What the Asharites have not understood - and this is characteristic of the alternativism of exoteric thought - is that natural causes, such as the function of fire to burn, in no way exclude immanent supernatural causality, [NA: According to the Koran  , God ordered the fire that was to burn Abraham: "Be coolness ..!" which would be meaningless if the nature of fire were not to burn, and which therefore refutes a priori and divinely the Asharite opinion.] any more than the limited subjectivity of the creature excludes the immanence of the absolute Subject. Immanent divine causality is "vertical" and supernatural, whereas cosmic causality is "horizontal" and natural, or in other words: the first is comparable to centrifugal radii, and the second to concentric circles. It is this combination of two relationships or of two perspectives that characterizes integrally metaphysical thought, hence gnosis. [NA: Let it be noted that, just as there is a "relatively absolute" - the logical absurdity of this formulation does not preclude its ontologically plausible meaning - so too is there a "naturally supernatural," and this is precisely the permanent divine intervention, in virtue of immanence, in cosmic causality.] sophiaperennis: Gnosis

At first sight, it might be thought that the end result of the cosmogonic projection is matter, which in fact appears as the "final point" of the existentiating trajectory; but it is so only in a certain respect, that of the cosmic Substance, of which it is the most exteriorized and contingent mode; it is such at least for our sensorial world, for one can conceive of indefinitely more "solidified" substances than the matter pertaining to our spatial cosmos [NA: For the evolutionists, this matter is the very theater - or the initial substance - of universal Possibility; gratuitous concepts such as those of the biosphere or of the "noosphere" add nothing that could attenuate this error whose effects are incalculable.]. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

We have compared pure intelligence to a mirror; now it must be recalled that there is always a certain element of inversion in the relationship between subject and object, that is, the subject which reflects inverts the object reflected. A tree reflected in water is inverted, and so is "false" in relation to the real tree, but it is still a tree - even "this" tree - and never anything else: consequently the reflected tree is perfectly "true," despite its illusory character, so that it is a mistake to conclude that intellection is illusory because of its subjective framework. The powers of the cosmic illusion are not unlimited, for the Absolute is reflected in the contingent, otherwise the latter would not exist; everything is in God - "All is Atma" - and the Absolute flashes forth everywhere, it is "infinitely close"; barriers are illusory, they are at the same time immeasurably great and infinitesimally small. sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. [NA: According to Pythagoras   and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.] This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of "sensible consolation" the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus   states that "it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance." [NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect - works of perversion and subversion being excluded - through pure mercy and by virtue of the ’exception that proves the rule".] This passage states the crucial principle of the almost magical relationship between the conforming recipient and the predestined content or between the adequate symbol and the sacramental presence of the prototype. The ideas of Plotinus must be understood in the light of those of the "divine Plato": the latter approved the fixed types of the sacred sculptures of Egypt, but he rejected the works of the Greek artists who imitated nature in its outward and insignificant accidentality, while following their individual imagination. This verdict immediately excludes from sacred art the productions of an exteriorizing, accidentalizing, sentimentalist and virtuoso naturalism, which sins through abuse of intelligence as much as by neglect of the inward and the essential. sophiaperennis: Plato

Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, Kant   admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by Aristotle  , [NA: Quantity, quality, relation, and modality; the latter no doubt replacing the Aristotelian " position."] while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp. [NA: Such as the principial and cosmic qualities which determine and classify phenomena, or the universal dimensions which join the world to the Supreme Essence and which include each in its own manner the qualities mentioned above. Aristotle for his part had the right not to speak of them in that he accepted God as being self-evident and his approach was in no way moralistic and empirical; since he accept ed God, he did not consider his categories to be exhaustive.] The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; Kant recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being "explored" by a process he called "transcendental investigation." But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates? sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Cosmic Manifestation necessarily reflects or projects the Principle both according to absoluteness and according to infinity; inversely, the Principle contains or prefigures the root of Manifestation, and so of Perfection, and this is the Logos. The Logos combines in divinis regularity and mystery, it is so to speak the manifested Beauty of God; but this manifestation remains principial, it is not cosmic. It has been said that God is a geometer, but it is important to add that He is just as much a musician. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. [NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.] This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of "sensible consolation" the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that "it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance." [NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect - works of perversion and subversion being excluded - through pure mercy and by virtue of the ’exception that proves the rule".] sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

