Firstly, the Principle is real; It is Reality itself. Secondly, It is both immutable and living, or absolute and infinite; It is therefore the Absolute and the Infinite, the Void and Totality. Thirdly, It is conscious, powerful, loving; It is at once Spirit, Cause, Goodness. Fourthly, It is at once, first, last, outward, inward; It is at once the Origin, the Result, the Manifested, the Non-Manifested. But It is always the One. Essays NATURE AND UNITY OF THE PRINCIPLE

Creation - or "creations" - should then be represented not as a process of transformism taking place in "matter" in the naively empirical sense of the word, but rather as an elaboration by the life-principle, that is to say, something rather like the more or less discontinuous productions of the imagination: images arise in the soul from a non-formal substance with no apparent link between them; it is not the images which transform themselves, it is the animic substance which causes their arising and creates them. That man should appear to be the logical issue, not indeed of an evolution, but of a series of "sketches" more and more centered on the human form - sketches of which the apes seem to represent disparate vestiges - this fact, or this hypothesis, in no way signifies that there is any common measure, thus a kind of psychological continuity, between man and the anthropomorphic and in some sense "embryonic" bodies which may have preceded him. The coming of man is a sudden "descent" of the Spirit into a receptacle that is perfect and definitive because it conforms to the manifestation of the Absolute; the absoluteness of man is like that of the geometrical point, which, strictly speaking, is quantitatively unattainable starting from the circumference. [NA: The same thing is repeated in the womb: as soon as the body is formed the immortal soul is suddenly fixed in it like a flash of lightning, so that there is complete discontinuity between this new being and the embryonic phases which have prepared its coming. It has quite rightly been maintained, against transformism, not only that "the greater cannot come from the less" (Guénon), but also that even though something existent may gain more precision or become atrophied, there cannot on the other hand be a motive, in a species, for the adjunction of a new element, not to mention that nothing could guarantee the hereditary character of such an element (according to Schubert  -Soldern).] [Stations of Wisdom, p.89]. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

In the beginning was the Spirit: hence the Word; for the Spirit, wanting and having to communicate itself because It is the Sovereign Good, brings about the manifestation of Its innumerable possibilities. The Spirit is both Light and Heat; the latter, life, is as miraculous as the former, intelligence, when we consider them on the plan of their earthly manifestation. Besides, to reduce all intelligence and all love to material causes is a way of not wanting to admit that our material existence is an exile; of wanting, on the contrary, to feel at ease in a world that presents itself as an end in itself, and which exempts man from the effort of transcending things and of transcending himself; whereas without this effort man bypasses the human vocation. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

In an altogether general way, it goes without saying that a rationalist can be right on the level of observations and experiences; man is not a closed system, although he can try to be. But even aside from any question of rationalism and dogmatism, one cannot begrudge anyone being scandalized by the stupidities and the crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, or even simply by the antinomies between the different creeds; however, since horrors are assuredly not the appanage of religion - the preachers of the "goddess reason" furnish the proof of this - it is necessary to confine ourselves to the observation that excesses and abuses are a part of human nature. If it is absurd and shocking that crimes claim the authority of the Holy Spirit, it is no less illogical and scandalous that they take place in the shadow of an ideal of rationality and justice. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

At all events, no infallibility exists which a priori encompasses all possible contingent domains; omniscience is not a human possibility. No one can be infallible with regard to unknown, or insufficiently known, phenomena; one may have an intuition for pure principles without having one for a given phenomenal order, that is to say, without being able to apply the principles spontaneously in such and such a domain. The importance of this possible incapacity diminishes to the extent that the phenomenal domain envisaged is secondary and, on the contrary, that the principles infallibly enunciated are essential. One must forgive small errors on the part of one who offers great truths - and it is the latter that determine how small or how great the errors are - whereas it would obviously be perverse to forgive great errors when they are accompanied by many small truths. [NA: There is certainly no reason to admire a science which counts insects and atoms but is ignorant of God; which makes an avowal of not knowing Him and yet claims omniscience by principle. It should be noted that the scientist, like every other rationalist, does not base himself on reason in itself; he calls " reason" his lack of imagination and knowledge, and his ignorances are for him the " data" of reason. 2 . Always respect ful of this form, the Holy Spirit will not teach a Moslem theologian the subtleties of trinitarian theology nor those of Vedanta; from another angle, it will not change a raci al or ethnic mentality; neither that of the Romans in view of Catholicism, nor that of the Arabs in view of Islam. Humanity must not only have its history, but also its stories.] sophiaperennis: The notion of philosophy

Infallibility, in a sense by definition, pertains in one degree or another to the Holy Spirit, in a way that may be extraordinary or ordinary, properly supernatural or quasi-natural; now the Holy Spirit, in the religious order, adapts itself to the nature of man in the sense that it limits itself to preventing the victory of intrinsic heresies, a victory which would falsify this "divine form" that is the religion; for the upaya, the "saving mirage," is willed by Heaven, not by men. sophiaperennis: The notion of philosophy

In Plotinus   the essence of Platonism   reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas - the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities - and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world - this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin. With Aristotle  , we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone. [NA: Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.] And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent. [NA: Kantian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for Kant  , God is only a "postulate of practical reason," which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.] sophiaperennis: Plato

