Two kinds of genius may escort you throughout life.
True Goodness falls on him who lets them lead as one.
Beauty enlivens and makes brief the winding road;
Duty and fate grow lighter with her by your side—
She leads with gracefulness and laughter to the edge.
And there, mortality waits by eternal seas.
There, you’ll discover the Sublime—daring and grave.
Never place your fate in just one: rely not on
The first for dignity, nor on the last for luck!

Translation © David B. Gosselin

Reflections on the Beautiful & the Sublime

The question of Beauty and the Sublime, and the relationship of these two distinct but intimately related concepts occupied much of the poet Friedrich Schiller’s time. This relationship was explored in his dramas like The Virgin of Orleans, Don Carlos, and Wilhelm Tell, but also in his philosophical verses like “The Guides of Life,” and his writings on aesthetics.

As part of his studies, Schiller composed a series of 27 “Letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” There Schiller explored the function of the fine arts and a classical education in society with the recognition that human beings would always remain incomplete and often awkward or deficient beings—regardless of how many rules and laws were legislated—unless they were able to adequately cultivate the sentiments necessary for an appreciation of both the Beautiful and the Sublime. In Schiller’s mind, as in the mind of many of the greatest classical thinkers, the relationship between the aesthetic principles of Beauty and the moral laws of universe were not separate; they were simply distinct reflections of the same universal order and harmony characterizing a cosmos composed according to Reason, and man’s innate ability to conceptualize and act on the principles of Reason, unlike beasts which had to rely on their inborn instincts, making them never free to venture beyond these predetermined guides.

Schiller’s reflections on the nature of art and its relationship to the development of a truly free and harmoniously composed society were in many ways spurred by the reigning philosophical system of Kant, the archetypal strict Apollonian system where virtue and morality were by and large framed as a question of “following the rules.”

So in his first letter, Schiller writes:

“Only the philosophers disagree concerning the ideas which prevail in the practical part of the Kantian system, but men, I am confident of proving, were always in agreement on them. If the ideas are liberated from their technical form, they will appear as the time-honored maxims of common sense, and as facts of the moral instinct, which wise nature appointed as the guardian of man, until his clear intelligence makes him mature. But this technical form, which renders truth visible to the understanding, in turn conceals truth from feeling, for unfortunately the understanding must first destroy the object of the inner sense, if it wants to appropriate the object as its own.”

Rather than a strict Apollonian or Kantian definition of Beauty which simply involves following “the rules” and adhering to formal principles—Formalism—Schiller introduces the idea of the “play instinct” as the mediating and transcendent instinct between what he identified as a “sensuous instinct” (man’s material condition) and the “formal instinct” (man’s reason). The “play instinct” serves as the fundamental driver for any truly creative mind whose mastery of form was understood as a means of granting him the freedom to create and participate in a truly thriving culture driven by new creative breakthroughs in both the sciences and arts.

So in his ninth letter, Schiller writes about art’s mediating role in fully cultivating the higher faculties of man:

“The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away from you, but they will accept them in play; their taste is more chaste than their heart, and that is where you must take hold of the shy one who is fleeing you. You will besiege their maxims in vain, to no avail will you condemn their deeds, but you can try your formative hand with their indolence. Chase away what is arbitrary, the frivolity, the crudeness from their pleasures, and in that way you shall banish these, unnoticed, from their deeds and finally their beliefs. Wherever you find them, surround them with noble, with grand, with brilliant forms, surround them with symbols of what is excellent, until the appearance vanquishes reality, and art vanquishes nature.”

In the first letter, Schiller begins by stating that few would disagree on the moral maxims and “categorical imperative” of Kant’s ethical system, but that no one in reality really learns or seeks to realize their true natural human potentials and desire to do good by simply “following the rules.” For, Schiller points out that one can follow rules without desiring to do so or not because of his love of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. In fact, for many following the rules takes the form of a blind adherence to formalism and rarefied forms of religion in which self-righteousness and virtue signalling, or simply slavishly going along with convention, either out of fear or for the purposes of maintaining appearances, upends the natural end for which The Laws and a philosophical investigation of the fundamental principles of nature were first laid out i.e. for the sake of living a happy and good life that benefits not only the individual, but society as a whole. For Schiller, anything short of performing one’s duty out of love and a desire for Truth and Goodness as ends in themselves constituted an individual’s failure to develop into a complete and whole individual—the condition of what Schiller called “the beautiful soul.”

It was by man perfecting himself as a true and whole human being that he could show his genuine love for God and be his neighbor’s keeper. Otherwise, one could technically “follow the rules,” but as Paul stated in 1st Corinthians 13:

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

Schiller understood that the ugliness and deformity of human character could never be fundamentally changed by simply introducing any kind of Legalistic or tyrannical system of reward and punishment—the kind typified by Pavlovian systems of control and classical conditioning, or purely religious dogmas based on faith without reason—but that were society to ever become truly free and stable, not destined to “boom and bust” cycles characterized by the vacillation between barbarism and anarchy, then a proper education of the sentiments and desires of the general population was a necessary condition for freedom. Schiller recognized that this could never be achieved by a system rules alone, however noble, diligently codified, or brutally enforced. Schiller ultimately pointed out that such systems would ultimately only enforce the notion of men as natural beasts, evidenced by the monumental and strict systems of reward and punishment established across societies to get everyone “in line.”

While one could argue that there is a high percentage of “following the rules” and “compliance” in totalitarian states and Legalistic tyrannies, one can’t necessarily say that these are “good societies,” and definitely not genuinely creative societies that thrive on the cultivation and flourishing of the highest faculties of its citizens. Additionally, despite the refining power of Beautiful forms, Schiller also recognized that there occur times in which reality requires individuals to violate the desire for their own natural self-preservation, comfort, pleasure, or self-interest. Beyond simply the question of rules and the ordered principles of Beauty, Schiller recognized that while the Beautiful in all its manifestations served as a guide for harmonizing both the sensual dimensions of man as well as his reason, in his “Guides of Life” he identified the need in both art and life for a second guide, “the Sublime.”

Schiller describes this sentiment in the following manner:

“The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a combination of woefulness, which expresses itself in its highest degree as a shudder, and of joyfulness, which can rise up to enrapture, and, although it is not properly pleasure, is yet widely preferred to every pleasure by fine souls. This union of two contradictory sentiments in a single feeling proves our moral independence in an irrefutable manner. For as it is absolutely impossible that the same object stand in two opposite relations to us, so does it follow therefrom, that we ourselves stand in two different relations to the object, so that consequently two opposite natures must be united in us, which are interested in the conception of the same in completely opposite ways. We therefore experience through the feeling of the sublime, that the state of our mind does not necessarily conform to the state of the senses, that the laws of nature are not necessarily also those of ours, and that we have in us an independent principle, which is independent of all sensuous emotions.”

In this respect, one can think of the opulence of richly adorned kings and their ancient palaces in which courts and rulers were everywhere surrounded by Beauty, including beautiful architecture, fine linens, lavish feasts, and illustrious speakers. However, in such cases, especially when a majority of the population still lived in deplorable conditions, the “stability” of a society depended on being able to provide the serfs and plebs with enough bread and circus for them to not revolt (as in the Roman Empire). Schiller recognized the limitations of Beauty unbridled by any higher system of lawfulness, that there were times in which a “higher system” of nature had to kick in.

Schiller gives us a wonderful example of the Sublime in action by hearkening back to Homer’s Odyssey:

“Beauty in the form of the goddess Calypso has enchanted the valiant son of Ulysses, and, through the power of her charms, she holds him for a long time imprisoned upon her island. For long he believes he is paying homage to an immortal deity, since he lies only in the arms of voluptuousness—but a sublime impression seizes him suddenly in the form of Mentor: He remembers his better destiny, throws himself into the waves, and is free.”

Further on in his essay “On the Sublime,” Schiller reflects on the liberating power of the Sublime:

“Does one now remember, what value it must have for a being of reason, to become conscious of his independence of natural laws, so one comprehends how it occurs that men of sublime bent of mind can hold out for compensation, through this idea offered to them of freedom, for every disappointment of cognition? Freedom, with all of its moral contradictions and physical evils, is for noble souls an infinitely more interesting spectacle than prosperity and order without freedom, where the sheep patiently follow the shepherd and the self-commanding will is degraded to the subservient part of a clockwork. The latter makes man merely into a spirited product and a more fortunate citizen of nature; freedom makes him into the citizen and co-ruler of a higher system, where it is infinitely more honorable, to occupy the nethermost place, than to command the ranks in the physical order.”

With the Sublime in mind, and returning to Schiller’s ninth letter, we find the poet’s requirements for the mature and fully-ripened artist:

“The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favorite! Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it.”

Schiller encouraged his readers to seek out the Beautiful as a guide and surround themselves and society with it in order to educate tastes, elevate desires, and chase away deformity, but also cautioned them not to place their fate in it alone. While Beauty makes life’s journey seem briefer, more enjoyable, and desirable even in the face of major trials, on the edges of life’s uncertain pathways awaits the Sublime, eternally—something which immortal and undying poets like Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare et al were always conscious of and actively sought to capture in their works. Alas, Schiller reminds us never to trust in one guide alone, neither “the first for dignity, nor the last for luck!”

David Gosselin is a poet, researcher, and translator in Montreal, Canada. He is the founding editor of The Chain​ed Muse. His personal Substack is Age of Muses, where he publishes historical deep-dives, original poetry and a variety of writings for a new renaissance. His new book A Renaissance or New Middle Ages: Magic, Mystery, and the Trance Formation of the West can be purchased here

By Gerald Therrien

With all the hoopla about a new movie on Homer’s Odyssey, I decided it was time to correct certain errors in my presentation of Homer’s Odyssey first presented to The Rising Tide Foundation in 2022.

In that earlier location, I had attempted to sort out all the different questions about whether or not Odysseus had sailed to the Americas, and this presupposed the question of the location of Atlantis – whether it was in the Americas or in the Atlantic in the Azores or in Spain.

However, all that dizzying speculation came to an end when I read the amazing book by Jack Kelley – ‘The Atlantis Puzzle’, and the ground-breaking work of Professor George Sarantitis, that finally proved the location of Atlantis to be in Africa – along the great river systems of the Green Sahara, that would empty out into the Mediterranean Sea at Gades (in present-day Tunisia).

While I found that I was correct with my earlier locations of ‘the Lotus-Eaters’, ‘the Cyclopes’, ‘Aeolia’, ‘the Lestrygonians’, ‘Circe and Aiaia’, and ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, I wished to correct my wrong locations of ‘Thrinacia’, and ‘Ogygia’ and of course ‘Scheria’ (Atlantis).

Here is my revised edition of ‘Re-discovering the Odyssey of Homer. Was it History or a Myth?’

1. Homer and Virgil

One way of looking at Homer is shown by Rembrandt’s painting of ‘Virgil contemplating the bust of Homer’ – Virgil vainly trying to figure out how Homer was able to compose his poem.

Rembrandt has the light shining on the bust of Homer in such a way that it looks like the light is instead coming from Homer and shining outward, and he has Virgil placing one hand on Homer’s head while his other hand is holding his nice shiny gold chains.

So, Rembrandt contrasts Homer, who is Plato’s Aristocratic man who is motivated by discovery and creativity, against Virgil, who is Plato’s Timocratic man who is motivated by power and by the appearance of honor. Rembrandt so poetically shows this conflict in Virgil with one hand on Homer and the other hand on his gold.

Virgil, who lived 70 – 19 BC, was commissioned by Caesar Augustus to write an epic that would legitimize the duty and obedience owed to the ‘pax romana’ of the new Roman Empire. Virgil spent over 10 years writing the ‘Aeneid’ when he died in 19 BC – in which he never once mentioned Homer, but he did show how he despised Odysseus, calling him a ‘heartless schemer’, a ‘master-craftsman of crime’ and the ‘double-talking Ulysses’. Unfortunately, Dante never read Homer (the first translation of the Odyssey into Latin wasn’t done until 30 years after Dante’s death), and he had to rely on Virgil and other Latin writers for the story of the life of Odysseus, which is why Dante places Odysseus in the 8^th circle of Hell. However, Dante still must have come to understand the problem with Virgil, as he wouldn’t let Virgil enter Paradise – only Purgatory and Hell.

Some people believe that Homer’s poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were not true history but were simply myths that he concocted, just as Virgil concocted his myth of the ‘Aeneid’.

But that was until Heinrich Schliemann’s defiant discovery of the ruins of Troy in the 1870’s, changed peoples’ minds and proved that the ‘Iliad’ and Trojan war did happen.

But what about Homer’s other poem, the Odyssey? Was that based on true events, or was it just a myth or a fable? Now, some of you may have read Homer, and some may not have. So, first, who was Homer?

2. Life of Homer

According to Herodotus in his ‘Life of Homer’, Melesigenes (his real name) a teacher at Smyrna, decided to join Mentes, a shipowner, to visit different places – to see the world while he was still young. On one trip on their way back from Spain and Etruria, he became very ill with an eye disease, and was left at Ithaca at the home of Mentor, a friend of Mentes, and while recuperating, he researched and learned the story of Odysseus.

Later, he rejoined Mentes to sail with him, until his eye disease returned, but this time he didn’t recover and became blind.

In the Odyssey, Homer repays his friends by having Athena take the guise of Mentes (book 1) and take the guise of Mentor (book 2) – so he’s already changing history a little bit!

Melesigenes returned home to Smyrna and decided to try his hand at poetry. Later, he decided to go to Cyme and asked the city, if they supported him at public expense that he would bring great glory to their city. However they decided that if they would support all of the ‘homeroi’ (what the Cymaeans called the blind) then the city would have a large and useless multitude. That name, ‘homeroi’, stuck with Melesigenes, and from then on, he was called Homer. He travelled and performed his verses in salons in different cities, and eventually he arrived in Chios and there set up a school, settled down, married, had two daughters, and it is here that he most likely composed the Iliad and Odyssey.

Perhaps, it had been possible for Homer to have heard some tales or stories about some voyages of discovery, and for the Odyssey to contain some of these tales. Perhaps, it may be possible that it was just a tale, that it was meant to show us the change in character that Odysseus needed to lead such a voyage of discovery? Or, as I will try to show – that it’s both, and is like the way that Strabo views Homer.

According to Strabo (who lived 64 BC – 24 AD), he writes this:

“Thus it is that our poet, though he sometimes employs fiction for the purposes of instruction, always gives the preference to truth; he makes use of what is false, merely tolerating it in order the more easily to lead and govern the multitude. As a man ‘binds with a golden verge bright silver’, so Homer, heightening by fiction actual occurrences, adorns and embellishes his subject; but his end is always the same as that of the historian, who relates nothing but facts. In this manner he undertook the narration of the Trojan war, gilding it with the beauties of fancy and the wanderings of Odysseus; but we shall never find Homer inventing an empty fable apart from the inculcation of truth.” [from Strabo, Geography, 1.2.9]

So now, we’re going to look at Homer’s Odyssey the way that Strabo says: that Homer took actual events, heightened them with fiction and gilded them with the beauties of fancy, but never without the stamp of truth. The Odyssey is really a story within a story. There is the outer story of Odysseus returning home after ten years of the Trojan War and finding his family and home under an invasion and destruction caused by the many suitors who wished to take over his kingdom. Within this is an inner story of another ten years of wanderings of Odysseus trying to reach home. We’re going to look at this inner story of his wanderings – his Odyssey.

3. Troy to Ismaros

At the end of the war, Odysseus, his men and 12 ships finally left Troy, and travelled to Ismaros, where they sacked the town, killed its men, took their wives and possessions, and divided the loot equally among themselves. The people, the Cicones, called together all their neighbours and the next morning attacked Odysseus and his men, and forced them to flee.

Following ten years of a devastating war, the first thing that Odysseus and his men do, on their return home, is to sack and pillage a town! What is wrong with these people, you ask? Hadn’t they learned anything about war? Or, after 10 years of war, they might think that the world is motivated by power. Homer is showing us how Odysseus and his companions were thinking, at the start of the Odyssey. And because of their actions, their destinies would be punished by ‘an evil fate of Zeus’. But before we blame all this on Zeus, let’s hear what Zeus has to say about it. At a meeting of the gods Zeus said this:

“Well now, how indeed mortal men do blame the gods!
They say it is from us evils come, yet they themselves
By their own recklessness have pains beyond their lot.”