It is necessary to dissipate here an error which would have it that everything in nature is beautiful and everything of traditional production is likewise beautiful because it belongs to tradition; according to this view, ugliness does not exist either in the animal or the vegetable kingdoms, since, it seems, every creature "is perfectly what it should be", which has really no connection with the aesthetic question; likewise it is said that the most magnificent of sanctuaries possesses no more beauty than some tool or other, always because the tool "is everything that it should be". This is tantamount to maintaining not only that an ugly animal species is aesthetically the equivalent of a beautiful species, but also that beauty is such merely through the absence of ugliness and not through its own content, as if the beauty of a man were the equivalent of that of a butterfly, or of a flower or a precious stone. Beauty, however, is a cosmic quality which cannot be reduced to abstractions foreign to its nature; likewise, the ugly is not only that which is not completely what it is supposed to be, nor is it only an accidental infirmity or a lack of taste; it is in everything which manifests, accidentally or substantially, artificially or naturally, a privation of ontological truth, of existential goodness, or, what amounts to the same, of reality. Ugliness is, very paradoxically, the manifestation of a relative nothingness: of a nothingness which can affirm itself only by denying or eroding an element of Being, and thus of beauty. This amounts to saying that, in a certain fashion and speaking elliptically, the ugly is less real than the beautiful, and in short that it exists only thanks to an underlying beauty which it disfigures; in a word, it is the reality of an unreality, or the possibility of an impossibility, like all privative manifestations. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

In the case of the examples just mentioned, we are obviously at the antipodes, not perhaps of certain medieval miniatures nor of the noblest and most spring-like works of the Quattrocento, but of the dramatic titanism, and the fleshly and vulgar delirium, of the megalomaniacs of the Renaissance and the 17th century, infatuated with anatomy, turmoil, marble and gigantism. Non-traditional art, about which a few words must be said here, embraces the classical art of antiquity and the Renaissance, and Continues up to the 19th century which, reacting against academicism, gives rise to impressionism and analogous styles; this reaction rapidly decomposes into all sorts of perversities, either "abstract" or "surrealistic": in any case, it is of "subrealism" that one ought to speak here. It goes without saying that worthwhile works are to be found incidentally both in impressionism and in Classicism - in which we include romanticism, since its technical principles are the same -, for the cosmic qualities cannot but manifest themselves in this realm, and a given individual aptitude cannot but lend itself to this manifestation; but these exceptions, in which the positive elements succeed in neutralizing the erroneous or insufficient principles, are far from being able to compensate for the serious drawbacks of extratraditional art, and we would gladly do without all its productions if it were possible to disencumber the world from the heavy mortgage of Western culturism, with its vices of impiety, dispersion and poisonousness. The least that one can say is that it is not this kind of grandeur that brings us closer to Heaven. "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, fundamentally belongs to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being. The cosmic, and more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent and sensitive creature the recollection of essences, and thus to open the way to the luminous Night of the one and infinite Essence. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

