Eros and Strife ~ In the Wake of Poseidon (pt. 2)

CHAPTER TWELVE -

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"In air, fire, earth and water
World on the scales.
Air, fire, earth and water
Balance of change
World on the scales
On the scales."

The Empedoclean idea of the four elements. The "world" is also the human psyche with the four elements being the four psychological functions.

"There is a stability in the Universe because of the orderly and balanced process of change, the same measure coming out as going in, as if reality were a huge fire that inhaled and exhaled equal amounts."

- Heraclitus 501 BC

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The Patriarch

The Patriarch

"Bishop's kings spin judgement's blade
Scratch "Faith" on nameless graves.

"The Church followed in the wake of Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism, a development that culminated in the Inquisition"

- Karl Popper

"Feeling Types - This includes moral feelings as well as other kinds of sentiment (love and tenderness)."

- Myths Dreams Symbols

"Thinking and feeling are 'judgmental' functions, that is an individual makes decisions by reasoning what is in one's best interest, or by feeling out what is 'right'."

- Cultural Economics: The Joyful Economy

"Paradoxically, individuals who possess a strong dose of the feeling function can be quite cool and dispassionate when it comes to matters of the heart...especially when it comes to considering other people's feelings. The subjective nature of the feeling function can make someone with a superior feeling function have high expectations about how others should behave towards them and yet be quite insensitive to the feelings of others."

- CTI Website

And here we get some idea of how it is that "Plato's spawn" (medieval Neo-Platonists) came to be so "cold".

"In the Republic, Plato defines justice in terms of order or harmony. Justice in the individual is the ordering of the will and the appetites by the supreme reason. Justice in the state will be the ordering of the different elements of society in terms of reason or philosophy by a ruling elite, or even one philosopher-king. The characteristics of this society are—not unexpectedly—totalitarian. The "Guardians" who are at once the military, police-force, and rulers of Plato’s state must live in a material and sexual communism. Any physically unfit or unlicensed children must be disposed of, via abortion or infanticide. There is no rule of law since the philosopher-kings are the walking embodiment of law. These rulers are the supreme law competent to use falsehood to achieve their will. There is no conception of personal freedom here. The interests of the many are completely subordinate to order, to the one, to the philosopher king. This is Plato’s justice.

The Religious Character of Neo-platonism

Sinnigen and Boak remark, "Neo-platonism was more than a philosophical system; it was then a religion and like Oriental cults, preached salvation." The character of religious Neo-Platonism is not difficult to see. The great goal is to scale the ladder of being and attain to the ecstatic experience of becoming one with "the one" i.e., the beatific vision.
Neo-platonism dissolves the many into the one. Politically, this leads to totalitarianism."

- The Expansion of the Early Churches

This passage of In the Wake of Poseidon is also strikingly suggestive of the life of Frederick II and his conflict with the papacy. As secular government is appropriately the province of rational thought, the "bishop's king", the king controlled by clergy, is yet another symbol of Thinking overshadowed by Feeling. "Faith" is the word Christians use to describe their renunciation of logical thought.

"Faith consists in believing what reason does not believe," wrote the eighteenth century French philosopher Voltaire [Philosophical Dictionary, Inondation]. Surprisingly, the Catholic Church endorses that view. It has stated that faith is not based on credibility, nor on the accumulation of probabilities [First Vatican Council session v and Lamentabile Dictu Proposition 25.]

Faith goes further still. Voltaire again: "Faith consists in believing, not what appears to be true, but what appears to our understanding to be false" [Philosophical Dictionary,, Foi].

The very impossibility of the articles of Christian faith made them attractive to the second century Christian father Tertullian:

The Son of God died; this is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And after being buried, he rose again: this is certain, because it is impossible. [On the Flesh of Christ, v.]

Everyday and scientific reason is based on evidence, probability, and logic. Faith, the opposite of reason, is willingness to believe the untestable, the impossible, and the illogical."

- The Perils of Faith

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The Old Woman

The Old Woman

"Harvest hags Hoard ash and sand"

The "harvest hags" are also symbolic of a psyche that has constellated too far in the direction of Eros.

"Total immersion in feminine energy may feel safe and comforting, but without the balancing influence of the masculine, the shadow feminine, within an individual woman and in the external world, will manifest as the helpless Princess/Victim or the beseiging hag."

- Shadow Feminism and the Reunion of Men and Women

The Slave

The Slave

"Rack rope and chain for slaves"

"Virgo is traditionally the sign of peasants, servants, armies (i.e. peasant levies), and other people performing simple or repetitive tasks under the direction of a superior. The virtues of the sign are obedience to authority, conscientiousness and meticulousness in the performance of duty, and contentment with one's place -precisely those "virtues" that the Christian Church encouraged in the populace for most of two millennia, along with other virtues designed to ensure a steady supply of replacement peasants. Using Christian terminology, the purpose of the populace was to be sheep."

- The New Aeon: A Consideratioon of the Astrological Symblolism

"There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery, and authority."

- Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Who fireside fear fermented words
Then rear to spoil the feast;"

The Fool

"Whilst in the aisle the mad man smiles
To him it matters least."

"Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

- Parable of the Madman
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science

"Eros makes man, Nietzsche says, the animal which venerates. What appears then is that the event of the "death of God" attains the eros of the soul, and thus the instinct of adoration, at its root, the instinct which generates gods. The "death of God" signifies ...that a rupture is produced in eros and that it is split, from this point, into two contrary tendencies: the _will to create oneself_ which never proceeds without destruction, and the _will to adore_ which never proceeds without the will to eternalisation; and in so far as the _will to power_ is just another term for this group of tendencies, and constitutes the universal aptitude for metamorphosis, it finds something like a compensation, like a cure in its identification with _Dionysus_, in the sense that, In Nietzsche, this ancient god of polytheism represents and reunites in himself all the dead and resuscitated gods."

- Pierre Klossowski:
Nietzsche, polytheism and parody

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Libra's Theme

Libra's motto

"I balance"

- Astrological Compatibility

"Libra is the first sign of the "not-self," the complementary opposite of Aries "I, me, mine." Libra begins with the autumn equinox when there is an equal balance between the length of the still warm days and cool nights. It is represented by the scales of balance, symbol of legal justice.

Venus rules Libra, as it does Taurus. The Venus of Taurus is Aphrodite, the sensuous, sensual, voluptuous goddess of the pleasures of the five physical senses. The Venus of Libra comes more in the guise of Pallas Athena, the warrior goddess, protectoress of Athens and civilization, defender of cultural and aesthetic values, the true, the good, the beautiful --and the only self-begotten daughter of Zeus, King of Heaven."

- Libra

"The sign Cancer ( Epitaph and Moonchild ) is the place of the first major fusion of the zodiac: it fuses the energies of Aries, Taurus and Gemini. The impulse of Life is awakened in Aries ( 21st Century Schizoid Man ), is given Consciousness in Taurus (the last verse of 21st Century Schizoid Man ) and manifested as duality in Gemini ( I Talk to the Wind ). Human birth in the sign of Cancer ( Epitaph and Moonchild ) is the arrival of this gathering of force on Earth. In Libra ( In the Wake of Poseidon ) these energies reach a point of balance."

- D. K. Foundation

"Libra, the Scales lies between the constellations of Virgo and Scorpio. In ancient times when the Sun passed through Libra, as it crossed the Celestial Equator, it marked the autumnal equinox in the year 1190 B.C. [NPS], the time of equal day and night (then about Sept 22) for the Babylonians. On that date, the day and night are of equal length, making for a perfectly balanced day. By the time of the ancient Greeks, about 1500 years later, that association had been lost.
Libra, brings in the Autumnal equinox (the Spring equinox being brought in by Aries, the Ram) when day and night are of equal length and thus balance. It is also noticeable that the movements of the scale-pans, like those of the Sun in its annual cycle, correspond to the relative 'weight' of yin and yang, of darkness and light, something running without any major difference from Ancient Greece to Ancient China. When the pans are in balance (at the equinoxes), the pointer on the scales, or the sword which is identical with it, becomes the symbol of the changeless Centre. The polar axis which stands for it points to the Great Bear which, in Ancient China, was called the Jade Scales."

- Libra

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The Warrior

The Warrior

"Heroes hands drain stones for blood
To whet the scaling knife."

The activity of medieval "heroes" is another example of Eros as "utter ignorance". Governments and "heroes" (crusaders) were controlled by the church during the medieval era.

"Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, enunciated a telling general law: the greater the lie, the more readily will it be believed. Once it resonates with the emotional needs of the hearer it will ignite the fuel of his prejudice to a scarcely extinguishable flame of enthusiasm. The same principle holds for racism, sexism, and the acceptance (and also the rejection) of the objective reality of psychic phenomena. It is our emotional nature, the "feeling" function of Carl G. Jung, that is our Achilles' heel; through it the forces of evil can strike at the root of our personality. But, of course, it is also sensitive to beauty and the pain of those around us, and can be the way of release from selfish preoccupation to a greater concern for other people. The person who is at the mercy of his emotions is a great public menace; when he can control them from a higher spiritual centre, they can become the inspiration of enormous aesthetic and altruistic creativity.

- The Dark Face of Reality
by Dr. Martin Israel

The Logician

"Magi blind with visions light"
Net death in dread of life.

"And with the light comes shadows, shadows not visible to eyes blinded by self-righteousness and intolerance."

- Cultural Economics: The Joyful Economy

The Child

The Child

"Their children kneel in Jesus till
They learn the price of nails;"

"St Augustine - the greatest of all Catholic theologians - believed with utter conviction that because of Adam's original sin children were all born the limbs of Satan. In the interest of orthodoxy, man's sinfulness and utter corruption was emphasised so as to bind him in strict obedience to the narrow path along which a remote and philosophical Church alone knew how to guide him."

- The Albigensian Heresy

The "price of nails" is what the individual gives up in the name of dogmatism. This will be explained in subsequent chapters.

The Mother Earth

"Whilst all around our mother earth
Waits balanced on the scales."

"Many have lamented a world that has not only differentiated but polarized the mind and the heart, so that the two are mutually exclusive. This schizoid split between reason and emotion has yielded precisely what one would expect: uncontrolled oscillation between the poles of heartlessness and mindlessness. Either we have hard-boiled rationalism and science, which exclude affection and spirit altogether, or mediums, fortune-tellers, spiritualism, and similar fringe beliefs, which require us to throw away our rationality and intellect. Whereas all the while, what we need is a harmonious synthesis of the mind and heart."

- The Meaning of the Four Books by R. Sunarman

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