newkid7

The Beatles and their fellow choirs of angels are the soundtrack to the hieros gamos, the sacred wedding. That songs of boldfaced coniunctio appear, in quantity, in our time and place is no accident. The songs and singers are emissaries of the Queen, philosophers before the alchemical furnace, waking the living Stone, wailing incantations to incarnate their Captain King.

When the Eternal Boys sing:

Golden slumbers fill your eyes!
Smiles awake you when you rise!
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby

modern Gnostic Princes call the scintillae from slumbering, suffering matter to arise and join a joyous homecoming, a marriage of antagonists. We are urged to see through the �golden slumbers,� the illusions of power and greed, that cloud our eyes and incarcerate us in cycles of affliction.

But the nightmare of history has also a golden kernel, a mote in the eye of divinity. John Lennon referred to his particular band of cherubs as �the egg men� -- as prototypical human beings, Philosopher Knights preceding the King.

Yo, Spiro T. Yo King George II. You hear them woofin�?

Bes� git. There�s a New Kid in town. He�s been around forever. He�s a waving baby, he�s a wise old man with a pointy hat, black on one side, white on the other. He�s the poison that heals, the swirling retort of the cosmos. He�s the Just Ruler for whom Creation screams unceasing.

As Plato understood, real �philosophy� is not a rhetorical device. Aristotle's syllogisms are only flint-knaps of consciousness, small bonfires on the shoreline of a vast, mysterious universe, outer and inner. Real philosophy is flesh on a cross, a man writhing in bloody branches, amidst Nemi�s sacrificial grove of oak. The philosophy of which Plato speaks is not academic exercise. His philosophy grew from Paleolithic earth-blood magic and ascent shamanism, incorporating Sumerian, Egypto-African, and other ecstatic experience and traditions.

(Recent archaeological evidence (beading) suggests that Paleolithic technological and cultural innovation occurred concurrently across geographies, rather than in linear �out of Africa� fashion.)

Plato submitted the Paleolithic/shamanic tradition to a new variant of analytical thought, much as Jung did two millennia later. But Plato did not invent the Philosopher Kings, any more than Jung invented �archetypes.�

Philosophy Ain�t What it Used to Be, and Never Was (In which the Reader is Offered a Fast)

What Plato really means by �philosophy� � as opposed to the fossil the subject has become -- is revealed in the Dialogues:

The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below, which we affirm to be true philosophy?

What could this babble possibly mean? �Ascent from below?� What�s up with that? Is the father of Western philosophy as extinct as the Victicrats claim?

Let�s make a deal. You don�t eat again until Junior Bush � or anyone in his administration � heck, make it anyone he can buy -- knows what Plato�s �ascent from below� means.

How�s that fast coming along?

The riddle cannot rightly be read. The answer in found in phenomenology, in experience, not words. Words come last, and weakly. It�s ironic that the works of Plato, based in the phenomenology of mystical experience, became the foundation of rationalistic thought in the West. Prior to the Bonfire of the Identity Censors, the Academy conserved such nuggets amongst the dross.

By a day which is little better than night and below, Plato refers to primitive states of matter, the Lower World and Middle World (surface Earth). Simultaneously, he describes the baseline reptilian unconsciousness of individual and collective humanity, mirrored in brutal, oppressive States.

By the turning round of a soul Plato refers to rising orders of consciousness through the ascent process, characteristic of shamanic out-of-body experience of the Upper Worlds (the true day of being). This is the ascent following nekyia, the descent process. Both upper and lower shamanic or �spiritual� realms are heavily documented in Western literature, iconography and myth. Descent and ascent are the sine qua non of Western mystical experience.

Typical of the West, Plato�s cosmologic schema is trinitarian, dividing the universe into Lower World, Middle world (surface Earth, the material interface) and Upper World or worlds. This is the collective geography personified by the male and female trinities which dominate Western gendered consciousness. The female trinity rules the underworld, the male trinity the heavens. The realms are sundered, guarded jealously.

By way of complementarity and inclusion, the heretic tradition is quaternary, seeking a resolution of contending trinities, especially at the core strata of gender. Likewise, the quaternity fuses the opposing female and male trinities into a single entity, which retains the dynamism, but not the waste, of dualistic antagonism.