A moralist would no doubt maintain that the expression of a face, even of one that is well proportioned, is ugly when the individual gives way to the passions; but this apparently acceptable opinion is in serious danger of being wrong in reality, for in the young the expression is often beautiful, thanks to the cosmic beauty inherent in youth; it is then, strictly speaking, youth itself, and not a particular creature who happens to be young, that manifests beauty. The passions readily take on the impersonal and innocent beauty of the forces of nature, but they are limiting and privative, since we are intellectual creatures and not birds or plants; our personality is not restricted to bodily beauty nor to youth, it is not made for this base world, but is condemned to pass through it. It is for this reason that beauty and youth desert man in the end; he is then left with nothing, if he has identified himself with his flesh, save physical degradation together with the ugliness of greed and hardness of heart, to which are added the vanity of regrets and the emptiness of a wasted life; but in all this the real beauty possessed by man has no place, any more than has the Creator whose Beatitude this beauty reflects. Attempts to moralize beauty and ugliness must be opposed, however convenient confusions of this kind may be from this or that relative point of view. [NA: There are people who denigrate beauty because their favorite saint does not possess it, or who adopt the contrary attitude and falsify the notion of beauty so as to oblige their saint to be beautiful. It is, however, suffi cient to know that the saints possess beauty in eternity, and that ugliness or something that comes near to it can be a means of sanctification here below, as indeed can beauty, though in a different way.] sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Sensible forms therefore correspond with exactness to intellections, and it is for this reason that traditional art has rules which apply the cosmic laws and universal principles to the domain of forms, and which, beneath their more general outward aspect, reveal the ’style’ of the civilization under consideration, this ’style’ in its turn rendering explicit the form of intellectuality of that civilization. When art ceases to be traditional and becomes human, individual, and therefore arbitrary, that is infallibly the sign - and secondarily the cause - of an intellectual decline, a weakening, which, in the sight of those who know how to ’discriminate between the spirits’ and who look upon things with an unprejudiced eye, is expressed by the more or less incoherent and spiritually insignificant, we would go even as far as to say unintelligible character of the forms. [NA: We are referring here to the decadence of certain branches of religious art during the Gothic period, especially in its latter part, and to Western art as a whole from the Renaissance onward: Christian art (architecture, sculpture, painting, liturgical goldsmithery, etc.), which formerly was sacred, symbolical, spiritual, had to give way before the invasion of neo-antique and naturalistic, individualistic and sentimental art; this art, which contained absolutely nothing ’miraculous’- no matter what those who believe in the ’Greek miracle’ may care to think - is quite unfitted for the transmission of intellectual intuitions and no longer even answers to collective psychic aspirations; it is thus as far removed as can be from intellectual contemplation and takes into consideration feelings only; on the other hand, feeling lowers itself in proportion as it fulfils the needs of the masses, until it finishes up in a sickly and pathetic vulgarity. It is strange that no one has understood to what a degree this barbarism of forms, which reached a zenith of empty and miserable exhibitionism in the period of Louis XV, contributed - and still contributes - to driving many souls (and by no means the worst) away from the Church; they feel literally choked in surroundings which do not allow their intelligence room to breathe. Let us note in passing that the historical connection between the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome - of the Renaissance period, therefore anti-spiritual and rhetorical, ’human’ if so preferred - and the origin of the Reformation are unfortunately very far from fortuitous.] sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