Perhaps, instead of being a punishment, Zeus was steering them onto a path for changing their way of thinking. Zeus raised a ‘North Wind’ and an ‘immense storm’ against them, and, as they were rounding Malea, the southern-most point of Greece, they were driven by destructive winds, away from their return to Ithaca, and after nine days, they reached the land of the ‘Lotus-eaters’.

4. Ismaros to the Lotus-Eaters

We can assume that the Lotus-Eaters lived along the coast of Libya, because according to Herodotus, (who lived 485 – 425 BC) in describing all the inhabitants along the coast of Libya, he wrote this:

“… the projecting coast in front of the Gindanes is possessed by the Lotophages, who (as their name indicates) subsist upon the fruit of the lotus: this fruit is nearly equal in size to that of the mastic, and in sweetness resembles the date. The Lotophages prepare a wine from it…” [from Herodotus, History 4.9]

After landing, Odysseus sent three of his companions to find out who these people were. The Lotus-eaters gave the three men some lotus fruit to eat. But when they ate the lotus fruit, they didn’t want to bring back any word to Odysseus, but just wanted to stay there and eat the lotus fruit, nor to even think of their return to Ithaca. Odysseus had to force his three weeping companions back to the ship, dragging and binding them under the benches, and then he called the rest of his men back to the ship, in case someone else ate the lotus fruit and forgot about returning. They fled from the Lotus-eaters and sailed away – to reach the land of the Cyclopes.

5. the Lotus-eaters to the Cyclopes

We can assume that the Cyclopes lived in Sicily, and that Odysseus had sailed across the Strait, from the land of the Lotus Eaters, to the land of the one-eyed Cyclopes near the great (one-eyed) volcano at Mount Etna in Sicily, because according to Thucydides (who lived 460 – 400 BC), in discussing the expedition of the Athenians against Sicily, he wrote this:

“… the Cyclops and Lestrigons are said to be the most ancient inhabitants of some part of this country; but, from what stock they were derived, or from whence they came hither, or what is become of them since, I have nothing to relate. Poetical amusements must here suffice, or such information as every man picks up for his own use…” [from Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, book 4]

The Cyclops were an uncivilized people who “do not sow plants with their hands and do not plow but everything grows for them unplowed and unsown… they have neither assemblies for holding council nor laws”.

After landing, Odysseus took twelve of his companions with him, and went to inquire about the inhabitants to see “whether they are proud and savage and without justice or are friendly to strangers, and have a god-fearing mind”.

They found and entered the unattended cave of Polyphemos, the giant Cyclops, and son of Poseidon. While his men wished to take away some of the cheeses and sheep back to the ship and then to sail away, Odysseus wished instead to stay and receive a gift from him – since it was the custom at that time for hosts to give gifts to the guests. But the pitiless Polyphemos trapped them in his cave and devoured six of them before Odysseus devised a plan to blind the eye of the Cyclops and to hide under the bellies of the sheep, and make their escape back to their ships. After finally escaping from the Cyclopes, Odysseus and his companions sailed to the island of Aeolia.

6. The Cyclopes to Aeolia

We can assume that Aeolia was one of the volcanic islands of Lipari lying off Sicily’s north-eastern coast, and that Odysseus had sailed from the land of the Cyclopes, around the coast of Sicily, to the island of Aeolia. According to Strabo, in his book ‘Geography’, he wrote this:

“… Homer’s narrative is founded on history. He tells us that king Æolus governed the Lipari Islands, that around Mount Ætna and Leontini dwelt the Cyclopæ, and certain Læstrygonians inhospitable to strangers…” [from Strabo, Geography 1.2.9]

Odysseus and his men stayed there with king Aeolos, the lord of the winds, for a month as guests before seeking to leave. To help them, Aeolos gave Odysseus an ox-hide, inside of which he had bound up all the blustering winds, so that they would not blow at all, and then he sent a gentle breeze to carry them and their ships home, and after ten days, they could finally see their homeland.

But, because of the foolishness and greed of the men who wanted to see how much gold and silver Aeolas had given to Odysseus, while Odysseus was asleep they opened the ox-hide, all the winds rushed out and a storm then carried them all the way back to Aeolia. The men do not seem to have learned anything or to have changed at all, since their actions at Ismaros when Zeus sent the North Wind to change their destiny. Back at Aeolia, Aeolos would not help them since they thought that they must be ‘despised by the gods’, and he sent them away. Leaving Aeolia, Odysseus and his companions sailed for six days until they arrived at the land of the giant Lestrygonians.

7. The Nuragic stone sculptures

We can assume that the Lestrygonians lived on Sardinia, and that Odysseus had sailed from Aeolia, one of the Lipari islands, to the land of the Lestrygonians, on Sardinia, because of the Nuragic statues. Some historians relate that the legend of the giants may be the result of the Greek sightings of the ancient stone sculptures of the Nuragic culture, like those found at Monte Prama – some of them 8 feet tall.

8. Aeolia to the Lestrygonians

Odysseus sent three men to see who lived here, and they found the glorious hall of the king, who was not happy to see them however, but was planning a woeful destruction for them, and then the king snatched one of them and made a meal of him, as the other two rushed back to the ships. But the two men were followed by the giants who attacked all the men and all their ships, of which Homer said this:

“… Thousands of them, like giants and not like men.
From the cliffs they threw boulders the size of a man’s load,
And at once an evil din rose up among the ships
Of men being destroyed and ships being crushed together.
Spearing the men like fish, they bore off their gruesome meal …”

Only Odysseus and his lone ship’s companions were able to escape the destruction, since they had tied up their ship outside of the harbour, but all the other men and the other ships were lost. After fleeing from the giants, Odysseus’ ship landed at the island of Aiaia, the home of the goddess Circe.

9. the Lestrygonians to Aiaia

We can assume that Aiaia is the isle of Elba, because according to Apollonius (who lived 295 – 215 BC) in his poem ‘Argonautica’, Jason landed first at Aethalia and then at Aiaia, and he wrote this:

“So they sailed through the river’s midmost mouth [Gibraltar] and came unto ‘the line of islands’… After leaving ‘the line of islands’ they sailed to the isle of Aethalia… Quickly they sailed thence across the ocean swell with their eyes upon the Tyrsenian [Etruscan] cliffs of Ausonia, and came unto the famous harbour of Aeaea… There they found Circe washing her head in the sea-water…” [from Apollonius, Argonautica, book 4]

After Jason had circum-navigated Europe and entered the Mediterranean sea, he sailed past the ‘line of islands’ to Aethalia that we assume to be Corsica, and then towards the Etruscan shore to Aiaia that we assume to be Elba.

Odysseus’ men, remembering the Cyclops and the giant Lestrygonians, were fearful of searching the island for any inhabitants. After drawing lots, Eurylochus led forth twenty-two men and they found the hall of Circe, who invited the men into her hall to eat and drink, but she stirred a drug into their food, that turned them into swine.

With the help of Hermes, who made him immune to Circe’s drugs, Odysseus was able to free his companions, and they were turned back into men and invited back into her hall to eat and drink (but without any drugs this time) – “until you have taken the spirit into your breast again, as it was when you first left your fatherland”. They stayed for a whole year until they finally wished to return home. When Odysseus asked Circe to show them how to return, Circe wouldn’t tell him how, but she said that they must enter Hades – where our souls go after we die, and to ask this of the soul of Tiresias, the blind prophet who possessed the gift of ‘Foresight’ – not that of predicting the future from a crystal ball but that of foreseeing where the course of events will lead.

Circe gave instructions to Odysseus about how to prepare a sacrifice for the dead, and how to journey to Hades – don’t worry about a guide, stretch out your sails and let the ‘North Wind’ bring you there – remember how Homer earlier had used this metaphor of the ‘North Wind’ sent by Zeus, that had started Odysseus on his voyage.

10. Hades

After arriving at Hades, Odysseus followed the instructions of Circe, prepared a sacrifice and met the soul of Tiresias, who told Odysseus that, first, he will have a disastrous return because of Poseidon:

“… I do not think You will elude the earth-shaker; against you he has laid up a grudge,
In his heart, enraged that you blinded his beloved son.
You may get there yet, even so, though you suffer ills;
If you are willing to check your spirit and your companions’…”

Tiresias forecast that IF you check your spirits that you MIGHT get home. Secondly, he spoke of the sheep and cattle of Hyperion, the god of the sun:

“If you let them go unmolested and think of your return
You may yet get to Ithaca, though you do suffer ills.
If you molest them, then I prophesy destruction
For your ship and companions…”

Tiresias forecast that IF you leave Hyperion’s animals unmolested that you MIGHT reach home. Thirdly, he spoke of making a sacrifice to Poseidon:

“… and carry out fine sacrifices to Lord Poseidon,
A ram, a bull, and a boar, the mounter of sows.
To the immortal gods who possess broad heaven,
To all of them in order.”

Tiresias forecast that IF you finally do reach home, how you would offer a sacrifice to Poseidon and the gods. Tiresias then showed Odysseus how he could speak with other souls of the dead. Odysseus met the soul of his mother, Anticleia, and spoke about his family. Odysseus next met the soul of Agamemnon, who told him of how he was killed by his ‘cursed wife’ and he asked if Odysseus had any news of his son, but Odysseus had none. Odysseus then met the soul of Achilles who asked about his son, and Odysseus spoke of his son’s courage at Troy.

Odysseus also saw the ‘difficult pains’ of three other souls – of Tityos, who was being punished by having his liver eaten by two vultures each day, while it grew back each night; and of Tantalos, who was being punished by standing in a lake beneath fruit trees, but the lake would dry up when he tried to drink, and the wind would blow away the fruit whenever he tried to pick any; and of Sisyphos, who was punished by rolling a monstrous stone to the crest of a hill, before it would roll back down, only to have to push it back up again. Then not wanting to stay any longer, he called his men back to his ship and they sailed away from Hades.

Perhaps, the idea of having to go to Hades, is to reminisce with those who have died – those who were relatives or dear friends or companions – in making your fateful decisions; or to see the punishments of others who did not have good intentions in their fateful decisions. But Odysseus didn’t talk to them – his ‘bold spirit’ talked to their souls. And, perhaps, this metaphor of going to Hades, is trying to indicate that if you wish to discover new worlds, you have to have a bold spirit, to have the courage to be willing to face the great unknown, in order to get there.

11. The Sirens

So, Odysseus and his companions returned to the island of Aiaia where they rested. Circe took Odysseus aside, away from his companions, and again did not tell Odysseus how to return home, but told him how to escape from the next challenges he was to face – first, the Sirens, and then Scylla and Charybdis.

Odysseus told his companions that Circe had said that they must not listen to the voices of the Sirens, or they’ll become enchanted and stay there in the meadow full of flowers and never leave, until their bodies had rotted away. So Odysseus took softened wax and smeared it into the ears of all his companions, so they would not hear the singing. Odysseus alone was allowed to hear their song, and he ordered his men to bind him, hand and foot, to the mast, so that they’d be able to escape the Sirens. And what was it that the Sirens sang that so enchanted Odysseus?

“Come near, much-praised Odysseus, the Achaians’ great glory;
Bring your ship in, so you may listen to our voice.
No one ever yet sped past this place in a black ship
Before he listened to the honey-toned voice from our mouths,
And then he went off delighted and knowing more things.
For we know all the many things that in broad Troy
The Argives and the Trojans suffered at the will of the gods.
We know all that comes to be on the much-nourishing earth.”

The Sirens tempted him with flattery and sang that they could predict his future (unlike the forecast of Tiresias), but Odysseus, being tied up, was able to ‘check his spirit’ and his companions, unable to hear them, were able to sail past the Sirens towards Scylla and Charybdis.

12. Scylla and Charybdis

Circe had told Odysseus that if his companions got past the Sirens, that at that point she couldn’t tell him which of two ways he should take – he, himself, must decide ‘in his heart’.

One way was by the ‘Wandering Rocks’, where all other ships were destroyed by sea waves and storms of destructive fire. The other way was by two crags – Scylla and Charybdis.

On the first crag lives Scylla, who has six very long necks, each one with a terrible head, each head having three rows of teeth, and from every ship that tries to pass, she will snatch a mortal from that passing ship with each of her six heads. On the second crag lives Charybdis, who three times a day will suck back the water terribly and three times a day will send it back – but if you are there when she sucks the water up or sends it back, nothing could save you from evil.

Circe told him to sail by the crag of Scylla – ‘since it is better by far to miss six companions, than all at once’. Odysseus urged his men to row hard against the waves and he urged the pilot to steer towards the crag of Scylla (but he didn’t tell them any more – fearing that if he did, in their fear of what would happen, they’d cease rowing). They were able to escape past the two crags, but were helpless as Scylla snatched away and ate six of the men – ‘the most piteous thing I saw with my eyes of all that I suffered as I sought out the paths of the sea’, and they sailed to the island of Thrinacia, where the god Hyperion kept his beautiful herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.

Metaphorically, sailing past Scylla and Charybdis, was like venturing out into the vast unknown. If we assume that sailing past Scylla and Charybdis, was sailing past the Strait of Gibraltar, then Odysseus must have sailed out into the Atlantic ocean. And this is where there is so much controversy, as some people refuse to admit that Odysseus could have sailed out into the ocean. But in the ‘Life of Homer’, Herodotus wrote that young Homer had sailed to Spain.

It is here that we must pause and learn the lessons of ‘The Atlantis Puzzle’ by Jack Kelly.

13. Pontos

Like Plato, when Homer wishes to talk about the Atlantic Ocean, he uses the word ‘Oceanos’, when he wishes to talk about the Mediterranean Sea, he uses the word ‘Thalassa’, and when he wishes to talk about other smaller seas, like the Black Sea, he uses the word ‘Pontos’.

Therefore, the sea from eastern Spain, southern France, western Italy, northern Tunisia, northern Algeria, and north-eastern Morocco, that we would call the western Mediterranean sea, is a ‘Pontos’. And Homer does not equate Scylla and Charybdis with the Pillars of Hercules, although many others do.

14. Thrinacia

As one of his ten labors, Hercules had to steal the magnificent red cattle of Geryon, the three-headed giant, on the island of Erytheia. Although Herodotus mistakenly assumes the Pillars of Hercules are at the Strait of Gibraltar, he writes that:

“Geryon lived west of the Pontos [i.e. western Mediterranean Sea], settled in the island called by the Greeks Erytheia, on the shore of Okeanos [i.e. Atlantic Ocean] near Gadeira, outside the pillars of Herakles.” [History, 4.8.1] And Strabo writes that:

“By ‘Erytheia’, in which the myth-writers place the adventures of Geryon, Pherekydes seems to mean Gades [a city and island off the coast of Southern Spain]. Others, however, think that ‘Erytheia’ is the island that lies parallel to this city [Gades] and is separated from it by a strait of a stadium in width.”

Perhaps, Erytheia is the same island as Thrinacia – perhaps referring to the three-headed giant, Geryon, and we may assume that Thrinacia is Gades, Spain.

As they were near Thrinacia, Odysseus remembered the warning he received from Tiresias, and he told his companions that a terrible evil would happen to them there, and he wanted to sail on past the island. But his companions said they were worn out with fatigue and sleepiness, and were afraid that a storm might come up during the night and destroy the ship, and that they therefore wanted to stay only one night on the island and then to leave in the morning. Odysseus agreed but made them swear an oath not to slaughter any of the cows or sheep. But that night a storm arose and the wind blew steadily for a whole month, keeping them on the island, until their provisions from the ship were all gone.

While Odysseus was gone away from his companions, to pray to the gods to show him the way to leave and return home, the men unfolded a bad plan – to kill some of Hyperion’s cattle:

“There are all kinds of hateful deaths for wretched mortals,
But most piteous is to die and meet one’s fate by hunger …
But if he is at all enraged for his straight-horned-cattle
And wishes to destroy the ship, and the other gods follow,
I would rather gasp once into a wave and lose my life,
Then to be starved a long time on a desert island.”

Not trying to come up with some kind of a way out, the men listened to their despair, instead of relying on hope and they made that bad decision – they slaughtered the cattle, both to make a sacrifice, and to prepare a meal – all to Odysseus’ horror when he returned. When the storm finally ceased, they boarded the ship and fled Thrinacia.

The story of Thrinacia unfortunately shows that Odysseus never reached America.

