Reclusland

The new post over at the Baptist’s Head has some things-of-relevance to what we’ve been discussing here (mainly to what we’ve been discussing in the comments here and here), so I thought I’d share:

“[2] The Hebrew letter AYIN represents an eye. Perhaps the letter that looks like an ‘I’ is merely a homonym, also pointing to this correspondence. However, AYIN is also the precursor to the Greek letter omicron, or O. In which case our attention may be being drawn to the contrast between the circle, O, and the line, I (Greek: iota, Hebrew: YOD). Proclus: ‘The demiurgic Nous has therefore set up these two principles in himself, the straight and the circular, and produced out of himself two monads, the one acting in a circular fashion to perfect all intelligible essences, the other moving in a straight line to bring all perceptible things to birth. Since the soul is intermediate between sensibles and intelligibles, she moves in a circular fashion insofar as she is aligned to intelligible nature, but insofar as she presides over sensibles, exercises her providence in a straight line. So much regarding the similarity of these concepts to the order of being.’ From: A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements.”

“[10] There is indeed interesting material in Steiner on the theme of gravity. For Steiner, levels of being at the human level and above are characterised by a rising away from the earth. This was discussed in the context of medicine in a lecture given at Dornach on 26th March, 1920. For an angelic being to reverse this process and willingly seek out gravity would indeed seem to be an unusual inversion of this model. On the nature of the cherubim in particular, Maimonides offers the following in his Guide For The Perplexed, Part II: Ch. 6: ‘[T]he Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called an angel; and the mind is called a cherub. How beautiful this will appear to the sophisticated mind – and how disturbing to the primitive.’ The cherubs, then, are mental forces, but of a relatively lowly kind. Certainly, cherubs are preferable to tripods, but the shouldn’t welcome them as our conquering lords and masters! The warning seems to be that as the aethyrs become more ineffable as we move to the outer rim, there is within them a danger of mental formations becoming reified.”