A Few Updates, A Hymn from Thomas Taylor, and a Quotation

Thargelia begins at sunset on May 3rd for many of us, which marks the holiday for Artemis and Apollon as well as Socrates and Plato’s respective birthdays in the tradition.

At the close of an academic year that was … intense? is that the right word for it? … due to looking back at the health things last year, the country’s fractious free-fall floundering, and all of the changes in my life, I decided to take some PTO days to make Thargelia into a fully immersive reset. I’ve built out a reading list of what I want to engage with during the two days, with an outline of the types of prayers I want to give and when, and have written down sunrise and sunset times.

The past few months have been a lot. For a few weekends over the past few months, I’ve done focused reading — one book in one day, with breaks for meals and to move around, because it does actually annoy me to chop up reading a long-form work into a series of moments spread across days or weeks. I’ve really enjoyed that practice. I went into NYC one day in mid-April with a friend and encountered the giant pigeon statue called “Dinosaur” (which feels like it’s staring through you). From mid- to late April, I finished reading some stray magazines, fell in delight with a hymn to Apollon and the Sun from Thomas Taylor, and perused some passages from Damascius’ Life of Isidore, the last one for no reason other than that I don’t want to start reading any new-to-me books before Thargelia. I also started looking through some of the photographs I’ve taken of book pages over the years. Work has been hectic, but while rushing home this Thursday to feed the cats and then hop on another work Zoom, I realized that spring’s greening buds on the trees had suddenly turned to leaves.

This has been a short update, but I’d like to close by sharing the Thomas Taylor hymn that I mentioned in the paragraph above, “To Apollo and the Sun,” which is in a book from the Prometheus Trust (I’m linking to the USA site):

The Sun’s resplendent deity I sing,
The beauteous offspring of almighty Jove,
Who, thro’ the vivifying solar fount
Within his fabricative mind conceal’d,
A triad form’d of splendid solar gods;
From whence the world’s all-various forms emerg’d
From mystic darkness into beauteous light,
Perfect, and full of intellectual goods.
Hail! Supermundane king of light divine,
And fairest image of the unknown good:
For, as the light proceeding from The One,
The god of gods, and beauty’s matchless flower,
Intelligibles, with deific rays
Occult, illumes; so from Apollo’s beams
Exulting glorious through harmonic power,
The mental world with elevating light
Is fill’d exub’rant: and th’apparent sun
Largely diffuses thro’ the world of sense,
Light, all-prolific, beautiful, divine.
To thee, as bright Apollo, it belongs
All multitude in union to collect,
And many natures generate from one;
With vigour in thy essence to convolve
The diff’rent ranks of secondary forms;
And thro, one fair hyparxis to combine
All-various essences and fertile powers.
‘Tis thine, from multitude exempt, t’inspire
In forms subordinate, prophetic truth;
For truth and pure simplicity are one:
And of preserving unpolluted power,
Thy liberated essence is the source.
Fam’d mystic bards of old, in sacred song,
By thee inspir’d, as th’arrow-darting god,
Constant invok’d thee, with resistless sway,
Because thy vig’rous beams like arrows pierce,
And totally, whate’er of measure void the world
Inordinate or dark contains, destroy.
And last, thy revolution is the sign
Of motion, harmonizing into one
The various natures of this mighty whole.
Thy first bright Monad hence, illustrious god,
Enunciates truth and intellectual light;
That light, which in the essence of the gods,
Subsists with rays uniting and unknown.
Thy second, ev’ry thing confus’d destroys:
And from thy third, the universe is bound
In beauteous symmetry and just consent,
Thro’ splendid reasons and harmonic power.
Add, that thy essence, ‘midst the mundane gods,
A super-mundane order is assign’d;
An unbegotten and supreme command
O’er all the ranks of generated forms;
And in the ever-flowing realms of sense,
An intellectual dignity of sway.
Progression two-fold, hence, to thee belongs, —
One in conjunction with the mundane gods,
The other supernat’ral and unknown:
For when the Demiurgus form’d the world,
He kindled in the solar sphere a light,
Unlike the splendour of the other orbs,
Drawn from his nature’s most occult retreats,
A symbol fair of intellectual forms;
And openly announcing as it shines
To evry part of this amazing whole,
The essence solitary and arcane
Of all the ruling, supermundane gods.
Hence too, when first thy beams the world adorn’d
The mundane gods were ravish’d at the sight;
And round thy orb, with emulative zeal
And symphony divine, desir’d to dance,
And draw abundant from thy fontal light.
‘Tis thine by heat apparent to exalt
Corporeal natures from the sluggish earth,
Inspiring vivid, vegetative power,
And by a nature secretly divine,
And from the base alloy of matter free,
Inherent in thy all-productive rays,
Thou draw’st to union with thy wond’rous form,
Exalted souls, that in dark Hyle’s realms
Indignant struggle for the courts of light:
All beauteous, seven-rayed, supermundane god!
Whose mystic essence secretly emits
The splendid fountains of celestial light.
For, midst the ruling, super-mundane gods
A solar world, and total light subsists;
A light, which as a fertile monad shines
Superior to the three corporeal worlds.
By sacred oracles of old, ’tis said,
Thy glorious orb beyond the starry sphere
And in the last etherial world revolves.
But in thy course, harmoniously divine,
Thy orb quadruply intersects these worlds;
And then twelve powers of radiant gods displays,
Thro’ twelve divisions of the zone oblique.
And still abundant in productive might,
Each into three of diff’rent ranks divides.
Hence, from the fourfold elegance and grace
Of times and seasons, by thy course produc’d,
Mankind a triple benefit receive,
The circling Graces’ never-failing gift.
All-bounteous god, by whom the soul is freed
From Generation’s dark corporeal bands,
Assist THY OFFSPRING, borne on mental wings,
Beyond the reach of guileful Nature’s hands
Swift to ascend, and gain thy beauteous world.
The subtle vestment of my soul refine,
Etherial, firm, and full of sacred light,
Her ancient vehicle by thee assign’d;
In which invelop’d, thro’ the starry orbs,
Urg’d, by the impulse of insane desire,
She fail’d precipitate, till Lethe’s shore,
Involv’d in night, unhappily she touch’d,
And lost all knowledge of her pristine state:
O best of gods, blest damon crown’d with fire,
My soul’s sure refuge in the hour of woe,
My port paternal in the courts of light,
Hear, and from punishment my soul absolve,
The punishment incurt’d by pristine guilt,
Thro, Lethe’s darkness and terrene desire.
And if for long-extended years I’m doom’d
In these drear realms Heav’n’s exile to remain,
Oh! grant me soon the necessary means
To gain that good which solitude confers
On souls emerging from the bitter waves
Of fraudful Hyle’s black, impetuous flood
That thus retiring from the vulgar herd,
And impious converse of the present age,
My soul may triumph o’er her natal ills;
And oft with thee in blissful union join’d
Thro, energy ineffable, may soar
Beyond the highest super-mundane forms;
And in the vestibule supreme survey,
Emerging from th’intelligible deep,
Beauty’s transcendent, solitary sun.

If you want to cross-reference Taylor’s hymn against anything, it pulls heavily from Proclus’ Theology of Plato before it gets personal with the all-caps towards the end.

And a quotation from Rebecca Solnit’s Spring 2024 interview with Tricycle:

Another story we’ve been told is that we currently live in an age of abundance and climate [action(?)] requires terrible renunciation of us. Βut we actually live in an era of austerity when it comes to social connection, to joy, to friendship, to free time, to hope about the future, or to living in a healthy world where the air is breathable, the food is good for you, and the ocean is thriving. For the sake of fossil fuel in particular, we’ve renounced so much: we’ve renounced clean air; we’ve renounced the future; we’ve renounced health and physical and political well-being. What if renouncing fossil fuels could bring us to an era where the air is clean, where the natural world is thriving, where food is good for you, where we have more time for friendship, for joy, for creativity, for meditation, for time in the natural world, for cooking or painting or whatever gives us pleasure? Where we have more confidence in each other and in the future?

The printed transcript seemed to be missing a word in her response, so I attempted to fill it in with my best guess. While reading the interview, I reflected on the wide chasm between last spring and this spring, and then I thought of Erysichthon.