If you read the ‘Life of Christopher Columbus’ by Washington Irving, how Columbus kept two sets of books, one true set for himself alone, and another false set that he used to show his men that they weren’t about to sail off the edge of the flat earth, it shows that while dealing with the problems of wind, weather and provisions, the hardest part of the voyage in crossing the Atlantic ocean was controlling the spirit of his men – the same problems faced by Odysseus at Thrinacia. Odysseus’ men showed that they weren’t capable of a trans-Atlantic voyage.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t trans-Atlantic commerce, but just not by Odysseus.

After they fled from the island, Zeus sent the shrieking West Wind in a raging tempest and threw a thunderbolt at the ship. The ship whirled around and filled with brimstone and sank, as all of Odysseus’s men were thrown from the ship into the waves – ‘they lost their own lives because of their recklessness’. Only Odysseus, who wasn’t part of the decision of despair, was able to survive, by holding on to part of the keel of the wrecked ship as he was carried away by the wind – back through the Strait of Gibraltar!

15. Ogygia

Odysseus was blown by a westerly wind, back through the Strait of Gibraltar and back into the Pontos – the western Mediterranean Sea.

After being borne on the waves for ten days, he was brought to Ogygia, ‘the flood-circled island where the navel of the sea (pontos) is’, and where lived the goddess Calypso, daughter of Atlas. There is much confusion about the location of Ogygia, but if we look for a middle (navel) of the western Mediterranean Sea (pontos), I think we can assume that Ogygia is Minorca – especially because of all the megalithic structures that can still be found there.

Calypso wished for Odysseus to remain with her on Ogygia, but Odysseus was not persuaded and wished instead to return home, of which Homer says this:

“During the days, sitting up on the rocks and on the beaches,
Shattering his heart with tears and laments and groans,
He kept looking over the barren ocean, shedding tears.”

While Odysseus waited there for seven long years, finally at the urging of Athene, Zeus sent his messenger to tell Calypso to allow Odysseus to leave. Calypso instructed Odysseus to build a raft with a mast and sail, and with a rudder to steer straight. And Odysseus, ready to bear whatever should happen to him, replied that:

“Yet even so I am wishing and longing all my days
To go home and to see the day of my return.
And if one of the gods wrecks me on the wine-faced sea,
I shall bear it in my breast, with a long-grieving heart.
For I have suffered much already and endured much,
On the waves and in war; and let this be added to those.”

This is different from his companions who said they’d rather die quickly of drowning than slowly of starvation. Unlike his men, Odysseus was still hoping and not despairing, and ready to meet his fate, whatever may happen. So he sailed as Calypso had bid him, watching the Pleiades (that was used to show the start of sailing season), and the Wagon (that was used to find the North Star), and keeping the North Star on his left, he sailed east.

After seventeen days he finally saw Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, but Poseidon, still angry at Odysseus, stirred up a violent storm against him, breaking the mast and tossing his raft about, as he held on – ‘shunning the end of death’. He was helped by the goddess Leucothea, and after three days, he came ashore at Scheria.

16. Green Sahara

Homer may have described the city of the Phaeacians as an ideal city, a kind of a utopia, and some people assume that the Phaeacians were the descendants of the Atlantians, and so they try to place Atlantis at Scheria – somewhere on the edge of the ocean, either at southern Spain, or northern Morocco, or at the Azores, or in the Americas. But Scheria is most likely east of Ogygia and on the edge of the Pontos.

And since, because of the work of Jack Kelley and George Sarantitis, we now know that Atlantis was located in Green Sahara with an entrance at the Gulf of Gabes, Tunisia, we may assume that Scheria is Gabes.

17. Scheria

Odysseus met the king, Alcinoos, and attended the assembly of the Phaeacians, who are ‘famous for ships… as swift as any wing or thought’, and Alcinoos summoned the singer Demodocos, of which Homer says this:

“The gods have granted him to please beyond others
With whatever kind of song his spirit urges him to sing…
Then a herald came near, leading the trusty singer
Whom the Muse loved dearly and gave both good and ill.
She blinded him in the eyes but gave him a sweet song.”

When Demodocos sang tales of the Trojan war, king Alcinoos saw that this caused Odysseus to cover his head and shed tears, and so he asked Odysseus this:

“Tell me your land and your district and your city
So that ships that are steered by thought may convey you there,
For there exist no pilots among the Phaeacians,
And there are no rudders at all such as others have,
But the ships themselves know the intentions and minds of men.”

Odysseus would tell them who he was and where he was from, and then he would tell them of his journey, from when he had left Troy until he had arrived there. After this, Alcinoos agreed to send him home. While they sailed in one of the Phaeacian ships, Odysseus fell asleep, and when the ship reached Ithaca, they set him down on the shore, while still asleep, with his gifts, and they started back homeward, before he woke up.

18. A new Odyssey

After returning home, getting rid of the suitors, and reuniting with his family, there was still one more place where Odysseus had to travel to, as he remembered what Tiresias had told him:

“… he ordered me to visit many towns
Of mortals, holding in my hands a well-fitted oar,
Till the time I come unto those who do not know
The sea and do not eat a food that has been mixed with salt,
Or about well-fitted oars that are the wings for ships…
When another wayfarer has confronted me
And said I had a winnowing fan on my gleaming shoulder,
He bade me to fix my oar then into the earth
And offer fine sacrifices to lord Poseidon…”

Now, when I thought of this scene, it really became most important, because if Odysseus followed this final advice from Tiresias, then those people that he found, far away and land locked, would ask him ‘what is that oar?’ And Odysseus would have to explain about ships, and about sailing and travelling to other parts of the world, and also about how the world really was. And then they would ask him why – what is the reason for your travelling? And Odysseus would tell them, well… take a seat… do I have a story to tell you – a story about an ‘Odyssey’.

Homer was showing us that it’s not enough to make a discovery, but that it has to be explained or taught, that it has to be passed on to others. And we can see how Homer changes Odysseus – from steering his ship, to learning how to steer his thoughts. And that this is the real purpose of colonization – not subjugating populations to become part of an empire, but sharing in the discoveries of human civilization.

And that brings us back to Homer’s metaphor of the North Wind – that changed Odysseus’ course that began his Odyssey and that later steered him to Hades, and whether it led to more troubles or to a solution to his troubles. So, what if fate gave us an obstacle that blew us off course? Would we act like Odysseus’ companions and despair, or instead would we be like Odysseus and let our Muse show us how to ‘steer our thoughts’ to try to effect a new discovery.

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

In this sixth lecture of a new course on Open vs Closed Systems for Russia's Nasha Zavtra publishing and the Academy for International Cooperation, Matthew Ehret introduces the figure of Vladimir Vernadsky (founder of Biogeochemistry and father of Russian nuclear science) as a leading champion of open system thinking, and renaissance science.

Watch Lectures 1-5 below:

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

You can watch the Q&A period below:

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, operates as an intellectual current dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

The prevailing view of Kepler's "archetypal" thinking today contains a fatal error that has been spreading in people's minds for half a century since an essay by Wolfgang Pauli. The error becomes clear when one realizes that Kepler thought metaphorically, but his critics, such as Pauli, think symbolistically.

I actually wanted to write a review of Rhonda Marten’s book “Kepler’s Philosophy and the New Astronomy,” but I will do that. It’s not worth it, even though the author is considered “bright young star in the history of the philosophy of science” and although experts recommend the book because it reflects “the latest thinking on the question of Kepler’s archetypes.” It is nevertheless worthwhile, or perhaps precisely because of this! For the prevailing view of Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking today is marked by a fatal error that has been perpetuated for half a century by Wolfgang Pauli’s well-known essay “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Formation of Scientific Theories in Kepler.”

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

It is easier to understand what this error is when one considers that Pauli’s essay was written as a supplement to C.G. Jung’s essay “Synchronicity as a Principle of Acausal Connections.” Both essays appeared in the same book and refer to each other repeatedly. Pauli explicitly states that his consideration of Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking is concerned with the connection between the thinking of “modern quantum physics” and C.G. Jung’s “modern psychology,” which “recognizes symbolic images as material” in the “collective (objective) psyche.” Pauli concludes with the words: “Precisely because the possibility of such symbolism has become alien to our time, it should be of particular interest to refer to another time (namely Kepler’s time, RS),… which enables us to prove the existence of a symbol with a simultaneously religious and scientific function.”

However, the fact remains, and Pauli cannot quite bring himself admit that Kepler’s thinking has nothing to do with the kind of symbolic “archetypal” thinking propagated by Jung and so widespread today. If one does not make this sufficiently clear, then one is attributing something false to Kepler. Kepler’s thinking then remains enigmatic.

In Martens’ book, this is already expressed in the question with which she begins her book: “How is it possible that the person who wrote the ‘Mysterium Cosmographicum’ could be the same person who also wrote the Astronomia Nova?”¹ One might ask oneself such a question in the privacy of one’s own room, but as the beginning of a book?! Kepler was obviously one and the same person, and he had no problem with that. This becomes clear to anyone who reads the casual and refreshingly open comments that Kepler included in the second publication of his early work Mysterium Cosmographicum, which had appeared 25 years earlier. So the mystery lies less with Kepler than in the mind of Rhonda Martens.²

Metaphor or symbol

When Kepler uses the word archetype, he means something fundamentally different from what Jung and Pauli call “archetypal.” The difference lies precisely in what distinguishes a metaphor from a symbol. Kepler thinks and speaks metaphorically, Jung and Pauli symbolically.

The effect of a metaphor in classical poetry, which evokes in the listener a transformation that is emotionally linked to the process of recognizing an essential idea, differs fundamentally from the sensual emotional state conveyed by symbols in romantic poetry. Unlike metaphors, symbols do not convey real insight.

The difference is as follows. Children’s magazines sometimes feature dot-to-dot puzzles in which dots numbered in a specific order must be connected with a pencil line. Once the line has been drawn through all the dots, a shape appears on the paper, for example, a bird or a little man. The child has followed the number symbols, from the first dot to the second, from 3 to 4, and has finally drawn a beautiful bird or a well-proportioned little man without understanding what a bird or a little man actually is. Landmarks such as 3 or 4, which have no real meaning for the bird or the little man, appear to the child as important means of orientation. This is how symbolic thinking works.

The situation is completely different when the child is given the task of drawing a bird or a little man on a white sheet of paper. The child must first understand the creature (the bird is an animal, but it does not have four legs) and derive the proportions from the creature. When it is finished, it has understood something essential about the bird or little man and can repeat the drawing in any number of variations (a hunchbacked little man, a beautiful girl, etc.). They realize that they have to find and understand certain proportions between the limbs. The child will also try to draw little men better and better, which requires them to understand more and more about the nature and anatomy of humans. Finally, if the child’s name is Rembrandt, for example, they will understand themselves better and better by drawing themselves. This is the simplest form of metaphorical thinking.

Today, symbolic thinking is the norm for thinking. typical, which, as in children’s puzzles, only connects points with connects point to point. Of course, there are scientific terms for this, such as “curve fitting” or “benchmarking” or “statistical method” or “chaos theory,” or, if it is supposed to sound particularly clever, it is emphasized that “ontological considerations lie outside the realm of exact sciences.” Even today, science is still as entertaining as the devil describes it in the student scene in Goethe’s Faust: Empiricism and symbolism are mutually dependent, because where the spiritual bond is missing, a word symbol sometimes takes its place. Symbolic thinking has also become so widespread through Romanticism and, more strongly, in the form propagated by C.G. Jung in the “open conspiracy” of the “New Age movement” that no one thinks anything of it anymore and it is considered completely normal.

Kepler’s metaphorical thinking

Before we can discuss the image of Kepler portrayed by Jung and Pauli, here are a few quotes from Kepler, which speak for themselves in their refreshing vividness. Kepler expressly opposes the symbolic use of geometry—today we say “mathematical models” instead of geometry—when he says, for example: ³

“I have not satisfied my mind with speculations of abstract geometry, i.e., with images of the possible and the impossible, with which the most famous geometers of today spend almost their entire lives; rather, I have traced geometry in the celestial bodies and in doing so have followed the footsteps of the Creator, sweating and panting.”

And even when he uses the word “symbolize,” he means something quite different from C.G. Jung. In his writing “Tertius Interveniens,” Kepler says: ⁴

“So it is one of my thoughts whether not all of nature and all heavenly delicacy is symbolized in geometry.” But the creature, in its activity, unconsciously or consciously, instinctively or rationally, imitates the Creator: the earth in the formation of crystals, the plant with its formative power in the structure and arrangement of its leaves and flowers, man in his creative activity. And all this activity is like the play of a child, without intention, without purpose, out of an inner urge, out of the joy of creating, so that the eye delights in what is being created and the observing mind finds itself again and recognizes itself in what it has created. “As God the Creator played, so he also taught nature, as his image, to play, namely the very game that he played before her.”

Primarily, it is free, creative, playful thinking, which Schiller calls the “play instinct,” that harmoniously produces the geometric “ornaments.” The harmonies that can be perceived by the senses are “traces” and “visible evidence” of this creative process. Not the other way around, as Jung would have us believe by claiming that geometric symbols are “patterns of behavior” to which our minds are “instinctively” bound.

Finally, let us consider a passage from the Chapter 12 of Kepler’s second edition of his Mysterium Cosmographicum, which deals directly with the significance of “archet y pal” archetypes:

“In the present chapters, I will have the physicists against me, because I have derived the natural properties of the planets from immaterial things and mathematical figures, and now dare to explain the origin of the celestial orbits on the basis of purely imaginary intersecting figures. I will respond briefly as follows. Since God, the Creator, is a spirit and does what he wills, nothing prevents him from basing his weighing of forces and marking out of orbits on immaterial things or things that exist in the imagination. And since he wants nothing that is not highly reasonable, and nothing exists without his will, may my opponents say what other considerations could have guided God in weighing the forces, etc., since there was nothing there except quantities? If, finding nothing, they then resort to the unexplored powers of creative wisdom, well, let them have the moderation they impose on their thirst for knowledge, and rejoice in it at the same time as in the reputation for piety, but allow us to make the causes probable from the quantities, provided we say nothing unworthy of the great architect … ‘

Kepler comments on this:

“Behold what rich rewards the principle has brought me in the last 25 years, of which I was already firmly convinced at that time: that mathematical things are the causes of natural things (a doctrine against which Aristotle has railed in so many places) because God, the Creator, carried mathematical things within himself from eternity as archetypes in the simplest and most divine abstraction from the quantities considered materially. Aristotle denied the existence of a creator and assumed an eternal world. No wonder he rejected archetypes. For I confess that they would have no meaning if God had not referred to them in creation… If he (Aristotle, RS) finally learned that the most beautiful and compelling reasons for phenomena arise from harmonies as archetypes, then I believe he would wholeheartedly acknowledge the archetypes and, since these have no effect in themselves, God as the architect of the world

Once again, Kepler turns against those who feel “pious” by “taking refuge in unexplored forces” and thus “imposing restraint on their thirst for knowledge,” while Kepler himself “traces geometry in the celestial bodies” and “follows in the footsteps of the Creator, sweating and panting.” He makes it clear that this “principle of archetypes” is not needed if, like Aristotle, one assumes an “eternal world,” or, as we can add from today’s perspective, like Newton, an entropic world in absolute space and absolute timeentropic world that occasionally needs to be wound up like a clock, or, as in modern times, a “Big Bang” as the origin of an eternally unchanging universe. However, if one recognizes the universe as a process of creation, not as something that is essentially complete after the

“Big Bang” and only follows the laws of causality laws, but as a process that recognizes humans as the image of the Creator (i.e., enabling freedom, which can be developed for the future through the discovery and application of fundamentally new physical principles), then, and only then, is the “principle of archetypes” needed to guide the process of knowledge. Where this process is negated (as Kepler’s above quotation teaches in relation to Aristotle), this “harmonic idea” is unnecessary. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz still understood this. In Newton’s “modern” universe, this thinking no longer existed.