Plato has been reproached for having had too negative an idea of matter, but this is to forget that in this connection there are in Plato’s thought [NA: By "thought" we mean here, not an artificial elaboration but the mental crystallization of real knowledge. With all due deference to anti-Platonic theologians, Platonism is not true because it is logical, it is logical because it is true; and as for the possible or apparent illogicalities of the theologies, these can be explained not by an alleged right to the mysteries of absurdity, but by the fragment ary character of particular dogmatic positions and also by the insuffi ciency of the means of thought and expression. We may recall in this connection the alternativism and the sublimism proper to the Semitic mentality, as well as the absence of the crucial notion of Maya -. at least at the ordinary theological level, meaning by this reservation that the boundaries of theology are not strictly delimited.] two movements: the first refers to fallen matter, and the second to matter in itself and as a support for the spirit. For matter, like the animic substance that precedes it, is a reflection of Maya: consequently it comprises a deiform and ascending aspect and a deifugal and descending aspect; and just as there occurred the fall of Lucifer - without which there would not have been a serpent in the Earthly Paradise - so also there occurred the fall of man. For Plato, matter - or the sensible world - is bad in so far as it is opposed to spirit, and in this respect only; and it does in fact oppose the spirit - or the world of Ideas - by its hardened and compressive nature, which is heavy as well as dividing, without forgetting its corruptibility in connection with life. But matter is good with respect to the inherence in it of the world of Ideas: the cosmos, including its material limit, is the manifestation of the Sovereign Good, and matter demonstrates this by its quality of stability, by the purity and nobility of certain of its modes, and by its symbolist plasticity, in short by its inviolable capacity to serve as a receptacle for influences from Heaven. A distant reflection of universal Maya, matter is as it were a prolongation of the Throne of God, a truth that a ’’spirituality’’ obsessed by the cursing of the earth has too readily lost sight of, at the price of a prodigious impoverishment and a dangerous disequilibrium; and yet this same spirituality was aware of the principial and virtual sanctity of the body, which a priori is "image of God" and a posteriori an element of "glory". But the fullest refutation of all Manicheism is provided by the body of the Avatara, which is capable in principle of ascending to Heaven - by ’’transfiguration’’ - without having to pass through that effect of the "forbidden fruit" which is death, and which shows by its sacred character that matter is fundamentally a projection of the Spirit. [NA: The "Night Journey" (isra, mi ’raj) of the Prophet has the same significance.] Like every contingent substance, matter is a mode of radiation of the Divine Substance; a partially corruptible mode, indeed, as regards the existential level, but inviolable in its essence. [NA: All the same, the biblical narrative regarding the creation of the material world implies symbolically the description of the whole cosmogony, and so that of all the worlds, and even that of the eternal archetypes of the cosmos; traditional exegesis, especially that of the Kabbalists bears witness to this.] sophiaperennis: Plato

According to Plutarch  , Alexander the Great received from Aristotle not only the doctrines concerning morality and politics, but also "those enigmatic and profound" theories that certain masters intended to "reserve for oral communication for initiates, without allowing many to learn about them." Having heard that Aristotle had published some of these teachings, Alexander reproached him in a letter; but Plutarch assures us that the books of Aristotle treating of metaphysics are "written in a style that renders them unusable for the ordinary reader, and useful only as memoranda for those who already have been instructed in this subject." Let us add however that according to the Kabbalists, "it is better to divulge wisdom than to forget it"; this is perhaps what Joachim of Fiore thought of when foreseeing an "age of the Spirit." sophiaperennis: Aristotle

The truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum is, not that it presents thought as the proof of Being, but simply that it enunciates the primacy of thought - hence of consciousness or of intelligence - in relation to the material world which surrounds us; certainly, it is not our personal thought which preceded the world, but it was - or is - absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is precisely a distant reflection; our thought which reminds us - and proves to us - that in the beginning was the Spirit. Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be. sophiaperennis: Descartes   and the Cogito

But not only is there the iconophobia of the Semites of nomadic origin, there is also the absence of images among most of the shamanistic Mongol peoples, notably the Red Indians; in this case, the divine image is absent, not because of a theological principle concerned with preventing given abuses, but because virgin Nature is itself "divine image"; because it is for the Great Spirit, and not for man, to furnish the image-sacrament of the Invisible. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

If the deviation of art is a possibility, the rejection of art is another. To speak of a great civilization which rejects, not one particular art, but all art, is a contradiction in terms; the more or less iconoclastic point of view of a St Bernard or a Savonarola cannot be the attitude of a whole city-based civilization. But this point of view, or a point of view that is in practice analogous, can exist traditionally outside civilization of this type, for example in the nomadic or semi-nomadic world of the North American Indians: the Redskins properly so-called - not all the aboriginal inhabitants of America - are indeed more or less hostile to the plastic arts, as doubtless were also their distant congeners the ancient Mongols, and perhaps also the ancient Germans and Celts. According to the Indians, virgin nature, which is sacred, is of an unequalled beauty, and it contains every conceivable beauty; it is thus vain and indeed impossible to seek to imitate the works of the Great Spirit. It is curious to note that the classical world, that of naturalism and anthropolatry, looks upon itself as a conqueror as far as nature is concerned; the cult of man involves contempt for surrounding nature, whereas for the Indian, as moreover for the Far-Easterners, nature is a mother, and also a fatherland, of which man is indeed the centre, but not the absolute proprietor, still less the enemy. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Empiricism operating blindly and endowed with a false doctrine, which does not prevent the phenomena to be real. (Images of the Spirit, p. 145, note 42 in the French version). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

