Music and Ecstasy in Sufism

<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png" width="1280" height="720" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></figure></div><div><hr></div><p>A piece of music you were not even attending to opens something in the chest. The throat tightens. The eyes sting before anything has been decided. You could not say what the feeling is about, only that it is large and old and arrived from somewhere underneath the part of you that chooses. Most people have had the experience and almost no one can explain it, and that inability to explain it is, for al-Ghazali, the most interesting thing about it.</p><p>His account is in the <em>Alchemy of Happiness</em>, in the chapter on music and dancing, and it opens with an image precise enough to build everything else on:</p><blockquote><p>The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Read that carefully, because it overturns the obvious explanation. The music does not put the fire into the person. The fire is already in the stone. Strike a flint and the spark that jumps was latent in it the whole time, waiting for the right hard contact to call it out. The melody is the steel. What it draws out of you was in you before the song started, sleeping in the rock, and the song is only what finally struck it.</p><p>This belongs, after all, in a book named for an alchemy, and al-Ghazali defined that alchemy plainly:</p><blockquote><p>The spiritual alchemy which operates this change in him, like that which transmutes base metals into gold, is not easily discovered, nor to be found in the house of every old woman.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The base metal is the heart as it stands, heavy and earthbound. The gold is the heart that has remembered what it is. Music is one of the rare strikes that can begin the change, which is why a chapter on song and dancing sits inside a book on transmutation, and why the fire it raises is handled with such care.</p><p>That care is not decorative. The same fire that purifies one heart can overwhelm the one who holds it, and before the chapter is done al-Ghazali will show us men carried out of themselves by it, one running through a field until his feet bled, another dropping dead at a single cry. We will come to them. First, what the fire is.</p><div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Vefhrxb2_fQ?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" width="728" height="409"></iframe></div></div><h2></h2><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div><h2>An echo of somewhere</h2><p>So if the fire was already there, what is it? Here is the most esoteric sentence in the chapter:</p><blockquote><p>These harmonies are echoes of that higher world of beauty which we call the world of spirits; they remind man of his relationship to that world, and produce in him an emotion so deep and strange that he himself is powerless to explain it.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The key word is <em>remind</em>. The emotion is not new. It is recognition. On this reading the soul came from somewhere before it came here, a world he calls the world of spirits, and it has not entirely forgotten it. Earthly harmony is an echo of a harmony heard there, and when the echo reaches the buried memory, the memory answers. That is why the feeling is too big for its apparent cause. A few notes from a stranger should not be able to undo a grown person, and they would not, if the notes were the whole of it. They are not the whole of it. They are a key cut to fit a lock the person forgot they were carrying.</p><p>This is why the emotion is strange as well as deep. It is the strangeness of a memory older than the self that holds it, surfacing without context, recognized without being placed.</p><h2>The descent</h2><p>Al-Ghazali had laid the ground for this earlier in the same book, where he described where the soul comes from. Of the spirit itself he says plainly that it came down:</p><blockquote><p>It is for the acquirement of this knowledge that the spirit of man has descended into this world of water and clay.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>A thing that descended has somewhere it descended from, and the whole logic of the music chapter rests on that prior sentence. If the soul is native to a world of beauty and is here only as a traveller in water and clay, then a pure enough beauty reaching it here will ring against the memory of there, the way a few words of a mother tongue will stop a traveller in a foreign street who did not know how homesick he was until he heard them. Music is that handful of words in the mother tongue. The soul straightens at a grammar it knew before it was born into this country, and the ache that follows is the traveller’s ache, sharp precisely because the home is real and was once known.</p><h2>The flame leans where the heart already leaned</h2><p>Now comes the turn that makes the whole subject dangerous, and al-Ghazali makes it without raising his voice:</p><blockquote><p>The effect of music and dancing is deeper in proportion as the natures on which they act are simple and prone to emotion; they fan into a flame whatever love is already dormant in the heart, whether it be earthly and sensual, or divine and spiritual.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Music fans whatever is already there. It is an amplifier, not a compass. It does not choose the direction of the love it intensifies; it only makes the love larger, and the love was pointed somewhere before the music arrived. He draws the consequence out without flinching:</p><blockquote><p>Music and dancing do not put into the heart what is not there already, but only fan into a flame dormant emotions. Therefore if a man has in his heart that love to God which the law enjoins, it is perfectly lawful, nay, laudable in him to take part in exercises which promote it. On the other hand, if his heart is full of sensual desires, music and dancing will only increase them, and are therefore unlawful for him.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>So the same evening of sound does opposite work on two people sitting side by side, and neither can tell from the heat alone which way he is being carried. The fire is identical. The fuel is not. And the pleasure itself settles nothing, since a heart that comes only for the enjoyment is doing a thing that is, in his word, merely indifferent, no more forbidden and no more holy than the rest of the day.</p><p>There is a further edge in his phrasing, that the effect runs deeper on natures simple and prone to emotion. It reads as a faint compliment to the unsophisticated, and it is also a warning to the sophisticated. A heart armored in cleverness, practiced at holding everything at the distance of analysis, is harder to strike. The flint is there, but the steel glances off a surface kept deliberately smooth against being moved. Such a person can sit through a hundred assemblies and conclude, at most, that the music was well performed. The capacity to be undone by beauty is not a weakness the strong have outgrown. It is an opening the guarded have sealed, and sealing it shuts the same window the whole path is trying to keep clear.</p><h2>The furnace</h2><p>When the heart the music finds is already turned toward God, al-Ghazali describes what the fire then does to it, and the image is again an alchemist’s:</p><blockquote><p>Such is that of [those] who by this means stir up in themselves greater love towards God, and, by means of music, often obtain spiritual visions and ecstasies, their heart becoming in this condition as clean as silver in the flame of a furnace, and attaining a degree of purity which could never be attained by any amount of mere outward austerities. The Sufi then becomes so keenly aware of his relationship to the spiritual world that he loses all consciousness of this world, and often falls down senseless.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>This is the claim that makes music more than an aid to feeling. The fire it raises is a furnace, and the heart held in it comes out cleaned in a way that years of dry discipline could not manage. Fasting and vigil scrub the surface from outside. Music reaches the metal and burns the impurity out from within. The price of that purity is the loss of the world: at the height of it the Sufi stops registering the room he is sitting in and goes down where he stands.</p><h2>Real ecstasy and the performance of it</h2><p>Because the fire feels like proof, and because falling senseless looks like attainment, ecstasy becomes the easiest thing in the spiritual life to counterfeit, and al-Ghazali is blunt about the counterfeit:</p><blockquote><p>Other features of these mystic dances are the bodily contortions and tearing of clothes with which they are sometimes accompanied. If these are the result of genuine ecstatic conditions there is nothing to be said against them, but if they are self-conscious and deliberate on the part of those who wish to appear “adepts,” then they are merely acts of hypocrisy. In any case the more perfect adept is he who controls himself till he is absolutely obliged to give vent to his feelings.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The test he names is involuntariness. The genuine state arrives unbidden and overpowers a person who was trying to hold still; the counterfeit is reached for. The real adept spends his effort resisting the state until resistance fails. The false one spends his effort manufacturing it. The temptation to the second is strong because the reward is real, since the one who visibly breaks is taken for the furthest along, and to be taken for the furthest along is a sweetness the self will work hard to taste.</p><p>He fixes the point with a story that does not end where you expect. A young disciple of Junaid, hearing the singing begin in an assembly, could not hold himself and shrieked aloud, and Junaid corrected him sharply, telling him that if he did it again he should leave his company. The youth learned the discipline of restraint. And then:</p><blockquote><p>After this the youth used to restrain himself on such occasions, but at last one day his emotions were so powerfully stirred that, after long and forcible repression of them, he uttered a shriek and died.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The discipline of restraint was not a way of feeling less. It was a way of refusing to spend the state in display, holding it until it was past holding, and when it finally broke the restraint it took the boy’s life with it. That is the distance al-Ghazali is drawing between the cry that is performed and the cry that is true.</p><h2>The test of the three days</h2><p>This is why the tradition put a gate in front of the dance, and did not hand the practice to whoever wanted it:</p><blockquote><p>It is not, however, lawful for the aspirant to Sufism to take part in this mystical dancing without the permission of his “Pir,” or spiritual director.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>And the way one director administered that gate is the whole teaching in miniature. When a disciple of the Sheikh Abu’l Qasim Girgani asked leave to take part in the dance, the Sheikh set him a condition:</p><blockquote><p>Keep a strict fast for three days; then let them cook for you tempting dishes; if then, you still prefer the “dance,” you may take part in it.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Three days of hunger sharpen the body’s appetite to its loudest. If, with rich food set before a starved body, the man still reaches for the dance over the dish, his hunger for the state is coming from above the appetite and not from inside it. If the food wins, then what he called a longing for ecstasy was the body in disguise. The fire fans whatever is dormant, and a heart still full of appetite has no business near a practice that will magnify exactly that, which is why al-Ghazali says the disciple whose heart is not yet purged should be kept from the dance, since it will do him more harm than good.</p><h2>Turning the love song</h2><p>Most of the verses sung in these assemblies were not religious at all. They were love poems written for human beloveds, full of longing and reproach and wine, and the Sufi took them and turned them upward. Al-Ghazali sets out the whole code of the turning:</p><blockquote><p>When in such poetry mention is made of separation from or union with the beloved, the Sufi, who is an adept in the love of God, applies such expressions to separation from or union with Him. Similarly, “dark locks” are taken to signify the darkness of unbelief; “the brightness of the face,” the light of faith, and “drunkenness” the Sufi’s ecstasy.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The wine of the love poem becomes the ecstasy, and the drunkenness is the state itself. And the verse he quotes to seal it carries the deepest point in the chapter about why music does this work that argument cannot:</p><blockquote><p>Thou may’st measure out thousands of measures of wine, / But, till thou drink it, no joy is thine.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>You can pour the wine forever and stay sober. Knowing about the state is not the state. Al-Ghazali presses it home:</p><blockquote><p>A man may converse much and write volumes concerning love, faith, piety, and so forth, and blacken paper to any extent, but till he himself possesses these attributes all this will do him no good.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>This is the whole case for music over instruction. The lecture hands you the measures of wine. The music makes you drink. But the turning has one hard rule. The listener may apply a verse to God only where it is true of God:</p><blockquote><p>The Sufi hearer, however, is in danger of blasphemy if he applies some of the verses which he hears to God. For instance, if he hears such a verse as “Thou art changed from thy former inclination,” he must not apply it to God, who cannot change, but to himself and his own variations of mood.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>And the image he reaches for to settle it is the one that runs under the entire book:</p><blockquote><p>God is like the sun, which is always shining, but sometimes for us His light is eclipsed by some object which intervenes between us and Him.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The sun does not dim. Something passes in front of it. So when the song’s beloved seems to have grown cold, what has happened is that the listener has let something drift between himself and a light that never moved. The love song, heard rightly, becomes a diagnostic of his own veils, and the ecstasy is the moment one of those veils thins and the constant light reaches him as though for the first time.</p><h2>The same fire, struck everywhere</h2><p>Al-Ghazali reaches past the human case to drive the point home, and the example he picks is startling:</p><blockquote><p>Even camels are sometimes so powerfully affected by the Arab-songs of their drivers that they will run rapidly, bearing heavy burdens, till they fall down in a state of exhaustion.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>A beast of burden, no theology in it, driven past its own exhaustion by a man’s song in the dark. If sound can reach down into an animal and move it against the body’s own limit, then the susceptibility is not a refinement of the cultivated heart but something built into the creature. And he turns the observation into a rebuke of the people who sneer at the Sufis for swaying and weeping in their assemblies:</p><blockquote><p>Those who find fault with the Sufis for being powerfully affected, even to ecstasy, by these and similar verses, are merely shallow and uncharitable.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The scoffer who feels nothing assumes there is nothing to feel. Al-Ghazali’s reply is that the deadness belongs to the scoffer, not to the music. The camel felt it.</p><h2>Not the descent of God</h2><p>Some were carried so far by the fire that it killed them, and al-Ghazali keeps one such case, because of the error it tempts people into:</p><blockquote><p>Such was the case with Sheikh Abu’l Hassan Nuri, who, on hearing a certain verse, fell into an ecstatic condition, and, coming into a field full of stalks of newly cut sugar-cane, ran about till his feet were wounded and bleeding, and not long afterwards, expired.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>When a man is taken that far out of himself, onlookers reach for the largest possible explanation, that God has entered into him. Al-Ghazali refuses it, and the figure he refuses it with is the one his whole book is built on:</p><blockquote><p>In such cases some have supposed that there occurs an actual descent of Deity into humanity, but this would be as great a mistake as that of one who, having for the first time seen his reflection in a mirror, should suppose that, somehow or other, he had become incorporated with the mirror, or that the red and white hues which the mirror reflects were qualities inherent in it.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The ecstatic has not become God. He has become a clean mirror, and what blazes in him is a reflection, not a possession. To mistake the reflected light for a property of the glass is the beginner’s error of a man seeing himself in a mirror for the first time and thinking he has climbed inside it. The whole danger of ecstasy is folded into that correction. The fire is real, the vision is real, and the moment the one who holds it believes the light is his own, he has misread the mirror for the sun.</p><p>The states themselves are not uniform. As al-Ghazali notes, they vary with whatever the heart was already carrying:</p><blockquote><p>The states of ecstasy into which the Sufis fall vary according to the emotions which predominate in them: love, fear, desire, repentance.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The fire is one. What it lights depends on what was laid in the grate.</p><h2>The assembly</h2><p>Al-Ghazali ends the chapter not on the soloist undone by the music but on the room around him, and the etiquette he prescribes is the quiet heart of the whole teaching:</p><blockquote><p>In holding these assemblies, regard must be had to time and place, and that no spectators come from unworthy motives. Those who participate in them should sit in silence, not looking at one another, but keeping their heads bent, as at prayer, and concentrating their minds on God. Each should watch for whatever may be revealed to his own heart, and not make any movements from mere self-conscious impulse.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Heads bent, eyes off one another, each man watching his own heart and not the performance of his neighbour’s: this is the structure built to keep the counterfeit out. You cannot show off to a room that is not looking at you. And then the last instruction turns the whole thing from solitude into solidarity:</p><blockquote><p>But if any one of them stands up in a state of genuine ecstasy all the rest should stand up with him, and if any one’s turban falls off the others should also lay their turbans down.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>When the fire takes one of them and lifts him to his feet, the others rise too, so that the one who was overcome is not left standing alone and exposed, marked out as the spiritual one while the rest sit watching. If his turban falls, every turban comes off. The assembly closes around the man the music struck and makes his disarray its own, so that genuine ecstasy costs nothing in self-display and the counterfeit has nothing left to gain. The fire was a flint’s fire, struck from the hidden stone of the heart by an echo of the world it came from. The room exists to let that fire be real without letting it be seen.</p><div><hr></div><h3>Sources and references</h3><ul><li><p>al-Ghazali, <em>The Alchemy of Happiness</em> (Kimiya-yi Sa’adat), Chapter V, Concerning Music and Dancing as Aids to the Religious Life, trans. Claud Field, 1909. Public domain, quoted throughout. The flint and the hidden fire; the harmonies as echoes of the world of spirits; the soul’s descent; music as the amplifier of dormant love; the heart cleansed like silver in a furnace; the wine and drunkenness of the love-verse and the line on those who only blacken paper; the camel and the Arab-songs; the sun that never dims; Abu’l Hassan Nuri and the mirror that is not its reflection; the deaths of the disciples of Junaid and Nuri; and the closing etiquette of the assembly, where all rise together and lay down their turbans.</p></li><li><p>al-Ghazali, <em>Kitab Adab al-Samaʿ wa’l-Wajd</em> (On the Conduct of Listening and Ecstasy), Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din, Book 18, the fuller Arabic treatment that this chapter abridges.</p></li><li><p>For the enacted form, the <em>samaʿ</em> ceremony of the Mevlevi order founded in the wake of Rumi.</p></li></ul><div><hr></div> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/music-and-ecstasy-in-sufism" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Music and Ecstasy in Sufism | Al-Ghazali on the Hidden Fire of the Heart

<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.inoreader.com/yt-embed/?v=Vefhrxb2_fQ" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/9;height:auto;display:block;border:0;" frameborder="0"></iframe></p><p>Nine hundred years ago al-Ghazali said the heart is a flint: it holds a hidden fire that music strikes, and the ecstasy you feel is the soul recognizing an echo of the world it came from. He also knew the same fire could overwhelm the one who held it. One Sufi ran through a field until his feet bled. Another heard a single verse and fell down dead.<br> <br> This is a transmission of his chapter on music and dancing from The Alchemy of Happiness: why a melody you were not even listening to can undo you, why the fire it raises is already in you before the song begins, how the Sufis told real ecstasy from its performance, and the quiet etiquette they built so that no one carried away by it would ever stand alone.<br> <br> Sourced directly from al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya-yi Sa'adat), Chapter V, in the Claud Field translation of 1909, public domain and quoted throughout. The fuller Arabic treatment is in the Ihya, Book 18, on the conduct of listening and ecstasy.<br> <br> Stay for the moment near the end, where a man is carried so far out of himself by a verse that onlookers call it the descent of God into a human being, and al-Ghazali corrects them with the image his whole book is built on: the ecstatic has not become God, he has become a clean mirror, and to mistake the reflected light for his own is the error of a man seeing himself in a mirror for the first time.<br> <br> Read along in the full Field translation, freely available, so you can check every line against the source.<br> <br> Subscribe for more readings from the rare end of the Sufi tradition. <br> <br> Written essays and full sources on the Substack below.<br> <br> MORE FROM SPIRITUALRELIEF<br> Music <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@UCBo3tQklTFD_10GtJx8mAmA">https://www.youtube.com/@UCBo3tQklTFD_10GtJx8mAmA</a> <br> Express Your Support Through A YouTube channel membership:<br> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb2GDYQwKx6lYfvJCZCHx0w/join">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb2GDYQwKx6lYfvJCZCHx0w/join</a><br> Essays and translations <a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com">https://spiritualrelief.substack.com</a><br> <br> #sufism #sufi #islamicmysticism #spiritualrelief #alghazali #rumi #alchemy</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vefhrxb2_fQ" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Sólo se habla del eclipse de sol

<p>Es de la única efeméride astronómica de la que se habla en estos días: el eclipse solar total del 12 de agosto. Hay una fascinación generalizada y unas ganas locas de observarlo desde una buena localización. Sobre la traza del eclipse no deben quedar plazas de hotel, habitaciones en casas rurales o parcelas de camping libres para dicha fecha, tal es el frenesí que ha despertado un fenómeno de cuyo significado profundo nadie parece tener ni la más mínima idea. Y quizás por la misma ignorancia supina, casi nadie habla del próximo solsticio de verano, como si no importara o fuese un acontecimiento de segunda.</p><p>Sí, casi nadie entiende ya nada de nada. Si saliéramos a la calle e hiciésemos una encuesta sobre las razones por las que interesa tanto presenciar el eclipse, seguro que abundarían las respuestas del tipo “es el primero del siglo XXI”, “mis amigos me han invitado a verlo”, “es una curiosidad interesante”, “será guay”, etc., motivos que para los encuestados son más que suficientes para librarse desinhibidamente a la contemplación de este “bello espectáculo de la naturaleza”.</p><p>Pero un eclipse total de Sol es un símbolo de la aniquilación de la luz y del advenimiento de las tinieblas, como de hecho puede entender cualquier persona que tenga un mínimo de inteligencia. Y la luz es el principio de la vida y la existencia universal. Con el <i>fiat lux</i> de la tradición judeocristiana -y sus análogos de las cosmogonías de las distintas tradiciones del mundo- se da paso al cosmos a partir del caos, por lo que jalear la abolición de la luz es, simbólicamente, sumarse a las fuerzas disolventes de lo creado y acelerar la ya de por sí veloz caída del ciclo cósmico en que vive nuestra humanidad, el funesto <i>Kali yuga</i> de los hindúes y la temible Edad de hierro de los griegos. Da igual que sea por un ratito; en el ámbito de lo sutil, el gesto simbólico, el rito y su intención es lo que cuenta.</p><p>Federico González Frías, en la entrada “Eclipse” de su <i>Diccionario de Símbolos y Temas Misteriosos</i>, dice que “si los antiguos viviesen estarían atónitos ante la levedad con que se tratan los eclipses actualmente”. Ellos se esconderían en sus casas “como hacían todos los pueblos europeos y precolombinos y otros descendientes de los atlantes”, los cuales, “llegado este momento preciso (de dos horas de duración) se cubrían con sus capas o ponchos y allí emitiendo todo tipo de sonidos espantosos trataban de ahuyentar aquello que había dejado el eclipse”, escorias que vienen a opacar la luz como las <i>qelippot</i> de la Cábala y de las que nada bueno puede esperarse. Concluye su entrada Federico con una advertencia y un consejo que haríamos muy en seguir: “Muy peligroso el eclipse. Se necesita ir con cuidado y posponer toda cita o encuentro en esas horas”.</p><p style="text-align:center;">***<br></p><p>El solsticio de verano de 2026 (de invierno en el hemisferio sur) comenzará el próximo 21 de junio a las 10 horas y 24 minutos de hora oficial peninsular según cálculos del Observatorio Astronómico Nacional. La estación estival durará aproximadamente 93 días y 16 horas, y concluirá el 23 de septiembre con el equinoccio de otoño.</p><p>A comienzos del verano, tras la puesta del Sol, serán visibles Mercurio (sólo en junio y donde haya condiciones óptimas para su observación), Venus y Júpiter.  Mercurio reaparecerá a comienzos de setiembre mientras que Júpiter desaparecerá hacia mediados de julio.</p><p>Al alba podremos contemplar a Marte y Saturno. Júpiter será visible desde mediados de agosto, mientras que Mercurio podrá ser observado entre finales de julio y finales de agosto.</p><p>El eclipse total de Sol del 12 de agosto afectará al Ártico, Groenlandia, Islandia, el norte del océano Atlántico y por la tarde, poco antes de la puesta, a España. Además, el 28 de agosto habrá un eclipse parcial de Luna que afectará a América, Europa y África. En España, la Luna se pondrá antes del final del eclipse.</p><p style="text-align:center;"><br></p><div style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ4eRDAipf-fMBERmyXQvApLlZEwg2k0hC7IMgnuUiGbG3rJOH0GkYZ5eKus5xo4BVyXkNgj3BjA-C0z_C2VhjczMSjAyMxra2ef9uu6kKagjRXs04VhyphenhyphenjSQSi6tKwUqRuY4S0nuCW1FZ-td0cgctyiY9BB7qug2i32WSa4K08mI-moY1DQwaxY_QFCPpG/s1929/Sol%20solet%20comediants.jpg" style="margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ4eRDAipf-fMBERmyXQvApLlZEwg2k0hC7IMgnuUiGbG3rJOH0GkYZ5eKus5xo4BVyXkNgj3BjA-C0z_C2VhjczMSjAyMxra2ef9uu6kKagjRXs04VhyphenhyphenjSQSi6tKwUqRuY4S0nuCW1FZ-td0cgctyiY9BB7qug2i32WSa4K08mI-moY1DQwaxY_QFCPpG/w400-h348/Sol%20solet%20comediants.jpg" width="400" alt="Sol%20solet%20comediants.jpg"></a></div><div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:x-small;">Páginas centrales del libro <i>Sol, solet</i>, de Els Comediants</span></div><p><br></p> <p><a href="https://astronomiahermetica.blogspot.com/2026/06/solo-se-habla-del-eclipse-de-sol.html" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

De DISNEY a NETFLIX: El documental censurado que YA NO podrán callar 🟥

<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.inoreader.com/yt-embed/?v=Gg_g0CIyZJM" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/9;height:auto;display:block;border:0;" frameborder="0"></iframe></p><p>¡La VERDAD siempre encuentra su camino hacia la LIBERTAD! Tras el escandaloso veto de Disney, el periodista Melchor Miralles anuncia una victoria crucial contra el silencio institucional: la serie documental sobre el Caso Kote Cabezudo ha cerrado un acuerdo oficial para su estreno en Netflix España. <br> Aunque todavía no hay una fecha de estreno definitiva, el equipo confirma que llegará muy pronto y su emisión está totalmente garantizada. Se trata de una docuserie de tres capítulos, coproducida junto a la productora "Señor Mono", con una factura técnica impecable que expone de forma rigurosa todo lo acontecido en una causa judicial que es completamente pública.<br> Desde Plural 21 celebramos este paso. Cuando las grandes corporaciones intentan amordazar una realidad tan dura, la resistencia periodística se abre paso para proteger la VIDA y la IDENTIDAD de las víctimas. El apagón informativo ha fracasado.<br> 👁️ ¿Qué opinas de que Netflix sí se atreva a emitir lo que otros censuraron? Déjanos tu comentario aquí abajo. ¡Dale "Me gusta", comparte para romper el algoritmo y suscríbete para apoyar la información sin mordazas!<br> <br> #CasoCabezudo #MelchorMiralles #NetflixEspaña #EnElNombreDeEllas #CensuraMediática #Plural21 #VerdadYLibertad #PeriodismoIndependiente #ShortsEspaña<br> <br> Recuerda que te puedes hacer socio de Plural 21 en <a href="https://plural-21.org/alta-nuevos-socios">https://plural-21.org/alta-nuevos-socios</a><br> Si quieres hacer alguna aportación a Plural 21 ahora puedes hacerlo a través de diferentes sistemas:<br> - BIZUM. En la opción "Donación a una ONG" utiliza el código: 07672<br> - A través de Youtube podéis: utilizar la herramienta "Gracias/Thanks" de Youtube<br> - a la vieja usanza: podéis hacer una transferencia a Plural-21 Caixa d’Enginyers cuenta nº ES55 3025 0004 3514 3326 6836</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gg_g0CIyZJM" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

En defensa de la ruina

<h4><strong>¿Qué esconde, en su secreto seno, la ruina? Ella es, como el teatro, la esfera de la visión. A partir de <i>El uso de las ruinas </i>de Jean – Yves Jouannais; un encuentro entre ruina y teatro — a través de Ortega y Gasset, María Zambrano, Clara Janés y Anne Dufourmantelle — una defensa de esa pequeña esperanza que emana de la grieta, recubierta de misterios, y que pide de nosotros la inclinación de aquel que se dispone a creer ejercitando la mirada.</strong></h4> <p><span></span></p> <blockquote> <p>«Y guarda la desposada el misterio</p> <p>en un cofre,</p> <p>pero pierde la llave</p> <p>y así misma en la oscuridad»</p> <p><strong>Clara Janés.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>Una ruina es un estado <i>otro.</i> Existe, en esa otredad, un secreto que la constituye, un devenir escondido. Cada cosa encarna su desmoronamiento, así como la verdad siembra sus silencios, alza sus edificios, se fragmenta y se encubre.</p> <p>Ruina, que no desastre, aquello separado de la estrella, ¡ruina! —<i>de ruere</i>—, lo que se ha venido abajo, lo caído, cadente o de-cadente. La Historia es un viaje entre las ruinas de lo egregio. A la gracia y virtud más perfectas les llega inexorablemente la hora de su ruina. Los protorrománticos buscan las ruinas, se establecen en medio de ellas, los románticos descubren su gracia. Decía Emerson que como cada planta tiene su parásito, toda cosa en el mundo tiene su amante y su poeta. Hay, en efecto, enamorados de las ruinas y, está bien que los haya, porque lo ruinoso es uno de los dos modos de ser la realidad. Ortega y Gasset, en <i>Idea del teatro </i>(1946), habla de la ruina para hablar del hombre y con ello, de la metáfora corporizada, el teatro, edificio de visiones, lugar al que hay que ir — el teatro no acontece dentro de nosotros, como pasa con el poema — tenemos que salir de nosotros y de nuestra casa e ir, más que a oír, a <i>ver</i>.</p> <p>Según Ortega y Gasset, es condición de toda realidad pasar por estos dos aspectos de sí misma: lo que es cuando es con plenitud o en perfección y lo que es cuando es ruina; no obstante, para él, las cosas deberían ser definidas según su «ser en forma» y no en sus modos deficientes y ruinosos. Pero, si la palabra «ser» significa la realidad, todo un lado de la realidad y todo un lado de las cosas humanas consiste en ser ruina. Entonces, ¿por qué no pensar la Historia desde la pérdida primera, los restos inconexos, silencio de nadas, silencio detrás de la máscara de bronce, tras la gran caída, después de dos días y dos noches de incendio, después de la muerte? Al fin y al cabo la Historia y las vidas, en sus vías, todavía, de expresión.</p> <p>En el teatro, la visión acontece en ese enlace místico que se produce entre lo que se ofrece y lo que se trae, una pequeña ruina que queda, después de la palabra, después de la imagen, <i>de lo que ha sido visto y oído</i>. Tras el aplauso final se abre un silencio ruinoso, y su poso solo puede encontrarse y sentirse, aunque no quizás <i>asirse</i>, en el corazón. Esa ruina que queda requiere, quizás, de una inclinación, de una fidelidad, de un acto de fe. El espectador debe introducir su propia existencia en esa esfera de misterios, y en el encuentro, confiarse al hallazgo: una sensación que tiene que ver con el desplazamiento de tierras, con lo adivinado, con lo impronunciable. Después de eso, transformado y cabizbajo, con la vida hacia adentro, volver a casa.</p> <blockquote><p>La ruina es el icono mismo de la gloria y de la pérdida; encarna, en la ironía de su polvo, al que duerme y al que está despierto. Anne Dufourmantelle nos dice en su <i>Defensa del secreto</i> (2015) que el secreto, el sermón y lo sagrado están vinculados a lo inefable, indefectiblemente ligados a una memoria. Las ruinas traen consigo el secreto, todo aquello que está «impedido de existir» pero que, de un modo hundido, insiste, persiste y actúa. En un juego metaliterario Jean-Yves le pide a Enrique Vila-Matas, otorgándole a este último la autoría de su libro de «retratos obsidionales», que lo envíe al país de las ruinas. Solo en el frente, encarnando, podrá traer el brillo de aquellas estrellas que podrían brillar nuevamente sobre nosotros.</p></blockquote> <p>«Todo silencio es un hacha», escribe la poeta Clara Janés en el poema titulado «Runas»<i> </i>dentro de <i>Huellas sobre una corteza</i> (2005): «Estar aquí es callarse». Solo así, en ese estado que recuerda al «callar y obrar» de San Juan de la Cruz, o a la máxima de Blanchot: «Él pasa días y noches en silencio. Eso es la palabra» — una puede atender a ese misterio que sigue del otro lado.</p> <p>Secreto, del latín <i>segreda/secretus:</i> «dejado de lado», «reservado». El secreto simboliza el poder sobrenatural. Pensar el secreto tiene que ver con adentrarse verdaderamente en aquello que se encuentra del lado del <i>ser.</i> El ser de las cosas acostumbra a estar dentro de la cosa concreta y singular, cubierto por ésta, oculto, latente. Necesitamos des-ocultar, y para ello, una mirada dispuesta que se entrega, serena y atenta, un <i>reposo</i>. En griego, estar cubierto, oculto, se dice <i>lathein,</i> con la misma raíz que latente. Recuerda a latir. Decimos del corazón que late, no porque pulse y se mueva, sino porque es una víscera, porque es lo oculto o lo que permanece latente dentro del cuerpo. Así, averiguar significa adverar, hacer manifiesto algo oculto, por tanto, <i>aletheia</i> es desocultar, descubrir, preguntarnos por el ser oculto de las cosas, esto es, su verdad.</p> <p>¿Cómo atender a una verdad? ¿Cómo llegar a ella? Tal vez haciéndola, como diría María Zambrano: «Hacer una verdad, ni que sea escribiendo»<i>.</i> La ambigüedad de lo humano pide un esfuerzo por extraer lo que está entre lo indecible y lo que el hombre, nuevamente, intentará decir en defensa de su propia ruina, la del habla.</p> <p>La sala de teatro sostiene y vela, en su arquitectura, por las revelaciones y transfiguraciones que se dan en el escenario. El telón sitia el espacio de la metamorfosis, en su alzarse nos desquita de nosotros mismos, nos conduce al <i>ver, </i>y; en su caída, nos devuelve a la agencia de nuestras vidas, evidencia que aquel es ya el espacio del recuerdo, de la abstracción. De un modo parecido, quizás, cuando un edificio cae abatido, se deshace, se desnuda. Queda o acontece, en su silencio, una nueva visión. Llega, el derrumbamiento, a su calma secreta. La sacudida desplaza el sentido y desvela algún tipo de secreto, algún tipo de nueva verdad. ¿No es ese el rastro de la perfección? La perfección, para la escritora italiana Cristina Campo, es antes que nada esa cosa perdida, pequeños lugares en ruinas batidos por los vientos, crisálidas de perenne sabiduría, iconos mínimos de inmensas ceremonias, saber durar, quietud, inmovilidad. Este aéreo y terrible peso: silencio, espera, duración.</p> <blockquote><p>«Todo silencio es un hacha», escribe la poeta Clara Janés en el poema titulado «Runas»<i> </i>dentro de <i>Huellas sobre una corteza</i> (2005): «Estar aquí es callarse». Solo así, en ese estado que recuerda al «callar y obrar» de <a href="https://elhombreylodivino.com/san-juan-de-la-cruz-un-silencio/">San Juan de la Cruz</a>, o a la máxima de Blanchot: «Él pasa días y noches en silencio. Eso es la palabra» — una puede atender a ese misterio que sigue del otro lado.</p></blockquote> <p>Las ruinas poseen un atractivo indudable, atractivo que ha sido utilizado como punto de partida por el crítico, periodista y escritor francés Jean-Yves Jouannais. Este toma, en <a href="https://www.acantilado.es/catalogo/el-uso-de-las-ruinas/"><i>El uso de las ruinas </i></a>(2012), una actitud propia no solo de espectador de tragedia sino más aún, de protagonista: «Un día u otro debía desvelarse el secreto / yo quiero conocer el misterio de la melancolía» — o lo que es lo mismo, el misterio de la obsesión. Jean-Yves se inserta en ciertos paisajes de la historia que comparten entre ellos <i>sus estados de ruina, </i>las trazas de algo humano vencido, los templos de la historia, eso de lo que nos habla María Zambrano en el capítulo de «Las ruinas» dentro de <i>El hombre y lo divino </i>(1991): «Toda ruina tiene algo de templo; es por lo pronto un lugar sagrado. Lugar sagrado porque encarna la ligazón inexorable de la vida con la muerte; el abatimiento de lo que el hombre orgullosamente ha edificado, vencido ya, y la supervivencia de aquello que no pudo alcanzar en la edificación: la realidad perenne de lo frustrado; la victoria del fracaso».</p> <div style="width:589px;"><img src="https://elhombreylodivino.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/IMG_6596.jpg" alt="" width="579" height="547"><p>María Zambrano durante su único viaje a Grecia en la primavera de 1972.</p></div> <p>La ruina es el icono mismo de la gloria y de la pérdida; encarna, en la ironía de su polvo, al que duerme y al que está despierto. Anne Dufourmantelle nos dice en su <i>Defensa del secreto</i> (2015) que el secreto, el sermón y lo sagrado están vinculados a lo inefable, indefectiblemente ligados a una memoria. Las ruinas traen consigo el secreto, todo aquello que está «impedido de existir» pero que, de un modo hundido, insiste, persiste y actúa. En un juego metaliterario Jean-Yves le pide a Enrique Vila-Matas, otorgándole a este último la autoría de su libro de «retratos obsidionales», que lo envíe al país de las ruinas. Solo en el frente, encarnando, podrá traer el brillo de aquellas estrellas que podrían brillar nuevamente sobre nosotros. Volver a vivir la vida de otro, padecerla, y así, en ese padecimiento, adentrarse en la actitud más humana del hombre, esto es, en su historia y más aún, en aquello que se nos escapa de ella, lo que la cerca, lo que la aguarda: su secreto. Como toda experiencia mística, es necesario sumergirse en cuerpo y alma en la opacidad: «Yo quiero vivirla, ser el punto de contacto: ser todos los personajes regalo de Enrique Vila-Matas».</p> <p>En su capítulo acerca de las ruinas, María Zambrano nos dice que «el gesto de aquel que se inclina sobre las cosas pasadas para ponerlas bajo la luz, ante la vista de todos, es un gesto de protagonista de tragedia». Los conflictos esenciales de la tragedia tienen que ver con eso que sigue siempre pasando, soterradamente, verdad de entrañas, desgarro sin nombre: «El pasar de la historia no ha pasado del todo, puesto que solo dentro de esto que ya ha pasado, lo que veo pasar y aun lo que a mí me pasa, cobra pleno sentido».</p> <p>En el gesto de adentrarse en el escenario de las ausencias, en el pasado cercado, Jouannais desvela una obsesión compartida, una necesidad de sitiar la propia Historia y con ello, deshacer la tragedia comprendiéndola, padeciéndola — en eso que hay, en eso que queda.</p> <p>«De toda ruina emana algo divino, algo divino que brota de la misma entraña de la vida humana; algo que nace del propio vivir humano cuando se despliega en toda su plenitud sin que haya venido a posarse como regalo concedido de lo alto; algo ganado por haber apurado la esperanza en su extremo límite y soportado su fracaso» (Zambrano, 1991).</p> <p>El sentido simbólico de la ruina es literal; lazos vividos que ya no poseen calor vital, pero que todavía existen, saturados de pasado y de realidad. En la ruina aparece <i>la yedra,</i> <i>el rastro,</i> y <i>el horizonte;</i> los secretos que aguardan la Historia, y en su inmovilidad: defensa, firmeza, eternidad.</p> <p><a href="https://elhombreylodivino.com/en-defensa-de-la-ruina/" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Can Dreams Change History?

<p><img src="https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/579ec161-7490-453e-8044-f115581b953e_1300x780.png"></p><p>Dear Classical Wisdom Member,</p><p>It’s the absolute worst feeling in the world… Your stomach sinks and your mind reels as one by one your teeth crumble and fall out… </p><p>Panic rises as each bloody tooth falls into your hand.</p><p>You wake up, perhaps with a gasp, as you reach into your mouth… just to see if it was real… or all just a dream.</p><p>I’m not sure about you, but this is a recurring nightmare of mine, especially whenever I have a big change or something stressful happening. I had thought that there was something deeply symbolic about this nightmare, an echo of my younger self making sense of one of the first and most tangible physical changes we undergo. </p><p>Surely this experience was embedded in my subconscious, re-emerging whenever a new shift in life occurred…a repetition of loss and uncertainty.</p><p>But then I came across an explanation that was far less symbolic… </p><p>This common dental dream, it turns out, may simply be the result of grinding one’s teeth while asleep. Bruxism, a common symptom of stress, seeps into our dreams and manifests as the nightmarish scenario described above.</p><p><a href="https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/p/can-dreams-change-history?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=share&amp;action=share"><span>Share</span></a></p><p>Whether symbolic or scientific in origin, dreams can have an immense impact on our lives. We can wake up elated from flying or fearful from some unsettling situation, played out in our minds. Our internal nocturnal visions can illuminate a deep worry or concern, or hint at an unrealised desire or aspiration.</p><p>Sometimes, however, dreams do more than reveal our fears or anxieties.</p><p>Sometimes they change the course of a life.</p><p>And occasionally, they change the course of history itself.</p><p>This was certainly the case in the ancient world, where dreams were taken very seriously by philosophers, emperors, priests and common people alike.</p><p>The history of medicine would not be where it is today were it for Galen’s father, Nicon, who dreamed that the god Asclepius instructed him to have his son study medicine. Galen abandoned his previous training in philosophy and became one of the most influential physicians in history, whose writings dominated medicine for more than a millennium. </p><p><em>(His work now accounts for a remarkable 10% of surviving ancient Greek materials, making him the single most prolific author from the ancient world!)</em></p><p>Nor were such poignant dreams confined to ordinary citizens.</p><p>The emperor Hadrian reportedly paid close attention to dreams throughout his life. Ancient sources claim that he experienced prophetic visions, foresaw important events, and even discovered a remedy for a serious illness through a dream.</p><p>One of the most dramatic dream narratives in all of ancient history, however, concerns the Persian king Xerxes. According to Herodotus, Xerxes initially decided against invading Greece. Then a mysterious supernatural figure repeatedly appeared in his dreams, threatening him if he abandoned the campaign. Even when his advisor Artabanus slept in Xerxes’ bed to test the vision, he experienced the same terrifying dream.</p><p>The result was an invasion that led to Thermopylae, Salamis, and some of the most consequential events of the ancient world…</p><p>Of course, these are only a few examples. Philip II, Socrates, Scipio, Cicero, Constantine, and many others all attributed profound significance to dreams.</p><p>Even sensible Aristotle, who viewed them as natural, biological and psychological phenomena (rather than divine messages), devoted an entire treatise to the subject in <em>On Dreams (De Insomniis).</em></p><p>Suffice to say, dreams are important.</p><p><strong>But what did dreams really mean to the ancients? How were they to be understood?</strong></p><p><strong>More intriguingly still, what happened when Greek thinkers began trying to interpret dreams systematically?</strong></p><p>As today’s article reveals, their attempts to decipher symbols, riddles, and hidden meanings may have helped lay the foundations for interpretation itself.</p><p><strong>Classical Wisdom Members:</strong> Please enjoy today’s special guest article, an in-depth exploration of dreams, symbolism, and the origins of Greek hermeneutics. The piece is an extract from the newly released book <em><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263557/the-ancient-interpretation-of-dreams">The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams</a></em><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263557/the-ancient-interpretation-of-dreams">,</a> generously provided by Mirjam E. Kotwick, Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University.</p><p><em>If you aren’t a member yet, make today the day you unlock the wisdom of the ancient world. Subscribe below and enjoy our exclusive members-only article:</em></p><p><a href="https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/subscribe?"><span>Subscribe now</span></a></p><p>All the best,<br>Anya Leonard</p><p>Founder and Director</p><p>Classical Wisdom</p><h1><em>The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams</em>: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources </h1><p><em>An extract, by Mirjam E. Kotwick</em></p><p>All ancient Greek thinkers who seriously inquired into what dreams are and where they come from assumed that they are principally significant of something. This holds, crucially, regardless of whether they understood dreams as messages sent by the gods or as originating from our body or mind.</p><p>Moreover, we find across the different explanations of dreams the consistent idea that dreams often mean something other than what they literally say—in other words, that they speak indirectly, figuratively, or in metaphors. Many ancient authors were fascinated with this formal aspect of dreams and the hermeneutic questions dreams raise. </p><p>Understanding and interpreting such dreams then often turned into understanding and interpreting figurative language more generally.</p><p>Many of the texts that discuss dreams and their interpretation, so I will argue, reflect on the process of interpretation and on basic aspects of figurative, indirect language. Indeed, as I will argue further, dream interpretation is the place where ancient Greek hermeneutic thought develops, often before it does elsewhere.</p><h1>Dreams in Ancient Greek Texts</h1><p>In ancient Greek texts, dreams are for the most part presented as significant, but not all dreams convey their message in an indirect, figurative format. </p> <p> <a href="https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/p/can-dreams-change-history"> Read more </a> </p> <p><a href="https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/p/can-dreams-change-history" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Hermetismo y Ciencia

<div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> <b>II. Los orígenes de la ciencia moderna</b> </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Se podría afirmar que la curiosidad es el motor que mueve al ser humano. Gracias a ella, el hombre y la mujer de nuestros días da un paso más allá y avanza hacia lo desconocido. Se cuestiona los límites de lo establecido, investiga y se adentra en realidades ignotas hasta entonces. La curiosidad es innata al ser humano, quien desde tiempos inmemoriales se ha preguntado acerca de su posición en el mundo, ¿quién soy? ¿de dónde vengo? ¿a dónde voy? </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Si nos fijamos en su etimología, que revela el sentido y significado original de la palabra, vemos que proviene del latín <i>curiositas</i> “deseo de saber”. O sea, que la curiosidad es esa fuerza interna intrínseca que lleva al hombre a desear (amar) la Sabiduría, uno de los grados más altos de Conocimiento. </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Pero, ¿qué es entonces el Conocimiento? ¿Cómo puede ser algo tan poderoso como para interpelar al ser humano y condicionar completamente su existencia en su búsqueda? Detengámonos a descubrirlo. Empezaremos diciendo qué no es. El Conocimiento no es la acumulación de pequeños saberes contingentes cercados por este o aquel campo de actuación. Tampoco es un grado que se adquiere al finalizar el curso de determinados estudios o un diploma que se obtiene tras la realización de pruebas constantes. Todo esto está muy lejos de lo que verdaderamente es conocer. En primer lugar porque el auténtico conocimiento trata sobre todo de un proceso interno, no dual, y, por lo tanto, excluyente de los pequeños saberes contingentes —por incluirlos a todos sin excepción—. O sea, que no necesita de la aprobación de un tercero que decida sobre su adquisición o valía. En segundo lugar, porque al tratarse de un proceso interno sólo dependerá de uno mismo y de su ímpetu y voluntad para adentrarse en él. En suma, el Conocimiento es el acceso a los estados más altos de uno mismo a través de una escala gradual que lleva al ser humano al máximo de sus posibilidades, traspasando el ámbito humano e individual e identificándolo con la totalidad de lo manifestado —y no manifestado—, es decir, una penetración en espacios mucho más allá de lo físico, psicológico y anímico, que tocan a lo espiritual y reposan finalmente en el ámbito metafísico. </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> El Conocimiento es, pues, conocerse, tomar conciencia de sí mismo y cerciorarse sobre la verdadera posición que le está asignada al ser humano en el mundo. Lo que precisamente es análogo al origen de la palabra “ciencia” —del latín <i>scientia</i>, de <i>scire</i>, “conocer”—. En estrecha relación con estas etimologías también encontramos a la filosofía, que deriva del griego <i>philos</i>, amor, y <i>sophia</i>, sabiduría. Lo cual nos remite directamente a la Antigüedad, pues es conocido que entonces no existía diferencia entre ciencia y filosofía ya que ambas se referían a la misma empresa, aquélla que llevaba al ser humano curioso a trascender sus límites y le impelía a explorar el más allá (1). Ligado con los procesos internos que simbolizan tanto la ciencia como la filosofía, también cabe considerar del mismo modo al arte en todas sus expresiones, pues en su origen no significaba otra cosa que un proceso intermediario mediante el cual el hombre hacía una obra de arte consigo mismo. Es decir, un medio a través del cual comprender el modelo cósmico, que es el modelo de uno mismo, y, habiéndolo comprendido, trascenderlo y adentrarse en el ámbito metafísico, meta última de cualquier aventura de conocimiento. </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> En una sociedad arcaica o tradicional, cada actividad ordinaria reflejaba las leyes naturales que al mismo tiempo estaban simbolizando las ideales y éstas a las arquetípicas, o sea que cada momento del transcurrir diario era un valioso soporte con el que adentrarse en mundos más sutiles y vivir en un constante hacer sagrado. Y si reculáramos aún más atrás en el tiempo y de acuerdo a las leyes cíclicas de un cosmos vivo, nos apercibiríamos de que incluso la existencia de dichas actividades era nula, pues el hombre vivía en un estado adánico, en lo que se conoce en la cultura clásica como Edad de Oro, teniendo acceso directo al Conocimiento y por lo tanto viviendo sin la necesidad de realizar actividades que le sirvieran de soporte. El hombre antiguo vivía en armonía perpetua con el medio que le rodeaba, incluyendo desde los estados más groseros y formales hasta los más sutiles y angélicos, participando plenamente de todo su despliegue. Él habitaba en el eterno presente. Platón lo dejó escrito en un fragmento del <i>Critias</i> que Federico González recogió a su vez en una de sus obras teatrales; en él se puede apreciar que con el inicio del devenir cíclico, el ser humano primordial se va alejando cada vez más del Principio: </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> <i>Otro —Dejadnos que leamos el discurso de Critias: “Durante muchas generaciones, mientras la naturaleza del dios era suficientemente fuerte, obedecían las leyes y estaban bien dispuestos hacia lo divino emparentado con ellos. Poseían pensamientos verdaderos y grandes en todo sentido, ya que aplicaban la suavidad junto con la prudencia a los avatares que siempre ocurren y unos a otros, por lo que, excepto la virtud, despreciaban todo lo demás, tenían en poco las circunstancias presentes y soportaban con facilidad, como una molestia, el peso del oro y de las otras posesiones”.</i><br> <i>Otro —“No se equivocaban embriagados por la vida licenciosa, ni perdían el dominio de sí a causa de la riqueza, sino que, sobrios, reconocían con claridad que todas estas cosas crecen de la amistad unida a la virtud común, pero que con la persecución y la honra de los bienes exteriores, éstos decaen y se destruye la virtud con ellos. Sobre la base de tal razonamiento y mientras permanecía la naturaleza divina, prosperaron todos sus bienes, que describimos antes. Mas cuando se agotó en ellos la parte divina porque se había mezclado muchas veces con muchos mortales y predominó el carácter humano, ya no pudieron soportar las circunstancias que los rodeaban y se pervirtieron; y al que los podía observar le parecían desvergonzados, ya que habían destruido lo más bello de entre lo más valioso, y los que no pudieron observar la vida verdadera respecto de la felicidad, creían entonces que eran los más perfectos y felices, porque estaban llenos de injusta soberbia y de poder”.</i><br> <i>Otro —Pero, ¿cómo? ¿Acaso me dices que me he autosugestionado por más de veinte años para que al final no haya nada?</i><br> <i>Otro —</i>(El anterior le contesta)<i> Sí, nada de lo que podría afirmarse que es algo</i> (2). </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> ¿Quién, entonces, con su estrechez mental puede juzgar a las sociedades arcaicas como “primitivas”, dibujándolas como integradas por una especie de homínidos cuyo lenguaje se limitaba a hacer chiscar dos piedras y pegar berridos como si de bestias ebrias se trataran? En fin, ¿qué se puede esperar del humanoide del siglo XXI, gobernado íntegramente por una mente que se ha modelado con la especialización técnica, las cadenas de montaje industrial, el consumismo extremo y el algoritmo estadístico? Como resultado de esta farsa, se tiende hoy en día a valorar todo a través de las leyes de causa-efecto, la prueba estadística y la materialización, sin adentrarse en las fuerzas motoras que lo originan y que en esencia son las mismas en toda ciencia, aunque en distinta combinación. Lo que quiere decir que si hubo culturas intelectualmente más brillantes que la actual —cosa harto fácil, por otro lado—, aunque no haya rastro arqueológico-formal de ellas, no por ello pueden ser consideradas como inexistentes; y que si esas civilizaciones dejaron, en lugar de un idioma inteligible por el hombre contemporáneo, un lenguaje basado en los símbolos universales —como son las pinturas parietales—, es un sinsentido que sean vistas a los ojos del ser humano del siglo XXI como inferiores y conformadas por unos primitivos cuya única preocupación era llevarse el pedazo de carne a la boca. ¿Y qué decir de todas aquellas culturas que no pusieron nada por escrito ni grabaron en la piedra porque no necesitaban dejar testimonio de nada, pues todos sus miembros compartían la universalidad del cosmos, su trascendencia y su visión de Unidad? El ser humano actual no comprende porque no conoce y como no conoce, lo niega por temor y por egoísmo, pues siempre se quiere ser alguien en este mundo pestilente de especializaciones, galones, títulos y aburridísimas composturas. ¿Cómo no reconocer la superioridad intelectual del primer ser humano? ¡Venga el arcaico al presente! </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Existe un lenguaje revelado que se ha expresado mediante símbolos a través del tiempo y que gracias a su estudio, comprensión y reconocimiento permite adentrarse en otros mundos más sutiles donde se puede apreciar la unidad en el pensamiento, desde la China hasta Cancún, desde Segovia hasta Nepal. El origen es el mismo, los arquetipos y las ideas son también los mismos; es sólo su expresión la que se ha ido adaptando para hacerse inteligible a cada momento cíclico. La Tradición es eso: la transmisión, adaptación, enseñanza, manducación y vivificación de las verdades eternas reveladas al ser humano desde el origen de los tiempos. Esto es el amor a la Sabiduría y así se accede al Conocimiento. No importa en qué lugar o tiempo histórico se sitúe el neófito. La posibilidad permanece siempre ahí, latente, adaptada a la humanidad de cada ciclo cósmico. Y aquí en Occidente es la Tradición Hermética la que cumple esta función. </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> <i>Antiquísimos conocimientos patrimonio de la Tradición Unánime fueron revelados a los sabios egipcios, persas y caldeos. Ellos se valieron de la mitología y el rito, del estudio de la armonía musical, de los astros, de la matemática y geometría sagradas, y de diversos vehículos iniciáticos que permiten acceder a los Misterios, para recrear la Filosofía Perenne diseñando y construyendo un</i> corpus <i>de ideas que ha sido el germen del pensamiento metafísico de Occidente conocido con el nombre de Tradición Hermética, rama occidental de la Tradición Primordial. Hermes Trismegisto, el Tres Veces Grande, da nombre a esta tradición. En verdad, Hermes es el nombre griego de un ser arquetípico invisible que todos los pueblos conocieron y que fue nombrado de distintas maneras. Se trata de un espíritu intermediario entre los dioses y los hombres, de una deidad instructora y educadora, de un curandero divino que revela sus mensajes a todo verdadero iniciado: el que ha pasado por la muerte y la ha vencido</i> (3). </span> </div> <br> <div style="clear:both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqFaWe95_5yhtHtOG0V4ySIZgxjHAlJnSJl74-CXUg5pvyGWfzKe1AAV8mMc5311naseqYr8TotiXptberUAk3iYan81ProVI0LWpw4PXsiWG-oaVomoKGuPAah5BYXabPBKobqoziHKky1XnMqN_NEJ8KIBkZlArWjYuejF0uCDb57-0vDmpViQ_DBHOW/s1799/1.-1-copy.jpg" style="padding:1em 0px;text-align:center;"><img alt="" height="560" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqFaWe95_5yhtHtOG0V4ySIZgxjHAlJnSJl74-CXUg5pvyGWfzKe1AAV8mMc5311naseqYr8TotiXptberUAk3iYan81ProVI0LWpw4PXsiWG-oaVomoKGuPAah5BYXabPBKobqoziHKky1XnMqN_NEJ8KIBkZlArWjYuejF0uCDb57-0vDmpViQ_DBHOW/w373-h560/1.-1-copy.jpg" width="373"></a></div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Será entonces de la mano de Hermes y la ciencia hermética como nos adentraremos en el estudio de la ciencia en los albores de la era moderna a través de las espiras del tiempo, penetrando en las obras de algunos autores célebres que las desarrollaron hasta sus últimas consecuencias, basándose todavía en los principios metafísicos. </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> <i>(Continuará)</i> </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Notas:<br> 1. Más allá de lo conocido. Sin que ello signifique algo externo y ajeno a uno mismo, sino por el contrario adentrarse en el conocimiento de sí mismo. La revelación constante de estados que, hallándose más allá de lo ordinario, están presentes en la conciencia del ser humano en su día a día.<br> 2. Federico González. <i>Rapsodia. Obra en tres actos</i>. Ed. S<b>Y</b>MBOLOS, Barcelona, 2015.<br> 3. Federico González y cols. <i><a href="https://symbolos.com/index.html">Introducción a la Ciencia Sagrada: Programa Agartha</a></i>. Ed. S<b>Y</b>MBOLOS, Barcelona, 2003.<br> </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Imagen: <br> 1. Estatua de Mercurio en mármol. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Thorvalden Museum, Copenhage, Dinamarca.<br> </span> </div> <br> <div style="text-align:justify;"> <span style="color:#000000;font-family:playfairdisplay;font-size:14pt;"> Colección Aleteo de Mercurio 11. <br> <i>Hermetismo y Ciencia</i>.<br> Alberto Pitarch.<br> Ed. Libros del Innombrable, Zaragoza, 2026. </span> </div> <br> <br> <br> <p><a href="https://aleteodemercurio.blogspot.com/2026/06/hermetismo-y-ciencia_0535659655.html" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Liszt: La Campanella | Illia Ovcharenko (piano) – Live at Kissinger Sommer 2025

<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.inoreader.com/yt-embed/?v=rPXfPCxwHLw" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/9;height:auto;display:block;border:0;" frameborder="0"></iframe></p><p>"La Campanella" by Franz Liszt is one of the most famous and virtuosic piano pieces in classical music. If there were a hit list of piano encores, "La Campanella" (Italian for "The little bell") would surely be among the top 10 — the dazzling piece is at least just as challenging as it is spectacular. The wide leaps required of the right hand are considered a technical feat that not every pianist is able to master.<br> <br> Yet the young Ukrainian pianist Illia Ovcharenko navigates the work’s difficulties with elegance and seeming ease. He chose this piece as an encore after a concert in which he had previously performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major, K. 488, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the direction of Cornelius Meister. The concert was part of the Kissinger Sommer festival, and took place on July 11, 2025, in the famous Max Littmann Hall in Bad Kissingen, Germany.<br> <br> Franz Liszt (1811–1886) drew inspiration for this musical miniature from the extraordinary technique of the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), transferring the brilliance of the violin to the piano. "La Campanella" was published in 1851 as part of the etude collection "Grandes Études de Paganini." The recurring bell motif, which gives the tune its title, is the piece's defining characteristic. High, bright tones create the impression of a little bell ringing.<br> <br> Ovcharenko, born into a family of teachers in Chernihiv, Ukraine, in 2001, has already had an impressive international career despite his young age. He has taken home numerous prizes at prestigious piano competitions, including first prize at the Prix du Piano in Bern, and performs in some of the world’s finest concert halls. His playing has been described by critics, including the industry magazine International Piano, as "technically flawless and musically impeccable."<br> <br> Text: Anastassia Boutsko<br> <br> © 2025 Kissinger Sommer<br> <br> Watch more great concerts here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SdnzPd3eBV5A14dyRWy1KSkwcG8LEey">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SdnzPd3eBV5A14dyRWy1KSkwcG8LEey</a><br> <br> More famous piano recitals here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SdnzPd3eBU7k2TJgrgNCc9aygnNkaGZ">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SdnzPd3eBU7k2TJgrgNCc9aygnNkaGZ</a><br> <br> And more music from the Romatic era here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SdnzPd3eBUCHNKKxIIM88sntDk1TVih">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SdnzPd3eBUCHNKKxIIM88sntDk1TVih</a><br> <br> Subscribe to DW Classical Music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/dwclassicalmusic">https://www.youtube.com/dwclassicalmusic</a> <br> <br> #liszt #pianorecital #romanticeramusic</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPXfPCxwHLw" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/OIxV5q0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

The Political Philosophy of René Guénon

<div> <div><div>This is the text of a paper presented by Johan Nilsson at the "René Guénon and the Revival of the Primordial Tradition" conference held by the Department of Religious Studies at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy in Tehran on February 17 and 18, 2026<i><em>.</em></i></div></div><p>It could be said that René Guénon’s thought is most controversial when it impinges on the political realm. Relatively little of Guénon’s writing is political. Indeed, many of his followers have sought to label him (and the school of thought he inaugurated) as essentially apolitical. While there is (qualified) truth to this claim, the fact remains that Guénon’s thought <em>does </em>contain political dimensions – dimensions that have thus far been neglected by Guénonians. However, Guénon’s political thought does not as it stands constitute a fully-fledged political theory, but rather the beginnings of one. In what follows I will first make the case that there is, in fact, a need to flesh out such a theory and thereafter I will provide a prolegomenon to any such project.</p><h3>The Need For A Guénonian Political Theory</h3><p>For the purposes of this paper, I will treat Guénonianism and Perennialism or Traditionalism as interchangeable. This is not to ignore the greatness of the contributions of Guénon’ssuccessors, most prominently Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. Neither is it to elide the fact that there is much to be found in later Traditionalists which goes beyond or even contradicts Guénon’s corpus. Nor still do I wish to ignore that Perennialists are sometimes divided into Guénonians and Schuonians. Nonetheless, there is no question regarding the fact that the Perennialist School was founded by René Guénon and that all Perennialists are therefore in some sense his followers – even if the case could and has been made that some of these followers have surpassed him. Indeed, such a relationship is not unknown in Tradition.</p><p>As just stated, Perennialists have been wont to describe their school and its founder as “apolitical” (Coomaraswamy 1970 p. 126; Fabbri; Oldmeadow 2024, p. 2). This is an accurate description if the political is understood in a narrow sense. That is, in terms of the daily struggle of different groups for political power, either by constitutional or extra-constitutional means, and prescriptions for how power should be exercised once gained. This struggle, which we can term activism, Guénon explicitly disavows (2004, p69). It is then unsurprising that one will search in vain for prescriptions from Guénon regarding the ends to which power should be wielded.</p><p>Indeed, Guénon himself is remarkably reluctant to acknowledge that he is talking about politics when he does, in fact, do so. Instead, he generally prefers the term “social”. We see this, for example, in the title of Chapter Six of <em>Crisis of the Modern World, </em>“The Social Chaos”. This chapter being one of the chief sources of Guénon’s political thinking. We find it also in his consistent characterization of Confucianism as a purely “social doctrine” (2004, p. 63). Setting aside the deficiencies in Guénon’s assessment of Confucianism, it is perhaps <em>the </em>most political of Traditions. Why Guénon preferred to use the word social in place of political can only be conjectured. Perhaps he wished to distance himself from the political in the narrow sense mentioned earlier.</p><blockquote>The political is that which concerns the particular social function of what Guénon identified as the Kshatric caste.</blockquote><p>But what <em>is </em>the political? We find in the Aristotelian origin of the word as meaning the collective affairs of the city some justification for Guénon’s conflation of the political and the social. If, however, one chooses to read the word esoterically rather than in a strictly etymological fashion – as it has been suggested Guénonians are given to doing – we can characterize the political in the following manner. The political is that which concerns the particular social function of what Guénon identified as the Kshatric caste. It should be noted, as an aside, that ‘caste’ is in this paper used – following Guénon – to denote the universal phenomenon of ‘natural’ caste and not ‘institutional’ caste which may be found to various degrees in different religions.</p><p>And what are the special social functions of the Kshatria? The prosecution of war and the delivery of justice, or in other words the creation of worldly order. And on this question – on right order in the world, Guénon indisputably has things to say. If we want to distinguish these things from politics in the narrow sense alluded to above – and so respect Guénon’s wish to insulate his work from the sordid grubbiness of the power struggle, we may call this metapolitics. Metapolitics pertains to all those questions which are anterior to said struggle for power – questions that are generally but implicitly taken to be settled prior to most of the disputation we think of when someone utters the word ‘politics’.</p><blockquote>Guénon and his followers … were … of a principally Brahminical type – which goes some way towards explaining their aversion to politics.</blockquote><p>We must hasten to add that the metapolitical portion of Guénon’s thought cannot be considered central to his intellectual project, and thus it remains underdeveloped both in his writings. Furthermore, speaking more broadly, it remains similarly embryonic in the Perennialist movement to which his writings gave rise. Yet a full-bodied political theory, according to this perspective, needs to be elaborated for two reasons. Firstly, precisely because politics is the chief concern of the Kshatric type. Guénon and his followers like Coomaraswamy, Lings, Burkhardt and Nasr were (or in Nasr’s case, are) of a principally Brahminical type – which goes some way towards explaining their aversion to politics. A regrettable upshot of this is that the spiritual needs of the Kshatric person, which includes being equipped with a panoptic doctrine of the political, are neglected. Even deprived of a profession appropriate to his or her vocational disposition, the individual will inevitably tend towards what is in their nature. So, a synoptic dismissal of modern politics as hopelessly compromised will not be enough to satisfy the Kshatric person, much less to discourage them from engaging in politics.</p><blockquote>...in these later days contemplation is in such a state of confusion that rectifying this must take precedence over action. Such a rectification has been the primary concern of Guénon..</blockquote><p>Lest this gives the impression of an overly severe criticism of Guénon and his disciples, there are good reasons for their having prioritized the Brahminical perspective. Consider the Hadith <em>Al-Silsilah Al-Sahiha</em>, 337 – which can be summarized to the effect that, in the time of the Prophet Mohammad (<em>Peace Be Upon Him</em>), contemplation was still in a state of comparative perfection such that one could focus on action. However, in these later days contemplation is in such a state of confusion that rectifying this must take precedence over action. Such a rectification has been the primary concern of Guénon and Guénonians. Let us recall in this connection that contemplation and action are proper to the Brahmins and Kshatria respectively.</p><p>Furthermore, the practical aim of the Guénonian project must also be kept in mind – namely to reach those still possessed of ‘eyes to see’ metaphysical verities, and from them construct what Guénon calls an “intellectual elite” (2004, p. 31)(although one may prefer Charles Upton’s term “remnant” (2018, p. 96)). It is unsurprising that such an elite should be comprised of the most spiritually sensitive constitutions. The hierarchy of castes being arranged on the basis of their proximity to the Divine, it then follows that the chief targets for Guénonian writing be those of the highest caste. However, we should remember in this connection that the Kshatric is the second highest of castes – and by no means a distant second. Let us recall that the most shining examples of the monarchical personage combined in themselves both the Brahminical and Kshatric types. The most prominent example of this being the Prophet of Islam. It should also be pointed out that in some of the most primordial societies, that is those of the hunter-gatherer type, the Brahminical and Kshatric types remain indistinct as was observed by Schuon (2005, p.203). This all amounts to saying that a comprehensive political theory, therefore, is necessary if authentic bearers of his legacy are to meet the spiritual needs of Kshatric people.</p><p>The second reason there is a need for a Guénonian political theory is because nature abhors a vacuum. The failure to address the political dimensions of Guénon’s thought has—and will continue to result in—his legacy being misappropriated by those who are not faithful to his core vision. In other words, it creates an opening for the forces of “counter-Tradition” to infiltrate and become entrenched, as he would say. A number ofthinkers have abused Guénon’s ideas in the service of causes far removed from his own views. Listing and critiquing these in full is beyond the scope of the present paper, so we must confine ourselves to a cursory consideration of some representative examples, namely: Julius Evola, Aleksandr Dugin and the Esoteric Hitlerists.</p><blockquote>if Guénonians themselves do not develop an authentic Guénonian political theory, others will provide a counterfeit in its stead.