The necessity of the “principle of archetypes,” which Once children have learned not only to connect dots with lines, but also to draw birds and little men in a wide variety of ways, they will understand everything that leads to the recognition of harmonious relationships. They will naturally realize that they are able to create increasingly beautiful pictures because they have a better grasp of the underlying proportions and harmonies. When the child sets out to draw a continuously improving, true picture of the universe, it will naturally apply the “principle of archetypes” here as well. Rhonda Martens interprets Kepler’s thinking as symbolic-archetypal and therefore sees problems that did not exist for Kepler. For Kepler, for example, there is no problem at all with the coexistence of the metaphors of nested Platonic solids, as he uses them in the Mysterium Cosmographicum, and the temporally variable harmonic intervals with respect to the angular velocities of the planets at aphelion and perihelion as seen from the sun, which he develops in the Harmonv of the World. Delighted like a child who has succeeded in drawing the bird or the little man in an even more beautiful way, Kepler reports on The “origin story” of his discoveries:

“I had been looking for nothing but stones in this house of the world, stones that had a pleasing shape, but still only a shape that stones have. I did not know that the architect of the world had shaped the stones according to the well-structured image of a living body. So I gradually came, especially in the last three years, to the harmonies (of the world harmony model, RS) by tolerating very small deviations in the spatial figures (of the mystery model, RS). On the one hand, I was led to this by the idea that the harmonies played the role of form, putting the finishing touches, while the figures played the role of matter, which in the world is the number of planetary bodies and the raw extension of spatial areas. On the other hand, the harmonies also provided the eccentricities that the spatial figures did not even suggest. Or: the harmonies gave the statue its nose, eyes, and other limbs, while the spatial figures had only prescribed the external size of the raw mass.”

Rhonda Martens writes on page 140 in reference to the same section of World Harmony: “In Kepler’s revised view, an acceptable model did not need to be geometrically determinable, as it could be influenced by harmony. One wonders whether it was easy for Kepler to revise his geometry.”⁵ Firstly, Kepler did not revise his “view of geometry” because he never thought symbolically or archetypically, and secondly, Kepler was a “philosophical mind”⁶who enjoyed constantly redesigning his system to make it better. But actually, I didn’t want to talk about Marthen’s book at all.

Jung’s archetypal symbolism: make 4 out of 3!

C.G. Jung does not recognize creative insight. In the human mind, symbolic images that have always slumbered in the “collective unconscious” merely “intensify.” In his essay “The Spirit of Psychology”⁷. Jung writes the following under the heading “Pattern of Behavior and Archetype”:

“… Instinct and archaic mode coincide in the biological concept of pattern of behavior. There is no such thing as an amorphous instinct in which each instinct has the form of its situation. It always fulfills an image that has fixed characteristics. The instinct of the leafcutter ant is fulfilled in the image of the ant, the tree, the leaf, the cutting, the transport, and the fungus garden. If one of these determinations is missing, the instinct does not function. because it cannot exist without its total form, without its image. Such an image is a type of a priori nature. It is innate to the ant before any activity, because the latter can only take place if a corresponding instinct provides the occasion and opportunity for it. This pattern applies to all instincts and is present in identical form in all individuals of the same species. The same applies to humans… Although, from a certain point of view, through… it is correct to refer to the pattern of behavior as an archaic remnant that still exists, as Nietzsche did, for example, with regard to the functioning of dreams, but this does not do justice to the biological and psychological significance of these types. They are not merely relics or remnants of earlier modes of functioning, but rather ever-present, biologically indispensable regulators of the instinctual sphere…”

C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli

For Jung, archetypes are virtually idols that imperceptibly guide human thinking in an eternally unchanging manner. In his convoluted way of speaking, C.G. Jung explains the following:

“From these experiences and considerations, I have recognized that there are certain collectively existing unconscious conditions that act as regulators and stimulators of creative imagination and produce corresponding formations by making the existing material of consciousness serve their purposes… The existence of these unconscious regulators, which I have occasionally referred to as dominants because of the way they function, seemed so important to me that I based my hypothesis of a so-called impersonal, collective unconscious on them.”

Jung found it “highly remarkable” that “a kind of spontaneous amplification of the archetypes” occurs in this process.

“The emergence of archetypes has,” for Jung, a character “that must be described, if not as ‘magical,’ then at least as spiritual… It is not uncommon for the archetype to appear in the form of a spirit in dreams or in fantasy figures, or even to behave like a ghost…”

That is why C.G. Jung profoundly recognized in 1936 that what happened under the Nazis was a spontaneous amplification, even a discharge of the Germanic “Wotan” archetype, for which individual persons could not be held responsible. After the war, when the whole nightmare was over, C.G. Jung took the “collective unconscious” of the Germans into collective custody and put forward the thesis of German collective guilt.

In order to evaluate Pauli’s essay on Kepler’s “archetypal thinking,” we must also consider what C.G. Jung discussed in 1948 in Symbolism of the Spirit under the heading “An Attempt at a Psychological Interpretation of the Trinity Dogma.” In his “Concluding Remarks”⁸he summarizes:

“The Trinity is also an archetype that not only promotes spiritual development with dominant force, but also enforces it when necessary.” Jung sees the danger of a “harmful one-sidedness,” whereby “goodness does not become better through exaggeration, but worse, and a small evil… a great one. The shadow is simply part of human nature, and only at night are there no shadows. It is therefore a problem.”

C.G. Jung locates his satanic worldview in this “natural” shadow side of human beings, which cannot exist in the trinity, but is completed by the meaning of the quaternity taken by Jung from Gnosticism and alchemy. He asserts: “In the comprehensive formula of the Trinity, ‘creation,’ i.e., matter, is not included, at least not explicitly.” This is not true, but it provides a useful basis for the following sophism:

“Under these circumstances, there are only two possibilities: either it is real and then it is included in the divine actus purus, or it is unreal, a mere illusion… However, the latter conclusion is contradicted on the one hand by the incarnation of God and the work of redemption in general, and on the other hand by the autonomy and eternity of the ‘prince of the world’, namely the devil, who is only defeated but by no means destroyed and, according to his eternity, cannot be destroyed. If the reality of the creation of the world is included in the actus purus, then the devil is also there — q.e.d. This situation results in a quaternity.”

Jung recognizes very well that through “the Holy Spirit’s influence on man,” man is “involved in the divine process.” Jung has a problem with this because through this involvement, man loses his “autonomy from God.” He therefore demands the necessary existence of Lucifer, “without whom there would have been no creation and certainly no history of salvation. The shadow and the counter-will are the inevitable conditions of every realization.”

This is nonsense, because belief in God expresses the creative cognitive ability of man. The “realization” of man is “autonomous,” i.e., not possible without or contrary to this ability. Indeed, this creative potential is precisely the basis of human freedom. The perversion of “freedom,” the freedom of a liberal hedonist or a drug victim, which is in reality the greatest human bondage, is what is brought about in the human spirit by this satanic “autonomy” demanded by Jung.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz develops a concept of evil compatible with human freedom in his theodicy. No “autonomous” devil is necessary for this: “There is, in fact, an original imperfection in the creature before all sin, because (but) limitation belongs to the nature of the creature: therefore it cannot know everything, it can be deceived and commit other errors.” Therefore, one should not “regard evil as an effective cause.” The cause of evil consists “in deprivation, that is, in what the effective cause has not done.”⁹ Real freedom “Harmonizes” with the creative thinking of humans—that is what Kepler actually expresses through the spherical metaphor of the Trinity.

This consideration of C.G. Jung’s “archetypal” thinking C.G. Jung regarding the Trinity and Quaternity was necessary in order to understand the connection between Jung’s essay “Synchronicity as a Principle of Acausal Connections” and Pauli’s “Influence of Archetypal Ideas… in Kepler.” In addition to his own astrological investigations and an enthusiastic eulogy of the card games of the founder of parapsychology, Joseph Banks Rhine, the article contains an attempt to develop an “archetype” valid for modern science. In this context, Jung refers to Pauli’s article and states: “The revolution in physics brought about by the discovery of radioactivity has significantly modified the classical view.” According to Jung, this classical view is a “triadic worldview” that “continued the type of trinity” advocated by Kepler. In his search for an archetype for the modification of the physical worldview brought about by the discovery of radioactivity, Jung enjoyed the “kind interest” that “Prof. W. Pauli showed in my research” and says: “We have accordingly agreed on the following quaternion: indestructible energy, space-time continuum, causality, synchronicity. This scheme satisfies the postulates of modern physics on the one hand and those of psychology on the other.” So now we know how modern physics went to hell.

Once again, Pauli’s Kepler essay

We now know the lens through which Wolfgang Pauli views the “influence of archetypal ideas… in Kepler.” It would be unfair to simply lump Pauli together with C.G. Jung, but he undoubtedly follows Jung’s symbolic mysticism to such an extent that he can no longer understand the decisive aspect of Kepler’s scientific way of thinking. Right at the beginning, Pauli says the following about Kepler’s “archetypal images”: “The correspondence with the ‘primordial images’ or archetypes introduced into modern psychology by C.G. Jung, which function as ‘instincts of understanding,’ is very extensive.”

To leave no doubt that he really did misunderstand, Pauli continues: “Insofar as these images are an ‘expression of a suspected but as yet unknown fact,’ they can also be described as symbolic according to C.G. Jung’s definition of the symbol… In this world of symbolic images, archetypes function as the sought-after bridge between sensory perceptions and ideas.” No, the bridge is not symbolic at all, but rather the active creative spirit of man. As Kepler says, it is “man in his creative activity” who, “like a child playing a child, out of the joy of creating,” rediscovers his creative spirit and recognizes in what he has created “how God the Creator plays.” It is in this activity, not in the symbol, that the bridge between idea and sensory truth lies.

Pauli’s symbolistic misinterpretation of Kepler’s thinking leads him to overestimate Kepler’s fascination with Pythagorean spherical harmony. For Kepler, “geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world,” says Pauli, adding: “This principle is both his strength and his limitation.” With this sentence, Pauli summarized the core message of Rhonda Marten’s book half a century before its publication.

However, Kepler does not say that “geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world” in the form of a bridging symbol, but rather that geometry is a prerequisite for the human mind to perceive the beauty of the world or to recognize harmony, and even dissonance.

“As for sensual harmonies, four factors contribute to their existence.

1. Two sensual things of the same kind in terms of size, so that they can be compared with each other in terms of quantity.

2. The comparative soul.

3. The absorption of sensual things into the inner self.

4. A suitable proportion, which is defined as harmony. If one of these four is removed, the sensory harmony is abolished.”

Geometry only provides the “pure” harmonies required under point 4, thus contributing only to one of the necessary components of the process by which we experience the “beauty of the world” in our hearts and minds. ^{1 0}

Pauli asserts:

“That is why we also regard Kepler’s view of the correspondence between the sun and the planets surrounding it with his abstract spherical image of the Trinity as primary: because he views the sun and planets with this archetypal image in the background, he believes in the heliocentric system with religious passion — not the other way around.”

In Chapter 33 of his Astronomia nova, Kepler says the exact opposite. He proves at length that the

“real sun” must be at the center of the world because that is where the center of power is, and then says:

“Of course, if I had attempted to prove a priori (from the very special significance of the sun) what I have proven a posteriori (from observation) through a rather long investigation, then… I would probably have deserved to be listened to with an inclined ear.”

If one does not assume that Kepler’s unconscious played a nasty trick on him, then these lines show that Kepler weighs the primary and secondary in exactly the opposite way to Pauli. But Pauli does not only present Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking in the sense of C.G. Jung. He contrasts Kepler’s “instinctively guided” thinking with the mystical symbolism of the co-founder of the Rosicrucians, Robertus Fludd, who represents the “thinking type” of quaternity. In this “historical investigation,” Pauli concludes that although the epigone Fludd is inferior to the original thinker Kepler, as already quoted at the beginning, the “investigation” provides “proof of the existence of a symbol with a simultaneously religious and scientific function.” And Pauli finds this important, because “since the time of Kepler and Fludd, however, the possibility of a bridge between the extreme poles of this pair of opposites has come closer: on the one hand, the idea of complementarity within modern physics has the contradiction” as it appears in the wave-particle paradox “only seemingly” resolved, “on the other hand, however, the applicability of old alchemical ideas in C.G. Jung’s psychology points to a deeper unity of psychological and physical events.”

The divine and earthly triangle From Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Maioris etc.

Kepler versus Fludd

The problem with Pauli’s essay becomes particularly apparent when one realizes that a “historical investigation” of the different points of view of Kepler and Fludd is completely superfluous. Kepler himself provided it with great clarity and generality in the appendix to Book V of his Harmony of the World. And it is precisely this discussion that makes it clear that Kepler’s thinking is not archetypal-symbolic. And one also sees immediately that it is not a question of 3 or 4. Kepler says:

“But when I decided a year ago to publish the five books of my Harmony, it seemed to me a matter of great importance to compare my work with that of Ptolemy… (and thus, RS) to point out the differences between the symbolism of Ptolemy and my genuine proofs.” revealing the weakness and imperfection of those symbolisms and the main cause thereof, i.e., the fallacy of the foundations of Ptolemaic astronomy… Those symbolisms are for the most part not compelling; they are neither causal nor natural, but rather poetic and oratorical… I have therefore shown, after an improved astronomy that records the true and simple movements of the planets, eliminating the apparent ones based on deceptions of our sense of sight, that all harmonious proportions occur in the sky according to a true and genuine, quantitative and measurable ratio, but not according to a mere meaningless symbolism…

Enough of Ptolemy’s work. I would hereby also conclude the appendix, were it not for the related nature of the subject, which invites me to satisfy those people who have demanded that I should not fail to mention in my work the harmonics of Mr. Robert Fludd, physician in Oxford…

There is a tremendous difference between us in this regard. For starters, the harmonies he attempts to teach are pure symbolism, about which I have the same to say as I do about those of Ptolemy, namely that they are more poetic and oratorical than philosophical and mathematical… That is why his work contains so many illustrations, while mine contains mathematical figures marked with letters. It is also clear that he derives his greatest pleasure from incomprehensible riddles about reality, while I aim to bring the obscure facts of nature into the bright light of knowledge. The former is the domain of chemists, hermeticists, and Paracelsists, while the latter is the task of mathematicians… This is the spirit of his entire book, as is already evident from the title Macrocosm and Microcosm …

In my work, I do, of course, also deal with some things that echo those macrocosmic explanations, where in Book IV I make the Earth into a living being. But this happens in a completely different context. For I do not claim that there is a pure analogy between the Earth and living beings; nor do I allow the archetype of the living being to be taken from the Earth. Rather, my intention is simply to prove that the processes observed on the globe cannot be attributed solely to the movements of the elements or the properties of matter, but testify to the presence of a soul. In order for my reasoning to be understood, I had to cite the various spiritual functions in the bodies of living beings…

An equally great difference between us is that he attributes four degrees of darkness and gloom to the elemental region, because, every thing has four quarters’ (yes, of course, as well as three thirds or five fifths) and of these he has four in the earth three in water (which is where its transparency comes from), two in air, and one in fire. Elsewhere, he further divides every region, both elemental and celestial, into three spaces, an upper, a middle, and a lower, without the senses making this probable everywhere. One sees that the units are again arbitrary… I, on the other hand, take natural units, namely the two extreme movements of the individual planets, which are formed by nature according to their specific sizes, and in these I seek harmonies only in movements. He picks out a few insignificant consonances and develops them from the mixture of his pyramids, which he carries in his mind as an image of the world he has conceived… I, however, have proven that the entire complex of harmonic tuning, with all its parts and the extreme proper motions of the planets, is contained according to specific measures proven by astronomy. For him, therefore, the image he himself has designed of the world is, for me, on the other hand, the world itself or the real motion of the planets in it, the object of world harmony.”

Kepler’s relativistic space

I would now like to refer to a passage in Pauli’s essay in which Pauli takes up a very interesting aspect and, inspired by this, considers what concept of space Kepler might have had. Pauli writes:

“Regarding the term ‘anima movens,’ I would like to note that Kepler’s views on the cause of motion are inconsistent. At one point in his writing on the new star, he says:

… Ultimately, the forces that move the heavenly bodies are somehow part of a thought process, so that they somehow understand, imagine, and strive toward their path, not through deliberation, as we humans do, but through an innate impulse that was imprinted on them at creation, and in the same way, the spiritual abilities of natural things also have an innate knowledge of their goal, according to which they direct all their actions.”

Here Kepler takes an animistic point of view, but elsewhere he says:

The sun, in the midst of the moving stars, itself at rest and yet the source of movement, bears the image of God the Father, the Creator. For what creation is to God, movement is to the sun. But it moves within the fixed stars, as the Father creates in the Son. For if the fixed stars did not create space through their static being, nothing could move. But the sun distributes its motive power through a medium in which that which moves is contained, just as the Father creates through the Holy Spirit or through the power of the Holy Spirit.