It has often been noticed that Oriental peoples, including those reputed to be the most artistic, show themselves for the most part entirely lacking in aesthetical discernment with regard to whatever comes to them from the West. All the ugliness born of a world more and more devoid of spirituality spreads over the East with unbelievable facility, not only under the influence of politico-economic factors, which would not be so surprising, but also by the free consent of those who, by all appearances, had created a world of beauty, that is a civilization, in which every expression, including the most modest, bore the imprint of the same genius. Since the very beginning of Western infiltration, it has been astonishing to see the most perfect works of art set side by side with the worst trivialities of industrial production, and these disconcerting contradictions have taken place not only in the realm of ’art products’, but in nearly every sphere, setting aside the fact that in a normal civilization, everything accomplished by man is related to the domain of art, in some respects at least. The answer to this paradox is very simple, however, and we have already outlined it in the preceding pages: it resides in the fact that forms, even the most unimportant, are the work of human hands in a secondary manner only; they originate first and foremost from the same supra-human source from which all tradition originates, which is another way of saying that the artist who lives in a traditional world devoid of ’rifts’, works under the discipline or the inspiration of a genius which surpasses him; fundamentally he is but the instrument of this genius, if only from the fact of his craftsman’s qualification. [NA: ’A thing is not only what it is for the senses, but also what it represents. Natural or artifi cial objects are not . . . arbitrary " symbols" of such or such a different or superior reality; but they are.., the effective manifestation of that reality: the eagle or the lion, for example, is not so much the symbol or the image of the Sun as it is the Sun under one of its manifest ations (the essential form being more important than the nature in which it manifests itself); in the same way, every house is the world in effigy and every altar is situated at the centre of the earth . . . ’ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: ’The Primitive Mentality’ in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, August-September-October, 1939). It is solely and exclusively traditional art - in the widest sense of the word, implying all that is of an externally formal order, and therefore a fortiori everything which belongs in some way or other to the ritual domain - it is only this art, transmitted with tradition and by tradition, which can guarantee the adequate analogical correspondence between the divine arid the cosmic orders on the one hand, and the human or ’artistic’ order on the other. As a result, the traditional artist does not limit himself simply to imitating Nature, but to ’imitating Nature in her manner of operation’ (St. Thomas Aquinas  , Sum. Theol. I, qu. 117, a. I) and it goes without saying that the artist cannot, with his own individual means, improvise such a ’cosmological’ operation. It is by the entirely adequate conformity of the artist to this ’manner of operation’, a conformity which is subordinated to the rules of tradition, that the masterpiece is created; in other words, this conformity essentially presupposes a knowledge, which may be either personal, direct and active, or inherited, indirect and passive, the latter case being that of those artisans who, unconscious as individuals of the metaphysical content of the forms they have learned to create, know not how to resist the corrosive influence of the modern West.] Consequently, individual taste plays only a relatively subordinate part in the production of the forms of such an art, and this taste will be reduced to nothing as soon as the individual finds himself face to face with a form which is foreign to the spirit of his own Tradition; that is what happens in the case of a people unfamiliar with Western civilization when they encounter the forms imported from the West. However, for this to happen, it is necessary that the people accepting such confusion should no longer be fully Conscious of their own spiritual genius, or in other terms, that they should no longer be capable of understanding the forms with which they are still surrounded and in which they live; it is in fact a proof that the people in question are already suffering from a certain decadence. Because of this fact, they are led to accept modern ugliness all the more easily because it may answer to certain inferior possibilities that those people are already spontaneously seeking to realize, no matter how, and it may well be quite subconsciously; therefore, the unreasoning readiness with which only too many Orientals (possibly even the great majority) accept things which are utterly incompatible with the spirit of their Tradition is best explained by the fascination exercised over an ordinary person by something corresponding to an as yet unexhausted possibility, this possibility being, in the present case, simply that of arbitrariness or want of principle. However that may be, and without wishing to attach too much importance to this explanation of what appears to be the complete lack of taste shown by Orientals, there is one fact which is absolutely certain, namely that very many Orientals themselves no longer understand the sense of the forms they inherited from their ancestors, together with their whole Tradition. All that has just been said applies of course first and foremost and a fortiori to the nations of the West themselves who, after having created - we will not say ’invented’- a perfect traditional art, proceeded to disown it in favour of the residues of the individualistic and empty art of the Graeco-Ro mans, which has finally led to the artistic chaos of the modern world. We know very well that there are some who will not at any price admit the unintelligibility or the ugliness of the modern world, and who readily employ the word ’aesthetic’, with a derogatory nuance similar to that attaching to the words ’picturesque’ and ’romantic’, in order to discredit in advance the importance of forms, so that they may find themselves more at ease in the enclosed system of their own barbarism. Such an attitude has nothing surprising in it when it concerns avowed modernists, but it is worse than illogical, not to say rather despicable, coming from those who claim to belong to the Christian civilization; for to reduce the spontaneous and normal language of Christian art - a language the beauty of which can hardly be questioned - to a worldly matter of ’taste’- as if medieval art could have been the product of mere caprice - amounts to admitting that the signs stamped by the genius of Christianity on all its direct and indirect expressions were only a contingency unrelated to that genius and devoid of serious importance, or even due to a mental inferiority; for ’only the spirit matters’- so say certain ignorant people imbued with hypocritical, iconoclastic, blasphemous and impotent puritanism, who pronounce the word ’spirit’ all the more readily because they are the last to know what it really stands for. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

It will be appreciated that rules such as these are not dictated by merely ’aesthetic’ reasons and that they represent, on the contrary, applications of cosmic and divine laws; beauty will flow from them as a necessary result. As regards beauty in naturalistic art, it does not reside in the work as such, but solely in the object which it copies, whereas in symbolic and traditional art it is the work in itself which is beautiful, whether it be abstract’ or whether it borrows beauty in a greater or lesser degree from a natural model. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of this distinction than that afforded by a comparison between so-called ’classical’ Greek art and Egyptian art: the beauty of the latter does not, in fact, lie simply and solely in the object represented, but resides simultaneously and a fortiori in the work as such, that is to say in the ’inward reality’ which the work makes manifest. The fact that naturalistic art has sometimes succeeded in expressing nobility of feeling or vigorous intelligence is not in question and may be explained by cosmological reasons which could not but exist; but that has no connection with art as such, and no individual value could ever make up for the falsification of the latter. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

We must never lose sight of the fact that as soon as art ceases to be a pure and simple ideography - which is perfectly within its rights, for how should the decorative element of art be banned when it is everywhere in nature? - it has a mission from which nothing can make it deviate. This mission is to transmit spiritual values, whether these are saving truths or cosmic qualities, including human virtues. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Hindu art has in it both something of the heavy motion of the sea and at the same time something of the exuberance of virgin forest; it is sumptuous, sensual and rhythmical; intimately linked with dancing, it seems to originate in the cosmic dance of the Gods. In certain respects the Tamil style is heavier and more static than that of the Aryan Hindus of northern India. Islamic art is abstract, but also poetical and gracious; it is woven out of sobriety and splendour. The style of the Maghreb is perhaps more virile than are the Turkish and Persian styles; but these - and especially the latter - are by way of compensation more varied. Within the field of Chinese art, which is rich, powerful and full of the unexpected and the mysterious, the Japanese style represents a tendency towards soberness and elegance. The Tibetan style is midway between that of the Chinese and the Hindus and is heavy, sombre, at times rough and often fierce; the Burmese and Siamese style is delicate, lively and precious. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Being absolute, the supreme Principle is ipso facto infinite; the masculine body accentuates the first aspect, and the feminine body, the second. On the basis of these two hypostatic aspects, the divine Principle is the source of all possible perfection, this is to say that, being the Absolute and the Infinite, It is necessarily also Perfection or the Good. Now each of the two bodies, the masculine and the feminine , manifests modes of perfection by definition evoked by their respective sex; all cosmic qualities are divided in fact into two complementary groups: the rigorous and the gentle, the active and the passive, the contractive and the expansive. The human body, as we have said, is an image of Deliverance: now the liberating Way may be either "virile" or "feminine," although it is not possible to have a strict line of demarcation between the two modes for man (homo, anthropos) is always man; the non-material being that was the primordial androgyne, survives in each of us. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

There is not only the beauty of the adult, there is also that of the child as our mention of the Child Jesus suggests. First of all, it must be said that the child, being human, participates in the same symbolism and in the same aesthetic expressivity as do his parents - we are speaking always of man as such and not of particular individuals - and then, that childhood is nevertheless a provisional state and does not in general have the definitive and representative value of maturity. [NA: But it can when the individual value of the child visibly over rides his state of immaturity; notwithstanding the fact that childhood is in itself an incomplete state which points towards its own completion.] In metaphysical symbolism, this provisional character expresses relativity: the child is what "comes after" his parents, he is the reflection of Atmâ in Mâyâ, to some degree and according to the ontological or cosmological level in view; or it is even Mâyâ itself if the adult is Atmâ. [NA: Polarized into "Necessary Being" and "All-Possibility."] But from an altogether different point of view, and according to inverse analogy, the key to which is given by the seal of Solomon, [NA: When a tree is mirrored in a lake, its top is at the bottom, but the image is always that of a tree; the analogy is inverse in the first relationship and parallel in the second. Analogies between the divine order and the cosmic order always comprise one or the other of these relationships.] the child represents on the contrary what "was before," namely what is simple, pure, innocent, primordial and close to the Essence, and this is what its beauty expresses; [NA: We do not say that every human individual is beautiful when he is a child, but we start from the idea that man, child or not, is beautiful to the extent that he is physically what he ought to be.] this beauty has all the charm of promise, of hope and of blossoming, at the same time as that of a Paradise not yet lost; it combines the proximity of the Origin with the tension towards the Goal. And it is for that reason that childhood constitutes a necessary aspect of the integral man, therefore in conformity with the divine Intention: the man who is fully mature always keeps, in equilibrium with wisdom, the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, that he possessed in the springtime of his life. [NA: "Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." (Matthew   18:3)] Since we have just mentioned the principle of inverse analogy, we may here connect it with its application to femininity: even though a priori femininity is subordinate to virility, it also comprises an aspect which makes it superior to a given aspect of the masculine pole; for the divine Principle has an aspect of unlimitedness, virginal mystery and maternal mercy which takes precedence over a certain more relative aspect of determination, logical precision and implacable justice. [NA: According to Tacitus, the Germans discerned something sacred and visionary in women. The fact that in German the sun (die Sonne) is feminine whereas the moon (der Mond) is masculine, bears witness to the same perspective.] Seen thus, feminine beauty appears as an initiatic wine in the face of the rationality represented in certain respects by the masculine body. [NA: Mahâyanic art represents Prajnâpâramitâ, the "Perfection of Gnosis," in feminine form; likewise, Prajnâ, liberating Knowledge, appears as a woman in the face of Upâya, the doctrinal system or the art of convincing, which is represented as masculine. The Buddhists readily point out that the Bodhisattvas, in themselves asexual, have the power to take a feminine form as they do any other form; now one would like to know for what reason they do so, for if the feminine form can produce such a great good, it is because it is intrinsically good; otherwise there would be no reason for a Bodhisattva to assume it.] sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

We have alluded above to the evolutionist error which was inevitable in connection with our considerations on the deiformity of man, and which permits us here to insert a parenthesis. The animal, vegetable and mineral species not only manifest qualities or combinations of qualities, they also manifest defects or combinations of defects; this is required by All-Possibility, which on pain of being limited - of not being what it is - must also express "possible impossibilities," or let us say negative and paradoxical possibilities; it implies in consequence excess as well as privation, thereby emphasizing norms by means of contrasts. In this respect, the ape, for example, is there to show what man is and what he is not, and certainly not to show what he has been; far from being able to be a virtual form of man, the ape incarnates an animal desire to be human, hence a desire of imitation and usurpation; but he finds itself as if before a closed door and falls back all the more heavily into its animality, the perfect innocence of which, it can no longer recapture, if one may make use of such a metaphor; it is as if the animal, prior to the creation of man and to protest against it, had wished to anticipate it, which evokes the refusal of Lucifer to prostrate before Adam. [NA: According to the Talmud   and the Koran.] This does not prevent the ape from being sacred in India, perhaps on account of its anthropomorphism, or more likely in virtue of associations of ideas due to an extrinsic symbolism; [NA: As was the case for the boar, which represents sacerdotal authority for the Nordics; or as the rhinoceros symbolizes the sannyâsi.] this also would explain in part the role played by the apes in the Ramayana, unless in this case it is a question of subtle creatures - the jinn of Islam - of whom the ape is only a likeness. [NA: The story recounted in the Râmayana is situated at the end of the " silver age" (Treta- Yuga) and consequently in a climate of possibilities quite different from that of the " iron age" (Kali- Yuga); the partition between the material and animic states was not yet " hardened" or " congealed" as is above all the case in our epoch.] One may wonder whether the intrinsically noble animals, hence those directly allowing of a positive symbolism, are not themselves also theophanies; they are so necessarily, and the same holds true for given plants, minerals, cosmic or terrestrial phenomena, but in these cases the theomorphism is partial and not integral as in man. The splendor of the stag excludes that of the lion, the eagle cannot be the swan, nor the water lily the rose, nor the emerald the sapphire; from a somewhat different point of view , we would say that the sun doubtless manifests in a direct and simple manner the divine Majesty, but that it has neither life nor spirit; [NA: It can nevertheless have a sacrament al function with regard to men who are sensitive to cosmic barakah.] only man is the image-synthesis of the Creator, [NA: And this in spite of the loss of the earthly paradise. One of the effects of what monotheist symbolism calls the " fall of Adam," was the separation between the soul and the body, conjointly with the separation between heaven and earth and between the spirit and the soul. The " resurrection of the flesh" is none other than the restoration of the primordial situation; as the body is an immanent virtuality of the soul, it can be remanifested as soon as the separative " curse" has drawn to its close, which coincides with the end of a great cycle of humanity.] owing to the fact that he possesses the intellect - hence also reason and language - and that he manifests it by his very form. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

One may wonder why the Hindus, and still more so the Buddhists, did not fear to furnish their sacred art with occasions for a fall, given that beauty - sexual beauty above all - invites to "let go of the prey for its shadow," that is, to forget the transcendent content through being attached to the earthly husk. Now it is not for nothing that Buddhist art, more than any other, has given voice to the terrible aspects of cosmic manifestation, which at the very least constitutes a "reestablishing of the balance": the spectator is warned, he cannot lose sight of the everywhere present menace of the pitiless samsâra, nor that of the Guardians of the Sanctuary. Darshan - the contemplation of the Divine in nature or in art - quite clearly presupposes a contemplative temperament; now it is this very temperament that comprises a sufficient guarantee against the spirit of compliance and profanation. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