</blockquote><p>It is telling that the first two of these are well known and are often the first names that are thought of when the political application of Guénon’s ideas are mentioned. Evola inverts certain central tenets of Guénon’s thought, such as the relationship of contemplation to action and his belief in not one but two primordial ‘Traditions’. These divergences stem, respectively, from Evola’s pre-existing commitments to Nietzchean vitalism and racism. Dugin, a contemporary thinker, draws Guénon into a complex of essentially Heideggerian ideas that can, with a high degree of accuracy, be characterized as post-modern fascism. One need only consider Dugin’s proposal that knowledge of God be “postpone[d]” (2012, p. 181) until we have come to grasp the essence of “being in the world” to see how radically he parts ways with Guénon. ‘Being’ in this peculiarly Heideggerian sense really refers to what Guénon would call “becoming”. Anyone familiar with Guénon’s work will at once see that postponing God until we have gotten to grips with “becoming” amounts to saying that God must be put aside indefinitely! Becoming by its nature is devoid of essence, so seeking to come to grips with it is an endless quest. The Esoteric Hitlerists, the most important of whom are Savitri Devi Mukerji and Miguel Serrano are less well known than Evola and Dugin. Esoteric Hitlerism is a strand of National Socialism which literally divinizes Adolf Hitler. Much of the framework of Esoteric Hitlerist thought is misappropriated from Guénon, and many Esoteric Hitleristideas find their origin in <em>The Morning of the Magicians</em> by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier which describes Hitlerismas “Guenonism plus tanks” (1964, p. 180)!</p><p>Regrettably all of this has led—in certain academic quarters—to the presentation of Guénon as essentially an ideologue of the “right-wing”. Clearly, there is a hunger among a certain metaphysically sensitive type of person for a Guénonian perspective on politics, and if Guénonians themselves do not develop an authentic Guénonian political theory, others will provide a counterfeit in its stead.</p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/06/IMG_1494.jpeg" alt="" width="1020"><figcaption><span>The Sphinx symbolized for Guénon the union of contemplation (the sacerdotal head or the Brahmanic aspect) and action (the warrior animal body or the Kshatric aspect).</span></figcaption></figure><h3>A Prolegomenon To Guénonian Political Theory</h3><p>Setting forth a complete Guénonian political theory is obviously beyond the scope of the present paper. Instead, the remainder of the present work will serve as a prolegomenon to such a project, furnishing a broad outline of what is needed to develop a political philosophy that does proper justice to Guénon’s metaphysical insights.</p><p>The point of departure for any such project is to first establish what Guénon has already said about politics as foundational. Aside from passages scattered throughout his corpus, Guénon’spolitical thought is contained in the earlier mentioned chapter “The Social Chaos”, and in the book <em>Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power. </em></p><p>Let us treat of the essential points of each in turn. In “The Social Chaos” the following points are made.</p><p>1. Political problems are second order manifestations of the “decline of intellectuality” (2004, p. 149).</p><p>2. Consequently, these issues are not to be addressed through political engagement but through the formation of an “intellectual elite”, as previously mentioned.</p><p>3. In the same vein, erroneous political doctrines like equality and individualism are to be critiqued first and foremost in metaphysical terms.</p><p>4. A proper political order would in some way reflect natural caste.</p><p>5. Democracy is an inversion of such an order, drawing legitimacy from humanity and not from the Absolute, and is consequently fundamentally illegitimate.</p><p>6. The different political regimes of modernity are all democratic as they share this reduction of everything to the human. Political orders that centralize power in the state, exercise invasive control over individuals’ lives and prioritize collectivism are not therefore in opposition to democracy or individualism, but are different expressions of this anthropocentrism.</p><p>7. That it is permissible to draw on modern thinkers in an otherwise Traditional critique (Guénon makes oblique references to both Gustav Le Bon (p. 75) and Edward Bernays (p. 74) in the chapter).</p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/06/IMG_1493.jpeg" alt="" width="584"><figcaption><span>Abolition of the Caliphate, The Last Caliph, </span><i><em>Le Petit Journal illustré</em></i><span>, 16 March 1924</span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power </em>could adequately be understood as a book length exposition of point four above. Its essential points are as follows:</p><p>1. Contemplation is superior to action, therefore any legitimate political regime must subordinate the temporal power (i.e. the Kshatric caste) to the spiritual authority (i.e. the Brahminical caste).</p><p>2. The political manifestations of decline proceed by way of a sequence of caste rebellions, wherein each caste is overthrown by the one inferior to it.</p><p>3. This provides us with a morphology and hierarchy of illegitimate political forms; Kshatric absolute monarchy, Vaishic liberalism/capitalism and Shudric communism.</p><p>What, then, are the lacunae that must be filled if a truly comprehensive Guénonian political theory is to be brought into being?</p><p>1. First and foremost, the task of drawing out what are the essential political principles to be found universally in the world’s variegated Traditional civilizations. Guénon and his followers have performed an heroic feat in doing just this in religion and other spheres, like art. But a question mark remains over what principles, aside from the proper ordering of castes, are universal.</p><p>2. The converse of the preceding. In other words, we must identify what political features are distinctively unique to particular Traditional civilizations.</p><p>3. A complete taxonomy of modern political ideologies, movements and regimes. Guénon has equipped us with the tools for the construction of such a taxonomy with his differentiation between anti-Tradition and counter-Tradition. Concretely applying these categories to politics, however, is a task that remains to be fulfilled.</p><p>4. Further to the above, Perennialist critiques of a whole host of modern political doctrines and ideologies, particularly those that only emerged after Guénon’s time, are yet to be made. This include, in a list that is by no means intended to be exhaustive, fascism, identitarianism, the Frankfurt School/Critical theory, Neo-Eurasianism, Hindutva and Islamism.</p><blockquote>If action to restore Tradition through political means is deemed pointless at best, is there any room within a Guénonian frame for <em>any </em>political action?</blockquote><p>5. A Guénonian theory of political praxis. From the preceding, one would say that what Guénon advocated was a non-praxis, but non-praxis is still a form of praxis. What remains to be delimited is what the boundaries of this prohibition against political involvement are. If action to restore Tradition through political means is deemed pointless at best, is there any room within a Guénonian frame for <em>any </em>political action? What of certain kinds of work, for example in the military or civil service?</p><p>6. As we have seen, Guénon has made use of modern thinkers in his political criticism. This may easily be justified within a Guénonian frame by reference to what he wrote in <em>Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times</em>, regarding the relative value of modern philosophy as critique (2004, p. 93). Again, the precise limits of the legitimate use of modern political theories remains to be determined.</p><p>Finally, the point must be insisted upon that a call to formulate a Guénonian political theory does not warrant a reduction of his thought to the level of mere ideological concerns. Rather, any authentically Traditional notion of politics must serve the pedagogical function of pointing beyond the human limitations of political discourse, towards that which Guénon prized the most: liberating spiritual realization. </p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>In this paper we have examined the need for a Guénonian political theory on that grounds that such a theory is needed to meet the spiritual needs of Kshatria, and that otherwise this need will be met by counter-Traditional forces. Thereafter, a brief prolegomenon to this project was outlined, identifying what Guénon has already written pertaining to political theory, and what further work needs to be done to produce a fully-fledged Guénonian theory of politics.</p><h3>Bibliography</h3><p>Coomaraswamy, A.K. in Riepe, D. (1970). <em>Indian Philosophy and Its Impact on American Thought. </em>Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, IL.</p><p>Dugin, A. (2012). <em>The fourth political theory. </em>Arktos Media Limited, London, UK.</p><p>Fabbri, R. (n.d.). <em>Introduction to the perennialist school</em>, Religio Perennis, viewed 16 October 2018, <a href="http://www.religioperennis.org/documents/Fabbri/Perennialism.pdf?ref=sacredweb.com">http://www.religioperennis.org/documents/Fabbri/Perennialism.pdf</a></p><p> Guénon, R. (2004). <em>Crisis of the modern world. </em>Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY.</p><p> Guénon, R. (2004). <em>Insights into Islamic esoterism and Taoism. </em>Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY. </p><p>Guénon, R. (2004). <em>Spiritual authority and temporal power. </em>Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY. </p><p>Guénon, R. (2004). <em>Reign of quantity and the signs of the times. </em>Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY. </p><p>Oldmeadow, H. (2024). <em>Gleanings: A miscellany. </em>CarbaritaPress, Bendigo, AUS. </p><p>Pauwels, L. &amp; Begier, J. (1964). <em>The morning of the magicians. </em>Stein and Day, New York City, NY.</p><p>Schuon, F. (2005). <em>The essential Frithjof Schuon. </em>World Wisdom, Bloomington, IN.</p><p>Sedgwick, M. (2004). <em>Against the modern world: Traditionalism and the secret intellectual history of the twentieth century</em>. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.</p><p>Teitelbaum, B.R. (2020). <em>War for eternity: The return of Traditionalism and the rise of the populist right. </em>Allen Lande, London, UK.</p><p>Upton, C. (2018). <em>Dugin against Dugin: A traditionalist critique of the fourth political theory</em>. Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY.</p> </div> <p><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/politics/the-political-philosophy-of-rene-guenon/" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/hsu30Gw / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>