About 60% done, but I decided to go ahead and put a filtered version up for all & sundry.
The congregation of various deities is a rich cornucopia…. where each countenance more elaborate than the next, all vying for attention with dramatic flourishes and eloquent speech….
(For part one, go here)
ELDER GODS
Their immortal hearts have been seared and hardened by an insurmountable evil that makes them immune to all fantasies & hallucinations of gods who still believe in ideals. Elder gods reject Cartaphilus, that dangerous prophet, and the most audacious thinker of delirious times.
The elder gods are typically radical skeptics & lovers of doubt. Instead of an impetuous glorification of life, these elders have a disillusioned outlook that considers themselves to be superior skeptics and exorcists of all certainty & conviction. Their observations are fueled with the abysmal mechanisms of doubt – an antiseptic that pacifies the spirit and detaches it from any vital stakes. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Before I jump headfirst into this review, perhaps a little background information is in order:
I grew up on mythology the same way most children of the 80′s grew up on Hasbro toys like GI Joe or Transformers, Barbie or Cabbage Patch dolls, etc. I mean, sure, like any active 10 year old, I enjoyed toys and cartoons and video games, but mythology – Greek mythology – was so fascinating and it served as my springboard into science fiction, literature, religion, and philosophy.
The life-long fascination with Greek myths drew me to God of War. Now, although I had stopped playing games by the time the original game came out in 2005, I was easily intrigued with it when I visited another child of the 80′s who had a bigger video gaming addiction. God of War was a brilliant blend of the action platformer & the hack n’ slash game that mined the rich heritage of Greek mythology. The sequel, while being bigger and badder than the original, also ended on one of the greatest cliffhangers I’ve ever seen. Once I heard that the finale would be released on the Playstation 3, I bought it in advance- 3 years ago. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
[Thoth, a god of wisdom and current consul of Teotihuacan, journeys to the bottom of Yggdrassil the world tree, in order to discuss with an ancient god of wisdom, Mimir, about the new radical, Cartaphilus, whether to oppose him or endorse him. Thoth removes Mimir’s decapitated head from the Well of Urd.]
Mimir: Who bestirs Mimir from the comforts of oblivion?
Thoth: It is I, son of Ra, and I seek your advice.
Mimir: Well met, Thoth. But we gods of wisdom hardly need advice.
Thoth: Yes, but your wisdom is distinct from mine: it is not as contaminated by the hysteria of contemporary ideologies. All the same, I request your wisdom regarding this new radical, Cartaphilus.
Mimir: Cartaphilus, the impetuous immortal? You have traveled very far just to discuss a misguided liberator.
Thoth: These days, the merest mention of his name is tantamount to political suicide.
Mimir: He reminds me of the original liberator. Prometheus.
Thoth: Indeed. It seems both Prometheus and Cartaphilus share an unhealthy obsession with mortals.
Mimir: Quite. Whereas Prometheus condemned the mortals of Midgard to consciousness with his myopic intelligence, Cartaphilus condemns mortals of the universe with his call of radical emancipation.
Thoth: Hubris is another thing Prometheus and Cartaphilus have in common.
Mimir: The Olympians were prudent to hide the sources of life from mortals. But that arrogant Prometheus decided to reveal them. The irony is that, despite his claims of lucidity, Prometheus ended up being the father of all misfortunes of the mortals.
Thoth: He was always scolding mortals for being too comfortable with original idyll and their lazy conformity to the laws of animal nature.
Mimir: By introducing self-consciousness to the species, Prometheus divided man from the sources of life he used to enjoy. That compelled man to analyze those sources and reflect on their meaning. Consequently, original happiness was replaced with the curse and torments of titanism.
Thoth: Mortals were doing quite well without self-consciousness? They had hitherto been merely drooling apes. You could hardly tell them apart.
Mimir: Yes and yet, consciousness began a spectacle in everyone that ceased only with the end of the human species.
Thoth: Despite all his foreknowledge, Prometheus never anticipated this.
Mimir: A feckless and blundering humanitarian, a deadly philanthropist whose excuse was illusion. Prometheus, by handing man over to history, banished him from the perfect present.
Thoth: We did applaud Zeus for punishing Prometheus, and applauded Heracles for freeing him with equal vigor.