This view has much in common with modern field physics.

Pauli undoubtedly recognized something very essential here. I would like to go beyond that and ask the reader two things. First, not to regard Kepler’s “view” as “vacillating.” but to assume a “language problem,” that is, a situation in which Kepler can only tentatively express a concept for which he does not have sufficient terms at his disposal. What “field concept” could that be? Second, to momentarily erase from our consciousness the concept of the gravitational field as found in every textbook, so that this concept, with all its “gravity” gained in the meantime, does not immediately steer our thinking in this direction.

If we look at the two quotations in this way, then they have something in common. If we interpret the comparison between the sun, the sphere of fixed stars, and the interwoven space in the second quotation not as a symbol that defines Kepler’s thinking, but as a metaphorical description of the creative process of cognition,^{1 1} then one understands that Kepler’s concept of space has a quality that is coherent with the human thought process. But how could he express this in the language of Euclidean geometry, to which he was bound? That is why the function of the Trinity metaphor in second “feldtheoretic” quote is the same as in the first “animistic” quotation, the image from the “spiritual abilities of natural things,” which have “a knowledge of their goal within themselves,” “according to which they direct all their actions.” It is not Kepler’s point of view that is wavering, but at most his form of expression.

If one considers Kepler If you are familiar with Newton, then vou know that he definitely does not anything mean mystical or supernatural. He always starts from material conditions and consistently rejects any symbolic construction, whether it be epicycles, equilibrium points, the mean sun, or anything else. He would also have rejected Newton’s “absolute space” as such a construct, as the second quote, which emphasizes that the fixed stars must “create” space, makes clear. ^{1 2}

Cover image of the Rudolphine Tables. Opposite: Excerpt

Kepler repeatedly emphasizes that even if one assumes a planetary soul, it does not have human-like “thinking activity,” and that all its actions must be oriented toward real, determinable things, such as the size of the solar disk visible from the planet. When he speaks of the soul of the Earth or the soul of a planet, he means a scientifically exact, universal function that must be researched using strict criteria. In this context, assumed. Kepler expresses a very fundamental principle in Chapter 38 of Astronomia Nova, according to which the harmonious interaction of the “forces” must be:

“The examples of nature and the assumed relationship between the heavenly and earthly Phenomena clearly demonstrate that the effects of a simple body are all the simpler the more general they are, and that any differences that arise (such as the varying distance from the sun or the eccentricity in the motion of the planets) are caused by external factors.”

Kepler’s thinking today and tomorrow

The real reason why I did not attempt to review Marten’s book is the lack of respect shown by the “new young star” of today’s science for the great achievements and brilliant mind of Johannes Kepler. What are we to think of someone who dismisses Kepler on page 171 of his book by patting him “snobbishly” on the shoulder, as if to say: Despite all your mistakes, it wasn’t entirely in vain, old man! And this after accusing Kepler of errors in his “archetypal” thinking, which have little to do with his actual thinking, but all the more with the perspective of today’s observer. Kepler advanced human thought by leaps and bounds; like no other person in modern times, he contributed to the advancement of science, and we should be happy if we succeed in mobilizing some of this tremendous power of thought within ourselves.

Kepler himself was a self-critical person and

never behaved arrogantly. It is very significant how he portrays himself on the title page of the Rudolphine Tables as the consummator of astronomy. At first glance, Kepler is not even recognizable in the Temple of Astronomy depicted there, whose ten columns are each dedicated to one of the great astronomers of the past. But then you find Johannes Kepler in a small picture at the base of the temple. He is sitting at a table and is in the process of completing this temple of astronomy by placing the dome on these pillars; a modest but self-confident and very accurate selfcharacterization.

Karl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest astronomers, says that after Kepler, the problem for astronomers was no longer to derive completely unknown elements, but that they only had to modify the already known elements a little in order to define them within narrower limits. ^{1 3} This is still true today.

Normally, Kepler is viewed through the lens of “Newtonian system,” through which Kepler’s work was supposedly “perfected.” With this approach, the essence of Kepler’s thinking is no longer recognizable. The great importance attached to the three “Keplerian laws” is misleading in itself. To make matters worse, they are numbered incorrectly in all textbooks. Kepler first came up with the “area theorem,” i.e., the so-called “second Keplerian law.” It was only later that he discovered the elliptical shape of the orbits, i.e., what is now called “Kepler’s First Law.” The confusion is quite understandable for someone like Newton and Galileo, who merely describe the phenomena formally with mathematical tools: first the shape of the orbit is described, and then the law for the velocity on this orbit follows. In reality, however, this obscures Kepler’s creative thinking. The correct Keplerian sequence of laws results in an interesting paradox (for formal thinkers). How could Kepler know that the “travel beam” of the planet passes through equal areas in equal times, when he did not yet know the respective distances of the planet from the sun, i.e., when he did not yet know whether the limiting curve was an ellipse, a circle, an oval, or whatever curve it might be?

When you think about it, you realize why the area theorem was of primary importance to Kepler. It expresses the physical principle of a coherent effect between the central sun and the planets. It is the same concept that led Leibniz, more than half a century later, to the new science of “dynamics,” which in turn led to his correction of Descartes’ concept of “quantity of motion” and to the methodological development of infinitesimal calculus.^{1 4}This transition from static-mechanical thinking to the dynamic concept of living force is already hinted at in the letter Kepler wrote to Brenger on October 4, 1607:

“Of course, I also use circles to help me, but only for calculation, insofar as circles explain the mode of action of the balance, the lever, and the weights, and thus only partially. For the rest, I draw on the areas described by the planet in its orbit; in these I seek the strength and weakness of the forces exerted on the movements.”

Research into the history of the natural sciences often refers to the significance of Kepler’s “harmonic principle.” It is even recognized that this principle “led Kepler directly or indirectly to all his discoveries.”^{1 5} It is then noted that this idea has since ceased to exist in natural science. That is precisely the problem! Is it enough to simply note this? Would it not be important to examine what science has lost with this “fundamental harmonic idea”? After all, it was this idea that guided the greatest astronomer to all his discoveries!

When poets such as John Keats and Friedrich Schiller say in “The Artists” that “truth is beauty,” then that is precisely Kepler’s “fundamental harmonic idea.” This is essential for the future of science: truth exists, but only if truth is beauty. Today’s natural scientists know reject such “metaphysical speculations” out of hand. They may think what they like. But when, in this state of mind, they say something clever about “Kepler’s thinking,” they resemble a group of blind people who reproach the sighted Kepler for not using his cane correctly along the existing orientation markers and railings and for talking about invisible spirits.

What the “precise” scientist does not want to see is that there is no such thing as “empirical truth.” It is, as Friedrich Schiller says in his poem “Columbus,” if America did not yet exist, it would rise out of the waves before the approaching Columbus. For nature accomplishes what the brilliant mind promises! Truth is beauty because scientific truth is based on the coherence of the creative process of knowledge with nature. The universe “obeys” the creative thinking of man, just as it obeys the creator God, whose living image is the creatively cognizant human being. This is Kepler’s “harmonic principle,” which he expresses with his metaphor of the trinity of spherical surface, spherical center, and spherical content, which can only be misunderstood as “mystical” if it is reduced to an “archetypal” geometric symbol. Basically, it is as simple as Kepler describes at the end of his Harmony of the World. Humans can recognize the universe because it is “harmoniously” ordered in such a way that it corresponds to their own process of cognition.

Therefore, according to Kepler, “the entire universe is animated by one and the same continually creative spirit, which acts for the sake of beauty and goodness and knows what to do with any excess matter .” For example, living beings arise from inanimate matter, but so do new stars.^{1 6}

“That universal world spirit seems to accomplish the feat of arranging everything in mutual harmony… If nothing living existed, it would make all matter alive.”^{1 7} We cannot perceive this principle, which continually shapes things for the better, directly, but we can recognize it from the harmoniously ordered traces it “leaves behind.” Even in inanimate matter, there is a “creative force” that acts “like a pregnant woman,” which “reproduces the five regular geometric bodies in gemstones and crystals.” Even when Kepler attempts to describe the movements of the heavens “like a clock,” this does not mean that he believed the universe to be a clock. Newton, on the other hand, believed in the absurdity of a dead universe that functions like a clock and therefore has to be wound up from time to time.

Leibniz, on the other hand, thinks exactly like Kepler when he says: “By no means, therefore, should one reject the final causes and the idea of a spirit of perfect wisdom whose activity is directed toward the highest good… Rather, the main principles of physics are derived precisely from the concept of a spiritual cause.” Leibniz refers to Socrates, who explains in Plato’s Phaedo that one cannot conclude from the movement of Socrates’ bones and muscles why he is sitting here, because he would not be doing so if the mind had not decided that it was more dignified for Socrates to accept the death sentence than to flee. Leibniz continues: “I do not deny, however, that once the principles have been established, natural processes can and must be explained according to the rules of mathematical mechanics, provided only that the admirable purposes of ordering providence are not forgotten. The principles of physics, and thus also those of mechanics, cannot themselves be derived from laws of mathematical necessity, but ultimately require reference to the highest intelligence for their justification: herein lies the true reconciliation between faith and reason.”^{1 8}

This is the core of Kepler’s “idea of harmony,” which (in contrast to Jung’s “archetype” of a “Quaternio” (from “indestructible energy, space-time continuum, causality, and synchronicity”) has the potential to transform modern science into a

This naturally requires that, despite centuries-old ways of thinking, we try to understand Kepler and develop his ideas further in line with his thinking and that of Plato, Cusa, and Leibniz.

Harmony in inanimate nature, in living nature and in the human cognitive process

“But note the analogy: where size predominates, significance declines. Where the scale is smaller, dignity increases. The sphere of fixed stars is the largest, but it is motionless, inert. Next comes the moving world; it is smaller, but all the more significant because it has been given such an admirable and well-ordered motion. But this part of the world cannot think, cannot draw conclusions, is not endowed with a vegetative soul; what it does, it has not learned, but has been imprinted upon it; neither what it is not and will not be, nor what it is, emanates from it. It remains as it was created. Now comes our little globe, our little hut, the creator of vegetative beings, which is itself shaped from within by a soul, the artful creator of such wonderful works, and daily ignites from within itself the little souls of so many plants, fish, and insects, so that they easily fill the immense expanse of the outshines the rest of the world! After all, look at the little creatures! Here there are already feelings and arbitrary movements, an infinite variety of artistic body shapes. Look at those specks among them that are called humans, who bear God’s image within themselves, who are the masters of the entire immense universe. Who among us would wish for a body as large as the universe in exchange for renouncing our soul?”

From a letter from Kepler to Herwart von Hohenburg, Prague, March 28, 1605

Epilogue about the sun with speculative assumptions

“…It is not only from the sun as the focal point or eve of the world that light, as the heart of the world, life and warmth, as the ruler and mover of all movement, emanates into the world. Rather, the sun also collects, as it were, taxes from the entire province of the world according to the law of kingship, which consist in a most lovely harmony, or rather, the species of two planets converging on it are united in harmony by the activity of some spirit and thus, as it were, minted into coins from raw silver and gold… Nor do we, like Aristotle and the pagan philosophers, introduce spiritual powers as gods, nor, like the magicians, innumerable hosts of planetary spirits… While I am careful to avoid this, let us now also examine openly and freely, with natural reasons, the nature of the individual spiritual forces, especially if such a spirit occupies the place of a world soul in the heart of the world…

If it is permissible to explore the labyrinth of nature’s secrets by analogy, then I believe the following conclusion is not unreasonable: just as the six spheres relate to their common center, i.e., the center of the entire world, so too does the discursive mind relate to the Reason, as distinguished by Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, and the other philosophers. And again, just as the revolution of the individual planets around the sun from place to place relates to the rotation of the sun in the center of the entire system without any translation, so too does the activity of the discursive mind relate to that of reason, and manifold conclusions to thoroughly simple spiritual knowledge. For just as the sun moves all the planets through the species emanating from it by revolving around itself, so too, as the philosophers teach, the mind brings forth conclusions by recognizing all things in and of itself, i.e., by unfolding and extending its simplicity to those conclusions, it causes everything to be recognized. The movements of the planets and the sun at their center and the operations of the reasoning mind are so closely connected and intertwined that human reasoning would never have worked its way through to the correct distances of the planets and everything that depends on them, and would never have established astronomy, if the earth, our home, did not travel its annual circle in the middle between the others, exchanging one place with another, one position with another

Kepler, Harmony of the World, Book V, Chapter X.

Footnotes:

1. “How could it be that the person who wrote the ‘Mysterium cosmographicum’ could also be the same who wrote the ‘Astronomia nova’?” ↩

2. In 1951, C.G. Jung wrote in Modern Myth: “We are now approaching the great change that can be expected with the arrival of the spring equinox in Aquarius.” He thus anticipates Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Aquarian Conspiracy, published in 1980. ↩

3. KGW 10, 11-15, Rudolphine Tables. ↩

4. The spelling has been adapted to today’s usage. ↩

5. “Thus, in Kepler’s revised view, an acceptable model need not be geometrically determinable since the harmonic can interfere. One wonders whether it was easy for Kepler to revise his view of geometry.” ↩

6. See the difference between “bread scholar” and “philosophical mind” in Schiller’s Universal History. ↩

7. Eranos Yearbook, Vol. 14, 1946, p. 385ff. ↩

8. C.G. Jung, Symbolism of the Spirit, Zurich 1948, p. 435 ff. ↩

9. First part of the Treatise on Divine Justice, Human Freedom, and the Origin of Evil, point 20. ↩

10. World Harmony, First Chapter, Book IV. ↩

11. Compare this quotation with his “Epilogue to the Sun” at the end of World Harmony. ↩

12. And Kepler would certainly have rejected the division of the spectrum into exactly seven primary colors, which Newton undertook following the alchemist Athanasius Kircher, as mystical speculation, because in reality there are no seven primary colors. It is one thing to describe the number and relation of existing planets, and quite another to assert the existence of seven colors on the basis of symbolic speculation. ↩

13. In his treatise Theory of the Motion of Celestial Bodies Moving in Conic Sections Around the Sun. ↩

14. In Specimen dynamicum (1695), G.W. Leibniz says the following about the foundation of the new science of dynamics: “The speed at which we simultaneously conceive of a certain direction is what we call ‘conatus’, while we understand ‘impetus’ as the product of the mass of the body and its velocity: that is, the quantity that the Cartesians usually refer to as the quality of motion, which is actually the quantity of the momentary velocity.” ‘impetus’ as the product of the mass of the body and its velocity: that is, the quantity that Cartesians usually refer to as the quality of motion, which is actually to be understood as the magnitude of the instantaneous motion. More precisely, however, since motion is an existence in time, its true quality is represented as the integral of the individual impulses.” ↩

15. Fritz Kraft, “Experience and Prejudice in Johannes Kepler’s Scientific Thinking,” Reports on the History of Science 14 (1991), pp. 73-96. ↩

16. Ode on a Grecian Urn. ↩

17. This is the beginning of the letter Kepler wrote to Fabricius on October 11, 1605, which is often quoted, without mentioning the opening lines, of course, because Kepler also describes in it the discovery of the elliptical shape of planetary orbits in accordance with chapter 58 of Astronomia nova. ↩

18. G.W. Leibniz, “On the Principle of Continuity” (1687), Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, Vol. I, Felix Meiner. ↩

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Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

By David Gosselin

July 8, 2023, marked the 201st anniversary of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tragic drowning in the Bay of Lerici, Italy, at the age of 31. However, before he died Shelley left the world with one of the most impassioned and timeless defences of poetry ever composed. At a time in which Western civilization appears almost rudderless—with virtually no vision or sagely wisdom animating its institutions—Shelley’s timeless reflections on the relationship between poetry and civilization remain as relevant as they have ever been.

In his essay, which he composed a year before he died, Shelley articulated the view that poetry plays a particularly important role in times of great civilizational crisis and critical change. He argued that poetry performs one of the most practical and essential functions in society: it informs the imagination—understood as the realm in which corruption, degeneracy (whether intellectual or moral), and false axiomatic thinking first take root. The cultivation of a genuinely mature poetic imagination, he believed, is crucial to transforming the moral, intellectual, and creative character of the human race. These considerations led him to the famous concluding paragraph of his defence, declaring poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

While the bar set for artists and poets by Shelley is admittedly high, the broader history of Western civilization offers some striking and decisive examples which prove Shelley’s argument to be more than some mere rhetorical effusion or flight of poetic fancy. The degree to which our own age finds Shelley’s conceits remote and archaic serves as a strong indication of how far the West has drifted from its own classical roots and the classical wisdom that is the bedrock of its civilization.

After all, both democracy and the establishment of constitutional republics have their root in this classical tradition. And it was no less than Solon (640 to 560 BC)—one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece—who forged the Athenian constitution in the form of a poem. The model for Solon’s constitution was none other than Athena—the only truly wise and virtuous god portrayed by Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey.

Solon’s constitution opened with the following lines:

“Never will our city be destroyed by Zeus’ decree,
Nor by the will of the bless’d immortal gods,
For, born of a potent father, great-hearted guardian
Pallas Athena spreads her hands o’er our city…”

The poem marked the end of a period in which the honest and productive economic sectors of Athenian society were crushed by a system of debt-slavery and predatory financial practices imposed by the oligarchy of that time. In our own age of political tumult and economic turmoil in which speculative financial bubbles reach into the hundreds of trillions in notional value—with trillions of dollars having been added to the national debts of sovereign nations through “bailouts” to prop up these values—remembering the bold visions of poet-sages who laid the basis for our modern civilization remains vital to the survival of Western culture and institutions.

However, Solon is not the only poet-legislator that comes to mind when reading Shelley’s defence. Dante Alighieri, whom Shelley referred to as “the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world,” wrote his Divine Comedy under similar conditions of societal collapse. Like Solon’s constitutional poem, Dante’s epic Comedy was spurred by the corruption he saw destroying his beloved Florentine Republic. The Comedy sprung from the poet’s desire to elaborate some higher approach and broader vision for rectifying the deep-seated civilizational decay that had consumed the religious and political institutions of Florence and Europe generally.

Of Dante, Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” wrote:

“Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarians. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning.”

He then added:

“The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention.”

Shelley correctly recognized that Dante created a unified national language out of thousands of local and regional dialects. This new Italian language was capable of the highest order of metaphorical creation, philosophical depth, and spiritual truth. As a result, it became one of the primary vehicles for conveying the classical ideas that shaped the conceptions and worldviews of not only Italy’s Golden Renaissance thinkers, but also leading minds throughout Europe. And as Shelley also observed, the poetical structures and music of Italian actually provided the “superstructure” for English literature, which would go on to experience its own Renaissance with the likes of Shakespeare and his collaborators.

In this light, we can fairly state that the Comedy and works like it, such as Classical Greek tragedy or the plays of William Shakespeare, were hardly what we in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would consider the modern aesthete’s “art for art’s sake.” However, the subtle and elusive manner in which these works—or any timeless work of literature—exerted their influence over the hearts and minds of citizens was also articulated by Shelley:

“The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.”

So Shakespeare—the quintessential everyman—continuously presented his audiences with an interplay of complex and nuanced personae engaged in constant counterpoint and dialogue. These characters often enacted tragedies which audiences could watch unfold on the stage of the Globe Theater, rather than acting them out in real life. For this reason, Shakespeare was likely a man of the highest good, with a wildly powerful ability to empathize with others, to feel their pains and joys, and to think as they thought. As a result, the Bard was able to wear many masks and put himself in the place of many very different individuals, giving his audiences a quality of foresight into the nature and consequences of their own thoughts and actions. The same goes for the greatest tragedians and poets across the ages.

Anticipating our own age of artistic “virtue signalling,” Shelley also cautioned artists and writers who sought to moralize through their works, committing one of the greatest sins in poetry, didacticism:

“A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.”

For Shelley, the poetic imagination first and foremost allowed humanity to wrestle with the greatest paradoxes concerning human nature and the universe, leading to a natural moral effect (rather than a didactic one). However, rather than strictly concerning itself with the mechanical arrangements of established facts and observations concerning man and nature, poetry had the effect of making knowledge of any one particular category or subject universal. Hence, Shelley wrote that while knowledge and the chronological arrangement of events were bound by time and place, the beauty and wisdom embodied in a poetical concept or metaphor was not subject to the same boundary conditions—it was eternal:

“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.”

He further added:

“A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive.”

Shelley understood poetry as the pure fount from which creative visions and new hypotheses ultimately sprung. A suitable defence of Shelley’s position can be found in no less than Albert Einstein, who famously said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

Consequently, Shelley viewed poetry as the primary preserver of language, serving as the basis for communicating any and all new concepts, whether moral, spiritual, or intellectual. It also renewed and revitalized language, maintaining it as a medium capable of reflecting the changing quality of knowledge and invention. Without this nuanced quality of poetic language, which allowed individuals to think “between the lines” and make leaps from seemingly unrelated ideas, the mind would essentially remain trapped by the stultifying effects of unchanging “standard-models” and definitions.

At such points, definitions no longer serve as useful tools, they become entrenched and calcified notions that make new and necessary qualitative changes in our body of scientific knowledge significantly more difficult than in cases where individuals possess a considerably greater degree of imaginative freedom. Bold and innovative thought-experiments like Kepler’s “vicarious hypothesis” which placed him on the surface of Mars to observe Earth’s orbit, or Einstein’s imagining a view of the universe from the front of a light beam would be the norm, rather than the exception.

The importance of a strong poetic and imaginative faculty in science was obvious to Shelley:

“Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life.”

Today, we can see that with the loss of a poetic imagination, modern science—as opposed to technical innovation and engineering—has suffered greatly. While computers become increasingly more advanced in their mathematical calculating power, they remain incapable of generating genuine concepts. Meanwhile, the ability to generate fundamentally new conceptions in the scientific community has become increasingly sparse. Instead, it has in many ways been replaced by statistical modelling and mathematical formalism, with some notable exceptions.

On the other hand, Shelley defined the poetic imagination’s function as essentially that of generating new concepts and developing the vehicle of language by which all new conceptions would necessarily be elaborated. In a word: the ability to think in poetical terms consisted of the ability to think in new non-linear ways and generate new concepts not bound by preconceived notions or the supposed authority of “peer review.”

Whether in the domain of art, science, politics, or the moral and spiritual realm, Shelley observed that poets essentially performed a universal function. This was especially the case in moments of critical juncture and civilizational crisis. In such moments, Shelley believed that poets functioned as the lightning rods for new ideas. These conductors of ideas ultimately rose to the status of legislators in the highest sense of the word—as Dante, Solon, and others did—expressing an exceptional power for “communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.”

In this light, we can observe how poetry took a decidedly different path with the advent of Modernism and the flurry of other schools and “isms” that arose in the twentieth-century. From Modernism, New Criticism, Dadaism, to Cubism and Post-Modernism, some of these directions yielded useful insights and experiments, but also gave way to a fundamentally different view of art and aesthetics, one largely centered on the idea of “art for art’s sake.” This was perhaps typified by W.H. Auden’s famous “poetry makes nothing happen.”

As Shelley demonstrated, poetry makes a lot happen, though how it performs its “magic” escapes some of the keenest observers. Like a galactic process shaping the Earth’s surface by way of cosmic radiation, or the erosion of land by wind and water, such macro processes remain invisible to our immediate sensory perception, but in reality shape the world of culture and ideas in continuously new and non-linear ways, and at such depths that it can be difficult to notice.

Shelley recognized the qualitative effects of the poetic imagination on society and wrote about the impossibility of picturing what the world might have looked like without poetry:

“But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.”

In the twenty-first century, as Western civilization encounters a whole flurry of seemingly impossible challenges, and much of our long-held assumptions and axioms about ourselves and civilization are unmoored and shattered at accelerating rates, we find ourselves in precisely the kind of moments described by Shelley in the concluding paragraph of his defence. These are the moments in which those with genuine poetic vision become like lightning rods—an individual who:

“Not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”

Concluding on the nature of those endowed with a prophetic and poetic quality, Shelley writes:

“The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

As new civilizational visions become direly needed, they can only come from those individuals who have cultivated their poetic imaginations with sufficient boldness and are endowed with enough foresight to steer the ship of our civilization through some very dark and uncharted seas besieged by many menacing storms.

David B. Gosselin is a poet, translator, writer, and researcher based in Montreal. He is the founder of The Chained Muse and hosts a new show called Escaping the Brave New World. Subscribe to his Substack ‘Age of the Muses’ where this essay was first published

In this Rising Tide Foundation lecture, Sam Labrier introduces the discoveries of some of the most important thinkers of recent history whose insights into the structure of reality provide the greatest answers to the questions: Is there a directionality in the universe? Does order govern chaos or visa versa and is there a scientific law of political economy that allows for the existence of freedom, spontaneity and creative thought?

In his presentation, Sam takes the audience through three interconnected domains of space time starting with fractal structures in both living and non-living spheres, the biological mechanisms of cephalization discovered by the great American scientist James Dwight Dana and the important ideas of the noosphere advanced by the Russian Biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. We are also introduced to the work of anti-Darwinian economists Henry C. Carey and the recently deceased statesman Lyndon LaRouche.

Speaker Bio: Sam Labrier has a degree in History from Concordia University and obtained his engineering degree from Ryerson University in Toronto. He has worked in the fields of nuclear engineering, electrical power engineering, and optical biophysics.

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

If one goes by data alone, then many will find themselves in a pit of numbers that have no order or alignment in concordance with natural law. Natural law you say, sounds lofty and idealistic on the surface but on deeper analysis it offers a far more grounded and realistic vision of the future than any set of linear data sets or reactionary opinions can.

One need only look at a few important metrics to realize a somewhat clear vision of the future, both near and far, for natural law has governable principles embedded at its core and these principles/laws essentially act as arbiters of the reality that we live in. They give us the best of all possible worlds reality, the time that is now, the present moment, a moment created by an extraordinary past that heralds unto an even greater future. It is not to say that one knows when these universal laws will ultimately rebirth the standard of governance on our planet, just that it will happen eventually because it is the only truly progressive and open way forward. It is the path of least resistance and all the other nations are in accordance with it, only the hegemon is not. All other false options have been totally exhausted by the hegemon now, as is the necessary nature of empirical entities throughout universal history…

The new universal standard for governance of the new paradigm that is emanating from China goes by this name – The Global Governance Initiative (GGI) and was just recently announced to the world in September 2025 at the SCO!

The Apollonian Standard

According to western media and the ivory tower institutions, such as the Economist, the Financial Times, the World Bank Group and individuals like the currently “popular” economic commentator – Jeffrey Sachs, who just to mention, is doing a face-saving walk back of the ages, from waxing lyrical about Free market/Laissez-Faire intervention in the 90’s, to now rocking up as an “expert” on how China became the worlds largest industrially productive economy and the worlds largest trading partner in just 30 years. If only we could laugh through a keyboard Mr. Sachs.

We find that poor economic policies have played an especially important role in the slow growth, most importantly Africa’s lack of openness to international markets.

To summarise, Africa has performed worse than other developing countries on the following economic policy variables: openness to international trade, average annual inflation (money-printing), and national saving rates.

There is now considerable international evidence that poorer developing countries that followed market-orientated policies in the past 30 years did indeed grow faster and thus catch up with the richer countries.

And what countries was he talking about at the time – Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. I’ll just say the quiet part out loud. All of these nations did not simply develop because of free-market policies but rather because of state intervention on an industrial scale. They lifted the standard of living for their people by increasing the value addition to raw resource extraction. Not simply by allowing corporations from already rich countries to come in and privatise every resource and industrial operation, the way Russia experienced in the very same decade due to Sach’s advised policies…

They also have China to thank since the 80’s onward –

• Since 1980: China has maintained a high average annual GDP growth rate, reaching 10% between 1978 and 2000 and averaging 9.91% between 1979 and 2010.

• Between 1980-1991, the average annual growth rate for real GDP in the Asia-Pacific region was 5.5%, compared to a world average of 3%.

• 1990-1994: High growth rates, reaching around 6-7% average annually.

• 1995-1999: The period was severely impacted by the Asian Financial Crisis (Western orchestrated), with average GDP growth dropping to approximately 3.5%.

• 2000-2004: Growth rebounded to an average of 5.1%, (China picks up where it left off).

• 2005-2009: Average GDP growth was 4.9%.

• 2008-2010: Despite the Global Financial Crisis, ASEAN’s average growth was a relatively strong average of 4.7% for the entire period. Imagine what it could have been had it not been for the vultures on Wall street and in the city of London Corporation…

So how in fact did these seven countries have such a great experience with the globalist free market when Russia was plunged back into another economic crisis in the same decade? A crisis that was brought about almost single handedly by yourself Mr. Sachs, thanks to your personal and awful intervention at Yeltsin’s invitation and Clinton’s behest.

Of course, you’ll find many self defense articles by the Harvard boy claiming that the “Shock therapy” effect was not his cause and so simply, he’s one or the other, not a very good economist or he is lying. I’ll take both as truths.

To wrap up a depressively redundant and yet important “Free market” history, it failed and Mr. Sachs is a failed talking head that recycles the same rhetoric over and over again. Here he is in 2015 repeating QE as the almighty savior for the world financial crisis, which merely means – WE ARE OUT OF MONEY SO LETS PRINT MORE DEBT FOR MORE SPECULATIVE BEHAVIOUR BECAUSE REAL CREATION AND INVESTMENT IS TOO LONG AND ARDUOUS. What a beautiful and cultured mind you have sir.

– https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/01/can-printing-money-save-global-economy-yes/

The Promethean Standard

Lyndon Larouche is a scary name for many western institutions and this likely down to his scientific discoveries on the relationship between the physical world (the Biosphere in Vladmir Vernadsky terms) and the human mind (Noosphere). This negentropic idea led the way for Lyn’s immortally annoying book (if your an oligarch that is) – There are No limits to Growth!

He plucks away at every string to undo decades of Malthusian brainwashing and programming under the guise of protecting mother nature and stopping the climate from changing; an insane idea when one understands that you are living in a living and ever developing universe, not a dead entropic one. Your brain is even naturally resistant to such a morbid idea and that is due to your childish and once innocent imagination, that we can agree may act silly at times, but is essentially optimistic that it can solve a paradox. With the honing of mental skills and understanding certain physical laws, the mind can navigate extraordinarily difficult tasks and lift the collective human condition to a higher level of understanding of the universe through an individual moment of excellence and divine connection with the one, thereafter raising the standard of life for everyone included in that space or nation.

That is an inevitable construct – If I come up with an idea, that I can extrapolate into physical space and it works universally, it will raise the physical condition of humankind universally. Nuclear energy was and is such an idea and is a great example of how Energy as a universal subject is not a dead end, cul-de-sac discussion that only humans can have (Imago viva Dei) but is a subject for humans to ever increase our knowledge and understanding off, so that we can release more and more souls into the domain of scientific and artistic freedom of thought. A true culture, that seeks the betterment not just of the physical space, for that would be ugly without the necessary development of the metaphysical first, well cultured and beautified before action.

Ethiopia unbound – A Renaissance in the making

• GERD – The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

• The Genale Dawa III Hydroelectric project

• Bishoftu/Abusera International Airport

• Addis Ababa – Meskel Square City Redevelopment

• The Adwa Memorial Museum

• The Lamu Port/Kenya – South Sudan – Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET)

• The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway

• The Gode Fertilizer Plant – Built by Aliko Dangote (Nigeria)

• Rosatom (Russia) + Ethiopian Ministry of Innovation & Technology start exploring the feasibility of an Ethiopia-based Centre for Nuclear Science & Technology. Two Nuclear power plant units each with around 1200 MW capacity too begin construction in 2032-2034.

The above list represents just some of the examples of world class infrastructure that have been or are going to be built in Ethiopia during the past five years or during the coming five. It is a list that shines a beaming light on the not so distant past and the failures of that past. You see, with the final revival of Hamiltonian America under John F Kennedy’s Platonic leadership and its fall from grace thereafter; the Oligarchical -Apollonian – Wall Street – Free market – Adam Smith heathens were waiting in the wings to charge once again into Africa for rampant extortion. From the 1970’s and onwards up until today, Africa has been forced into a neo-colonial debt trap; enslaved by the whims of the U.S Dollar; a currency that has been so awfully managed back home in America that the world now finds itself in the very precarious position of trying to loosen the load without upsetting the tyrant and receiving the mother of all manipulators – the regime change sauce.

Ethiopia has managed to last the length of this dance and fortunately for the 130 million Ethiopian souls, Abiy Ahmed has been in quickstep with the geopolitical world arena. Today, Ethiopia has left the former IMF/World Bank port of poverty and instead, she has charted a course towards China and BRICS+, she has navigated the cold waters of regime change during the Tigray civil war (2020-22) and now finds herself at that new port of the BRICS+, as a major global actor in the world arena.

2025 has heralded in a new dawn for humankind and especially for the continent of Africa we can see the early light glowing on the horizon. The early bird is perfectly aware of what is dawning and has already been chirping the first hour to wake the others but to little avail just yet. The others will come and see eventually but first they need confirmation that the light is real. The data is undeniable so lets get into some of the very important metrics that go someway into showing the current and future path that Ethiopia and many other similarly placed nations are on. To do this we need to take the highest world example in human development terms over the past 50 years and that is most certainly China given the sheer scale of human lives lifted above the world poverty line since 1980 until today in that nation.

The above graph illustrates two significant metrics that play an extraordinarily important role when attempting to forecast the future economy. The Human Population and the density thereof leads to a necessary increase in economic activity within the given space. Due to the intrinsic nature of humankind to work together to create new processes of physical productivity, when we increase the density of economically active humans in an area, the value added to that area is significantly increased in a short period of time and the land/area value increases with that development and increase in people.

The next metric is Energy Production and the access of the population to that energy. This increases the power by which the given population can use to increase economic productivity even further and faster. Access to energy gives many a basic standard of life so that they are better enabled to study higher methods of production,. This in turn can change the standards of living around them for the universal welfare of the community and to increase the potential of that environment too. The increased abundance of energy gives the human being more time for other actions; rather than producing a fire to cook, keep warm and provide light in the dark, that same individual can now put their action toward increasing their potential in all areas of the human domain – science, art, culture, mathematics and history. This will all lead towards a universally developed nation where no single soul is left to rummage through the dust of the earth but rather, every single soul would have his or her eyes fixed firmly on the world around them and the stars and heavens above…

From the graphs above i would like to note an inflection point for both nations based on the simple metrics provided. It would appear that the inflection point for China’s now witnessed historic growth became apparent with the opening up of the PRC under Deng Xiaoping in 1978; with Mao Zedong having already provided the massive foundation of almost 60-70% Energy access and 300% growth in Food production for the nation.

When the PRC was founded in 1949, the grain output was only 113.2 million metric tons, which translated to 104.5 kilograms of grain per capita, providing an inadequate guarantee for people’s basic food needs. Grain production was later improved to a certain extend due to the rural land reform starting in the 1950s. In 1978, grain output reached 304.7 million metric tons. – Source: China.org

With the foundation of basic universal standards of living now in place and even though the percentage of people living in poverty was still very high in rural China, enough good work had been done in the cities and townships to start the process of industrialisation.

And start it did; as we can see above, the rates of poverty in rural China plummeted from 1978 onwards and we have the great Deng Xiaoping to thank for that beautiful economic plan but also we have Mao Zedong to thank for the very difficult and perilous foundation that was built for the PRC. No house, family or nation will have true last independence without that sovereign economic foundation.

Rolling forward to Ethiopia and Abiy Ahmed’s steering of the ship. For this Author, Mr. Ahmed is standing at the same step as Mr. Xiaoping had some decade before him and that step is the step of industrialisation or “opening up” as the Chinese called it at the time. You see when China “opened up”, the western oligarchs were rubbing their hands with glee for it surely meant that it was open season for themselves to come into China and buy up every industry with fanfare. Invite them in, China did; only that China did not let the western oligarchs come in and takeover industries, rather they told the Bank in London and Wall St in New York that we got this and your system of “governance” is not needed; but we will build the new Apple factories, learn from your wonderful hardware and software skills and also make you your cheap iPhones… the rest is history as they say and China has completed her made in China 2025 task. (“Made in China 2025” – a strategic industrial policy launched in 2015 by the Chinese government to transform China’s manufacturing sector from a focus on low-cost goods to one that is dominant in high-tech, innovative industries.)

Back to Ethiopia and where this nation is situated along the path of Hamiltonian/Xiaopingian economic development. I’d like to suggest that Ethiopia has arrived at China’s 1978 moment, in fact even a little past it already, for Ethiopia is fast becoming a multi vectored industrial nation with multiple modes of production.

• Agriculture – Coffee, Livestock and Crop production.

• Manufacturing – Textiles, food processing, beverages, cement and leather tanning.

• Mining -Gold, tantalum, niobium, and gemstones.

• Construction – Ethiopia’s construction industry is projected to grow by approximately 9% in 2025, following an 8.7% growth in 2024. The sector is also expected to average a 7.7% growth annually between 2026 and 2029.

• Services, Tourism, Telecommunication and IT, Financial services.

Then when we include the vast development of energy resources to back this quantum leap in industrialisation, we can see a very bright fire being lit in the horn of Africa. Ethiopia has just recently become an energy exporting nation, an achievement that is not just helping the nation but the entire region –

Timeline of electricity exports

• 2011: Ethiopia began exporting power to Djibouti, enabling Djibouti to import 35 megawatts of electricity.

• 2011: An interconnection with Sudan was established, with exports beginning in September 2011.

• November 2022: Ethiopia officially started exporting electricity to Kenya via a new 500-kilovolt power line – 200MW annually.

• 2024: Ethiopia expanded its energy exports to include Djibouti, Kenya, and Sudan, and plans to add Tanzania in the near future. The initial agreement is for 100MW, but there is potential to increase this to 200MW by 2027. Key players – The deal involves Ethiopia Electric Power (EEP), Tanzania’s Tanesco, and Kenya Electricity Transmission Company Limited (KETRACO), which will be paid a wheeling fee for using its transmission lines. Status: Trial runs have been successful, and the full-scale operation is being implemented soon.

• Present day: The country currently exports electricity to Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania and Sudan.

What we are witnessing above is the creation of an East African energy pool that will secure electricity access for all of the 520 million souls living in the region, thereby unleashing the birth of the next industrial revolution on this planet. Believe it or not, these nations have never had such extensive transport and energy corridors exist between them and are only just now beginning to realize the enormous potential in the development of that infrastructure. With the coming increase in the movement of people and trade, this development will inevitably speed up what is already a very impressive GDP and PPP growth for the region as a whole, but particularly for the big players – Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

To be continued in part two…

On Sunday December 15, 2024, investigative journalist and independent researcher Paul Collins elucidated the intelligence circles and deep state operatives perpetrating the UFO deception. This deception serves elitist interests seeking the technocratic restructuring of human civilization.

Paul David Collins is the author of The Hidden Face of Terrorism and the co-author of The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship and Invoking the Beyond: The Kantian Rift, Mythologized Menaces, and the Quest for the New Man.

Paul has published several articles concerning the topics of deep politics and elite deviancy. Those articles have appeared in Terry Melanson’s online Conspiracy Archive, Paranoia magazine, Vexilla Regis Journal, and Nexus magazine.

The Hidden Face of Terrorism
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASI...

The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASI...

Invoking the Beyond: The Kantian Rift, Mythologized Menaces, and the Quest for the New Man
https://www.amazon.com/Invoking-Beyon...

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, operates as an intellectual current dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

Watch Part two of this series: St Augustine’s City of God vs the Rot of the Roman Empire) here:

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, operates as an intellectual current dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

In this provocative lecture hosted by the Rising Tide Foundation, veteran journalist and historian Martin Sieff delivers a deep-dive revisionist look into the life, psyche, and literary legacy of Eric Blair—better known to the world as George Orwell.

While conventional history attributes Orwell’s dystopian vision in 1984 and Animal Farm solely to his firsthand experiences with Soviet totalitarianism during the Spanish Civil War, Sieff presents a profound psychological twist - that Orwell’s darkest concepts were actually forged a decade earlier during his time as a high-ranking colonial police chief in the British Empire in Burma (modern-day Myanmar).

Sieff argues that Orwell didn’t just write himself into 1984 as the victim, Winston Smith—he also wrote himself into the story as the ruthless, calculating interrogator, O’Brien. This lecture explores the concept of “the divided self,” the systemic nature of imperial oppression, and how Orwell’s subsequent life of self-imposed poverty and ultimate isolation was a subconscious penance for his role as an enforcer of empire. The talk also contrasts Orwell with his contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, examines his time manipulating truth at the BBC, and looks at how popular culture mirrors these deep psychological undercurrents.

Key Topics & Timestamps:

• [00:59] – Introduction Opening remarks on the sloppy use of the term “Orwellian” in modern geopolitics and the distinction between the British people and the British Empire.

• [07:22] – The Daughter’s Insight: Who is O’Brien? How a breakthrough realization reframed 1984: Orwell wasn’t just the tortured protagonist Winston Smith; he was also his own torturer, O’Brien.

• [12:04] – The Paradoxical Contemporary: George Orwell vs. Evelyn Waugh A fascinating contrast between two literary giants who deeply admired yet utterly baffled one another—the secular socialist who loathed empire versus the traditionalist Catholic monarchist who loved it.

• [18:23] – The Spanish Civil War and the Illusion of the Left How the Western intelligentsia, including figures like Ernest Hemingway, suppressed the dark reality of Soviet subversion and executions during the Spanish Civil War.

• [26:45] – The Secret Bureaucrat: Eric Blair’s Hidden Power in Burma Dismantling the myth of Orwell as an obscure, low-level constable. Sieff reveals Orwell’s role as a highly commended, senior administrator commanding over 300 imperial police forces.

• [46:40] – The Darkest Circle: The Origins of Room 101 A sobering look at how the infamous “rat torture” scene in 1984 was not a work of pure fiction, but a documented, systemic interrogation technique utilized by the British colonial police in Asia.

• [01:05:58] – The Disintegration of the Soul and Self-Penance How the psychological trauma of being an instrument of imperial terror caused Eric Blair’s psyche to collapse, driving him to live as a literal tramp and spend his remaining years in grueling, self-punishing poverty.

• [01:14:27] – The BBC and the Architecture of Modern Doublethink Orwell’s wartime work at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where he learned the systemic mechanics of truth manipulation and propaganda from the inside out.

• [01:30:01] – Audience Q&A & Discussion: The Divided Self & Psychological Warfare An expansive open floor discussion touching on R.D. Laing’s psychiatric concepts of “the double bind” and “knots,” the systemic schizophrenia of modern Western politics, and how pop culture (like The X-Files and The Twilight Zone) uncovers societal shadows.

  ---

  The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

  Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

  Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

  Rising Tide Foundation

  Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

Matt Ehret joined up with Peyman Askari on In Lay Terms to delve into the important role that Ideas play in shaping Universal History, and also the outline of the new RTF spring anthology.

You can purchase our RTF winter and spring Anthology as a Magazine via our substack page here:

Peyman asked some great questions, including: How do I compare the more collectivist/authoritarian views of Plato to the more individualist/observational approach of Aristotle?

Who was Cicero of Rome, and what were his contributions?

Who was St. Augustine, and what were his contributions?

Is there a connection between Teddy Roosevelt's progressive ties and his Anglophilia?

Enjoy this introductory lesson into universal history and if you liked this short dialogue, I encourage you to dive into our newest RTF Anthology: “Conquering Tyranny and Defeating Tragedy’ available here.

Watch the full unabridged interview here:

Matt Ehret's Insights

Plato, Cicero and St. Augustine: Three Men with One Mission

I joined up with Peyman Askari on In Lay Terms to delve into the important role that Ideas play in shaping Universal History…

Read more

4 months ago · 27 likes · Matthew Ehret

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

By Gerald Therrien

Have you ever thought about where the English language, that we speak today, came from?

In school, we were told that there was some indigenous Celtic language, and when the Romans invaded, the Celtic got mixed in with the Latin. And when the Romans left, the Angles and Saxons invaded, and some Germanic words got mixed in too. And when the Normans invaded, some French got mixed into the pot as well.

But with all this mixture of different languages, Latin remained the language of public documents, of the churches, and of teaching. Some people point to a Greek influence on English, but any knowledge of Greek thought would have come through Latin translations.

A more serious study of Greek in England’s universities didn’t begin until after 1499, when Erasmus visited England and drew around him some like-minded thinkers, like Thomas More, and a revival in the study of Greek thinking began.

But by the question – where did the English language come from? – I didn’t mean, where did English come from ‘technically’, but where did it come from ‘ideally’ – i.e. the idea of having a modern English language, an English that could be spoken by the average person, and not only the administrators, but a language that could build a culture for all the people.

But today, the English-speaking world seems to be descending into a cultural civil war, forcing us to steer between the Scylla of neo-liberalism and the Charybdis of neo-conservatism. Only a proper cultural confidence of English/American history may provide us with a safe passage to our past and to our future.

Around 1136 AD, just before the start of the civil war among the Norman rulers of Britain, known as the ‘Anarchy’, that brought the Plantagenets to the throne of England, a story was written (in Latin) that came to be called ‘the History of the Kings of Britain’ (Historia Regnum Britanniae) by a Welsh clergyman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it was written in much the same manner as Homer:

“Thus it is that our poet [Homer], though he sometimes employs fiction for the purposes of instruction, always gives the preference to truth; he makes use of what is false, merely tolerating it in order the more easily to lead and govern the multitude … In this manner he undertook the narration of the Trojan war, gilding it with the beauties of fancy and the wanderings of Odysseus; but we shall never find Homer inventing an empty fable apart from the inculcation of truth.” [Strabo]

Geoffrey tells a wonderful story of Aeneas’s great-grandson, Brutus, who sailed to Briton and founded New Troy (London), and then of the kings of the Britons (including Lear) until the Roman invasion, and after that, of the Germanic invasion of the Angles and Saxons, and later of the invasion from Brittany. And it is here that Geoffrey tells the story of King Arthur, and the attempt to unify the Britons and fight against the barbarians and invaders.

And perhaps seeing the coming civil war in his own time, Geoffrey tells this story of the great King Arthur, a story that could one day be used as a beginning of a cultural confidence for England, and perhaps end the civil war. But during the later Middle Ages and the age of the Crusades, this story of Arthur and his knights was changed, by people like Chretien de Troyes, into a chivalric romance.

But this ‘romantic imitation’ of ideas of fate and love was a problem for a proper and truthful English cultural confidence – a problem that began to be addressed ‘ideally’ by Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400), at a time just before another civil war, known as the ‘War of the Roses’. A good look at the history of this period can be found by reading Shakespeare’s history plays: ‘Edward III’ and ‘Richard II’ – the Plantagenet kings; ‘Henry IV’ and ‘Henry V’ – the Lancaster kings; and ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’ – the kings during the ‘War of the Roses’ before the Tudors came to the throne.

As the Lancastrians could be seen as a bridge from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, so in a similar way, Chaucer can also be seen as a bridge from the Middle Ages of Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Age of Spenser and Marlowe. And Chaucer would be very close to the political fights that were ongoing during this time of change. He lived during the reigns of Edward III, of Richard II, and after Richard’s abdication (for a very short time) of Henry IV, the son of John of Gaunt (the Duke of Lancaster) – who was Chaucer’s good friend.

Chaucer was born (possibly) around 1340, the son of a vintner in London, and lived during the years of the ‘black death’ in the British Isles, 1348-1351. He was (possibly) schooled at St. Paul’s, where he (possibly) learned Latin, French, and later, Italian. At around the age of 16, he became a page to the wife of Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and upon her death, he became a page for the Queen. Later he (possibly) studied law at one of the Inns of Court, and (possibly) at Oxford. Afterwards, he became a valet and squire to King Edward III, and he married Philippa Roet, a lady-in-waiting of the Queen, that he had first met while both were working for the household of Prince Lionel.

Sometime during this period, Chaucer would become friends with Prince John of Gaunt, who became the Duke of Lancaster after marrying Blanche of Lancaster. After Blanche’s death in 1368, Chaucer would write a poem ‘The Book of the Duchess’ as a consolation to John. Lancaster’s third wife, Katherine, was the sister of Philippa, Chaucer’s wife, and so Chaucer and Lancaster would become brothers-in-law. Lancaster’s son, the future King Henry IV, and his grandson, the future King Henry V, would (possibly) have met and spoke with, and (possibly) also have studied and learned from Chaucer. Lancaster would die eight months before the 32-year-old Henry IV became king, and Chaucer would die, of unknown causes (???), one year after Henry IV became king, when Henry V was 13 years-old. Lancaster’s and Katherine’s great-grand-son (and Chaucer’s great-grand-nephew) would become Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England !!!

In December 1372, Chaucer was sent, as part of a trade mission, to Genoa in Italy, and he also visited Florence, where he was able to learn about Dante and his ‘Divine Comedy’ – and where it is thought that he (possibly) may have met Boccaccio at Florence or may have (possibly) met Petrarch at Arqua. And it would be this ‘Italian’ influence that helped Chaucer in his attempts at a beginning of an English school of poetry.

In 1374 Chaucer became a comptroller of the wool customs in the port of London, and now having more time at home and less time at court, he wrote another poem ‘The House of Fame’.

In 1378, Chaucer was sent on another mission to the Lord of Milan, where Chaucer could have experienced this lord’s great library, and maybe here he became acquainted with the poetical works of Petrarch and Boccaccio, because he brought back to England with him, copies of Boccaccio’s poems. Afterwards he wrote another poem, about St. Valentine’s Day, ‘The Parliament of Fowls’. While most of us know Chaucer as the author of the ‘Canterbury Tales’, we should also remember him for these three poems, and for what these three poems all have in common – a dream. And in all three poems, he directly references ‘Scipio’s Dream’ by Cicero.

Part 1 – ‘The Book of the Duchess’

[Note: I have used “a modernised version or translation, retaining Chaucer’s rhyme scheme, and close to the original, but eliminating archaisms which would require explanatory notes” by A. S. (Tony) Kline (2007).A free download of Chaucer’s poem can be found at: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Duchess.php While it is not 100% perfect, it is still a wonderful work and an enjoyable effort that gives us humble readers an easily read and easily understood insight into the mind of our English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.]

The poem begins with the author of our poem complaining that he cannot sleep, that he lives in a kind of apathy, where he feels neither joy nor sorrow, where he doesn’t care about anything, and where his ‘sorrowful imagination’ fills his head with such ‘melancholy’ and ‘fantasies’ that he fears that this may eventually kill him.

I wonder greatly, by this day’s light,
How I still live, for day and night
The sleep I gain is well nigh naught,
I have so many an idle thought,
Simply through default of sleep,
That, by my troth, I take no heed
Of anything that comes or goes,
Nor anything do like or loath.
All is of equal good to me,
Joy or sorrow, whichever be,
For I have feeling now for nothing,
But am, as it were, a dazed thing
Ever on the point of dropping down
For sorrowful imagination
Always wholly grips my mind.
[lines 1-15]

But then, one night when our poet couldn’t sleep, he decided to read a book – Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’, and in this book, he found a tale of a king and queen – ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’. And now their story is told – that when Ceyx didn’t return from a sea voyage (where during a storm, he and all his crew were drowned) Alcyone was so worried and so sorrowful, not knowing if he was alive or dead, and so she prayed to Juno to show her ‘mercy’, and to tell her, in a dream, what had happened to her husband.

Juno sent her messenger to tell Morpheus, the god of sleep, that he should go and find the dead body of Ceyx, and so, wearing the body of Ceyx, he could appear to Alcyone in her dream, to tell her how he had drowned, so as to end her sorrow.

In the next part of the poem, our poet tells us that this story made him think that this would be wonderful, if it was true – that maybe here was a way that he could solve his problem of not sleeping!

And so, after promising a gift to Morpheus, or Juno, or anyone else, that would let him sleep and get some rest, he finally fell asleep and he had this dream. And he compares this telling of his dream, to Joseph telling Pharoah of his dream, and to Macrobius telling of Scipio’s dream.

[Macrobius Ambrosius Theodorius, who lived during the 5^th century AD, wrote ‘Commentary on the Dream of Scipio’ that was widely copied and read, and this is how the ‘Dream of Scipio’ – the sixth book of Cicero’s ‘Republic’, survived and was passed down to later generations, including Chaucer.]

Scarcely had I that word said
Right thus as I have told it you,
When suddenly, I know not how,
Such a desire at once me took
To sleep, that right upon my book
I fell asleep, and therewith seemed
To dream so wholly sweet a dream,
So wonderful that never yet
I think has any had the wit
To know how my dream be read;
No, not Joseph, be it said,
Of Egypt, he that deciphered so
The dreams of the king, Pharoah,
No more than the least of us;
No, scarcely could Macrobius,
He who wrote the whole vision
Scipio dreamed, of that noble man
He who was called the African –
Such marvels happened then –
Read my vision, it would seem,
Lo, thus it was, this was my dream.
[lines 270 – 290]

Now our poet is dreaming, and it’s a morning in May when he’s just been awakened by the sweet singing of the birds, and all the windows in his chamber were stained with the story of Troy, and all the walls were painted with the story of the Romance of the Rose.

[It has been claimed that Chaucer translated into old English ‘The Romance of the Rose’ (a 13^th century French poem that was also about a dream of a search for love).]

While lying awake in bed, he heard the huntsman blow his horn to signal the start of the king’s hunt, and so he rose and joined the hunt in the forest. Then while walking in the forest, he came across a young knight, dressed in black, sitting against a tree, with his head hanging down in grief, reciting a song of sorrow.

Our poet asks the knight what makes him so troubled, and that if the knight would tell him why, then maybe he could help to ease his heart. But the knight says that nothing can cure his sorrow, but that if anyone that heard his story, didn’t have ‘ruth’ and ‘pity’ for him [i.e. compassion], then they must surely have an fiendish heart.

And whoever knew all, by my truth,
Of my sorrow, and had not ruth
And pity on my sorrow’s smart
He would have a fiend’s heart. [lines 591 – 594]

And now, we hear the knight tell his tale of woe to our poet. He blames his sorrow upon Fortune, and he compares his fate to a game of chess, where he lost his queen, and Fortune called out ‘Check’ and ‘Mate’! And the knight wished that he had studied more, so that he could have guarded his queen better, but then he said that ‘I hold that wish not worth a straw’ – that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, that he couldn’t have changed his fate, and that is why he is so sorrowful.

Yet, in truth, I say, what for and why?
I hold that wish not worth a straw.
It would never have aided me more,
For Fortune knows many a wile,
There are but few can her beguile [lines 670 – 674]

And so, our poet said that the knight should have some compassion for himself, and he tried to remind the knight of Socrates, who cared ‘not a straw’ for fate.

‘Ah, good sir’, quoth I, ‘say not so.
Have some pity on human nature
That created you as a creature.
Remember how once Socrates
Counted not a straw, not three,
Aught that Fortune could do.’ [lines 714 – 719]

Here our poet is referring to Socrates saying that instead of fearing death, he feared doing something that was unjust:

‘Then I, however, showed again, by action, not in word only, that I did not care a whit for death, if that be not too rude an expression, but that I did care with all my might not to do anything unjust or unholy.’ [Apology – 32d]

And now begins an argument between our poet and the knight.

‘No’, quoth he, ‘I can not so’.
‘Who so, good sir, by God!’ quoth I,
‘Nay say not so in truth, for, why,
Though you had lost queens twelve,
And then for sorrow slain yourself,
You would be damned in this case
As rightly as Medea of Thrace,
Who slew her children for Jason;
And Phyllis who for Demophon
Hung herself, well-away,
Since he had failed on that day
To come to her. Another rage
Had Dido too, Queen of Carthage,
Who slew herself since Aeneas
Was false, what a fool she was!
And Echo died since Narcissus
Would not love her, and right thus
Many another was folly done.
And for Delilah died Sampson,
Who slew himself beneath the pillar.
But there is none alive here
Would for a queen feel this woe!’ [lines 720 – 741]

Our poet tells the knight that this ‘romantic’ kind of love will end with him killing himself, and it’s not real love, it’s rage, foolishness and folly, and that he shouldn’t feel this way, over a queen. But now, the knight tells our poet that he has lost more than a queen – ‘I have lost more than you can see’, and so, the knight tells his story that since his youth, when he first began to understand what love is, he devoted himself to love.

But because love came first in thought
Therefore I forgot it nought.
I chose love as my first craft,
Therefore it bides with me at last.’ [lines 789 – 792]

Then one day, by Fortune, he chanced to see a lady that surpassed all others in beauty, both in manners and in appearance, and that she was all that entered into his thoughts. And many others also looked on her, hoping that she would take mercy on them – but ‘she gave not a straw’ for them all.

‘But many a one with a glance she hurt,
Though that little troubled her at heart,
For she knew nothing of their thought:
Though whether she knew or knew it not,
She gave not a straw for all, you see!
To win her love no closer was he
At home, than one who in India pined;
The foremost one was ever behind.
But good folk above all others
She loved as men love their brothers;
Of which love she was generous rarely
In certain places that proved worthy’ [lines 883 – 894]

But she gave ‘not a straw’, not because of pride, or ‘petty tricks’ but because she set her mind ‘without malice upon gladness’ – no one was ever harmed ‘by her tongue’, her word was ‘true as any bond’, ‘nor chided she’ whatever happened.

‘She so loved her own good name,
She wished to trifle with no man,
No, be sure, she would not stand
That any should live in suspense
With half-hints or sly countenance’ [lines 1018 – 1022]

And so, the knight set about to lay all his love, his joy, and his bliss upon her, and he even made songs of his feelings for her, but he was afraid to tell her. Then thinking that Nature couldn’t have made someone with such beauty and goodness, but ‘without mercy’, he finally told her his story (but not very well).

‘For many a word I over-skipped
In my tale, simply through fear,
Lest my words unfitting were.
With sorrowful heart to wounds wed,
Softly, quaking for pure dread
And shame, and halting in my tale
For fear, and my hue all pale,
Full oft I waxed both pale and red.
Bowing to her, I hung my head;
I dared not once look thereon,
For wit, manner and all were gone.
I cried ‘mercy’ and no more [lines 1208 – 1219]

And when he had finished telling his tale ‘she gave never a straw’, (or so he thought)!!!

And when I had my tale all told,
God knows, she gave never a straw
For all my tale, so I thought. [lines 1236 – 1238]

And he quietly slipped away and lived each day looking for sorrow. But after a year, and overcoming his fear, the knight decided to tell her that he only wanted ‘nothing but good, and honour, and to guard her name above all things’. And that it would be a pity if he should die because of his woe. When she now knew all of this, she showed him ‘the noble gift of her mercy’, and she gave him her ring, and he learned of her true compassion.

Our joy was ever endless new;
0Our hearts were so even a pair
That neither was contrary, I swear
Ever to the other, despite all woe.
For truly they suffered alike so
One bliss, and one sorrow both;
Equally glad and vexed both.
All was one, no quarrelling there.
And thus we lived full many a year
So well, I cannot tell you how.” [lines 1288 – 1297]

And so ended the knight’s tale. But our poet asked where is she now? And the knight replied that he had said that he lost more than our poet could see.

‘Alas! sir, how? How may that be?’
‘She is dead.’ ‘Nay!’ ‘Yes, by my troth.’
‘By God, then I pity you for your loss.’ [lines 1308 – 1310]

Our poet gives the knight ‘compassion’, (and shows that he does not have a fiend’s heart – lines 591 – 594). What more can the knight ask for, and what more can our poet give him – but compassion? The same ‘mercy’ and compassion that his lady had given him? And immediately, the huntsman’s horn rang out, and the king and his followers returned to his castle, when the castle bell now rang out – and our poet awoke.

Thought I: ‘This is so strange a dream
That I will, in process of time,
Strive to put this dream in rhyme
As best I can’, and that full soon.
This was my dream; now it is done. [lines 1330 – 1334]

And our dream and our poem have ended. And hopefully, Chaucer has shown us that melancholy and fantasies of ‘romantic love’ are ‘not worth a straw’, but that we should instead look to ‘mercy’ and ‘ruth’, and a compassion (and not fortune) that may change our fate.

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

Cynthia takes the audience through the subsequent wave of history as Giusseppe Mazzini emerges onto the scene to shape what becomes known as the international Mafia brotherhood, Young Europe anarcho fascists, and the Jesuitical operations that emerge behind the scenes to shape the European Fascist program under the figure of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.

You can purchase Cynthia Chung’s books here.

Watch the first part of this seminar delivered by Matt Ehret here.

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

Cynthia and I are proud to announce the publication of the second Rising Tide Foundation Anthology ‘The Art of Liberty’ with a theme of ‘Conquering Tyranny and Defeating Tragedy’.

In this epic 200 page special report, you will be introduced to a sweeping overview of universal history with a fresh look at Plato’s fight against the Temple of Delphi and the broader Babylonian Priesthood, the rise of Cicero who took up the torch laid down by Plato to save the soul of the Roman republic as it slid into a dystopic transformation as a new Babylonian marcher lord.

We will review the mystery cults that took control of Persia, and went to war with early Jewish and Christian leaders who sought to resist the forces of Baal and Molech.

The early fifth century fight led by Augustine of Hippo to bring forth a City of God on earth, all the while battling the Gnostic high priests during the collapse of the western empire is explored. The battles by Platonists from the Academy to organize young Alexander to break apart the Persian empire setting the stage for the Han Dynasty’s creation of the Silk Road, and kingdom of Gandara are also explored… and also the ongoing Augustinian/Platonic movement that kept humanity progressing against all odds via the 6th century Celtic Augustinian movement at Clonmacnois, the Carolingian renaissance, the battles of Peter Abelard against the new gnostic Templar sorcerer knights, Ramon Lull’s efforts to spark a renaissance while trying to stop the Crusades.

You will see how this incredible movement has represented the most potent renaissance tradition throughout history and invokes the same principles of Natural Law when it was awoken in India, China, Africa, Egypt, the Americas and Europe.

We trace this fight through the Florentine renaissance movement, the Brotherhood of Common life, the battles to destroy the new Babylonian hive in Venice via the League of Cambrai, and of course the American Revolution.

The potent battles of Homer, Aeschylus and later Shakespeare and Schiller’s revival of classical tragedy are outlined along with an assessment of the revival of the mystery cults in the 20th century.

Throughout the book, don’t be surprised to find an array of beautiful paintings, especially as we explore the poetic mind of Rembrandt van Rijn who chose to leave his mark on immortality through several creative renditions of biblical lessons which bookend this issue.

We are sensitive to peoples budgets, but still wanted to have a premium full color edition of this anthology available (they are remarkably expensive to print on Amazon)… so we decided to make available one softcover edition in black and white which is less than $19 USD, and a more expensive premium hardcover edition… as well as a digital PDF and Kindle version.

CLICK HERE TO PICK UP YOUR COPY OF VOL. 2 TODAY

AND GET VOLUME 1 HERE (ONLY FULL COLOR AVAILABLE)

Of course, for paid subscribers, you can download a complementary copy of the past two RTF anthologies by going to the links below:

Read more

Read the four installments of Deception Through Disclosure published on the Canadian Patriot

Deception Through Disclosure Part 1: Decoding the Grusch Enigma

Deception Through Disclosure Part 2: More Spooks, Complicit Media, and Deep State-Sponsored Fringe Science

Deception through Disclosure Part 3: The Galileo Project, the Mellons, the Ghost of Paul Nitze, and the NSC-68 Agenda

Deception Through Disclosure part 4: The Coming Cosmic Operation Northwoods?

Purchase Phil and Paul Collins’ books The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship and Invoking the Beyond: The Kantian Rift, Mythologized Menaces, and the Quest for the New Man. (both available on Amazon.com)

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

In this first of two presentations delivered to a live audience in Calgary Alberta, Matt Ehret introduces the occult underpinnings shaping major events of world history, from the Crusades, the rise of Chivalric orders, to the major religious wars of Europe’s past before, during and after the golden renaissance.

A look to the rise of Rosicrucians as a rebranded occult Templar order (serving as a dark mirror to their Jesuit counterparts), the formulas of left hand vs right hand political alchemy, the dark origins of the Thirty Years War, and the parallels to today’s occult military intelligence operations influencing many right and left leaning circles is explored in some detail.

This lecture is followed by a presentation by Cynthia Chung on the ugly truth behind the French Revolution, the occult mafia brotherhood, freemasonry, Giusseppe Mazzini’s Carbonnari, Young America movement, Albert Pike and the rise of the European Union as an occult operation.

Watch Cynthia’s lecture from the same event here.

The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization.

Watch our RTF films and documentaries here.

Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.