Prometheus and the Occult Pt. 3 - Medieval Errors

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The last couple of occult posts have been looking at Prometheus - the figure from Greek myth who morphed into a complex symbol human vanity and technological arrogance in the modern globalist world. Until now, we've focused on his ancient Greek roots to get a sense of where he came from, and what we found was interesting [click for part 1 and part 2]. Like Greek myth in general, there is no one canonical account of who Prometheus was and what he did. His ancestry doesn't change - he's always the same Titan, but his role certainly does. This gives us a figure with different attributes and identifiers that can be interpreted in different ways.  And this will make him an ideal symbol in the future, because without a fixed identity, he is adaptable.

Jean-Simon Berthélemy and Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, Prometheus Creating Man in the Presence of Athena, 1802, repainted 1826, fresco, Louvre Museum 

There are a few key details - originally from different sources - that combine into the post-Classical Prometheus. The creation of man, teaching man the arts, stealing the fire...

Nicolas-Sébastien Adam, Prometheus Bound, 1762, marble, Louvre Museum

... and the terrible punishment with the liver-eating eagle are the main plot points. 



















But what these "mean" depends on the context. This post will consider the meaning of Prometheus after the end of the Classical period.

Greek art and thought was taken up by the Romans who absorbed it into their own culture. This started with the conquest of Magnia Grecia - the Greek colonies in the south of Italy, and really took off after Greece itself was absorbed into the empire.

Thomas Allom, The Sack of Corinth, 1870, oil on canvas, private collection
The utter destruction of Corinth in 146 BC ended the Achaean War and brought completed the conquest of Greece. This coming in the same year at the destruction of Carthage brought most of the Mediterranean under Roman control.


But by the time of the Roman conquest, Greece had already changed a lot. The tight, exclusive city-states of the Classical era had been replaced by the vast Hellenistic empires of Alexander's followers, and Greek culture had mingled with the civilizations of the Middle East. This included the mythology.

The Hellenistic World, 40 years before the conquest of Greece. Greek culture had spread across the ancient world in the wake of Alexander, while bringing foreign influences into what had been a small, exclusive society. 










One thing about ancient myths is that the lack of a scriptural canon like the Bible made them adaptable. New cults and traditions were easy to integrate - sometimes combining them with Greek counterparts, and sometimes just adding them. After the Roman conquest this continued, and the Greek Olympians essentially became the Roman pantheon with some changes. Other gods flourished as well - Egyptian Isis was really popular, both in her native form and in hybrid ones. Mithras was a variant on a Persian god who attracted a big following in Rome.

Altar of the twelve gods, marble, 1st century AD, Louvre Museum  

The Di Consentes, or 12 major Roman gods on an "altar" of unknown use. These more or less correspond to the Greek Olympians. Roman religion was different from Greek overall. The details aren't well known, but it seems more complex in terms of ritual and social dimensions. 

Given the close relationship between Greek and Roman myth, it isn't surprising to see Prometheus carry over. It's worth a quick look, because it's the Roman adaptation of Greek culture rather than Greek culture itself that makes the first impact on Western culture. Ovid's Metamorphoses is a good place to start. This poetic recap of Greco-Roman mythology starts with the creation of the world and runs through the Trojan War and into Roman times (click for an interactive translation). It defies easy classification, and its main theme - transformation - seems to fit mainly with Ovid's own literary interests. It's also very concise. But we are thinking about the future, and Ovid's poem is one of the most influential works in the Western tradition. So it's worth checking out what he says about Prometheus.

Antonio Tempesta, Titlepage to Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1606, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The eroticism and violence likely accounts for the popularity because the stories aren't that good. The literature of the Christian Middle Ages didn't have anything quite like Roman libertinism. And the classical origins made it "legitimate" in the Renaissance. 

Ovid's creation story is much less definitive than the Greek ones - he doesn't even identify the god that shapes the world out of chaos.  Like in this quote: "whichever god it was had ordered and divided the mass, and collected it into separate parts, he first gathered the earth into a great ball so that it was uniform on all sides". .

This continues into the creation of man. He gives us an origin story where he can't pin down the origin:

"Then Humankind was born. Either the creator god, source of a better world, seeded it from the divine, or the newborn earth just drawn from the highest heavens still contained fragments related to the skies, so that Prometheus, blending them with streams of rain, moulded them into an image of the all-controlling gods. While other animals look downwards at the ground, he gave human beings an upturned aspect, commanding them to look towards the skies, and, upright, raise their face to the stars."

The historical accounts tell us Ovid was a libertine - a man of the world rather than faith - and this quote certainly bears that out. But what's interesting is the absence of details - no Jupiter (the Roman Zeus), fire, the eagle - any of it. Remembering that Ovid is a poet not a mythographer, we have to view his language as more evocative than it appears. The "raising their face to the stars" references human intellect and consciousness compared to the animals and can be interpreted as a reference summing up the ingenuity that Prometheus teaches in the older stories. But that still doesn't give us Jupiter or the punishment.

Annamare, The Awakening of the First Elves at Cuiviénen, 2016, digital art

Looking to the stars as a sign of higher concsiousness reminds of Tolkien's elves awakening in The Silmarillion. They also represent higher consciousness. Applicability.









Ovid actually changes the Greek account of the Ages of Man to the Etruscan hybrid popular in Rome. Here, Jupiter doesn't preside over all of them, and his overthrow of his father Saturn (Roman Kronos) is a net negative for humanity. The Golden Age was the Age of Saturn, when everything was perfect, while Jupiter brings the Silver Age. This is still better than it will get, but the world is a harder and less hospitable place under Jupiter's rule.

Part of this is political - the pleasure-loving Ovid found himself at cross-purposes with the Emperor Augustus' push to restore Roman morality and religion and use them to unify imperial culture. The emperor had come to power through civil war and tried to create a common set of values and beliefs in his polyglot territory - a new "national" culture. We know this sort of top-down imperialist effort is impossible, but that didn't stop him from trying.

Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, around 10-1 BC, Greek and Italic marble, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome

Augustus as the high priest of Rome's complicated civic religion. Showcasing his own piety was supposed to be inspiring.

It was Virgil who Augustus' poet of choice and who proved greater and more influential writer than even Ovid. His epic The Aeneid is a far superior literary creation than The Metaporphoses and one of the foundational works in the Western canon.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Livia, Octavia and Augustus, 1812, oil on canvas, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse

Octavia (Augustus' wife) faints at the mention of her dead son Marcellus, who Livia (Augustus' sister) is believed to have had killed. Advisors Agrippa and Maecenas seem concerned and the lighting captures the tension. Ingres straddled classicism and romanticism - classical precision and heightened emotion








The Aeneid tells a story of persistence, civic virtue, and the divinely-ordained coming of the stable Roman empire. The idea was to foreshadow the rightness of Augustus' own rule by linking him back to the ancient history of the Trojan hero Aeneas. In this context, Jupiter is the supreme power, a stable cosmic ruler who justly determines the course of fate - both Aeneas' founding of Rome, its imperial ascendancy, and rule of Augustus.

Pompeo Batoni, Aeneas Fleeing from Troy, 1753, Galleria Sabauda, Turin

Aeneas' fate is directed by the gods, from his dramatic escape from Troy, through all his adventures, and the founding of Rome. His divine mother Venus watches over his and intercedes with Jupiter on his behalf.  









Ovid's poem is about the opposite of stability and divine sanction - the inevitability of change and the certainty that all things must pass. The way he downplays the role of Jupiter fits with this. It isn't surprising that a notorious playboy best known for his love poems and writings on the erotic arts would be at odds with the emperor's push for public morality. Augustus eventually exiled Ovid in 8 AD to the Black Sea outpost of Tomis where he lived out the rest of his life.

Eugène Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1862, oil on paper on wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Historically, the semi-civilized Scythians warmly welcomed the gifted poet - a contrast with the Romans. But Delacroix captures Ovid's dismay at the loss of his urban home.

Virgil doesn't take up the story of Prometheus other than a brief mention of the theft in the 6th Eclogue, but his version of Jupiter - even-tempered divine lord of the universe - will become the model for later Christian allegories of divine rule. If you're wondering why the monstrous Zeus of the Greek myths went, this is the answer. By the same token, Ovid's Prometheus - the maker of man without the other details - becomes a model for the future. The theft and punishment don't go away, but Prometheus as creator is central to later allegory.

And allegories move to the center of things with the coming of Christianity.

The Good Shepherd, 425, mosaic, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

Christianity used allegory from the start. Most commonly to represent a concept of divinity not seen in the ancient world - as in the Good Shepherd as a symbol of Jesus.

Sarcophagus of Jonah, around 300, marble, Vatican Museum.

Or to link Old and New Testaments together through what is called typology - Old Testament figures as types of New ones. Like Jonah as an allegory of Jesus, or Lazarus in the upper left of the detail.
















The allegorical is the main method of interpreting Prometheus in the post-antique world, although it takes a while to develop. In early Christianity, there are two main approached - an early form of the allegorical and what is called the euhemerist. The first kind takes the gods and myths as symbolic references to Christian things. The  second interprets them as real people who did great things and who came to be mythologized over time.

The roots of the first appear during Roman antiquity, in the writings of "satirist" and king gamma Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-200 AD). Lucian drips with the smug "wit" that in modern terms recalls tipped fedoras. His "Prometheus on Caucasus" foreshadows Prometheus as Christ-figure by describing him as "crucified", rather than bound [click for text]. Crucifixion was a common punishment in Rome, but Lucian had dabbled in and satirized Christianity, so he was probably clear on the reference. It's not much of an allegory, but an influential antique source foreshadowing the Luciferian comparison between Prometheus and Jesus.

William Faithorne, Lucian, the Satirist, 17th century engraving, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington 

Here's the the punishment and a taste of the wit (click for the link): 

"Though, upon my word, I blush for Zeus when I name it: to think that he should be so touchy about trifles, as to send off a God of my quality to crucifixion, just because he found a little bit of bone in his share!" 

All that's missing is the good day sir!












Prometheus puts his nose in the Christian tent with the Patristic writers, or Fathers of the early Church. We find versions of both interpretations here, although the allegorical ones are much less favorable than they will become. Take Clement of Alexandria - a writer typical of Alexandrian school of theology based in the legendary center of Hellenistic learning in northern Egypt. Alexandria was home to the greatest library in the ancient works, and the universalist outlook on knowledge was a forerunner to modern globalism. The Alexandrine exegetes (Bible interpreters) were open to Neoplatonic and other pagan interpretations, and Clement has been credited with introducing Greek allegorical interpretation to Christian theology. The idea is that the literal meaning of the Bible conceals deeper symbolic ones.

Illustration of the Great Library of Alexandria. 

The bigoted, ignorant, anti-Christian retards blathering accusations about a "destruction" of the library that evidence indicates never happened would be funny were it not motivated by vicious wickedness. The Serapeum - a smaller library -  may have been destroyed when Bishop Theophilus razed of the Temple of Serapis - but even this lacks evidence. 

The story comes from Gibbon - a "Father of History" and liar who fabricated the charge.. There were other fake politically-motivated accusations, but Gibbon's stuck because it fit the Enlightenment narrative and 18th-century evidentiary standards were abysmal.  





Clement originates an idea that will be big centuries later in the Renaissance - that philosophy foreshadowed Christianity to the Greeks as the Law of the Old Testament did for the Jews. While there are structural similarities in Christian and pagan thought - the Logos of the Gospel of John derives from Greek origins - Clement's equating of human thought and divine revelation is fundamentally un-Christian. It just appeals to human vanity in the same way that 'do what thou wilt' does. It also gives a sense of the free-wheeling attitude towards scripture in the Alexandrine School.

Michelangelo, Delphic Oracle, 1508-12, fresco, detail of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican

He is harder on Greek wisdom than the Renaissance will be, because the Renaissance had centuries more luciferianism to draw on. It;s how you get sibyls like the Delphic Oracle on the Sistine Chapel ceiling between Hebrew prophets and the ancestors of Christ. 










Clement describes Greek myth and philosophy as "plagiarism" of Biblical truth - a second-rate echo debased and poorly understood. Prometheus stealing fire becomes an allegory for this plagiarism - this pallid crappy copy in the first book of his Stromata (click for link, Prometheus is in Chpt. 17).

"There is then in philosophy, though stolen as the fire by Prometheus, a slender spark, capable of being fanned into flame, a trace of wisdom and an impulse from God. Well, be it so that the thieves and robbers are the philosophers among the Greeks, who from the Hebrew prophets before the coming of the Lord received fragments of the truth..."

His claim that Prometheus's creation of man is an allegory of God's creation in Genesis is much more influential, and appears in Book V, chapter 14 if you're interested. We don't want to load up on Clement quotes - just show how he wrote and thought. It's easy to see the comparison:

Creation of Adam, finished by 1143, mosaic, Palatine Chapel, Palermo, Sicily

"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."   Genesis 2:7 (KJV)

The "dust" was likened to the clay in the Prometheus story.

Prometheus and Athena create the first man, detail from a Roman sepulchral relief of around 185, marble, Museo del Prado, Madrid

In the myth, the goddess Minerva adds the soul to the body Prometheus forms, while in the Bible, God provides both. But the images make it clear how similar the imagery in the accounts are. It's this similarity that made it easy to claim Prometheus was a debased copy of or allegory for divine creation.












Tertullian (c. 155-240) is more orthodox in his interpretations than Clement, including a more restrained approach to allegory. Unlike the free-wheeling and borderline occult Alexandrines, he mostly uses allegory as a way to link the two Testaments, and rejects it if it is not consistent with the literal meaning. This is much closer to standard typological exegesis, where the literal comes first and the figurative meanings build on that. Tertullian does away with Clement's idea of plagiarism and created a more directly allegorical connection between God and Prometheus. One example appears in Chapter 18 of his Apology" (click for the link), where he refers to God as "the true Prometheus who gave order to the world by arranging the seasons and their course".

Limbourg brothers, creation detail from Les Très Belles Heures de Notre-Dame, fol. 240, 1390-1410, tempera on vellum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAL 3093


Of all the Patristics, Lactantius (c. 250 - c. 325) most clearly connects the notion of Prometheus as a Christian allegorical error to the euhemerist concept of a real origin. This is found in Book II (Of the Origin of Error), Chapter 11 of his Divine Institutes (click for the link):

"The poets also have not given a different account respecting this formation of man, however they may have corrupted it; for they said that man was made by Prometheus from clay. They were not mistaken in the matter itself, but in the name of the artificer..." "...Prometheus made the image of a man of rich and soft clay, and that he first originated the art of making statues and images... And thus the truth was corrupted by falsehood; and that which was said to have been made by God began also to be ascribed to man, who imitated the divine work. But the making of the true and living man from clay is the work of God."

This brings a lot together. Prometheus' creation is an erroneous version of the real creation that gets the making from clay right, but credits the wrong maker. But the source of the error isn't corrupted Hebrew wisdom, but the deification of a notable man - Prometheus was actually the inventor of sculpture. Over time, this kernel of truth was blown up into the claim that he invented mankind.

The Creation of Man by Prometheus, 3rd century AD, Roman marble relief, Louvre Museum

He even looks like a sculptor. This relief is pretty much contemporary with Lactantius. It's easy to see how the euhemerist account would be compelling.












The euhemerist idea - Prometheus was a real guy misrepresented over time - is carried into the Middle Ages by the great encyclopedist and compiler Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636). Isidore wasn't known for his original thought as much as his immense efforts to gather the legacy of ancient knowledge and preserve and transmit it. He is best kown for his Etymologiae, the first Christian attempt at a summa or compilation of ancient knowledge, and his text involves hundreds of classical sources.

Table of contents from a 9th-century version of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies from Northern France, British Library Harley MS 2686, f. 5r

The myth that the Renaissance "recovered ancient learning" is irritating. It focused on certain forms of ancient writing, but the West was trafficking in ancient knowledge since shortly after the collapse of the Western Empire.  They just didn't treat it as an end in itself, but as something practical. 

The British Library has made a lot of progress digitizing their huge collection of medieval manuscripts. This is a significant contribution to the history of the West and a nice change from the usual converged nonsense. Note the Germanic animal style interlace in the big D.












Isidore included Prometheus in his Chronicon, a brief world history from around 616 (click for link. Prometheus appears in the "Third Age" section). His perspective is the euhemerist one he includes him with other ancient founders of arts that became mistaken for Gods. This is typical of the earlier medieval attitude - the interest isn't in turning Prometheus into some kind of allegory for higher truth. Just accounting for what was believed, and offering a possible explanation for the origins.

This changes in the later Middle Ages. By this time, an established aristocracy has grown up in Europe, adding an internationalist parasite culture that prefigures the globalist elites in important ways. This is something we're exploring in the regular Band posts - for our purposes here it is enough to note a few key features.

Limbourg brothers, Household of John, Duke of Berry Exchanging New Year Gifts, detail from January page in the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, f.1v., tempera on vellum, Condé Museum

The aristocracy was more uniform in culture than the nations they ruled over. Royal marriages, international treaties and negotiations, and high-style luxury aesthetics were all reasons. The Band calls them a parasite class, because the resources that they extracted from their societies were far greater than any value that they added. 










It made sense in the early Middle Ages for villagers to feed and work for a local lord and his men who would shelter and protect them in times of trouble. But the bloated courtly teat-riders of the later medieval courts contributed little more than supporting service economies geared around luxe tastes. Which isn't nothing, but it isn't optimal either. Think of the high-end shopping street in any world city for a decent modern analogy.

Limbourg brothers, detail from Octtober page in the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, f.10v., tempera on vellum, Condé Museum

Money is sucked out of rational economies and burned on the inflated rents and costs of the elite district. Consider the relative impact of the cost of Davos vs. leaving that money in the local economies where it came from.
















But worse than economic predation is the moral degenracy. The aristocracy, like elites anywhere, were a closed-off group wallowing in unearned wealth and privilege and outside any social standards of decency. In other words, pretty much free to do what they wilt. But they were also seen as aspirational, in that ordinary people wanted to be like them. This made their corrupt culture appealing and influential. Just as it is now.

Court of the God of Love, early 14th century, ivory, traces of polychromy, Louvre Museum

Ivory was a high value item and the carvings celebrate carnal love for its own sake. That it is the back of a mirror takes it up another level. It is a lovely object, but everything about it captures the de-moralized hedonism of the late medieval elites. That is seems tamely innocent today is just proof that slippery slopes are real. 











It's the luxe appetites of the late medieval elites that undermined moral standards, but they were way less far along the debauchery curve than modern elites. The arts that they blew money on were really high quality, unlike the mixture of self-loathing pretension and money laundering of today's trash culture. It gave us the art movement known as the International Gothic that was known for refined courtly beauty. Religious art was aesthecized and secular subjects came onto the scene in a significant way.

The Virgin of Jeanne d'Evreux, between 1324 and 1339, gilded silver, stones, pearls, and enamels, Louvre, Paris
Jeanne d'Evreux was Queen of France when she donated this golden idol to the Royal Abbey of St. Denis. The elegant pose, tender expressions, and luxury materials are all typical of the International Gothic. It is beautiful and has a religious purpose. But it is also conspicuous consumption - excess for the sake of excess.


If this is the context for religious art, it's not surprising to see the return of Ovid. Although not in his original form. The moral slide wasn't far enough along for that.

The Ovide Moralisé was an early 14th century Burgundian French translation and interpretation of the Metamorphoses that was six times longer than the original. Ovid's verses - many scandalous to medieval Christian morality - were given lengthy glosses to turn them into "allegories" and make them more acceptable. It's an early version of the courtly art collectors that covered their walls in painted soft-core that was ok because they were "Venuses" and mythology was highbrow. Here's a version from 150 years later to show how popular this remained. Notice the title - the Bible of Poets. The claim that Ovid was a source of legitimate moral wisdom is boldly stated with a direct analogy to the Bible. Click for a link to an extensive coverage of the imagery.

How the companions of Ulysses are turned into Pigs by Circe and how Ulysses defeats the enchantment by his prudence, from La Bible des poëtes, Métamorphose d'Ovide moralisée byThomas Walleys, translated by Colard Mansion, Paris: Antoine Vérard, 1493-94.

The allegorical moral applies the basic Classical idea that man has two parts or directions - a base animal nature and a higher spiritual one. The transformation into pigs represents the degradation to the animal aspect when he gives in to the passions. Prudence and restraint - as shown by Odysseus - is the path to our higher nature. Then we recall the Circe story from the Odyssey...

Battista Franco Veneziano, The Story of Circe and Odysseus, 1550s, oil on panel, Palace Museum in Wilanów

We are less clear whether the "prudence" that gives the moral weight includes the married Odysseus "dallying" with Circe for a year and fathering an illegitimate son. On the other hand, this fits perfectly with the "courtly love" moral inversion popular with late medieval aristocrats.  

This is why the we describe the "moralizing" as a thin fig leaf to cover the celebration of dyscivic immorality. 

Limbourg brothers, February page from the Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry f.2v., between 1412 and 1416, illumination on vellum, Condé Museum

Dyscivic because monogamous family households were the basis of medieval social stability. The abolition of cousin marriage - outside the aristocracy of course - drove improvements in genetic stock. Here's an aristocratic picture of a late medieval peasant household getting through the winter. 

The hedonistic crap represented by Ovid shows the aristocrats felt unbound by morality or social good and  free to do what they wilt. When this trickles into the public, modern de-moralized trash culture is the end result. 








This is a very different kind of allegory than the errors of Clement or Turtullian. The Patristics were writing at the end of antiquity - often to pagan readers - and were explaining old beliefs in new terms. The premise is that Ovid's verses contain Biblical and moral wisdom and are worth reading for their educational value. They didn't but that's the point - the moralizing was a completely made-up fiction intended to get Ovid back into circulation.  The Ovide Moralisé was a deliberate revival and rehabilitation of long buried erotic pagan mythology. There was neither reason nor demand for it other than the desire of aristocrats for titilation. It was totally cynical. Which is why it is such a great example of aristocratic immorality and a very gentle bellweather of the secularizing hedonistic elite culture to come.But it put Ovid back on top of the medieval bestseller lists over a millennium after his exile.

 And look... Prometheus!

Creation and Animation by God and Prometheus, Ovide Moralisé, early 14th century, Lyons, Bibliothèque de la Ville MS. 742


As a surprise to no one, Prometheus is presented as an allegory of divine creation - not as a mistake in information or identity, but a foreshadowing of truth. Something worthy of consideration as a representation of God in Christian terms. If pagan morality can slip in under the cover of ancient sexual attitudes, why can't the fake creator become a sign of the real one? It isn't hard to see how this creates an easy pathway from "augmenting" wisdom to potentially replacing it.


The Ovide Moralisé foreshadows the Renaissance treatment of antiquity as an end in itself, but at least maintains the illusion that is is just allegorizing. Then when we get to the actual Renaissance - an Italian cultural movement that started in the mid-14th century and completely inverted moral priorities.

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, marble, Accademia, Florence

The David  is stunning - a masterpiece of technical brilliance and expression. But the venue - an Old Testament prophet and hero of the Church is totally inappropriate for a classical nude. The Band has no problem with nudes in art per se. It's the idea of deliberately adding carnal and often homoerotic allure to religious subjects in the name of "antiquity" that blurs moral boundaries. Why does ancient Roman statuary become an "authority" for Christian themes?



This is an ususual take - the Renaissance is usually held up as a great leap forward in human progress. But that's the point - the progress is the path of materialism, de-moralization, and literally impossible human self-deification. The tell is the inversion - the replacement of an integrated medieval Christian world view with a morally-bankrupt pagan antiquity. If you're interested in a long regular Band post on Renaissance inversion, click for the link. We'll be looking deeper at it in the roots of the West series after a few posts.

For now, a brief excerpt from leading 15th-century Neoplatonist, synchronist, and occultist Marsilio Ficino will have to do - this from the opening to his De Christiana Religione [On the Christian Religion]. Guess what - it isn't all that Christian...

You can see the corruption in the first paragraphs. "Will" and "intellect" as paths to divine Wisdom? Not what isn't there - faith. The one indispensible thing from a Christian perspective. And his authority? Plato.

Look closer and you realize that he is doing that luciferian-Gnostic thing where humans power their own divination. Will and intellect are things that you determine. To an actual Christian, salvation is a divine gift. A reward for faith. Beyond understanding how to behave morally, "intellect" has nothing to do with it. We'll look at this heretic when the roots of the arts series get here.





The Renaissance Prometheus, will be the subject for the next occult post as we follow him into the modern age. For now we'll wrap up with a transitional figure - the early Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) who wrote a treatise on Classical myths and set the stage for the Prometheus to come.

Boccaccio's Geneology of the Pagan Gods was written to combine the pagan and Christian into a unified set of wisdom. We don't have Patristic error - allegorical or eumhemeristic - or even the thin justification for worldly pleasure. This treats the pagan as a source of real wisdom - pointing to Christian truth, but containing value and truth on its own.

Genealogical tree from Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium, 1388 parchment codex copy from Venice, British Library, Egerton 1865 f26.

Boccaccio was original for his use of genealogical trees to try and sort out the relationship between the pagan gods. This was adapted from the Biblical notion of the Tree of Jesse or ancestry of Jesus and is typical of his muddying the waters between Christian and pagan wisdom. 

He claimed the gods were spawned by a fake entity called "Demogorgon" that never existed. It seems to have been a scribal error regarding Plato's demiurge - the generative force below the Forms that made the world and became central in Gnostic thought. This is interesting for the accidental insight it give us about the gods in the Renaissance. 








Demogorgon hangs around for a while, but the connection to the Demiurge - the notion that the gods represent entities in the cosmic hierarchy - is more important. This was an old Platonic idea - Plato was trying to explain them away within the terms of his philosophical system, but Plato also will come back in the Renaissance as a legitimate authority. Boccaccio wasn't a Platonist - he was too soon for that, since Plato really only became a central focus in the mid-15th century, but his Prometheus foreshadows what's to come.

That is, "Classical wisdom" as a parallel alternative path to Truth to Christian faith.

Friedrich Heinrich Füger, Prometheus Bringing Fire to Mankind, 1817, oil on canvas, Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany

For Boccaccio, the stolen fire represents divine wisdom that Christians and pagans recognized as necessary to raise the human above the animal and towards it's own divine nature. Only is isn't a "wisdom" that comes through faith and revelation. It is a consequence of human philosophical striving that foreshadows the Ficino quote mentioned above. 

When we think of Prometheus as a symbol of self-elevation through wisdom, we taking a first step on the occult path of becoming your own god. That is the Prometheus-Lucifer parallel we see in modernity.









By this account, the eagle becomes the symbol of the suffering that attaining divine wisdom brings a fallen human - the wisdom draws us upward, but we are tormented by the inability of our mortal bodies to fulfill the potential of our higher selves. The punishment isn't the psychopathy of a cosmic madman, but one more limitation to be overcome through a mastery of occult learning.

Giuseppe Baldrighi, Hercules Liberating Prometheus, late 18th century, oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale, Parma

So the eventually freeing of Prometheus and the killing of the eagle represents our final ascent into enlightened wisdom and the overcoming of this limited human nature.

Boccaccio doesn't offer it up as the alternative to knowledge through faith - that bit of incoherence only comes later. But the basic structure is there for every Gnostic, pen of light wielding moron to come. 














So the modern Prometheus starts to shuffle into view in Boccaccio's treatment. It's not as clear as it will be, but we can see how the Renaissance love of antiquity opened the potential for paganism - that is, an internally derived human path - to lead to divine wisdom. One where human powers replace faith and divinity as the road to abstract Truth.

And that's the key - the humanists will swoon for Plato, but Plato's Prometheus was an allegory of human wisdom - techne or technical knowledge below the higher wisdom represented by Zeus. It drew on the older notion that Prometheus gave fire, the means of life, or taught technology. Boccaccio's based his version on the later idea of Prometheus as creator, and allegorized him as the source of divine wisdom. See the shift? It's our old friend secular transcendence - the moronic fiction that transcendent things are attainable by limited human minds, and the source of all the de-moralized trash culture, fake enlightenment "truths" and occult garbage that the Band has been pushing against since the start. Like magic, what was technical knowledge becomes divine - humanity is divinized - and Prometheus is the poster boy.

It is logically impossible and incoherent, but so is modern secularism and the luciferian do what thou wilt b.s. that serves as its morality. The next post will bring us there.

Piero di Cosimo, The Myth of Prometheus: Prometheus Fashions the First Man, 1515, oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

The Applicability of Philosophy: Being and Time

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.


Time for a more speculative post. Our reflections on esoteric philosophical subjects like ontology and epistemology aren't the most popular because the are of limited interest. But they are the most fun to write - especially since so many "philosophical" thinkers are intellectually gelded by the self-inflicted idiocies of materialism, atheism, and secular transcendence.

OFF THE TRACK— A Blind Leader of the Blind, from The Ram's Horn, 1896 printed in "Blasts" from The Ram's Horn, 1902, Chicago, The Ram's Horn Co.

It's been eye-opening to see how many supposedly deep and intractable problems vanish when one is open to the full range of ontology, rather than running around with fingers in ears bleating "I can't hear you". 

The Ram's Horn was a journal from the 1890s that was already sounding the alarm about materialism and de-moralization in American society. A collection of their cartoons were reprinted in 1902 in Blasts from the Ram's Horn and are available on line. Evil and inversion have been playing a very long game, and "philosophy" hasn't exactly improved.









We've tended to toggle between a few categories, though not as quickly as we'd like. Part of it is life getting in the way, though big time-consuming speculative posts don't help. The slow march through the roots of Western art and the occult posts have been the most common, and we'll get back to them next.

Kip Rasmussen, Melian and Thingol, scene from The Silmarillion.

Then there is are the dives into more positive expressions of the True, the Beautiful and the Good, which up to now have consisted of takes on The Silmarillion. Although that was certainly a worthy cause, as this  painting of a rare happy moment in the story indicated. 

And we aren't done with that - a trusted collaborator has prepared a condensed version of the last Silmarillion post that we will probably share as the next positive post. And others are on the drawing board. Namely the absurdly underrated Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. As always, we just need more time. 











Then there are the speculative ones like the dismantling Postmodernism series that we started with. The first of those were take-downs of some low-hanging academic fruit, but they morphed into serious reflections on ontology, epistemology, and historiography. We recently got back to that with a reflection on time, but before that it had been quite a while. The most recent prior was probably the argument that when you adjust for allegorical mode, the Fallen nature of the material world is reflected in our limits of discernment and entropy (click for part 1 and part 2) We'll refer to these as "the fallen/finite posts".

George Grie, Bridges To The Neverland, 2019, digital art


The Band considers these posts among the most significant things we've ever come up with, but like the more recent post on time, we were relying almost entirely on our own reasoning rather than working off the writings of a philosopher. For that, we'd have to go back to the development of the ontological hierarchy, it's relationship to logos, and alignment with epistemological modes that we used to expose the incoherent idiocy of Postmodern "thought". This post will build off the finite/fallen ones by further considering the ontological nature of mathematics, and the post on time. But it also will examine the applicability of Martin Heidegger to our take on these topics.

Nicolas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, 1658, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York

We prefer to use this platform for our own speculations and interests, but when dealing with theories of knowledge, semiotic limits, or concepts of Being, it makes sense - it is necessary - to draw on the thinkers who have addressed these questions. Hence our debt to the likes of Aristotle, Aquinas, Peirce, Kant, and others who have provided us with intellectual guidance and good ideas. Standing on the shoulders of giants.




This post is a return to that approach as we reflect further on the nature of time as a defining characteristic of human experience and material reality in general. The interrelated ontological-epistemological hierarchy is our formation, but our thinking has been influenced by the many others who have meditated deeply on questions of time and reality. But we not interested in posing on top of the uncredited work of other people. Especially not those to whom we are indebted in the development of our thought.

The point of the Band is to seek the truth and cut through the darkness of globalist, Postmodernist, satanic lies. 

What matters is clarity, and that starts with honesty in our own activities.









We link to simple sources so others can read further and also assess for themselves where we are coming from. This is not always practical with longer philosophical pieces, so in these cases we introduce the thinker then explain how we are reading and adapting their ideas. We may be wrong at times - everybody is. But if we are, it will be an honest mistake. And we will never claim credit for work that is not ours.

The Band does not consider itself a dealer in philosophy - at least not in the modern academic sense of the term. The original Greek notion of love of knowledge is obviously different, but Philosophy the discipline is a hive of arrogant mid-wits vainly attempting to address questions in ways that their means of address are incapable.

Dire Straits, Industrial Disease, written and produced by Mark Knopfler, Phonogram, 1982.

When it comes to Philosophy or Theology for that matter, we defer to Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits:

"Philosophy is useless, theology is worse"

This is correct because the theological stakes are so much higher, but both disciplines suffer from the same terminal sin of arrogant vanity, or what the Band calls auto-idolatry. 








Both philosophy and theology fall into the same trap: finite human minds declare certainty about things beyond the purview of human minds - like the nature of God or Being. You don't even have to read that again to see that it is inherently impossible, and therefore necessarily false. But it gets worse. They assert their impossible certainties in language, as if transcendental things are somehow reducible to the atomized components of man-made sign systems. It would be more credible to model quantum gravity with Lincoln Logs. 

But philosophy is flypaper for mid-witted "smart" boys who memorize bits of Textbook Learning and drop Philosopher's Names - to use some of our old terms - as a substitute for honesty about the human place in reality. Like this twaddle peddled at the Met gift shop. 

The first sentence is literally claiming to determine the nature of the superset from the subset. A product of cognition can't reach the precondition. We don't have the means to get there by definition, and patience has nothing to do with it. Big letters notwithstanding. 

Hegel was an arch-secular transcendentalist, who believed that Progress! would eventually reach the level of "spiritual" enlightenment through human means. We've seen how that turned out. 









This recursive irrelevance is unfortunate, because the endless parsing of the Lincoln Logs leaves out the one thing philosophy really is useful for - tracing ideas and thought patterns that actually can be applied to real questions.

Applied isn't a random word choice. Applicability is a concept that came up in a Silmarillion post - one that Tolkien used to describe how a fantasy story can simplify and clarify ideas and insights that are applicable to our world. He used it as an alternative to allegory, which is a more limited form of figural representation that stands for subjects in a tight, beat for beat way. Applicability is looser - the story isn't bound to an exact narrative structure, but still makes us aware of real truths by analogy.

The versatility of this concept has interested us - in one post we tried applying it to history rather than fiction and found that it worked pretty well. There is a saying that history doesn't repeat, it echoes. Now extend that to Tolkien's literary relationships and repetition is to allegory as an echo is to applicability. One has to stick to the same same symbolic structure while the other has much more freedom with its analogies.





Obviously the EU and the Soviet Union were different forms of globalist oppression, just as the corruption of the Medieval Church by aristocratic elites is not the same as the corruption of democratic systems by global ones. There are too many differences for strict allegorical repetition -  you have to force it like a cartoon caricature. But applicability is much freer. It highlights patterns and relationships in broad strokes and gives insight and understanding into things in our world without being exactly the same. Echoes rather than repeats.

This post is going to try applicability with philosophy. 

The premise is not to get caught up in the textbook summaries and Philosopher's Names of the smart boys, or the endless dithering over what Panjandrum X really meant in the 6th paragraph of chapter 32 of Dialectical Investigations Y and how it applies to Gasbag A's Nth Transcendental Analytic.  No, that's the fast-track to irrelevance - the same reductive spiral that reduced Philosophy from the "Queen of the Sciences" to whatever corner of the Arts Building that it occupies today.

This isn't really an exaggeration. Consider this "snapshot" into Princeton's Philosophy Dept. in the '80s - supposedly one of the nation's best. The burning debate they chose to highlight was whether to teach the history of philosophy. Presumably the alternative is whatever nonsense Team Gasbag made up at the time. Consider that the 90s added a "bioethicist" that argued newborns aren't sentient, 

Team Gasbag in 1988...

...and Team Gasbag in 2010.

A marginal uptick in diversity and looser dress code didn't do much for the cultural relevance. But the 00s did bring close ties to the lying globalist grievance peddlers known as the University Center for Human Values.








Princeton can coast on prestige and endowment, meaning that the philosophers don't actually have to do anything other than fluff discourse while continually eviscerating intellectual rigor. But if we aim to test and apply general ideas to reality, we don't have that luxury. We actually have to come up with extra-discursive insight that stands on its own without departmental letterhead.

Édouard Manet, The Reader, 1861, oil on canvas, St. Louis Museum of Art

This involves a couple of things. First, books have to be read and understood - not Textbook Learning precises or the malevolent projections of deranged SJWs and NPCs. But they can't be read with the myopic spirit of the typical academic philosopher, who can make a career endlessly spinning the same few sources. 















Applicability means understanding the texts with enough flexibility and extra-discursive erudition to apply them to reality. To take the ideas locked away in a tiny, inconsequential hermetic bubble and bring them into actual relevance. That's the idea anyhow. Let's see if it works.

In this case, looking closely at the relationship between time and material reality through Martin Heidegger - one of the more controversial figures in philosophy and someone often associated with the worst aspects of Modernism.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962.

Rare signed first edition of the canonical English translation of Heidegger's most famous work on sale at a Florida book dealer for $20,000.00. Plus they throw in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

Being and Time was an unfinished project and and Heidegger's first major work. It is also considered his most important, though his later career moved away from it in style and focus.

And the Joan Stambaugh translation, first published in 1996 and revised in 2010, Albany: SUNY Press. Arguable slightly clearer for the less experienced reader, the difference is pretty minor. But it does have leaves on the cover.

The problem is that Heidegger is very difficult to read on account of his constant creation of new terms, convoluted style, and major shift in perspective halfway through his career. And of all his works, Being and Time is probably the most painful. It's even worse in translation, since it can be impossible to pin down his exact nuances in German, let alone English. Stambaugh's biggest advantage is better explanatory notes, but the Band "prefers" Macquarrie and Robinson

Maybe Princeton wanted to do away with the history of philosophy to not have to read him...









Reading these comments, he seems an unlikely choice. But on the other hand, if there is something applicable here, than applicability wins another gold star. And it is our contention that he is very applicable to questions of time and ontology. You just have to get through the turgid prose. Because applicability isn't a point by point summary for its own sake that has to clarify every paragraph. It is an application of ideas to an understanding of reality "outside" those ideas. It is more fluid and general.

So let's set the stage then give Heidegger a few minutes to impress the judges.














First some general observations on time and ontology as we see it. Then we'll try and apply Heidegger's take and see what comes out.


Time complicates the simple ontological hierarchy graphic that came out of our earlier investigations because it has a different relationship to each level.

Ultimate reality can be thought of as super-temporal or above time, in that it is not only "timeless", but it precedes time.Time is sort of like a bubble in ultimate reality - ultimate reality was there "before", is outside of it now, and will be there "after" the end of time. .

Abstract reality is a-temporal. It is unchanged by the passing of time, but is within creation. If creation ends, abstract reality goes with it.

Material reality is temporal. It is defined by movement, change, and decay in time, and is inconcievable without it. Our temporal natures are so definitive that is is impossible to really conceptualize a super-temporal or eternal state.




But despite being fundamental to our experience of material reality to the point that questions like "what time is it" are ordinary to the point of banality, time is pretty mysterious. We experience it as predictable and uniform and can measure its passage as precisely as anything else in this blurry world. Yet we don't really know what it is in itself - or time qua time as the philosophers say.

Math and physics suggest that time is not as uniform and consistent as it appears to us empirically:

This formula shows how time moves differently in reference frames defined by differing velocities. This is called time dilation and allows us to calculate how time behaves differently on bodies moving at different speeds.








Time dilation is fascinating, but it doesn't tell us what time is either - just that is behaves differently than appears to direct experience. This is because the square of the velocity modifier is divided by the square of the speed of light, and at the sort of speeds we naturally encounter, the resulting change is too small to perceive. This only becomes relevant as the difference in relative velocity becomes large enough to still be significant, even when divided by the speed of light. Like in science fiction stories, where what the limits of engineering and material science can be ignored...

It's why it's both pathetic and comical when losers try and pretend space opera sci fi is somehow "more realistic" than fantasy. Actually picture the materials and power plant needed for this sort of velocity. And what the acceleration would do to the people, objects, and surrounding space. Then there's the time dilation. Magical transport is actually more credible as a plot device.


... or in the mathematical allegories of physicists and mathematicians:

Here's an abbreviated derivation of the time dilation equation. 

Click for a more thorough derivation with more explanatory graphics.

















The Band considered mathematical allegories in the Fallen/Finite world posts and observed that they have an interesting relationship to the ontological hierarchy.

Math itself seems to belong to abstract reality, since it describes ideal, infinitely precise, unchanging conditions that do not exist in the material world. That included measurements with uncertainties of exactly 0, imaginary numbers, and entities that aren't "imaginary" in mathematical terms but are physically impossible, like negative numbers and true infinity.

At the same time, mathematical symbolism is rooted in quantity, which was "discovered" through empirical observation of physical entities and recorded with arbitrary, man-made sign systems. 

Counting is the easiest form, but here we need to quantify mass as well.  

It works both ways: once we have a mathematical system, its calculations can be applied back to material reality in reliable ways. Like any number of word problems all the way up to complex equations.




So we have to account for something that is adjectivally present in the material, but able to move into a realm of abstract perfection that the material can't express directly. Using the terms of the ontology hierarchy graphic, we could say that math straddles the divide between the material and abstract levels - empirically observable quantification elevated to an abstract logic-based system with perfect repeatablity, precision, and changelessness that can't exist in material experience.

This abstract/material nature makes perfect sense when we consider that the connective axis across all levels is Logos. Logos manifests in the abstract as logic, and math is symbolic logic in its most refined form. The perfect precision and clarity of math represents the nature of abstract idealism.

Likewise Logos manifests in the material as the natural order - physical realities and patterns that are consistent and predictable, if more blurry and entropic than abstract ideals. Like patterns in the weather or the workings of genetic inheritance.





When math shows patterns and relationships that are unclear or too complex for direct observation, we are "seeing" the axis of Logos crossing from the abstract to the material - from Logic to natural order.

You can see this with time. Simple quantification and periodization measures it in a way that aligns with material conditions. But theoreticians can model scenarios where time does empirically odd  things under conditions that are materially impossible. Does it matter if time passes differently on a spaceship to Aplha Centuri going .9 the speed of light when that will literally never transpire for a host of materially real reasons?

But time dilation does appear to happen under conditions that are impossible for pre-technological human experience but not for modern material science, instrumentation, and engineering.

One example - the Hafele–Keating experiment that used cesium beam atomic clocks to note small deviations between the passing of time on planes and the ground. This has been repeated, though it is worth noting that the difference is not observable without instruments of this sensitivity. 










This is a great example of math straddling of the abstract / material line. To repeat: it can show patterns and relationships that are unclear or too complex for direct observation. You wouldn't notice time dilation on an airplane without math to predict it and modern instrumentation to confirm. It is not surprising that the direct experience of the material world as seen through a glass darkly with limits of discernment and the pure abstract logic of mathematics represent time differently.

We noted in the Finite/Fallen posts that ontology operates on an sliding scale, where the "higher" you go, you gain truth-value but lose direct accessibility. Because human experience and Truth/ultimate reality are opposite poles, proximity to one means distance from the other. When the math is mapping onto empirical observation it clarifies for us, but as it moves into pure abstraction, it leaves our experiential world behind. We can't experience abstractions directly by definition - they're abstract - but can only access them metaphorically, through semiotic allegory.

This is the key to the fake physics of sci fi time travel. The easiest way to think of it is that it takes the full range of mathematical abstraction and pretends it's all as applicable to material existence as basic quantification. It collapses the differentiation between semiotic/metaphorical and empirical/material, and turns straddling two states into one.



One might say that the distinction between empirical or material and abstract or mathematical corresponds with - or at least tends towards - a subjective - objective one. With the empirical understanding of the material world relying on personal observations of visible reality and the mathematical being more impersonal and constant. The problem with this is that both the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity have limits of discernment, because neither can bring us to Truth. Because Truth is a quality of ultimate reality and that lies outside empiricism or logic.

Gustave Doré & Kalki, color modification of Doré's Dante Alighieri and Beatrice Portinari gazing into the Empyrean Light of 1867, from Dante's Paradiso

Neither the subjective empirical observations of Dante or Beatrice or the objective mathematical of perspective can see the ultimate reality. Since neither material nor abstract reality reach Truth, why is it necessary to choose which account of time is "correct"? 

Embrace the power of "and" - time exhibits different properties under different conditions. Subjectively, it's material and consistent - the conclusions of the physicists are not directly evident to the senses. Objectively it is relative - the evidence of the senses is inconsistent with the mathematical models. Why can't we grasp two levels at once?



It is a characteristic of human vanity that the fullness of ontology and the richness of reality have to collapse into a single semiotic - as if linguistic reductionism is a measure of truth. There is a reason why we call it Flatland. It's myopic and self-limiting when you think it through. Which is probably the point, considering the extent to which modern secular transcendence involves making man feel ontologically inconsequential.

As an aside, putting the arbitrary linguistic expression over the complexity of reality is the basis of Postmodernism. It would like if we looked at our ontological hierarchy graphic and decided that since we diagrammed it that way, we are actually claiming that the material, abstract, and ultimate are literally stacked on top of each other in a vertical spatial relationship. Time is what it is, regardless of how we describe it. If our frames of reference can't capture it fully, the problem is with our frames of reference. Not the imbecilic Postmodern notion that things we can't articulate clearly don't exist. We do beat it like a dead horse, but every time it comes up we are bowled over by how retarded it actually is. The popularity is truly unfathomable. 

Salvador Dali, Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion, 1954, 

If time  appears differently under different conditions, perhaps that's because those conditions involve different modes of describing and understanding the reality around us.









But if we are going to consider time as manifesting differently according to ontological level, we need to be clearer about how that would work. And that brings us closer to the applicability of philosophy. Go back to the diagram and add in time so we can take up the differences between what we are calling super-temporal, a-temporal, and temporal.

In the last time post, we noted that despite their differences, neither abstract nor ultimate reality were subject to the movement and changes of time that we see in the material world. They are timeless and outside of time respectively. 

Mathematics shows a different "time" than we perceive materially, but does so with an abstract symbolic logic that is itself timeless. Time is relative. The mathematical rules that show this are not.

Only material reality is time-bound, that is defined by change, causality, and movement. 






The movement of time is essential to the nature of the material world. Referring back to our finite/fallen posts, both entropy and the Fall require temporally change to even be possible. Human experience is also defined by time, because we are all born at one moment, live our tale of years, then die. This finitude - this finite span of years - is one of our most fundamental characteristics. Just think how much total time and energy has been spent thinking about, preparing for, fearing, and resisting death. Our finite lifespans limit our discernment, our capacity for knowledge, our range of experiences, and make our understanding of the world subjective by necessity.

Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1st version, 1880, Kunstmuseum Basel

It's a material endpoint for all of us that we can't see past empirically.

Ans a note on applicability: Heidegger makes a similar case about the definitive nature of death in Being and Time, just way less clearly.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Regina Angelorum, 1900, oil on canvas, Petit Palais, Paris

Finitude is what puts universals out of reach, and why God qua God is so infinitely beyond us. The only way he can even reveal his presence is through some sort of temporal accommodation, whether theophany or scripture. Jesus is the perfect example - the Logos made flesh. That is, divinity entering into time, with a birthday, life, and death. In other words, He had to accommodate us because we can't reach Him.

Bouguereau was a technical genius and captures the divine nature of Jesus with his knowing, mature expression.

















In the most general sense, Heidegger's ontology is compatible. He doesn't refer to God or ultimate reality, because he isn't dealing with the creation of the world. His notion of Being is the ontological predicate that makes it possible for us to conceptualize entities - small-b beings - or even frame the question "what is Being?". And as the title of his most famous work Being and Time hints at, our existence as human beings in an interaction between the timelessness of Being and our limited, time-bound understanding. Being irrupting into time.

The fatal flaw in Heidegger's account is the intellectual constipation known as "atheism". A system of "thought" so moronic that it considers creation ex nihilo more sensible than causality. That criticized those with faith about ultimate reality with impossible fake certainty about ultimate reality. And may be correlate with mental illness.









Heidegger was raised Catholic and drifted to Protestantism before becoming a delusional self-idolator. This may be where the comparability between his ontology and ours came from. Had he remained Christian, he could access this mysterious ontological grounding of Being darkly, through faith. But he falls into the typical vanity of secular transcendence - that his inconsequential time-bound mortal intellect could possibly grasp ultimate reality, and that that could be spelled out in language.

Consider our ontological hierarchy. The boundaries are not hard - we saw how mathematics crosses between material and abstract. 

But note how Logos runs through the whole thing in an unbroken thread, manifesting in an appropriate way on each level. And in an appropriate way includes temporal state.

Ladislav Zaborsky, Supper at Emmaus, 1990, oil on canvas

At the ultimate level of God, it is the Logos of the Gospel of John - God the Son, the second hypostasis of the Trinity who we are told was with God and was God in the beginning. We are not going to say more on that, since the nature of divine relationships that precede the temporal universe are not penetrable. If the Bible doesn't elaborate further, that's good enough for us.

Luca della Robbia, Dialectic (or Philosophy), 1437, stone relief, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence

At the abstract level it is logic - the faculty that allows humans to extrapolate insights and observations into relationships that transcend the vicissitudes of time-bound material life. Like mathematical formulas, the necessity of causality, and the logical impossibility of atheism.

This carving was originally on the bell tower of the Florence Cathedral in the Renaissance, but was moved indoors to protect against the elements. It depicts dialectic by showing Plato and Aristotle arguing.

Detail of a poster of Gregor Mendel, 

On the material level, logos appears as natural order - simple physical truths, like the laws of nature or genetic reality. Mendel was an Augustinian friar who discovered rules of heredity and is considered the father of modern generics. 

That genes can mutate, and transmission has random elements is the uncertain, changing nature of material reality. Doesn't change that genetic inheritance is where our biological natures come from.

Because it extends across the entire hierarchy, Logos is the basis of moral reasoning -  the application of faith and logic to the uncertainties of the material world in reliable and coherent ways. Just take Christianity as a set of religious practices. It is socially and culturally dependent in its forms - ancient vs.  modern - but rooted in consistent dogmatic and moral principles. Applying these to different circumstances in meaningful ways requires a rational faculty that can reach beyond the here and now to some degree.

Material realities keep changing because they're temporal. Abstract and ultimate ones don't because they're a-temporal and super-temporal. Morality is where they meet.

John Pettie, Fixing the Site of an Early Christian Altar, 19th century, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries
They don't look or live anything like modern Christians because culture is material, therefore temporal, and therefore keeps changing. But the ultimate reality they know by faith and abstract principles known by logic don't. Understanding of these may evolve - material applications - our imperfect understanding had no impact on what they actually are. This means that the mechanics of moral reasoning faith and logic applied to the material - don't.


Earlier posts have explained how healthy material-level culture is formed by a bottom-up process - groups of people with a shared identity shaped by the same organic pressures and environments. But morality is top-down if it is going to be meaningful, because it needs an objective grounding or else it's just arbitrary authoritarianism. That's what we have now - Postmodernism is totally relative, so morality consists of who has the power to force their vision on everyone else.

Heidegger goes the opposite way. Because he denies Logos, his reasoning has no pathway for Truth  to flow into. He sets out to account for Being from observation - or a particular philosophical approach to observation. What his predecessor Husserl called transcendental phenomenology, modified by Heidegger's own take on Aristotle. So some explanations are needed.

In plain English, phenomenology is a philosophical approach that sidesteps theoretical questions of consciousness or how we can know and relate to things in the world around us. Think of those irritating questions like "how do you know the table is really real?".  It claims that our awareness of things - of phenomena - are given into our consciousness directly, through the senses, before we are even conscious enough to question how. The way a baby can pull itself upright with the side of its crib before it can formulate thoughts about standing or the nature of cribs.

In more technical terms, it investigates the idea of what is called a priori knowledge. This means "from the earlier", and traditionally refers to things we can know without direct experience. Things deduced from general principles. But Husserl argued that we have experience of phenomena before we have the reason to conceptualize them. 

Perceiving the cup is prior to any understanding or interpretation of what the cup is or does. We have to start with raw impressions of reality before moving to exceptions, principles, deductions.






Transcendental phenomenology means getting to those primordial experiences that come first rather than looking to establish "first principles" from reason or logic. If Cartesian philosophy would argue "I think therefore I am", the transcendental phenomenologist would reply that the concepts of "I" and "think" aren't basal, but dependent on prior, pre-reflective experience. It's the raw impressions that are a priori - and not generalized principles or concepts. These actually derive from the raw impressions, and come later, or a posteriori.

You could say phenomemological understanding is more inductive and not be completely off. 

See how much sense everything makes when you understand the the epistemology of faith?






The problem with this argument for Heidegger is that it doesn't explain how this phenomenological awareness is given. Not the biology of the senses, but the thought processes by which the phenomena are recognizable to us as phenomena. To extend our example - how does the pre-linguistic, pre-rational awareness of the crib get into the baby's head in the first place? How can it realize or conceptualize that this is something it can pull itself up on?

This leads into Heidegger's concept of Being and beings. Small-b beings or entities are things in the world like the baby or crib. But if we can understand and distinguish the different natures of things/beings the way the phenomenologists claim, there has to be some sort of backdrop or ground that informs them and through which they become intelligible to us.  This is capital-B Being.

Beings are anything we might encounter in the world - the phenomena of phenomenology. Being is what allows beings to "be".











Heidegger famously asked Leibniz' question "why is there something rather than nothing?" For Leibniz, God was the obvious answer, but Heidegger was pretending he had to answer from material observation. Which led him to conclude Husserl's "transcendental" phenomemology was a posteriori to some ultimate ground.

The study of that is the study of Being. It's sort of like ultimate reality in that it is the ultimate ontological prior that makes beings meaningful as beings but it isn't an entity itself that you find or identify. It's the precondition that makes them identifiable.

It's impossible to really illustrate, but we can try a metaphor. Without "something" to make them stand out as individuals, beings have no individual being. Capital-B Being is what does that. The problem with an illustration is that whatever depicts them as standing out or individuals is also a thing. A background, the sky, a light box, whatever. Being isn't also a thing - it's an ontological precondition, not a relational object. It's conceptual, if we recognize that conceptualizing it is treating it like a thing - like a being - which it isn't. 

Ontological Lite-Brite as a poor analogy. There is a reason why a lot of people dislike Heidegger. 






Even this attempt at explanation is convoluted - let's oversimplify for clarity. What he is wondering is how are understanding, consciousness, meaning possible? Husserl argues we are capable of intention because we are conscious of objects. Heidegger wonders how.

This is where the reading of Aristotle comes in. What he takes from Aristotle is that we don't really know beings in themselves - qua beings - but through some activity or action that they do. To use Heidegger's language, we know them by how they "present themselves" to us. This is clearer to represent.

William Edward Norton, Sailing Boats in the Mist, oil on canvas, ~1900, private collection

We are conscious of the nature of a boat because it floats and sails. We are aware of the nature of a knife because it cuts. Things become intelligible through action, or more precisely, instrumentality. 

We know them through what they do or how we use them and not some pure ontological essence shining through like Plato's Forms.





So Being isn't something we can conceptualize directly, but we can identify how it operates. Capital-B Being distinguishes the nature of beings through the expression of their natures in action. Not what they "are" in an absolute ontological sense, but what we take them for, or how they become present to us through "use". This is where it's important to understand the difference between "ordinary" and "philosophic" language.

Edward Henry Potthast, The Village Carpenter, 1898, oil on canvas, private collection

Heidegger isn't asking if you can point out a hammer on a carpenter's workbench. That's basic denotative language. He wants to know how the very concept of "hammer" can be known to us in the first place. Where the idea of a hammer as opposed to something else - say paperweight - came from so that the linguistic definition was possible. Think of it in essential terms. 

Implicit in any definition of "hammer"  is the notion of what a hammer does. Hammering. Suppose you drive a tent peg into the ground with a rock. You'd say you used the rock to hammer the tent peg. Used it like a hammer. Why? Because hammering is the essential condition that defines the word. We don't build concepts of Platonic ideals, we build them off how they work, what they do, why we use them. Hammers hammer. The idea of a higher, perfect form of hammer comes after. It is abstracted from the class of objects that do the act of hammering. The expression of nature through action. 





When you think about it, everything has this aspect of what it does, how we know it, how it makes itself present at the root of its identity.

If you squint, you can start to see the connection to the distinctions of the ontological hierarchy. We don't have pure knowledge of things-in-themselves because our consciousness is limited to temporal material reality. Being is a weird notion of ultimate reality but that's because of the pretense that you can reason your way there from phenomena. You can't. But set aside the flawed epistemology and it's clear that that which that underwrites all understanding - makes reality intelligible - is beyond us in an ultimate reality sort of way. This is like Kant's nouminal level in an earlier post.

George Inness, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1867, oil on canvas, private collection

We are in a shifting, changing, time-bound world defined by finite perspectives and inevitable death. A Christian connects to the nouminal by faith. But without that, we are stuck with how things make themselves present - contextual and contingent definitions that can never reach the essence of things. There is no other access.

Perhaps the easiest way to think of this Aristotelian modification of Husserl is grammatical. Being as it is accessible to us isn't a noun but a verb - or more accurately a gerund. It isn't something we can grasp in itself, but as a process. Be-ing rather than being-in-itself. This is what Heidegger means by making itself present - we can't grasp things in themselves, only how they operate in the finite world of our experience. Sorry for this, but the Being of beings is be-ing.

The problem for Heidegger is that by his reading, Aristotle is too fragmented. It explains how Being could act in the world, but there is no sense of unity - just endless clusters of beings coming into view. This is consistent with Aristotelian causality and it gives Heidegger a mechanism to get past Husserl's claim that things are just given to consciousness. But it needs something to tie it together into a universal account of how humans can become conscious of beings.

19th century carpenter’s workshop & original tools, Weald and Downland Museum, Singleton, Chichester, England

All these tools are conceptualized through some sort of usage or purpose. But what "is" it that allows us to recognize them through use in the first place? What is the a priori precondition that makes consciousness of their beings possible? 

It's a better definition then Husserl's but it doesn't get to the fundamental basis of human understanding. 




For Heidegger, it is time, or more specifically our condition of being in time - what the Band's been calling temporality - that is the underlying condition behind all our consciousnesses of individual be-ings. The common factor is that their different essential natures that are beyond us in themselves make themselves present to us in time. Which makes sense - the "ing" in beings implies action and action is temporal my nature. That's the gerund / essence distinction - Husserl wants us to be conscience of "things", but we aren't. And that opens the way to ontology. Because if you want to understand how we become conscious of anything, you need to address how our interaction with everything takes place in time.

Being is timeless but human consciousness of its effects are temporal. Becoming conscious of phenomena is an interaction between the timeless - Being - and things presenting themselves in time.

His consideration of time in ontology is why the Band was interested in testing the applicability of Heidegger. We've come to realize that temporality is a defining characteristic of material existence and that in order to have a coherent ontological hierarchy, we need to account for transitions from the timeless to the time-bound. Heidegger's very different outlook on the world means that his reflections will come from different angles, and we were interested to see if they reach applicable conclusions. 

Let's see:



The unique ability of humans to ponder being and consciousness - to connect this interplay of temporal and timeless leads to Heidegger's most famous neologism: Dasein or Being-in-the-world. That is, the being of humans - what it is that defines us through action or making ourselves present. And the action that makes us conscious of ourselves as beings is consciousness of ourselves as beings. What defines us is that we can form these questions about being and Being and are aware on some level of how it is that we do so. Or at least that we can do so. And as we just argued, becoming conscious of anything is temporal. It happens in time.

VintPrint, Fantasy, Clock, Statue, Light, poster

So our fundamental nature - like any being - is temporal. The difference is that we are self-aware, but that self-awareness itself happens in time. Dasein describes our limited, time-bound consciousness of Being as it unfolds temporally. We can contemplate it in a unique way, but can't get to its essence. We are literally Being-in-time.





The timeless is beyond us. The best we can get are temporal unfoldINGS of Being in time. How else can the eternal enter the temporal? There's obviously more to it. Part of this exercise was to see if we could make Heidegger intelligible, and readers will have to be the judge of that. But we can draw some applicable conclusions from what we do have.

The first is that the subjectivity of human experience is implicit.

Hans Dahl, Fjordlandskap, undated

Dasein is finite - we are born and die, creating beginning and end points to our lives. Perfect understanding is impossible because we don't have time. This means we will always be dependent on perspective and context. 






There is a distinction between physical time - which exists outside  of our awareness - and meaning in time or subjective time. Time marches on in the manner understood by physicists regardless of us. But for it to be meaningful - for it to create the condition where Being unfolds into consciouness - Dasein is necessary. We are necessary.

Ivan Shishkin, A Fallen Tree, 1879, oil on canvas, private collection

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see it, it takes the same amount of physical time to hit the ground. It just doesn't mean anything because no one is conscious of the fall to give it meaning. The time is physical. The meaningful consciousness of temporal actions - of Being unfolding in time - needs Dasein.

And Dasein - being-in-time - leads him to his own versions of past, present, and future. This would be one of the many digressions that we are overlooking except for the terms he uses. Those make it applicable, in ontology and time from the opposite direction from ours way.

The past is defined by being thrown or thrownness - we are thrown into a preexisting world that shapes our limited understanding. This is the inherent subjectivity of Dasein and what led to critics accusing him of "cultural relativism". As if there was a way for our perspective or our culture not to be relative. The whole point of Being and Time is that meaning needs a condition to make it mean - it is relational from the jump. Morons. Anyhow.

Henry Bacon, Pay Attention, late 19th century, oil and canvas, private collection

This relates to the Band's emphasis on the importance of naturally-forming organic cultures to our well-being. If what we are thrown into - family, society, nation - determines how we be-in-the-world - then others in the same situation will most share our our frame of reference. They will be most relateable, empathetic, and compatible. 

This is obviously empirically - Heidegger just reiterates this truth from a different angle. The fundamental nature of a finite being in time. 

He uses a few terms for the present - the best are fallen or fallenness and discourse. Seriously. He doesn't use them in a Christian way - too blind - or a Postmodern way - too early - but the way he does use them is applicable to those contexts.

Fallen to Heidegger is fallen away from an awareness of Being into distraction - fascination is his word - with the material world for its own sake. This rejection of ontology for materialism is as close to an atheist version of the Fall that you can get. Empty, cat chasing a laser pointer obsession with stuff and entertainment while ignoring truth and meaning in your existence.




Discourse is language or some other mode of communication how reference is articulated. How we interact superficially in the state of fallenness. Like a Postmodernist he differentiates between discourse and Being, but utterly rejects the Postmodern conclusion. The Postmodernist pretends that the difference between language and meaning means that there is no meaning outside language. Heidegger concludes the opposite.

 The Postmodernist pretends language preceeds meaning and that there is no meaning outside of it. 

Heidegger would call discourse a projection that ties and limits us to the fascinations of the material world and obscures the awareness of Being in Dasein. 

One is realistic, the other an idiotic satanic inversion.

Future is defined by projection - expectations and anticipations that come from projecting the past and present forward. The future is always the future of the present - we can't experience it directly, only imagine it from our current, subjective position in time. By the time we get there to see how off we were, it isn't the future anymore.

Poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick

This is really clear when we look at old futurecasting. Like 2001 from the perspective of where people thought Progress! was going back in the 60s. The Band remembers 2001 - the year, not the film. It didn't look like this. 

It's not just the stagnation of engineering. Nothing dates futurecasting like some huge unforeseen paradigm-shifting change. 70's and 80s projections are so terrible because they missed the internet. 

As Heidegger would say projection of the past we are thrown into and the fallen present that fascinates us.










Physical time may be sequential, but human time - the time of Dasein - is more intertwined. Because we are temporal, our perspective keeps changing. We are always in the present - contingent on a lengthening past and projecting with a shifting sense of the future. The interaction of thrownness, projection, and fallen-ness create a limited, fluid, and subjective consciousness of temporality, the meaning of which can never be grasped in its fullness.

And his account of subjectivity is also applicable. It highlights the necessary connection between our temporal and material finitude. That what we call the limits of discernment in a fallen/finite world is a product of our experience of time as well as space. Physics tells us that the two are intrinsically related, but we perceive them as different. Dasein gives us an argument that doesn't rely on mathematical abstraction or complex instrumentation, or even awareness of God. So two big applicabilities:

that our ability to make meaning is temporally and spatially limited

and 

that faith is absolutely necessary when it comes to knowledge of ultimate reality. 

Some have attacked him as being a relativist, because Dasein is temporal and contingent. But if we do what he does and come from a purely material perspective, we are also temporally limited, subjective, and relativistic in our understanding. That's all we can hope for in such a frame of reference. And this brings us right back to the absurdity of secular transcendence - that finite human mind can directly access transcendent truths through its own power. 

Only the auto-idolatrous retards larding useless departments could think that "Philosophy" can reach a transparent of Truth qua Truth through the linguistic equivalent of Lincoln Logs. For the nth time, we can only know Truth through faith. Even the Bible tells us we see it as through a glass darkly - what hope does a dude who willfully limits his epistemological range have?






Heidegger's "relativism" is actually more honest than the usual Flatlander, because if we are temporal by nature and can only access Being through it's limited accommodation in time, then Being qua Being must be outside of time.

To which a Christian would reply,  Bingo.

Gabriel Loire, Glory Window, 1976, Chapel of Thanksgiving, Dallas. 

More applicability. We know that the ontological hierarchy includes temporal and timeless elements bound together by Logos. The problem is conceptualizing how this works. The mechanics by which the timeless comes into time. Heidegger visualizes it as an opening - perhaps irruption is the more accurate term - in any case, some finite expression of being projecting into the material. Even this is still pretty esoteric, but mapping the relationship makes it easier to come up with a clearer illustration.

Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, 1st edition, London, Seely & Co., 1884

The way to picture is is like the story Flatland. Not in the way the Band uses it to describe how secularists, globalists, and other intellectual geldings pretend the fullness of reality can be compressed into material existence, but the actual book. This clever piece that attempted social satire with animate shapes of different dimensions and is much more interesting for the representation of polytope geometry. 

When an entity from a higher dimension - say a 3D sphere - visits a lower one - like 2D Flatland - only that number of the higher-dimensional entity's dimensions are visible. The sphere appears as a flat circle in Flatland, while the 2D square looks like a line in 1D Lineland. 

Still  from Flatland: The Movie, 2007, directed by Dano Johnson and Jeffrey Travis

The analogy with Being works because (n-1) dimensions of an n-dimensional figure isn't a conventional "fraction". It's the elimination of the entirety of the other dimension. A pure 1D line has precisely 0% of the a 2D figure's area. If it is expressed as a fraction, it is literally 1/∞, although a bounded one. A finite portion of a relatively infinite whole.

Being irrupting into temporal reality through Dasein would look a bit like that if the infinite was boundless and the visible portion was a temporal impression rather than a spatial one.

More applicability. If we set aside Heideigger's weird language and atheist delusion, he makes a case why ultimate reality in its fullness can't enter the finitude of a temporal world. And once again, working up from the material and complimenting the Band's Christian ontology.

Platytera Icon, 17th century, fresco, Archangel Michael Church, Benche, Macedonia

Even God had to incarnate, which is not a limitation of His, but of ours.

That ultimate reality which gives us and our world meaning is only known instrumentally, and that means in time. That sounds familiar...

That's enough. We can leave Heidegger after his "Turn" for another time. His later work does make some applicable observations about the nature of truth, technology, art, and thought, but this post has done what it set out to do. That is, use Heidegger to test the applicability of philosophy. The must useful insights have to do with the temporal nature of material reality and the inaccessibility of ultimate reality to finite intellects. It isn't as if we didn't know this - we worked out ontological hierarchy diagram some time ago. But it's interesting to see someone approach timelessness and temporality from the opposite direction and reach the same basic conclusions.

We accept faith and see the limits of time-bound human understanding. 

He rejects faith and sees the limits of time-bound human understanding. 

Looks like there are limits.








We see how subjectivity and cultural determination are also intrinsic consequences of this limit, and not something that can be overcome with "education", "sensitivity", or "progress". And his critics reveal the arrogant secular transcendence that poisoned modern philosophy. Dasein is a fine mechanism for thinking about the interaction of the temporal and timeless, even if the term is a bit clunky. But that's ok. We don't need his language to appreciate how the human brings a tiny slice of the eternal into a temporal package.

Body and soul works just fine.

Thomas Cole, The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey (study for The Cross and the World), 1846-1848, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum