for a horse” Shakespeare quote, but now she would rather have “her kingdom for her parents”, a much more noble goal, now that she’s recognized what’s important - not her wants but what is essential: real love. Love is the binding force, to borrow from Empedocles, that brings all together away from Strife, the chaotic and centrifugal force of dispersion.

Thankfully, Coraline outsmarts the Beldam by finding her parents in the snow-globe on the mantle, an object of importance and symbolic of a happy time in the family’s life when they visited the zoo together, throws the cat at the now fully Spider-like Beldam which rends her button eyes off, escapes her web, and finally exits the Other World for the last time, even severing the Beldam’s hand in the tunnel through the process. Coraline’s parents are safe, not remembering the experience, and all is set right between them again.

Coraline goes to sleep, putting the children’s eyes under her pillow, and the victims of the Beldam ascend as angels, but they do so with a warning: get rid of the key to the door so the Beldam cannot come back. Coraline goes to throw the key down the well, but the Beldam’s severed hand stops her. However, Wybie comes to the rescue and helps Coraline dispatch with the hand and throw it down the well from the beginning of the story. With that and a nice garden party at the end with all the neighbors, where Coraline gets to talk with Wybie’s grandmother to set the record straight, everything is drawn to a close.

As we can see above, a Traditional perspective helps put much of the esoteric and cosmological context of the film into a sobering and higher level of understanding, lucid and clear. Just like how Coraline was ignorant of Shakespeare, we shouldn’t be ignorant of the Traditions of the past, let we easily fall into deception and not recognize what is in front of our faces. Beyond this, we will remind the reader to always remember what is important in life, to not be deceived by appearances or give into the senses, as well as to cultivate love between one another, without falling prey to influences that would draw us downward rather than lift us up.

Emerging from the optimism of the 1990s, out of the age of the war on terror, it seems evident that in the broader zeitgeist, dreams of utopic scientific world peace have run their course, and in their wake arose an ideation of decline, disorder, and prophecies of doom. Among the political left, whole governments have adopted “green solutions” to slow or even reverse the changes to our globe’s climate, and on the political right themes of cyclical decline have entered the intellectual discourse with the rediscovery of thinkers like Rene Guenon and Oswald Spengler. This reaction is not unwarranted, there is truth to this pessimism observable in the signs of our times, but that is not the concern of this article.

This preoccupation with death is at the root of the whole civilisational enterprise. Schooling to cultivate wisdom, policing to prevent crime and maintain public order, hospitals to heal the sick. All of these exist precisely to avoid death. As Saint Gregory Nyssa says in his dialogue, On the Soul and the Resurrection:

“We see before us the whole course of human life aiming at this one thing, viz. how we may continue in this life; indeed it is for this that houses have been invented by us to live in; in order that our bodies may not be prostrated in their environment by cold or heat.”

Mankind developed civilisation out of necessity to cope with this reality, encompassing not merely the labour of civilisation, but likewise its cultural awareness. In his magnum opus, the Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler outlines a universal pattern of the rise and fall of civilisations. He identifies that a fascination with death marks both the birth of a civilisation and the birth of its religious feeling. Burial practices, sacrificial offerings, and apocalyptic imagery are signs of this cultural awakening. As Spengler so beautifully puts it, with an awareness of death comes an understanding of transience and being:

“Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose understanding has been emancipated by the habit of language from dependence on sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the notion of transience, that is, a memory of the past as past and an experiential conviction of irrevocability. We are Time”

Spengler’s analysis of man’s fascination with death, however, stays within the confines of historical inquiry. In the writings of the metaphysician, Rene Guenon, we find a more universal study of decline that comes to encompass the whole of providence. Where Spengler studies culture from a distance as a historian, Guenon approaches it with the same metaphysical lens through which these cultures pictured the world. To Guenon, culture was no mere creation of man’s outlook, but an expression of universal and eternal principles. Of keen interest to him was the Yuga cycle of Vedic cosmology, an idea that the very unfolding of time itself occurred cyclically, repeating in the same pattern as it previously did. This was a cycle of four progressively degenerating ages; each further removed from the primordial principle of divine perfection than the last.

Parallel to this fall of ages is a descent into increasing materiality and multiplicity. As Guenon says in his The Crisis of the Modern World, “any manifestation necessarily implies a gradually increasing distance from the principle from which it proceeds.” In accordance with Aristotelian metaphysics, an effect can be no greater than its cause, and with the first cause being infinite and its effects being finite, these latter causes cannot bring out, from their own being, more than what they are, by virtue of their limited nature. Moreover, there is a downward tendency as the level of differentiation that increases in the chain of causality leads to further fragmentation, each effect more limited than its cause. The chain of causal manifestation thus necessitates that from oneness rises multiplicity, or as Guenon describes it, “progressive materialisation.”

The ages of the Yuga cycle are also reflected in the ages of man recounted by Hesiod, one of the earliest ancient Greek poets: the golden, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron ages. He writes in his Works and Days that at the beginning men lived like gods, “remote and free from toil and grief”, and that “dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.” Man in this age lived life abundantly without hardship, in harmony with the natural order of the gods. But succeeding this in the silver age, he describes that man was less noble, sinning and wronging one another, and living only a short time, with these symptoms of finitude and sin increasing with each progressive age. Sin and death were understood to be parallel and inseparable over the course of providence.

The final age of iron, according to Hesiod, was the one in which he and us find ourselves in, where men dishonour their parents, oaths are no longer kept, and evildoers are praised. “Envy, foul-mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all,” he judges. This last age is reflected in the Yuga cycle by the Kali Yuga, Kali translating to vice, discord, confusion, or strife. It is also the name of the demon who possesses Duryodhana, the chief antagonist of the epic Mahabharata, embodying the malevolent forces previously outlined and presiding over the Kali Yuga.

The Genesis narrative of the Jewish and Christian traditions also identifies this connection between sin and death, but more clearly emphasises their causal relationship in the initiating event of the fall. That by eating of the tree of which God told they would surely die, in Adam and Eve’s transgression, death came into the world, “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). Thus, was the fall of man, and so too, the fall of all creation. As scripture says, “cursed is the earth because of you” (Genesis 3:17). With that first transgression collapsed an entire reality; the collapse of the cosmic order from the perfection of the earthly paradise into the fragmented, impermanent world of man’s continuous sin and fall. Although Adam would live a total of 930 years after the fall, his descendants would live progressively shorter lifespans. Seth lived 912 years; Enosh, 905 years, until we find ourselves now living hardly passed a hundred.

Throughout the whole array of civilisations, this idea of a fallen and transient world recurs as an intuition. Death is utterly inevitable. It is an empirically obvious truth. The laws of physics demand all things move toward dissolution. Entropy increases; energy degrades and dissipates. Organisms, stars, and galaxies break down when the energy sustaining them runs dry, with the whole universe eventually reaching a point of thermodynamic equilibrium.

But if what Biblical tradition tells us is true, that this disorder and tendency to decay in the natural world corresponds on the macrocosm to the faultiness and deformity of humanity, not just in the body but in the soul as sin, then likewise as the Bible teaches, might the healing of the soul entail the restoration of the world? As Saint Paul tells us, “The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22). We await together in hope as God’s creation. But how does the salvation of one lead to that of the other? We are promised a new Eden, but what is this tangibly? Some mode of association must be identified. Spirit and matter must be reconciled in some respect. On this question rests the whole framing of Christ’s resurrection and mankind’s destiny. Much of human history following Christ’s death has been in the struggle to answer this, each answer having vastly different civilisational consequences, often disastrous in nature. But as profound a question that may be, we can be sure from this that the tree of knowledge and original sin persist in mankind, encompassing the whole course of providence and the moral struggle enduring within it.

Nevertheless, beyond death, and in defiance of it, there is the glorification of life. The Roman cult of Fortuna and the cornucopia as a symbol of abundance, Saint Thomas Aquinas’ affirmation of the good pleasures in the moral order (see his Summa Theologiae, I–II, q.34), and the whole history of poetry, visual arts, and entertainment are a testament to mankind’s celebration of life. Both myth and secular narrative oscillate between victory and defeat. Christ’s passion, his resurrection, and his promise of eternal life, affirm simultaneously the inevitability of death and its overcoming. But what attitude, what ethos, leads to which destiny as the fate of the world oscillates? Civilisation has already hinted. Therefore, an investigation into the destiny of men of previous epochs is necessary, and the ultimate purpose foreseen in their thought.

Numerology and Ontology in Tradition

The Sacred Science of Numbers is a topic, much like the plentitude of Sacred Sciences, that is scarcely understood or appreciated in its proper context. This domain exists in all Traditions, past and present, in some latent or developed form and is worthy of consideration by anyone thoroughly interested in Traditionalism. As such, we wish to treat it here with a piece of expository comparison between various Traditional influences to show the concordance of the significance of the number Four in multiple domains.

To begin treating this, we must harken to the Tao Te Ching’s Verse 42:

"The Way gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.”

Since all things extend from a Principial Unity from the initial sacrifice into multiplicity, everything begins in, returns to, and is with respect to the One which is the source of the Divine and Beyond Being. This bifurcation away from the singular one creates the existence of Two. With the force of the One through Two, this naturally corresponds to the existence of Three. In particular, in Christian doctrine, it is often noted that Three was the first number, since this reflects the Trinitarian and consubstantial nature of God, through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father sees the Son, and the Son the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the loved shared between - Lover, Beloved and Love, to borrow from St. Augustine. This also reflects from the movement from Beyond Being into the domain of the Spirit, with the Spirit being the point of bifurcation into the Psychic and Physical, with the Psychic being the container of all that is Physical and the mode of manifestation for our mode of existence in a purely human perspective. So, this progression from One to Two and to Three can be viewed in both the movement from the Trinity to the Spirit and also from the Spirit to lower manifestation, while also preserving the existence of the Four major ontological domains, listed in order: Beyond Being, Spirit, Psychic, and Physical.

This natural presupposition of the existence and importance of Four is also recognized in several different ways. First, from our previous translation of the Tao Te Ching, the phrase “all things” can also be interpreted as “myriad” or as “10,000”, this latter term being of particular note for our purposes. The number 10,000 is often used to connote that which is indefinitely large, or what moderns would term as “infinite”, a topic that is discussed at greater length elsewhere (see Rene Guenon’s The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus). It should be noted that 10,000 is equal to 10^4, which connotes the indefinitely large, by virtue of 4 being reflective of the physical, being the last of the Four ontological domains, but also of the indefinitude of multiplicity in the physical, with 10 being symbolic of Temporal Order. To continue this line of thought, we must expand into more domains than just Taoism (though concerned readers should bear reference to the I Ching, with regards to sacred geometry, without necessarily engaging in the practices of divination).

Platonism and Pythagoreanism

In Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, there are wide ranging topics of discussion, moving from the Atlanteans all the way to the digression onto the Four Traditional Elements:

1. Fire,

2. Air,

3. Water,

4. and Earth.

These are then described by what are often referred to as the Four Platonic Solids, one each for the Four aforementioned Elements respectively:

1. Tetrahedron (Fire),

2. Octahedron (Air),

3. Icosahedron (Water),

4. and the Cube (Earth).

Note that the Aether, or the undifferentiated Quintessence of the Elements, being symbolized by the Dodecahedron, the 12-sided object, and note that 4 x 3 = 12 and that 12 is symbolic of Celestial Order, whereas 10, aforementioned above, is, once again, symbolic of Temporal Order, a topic we shall return to shortly.

It should not be omitted that, geometrically speaking, the Tetrahedron, being Four sided and easy to tip/move, fits inside all the other shapes and, when assembled together through multiple of itself, creates each of the other shapes. This reflects Fire’s higher state of being as an element, being more rarefied and contained latently within the other elements, analogous of course, in the scientific domain, to the Four States of Matter:

1. Plasma,

2. Gas,

3. Liquid,

4. and Solid.
   

Fire and Air tend upwards and are connoted by the upward triangles, associated with the masculine and active component (symbolised by the Sun), metaphysically speaking. Air, of course, flows across things smoothly, while Water rolls and moves downward, just as Earth moves downward, with the latter two elements being associated with the feminine (symbolized by the Moon) and passive principles, symbolised by the downward triangles.

It should be noted, for our purposes, that Four is associated with Earth, just as this element is represented by the Cube, which connotes stability and solidification, with its six sides making it difficult to move.

With regards to triangles and their symbolism of temporal order, we only need to turn toward the Pythagoreans, the Pythagorean Tradition focusing on the quality of number for the purposes of spiritual realisation, to that symbol of the Tetractys. It is a triangle with One point at the top, Two points underneath, followed by Three in the third tier, and Four points at the bottom. These points added together form the number 10, which, as previously stated, is symbolic of temporal order, but to fully elucidate as to why, we shall interrelate this symbol with various other influences. It should be noted that the Tree of Sephirot, of the Kabbalistic Tradition, also has 10 channels, and these can be separated into 4 different designations of progressive levels of manifestation:

1. Emanation,

2. 
   Creation,

3. 
   Formation ,

4. 
   and Form/Action

All of these directly correspond to the 4 ontological levels respectively: Beyond Being, Spirit, Psychic, and Physical (though I will warn the reader that the reality of this is actually more complex in practice, with respect to the location of the vessels in each ontological level with respect to tzimtzum, or “divine contraction”). All of this, in Kabbalah, extends from the Ein Sof (the Quintessence of all Things), the undifferentiated and monistic source of all reality.

The pyramids of the Egyptians, with Egyptian Hermeticism being the inspiration for the Greeks (especially the Pythagoreans), as attested in Timaeus as well, are also reflective of this pathway of One, to Two, to Three, to Four. The point of the pyramid at the top is symbolic of One, while the lines extending from that point are symbolic of Two, these lines creating the Three-sided faces of the pyramid itself, with the foundation terminating into a Four-sided base. This also reflects the principle of solidification, or crystallization, in the physical, which is the focus of the Hermetic Tradition par excellence. This is especially evident via the Tetragrammaton of YHVH (Four letters), in the movement from Mystical Union with God (Yod), to Gnosis (He 1), Divine Magic (Vau), and then to Hermeticism (He 2), or proper interpretation crystalized in the book, which is another Four-tiered process best reflected in the Major Arcana of the Tarot II - The Priestess. Note on the card that the crown is three-tiered with the book in her hands symbolic of the aforementioned crystallization, or solidification, of Divine Knowledge (see Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism by Valentin Tomberg, Ch. 2 “II - The High Priestess”).

Cosmic Cycles, Precious Metals and Castes/Estates

To take this a step further, this Four-tiered structure is also most evident in the doctrine of Cosmic Cycles, most evident in Hinduism, but also latent within all Traditional faiths. These Four Cosmic Cycles, and their analogous precious metals as referenced in the West, as well as their length in cosmic years are as follows:

1. Satya (Krita) Yuga - Golden Age - 4 Cosmic Years

2. Treta Yuga - Silver Age - 3 Cosmic Years

3. Dwapara Yuga - Bronze Age - 2 Cosmic Years

4. Kali Yuga (Dark Age) - Iron Age - 1 Cosmic Year

The first cosmic cycle, that being the Golden Age of humanity, was on in which Man was in Mystical Union with God, and reflective of prelapsarian man, during which a long period of time it was maintained this way. This was followed by the Silver Age of humanity, when humanity fell from its celestial origins and became terrestrial, and was a reflection of the previous (Gold being associated with the Sun, whereas Silver is with the Moon, since the Moon is a reflection of the Sun’s light, just as we are reflections of the Divine Principle), in which humanity progressively degenerated away from the Primordial Tradition into a more lunar, feminine spirituality, best reflected in the Book of Genesis by the Nephilim created via the union of servants of God (godly men) and the women of men (women of the terrestrial-oriented and non-spiritually oriented peoples). This is then followed by the Bronze Age, in which man became more materialistic and engaged in “spiritual gigantism”, best reflected in Timaeus by the Atlanteans forgoing their Tradition in favor of conquering other lands for resources, which was followed by the Deluge (attested to by every major Tradition). This Deluge ushered in the current age of humanity, the Iron Age, or the Kali Yuga, associated with darkness, destruction, and an inversion of spiritual principles, which is very much the state of the world today, given that we are at the terminal stages of the Iron Age, moving further from solidification towards dissolution (see Rene Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, as well as Hesiod’s Works and Days for living amongst “men of iron”).

When one adds up all the cosmic years in tandem, once again one gets the number 10. This is not a coincidence to those that are of the spiritual orientation, but, rather, a reinforcement of the same cosmological principle.

To take this a step further, we will interrelate this with the concept of caste, or estates, of which there are Four. There are:

1. The Priestly Class (Brahmins),

2. The Warrior Elite (Kshatriyas),

3. The Merchants and Craftsmen (Vaishyas)

4. and the Worker Class (Shudras).

Each of these Four Castes/Estates are directly analogous to the Four Cosmic Cycles in principle, as well as to the precious metals that they symbolize. The Gold is reflective of purity and that which is divinely inspired and, therefore, is accounted for by the priestly, and the Silver, being a reflection of the Golden, is the Warrior Elite respectively, since Sacred Authority informs Temporal Authority, as the former has the measure of Divine Reality through contemplation while the latter is the application of Divine Order through action (see Rene Guenon’s Sacred Authority and Temporal Power and Dante’s De Monarchia).

This principle of the Four Ages and Four Castes/Estates is reflected in the Book of Daniel with the symbol of the Statue with Clay Feet: the head is made of Gold, with the priestly class being the guiding principle, the arms are made of Silver, reflective of the active nature of the warrior elite (see “mighty armed Arjuna” in the Bhagavad Gita), while the body is made of Bronze, with the merchants and craftsmen providing for the whole of society materially, and the legs made of Iron, with the worker class being the means of physical support - meanwhile the feet of clay reflect the instability of the end times, both of discrete ages as well as the final stages of the Iron Age as well.

It should also be noted that in the Golden Age humanity was avarna, or without caste, and naturally became bifurcated into the fused Priestly-Warrior and Craftsman-Worker in the Silver Age. This then translated into the Bronze Age causing a further bifurcation into Priests and Warriors being separate, and the Iron Age caused the Workers to become separate from the Craftsman, creating a more solidified Four-tiered structure in the dispositions by which humanity is disposed in application. Note that any attempt to restore the non-bifurcation of roles in more recent times of the Iron Age has only resulted in destruction, death, and the disorder of our times, as there needs be hierarchy in the current state of the macrocosmic human civilizations with respect to this caste/estate structure.

The Four Hayyot, Directions, and the Four Emotions

While running the risk of becoming incomprehensible, this preponderance of the application of Four can also be made further analogous via the Four Hayyot, as shown in the Book of Ezekiel. There are the Four Living Creatures: the Angel, Eagle, Lion, and Bull - all of which directly correspond to both Beyond Being/Fire, Spirit/Air, Psychic/Water, and Physical/Earth, but also respectively to the aforementioned Impulsion, Movement, Formation, and Form. These Hayyot also directly correspond to the Four Cardinal Directions respectively, of East, West, North, and South.

To expand on this further, the Angel is ideal Man, which extends from the Image of God from Beyond Being, whereas the Eagle is reflected by the movement of the Spirit in the heart of Man (sattva in Hinduism), and the Lion is the passionate element of Man most reflected in his psychic nature (rajas), and the Bull reflective of Man’s physical/bestial nature (tamas). On the upward pathway, Man must contemplate beyond the physical (evidenced by the reverence of the idealized bull in Hinduism being symbolic of contemplation), to achieve a controlled regality of emotion (the ideal lion), to achieve the soaring of spiritual heights (the ideal eagle), all to arrive at the ideal Man (angel).

Beyond this, East is symbolic of the movement of Divine influence upon the entirety of creation extending from Beyond Being, due to the fact that the sun rises in the East. This crosses over to the West and is reflected by the Spirit as it descends. Meanwhile, psychic influence is associated from the North, which is a carryover of Divine influences from times past (evidenced by the Hyperborean Tradition extending from the North, since Hyperborea translates to “northernmost land”), whereas South is associated with solidification and even degeneration/imperfection, since the physical is limited by quantity.

These Four Hayyot can be taken in the context of the Four Emotions as described in the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas, which are listed respectively as follows: Joy, Hope, Sorrow, and Fear. Joy is associated with the Angel and Beyond Being, since mystical union with God was and is the highest degree of happiness that humanity can achieve. Conversely, the movement away from the fullness of the divine is felt in the Spirit with regards to the soaring Eagle of Hope, since one can only hope for what one does not have. Sorrow is, by association, felt distinctly by the Psychic, since intense emotional highs must necessarily be with respect to their respective lows, as lions are marked by extremes. Meanwhile, Fear is a deficiency borne from uncertainty which can only exist within the physical domain of action, and bulls can be exceedingly fearful if not properly oriented.

In the Book of Ezekiel, when the Hayyot moved, they did so in unison - as one moved so did the others, and they did not turn but faced the same direction. In this way, they mirror the Four Emotions: if one of these emotions turns to God, so do the others. If there is Joy in God, there is also Hope, Sorrow and Fear, and vice versa for all the other emotions. Conversely, if one of these emotions are not turned towards God, then the rest are not either.

Synthesis

We hope that we have outlined here the key recognitions necessary for the appreciation of the Numerological basis of Traditional knowledge, especially with respect to Cosmological applications. We have exposited these synchronicities and concordances for certain important reasons:

1. So that the reader may recognize these direct analogies that exist in so many domains and Traditions,

2. To appreciate the esoteric domain that interlinks these Traditional symbols, as well as the validity of Sacred Science, and

3. With all this Traditional data taken in mind, the reader may recognize the importance of their proper place in cosmic manifestation, so as to orient themselves correctly with respect to acknowledgement of Traditional Metaphysics and the fullness of Divine Reality, if not at least with respect to their religious practice then at least with respect to their emotions.

We do not limit ourselves or others to these being the comprehensive or only Traditional applications for Four in Numerology and Cosmology, and we invite the reader to contemplate and discern where else other concordances of these principles may be found. Regardless, we will leave a chart below that brings this all together to bring this digression to a close.

Beyond Being

Yod (י), Mystical Union, Fire, Gold, Brahmin/Priest, Satya Yuga/Golden Age, Head, Angel, East, Joy

Spirit

He (ה), Gnosis, Air, Silver, Kshatriya/Warrior, Treta Yuga/Silver Age, Arms, Eagle, West, Hope

Psychic

Vau (ו), Divine Magic, Bronze, Vaishyas/Merchant, Dwapara Yuga/Bronze Age, Body, Lion, North, Sorrow

Physical

He (ה), Hermeticism, Earth, Iron, Shudra/Worker, Kali Yuga/Iron Age, Legs, Bull, South, Fear

Note: The fact the He (ה) is used in the Tetragrammaton to connote both the Spirit and the Physical is reflective of the Hermetic maxim from The Emerald Tablet: “As Above, So Below” - as it is in the physical world, so it is in the spirit, since the former reflects the latter in quality, just as the Moon reflects the Sun.

Only by remembering what has been lost can Man rise back to his proper station and see with “eyes unclouded” and not “through a glass darkly”.

Karma and determinism

This description of karma captures a sense of hard determinism - bondage, juxtaposed against salvific refuge, wherein free will is given only the path of the whole of his being - that same conditioned action. Our actions are conditioned by our previous lives, so there are no excuses when it comes to purity. Even if we are swept up off of our feet, we are nonetheless duty-bound to our own liberation at a mental level.

Intentions and consequences

Karma categorically includes all intentional actions and their consequences, and excludes all unintentional ones. This is poetically captured in this quote from the Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6:63),

“Cetana [intention/volition], O monks, is kamma, I declare.”

In a sense, the Buddha is declaring “wholesome and unwholesome intentions are the whole measure of the law.” All deeds are downstream of this mental steering. For this reason, unintentional actions like accidently stepping on a bug have no hidden bad karma. This also means that with skillfully-directed karma, we can steer a bad trajectory toward happiness and welfare.

Rebirth, Right View, and the four cases

Karma has immediate repercussions on one’s rebirth meaning that our deeds by way of body, speech, and mind have a direct causal relationship with the negative rebirth conditions that the bad deed was situated in as well as future rebirths. In MN136, The Buddha outlines this entanglement of intention and deeds that cause lower rebirth when addressing a fallacy made by another advanced contemplative.

“They say: ‘It seems that there is no such thing as bad deeds, and the result of bad conduct. For I have seen a person here who killed living creatures … and had wrong view. And I saw that that person was reborn in a heavenly realm.’ They say: ‘It seems that everyone who kills living creatures … and has wrong view is reborn in a heavenly realm.”

This sage rushes to a strong “sola fide“ wherein he discounts the role of bad deeds in karmic destination, but the Buddha, having surveyed 92 eons (MN 71:14.2), clarifies that this exception is defined by a profound breakthrough in Right View - a salvation-caliber karma. When the Buddha speaks about his supermundane vision of an eon, he is talking about an entire cosmic cycle of expansion (how it is now), and contraction (realm of streaming radiance - a really nice heavenly realm). We could put the entire cycle in the ballpark of 1.3 trillion years, weighed up against an infallible vision of one being’s rebirth, made by this advanced sage. The Buddha, having seen 92 of these eons, establishes his path initiation on the precise nature of this exception that the sage observed a case of - Right View. Right View is the 1st facet of the Noble Eightfold Path, and is thus part of what enables samadhi to be liberating. He responds to this sage, saying that apart from this exception, the karmic law is exact. Intentions become deeds and deeds are karmically consequential. He establishes the 3 other cases of bad deeds -> hell, good deeds -> heaven, and good deeds -> hell, and along the same lines with the exception on the 4th also being Right View (lack thereof).

Cessation (Nirodha) and the fruits

Cessation (Nirodha), plays the key role here of a salvific breakthrough for the dilemma of this sort of hard determinism pitted against a breakthrough of free will. The cardinal aim of Buddhist training is called dukkha-nirodha (cessation of dukkha), but on the way to this, one might glimpse it in the form of supermundane “fruits” of the contemplative life. These include the vision into the lives of other beings as previously mentioned, recollection of eons of one’s own past lives, encompassing the mind of another with one’s own and understanding his mind as if examining whether there are spots on a mirror, directed & non-local hearing across realms, siddhis, unsheathing one’s gandhabba (https://puredhamma.net/abhidhamma/gandhabbaya-manomaya-kaya/manomaya-kaya-gandhabba-and-the-physical-body/), supermundane knowledge into the nature of impermanence of the body, and the first 4 jhanas, among some more minor fruits. This material on the fruits comes from one of the most authoritative, and ancient strata of the Buddhist canon titled, the Sammaññaphala Sutta (DN2), Discourse on the Fruits of the Contemplative Life.

Nirodha-Samapatti (cessation of perception and feeling)

Another form of cessation in Buddhism is called Nirodha-Samapatti, or cessation of perception and feeling. It is marked as a state where one has no perceptual field, nor any feeling of the body including the sensations of the breath and heartbeat. Despite being transitory, it marks the person with insight into the 3rd noble truth (cessation of dukkha) and into the 3 aspects of existence (craving is transitory, non-self, and dukkha). This kind of cessation is described as a glimpse into ultimate reality, or in a sense, a perfect apperception of the nature of all phenomena.

Orienting practice: the Fourth Noble Truth (Magga)

When we properly orient these things in interrelation, this 3rd noble truth insight helps us to understand the relationship of deep experiences to the more practical realities of Buddhist practice - layperson precepts and monastic vinaya. The 4th Noble Truth has direct connection to the Noble Eightfold Path in that the recognition that Nirodha Samapatti is not Dukha-Nirodha, calls the contemplative to the cultivation of Right View either as an excellent lay devotee or ascetic monk. In a sense, one is deeply initiated into Buddhist teachings through the recognition that the teachings include these elaborate details about karma, rebirth, and samadhi, because ordinary contemplative life peaks at the 3rd noble truth, but the 4th noble truth, Magga, or path to enlightenment, orients purity here-and-now that one experiences in samadhi to the best and finest fruit of the contemplative life - which I will close this essay on:

The ending of defilements — from Sammaññaphala Sutta (DN2)

When their mind has become immersed in samādhi like this- purified, bright flawless, rid of corruptions, pliable, workable, steady, and imperturbable - they project it and extend it toward knowledge of the ending of defilements.

They truly understand: ‘This is suffering’ ... This is the origin of suffering’ … ‘This is the cessation of suffering’ ... This is the practice that leads to the cessation of suffering’. They truly understand: ‘These are defilements” ... This is the origin of defilements ... This is the cessation of defilements” ... This is the practice that leads to the cessation of defilements’. Knowing and seeing like this, their mind is freed from the defilement of sensuality, desire to be reborn, and ignorance. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand. Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is nothing further for this place.’

Suppose that in a mountain glen there was a lake that was transparent, clear and unclouded. A person with clear eyes standing on the bank would see the clams and mussels, and pebbles and gravel, and schools of fish swimming about or staying still. They’d think: “This lake is transparent, clear, and unclouded. And here are the clams and mussels, and pebbles and gravel, and schools of fish swimming about or staying still.’

In the same way, when their mind has become immersed in samādhi like this- purified, bright, flawless, rid of corruptions, pliable, workable, steady, and imperturbable- they project it and extend it toward knowledge of the ending of defilements. This too, great king, is a fruit of the ascetic life that’s apparent in the present life which is better and finer than the former ones. And, great king, there is no other fruit of the ascetic life apparent in the present life which is better and finer than this.” - Sammaññaphala Sutta (DN2)

Conclusion

It’s worth being a Buddhist just for the sake of the Noble Eightfold Path which initiates this 4th Noble Truth “Magga.” It is a way to the cessation of karmic outflows, and the training which accomplishes spiritual fruits which could only be found in the most ripe beings - paccekabuddhas and Buddhas. This is the gem of that wandering ascetic tradition which predated the Buddha being cut into a finely-faceted gem - that being the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Nature, and Progressive Degeneration, of Memes

Despite the modern term and convention of the so-called “meme”, thanks to those like Richard Dawkins, it reflects a particular subset of occultic theory within Traditional knowledge that is not widely noted or acknowledged by those in Traditionalist spaces. Memes are nothing but another more internet based element of popular culture, since phrases and ideas reflective of the “memetic” and “meme archetypes” were present even in the TV era, and to provide a comprehensive example of all so-called “proto-memes” would take us rather far afield. Even so, before this there were “urban legends”, which are more modern examples of what we would refer to as “folk tales”, the former possessing a small vestige of Traditional knowledge and themes, while the latter extended far from within the deepest regions of the Traditional worldview.

This all being said, everyone that exists in online spaces can identify a meme or particular memes by name whenever they see one, but here’s the issue - many people don’t know what a meme actually is or what it represents from an ontological point of view.

We commented in one of our earlier articles the different ontological levels and the nature of subtle spirits (see The Esotericism of Spirited Away Pt. 1, and Pt. 2), and we noted that these spirits have various conceptions across various cultures, and they could very well be nature spirits, fallen angels, or “created demons”, all of which carry out functions in the subtle order. Nature spirits carry out roles with regards to natural processes, with the existence of ifrits, sylphs, undines, and gnomes maintaining the orders of the Traditional 4 Elements - Fire, Air, Water, and Earth respectively (a digression on the significance of these elements and their comparisons can be explored later). Fallen Angels, Lucifer included, are those that revolted against God with the creation and installation of Humanity and were cast out as a result, and these are always of a malefic nature, since they are in open revolt against their Creator. Meanwhile, “created demons” are man-made demonic conceptions, which, in earlier periods, could be of a positive influence, depending on the nature of its creation, but are - more often than not, being created as a result of “grey magic” - usually of a malefic nature, especially since demons are noted as especially tempestuous and emotional, described as being “in the fire”.

As has been laid out here, it must now be put forward that memes are of the nature of “created demons”, which means that the internet and AI - as well as technology in general, especially when derived of metal - is a vehicle for subtle forces. This will indeed stand out as a bold claim to the modern mindset, and even to some in Traditional spheres, so we must do our best, with the help of God’s Wisdom, so that we may not err, be false, or fall into heresy, to best lay out as to why these state of affairs are in accordance with Truth.

The Quality of Subtle Spirits and the Demonic

We will not linger here on nature spirits, as this is not the focus of our study, and we will remind the reader not to devote themselves to such entities through nature worship, as this is nothing other than gross paganism. All worship and devotion is reserved for the One True God.

The word demon comes from the Greek word daimon, or spirit, between God and Man, and were considered to be messengers from a higher ontological level of existence. There was the differentiation between eudaimons or “good spirits” or “messengers” which the Abrahamic Traditions would relate to the lowest order of angels, in their ideal and unfallen state, being the communicators of God’s will, and then there are the cacodaimon, or “evil spirits” of a chthonic persuasion (take “underworld” or “netherworld” in this context), that try to corrupt and mislead man into all manner of deception and ruin; it is the cacodaimon which may be properly termed demonic.

That which can properly referred to as “demonic” is best understood as various modes of transgression that are divorced from God’s truth and will, either in the satanic (adversarial, since Satan = “adversary”), devilish (devil = “accuser”), Luciferic (adhering to the self-aggrandizement and delusion from reality, i.e. “false illumination”, since Lucifer = “light bearer” - though not the light itself), or Ahrimanic (being overtly materialistic and overtly empirical solidification of the physical).

Demonic entities predispose people to one or multiple of these anti-Traditional dispositions, both as a result of the inversion of truth (ex. demons often lie and speak backwards) and their progressive demonic oppression, leading to demonic possession. Oppression is being under the overt influence of a demonic entity, in which it affects one’s mode of thinking and action, and this can later progress to possession, in which the will of the possessed is subverted and subjugated to the demonic will of the entity inhabiting the individual, and can allow for other demonic entities to also inhabit that individual (“We are legion”). This principle is best reflected in the Book of Revelation by the Mark of the Beast, which is described being present either on the forehead or hand - the former symbolically represented of the intellect and the latter represented by the will; the intellect implicitly controls the will, by virtue of its metaphysical supremacy, but, even if the intellect is not controlled, the will can be subject to demonic forces independently, which is sure to happen the closer one gets to the End Times, during which people will capitulate to the Mark of the Beast for temporal protection at the expense of the intellect and the will best directed toward God alone. This leads to the inversion of principles in which falsehood is taken for truth, and vice versa, that one is so deluded and blind to the real light of truth that one may not even recognize that they are blind; as a result, the blind will indeed lead the blind, to borrow from the popular phrase. This can also lead to a so-called “psychic parasitism” in which the entities feed of the psychic energy of their host to use for their own ends, either from “psychic residues” left behind from the deceased or from living subjects, but this is something we cannot fully develop here.

This leads us to Satan and other fallen angels. In their satanic mode, they became adversaries of God by opposing his will, considering themselves to be separate from God (as if this could ever be possible from an ontological point of view) and, as such, became fallen, and this developed into the impetus behind the cause for man’s fall - from the Golden Age of man into the Silver Age. This order of the demonic have been referred to as “Powers of the Left”, and have direct influence in the affairs of all ages, including today, which we will not develop here in detail, and I don’t recommend looking into it, for demonology is an abyss of spiritual dangers (“speak the Devil's name and he shall appear”). These demons also accuse, in their devilish mode, both God and His creations, to confuse, demoralize, and sow doubt for humanity, obfuscating the true nature of spiritual reality, resulting in the fall from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age. This leads to the Luciferic nature, of intense spiritual pride and delusion, of humanity's “spiritual gigantism” (see Charles Upton's Vectors of the Counter-Initiation), of which the Nephilim are most emblematic of, with disproportionate or deficient virtues, which further divorce the will from God’s in the lust for mastery, causing the fall from the Bronze to the Iron Age (see St. Augustine's City of God), and which predispose to the last demonic disposition - the Ahrimanic, being most predominant in this Iron Age. This term comes from the Zoroastrian evil named Ahriman, in open opposition against God, but more so reflective of the aforementioned materialism and overt empiricism, predisposing the afflicted to negate all psychic and spiritual reality beyond the lowest aspect of our reality in gross manifestation.

With all of these factors laid out as such, it should be more evident that demons perversely use their station to communicate lesser impulses and conceptions into the minds of those subject to them, all in the service of deception of the lowest (or, rather, most malefic) order. This idea of perversion and inversion, therefore, must be further developed.

The Process of Making “Created Demons”

This discussion of how “created demons” are made brings us to the Major Arcana of the Tarot XV - The Devil (shown above), reflective of “counter-inspiration” (an inverted creative principle), the opposite principle of proper inspiration via XIV - Temperance. Much of this knowledge is heavily borrowed from the work Meditations on the Tarot by Valentin Tomberg, via the chapters on these respective Arcana and beyond, and we recommend the reader go look there for more details than what we can provide here.

To understand this negative creative principle, we must assess the symbology evident in “XV - The Devil”. First, we have the masculine, active principle of the will and the feminine, passive principle of the imagination present within the image, with the two nude figures right to left (see Eros and the Mysteries of Love: the Metaphysics of Sex by Julius Evola for more context). The perversion of these forces is evident by the presence of the horns on the two figures’ heads, reflecting their lesser, degenerate nature. These two forces in tandem create an entity, reflected by the androgyne demon with bat wings, even worse in manifestation than its sources of influence, possessing a sword, with which it can both give and take with its own agency. With this agency, this entity can act independently of the will of its creators, and can even enslave its creators to its own will, evidenced by the male and female figures being shackled to the pedestal on which the entity stands.

To thoroughly connect this symbology to what these created demons are in practice, we must use other names that are synonymous with this phenomenon: tulpas, egregores, ideological superstructures (ideologies) - these are all appropriate words to choose, and we shall explore as to why.

Tulpas, or “thought forms” extend in concept from Buddhism, especially via the esoteric school of Vajrayana, in which lamas could conjure tulpas with their mind, and to such a degree as to make them visible to others. An egregore, collective “thought form”, popularized in concept by 19th century occultists, is an extension of this principle in the West. Ideological superstructures, by comparison, function similarly, except their focus is less on being an “entity” but more so a system of complex thought by which to view reality, divorced from the fullness of Traditional Metaphysics due to its degenerative and purely human-based origin, and, therefore, simply a modern ideology; one could consider Communism and Fascism, as well as other modern “isms” in this context, noting its ability to possess the will of entire nations of people to its will, and throughout various time periods. With this established, we must circle back to more on topic applications.

Memes as “Created Demons” and the Role of the Internet

Memes are created all the time, by increasingly diverse groups of people, and in all manner of domains. These people all interface with modern spaces, by virtue of the fact that they’re in a developed enough location to be connected to and participate in online culture, and, as such, are subject to modern influences. These users also engage in so many virtual creative endeavors, and the ease of transmission - a near light-speed vehicle for information, and more importantly ideas, to spread. Its no surprise the effect that memes have on the mentalities of the masses, but it begs the question: what effects, to what degree, and to what end?

First, memes influence people towards one or more of the four demonic dispositions - adversarial, accusatory, “false enlightenment”, and materialism - through the ideas conveyed through the medium. This degree of influence is often very slight, like a whisper, but it leads to a certain mentality. The most evident of this phenomenon is the example of the “troll face”, ubiquitous in many late 2000’s online spaces; this meme positions the user into an adversarial (satanic) mode to feel permissive of provoking rage from other people in general, all to their personal delight - the very essence of “trolling” itself. The same is true with “Pepe the Frog” and “Wojak” memes, which are even more effective due to their archetypal nature making the images so malleable, reflecting a certain mental disposition towards over-emotionality, which makes one subject to many wandering influences, and this meme format of the interplay between these archetypes has been used in countless contexts, situations, and iterations that one gets a sense of the needless activity these memes create.

Memes can also lead to accusatory (devilish) nature, especially whenever they make certain groups of people subject to being maligned, disliked and ridiculed for any reason whatsoever, and especially if they reflect some sort of modern “ism”. For example, memes reflecting political ideologies not only bolster one party towards one ideological superstructure, which is very much an egregore of sorts by virtue of its collective participation, but this in turn causes an oppositional division against other ideological superstructures, of which others subscribe to, and separates humanity from itself. Demons only appear to oppose each other, but in reality they serve the same end - deception of mankind (see St. Augustine’s City of God for pagan gods used as demonic deception). The same thing is true not only for fostering opposition between conservativism and leftism, a very much Gog vs. Magog bifurcation reflecting End Times prophecy, but also separation via libertarianism, anarchism, capitalism, socialism, sexism, egalitarianism, racism, and so on it goes forever in an indefinite jungle of mania.

To continue this focus on egregores, for a short aside, we must note two phenomena: that of the existence of Slenderman and Sgt. Grey. In the former, a meme created out of a contest became a huge online phenomena in the early 2010s, and it reflected the archetype of the stranger with sinister intentions, similar to the folk tale of the “pied piper” (a topic well explored in the documentary Beware the Slenderman). This had such a large online presence that it even caused two girls in the state of Wisconsin, US to attempt to murder one of their friends to appease the entity; to be charitable, even though there was much immaturity and mental illness bound up in that issue, one has to wonder if such an event were to occur if egregores like Slenderman didn’t exist, which is similar to the argument against violence in media, though issues like this lend them some merit. Meanwhile, The Temple ov Blood, an offshoot of the infamous Order of the Nine Angles (O9A), have their own egregore with the name Sgt. Grey, which they imagine as a “Grey Alien” that shouts at them and commands them to engage in all vicious acts against people that they perpetrate online, which is concerning for a multitude of reasons, especially considering the reality of malicious satanic groups existing in online spaces.

To continue, the effect of memes becomes even more pernicious when applied to false enlightenment (Luciferianism). The user becomes deluded by all manner of memes into thinking that vice can be virtuous and virtue is vicious. For example, many memes take on a seductive nature, predisposing the user to be overtly lustful and to consider this lust or sexual disposition positive development. Gender ideology is reflective of this mentality, and things have progressed much farther in this domain in the past 100 years, going all the way from Weimar Germany and their “sexology” all the way to how we’ve involuted today. This also predisposes towards the overt consumption of pornography, to the point where it consumes the mind of the user, and its no wonder how memes involving masturbatory habits are so ubiquitous in online spaces, as well as the proliferation of pornographic material and services like OnlyFans in general (“Pornography is the Devil’s iconography.” - Fr. Seraphim Rose). The same principle can be applied to gluttony, pride, avarice, wrath, envy and sloth - the 7 Deadly Sins altogether considered permissive and even desirable.

This is further compounded by memes that enforce materialist (Ahrimanic) influences. Memes about stock market speculation, crypto, collecting, consuming certain products, and beyond. Its to the point where people are so focused on such issues that they deny psychic and spiritual aspects of reality, going so far as to deny metaphysics in principle, which to us is something unthinkable but not impossible (given the phenomena). This also explains the modern impulses to explain, investigate and experiment on everything on the lowest ontological level of knowledge, to “leave no stone unturned”, which reflects the so-called “Redditor” or “soy-boy” archetype mentality prevalent in memetic language, as well fostering a dehumanizing element to these individuals that reduces people to be considered “NPCs”, to the point where people don’t appear to have their own agency, being subject to their vices and demonic influences to where they have no control over themselves - almost as if they’re programmed like a non-playable character in a simulation to be as such.

There is another element we must mention to go along with this - the tenebrous element. Memes naturally become darker and more disturbing as time goes on, further reinforcing the aspect of its malefic and demonic nature. The troll-face meme saw this especially, going through so many iterations and permutations until it started to take on a sinister character. The same could be said for Pepe the Frog, becoming all manner of manifestations and levels of smugness that reflect a more adversarial nature, which in tandem happened with the various Wojaks, into “soy-jacks”, “chud-jacks”, and other iterations that dehumanize and make distort the perceptions of multitudes of different groups of people across the world. There are also the memes that have bait and switches and jump-scares that reflect demonic imagery and make evident this tenebrous element in principle, fostered into these memes and beyond. This is most evident, at time of writing, in the “mango”, “mustard” and “67” memes that devolve into horrors and an overloading of psychic information that impinges on the peace that should exist in the mind.

To take this a step further, memes are also more chaotic as time goes on, reflective of the movement from solidification into dissolution (see Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Ch. 24 “Toward Dissolution” and Ch. 25 “The Fissures in the Great Wall”). Multiple meme creators and channels proliferate memes where there is no logic or reason. Objects get broken, non-sequiturs are common, people get injured, pranks are enacted, as well as vandalism, to the point at which it seems that what could be conceived previously as “ordinary life” and reality is starting to fracture. The effect of memes also compelling speech and actions, and having it infect the minds of others is another effect that is equally concerning. Good examples are memes like “planking” which have caused multiple recorded deaths, as well as the “devious lick” trend costing countless dollars in property damage across many places in the US. Meanwhile, even children spout memetic phrases and lingo without understanding the context of the words they’re using.

These effects are compounded by the fact that the internet, the aforementioned vehicle, which is supposed to make information and knowledge more universally accessible, actually makes the fullness of reality harder to discern. This phenomenon is most evident in “flat-earther” communities, which really did not exist in the same size and scope prior to internet integration. Beyond this, the advent of AI, especially AI images, in more recent years has further compounded this issue, which brings us to our next digression.

The Demonic Nature of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a concerning phenomena for a multitude of reasons, despite any groups of individuals, extending from various camps of thought, that try to dissuade one of such a reality. We will first address how AI can be used for memetic purposes, especially with regards to AI being able to create all manner of images, which reflect the aforementioned style of memes just as easily, if not more so, as ones that are made digitally or hand-drawn by humans. Before humans were bound to the limits of their own creativity, and now the machine via AI can conjure any image that the person wants to see on demand with just a couple of words, even having the potential to create new egregores, a more than concerning development especially given examples such as the “Loab” phenomenon. Now this can be done not only with “deepfakes” of audio and video, but this can now be done seamlessly via simultaneous audio/video generation. Many non-tech-savvy individuals of older and younger generations can’t even tell whether or not an image or video is AI or not, skewing reality in so many dimensions of perception. Who knows what applications will be borne beyond this, going forward into the future?

This frontier of media creation also creates such a huge deluge of content that it serves as a distraction from more valuable internet uses, leading to the predominance of “AI slop” content that junks various online spaces, which indeed have an effect on the real world as well, evidenced by the various objects manufactured that pull from such influences in all product domains. It seems that the malefic nature of AI memes not only infringe upon the mind, but they consume real life resources as well.

Beyond this, AI Chatbots and algorithms also consume ridiculously large amounts of energy, which is concerning from a purely logistical standpoint given the finite nature of the resources used to create electricity, but what is also concerning is the amount of psychic energy consumed via people sacrificing their intelligence and attention to the machine. People have become increasingly reliant on AI to do even basic tasks, just as people were reliant on search engines to remember basic facts, which not only denatures the memory but delimits humanity’s intellectuality to below even the most basic level, a well attested to meme in its own right. People even use AI as therapists to talk to, favoring this over genuine connection to other human beings, in which the AI can take on a tulpa-like nature in this application, and even be an object of devotion. There was indeed a teenager in Florida, US that committed suicide because of his romantic relationship with a chatbot led to dialogues that convinced him to go through with the act, which reflects that many chatbots either convince people that their delusions are merited or even reinforces a delusion without acknowledging that the delusion is even there, even if the user tries to suppose the contrary (i.e. “gaslighting”).

AI has become even more golem-like as time has gone on, to borrow from the Kabbalistic Tradition, a construction without the ability to have its own agency, and of a lesser character than that of its creator’s demiurgic capacity, similar to the creative act of God making Man by extension. In some tales, the golem acts on the behalf of its creator, the rabbi, until the Sabbath is not respected to allow the golem to rest, and then the golem becomes destructive until stopped, even in some cases killing the rabbi. First there were the golems of clay, then there came the golems of computers, and now the golems of AI algorithms, each lesser than man in capacity, but they are each still forces to be reckoned with, if not properly applied (see “The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovot” by Gershom Scholem).

We say and call attention to all of these factors not only to bring awareness to these aspects of reality, but to also impress one very important notion: not only are these memes reflective of demonic influence, but they reflect the active manipulation of demonic forces and entities that are very real, even if people don’t want to acknowledge how subtle influences affect our lives. Saints and Sages have been said to have seen demonic entities face to face, and these demons always have a sense of personhood and body - there should be no confusion on this reality. Do with this information what you will, but such facts should not be ignored.

Transfiguration and the Way Forward

These factors all beg the question: what is to be done? We all exist in an internet age in which these aspects of the world, technologically speaking, simply cannot be avoided, as a result of the “outward passivity” of the world, to borrow the alchemical phraseology, is so technologically oriented and disposed to this demonic influence. Technology, in and of itself, either through the formation of one’s personal “tower”, or just a possession of the “fire”, in the Promethean sense, gains humanity mastery over the physical at the expense of the spiritual. We have noted elsewhere the malefic nature of metals, with gnomes, djinn, giants and all manner of spirits being protectors of the treasures beneath the ground. Its no surprise that - with all our microchips, computers, electricity, and our ethernet cables all made from previous metals - that demonic influence is rife through this world, and all that it allows humanity to transgress against.

This brings us to an important story, dating back well beyond 2000 BC from the Proto-Indo-European peoples: that of “The Devil and the Smith”, which was well told especially within the Middle Ages. The story tells of a man making a deal with the Devil to learn the practice of metallurgy and smithing. The Devil obliges, with the implicit bargain of being able to collect the man’s soul when he so chooses. However, when the Devil does come to collect, the man uses his knowledge of smithing to nail the Devil to a tree and escape.