Man stabilizes woman, woman vivifies man; furthermore, and quite obviously, man contains woman within himself, and vice versa, given that both are homo sapiens, man as such; and if we define the human being as pontifex, it goes without saying that this function includes woman, although she adds to it the mercurial character proper to her sex. [NA: If woman is "of one flesh" with man, — if she is "flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone", — this shows, in relation to the Spirit, which man represents, an aspect of continuity or prolongation, not of separation.[Esoterism as Principle and as Way, page 139, note 135].] [Esoterism as Principle and as Way, page 139]. sophiaperennis: Femininity

The human being is compounded of geometry and music, of spirit and soul, of virility and femininity: by geometry, he brings the chaos of existence back to order, that is, he brings blind substance back to its ontological meaning and thus constitutes a reference point between Earth and Heaven, a "sign-post" pointing towards God; by music he brings the segmentation of form back to unitive life, reducing form, which is death, to Essence — at least symbolically and virtually — so that it vibrates with a joy which is at the same time a nostalgia for the Infinite. As symbols, the masculine body indicates a victory of the Spirit over chaos, and the feminine body, a deliverance of form by Essence; the first is like a magic sign which would subjugate the blind forces of the Universe, and the second like celestial music which would give back to fallen matter its paradisiac transparency, or which, to use the language of Taoism, would make trees flower beneath the snow. [Stations of Wisdom, p. 80]. sophiaperennis: Femininity

It came about in this way: I was a Sheridan in the State of Wyoming, with my travelling companion, during the All Indian Days. One morning while walking across an open space where the tents or tips, of many Red Indians of different tribes were pitched we heard a voice which seemed to be calling us; we sent in that direction and approached one of the tents, asking if somebody had called us and were told that they had. An old man was there, and a younger woman with some children also were present. The old man wanted to know where we came from and who we were, and we told him everything and began to talk about spiritual matters and about the ancient American Indian religion. The old man explained that they were Cheyenna Indians; he spoke about the Sun Dance and said. "Our religion is the same as what is in the Holy Scriptures; God-the Great Spirit cannot be seen, He is pure Spirit." sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian

He told us that he was a very important priest of the Cheyennes, the so-called "Keeper of the Sacred Arrows", these are the holy objects of the Cheyennes tribe. They are marvelously beautiful, the old man said, but they are always hidden in a sacred bundle, which is opened only on very few occasion. We were told that these arrows had been brought to his tribe some thousand years ago; that they had been brought by a "Spirit Man", who was transparent; and that the whole tribe witnessed the event at the remote time. The Spirit Man said: "As long as you keep these Arrows, your people will not disappear; if you lose them, the rivers and the grass will dry up". if you lose them, the river and the grass will dry up". And the old priest added: "May be this would mean the end of the World". sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian

A few words should be said here about the ancient American religion, or more precisely that of the Plains and Woodland Indians. The most eminent manifestations of the "Great Spirit" are the Cardinal Points together with zenith and nadir, or with Heaven and Earth, and next in order are such as the Sun and the Morning Star. Although the Great Spirit is one, He comprises in Himself all those qualities the traces of which we see and the effects of which we experience in the world of appearances. The East is Light and Knowledge and also Peace; the South is Warmth and Life, therefore also Growth and Happiness; the West is fertilizing Water and also Revelation speaking in lightning and thunder, the North in Cold and Purity, or Strength. Thus it is that the Universe, at whatever level it may be considered, whether or Earth, Man or Heaven, is dependent on the four primordial determinations: Light, Heat, Water, Cold. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian

A most striking feature of the North American branch of the Primordial Sanatana Dharma is the doctrine of the four years: the sacred animal of the Plains-Indians, the buffalo, symbolizes the Mahayuga, each of its legs representing a Yuga. At the beginning of this Mahayuga a buffalo was placed by the Great Spirit at the West in order to hold back the water which menace the earth. Every year this bison loses a hear, and in very Yuga it loses a foot. When it will have lost all its hair, and its feet, the water will overwhelm the earth and the Mahayuga will be finished. the analogy with the bull of Dharma in Hinduism is very remarkable; at every Yuga, this bill withdraws a foot, and spirituality loses its strength; and now we are near the end of the kali-yuga. Like the orthodox Hindus, the traditional Red Indians have this conviction, which is obviously true in spite of all the mundane optimism of the modern world; but let us add that the compensation of our very dark age is the Mercy of the Holy Name, as it is emphasized in the Maneuver Dharma Shasta and the Trimmed Bhagavata and other holy scriptures. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian