Catshaman

Thanks to Ness for an introduction to Catshaman and his marvellous archeological and mythological e-pages. I will no doubt spend hours [I have already] wandering amongst his online e-books through these millenial records and myths.Click here.

the 'occult' Carl Jung

Some notes from material going around the internet, stemming from a pastoral counselling publication years ago, but interesting:

"In The Jung Cult (1994), clinical psychologist Richard Noll amply documents Jung’s immersion in the paganism and occultism of German culture near the turn of the last century. Although raised in a Christian environment, Jung’s passion focused on the rediscovery of ancient mystery religions that emphasized occultic initiations and sun worship. He immersed himself in the study of mythology and archeology in the hope of finding a primordial wisdom that had been obscured and rejected by the Christian conquest of paganism. Jung resolutely rejected the Christian view that God transcends the creation. Instead, he embraced pantheism, with its god within....
"Mystical paganism was not mere history or theory to Jung. Noll reports Jung’s claim that in 1913 he himself became a god through an extended visualization exercise based on the elements of the initiation rituals of the ancient mystery religions, especially Mithraism. Noll comments that it 'is clear that Jung believed he had undergone a direct initiation into the ancient Hellenistic mysteries and had even experienced deification....'

"Jung also claims to have contacted various spirit entities through his process of 'active imagination,' or directed visualization. By 1916, an entity called Philemon had become Jung’s spiritual guru, and functioned much like the “ascended masters” of the Theosophical movement in Jung’s day. These entities were not occasional visitors with little influence on Jung’s work. According to Noll, these encounters helped shape the whole pattern of Jung’s theoretical work. According to Jung, they had 'their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.' Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, records a haunting of the Jung house, which, he claims, involved paranormal phenomena.

"Through the profound influence of this haunting, Jung wrote a short essay called the Septem Sermones ad Mortuous (the Seven Sermons to the Dead) , under the pseudonym Basilides (a second Century Gnostic writer). In his autobiography, Jung says that 'I was compelled from within, as it were, to formulate and express what might have been said by Philemon. This was how the Septem Sermones ad Mortuous with its peculiar [Gnostic] language came into being.' The sermons are directed at deceased Christian souls who arrive at the Jung household because they have failed to find liberation through the church. The first six sermons present a Gnostic world view, and prepare the dead for the final sermon. Here, Jung tells them to stop seeking salvation outside of themselves, but to look inward toward the 'innermost infinity', which is also referred to as the inner 'Star' or the 'one guiding god.' Having received this revelation, the restless dead disappear and rise into the night sky, apparently to find their own inner stars. Jung’s sun worship and Gnostic predilections appear in full force in this essay...."

The gnostic interpretation regards people who lack an inner life or spiritual awareness as the walking dead so these sermones may be addressed rather to these unenlightened souls.
nekkid

Abendrot

The late afterglow of the sunset tonight was so lovely!

Lighting the fluffy white clouds first rose then gradually becoming more peachy ... one was moved to elated contemplation ... and genitive absolute observations.

click here

Nympholepsy

Nympholepsy is a term covering several overlapping concepts including heightened awareness and sharpened verbal abilities resulting from the influence of the Muses or other Nymphs.
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The nympholept is in a state of divine madness; not a madness regarded as pathological in the Archaic and Classical periods.
In postclassical times, however, possession by nymphs became increasingly feared as pathological; the ultima of this being the dramatic 'demonic possession' calling for The Exorcist.
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There were those, even in classical times, who were physically 'snatched away' by nymphs, sometimes never to be seen again. This is like the Irish state of being "awa' wi' the faeries".
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The inspiration of the Muses is desired by most poets. One finds frequent invocations of the Muses in Homer and poets continuing into the present.
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Come Muse and light my creative fires
so I may create beauty, singing bliss
***nekkid***26July2006
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Readthis It's
a ninth grader's essay on The Muses

Ahoy mateys !

Ahoy!

Fat Angel beaming down with Sunshine Superman while

Twisting Plotinus' thought & descrying in Plato's teeth:

O, Fly Translove Airways...with a bopa bop bippity bop:

Sh'll get you to the Translunar Paradise betimes, O dudes:

Skittering through the jinglejangles with barking moondogs:

Yous'all don't need some weathermen to know which way the

Conspiracies are hiphopping; & the carbombs they're blowing.

O say can you see...all through the days...all through the nights!

nekkid

For a fun divertimento, check this'n out:

http://webusers.physics.umn.edu/~duvernoi/ball.html

Edith Hamilton

The dust jacket of my 1942 edition of The Greek Way relates that "Edith Hamilton has won a notable place in contemporary American letters through her books on the culture of the ancient world. A student of the classics from her earliest youth, she has read Latin and Greek all her life for her own pleasure. She was graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1894 and did graduate work in Greek and Latin at the University of Munich, to which she was the first woman ever admitted. She was for twenty-five years Head Mistress of the Bryn Mawr School for girls in Baltimore...."

Fancy that ... reading Latin and Greek "for her own pleasure"! The established hierarchy of academia was, of course, umbraged by this feminine aristo cavorting wantonly in their sancta sanctorum as you may note in some of these references:
http://www.bookrags.com/notes/myt/BIO.htm
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http://www.brynmawr.edu/classics/hamilton.html
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http://genforum.genealogy.com/dc/messages/2850.html
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http://www.answers.com/topic/edith-hamilton

Pindar -- Edith Hamiton's criticism

Edith Hamilton, a lifelong scholar of the classics, wrote in her The Greek Way (1942): "Pindar is austere. Splendor can be cold, and Pindar glitters but never warms. He is hard, severe, passionless, remote.... He never steps down from his frigid eminence. Aristocrats did not stoop to lies, and his pen would never deviate from the strict truth in praising any triumph.... 'Now do I believe,' he says, 'that the sweet words of Homer make great beyond the fact the story of Odysseus, and upon these falsities through Homer's winged skill there broods a mysterious spell. His art deceives us.... But as for me, whoever has examined can declare if I speak crooked words.' Again, 'In ways of singleheartedness may I walk through life, not holding up a glory fair-seeming but false.' and in another ode:

Forge thy tongue on an anvil of truth

And what flies up, though it be but a spark,

Shall have weight.

Nevertheless, also strictly in the aristocratic tradition, he would leave the truth unsaid if it was ugly or unpleasant, offensive to delicate feeling. 'Believe me,' he writes, 'not every truth is the better for showing its face unveiled.' "

Straw

"Everything I have written is straw." This quotation is attributed to Thomas Aquinas, philosopher-theologian and Dominican priest. I would like to find a biographic source to substantiate this as I have only received it as an oral transmission.
I also recall hearing that in his young student days he was known as "the dumb ox" by his fellows. That seems to fit with the straw metaphor nicely.