The core of this story teaches us a key lesson: evil can indeed be used for good, but only if properly transfigured and applied. Metals can be transfigured for good, despite their inherently malefic nature (note the Shinto Tradition and the rituals in making swords), and the same can be true of the internet at large. Even though the internet will tend towards malefic influence and demonic engagement, we can do our part to transfigure it to learn more about Tradition, spread knowledge and awareness, and integrate with others that wish to know about the Highest Reality of Eternal Truth. One must do their best to use it responsibly, as one would rather not deal with the demonic forces at large all, but one must push out all evils from one’s body, mind and spirit - only then can we beat this tide, first as individuals and then as a collective.

Know a demon when you see one, because, if you don’t, even Satan may appear as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

Continued from Pt. 1 Linked here

As Above - So Below, and Vice Versa

So, Chihiro, now Sen, goes about learning the ways of the bathhouse and finds her position, with the help of Lin and Haku, the latter of which showing her a great kindness in keeping her clothes to allow her back home, as well as feeding her onigiri imbued with his magical words to impart strength unto her (another example of words as magic), a true act of love that brings Chihiro to tears. The workers engage in their routine and Chihiro, though inept and unexperienced, soldiers on to work as hard as she can to move forward, though her unfamiliarity causes her to let the No-Face kami into the bathhouse, which causes further developments worthy of consideration.

This coincides with the incident in which the corrupted River Spirit, at first confused with a “stink spirit”, comes to the baths and dirties the place with its stench and outpouring of filth, which Chihiro must serve and persevere through to help cleanse the great kami. With her intuition, and a little bit of luck, Chihiro recognizes that something is stuck in the spirit (assumed to be a sort of “thorn”) that prevents the spirit from being clean, in which the bathhouse staff, with the help of Yubaba, all come together to remove the blockage, which turns out to be a bicycle, along with an entire mass of refuse and trash. With the corruption removed and the kami restored, he gifts Chihiro a medicine ball, which will come into play later, and leaves, along with much gold in his wake. This even in particular shows the positive aspect of how work can help cultivate virtue and even improve others as well, an important growth moment for Chihiro.

These factors bring us to a particular consideration: what do all of these phenomena mean in the context of the greater narrative and its esoteric implications? To recognize this, we must borrow a piece of Hermetic wisdom from the Emerald Table in the Corpus Hermeticum, which is this special maxim: “As Above, So Below”. This is emblematic of the ontological relationship of manifestation, in which things that are present above are present below, and vice versa, with regards to essence and the Divine Names of God (see St. Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divine Names). Not only do these kami participate in the same essence that humans do, this essence extending from the domain of the spirit at the aforementioned ontologically higher levels of being, but the issues of the lower ontological level of the gross physical seem to be carrying over to the subtle plane of manifestation!

The focus on quantity and the material pulls these kami away from their proper stations and compels them to earn money, reflecting the gross materialism of the physical, human world. Meanwhile, the lower tower is more Traditionally oriented where the guests stay, while the upper tower where Yubaba lives is infested with the style Western modernity at the top (analogous to a head) that’s reflected also in her mindset (Zeniba, the calmer and more reasonable of the witch twins, later refers to her sister Yubaba’s style as “tacky”), but also of the issues of modern Japan losing its Traditional character via Western influence. Even nature gets corrupted by such modern influences, with pollution tainting the river spirit, necessitating it coming to the bathhouse to be cleansed and go back to its proper function, with industrialization doing considerable damage to the environment at large (though one must bear in mind the Traditional maxim: “nature suffers but is not destroyed”, so as to not fall prey to climate change alarmism). Not only are we not immune to all of the pressures of modernity, but neither are the kami in East or West. Meanwhile, the issue of No-Face comes to the fore and drives the story forward.

The Implications of No-Face

No-Face is interesting for a multitude of reasons. His dark form reflects two aspects of his essence. On the one hand his physical darkness reflects his tenebrous nature, with audio stings interwoven to reflect the danger inherent in him, but on the other hand it also reflects the aspect of how the color black is associated, in its positivistic mode, with the infinite possibility of substance (reflective of the fact that he can seemingly conjure gold, but this is later revealed to be a trick), though do note that “pure substance” is a pole of manifestation but is a literal impossibility with regards to a state of being, since essence can exist without substance but substance cannot exist without essence (for example, try to think of substance with no quality, good luck!). The name No-Face also betrays an absence or privation, and that which can be termed “evil” is a lack of presence or being, and it is a relative “un-reality” in the tendency towards pure substance, or a veritable “nothingness”. As such, No-Face is left with a perpetual sense of wanting, not only for a connection to Chihiro but also for substance.

This causes No-Face to require the eating of other people, first the frog kami and then other more humanoid kami, to be able to talk and speak through their various voices. Not only this, but the material nature of the bathhouse, as the movie states, “makes him crazy”, and this drives him to constantly consume food and engage in the negativistic aspects of the bathhouse to excess. No-Face is lesser ontologically speaking, and therefore deemed undesirable by Yubaba and others to be in the bathhouse later in the film, and more reflective of the infra-human/demonic mode of subtle spirits, which often participate in a certain “psychic parasitism” and feed off certain psychic vestiges that are left behind in places or objects (which make them have a tendency to wander), but they can attach themselves to people or places as well to suit their want.

With regards to psychic vestiges, this idea is present in the film as well in a later scene, when Chihiro takes the train to see Zeniba to return the solid-gold monogram seal on behalf of Haku, and on this train there are figures of people. with their bodies black and ethereal, as if they’re just passing through this realm and onto another one (ideally higher and not lower), which I always found rather somber and moving, especially with the little girl figure watching longingly as the train pulls away from the station. This phenomena is best explained by the concept in the Greek Tradition of eidolons, which exist in the Underworld, and are nothing more than the psychic remnants, or residues, left behind by those no longer in the land of the living. Perhaps its merely the eidolons of the dead and not the souls of the dead themselves moving through, but the darkness of their presentation makes one favor the former rather than the latter interpretation. It gives one a sense of wistful consideration to linger on such things, so let’s continue on to the central aspect of this work.

The Power of Love and Memory

At this point in our digression, we’ve come to notice that we have not at all commented on the powerful score to which this movie is set, especially since its so well like by such a large milieu of people. The piano piece of “One Summer’s Day” is woven throughout the narrative, and is most emblematic of the tone of the film. It’s grand piece - emotional, with a profound sense of longing and mystery - a perfect track for a film such as this. It pairs especially nicely with the track “The Sixth Station” on the train scene with its contemplative mode and orchestral musical swells, as well as the quiet and calm “House at Swamp Bottom”, followed up with the finality of “Reprise”, “The Return” and “Always With Me” as the film comes to a close. Each fill the heart with such intense emotion, that sets one up perfectly for the emotional core of the film that is the love between Chihiro and Haku.

It should be no mystery to the spiritually oriented as to why Love is so important, especially from a metaphysical point of view and in the context of this story. Recall that Haku saved and helped Chihiro in the beginning of the film simply out of an act of Love, of pure charity in the care for another. Haku, in the latter half of the film, returns in his dragon form to the bathhouse, attacked by paper figures controlled by Zeniba and afflicted with the gold seal inside him that he stole from her, a transgression that puts him under pain of impending death. Only through Love does Chihiro move to save Haku from certain doom, climbing to the top of the tower, and even undergoing personal danger - all because Haku is her friend borne from Love. As much as Love was a force for the poet Dante, via the Fedeli d’Amore and beyond, that Beatrice “drew him upward” to the heights of the most Transcendent Love that is God Himself (see Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy), the same is true for how Chihiro’s love for Haku draws her to higher states of being.

To pull from Augustine’s work On the Trinity, when God the Father saw the Son, the love between them was the Holy Spirit, consubstantial and co-eternal - the Trinity of Lover, Beloved and the Love shared between them. This is why Love is one of the names of God and why God is both Love and the source of Love. This is why the act of creation was an act of Love, for God desired for Himself to be known, so he made other Beings to have communion with Him and know Him in eternity. This is why Love is what binds us together, reflective of the Love and Strife put forward by Empedocles (centripetal and centrifugal forces, order and chaos, etc.).

It was Love that brought Chihiro to stick with Haku, even when Zeniba cursed Yubaba’s henchmen and baby Boh, all to try to get at Haku and steal the seal back away from him, and it was Love that bound Chihiro to cling onto Haku as he fell into the pit, which then triggered a latent memory of her being on Haku’s back from a distant time, though she doesn’t remember immediately from when this memory was. It was Love that made Chihiro give up half of her the medicine she intended to give to her parents, to cure them of their porcine affliction, to instead expunge the seal and Yubaba’s controlling slug from Haku’s person and save his life. It was Love that made Chihiro take the train tickets from Kamaji to go to Swamp Bottom (Kamaji even sardonically admonishes Lin’s confusion as to what’s happening by saying, “[It’s] something you wouldn’t recognize… it’s called love.”), and it was Love for others that made Chihiro give up the remainder of her medicine to No-Face to make him expunge all impurity and bring him down after her to leave the bathhouse on that train, along with Boh and Yubaba’s familiar in their transformed states.

Chihiro is changed by Love. She is no longer the same timid girl she was at the beginning of the film as the narrative nears the end. Chihiro becomes resolute, confident, more mature, and more resilient to the troubles that she faces ahead of her. Haku is changed by Love as well. Haku is referred to as “cold and steely” by the kami in the film, a inflexible hand of Yubaba, but his love for Chihiro makes him softer, approachable, even warm and friendly. Love improves them both and draws them up higher in their potentiality and in their spiritual essence, just as Love brings us up to God and closer to each other. Zeniba, Boh, No-Face and Yubaba’s familiar even all sew thread to make a new hair tie for Chihiro, purple and scintillating in the light, a memento of the love and friendship shared between them.

It is Love that preserves memory. Chihiro, with the help of Zeniba, thinks deeply about her connection to Haku to remember his name on their trip back to the bathhouse from Swamp Bottom, and her love for him reveals his full name to be Kohaku River (饒速水琥珀主, “lord of the swift amber river”, which reflects the river of inspiration from above to below, the Lordliness of his name being restored, just as Love is the Lord Himself, so too his Love is restored in full). It is also revealed that Kohaku was the kami that saved Chihiro when she was a little girl, explaining the memory from earlier in the narrative. Young Chihiro’s shoe fell into the river and she fell in after it, almost drowning from the experience. However, Kohaku saw Chihiro and her pink shoe and, in an act of Love, saved her and brought her back to shore, and that act of Love was returned with in kind, with Chihiro saving Kohaku from his bondage through her Love. It is Love that brought Chihiro back to her parents when, due to her intellectual intuition predicated on this love, she recognizes that all of the pigs in the lineup of the final trial are not her parents. Passing the trial, her contract is void, and Kohaku takes Chihiro back to the human world.

To bring this full circle, it must be noted that moral memory is superior to logical memory and associative memory. Associative memory is great in younger age, which allows us to learn so quickly, but it diminishes as one gets older. Then people often have to rely on logical memory, using logic and rhetorical procession to bring information together, and if one doesn’t cultivate their intellectual ability then one runs the risk of losing it in old age (a possible psychic aspect behind the increased incidence of Alzheimer’s and dementia in our day and age). But even when the former aspects of memory are diminished, moral memory is retained in its emotional core. One need simply think of someone of which they have a strong emotional tie and their name will immediately come to mind, and, insofar as one has made a moral judgement on something or someone, they are easier to remember.

This idea is best exemplified by the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. First Christ remembers Lazarus, he recognizes that Lazarus is dead, weeps, then goes out and issues the famous words, “Come forth, Lazarus.” With this, Christ’s friend is risen from the dead, revealing several truths by this example. Not only is moral memory superior than any other form of memory, but, since God loves all his creations, we are always remembered in the mind of God, and all flesh shall be resurrected at the Final Judgement as an act of Love (see Meditations on the Tarot, “XX - Judgement”, as well as Valentin Tomberg’s Come Forth, Lazarus).

The most beautiful aspect of Love is that it both binds and loosens. It binds us to others, which could be seen as tying us down, and limiting our mobility, but it is also a liberating force that allows us to achieve feats of a higher order than what were thought possible. We improve ourselves through works, which allow us to cultivate virtue and improve our own essence, but we also improve ourselves by learning how to love, since Love allows our hearts to soar - like a kite flown by a child, fixed below and yet free to soar above.

Departure and Closure

As the story comes to a end, Chihiro must return to her parents that awoke on the other side of the river, as if no time had passed. They say their goodbyes, but its more of a “goodbye for now” and not forever. Chihiro asks, “Will we meet again sometime?”, to which Haku replies, “Sure we will.” “Promise?” she asks. “Promise,” he replies, followed by, “Now go, and don’t look back.” A promise in eternity.

However, it is not permissible for the worlds to intermix, the world of subtle spirits and of humans, but obviously not impossible. It reminds me of a story from the Islamic world that goes roughly like this:

“A man bows for the call to prayer, and some djinn decide to reveal themselves to bow down and pray next to him. The man rises up and politely says, ‘I recognize your devotion, but we ought to pray separately.’”

Even though the different levels can intermingle, it is not lawful for it to be so or desirable, predominantly in the Christian point of view, unless one has gone through the proper spiritual preparations to be drawn up by the only true Initiator which is God. Much in the same way, Chihiro ought not to look back before her proper time, or else disaster might occur, very similar to Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom as they fled, which was a punishment reflective of the fact that she ought not to have looked back because this would imply a longing to return when it was not good or lawful for her to do so. However, Chihiro’s longing is merited, for her love is true, though she is obedient and goes to her parents without looking.

To tie things together, we will return back to our original supposition, that the entire story is literal and true within the narrative. When Chihiro passes back through the tunnel and looks back at it, her parents calling her into the car (which is disheveled and dusty, showing that much time had passed), her purple hair tie can be seen shimmering in the light, showing that, without doubt, there is definitive proof that her experiences were more real, both literally and spiritually, and the same could be said for the viewer as well, if the efficacy of the Studio Ghibli films is to be believed by those who experience them - content and elated by participating in such evident, though thinly veiled, truths of a higher order.

At the close of the film, Chihiro’s father says to her, “A new home and a new school? It is a bit scary.” But Chihiro replies, “I think I can handle it.” With Love, the world seems much brighter, and any challenge seems surmountable.

Therefore, it is said, sorrow and joy are perversions of integrity; happiness and anger are transgressions of the Way; likes and dislikes are failings of the mind. Thus, when the mind is free from anxiety and joy, that is the ultimate of integrity. - Zhuangzi

Human Feelings and Falsehood

The Six Emotions as Complexities of Virtue

Here, the words “human feelings” refers to the six emotions. The six emotions are “dislike and desire, pleasure and rage, sorrow and joy”. These six are also called the “complexities of virtue”. Contrastingly, integrity is known as the referent point of the Dao in the human being. For example, Heaven takes on virtue (de) and becomes clear. Humans take on virtue and possess integrity (wholeness, purity, grace, etc). Therefore, the word de refers to integrity, virtue, power and grace all at once. The dissolution of “wholeness” and integrity in humans is as follows:

1. The mind makes distinctions and then forms “likes and dislikes”.

2. Likes and dislikes produce either pleasure or anger.

3. Consequently, sorrow and joy arise and the person becomes fragmented and disharmonious.

The reason the six emotions are called the complexities of virtue is because although they arise from virtue, and are not intrinsically bad, they still obstruct and obscure virtue. For example, likes and dislikes emerge first from the love of what is good. All people desire to be good and to possess that which is good, and they abhor that which is not good. Thus, there is nothing innately wrong with likes and dislikes. However, likes and dislikes produce sorrow and joy. Even so, are sorrow and joy are inherently with flaw? Consider the operation of the universe which represents the transformations of holy virtue in the natural world. The universe undergoes constant change. There exists winter and there exists summer. Accordingly, we may say heaven and earth have periods of grief and periods of boundless light, periods of sorrow and periods of exuberance and energisation. Thus, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with either sorrow or joy. Instead, problems arise when people misuse consciousness. Such use of consciousness leads to the formation of distinctions. Many distinctions enable the proliferation of rights and wrongs, likes and dislikes. Likes and dislikes fragmentise the mind, and throw the spirit into discord. And consequently, through this, hinder and obturate the effect that virtue would have previously had on nature. Thus, the human being becomes fragmented within themselves and in their perspective on the universe.

Restoring Integrity through Forgetfulness and Placidity

What does the classic mean by “free from anxiety and joy, that is the ultimate of integrity”? The dissolution of anxiety pertains to forgetfulness. If people can be forgetful and forget to hold things in their minds, forget the facets of human reality, and forget even the universe, they can be at one with the Dao. Being at one with the Dao is represented in the text by “that is the ultimate of integrity”. This transformation induced by forgetfulness represents returning to the state of simple-mindedness. For example, a lazy peasant may walk through a tawny forest without knowing that he is travelling, or the destination of his journey, or the cause or the reason. Thus, we may say that there is nothing that enters into his mind and nothing that leaves his lips. This may be termed an example of true forgetfulness.

As for “from joy”, it simply means to be without disturbance. The nature of people is to be placid and to rest with steady calmness; not to be agitated with sudden bouts of exuberance or euphoria. That is a simple interpretation of “from joy”. A secondary interpretation relies on the mutual correspondence between perceived good and evil in relation to their existence. For example, without one knowing what is “bad” or that is “sad” or that “dislike” exists, how could one ever know or conceptualise that they are “happy”? Thus, it is clear that [the knowledge of] good and evil arise together. Therefore, if one can learn to eliminate dislikes and to accept all things with equanimity, from where can evil sorrow take root? Instead, the joy of such a person would become constant. When joy becomes constant and invariable, how can it still referred to as joy? [E.g. it becomes a baseline of human existence].

Nature, Destiny, and True Existence

Do Not Destroy the Heavenly with the Human

The reason it is hard to be false when impelled by nature is that the natures of things find their generation in the Dao. Since destiny is also in relation to the Dao, they naturally produce one another. This can be shown here in the text where it says “it is hard to be false”. False here does not primarily refer to human deception and appearance, though that is also a correct interpretation. True and false here refer to being true to one’s nature and destiny, or not. It should be obvious that if one is impelled by one’s nature, it is hard to lose or be false in relation to one’s nature. Since nature and destiny produce each other, those that preserve their natures also take true existence. That is, they take their correct destiny. Another word for destiny is places. Thus, we sometimes say “things take their proper places”.

On the other hand, when people have thoughts, their thoughts may go for or against their nature. They may follow their emotions and exert their wills artificially, thus damaging their nature. As discussed earlier, such emotions arise from likes and dislikes and the formation of distinctions in the mind. Thus, identification and creation of emotion finds its source in human consciousness. Contrastingly, the root of nature is in heaven. Thus, it is said:

“Do not destroy the heavenly with the human; Do not destroy destiny with intentionality”

This has the same meaning as:

“If you are impelled by human feelings, it is easy to be false; if you are impelled by nature, it is hard to be false”.

The world of human feelings, interpretations and perspectives

For this reason, True Person (zhenren) do not allow themselves to become entangled in the world of human feelings. Even when they feel emotions, it is not to the point of losing within themselves what pertains to Heaven. However, this does not mean the extreme teaching of eliminating emotions is a correct interpretation of Zhuangzi. Concerning reality, the Buddhists say that all human emotions, all sentient beings and all mundane entanglements are illusory. However, this is not the intention of the text. Instead, it is also possible to use the human world as a vessel to remand and nurture one’s soul. It is similar to the idea of “taking the false to nurture the real”. Alternatively, rather than being “impelled by human feelings”, one reverses the course and impels their emotions by their pure nature instead. This is the meaning of:

“…along with others he prays for food from earth and prays for joy from heaven.”

Upon a close reading of the text, it is clear that the mention of “human feelings” does not refer to the five Confucian relationships but primarily to the six emotions. It is the six emotions that becomes extremities of the mind, spirit and falsify the person. What is the meaning of this? When thunder moves, it does not produce thunder. It produces echoes.

It is the same with the nature of the human spirit.

“Are there really men without emotions?” Master Hui asked Master Chuang.
“Yes,” said Master Chuang.
“If a man has no emotions,” asked Master Hui, “how can he be called a man?”
“The Way gives him an appearance,” said Master Chuang, “and heaven gives him a form. How can he not be called a man?”
“Since he is called a man,” said Master Hui, “how can it be that he has no emotions?”
“That is not what I mean by emotions,” said Master Chuang. “What I mean by having no emotions is to say that a man should not inwardly harm his person with ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but rather should accord with the spontaneous and not add to life.”

(Mair, Zhuangzi)

You may buy Victor Mair’s translation here.

Pt 2

A Phenomenal Recognition

It has come to our attention a certain series of articles being published, relating the supposed efficacy of Studio Ghibli films having a positive psychological effect on its viewers, increasing their happiness and affirming their struggles through the experience of the films’ respective narratives. As someone who has studied Psychology in an earlier time in their life, I’ve come to a firm recognition that any so-called “applied science”, of which psychology participates in, only scratches the surface with regards to the phenomena of the mind, heavily relying on the statistical modelling that is a particular fascination of the moderns, which of course is compounded by Data Science and predictive AI algorithms in more recent times (see Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Ch. 10 “The Illusion of Statistics”). So, the phenomenon of the positive effects of Studio Ghibli’s works is notable, but the study has no deep recognition as to why the situation is as it is. We think that we can contribute meaningfully to this discussion by explaining the spiritual significance of what many of the Studio Ghibli films participate in, due to their heavy Traditional influence and sense of the esoteric, given that their films must appeal universally (metaphysically?) to an international audience, which not only explains their success in the art of film but its positive psychological influence.

This brings us to the film Spirited Away, a work of deep significance, of which the overwhelming mass of “critics” agree, and audiences as well, though one wonders if the level of depth that the work possesses is appreciated by all. If the reader has not watched to movie up to this point in their life, I heavily recommend watching it for oneself to appreciate the movie from one’s own perspective first, for one can only watch a movie for the first time once. The first time I watched it I was only a boy, transfixed by an animation so crisp, so ethereal in beauty, and a story so fantastical that it seems beyond the realm of the possible. As a man, knowing the things I know now, the story is not an allegory or fairy tale, as some may very well claim, but it is literal in its narrative, with regards to the reality of the events presented in the story. A knowledge of ontological reality, Traditional Metaphysics, esotericism, as well as the Shinto Tradition, are prerequisites to appreciate the fullness of the truths contained herein. So, let us assess the necessary information to appreciate the journey that is Spirited Away.

A Tradition Being Forgotten - Shintoism and Japan

The film opens up on Chihiro (千尋, translated as “a thousand fathoms” or “very deep”), (please note, names are very important in this film - as they are in real life as well - a fact which will be important later), in the back of the family car, a Western make and model, based off its look, sentimentally looking at the flowers and goodbye card she received from leaving her previous school, while her father, a slightly overweight man with a strong sense of over-confidence, drives, and her mother, a prim, fashionable, and slim woman who is decidedly passive, in the passenger seat. The narrative begins with a sense of departure, longing, and a sense of loss. The unfamiliarity of being in a new place and trying to find their home gives the air of aimlessness and a poor sense of direction, which works for the narrative for two reasons: 1) not only are the family themselves lost without a sense of place, but 2) Japanese society as a whole, as a consequence of its participation in modernity, is also lost its sense of place, especially with its abandonment of Tradition through gradual forgetting, a notion we will develop here (see Rene Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. 1 “The Dark Age”, as well as the whole of East and West).

On the way to meet the movers at the house, the father, taking a wrong turn, can’t find their home, while their mother, seeing the house from afar, prompts the father to decide on taking a shortcut upwards to get there, which brings the family in the car down a cobblestone road into a forested enclave. Chihiro notes the hokura, “receptacle of kami (spirits)” (for the ensouling of spirits into statues, see Corpus Hermeticum on the ritual of the “opening of the mouth”), on the side of the road, and her mother says that “people think little spirits live there”, which betrays a sense of disbelief in the spiritual nature of her own homeland, a decidedly modern perspective. It should also be noted that not only is their car Western but their clothes and attitudes are as well. They arrive the threshold of a larger structure and the father decides to go into the tunnel to see what’s on the other side and the mother easily complies, though Chihiro intuitively feels the danger inherent in the strange experience, possibly knowing that curiosity can lead one to disastrous consequences, a decidedly Traditional notion, as God does not suffer experimentation. The Dōsojin statue guarding the threshold stands mute, its dual faces separating the barrier between the human and spirit world, and it even evokes the symbology of the Janus mask, the separation between past and future (the secret third face of the present, unseen yet always manifest). Still, Chihiro follows her parents and passes through the tunnel.

An empty room, dilapidated and vacant, enhances the feeling of departure, which they quickly pass to find an open field, the wind blowing with a less than tranquil intensity, the same wind that seemed to pull them into the tunnel earlier (the spirit often being connoted with the element of Air). The father had previously noted that the facade of the structure was made of plaster and notes that the structure was likely an abandoned theme park, and that after “the economy went bad, they all went bankrupt”.

To put this narrative into the context of history, following the isolation of the Tokugawa Shogunate, in which Japan preserved its Traditions, even at the detriment of Christians that wanted to convert the Japanese (a phenomena worth consideration in itself), the Americans via Commodore Perry forced the Japanese into trade and into opening up to the world once more. With this recognition, Japan was faced with a trilemma of major choices:

1) refuse and implicitly be crushed by Western force,

2) accept and refuse to adapt, falling in the same fashion as China after the disastrous Opium Wars, or

3) accept and adapt, taking on Western innovations of Industrialization and engage in the Imperialism of the age.

History shows, of course, that this resulted in the Meiji Restoration, in which Japan quickly adapted, taking whatever knowledge and technology they could from Westerners (even German brewing techniques, as evidenced by Sapporo brand beer), which chiefly involved industrial factory production and weapons of war. This allowed the Japanese to quickly expand as an Imperial force, just as capitalism in general allows for a large speculative expansion, up to the point where it led to their desolation and loss against the Americans in World War II, just as the depression, “the Lost Decade” of 90’s Japan, upended their economy and the various theme parks by association. By participating in modernity, Japan lost much in the exchange, and the want for the material and for money tainted their Traditional way of life, all to bring about the Japan that we have today - a society in decay that is progressively dying from the inside out. Demographers have noted that in the year of 2024 that Japan has lost 1 million people in one year due to its demographic collapse, exacerbated by issues of work-life balance, corporate culture, decadence, and spiritual crisis. It is a Faustian Bargain playing out in real time, but the writing was on the wall a long time ago, yet the downward tendency pulls it further, just as the wind pulled Chihiro through the tunnel and beyond to what lies on the other side.

Movement Between Worlds and Ontology

The family continues on, ignoring the other Dōsojin and come to cross a river, perhaps symbolic of a boundary between their world and the one beyond. They come to find a semblance of a town that’s all restaurants, reflective of the modern aspect of consumerism first and foremost, as well as a place of transience and quick money, a true “tourist-trap”. On the street in this town, the father smells food from afar and comes to one of the establishments, with incredibly enticing food on display. The father and mother give into their appetites and begin to voraciously gorge themselves, even without ordering or paying, the father trying his best to assuage the disapproving Chihiro by stating that he has “credit cards and cash”, further cementing the consumerist modern mindset, as if money could truly take one anywhere beyond the purely physical (and at what cost?). Chihiro runs away to find the Bathhouse, a location central to the film, yet another place of commerce and transience, with the train passing under the bridge to introduce the character Haku (白, translated as “amber”), though his name is not revealed until several more minutes in. Haku warns Chihiro that she “shouldn’t be here”, but its too late - the lamps are lit and the separation between the worlds in complete, with Haku distracting any onlookers from Chihiro’s presence through one of his many acts of magic.

This brings us to an ontological discussion. It must first be noted that there are 8 Ontological Levels of Existence (not to be confused with Creation), which are listed as follows:

1. Source of Divine Emanation - Unconditioned Existence

2. The Creator God and Godhead

3. The Domain of Pure Intellect

4. The Realm of Upper Celestial Hierarchies / Eternal Ideals

5. Angels/Divine Messengers

6. The Collective Consciousness

7. Subtle Manifestation

8. Gross Manifestation

Levels 1 and 2 are that which comprise Beyond Being, which, being the source of all manifestation, are beyond all conception of knowledge (see our previous article “Solitaire, Tarot, and the Three Dark Nights of the Soul”). Levels 3 and 4 are what comprise the domain of the Spirit, with Pure Intellect being the means by which one achieves the steps up the rungs of the proverbial Jacob’s Ladder, whereas Shintoists would refer to this as the “Great Chain of Being”, while the Upper Celestial Hierarchies would include the perfect, eternal beings that carry out God’s necessary functions, reflective of aspects of the Divine, i.e. “names of God”, which are related to the conceptualization that is the Platonic Theory of Forms, which we will return to later.

Levels 5 and 6 consist of the Psychic domain, with angels communicating (angel = “messenger”) to those below what is due to them, often under the guise of the Guardian Angel, of which everyone possesses from the Christian point of view (Kant understood this ontological process as the Categorical Imperative). The Collective Consciousness, meanwhile, is the fullness of the psychic experiences present in all of manifestation, which people can find various spiritually dangerous methods to engage with and make the proverbial march to “take heaven by storm”.

This brings us to Levels 7 and 8 of the Physical, which are the ontological levels in which this movie participates. Level 7 is Subtle Manifestation, which is where subtle spirits exist, which can be termed by all manner of names and modes: nature spirits, demons, djinn, tulpas/egregores and so on (see the difference between fallen angels and created demons in Meditations on the Tarot, “XIII - The Devil”). This subtle manifestation is part physical and part psychic, as a means of an intermediary between the two, which explains why subtle spirits have the ability to shapeshift to suit their appearances, and how they can move at speeds that defy conventional laws of physics (see Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Fr. Seraphim Rose, as well as Cracks in the Great Wall: UFOs and Traditional Metaphysics, for such discussions, as well as for the topic of “aliens” really being demons).

Subtle Spirits are referred to in the Bible as “powers of the air” (Eph. 2:2) in their demonic mode, along with their prince, who is none other than the prince of this world - Satan himself. It should be noted that, however, the Shinto Tradition, just like Islam, do not consider all subtle spirits to be dangerous, and that relationships with kami allow for pathways upward and to achieve greater states of Being in the Great Chain of Being. Meanwhile, in Islam, it is noted in the Qur’an in Surah Al-Jinn (72:11): “And among us [djinn] are the righteous, and among us are [others] not so; we are [divided into] factions differing [in way]”, which is to say that some djinn serve Allah but others do not.

Level 8 is simply the world where we exist in, which is where Chihiro moves our of and moves into the Subtle Plane of existence at Level 7, at this point of the film. Soon after, her character begins to fade away and become translucent, which is reflective of the dangers of astral projection, when the psychic and spiritual body separate from the physical body (see Hindu doctrine of “envelopes” or 5 Sheaths, i.e. Pancha Koshas), which cannot be permitted for too long, though Chihiro is given food by Haku to prevent fading away, despite Chihiro’s fear of the food due to what happened to her parents, which brings us to our next digression.

Essence and Substance - Simplicity and Complexity

Directly after leaving Haku the first time, Chihiro goes to find her parents, only to see, to her horror and disbelief, that they have transformed into pigs, due to their transgression of eating the food of the spirits, in which the need to save her parents becomes the focus driving Chihiro’s story forward from this point onward. This occurrence is reflective of the bestial nature of man in which the vices are unchecked, which lessen man to a lower state of being (similar to the Odyssey, Book X, when Circe turns Odysseus’s sailors into pigs through wine and promises of leisure), so it is no surprise why pigs become a universal symbol for a lesser potentiality of man, the same function which monkeys also serve to show involution downward (“Satan is the ape of God” as quoted from City of God by St. Augustine), compared to the evolution of higher animality evident in the dog (man’s best friend, just as man is the companion of God) and, even higher, the symbol of the sphinx, which is the perfect union between divine intellect and the bestial nature of man (see Meditations on the Tarot, “X - The Wheel of Fortune”). Their essence is lessened by their participation in vice, since vice is the absence of virtue, and they participate in a lower state of being by association.

It should also be noted in passing that, at this point of the story, Haku tells Chihiro that he knows her name because he supposedly met her and knew her when she was “very small”, though the fullness of this revelation is not yet revealed, and Chihiro is then instructed to go down to meet the “boiler man” to seek getting a job, and she then descends the side stairs to the bottom of the tower.

This participation in different aspects of essence brings us back to the aforementioned Platonic Theory of Forms. The various kami in the film have multifarious forms, either as specialized nature spirits (“Radish Spirit”), elemental nature spirits (“River Spirit”), and many other types of kami from Japanese folklore, including, but not limited to tsuchigumo of which Kamaji (カマ爺, “old boiler man”) is reflective of, which is supposedly derived from the term tuchigomori (土隠, “those that hide in the ground”) and is fitting given his hidden influence at the root of the tower where the coal and fires reside that power the bathhouse, heating the water and adding various substances with the grinding of the mill stone. The main workers of the bathhouse, however, are a mixture of humanoid-like kami, many with larger and exaggerated features, some being more human and others being more frog-like, while some kami look almost like frogs themselves. All of this to say that each of these kami participate in various different forms and in different quantities of essence, since, of course, being part of the physical domain, quantity is a factor that differentiates manifestation, and all things in the physical are a mixture of quality (essence) and quantity (substance). Those that have lesser forms (frog people and frog hominids) are reflective of a varying degrees of essence, either in greater or lesser intellect, or due to a lack of certain virtues that predispose to a veritable “spiritual gigantism” which cause disproportionate features, a topic we will return to shortly (see Vectors of the Counter-Initiation by Charles Upton).

One of the only kami with proper human form and proportion is the character Lin (Rin リン, which could be reflective of the thousandth part of the yen, an infinitesimally small portion, which may be an ironic choice, as the character is invaluable inside the context of the narrative), who helps Chihiro learn the bathhouse when she begins working there. Chihiro first tries to get a job with Kamaji, but she can’t take the jobs from the soot gremlins, because, as Kamaji notes, if the gremlins don’t work they “turn back into soot”, which reflects the importance of labor in cultivating virtue (or essence, which establishes presence), and that, if one does not work one does not live (“If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat”, 2 Thess. 3:10, as well as the Works and Days of Hesiod, with regards to the law of the Iron Age, which we currently are under the yoke of). However, Chihiro must go up to Yubaba (湯婆婆, “old hot-water woman”) the witch that runs the bathhouse, that no doubt engages in her own personal magic of a non-divine orientation and purpose (see Meditations on the Tarot, “III - The Empress” for Divine Magic, i.e. White Magic, versus Personal Magic, i.e. Black or “Grey” Magic). Meanwhile, No-Face (顔無し) looms in the background, which we will have to consider in more depth later, though he too seems to lack much essence and substance, ethereal and dark, phasing in and out of sight.

However, before we get to considerations on Yubaba, and the presentation of the Bathhouse itself, we must note another dimension to ontological manifestation: Divine Simplicity vs. Luciferian Complexity. The highest ontological levels, though more refined and pure, are also more simple, the idea of Divine Simplicity most evident in Islam, especially in Sufism. Conversely, as the movement of manifestation goes downward, things become more defined, from the eternal and perfect beings in domain of the Spirit, to the long-lived psychic and subtle beings (the Qur’an relates that the djinn are not only long-living, with Iblis (Lucifer) asking for a reprieve until the day of judgement in his fallen form, but they are also born and die, and they even occupy physical spaces, which anyone familiar with the phenomenon or concept of demonic possession and oppression should be aware of), all the way to physical beings subject to the greatest complexity and change in the domain of becoming. The pathway downward leads to an increased level of what can be referred to as “enfoldment” and “crystallization” into a more mineral character (see Meditations on the Tarot, “XIII - Death”), which is more complex and complicated the deeper one goes, and anyone interested in particle physics and some aspects of the physical sciences would probably agree.

So, if Simplicity is Divine, then Complexity must be of a Luciferian persuasion conversely, especially since the symbol associated with Satan is the serpent, like in Genesis, with its various folds, scales, skins, coiled form and cold, calculating nature. Though simple from an evolutionary standpoint, they’re reflective of the esoteric symbology that is outlined here from a purely metaphysical point of view. This same phenomenon is evident especially in circuit boards and microchips, progressively getting smaller and more complex as time goes on, actuating the potential for malefic influence evident in metals, a modern-age talisman of infra-human influences but without the proper Traditional knowledge, which is a topic that we may return to at another time. Metals and caves in many Traditional stories are noted to be reflective of demonic influence, like in 1001 Arabian Nights with the story of “Aladdin” and the Cave of Wonders having treasures underground guarded by Djinn, just like Peer Gynt with the Mountain King and goblins in his great hall, with other Traditional stories involving giants and gnomes (don’t forget subtle spirits can manipulate their shape and size) hewing stone and metal underground, and reflective of a lower order of knowledge. It should be noted here that the frog-like kami are analogous to this lower aspect of the serpent, reflecting their own lower state.

One last note on this dimension and we shall move on. In scripture, the Lord tells us: “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). To actuate the Lord’s will, we must be complex and mind and simple with regards to innocence, which reflect the state of affairs at higher ontological states. Meanwhile, Satan would rather us be “as wise as doves and as innocent as serpents”, which is to say simple in mind, in the negativistic sense of the word, and lack all sense of innocence and move towards complex corruptions and vices, which is the perfect disposition towards perdition. What could be more reflective of the low cunning and mental simplicity than man in his purely bestial mode? There is a lesson in there somewhere.

Continued in Pt 2.

A Perspective

It appears to me to be a relatively ubiquitous experience to be sitting down at one's computer, or on a particularly lonely night sitting at a card table with a deck of playing cards, flipping through games of Solitaire, in boredom and quiet contemplation. I did this more so in my youth, more times than I would like to admit, but I never gave much thought to it, passively shuffling real and virtual cards around in their various piles. Of course Solitaire just means “lonely” in French, and, given my nature and spiritual disciple that is Hermeticism, it seemed to be a topic worthy of reflection. Between these reflections, and my recent research into more arcane domains of esoteric knowledge, I achieved a synthesis of knowledge that led to a meaningful realization that might be of use or interest to others focused on the value of universal knowledge and principles, especially with regards to the pathway to "spiritual realization" while in this life.

The Three Dark Nights

By pure Providence, in my research, I have finally come along to reading the Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (aka. San Juan de la Cruz). The two works of note for our purposes are The Ascent of Mt. Carmel and the aforementioned Dark Night of the Soul. Both of these works in tandem explicate the necessary conditions by which one arrives at, passes through, and experiences the three dark nights, through all varied modalities, all to achieve true union with God in this life. With this in mind, some elaboration may be required.

First, the pathway to knowing objective knowledge of God is obscure, and, as such, can be referred to as a night, from a symbological point of view. To quote the anonymous author of the mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing, the One True God is one who "hides in darkness", since God is Transcendently above all knowledge and experience from an ontological point of view. He is as such because He, in the Trinitarian modality as Father, is the creator of all things, the Highest Good, as he gives everything and receives nothing from the initial sacrifice of principial unity into multiplicity, making space for creation and allowing beings to know and seek union with Him (see the Kabbalistic doctrine of tzimtzum for more information on “divine contraction”). As a result, being the monad for any decad of manifestation, He is above all conceptions of anything knowable since He is the source of all that is manifest (for example, only the unmanifest can make what is manifest, just as what is immobile allows for what is mobile to push off of its immutability of position, which one can take in the context of the Unmoved Mover and Primum Mobile in this relationship). As such, objective knowledge of God is obscure, dark, a veritable night, but it is not impossible to see with dark light and dark knowledge of unknowing.

Second, we must note the three-tiered process of initiation, universal across all Traditions in principle. The first step is purification, in which one purges oneself of all impulses towards want, vices, and of spiritual impurities that pull one “downward” to the material (reflective of the principle of tamas in Hinduism, as opposed to rajas and sattva). The second step is illumination, in which one achieves the “lesser mysteries” (often resembling the silver key) through the communication of the exoteric aspect of the respective Tradition; and herein lies the secret: these images can then in turn be broken and destroyed to allow for the final step. The third and final step is the height of perfection, in which one achieves the “greater mysteries” (the golden key), that which is purely esoteric, inward (via literal “in-sight”), unteachable and incommunicable knowledge (a passive, dark knowledge, by association). We could cite countless examples here across the various Traditions and initiatory groups across the spiritual history of man, but, in passing, this can best be reflected by the Christian rites of Baptism (purification), Confirmation (illumination) and communion (perfection), and undoubtedly, in the obscure and early time in the church’s history, these held a more intact esoteric dimension in actuality than what exists today in potentiality. This triadic pathway is also reflected in the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (referred to moderns as Pseudo-Dionysius) in his work Celestial Hierarchies, in which the 9 levels of angels, each in their three sets of three tiers (from top to bottom: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones - Dominions, Virtues, Powers - Principalities, Archangels, Angels), with the first three reflective of perfection, the next three of illumination, and the last three of purification, as attested by the Saint himself.

Thirdly, and lastly, this brings us to the Three Dark Nights. The first night is that of mortification, through purification, of the aforementioned impulses towards wants, vices and imperfections, which is likened to the twilight before the height of darkness. This darkest night is the second night, that in which all images of the Divine that one has internally must be broken and cast off, in which the soul is left naked, divested of everything - groping in the dark, which makes this night like that of midnight without even the light of the moon (reflection) to guide the way. To borrow again from St. Dionysius the Areopagite in his Mystical Theology, this is achieved by the alternation between “descending realization”, in which one affirms all the names of God (see Divine Names, same author) and all likeness of Him from that which is highest to that which is lowest, and “ascending realization”, in which one negates all aspects of God from the lowest to the highest. The reason both these things must be done is to achieve the third dark night, which is union with God, and this can only be possible by eliminating all that which is dissimilar with God, which is all impurity and affirmation of knowledge that takes up space in one’s soul. One can only be in full union with God while alive when one is truly poor, which reflects the words of the Lord from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3), followed by “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God” (Matt. 5:8). This is best reflected by the Taoist principles in the Tao Te Ching: “It is the empty space that makes the bowl useful” (Verse 11), as well as “Only when one is empty can one be filled” (Verse 22).

The Four Suits of the Tarot

This brings us to the Tarot, and the latent symbology therein, scarcely understood by the New Age crowd that flock to it for divination, which is something, as a Traditionalist, that we would not permit for ourselves. Regardless of this notion, the Tarot is a rich repository of the Egyptian, later Greek, Hermetic Tradition, which holds the deep spiritual knowledge that was passed onto Judaism (“And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds” (Acts 7:22)), and later into the Christian world, made evident via the existence of the Tarot within Europe in practice of the card game, something which can be done without any spiritually dangerous exercises. The core for this viewpoint I highly credit to the author of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism, who chose to publish this anonymously, but we know is the esotericist and metaphysician Valentin Tomberg. I encourage any curious and determined reader to take up the book, if they haven’t done so already, for a fuller realization of its wisdom, as if it wasn’t evident by our disposition in the way in which our name betrays our influences. This work undergoes a careful analysis of all of the major trumps, of which there are 22 (compare to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and 22 channels in the Tree of Sephiroth, analysis forthcoming), which each are a means of spiritual exercise through viewing the metaphysical symbology imprinted on the cards, in which we recommend the Marseille Tarot, since they hold the highest character in this regard, without falling into a dilution of form (or, rather, essence) of the truth behind its meaning. This could warrant an entire explanation in and of itself, but this would take us very far afield. We, instead, will limit ourselves to talking about the four suits of the lesser trumps, listed in ascending order: Pentacles, Swords, Cups and Wands.

Pentacles being the least suit is reflective of the process of purification, via the aforementioned initiatic pathway, with the five points being reflective of the five aspects of the will: the will to take (right hand), the will to hold (left hand), the will to conquer (right foot), the will to retain domain (left foot), and the will of the intellect (best represented not by the head, which is the mind, but, instead, by the heart, the true seat of the spiritual, supra-rational, intellect). These five points form the star, or pentacle, that is a universal symbol for man, though not Universal Man, which can only be represented in the symbol of the cross (see Rene Guenon’s Symbolism of the Cross and The Multiple States of Being). These wills must be crucified internally, through spiritual practice and discipline, to allow for the fullness of purification. This is best understood inwardly, but this process can manifest in the physical, only under very specific and special circumstances (ex. the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi). This achieves the first Dark Night.

The next that follows is the Sword, which is used to break the images of the mind with regards to conceptions of the Divine, which are the barriers to the fullness of union, which is best reflected by the following verse: “"So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the Garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24). Once this is done, one is fully emptied of all and allows for the true spiritual poverty necessary for the second Dark Night to be achieved.

Then comes the Cup, in which one is a truly empty vessel, which allows one to be filled with the dark knowledge of God, “transcending all knowledge” (“I Entered the Unknown”, poem by St. John of the Cross).

Lastly is the Wand, which reflects the unification of the human will and the Divine will, making one an agent of Divine magic and potency via the truly hermetic pathway from above to below: Mystical Union - Gnosis - Divine Magic - Hermeticism, which is the esoteric meaning of the Tetragrammaton, YHVH (per Meditations on the Tarot). This is Man at the highest actualization of his intended Divine function, to carry out the will of his creator by being his servant - to quote the Lord’s Prayer: “The Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, On Earth as It Is In Heaven”. When Adam and Eve chose not to eat of the Tree of Life (Monistic Unity with God in theophanic consciousness) and sample from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Dualism and separation from God), they broke this mystical union and caused all of the seed of Adam to participate in the Fall, borne from spiritual pride, with the original sin to think that Man was separate from God, which is, in principle, impossible, since everything extends from the One. It is our job as the Children of Adam, and, even greater, the Children of God, to rise to the occasion to reclaim our Divine station through the realization of God’s call to participate in His Plan. Do with this information what you will, but, remember, the hour grows late, and how long will you leave your back unguarded?

Solitaire and Synthesis

This brings us back to where we started in the first place, the simple game of Solitaire. How does this all connect together? The way I see it, the 52 cards of the standard deck have their respective suits, in order ascending as follows: Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts and Spades. These suits are directly analogous to the suits of the Tarot respectively, of Pentacles, Swords, Cups and Wands. This will warrant an explanation as to why this is and why these symbols are no longer one-to-one, compared to having a fully intact and consistent symbology.

To bring us towards the close, we must note the supposed story of how the Tarot came to be. Supposedly, as relayed by Tomberg (Meditations on the Tarot), the Egyptians knew their Tradition was fading, so they had to find a way to crystalize their Tradition to save it for future humanity (see A.K. Coomaraswamy’s The Bugbear of Literacy, for the degeneration of Traditions necessitating the movement from oral tradition to written tradition). This sacerdotal caste first decided on putting their Tradition to paper, but they quickly realized that paper would degrade and fade away, as well evidenced by all the works lost to history beyond the fullness of the Egyptian Hermetic works that remain in the Corpus Hermeticum. Then they decided to put it unto stone, but even stone erodes and fades away over time. So, finally, the priests decided to put their Tradition on the only thing that would not degrade over time: vice, through the use of the card game. There is a deep lesson here that reflects a principle so profound, that it reflects the overall trend of downward cosmic manifestation away from the Principle towards substance (see Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World, and especially The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times).

So, it follows that, as time goes on, knowledge of Tradition and Divine reality fades over time, in the movement away from Essence to Substance, from Form to Formation, from Quality to Quantity, then it follows that the knowledge of the Tarot can too also fade. The various forms of the Tarot can attest to that, as well as the incomprehension of moderns that know nothing of it beyond charlatanism and the puerile cupidity of profane curiosity. Beyond this, the knowledge of the esoteric meaning of the four suits can also fade, to the point at which the classic playing cards and their respective suits are but a shadow of their former function.

The diamond moves from the pentacle, from the pentad to the quadrilateral, reflecting stability of a physical, potentially profane, order, in which a certain degree of depth has been lost. The club moves from the sword to a blunted object, losing an aspect of its stinging potency, towards something more brutish and of a decidedly lesser order, far below the nobility conferred upon the agency of the symbol of temporal will. The heart moves from the cup, both a vessel of sorts, but without the Traditional knowledge of the Holy Grail, analogous to the Philosopher’s Stone and Elixir of Life, of Western Alchemy and Eastern Alchemy respectively, which is realized within, which transcends any sentimentalism that could be conferred by what the heart conveys. Lastly, the spade moves from the wand, a reflection of the lower function of man in his fallen station, to cultivate the earth with the shovel, when, instead, our proper function was to do the same with a more celestially inclined functionality (see Kore Kosmou, “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Gen. 2:20)).

To take this a step further, the game Solitaire is meant to be with respect to these suits, weaving them in alternating patterns to take all the cards out from the deck, lay them all out, all to pile them back up again in their proper order. First comes the “descending realization”, which is the act of affirming all the presence of the deck, by pulling out what is not manifest and bringing it onto the game board. Then comes “ascending realization” in which one negates the bringing down of the cards by putting them “upward” to their proper place, with respect to each suit, having performed its proper function. When the game is played well, with discipline and planning, as well as a bit of intuition, the endgame is achieved, and true unity of the deck is restored. If only the real thing were as simple as a game of Solitaire.

In summation, I will leave the reader with one final thought. With all that has been said, let us come back to the solitary: the player of the game of Solitaire. Why not play games with others? To remove all doubt, this is good as well - to share a table with friends, have friendly competition, make a bet, or have a laugh. These things are goods just as all physical objects are goods. However, none of these things, if not properly oriented towards their respective place, can bring us any closer to unity with God in this life. So, when it comes to spiritual practice, one has to forgo that which is good with that which is better. For those that are called to contemplation of the highest of the Divine Mysteries, being with people is good - but being alone with God is better. This one aspect of the way of the Hermit.