essays on polytheism, minimalism, and everything in between
I. To Elpis (Hope) Elpis, you remain in the jar, the potential of libations. Before words are spoken, on the tip of the tongue, among our racing desires, adventurous, grasping thoughts, you shine like a struck nebula, dispensing grace like flowers. You are the brightness we grasp, unseeing the Fates who know the topography of … Continue reading Maxim 62: ἐλπίδα αἴνει
I'm working my way through G. Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul (2nd ed.) While at the laundromat yesterday, I read the chapters "Ritual and the Human Hierarchy" and "Ritual as Cosmogony." The chapters rely on De Mysteriis, with injections of De Anima and some other texts. Essentially, human souls are divided into three groups, with different types of … Continue reading Returning to the Lojong Slogans (with Iamblichus This Time)
It occurred to me while reading an article in Scientific American about misconceptions people have about cosmology that there are similar challenges when trying to visualize the systems in philosophers like Iamblichus and Proclus. I'm blogging briefly about it because (a) I get to talk about astronomy and (b) maybe it's useful to others. (Now that … Continue reading A Cosmology Analogy for Something in Iamblichus
I’ve made some notes and highlights public on Goodreads related to polytheistic things I’ve read over the years. You can look at them even if you don’t have a Goodreads account. While I don’t read books on Kindle anymore because I have a Kobo and am trying to avoid Amazon, there’s no real reason for … Continue reading Some Highlights From Things I’ve Read
Recently, my girlfriend and I have been attending a Buddhist LGBTQ sangha, which holds a meditation once a week, in the Shambhala tradition. It's 90 minutes long, with a combination of sitting and walking meditation followed by scriptural discussions. While I am not a Buddhist, I can appreciate a lot of Buddhism — the discipline … Continue reading Plato-Related Thoughts After Reading a Few Lojong Slogans
The Nobel Prize in Physics announced on Tuesday went to cosmology and exoplanets — the second half specifically to two people who discovered a planet around a Sun-like star. In October 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the … Continue reading Exoplanets, Exolife, and Gods
A few verses about social media, opinion, and unknown ways forward.
This is something Proclus wrote in his Parmenides commentary that I rarely go more than 2-3 days without thinking about. Proclus is commenting on that part of the Parmenides (at 128d) where Zeno describes how awkward it was to go viral with a philosophical thing he wrote as a young man — someone stole a copy of … Continue reading What Does One Transmit?
The past two posts — the one about how Strawberry Shortcake got me thinking about depictions of Hêlios and Zeus I encountered as a child and the other about motivations and actions — both included some discussion of (and reaction to) Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods, which I am reading through right now. Since … Continue reading Some Quotations from a Thing I’m Reading On Orphic Things
KALLISTI 