“As Above, So Below”: Following a Slogan Back to Its Source
The four-word formula at the heart of much modern esoteric and New Age writing is usually presented as the teaching of an Egyptian sage older than Moses.
"What He Retains Is An Agency Grounded in the Soul’s Union With Its Divine Source."
Plato’s Sixth Definition of the Sophist
The Book Was Empty When He Got It
Journals, Notebooks & FragmentsPhoto of the Day
Pelicans drift across a wide blue sky.
A loose formation of brown pelicans glides overhead, their broad wings and long bills silhouetted against a clear, open sky.
Philosophy
Would Kant's Dove Fly Better in Empty Space?
In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant pictures a dove that feels the air pushing against its wings and imagines it would fly better without any air at all, and says that this is what Plato did when he left the world of the senses for the world of ideas.
Reading Spinoza's Ethics: Why a Book About Blessedness Looks Like Euclid
Spinoza's Ethics, written in Latin between 1661 and 1675 and published only after his death in 1677, is laid out like a geometry textbook: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, each followed by its proof and the letters Q.E.D. Its subject is God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage, and the way to freedom, and its last page is about blessedness.
More Things in Heaven and Earth
Hamlet's "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" is quoted more often than almost any line in the play, usually to rebuke a sceptic.
Is “Know Thyself” Enough? Plato’s Test of Self-Knowledge
Plato’s Charmides shows why knowing that we may be ignorant is valuable but insufficient: responsible judgment also requires knowledge of the subject and some understanding of good and evil.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
¶ 3laxity bears its fruits; and, in the drawing room as in the street, no one there is one too many, no one there is absolutely useful, nor absolutely harmful: fools and rogues, as well as people of wit or probity. Everything is tolerated there, the government and the guillotine, religion and cholera. You always suit this world, you are never missed in it. What, then, rules in this country without morals, without belief, without any feeling; but from which all feelings, all beliefs, and all morals depart and at which they arrive? Gold and pleasure. Take these two words as a light and traverse this great cage of plaster, this hive with black streams, and follow within it the little serpents of this thought that agitates it, lifts it, works it? Look. First examine the world that has nothing?
The Seeker’s Journey
Journals, Notebooks & Fragments
Today’s Passage
“All the Angels and Cherubims in Heaven, though their righteousness should be imputed to him could not justify him.”
Thomas TraherneCenturies of MeditationsMeditation II.35, English p. 298
Read this entryRenaissance · From the Library
Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II
Today’s passage
Either it would cease to exist before it ceased to move, cease to move before it ceased to exist, or cease both to exist and to move at the same instant.
Marsilio Ficino Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II V.1.1–V.1.3
Translation: Diotimos Editions
Read this passageRenaissance
Did Pico Really Write An "Oration on the Dignity of Man"?
The most famous speech of the Italian Renaissance was never delivered, was not published in its author's lifetime, and did not receive its famous title from him.
Reading Alciato's Emblems: Whose Idea Were the Pictures?
Andrea Alciato's Emblemata, first printed in 1531, founded a genre in which a motto, a picture, and a short poem are read together; yet the evidence suggests the pictures in that first edition were not his doing.
The Horse Without a Rider
Montaigne retired to give his mind some leisure and found it bolted like a riderless horse, which spoils my theory that all I need in order to think well is more free time.
What Is All This Self-Awareness For?
Marsilio Ficino turns “Know thyself” into an uncomfortable practical demand.
Why Alberti Chose Narcissus as Painting’s Inventor
Alberti’s surprising suggestion that Narcissus invented painting turns Ovid’s reflecting pool into a compact theory of images.
Literature & Criticism
The Fifth String
An original fable, told the way the old literary fairy tales are told: a puppet king in a toyshop window wants to stand up without strings, and learns, after a flood and a fisherman's daughter and a one-eyed gull, that there was a fifth string all along, too fine to see, which does not pull.
Reading Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Who Says “Beauty Is Truth”?
The closing lines of Keats's ode are among the most quoted in English and among the most disputed, partly because printed texts do not agree on where the quotation marks go.
In the Grimms' "The Juniper Tree" (KHM 47), a murdered boy returns as a bird and sings the story of his own death, first to strangers and then under his family's windows.
Gnosis & Western Esotericism
Encyclopedia
Today’s Featured Entry
Peter Kingsley
A British-born classical scholar and mystical writer who recasts Parmenides and Empedocles as healer-prophets and joins philology to a claimed living lineage of Western initiation.
Words from the Library
Lexicon
Today’s Term
Sicily, Sannion, and the current expedition
Ancient GreekΣικελία (Sikelia); Σαννίων (Sanniōn); Θράσυλλος (Thrasyllos); Ἔφεσος (Ephesos); Ἰωνία (Iōnia); στρατόπεδον (stratopedon); στρατιά (stratia); στρατεία (strateia); διαφθορά (diaphthora)
Strateia is military service or a campaign; stratia is an army or military force.
- Meaning
- The Sicilian reference is retrospective. Socrates says the listeners can hear from many people what he had said about the army’s destruction. He gives no exact earlier prediction, occasion or personal intervention in the expedition.
PlatoTheages