All its attempts at explanations regarding things of this order are vitiated basically through a defect of imagination: all things are viewed in function firstly, of empirical "matter" - even if called by some other name and secondly, of the evolutionist hypothesis, instead of primary consideration being given to the principial and "descending" emanation of "ideas" and the progressive coagulation of substances, [NA: Where the perennial philosophy says "Principle, emanation substance" modern science will say "energy, matter, evolution." ...] in conformity with the principle of individuation on the one hand and of demiurgic "solidification" on the other. One tries to explain "horizontally" that which is explainable only "in a vertical sense"; it is as though we were living in a glacial world where water was unknown and where only the Revelations mentioned it, whereas profane science would deny its existence. Such a science is assuredly cut to the measure of modern man who conceived it and who is at the same time its product; like him, it implicitly claims a sort of immunity or "extraterritoriality" in the face of the Absolute; and like him, this science finds itself cut off from any cosmic or eschatological context.[Treasures of Buddhism, p. 43-44. sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

Science, like the machine, has reversed the roles, turning its creators into its own creatures; it escapes the control of intelligence as such from the moment that it claims to define the nature of intelligence from the outside and from below. Our timeless cosmic environment has been deprived of its teaching function in being replaced with a "stage setting": the stellar vault has been turned into the extension of a laboratory, bodily beauty is reduced to the mechanism of natural selection. sophiaperennis: Science and technique, industry, machines

"The truths ... expressed [by the Sophia Perennis] are not the exclusive possession of any school or individual; were it otherwise they would not be truths, for these cannot be invented, but must necessarily be known in every integral traditional civilization. It might, however, reasonably be asked for what human and cosmic reasons truths that may in a very general sense be called "esoteric" should be brought to light and made explicit at the present time, in an age that is so little inclined to speculation. There is indeed something abnormal in this, but it lies, not in the fact of the exposition of these truths, but in the general condition of our age, which marks the end of a great cyclic period of terrestrial humanity — the end of a maha-yuga according to Hindu cosmology — and so must recapitulate or manifest again in one way or another everything that is included in the cycle, in conformity with the adage : "extremes meet"; thus things that are in themselves abnormal may become necessary by reason of the conditions just referred to. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

Pseudo-Vedantist ’subjectivism’— which in reality is solipsism — is incapable of taking stock of the objective homogeneity of the cosmic environment. (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 114). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

One particular of grace is ecstasy. Here too one must distinguish between the true and the false, the spiritual and the morbid — even the demonic. A very rare and, at the same time, most paradoxical exception is accidental ecstasy, something which, in this context, we cannot pass over in silence. It may happen that someone entirely profane has a real ecstatic experience, without understanding how and why; such an experience is unforgettable and has a more or less profound effect upon the character of the person concerned. This is a matter of a cosmic accident of which the causes lie far distant in the individual’s destiny, or in his karma — merits acquired in the past and before birth — as Hindus and Buddhists would say. But it would be a serious mistake to see in such an experience a spiritual acquisition of a conscious and active character, for such an event can only be a call to an authentic way on which one starts again at the beginning: quaerite et invenietis. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

The profound explanation of the myths of the "sinful" woman, "prisoner" of chthonic powers, "ravished" by a demon, "swallowed" by the earth, or even become infernal — Eve, Eurydice, Sita, Izanami, according to case — this explanation doubtless is to be fond in the scission between the male demiurge and the female demiurge, or between the center and the periphery of the cosmos; this periphery being envisaged then, not as the cosmic substance as such, which remains virgin in relation to its production, but as the totality of these productions; for it is the accidents, and not the substance, which comprise "evil" in all its forms. But, aside from the fact that the substance remains virgin even while being mother, it is redeemed at the very level of its exteriorization through its positive contents, which are in principle sacramental and saving; symbolically speaking, if "woman" was lost through choosing "matter" or the "world", she was redeemed — and is redeemed — through giving birth to the Avatara. And besides, "everything is Atma"; and "it is not for the love of the husband (or of the wife or the son) that the husband (or the wife or the son) is dear, but for the love of Atma which in him". That is, the feminine element — the Substance — is by definition a mirror of the Essence, despite its exteriorizing and alienating function; moreover, a mirror is necessarily separated from what it reflects, and therein lies its ambiguity. [Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, p.53-54]. sophiaperennis: Femininity