Mimir: At once the first zealot of science, and the worst modernist, his sufferings console man for his pyrrhic victories. As an instigator of indiscretions, Prometheus idealized knowledge and action and consequently ruined existence. This dereliction of knowledge and destructive curiosity ended the golden age.
Thoth: Undoubtedly. But what to do with our modern-day Prometheus?
Mimir: Cartaphilus, like most moderns, is in a hurry to expedite the onset of a utopia and institute it for perpetuity. His impetuousness does not come from anxiety but from the idolization of euphoria, a secret and morbid craving for Hyperborea.
Thoth: He is convinced that his revolution will be the final one.
Mimir: Because he thinks it’s up to him to complete history for all mortals. History belongs to him alone; thus, he must close it. As if Truth has finally has chosen to reveal herself!
Thoth: Has Truth made a great error?
Mimir: Error is but the fate of others. Never Cartaphilus’.
Thoth: Cartaphilus desires victory over his race, his peers, over us gods, and seeks to revise our work and correct its imperfections. He claims that whosoever doesn’t try or doesn’t think it his duty to try, has given up his destiny, from either wisdom or weakness.
Mimir: Pithy sophism. Prometheus tried to one-up Zeus. But Cartaphilus, a soi disant demiurge, tries to one-up us all and inflict the humiliation of a utopia superior to ours. That is Prometheus all over again, Titanism to a whole new level. The desire to equal the gods by stealing our powers.
Thoth: As long mortals are shackled by sin, they will never enter paradise. Thus they must be freed.
Mimir: Cartaphilus and every other utopians are consciously or unconscious Pelagianists.
Thoth: Yes. Pelagius, who denied the fall, rejected Adam’s lapse the ability to indoctrinate posterity. Adam only suffered a personal turmoil, and disgraced himself alone, and didn’t know he would bequeath the human race his flaws and misfortunes. Mortals are born free, good, and lack original sin.
Mimir: That is a very generous observation, yet very false. Pelagianism is the heresy of utopians.
Thoth: Whether consciously or unconsciously, Cartaphilus subscribes to pelagianism, the idolatry of progress. Revolutionary ideologies are its conclusions, in which mortals make up a mass of sentient beings freed from original sin, infinitely malleable and, self-directed, capable of anything.
Mimir: What an optimistic vision of the nature of mortals! There’s no evidence that their nature is any good. Only those with an inferior will are spontaneously good, and the rest must devote themselves to be good. Whosoever succeeds does so only at the cost of efforts that embitter them. Evil is inseparable from action, and therefore, all action is necessarily directed against another person or thing, and at most, against themselves. Mortals will only at another’s expense.
Thoth: So, the only way Cartaphilus could construct a society where mortals never harm one another is if he limited it to anemic ones.
Mimir: The nature of mortals follows a dynamic principle, one that sustains the fever of change and provokes events. If this is absent or removed, then utopia is possible. Mortals are resistant to true happiness, even though they long for the institution of an ideal society that promises happiness. If that takes place, they will suffocate in it.
Thoth: In other words, satiety is much worse than poverty.
Mimir: Mortals need tension and challenges in order to evolve. What could they do with perfection?
Thoth: True. Cartaphilus, as an anarchist is the last and greatest of all pelagians. His freedom rejects all religions, including those of the most progressive gods, and substitutes for them a new variant of worship – self-love – more brilliant and impossible than the existing ones. Cartaphilus curses the religions and demands their abolition because he sees them as an obstacle to the free expression of mortal nature that was fundamentally good. Now it’s because mortal nature was corrupted that religion was born.
Mimir: Were religious instincts to vanish, then mortals would give themselves up to evil without any restriction whatever.
Thoth: Cartaphilus’ idea of destroying all authority indeed remains the greatest ever conceived.
Mimir: Alas, the human race who fathered Cartaphilus is now extinct. But perhaps they had to fade to vanish from current age to validate his theories?
Thoth: Well, we don’t even have the luck of believing in destruction because we gods are already secularized anarchists. Also, we already understood the urgency and ultimately, the uselessness of destruction. No matter how succinct our denials are, we cannot destroy the objects of nostalgia.
Mimir: The dreams of mortals survive our wisdom. Even though they have given up on the geographical reality of paradise, it resides in them a dimension of their original ego. Can they recover it?
Thoth: Cartaphilus is convinced of that possibility if his program becomes a reality.
Mimir: And once they do, will they realize the ultimate glory? It is not their gods they will see but the eternal present freed from becoming, and eternity itself perhaps.
Thoth: The remedy of the ills of mortals resides within themselves, in the timeless principle of their nature. Even if we gods proved this principle to be false, mortals are convinced that some part of them escape duration.
Mimir: It is useless to recover the old paradise or march towards utopia. One is inaccessible and the other is unattainable.
Thoth: The only paradise lies deep within their being. In order to find it, Cartaphilus must have inspected every past and possible paradise, loved and hated them with clumsy zealotry and scrutinized and rejected them all with competent disappointment.
[Silence interrupts them.]
Mimir: You did not come here for advice.
Thoth: You are every bit the god of wisdom. Nothing escapes your attention. Admittedly, I traveled far away from the pretentious and self-serving rhetoric of Teotihuacan to hear the strongest case against Cartaphilus. Yours.
[Thoth bows, and departs.]
Mimir: There is no difference between a god and a mortal who substitute one illusion for another. The fables of golden age are equal to the vapor of utopia.
Among the early christians in the 2nd century AD, a number of rival churches emerged and developed their theologies. One of the groups called themselves the gnostikoi – the Knowing Ones – people who turned from philosophy to mythology in order to placate their sense of anxiety, a feeling of alienation from the divine.
The teachings of Basilides of from Alexandria and Valentinus inspired many people and attracted an audience….
Gnostics, especially the disciples of Valentinus taught that there was the One – unknowable God – bythos, the first Aeon. All other aeons emanated from this unnamable one, an together all aeons made up the Pleroma (fullness) of God. One of the lowest of these aeons was Sophia.
She sought the unknowable one, the source.
Initially, Sophia becomes confused with a point of light, mistaking it to be the source, and goes after it. But the false light was a mirror image, within an abyss, and the journey only takes Sophia further away from her home, pleroma (Fullness). Upon the realization that she had been deluded, Sophia returns to her home – but at a cost to herself.
After Sophia is split into two, where the higher self ascended back to her realm of fullness, her lower half, achamoth (anagram of chokmah, the hebrew name for wisdom) is having a rough time, furious and simpers for her old life. Badly distressed she leaks energy that transforms into the fundamental elements of nature (antiquity categories: earth water air and fire). Sophia also prodduces, creates or give birth to a quasiconscious entity, a monstrous being that eventually becomes the Demiurge, aka Ialdaboth, saclas or samael, the artificer of the universe. The misbegotten entity creates his own kingdom of 7 spheres that are ruled by 7 archontes of time (ruling over destiny and jail spirits). Sophia remains stuck in the 8th sphere….
It is mistaken to conceive of the Demiurge as an evil entity, because gnostic scriptures only characterize this entity as ignorant, that he is completely unaware of the higher levels of reality above him, and is ignorant of the existence of his mother, sophia. Ergo, creation is a mix of the flawed work of the demiurge and the celestial wisdom/beauty of sophia. For the ancient Greeks, demiurge meant ‘craftsman’ or ‘artisan.’ According to Plato in Timaeus, demiurge refers to the maker of the universe, who is unreservedly good and intended that the world ought to be as good as possible. The only reason for the inherent flaws is cuz the demiurge was limited to preexisiting chaotic matter. Ergo, thhe demiurge is no omnipotent creator. Early christian thinkers quickly claimed that this demiurge meant the pagan philosophers anticipated the God of revealed religion.
The writing of the heresiological church father, Irenaeus elaborates further, that the demiurge is utterly full of conceit and presumption, believing to be “the only god and there is no other god before/above him.” Then it follows that sophia inserts her own intentions into the Demiurge’s creation. Some gnostics claim Sophia sent messages through the serpent, and gives human beings gnosis, or knowledge. This pisses off the Demiurge, who believes himself to be the sole creator. Hence, gnostics see original sin as the original enlightenment.
Counter cardinal Stephan Hoeller says “there is a crack in the world.” The architect of the world/universe isn’t skillful. Clearly, there are flaws in the blueprint, fissures in the foundation thru which we can glimpse the supernal reality. However we must be very attentive cuz as soon as a crack appears, the opponents of gnosis (enemies of a direct human perception of the true nature of God and man) show up and paper or plaster it over.
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