Giovanni Monastra
«Sophia», vol. 6, n. 2, 2000 [it. ed. «Futuro Presente», a. IV, n. 8, inverno 1996].
Translated from the Italian by John Monastra

We have seen above that Altheim singled out, among the insignia of the Notitia Dignitatum, the presence of ornaments of the typical wagons of Asian people, understanding this to mean the people of the Middle East, as is seen from the context of the book from which we quoted. In general, the German historian only emphasizes the symbolism ascribable to the Nordic, Indo-European peoples. He makes no mention of the presence of at least one emblem17 which represents a two-color, yellow and red symbol (fig. 1), similar in all, graphically speaking, to the Taiji of the Chinese tradition: the yin and the yang are paired there, first the black and secondly the white (fig. 2), in their "dynamic" representation, expressed through a clockwise motion. Such an emblem identifies the Armigeri (esquires, shield-bearers), included in Chapter 5 of the Insignia viri illustris magistri peditum, i.e. detachments of infantry, Western Roman Empire.

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When Julius Evola died on June 1974 the eleventh, his books used to be read by a huge part of the right-wing political youth in Italy. The traditionalist thought of Evola, since the first years after World War II, had been a central point of reference for people who didn’t accept the destiny of decadence and spiritual destruction of his country and of the whole world. As well known, and as Evola often wrote, not only the defeated countries, infact, lost parts of their national territory, prestige and international authority, but all the european coutries lost in a few years their colonial dominions and empires (England, France, Portugal, Spain) and went losing their influence with all the advantage of the two more powerful political blocks, the western and the eastern one: the world of Las Vegas, Coca-cola and Hollywood and the communist empire.
So, when in 1948 Evola came back in Rome (after the long stays in many hospitals in Austria and Italy), he met a group of young men «who didn’t let drag themselves in the general collapse» . Between these lads were Clemente Graziani , Fausto Gianfranceschi , Roberto Melchionda , G.A. Spadaro , Enzo Erra , Paolo Andriani , Rutilio Sermonti and Pino Rauti, who remembers with these words his discovery of Evola: «we didn’t know him. During the fascist regime he did have a little official relief, though the articles he wrote on «Diorama» were, in my opinion, something “enormous”. But we did ignore at all the cultural life of Fascism […]. We discovered Evola during one of our many stays in prison. We read Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, which had for us a decisive importance» .

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Darwin’s theory of evolution today is widely regarded as valid. This is quite comfortable for many people as it serves as an analogy of democratic or communist ideology transposed on the animal kingdom. But is Darwin’s theory coherent? Does positive data prove Darwin? These questions today are posed most of all by religious groups in the United States, there are also some scientists who challenge said theory on grounds of a lack of objectivity towards it.

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Review of one of his father's unpublished essay.

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Metanoia in Tales of Power
Alan Gullette

University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Fall 1975 (11/25/75)
Philosophy 1520
Dr. Kathy Emmett

The concept of metanoia, as delineated in Joseph Pearce's The Crack in the Cosmic Egg1, is very similar in meaning and implication to certain ideas expressed in Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda.2 These latter include: "the totality of oneself;" the tonal and the nagual; reason and will; "the bubble of perception," and generally "the sorcerer's explanation." I will discuss these similarities here, with mention of the work of Dr. John Lilly to help resolve the ideas of "will" and "belief."

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Nagarjuna's Negative Dialectic And the Significance of Emptiness
Alan Gullette

University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Winter 1975
Philosophy 3660: Buddhism
Dr. Lee

Of the two great schools in Buddhism, the Hinayana and the Mahayana, the latter is divided into two major systems of thought, of which the Madhyamika predominates. As the Mahayana school is the more widespread school that has evolved from Buddha's original Order, so is the body of underlying principles of the Madhyamika system of considerable importance in relation to other doctrines. Apart from this distinction, it is considered to embody the central philosophy of Buddhism and so created a revolution in that religion which carried over, in its influence, into the whole of Indian philosophical thought (Murti, vii – see Bibliography; citations are given in parentheses within the text of this paper). I will discuss the negative dialectic process of Nagarjuna (AD 200), the founder of Madhyamika, in order to clarify the doctrine of Emptiness (sunyata).

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“The wise man will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients, and will be occupied in the prophets...” Ecclesiastes 39: 1-5

It is generally assumed that there is no room within Christianity for accepting the concept of Sanatana Dharma, or what in the west has been called philosophia perennis or priscorium. This Sophia perennis, to use a phrase preferred by Wolfgang Smith holds that certain metaphysical truths, and hence access to a knowledge of the divine, have always been available throughout history and are to be found within the framework of every valid religious tradition.

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Arnold Toynbee has clearly delineated the prevailing attitudes and convictions about the nature of “spirituality.” This opinion however is a gross distortion, the consequences of which are fraught with dangers for those who legitimately seek out the “higher” things in life. Our Psychies, which include not only our subconscious drives, but also our egos and our thinking processes are notoriously unstable in the sense that what we think or feel at any given time can easily shift and change. Moreover, they fail to embrace the totality of what we are as human beings. That spirituality should have its foundation on such “shifting sands” belies its intrinsic nature, for Spirituality, if it be True and Real, must be established on more solid ground .At the same time, it ignores what is most central to our nature as human beings made in the image of God. It almost inevitably follows that Spirituality has become divorced from religion, from true intellectuality, rom reason, and even from common sense; and that some of the most bazaar cults get characterized as religion.

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It is often useful to be reminded of something that is already well known. When addressing the question of method, such a reminder seems especially important. For in asking about method and in framing a methodology, we are concerned above all with assumptions: with what, in particular, is assumed to be known, and with the problem of how to proceed from the alreadyknown to the as-yet-unknown. In the case of contemporary academic theology, the need for reminders is uniquely acute, in proportion as it is uniquely ironic. For in today’s theology, what is best known is the fact of how little is known. And it is of this, I suggest, that we need reminding.

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Theophanies and Lights in the Thought of Ibn 'Arabi by Osman Yahya, whose bibliographic work established the co-ordinates for modern studies of the Shaykh's work, who, for more than twenty years, worked on the critical edition of the Futuhat al-Makkiyya, and who also edited and published the text of Ibn 'Arabi's Kitab al-Tajalliyat. The poem from that work, memorably translated by Henry Corbin as "Listen, Dearly Beloved", occurs in this paper in another guise. It was delivered in Oxford at a Symposium held by the Society.

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Mary's Gardens was founded in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to research the hundreds of flowers named in medieval times as symbols of the life, mysteries and privileges of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus - as recorded by botanists, folklorists and lexicographers; and to assist in the planting of "Mary Gardens" of "Flowers of Our Lady" today.

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Nothing is sacred in Zen: it is a central theme, an essential concept in Zen thought. Yet it is not a concept, for there is no conceptualization in true Zen; and there is no Zen thought, for there is no thought in true Zen. Nothing is, rather, something that is experienced and not merely conceptualized. Yet nothing is no "thing" as all, for there is no "thing" to be experienced in Zen: the experienced and the experiencer and the experiencing are all one and the same. Sunyata, emptiness, nothingness is the heart of Zen.

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Irina Tweedie was born in Russia in 1907 and was educated in Vienna and Paris. Eventually she moved to England, where she married a naval officer. Distraught by his premature death in 1954, she began to search for the meaning of life, especially through the Theosophical Society. In 1961, when she was fifty-four, her search took her to India, where she met her Sufi Teacher Bhai Sahib (in Hindi, Elder Brother). Her years in his company, until his death in 1966, could be characterized as the same trial of human growth and purification we discuss throughout this issue. During this intense period, which prepared her to contact the spiritual presence of her Teacher after his death, she endured many trials of mind and body, which at times brought her to the edge of despair. Nevertheless, her deep conviction that the meaning of her life lay in the relationship to her Teacher enabled her to persevere.

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Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328) has been known as the father of German mysticism and the greatest of all mystics. Several authors reference him with the honour "the man from whom God hid nothing." He is known as a philosopher and a theologian but it was as a mystic that Meister Eckhart excelled. In his day Meister Eckhart enjoyed success as a popular preacher and churchman of high rank in his order, the Dominicans. However, Meister Eckhart was the only theologian of the medieval period to be formally charged with heresy. The shock of his trial for heresy and the condemnation of some of his work by Pope John XXII in Argo Dominco has cast a shadow over his reputation and a lingering suspicion over his orthodoxy that has lasted to this day.

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The Sufi Enneagram Website{/url]

In the work of Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar Ph.D, the origins of the Enneagram symbol (see illustrations) are traced from within the Sufi Tradition of Central Asia. The Islamic Sufi tradition incorporated wisdom from past traditions including Pythagorean, Platonic, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and Zoroastrian Religions as long as that knowledge did not contradict the principle of Unity or belief in the Oneness of God. The Sufi tradition inherited a sacred tradition of psychology which existed in the past but was the first to develop this psychological teaching into a system based on the nine points, particularly in the work of the 13th century Islamic scholar Nasir al-din Tusi. It was this same traditional psychology that G.I. Gurdjieff encountered through the Sufis in Central Asia which led to his use of the Enneagram symbol in his teaching during the 1920's. The modern typological interpretation of the enneagram (by Riso, Ichazo, et.al.) does not originate from this primordial tradition and is in fact something quite different.

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Concerning the conflict of religious faith and knowledge
as the spiritual root of the decline of religious and political society
in our time as in every time

by Franz von Baader
(1833)

Translation and Notes by J. Glenn Friesen 2004

In every era of time, the conquest of errors and lies, like the conquest of crime and or revolt, does not only have the goal of restoring the pure teaching, morality as innocence and social order to the old threatened or wounded status quo, but it also has the task, by weakening those powers, to enrich us with new powers, as the spoils of victory. And it has the task to set up that which is strong in place of what proves a failure, i.e. shows itself to be weak. One therefore sees that the true preservation in each era can only be obtained by an unrestrained further development (growth)–something that is already included in the concept of temporal life.

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‘I’ is a door – part 2:
Nisargadatta Maharaj
by Philip Renard

In the first part of “‘I’ is a door” I described the striking phenomenon that in Advaita Vedanta the term ‘I’ is maintained to indicate even the higher levels of reality, the levels ‘beyond the person’. The help given in doing so is that by maintaining the term it is indicated that the notion ‘I’, so obvious for experiencing the person, in fact is deeper than the person presenting itself temporarily, and that this notion is there continuously, also now already. So in order to be able to get in contact with That which you really are, nothing needs to be eliminated or excluded first. In the first part I examined the approach of Shri Ramana Maharshi, and this time I should like to pay attention to the way Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981) articulated this matter.

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One of the expressions most often heard of on the path to Self-realisation is ‘letting go of the ego’. What exactly is meant by this?

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STUDIES CONCERNING JACOB Boehme
Journal Put', feb. 1930, No. 20, p. 47-79.

Jacob Boehme has to be termed the greatest of Christian gnostics. The word gnosis I employ here not in the sense of the heresies of the first centuries of Christianity,2 but in the sense of knowledge basic to revelation and dealing not with concepts, but with symbols and myths; contemplative knowledge, and not discursive knowledge. This is also a religious philosophy or theosophy. Characteristic for J. Boehme is that he had a great simplicity of heart, a child-like purity of soul. Therefore before death he could exclaim: "Nun fahre ich in's Paradeis" ("Now I journey on into Paradise"). He was not learned, not bookish, not schooled a man, but rather a simple craftsman, a shoemaker. He belonged to the type of the wise-seers from amongst the people. He did not know Aristotle, he did not know Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, he did not know the Medieval Scholasticism and mysticism.

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Review Sheet: Medieval World View
Dr. Charles Bergengren
Cleveland Institute of Art
Spring 2001

Until the scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo), the concept of physical world and our place in it changed very slowly. For instance, already in the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle had declared that all material substances on earth were composed of 4 elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water) each mixed in varying proportions; no one contradicted this concept for over 1800 years. Even after some of the new discoveries about the solar system were made, the new concepts were slow to take hold (too radical for most), and some of the most powerful images of the traditional medieval worldview were made by conservative holdouts late in the 16th and early in the 17th centuries. It would seem that the more physical evidence piled up contradicting the traditional scheme, the more defensive the conservative thinkers got and the more gorgeously elaborate their justifications. Nevertheless, however vastly our scientific ideas about the world differ now, we must recognize that at a metaphoric or poetic level, there is considerable beauty to the medieval concept. It is perhaps the most intellectualized expression of the primordial idea of the sacred interconnectedness of Nature, ever.

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Following are excerpts from the author's forthcoming book, In the Dark Places of Wisdom: the Forgotten Origins of the Western World. Parmenides, who lived 2,500 years ago in southern Italy, is well known as the father of philosophy and the founder of Western logic. But his real significance for us all has long been forgotten. This book is the story of remarkable new discoveries and old neglected evidence. It describes Parmenides' connections with the Pythagoreans, and explains the meaning of the poetry he wrote about his journey, guided by girls, to a goddess deep in the world of the dead.

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Published in Parabola, Spring 1997

At the center of the Hermetic tradition lies the need for a certain type of knowledge: gnosis, or knowledge of the divine. This is something entirely different from formal types of knowledge, which separate and distance us from what we think we know. Yet according to the Hermetic teachings, this knowledge is not a "bonus" or extra that we can set our minds on if we want. Far from it: without that particular knowledge we are not men and women in any true sense. This knowledge has to do with the core of our existence, and that is why it is intensely intimate. That is also why the process of discovering it is so intensely disturbing, because it forces us to confront the silent core of our being. This knowledge can never be defined in terms of formal knowledge. It is not possible to define the new in terms of the old, or something so intimate in the normal objective way. The Hermetic and Pythagorean traditions both relied heavily on teaching through hints: not because they wanted to mystify, but because that is the best that can be done. Those who are serious learn to follow the hints. Others overlook them; hence the problems that have arisen in understanding these traditions.

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