AD: Therein lies the difficulty. We are not free from our historial, since precisely it predetermines our content, and hence the structures of the Logos that form us. Distance is impossible if we make it an end in itself; we will only arrive at a serpentine twist of ourselves, like moving around the Mobius strip. We must become Heraclitus, but it is not possible to do so. We can try to become a Greek and try even harder to become an ancient Greek. There is no guarantee, but the very desire to emigrate from out of the present is highly important. The construction of a map of civilizations is intended to give at least a few reference points for how to make that distance real. And as I have already said, getting out from under the hypnosis of contemporary (and post-contemporary) European rationality will already show to what extent contemporary Europe in its structure is noologically far from, or even directly opposed to, Europe as such. The postmodernists that brought down the structures understood this clearly: the European logos is in fact in radical opposition to the contemporary European moment. If we are carriers of European identity, then we are in the Titans’ captivity, sold into slavery to them. If we do not experience the West as decline, we are shadows of the Titans, which means that we are not autochthonous Europeans, but noological immigrants, nomads, eroding European structures once and for all (the precise meaning of the concept of poststructuralism). The map of civilizations outlines the circle of the European Logos, its frontier regions and the zones that don’t depend on it. Thereby there emerges a synchronous map of frozen time distributed along semantic axes. Theoretically, this should open the possibility for the practice of a philosophy of distance, placing the moments (including the contemporary) into the historial, and the historial into the more general field of noological structures. Thus, Noomachy appears before us in many slices, temporal and spatial, and each civilization has its own unique proportions of balance of Logoi, congealed into dynamic crystals of semantic types. Time is a sequence of meanings. If we understand the meaning of time, we acquire a special noetic life where contemporaneity and even the limits of a civilization cease to be fatal. That is the original meaning of the term theoria (θεωρία) as interpreted by Festugière in the spirit of Platonic and pre-Platonic philosophy. Contemplating what is diverse in its structures, a thinker reaches the semantic core, and then begins to contemplate that very core. The three Logoi are the structure of the core, and concentrated attention on it allows one to comprehend the plurality of civilizations in their uniqueness and unicity, since in each civilization the Logoi always fight among themselves in a manner intrinsic only to that civilization.
NS: Referring to Julius Evola’s well-known work Ride the Tiger, you talk about the fact that it is possible to view the contemporary world (“contemporary moment”) and Tradition as co-existing synchronously. which means that we should be able to find traces of the contemporary in even earlier stages, correct? I remember that when I paid close attention to the observation of another traditionalist, René Guénon, he said the sources of the contemporary world should be sought in classical antiquity. I immersed myself in the heritage of the epic poets, early mythographers, and pre-Socratic thinkers, and established that even the legendary “Seven Sages” prepared what today we call “the end of philosophy.” Moreover, I discovered with surprise that various schools and tendencies of thought, and also separate thinkers, were under the influence of one of the three (synchronously existing in space) Logoi: Apollo, Dionysus, and Cybele. This co-existence was not peaceful. On the contrary, all three Logoi were in a state of tense battle (which you call Noomachy). The final collapse of the original union of Dionysus and Apollo led to the total domination of the Cybelean Logos. Guénon was absolutely right: he guessed clearly that traces of the contemporary world were already present in this period. Can we assume that the opposite is also the case: traces of Tradition can still be found in the contemporary [world]? If Tradition continues to co-exist with contemporaneity, should we expect the turning of the hourglass? Who will turn it: the human, as the one found “between” (the contemporary and Tradition), or is this radical gesture beyond man’s power and someone else needed?
AD: Concerning the contemporaneity [contemporary character] of the thought of the pre-Socratics and especially of Democritus and Epicurus: that is entirely accurate. The same is true in general of the substantialist and proto-material pursuits of the early natural philosophers, where the shadow of the contemporary [world] is fully discernible. In some sense the materialism of modernity consisted in a rediscovery of pre-Socratic atomism and a number of Epicurean doctrines, through Lucretius in particular. That is, Tradition and the contemporary should be understood synchronously, as types of philosophy, culture, and society. Apollo and Dionysus rule over Tradition; Cybele and the Titans [rule over] the contemporary. There is a battle between Tradition and the contemporary, and that is Noomachy. The battle is eternal. Apollo and Dionysus (Tradition) won the main victory in it, but Cybele and the Titans sometimes have tactical successes. The contemporary, modernity, is the epoch of the temporary triumph of the Titans and the Great Mother, Cybele. Apollo and Dionysus were forced to retreat; matter became humanity’s master. This began with the West, the countries where the sun sets. According to Heidegger, we are on the cusp of the Great Midnight. The contemporary predominates and does not even understand that there can be something other than itself, but there is something other than it. Tradition, and the returning solar gods. In the Great Midnight the turn that you are asking about occurs. Who accomplishes it? That question is central in the philosophy of Heidegger’s middle period. He resolves it in a complicated manner: through Ereignis on the side of authentically existing Dasein and through the appearance, passing by, of the “last God” (letzte Gott). But both members of the pair Dasein — last God have, and do not have, a relation to the human. In some sense, Dasein is the core of human [adj.], and the letzte Gott is that which appears to Dasein from the side of the Fourfold (Geviert) opposite to humanity. This moment is the moment of turning [perevorot]. The human [adj.] should only be thought of as paired. Thus, Dionysus lives inside Apollo. Both these elements are present in Socrates. Plato is strictly Apollonian. But if that is so, the alliance of the two main figures of Indo-European culture is open to him, and he praises their unity and their harmony, delighting in his teacher Socrates in the most diverse situations that reveal now one, now another side of this perfect human.
NS: Who was Socrates’s daimon, which never impelled him to do anything, but only cautioned the philosopher against doing anything wrong?
AD: In contemporary Iran there is a Council of Spiritual Expediency [Expediency Discernment Council]. It consists of spiritual authorities, Ayatollahs, it plays an important role in State rule. It also does not impel [anyone] toward anything, that’s what President and parliament are for, but cautions against wrong acts. Socrates’s daimon is a form of the paradigmatic presence that is not the rational and voluntary ego (it does not impel), but illuminates with a momentary flash the context of each concrete problematic. A person’s “I” is martial, but Socrates’s daimon is priestly. It knows what truth is, while Socrates himself, being a partial occurrence inside his daimon, cannot know that. The daimon keeps an eye on “spiritual expediency.” It does not act for Socrates; it subtly looks after him. But in contrast to bodily-oriented persons, Socrates’s daimon is a luminous, Apollonian cone based in the bright sky. Socrates himself is a divine and daimonic person. Titanic man is philistine, and his ego rests on a cone whose foundations lie deep in the earth. This sort of person is titanic and cybelean. Socrates’s daimon stands higher than him. The titanic self of the material person is ruled by another, non-spiritual expediency, inlaying the individual in the folds of material darkness.
NS: The issue about how the question of matter was resolved in antiquity seems to me extremely important. And how, in accordance with the triadic model of Logoi, do you resolve it in Noomachy? In the chapter on Cybele, you present twenty principles of black philosophy, giving precisel
y matter the predominant place.
AD: Matter is etymologically like the Greek hyle (ὕλη), timber. That is an Aristotelian term. Semantically it means the lower limit of bodily forms, that which is lower than the elements from out of which corporeality is woven. The tree is the symbol of the Great Mother. The tree is the trick of an optic-ontological illusion: it seems to the observer that it grows from the Earth, which produces it from itself. But the tree grows from the seed, not from the Earth. Consciousness of the role of the seed is the beginning of patriarchal philosophy, the cult of the Father and Son. Earth is important, but it does not give things being. Earth in a philosophical sense is sterile; it is the milieu, but not the bearing impulse. It does not give things being; it accepts a small being (seed) and helps it have its fill of juices, feeds it (the wet-nurse-Khôra in Timaeus). That is a solar relation to matter, which itself does not exist (like the seed exists) and does not give things being. But in matriarchal cultures, among “peoples of the sea,” and certain Western Semites there is the idea of the birth-giving Earth, i.e. matter as possessing being and granting being. This being of the earth is embodied in the tree, in timber. The tree is a seal (of the imagined, for Indo-Europeans) being of Earth. That is the woods, hyle (ὕλη), and the Latin materia, matter. The optico-ontological illusion of the tree is a [praistok1 ] of materialism and black philosophy, which understands the world from below and explains the higher through the lower. In antiquity, this understanding was characteristic of Western Semitic cultures, the Phoenicians in particular, and it is possible that it passed from them to the Hellenic pre-Socratics, and later to the Stoics, as Pohlenz and Sidash show. The Great Mother — wood [tree] — matter. That is the chain of homologies leading from myth to philosophy. But one can move along it in the opposite direction also. Then any, even the most nuanced materialism, will be a variant of the cult of the Great Mother.
NS: My next question is similar to the previous one, but this time I would like to ask you about the place of evil in the picture of the three Logoi.
AD: That is a huge topic. Apollo knows evil as being’s depleted (depleting) antithesis. If day exists, night does not exist. But if clouds cover the sky, the sun will come out sooner or later. Night still does not exist, since there is day and the sun of day. Apollo refers evil back to evil, night to night, and with disgust he tells chthonic Python, cast down by him, “continue to rot” (πύθω). Dionysus knows the game of good/evil, this/other. He is non-dually dual. He suffers, lacerated by the Titans, but he plays with them and battles simultaneously. Evil for Dionysus is always relative. He is always ready to turn the proportions around. He is not beyond morality; he bears a certain Dionysian morality, the morality of epiphany, the morality of Presence. Cybele regards evil as a light that falls on her, consumes her, stings her, and shows the frightful picture of her face. Cybele lives by night and darkness, and in the best case by the swampy fires of St. Elmo. In its malleable embrace there is no opposition of good/evil. A mother forgives and loves all her progeny, both the saints and the sinners, both the virtuous and the vicious. Cybele is truly amoral and only hates the blue lucidity of the heavens, in which it reads its condemnation. Flight upward, without a return downward, is for Cybele the sum of all evil. To take flight and not fall, not return into the depths of the Earth — that is unbearable for Cybele. That is why Cybele loves fights but hates war: in war, the hero is capable of ascending to the heavens and thus avoiding its grasp.
NS: Over what does Plotinus fundamentally disagree with the Gnostics and why do you think that “Gnosticism is the childhood disease of Platonism”?
AD: Plotinus is a purely Apollonian philosopher. He does not understand the tragic element of the Gnostics. Yes, the ingress of souls into the vice of matter is, for Plotinus, an extremely unpleasant episode of fate, but he does not give that condition the metaphysical meaning that the Gnostics give it. Plotinus thinks that the Gnostics hold on to their ego too tenaciously, causing them to suffer. A person can be caught in the snare of matter, but if he closes his eyes and contemplates the ideas, this difficulty will be forgotten and will disappear. Within lives the soul, and if someone looks at it steadfastly, at some point it will look back in return. When the soul looks at the ego, it abolishes material chimeras and opens the horizons of the Intellect. The world is a copy, Plotinus agrees with the Gnostics, but it is not such a bad copy. The charms of the Great Mother do not reach Plotinus. He does not understand the inescapability of the material burden. The philosophical gesture of turning the head towards the opposite direction (the Platonic cave in the Republic) comes to him easily and like a man. And he is ready to raise himself up, and he does not give meaning to the howls and spasms of matter. He is completely free of the female principle, whereas the Gnostics are not.
NS: In his work on the life of Plotinus, Porphyry cites the well-known legend that in response to Amelius’ invitation to participate in a rite associated with the full moon, his teacher Plotinus said, “the gods should come to me, and not I to them.” Many students were confused about how to interpret Plotinus’s words, and some even accused him of disdaining the traditional cults. Pierre Hadot sees in Plotinus’s words the indication of a peculiar understanding of divine presence. He writes, “to find God, it is not necessary to go to His temples. It is not necessary to go anywhere to find His presence. But one must oneself become a living temple, where it could manifest.” What do you think of Hadot’s interpretation and how do you understand Plotinus’s words about the gods?
AD: The worship of God is not in the body, but in the soul. In the context of spiritual geography, this is one of the most important themes of our Gospel. In particular, in the Gospel of John, in the conversation with the Samaritan who asks where one must worship God: “Jesus tells her, believe Me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” That is a specific time, which is the time of the Soul. In my opinion, Plotinus means sometimes similar. There are external rituals and there are internal ones. The philosopher is located under the direct ray of eidetic presence, and wherever he might be, this ray is with him, and it pierces him each time he begins to think, but for Plotinus, the element of thought is divine. The highest ideas are gods and he who is able to contemplate them is in direct association with God. In the Christian tradition this has another interpretation, but the meaning of the superiority of the inner to the outer is the same. In the traditions of radical Shiism, Ismailism, the call to a radical opposition of the inner over the outer was given even more drastic forms, right up to the abrogation of Islamic regulations among the Qarmatians, or in the time of the announcement of the era of spiritual renaissance at the Alamut Castle. I’ve written about these events in the third volume of Noomachy.
NS: You talk about the female nature of the demiurge, indicating thereby its belonging to the “black” Logos of Cybele. Nevertheless, when determining the place of Gnosticism in the three noetic universes, you locate it in the zone of the Logos of Dionysus, a Logos found dangerously close to the Logos of Cybele. Which secrets of the Great Mother does Gnosticism begin to open? Talk about the role of the “female creator” in Noomachy.
AD: The Gnostic worldview is very complex. Any attempt to reject or accept it at the outset seems superficial to me. A Gnostic is the bearer of the unhappy consciousness, but according to Hegel only the unhappy consciousness is capable of philosophy. The happy consciousness is a dream, and at the limit, the absence of consciousness altogether. The world of the Gnostics is dual and problematic. That is why it relates to the zone of Dionysus, where duality reigns. The Gnostic is not an acolyte of Cybele, but in contrast to patriarchal Apollonianism, he feels himself captive to Her. He knows the might of the Great Mother, and guesses the secret of the titanic usurpation of the Female Creator [Tvorchika], who poses as the creating Father, while being in fact a usurper, a female androgyne [sic]. The Gnostic exposes the ontological illusiveness of the corporeal world, but he cannot yet deal with this i
llusiveness. He is a hero tortured and tormented by matter. His drama is the drama of Dionysus. The Gnostic is torn apart by Titans and rises above them in fierce battle with the Great Mother. The Gnostic knows the entire titanic principle, since Titan is the matrix of the human, his extended (downward) chthonic and hypochthonic foundation. The Gnostic carries the abyss in himself. He knows the Great Mother as his I, which he strives to overcome, as the spirit of gravity. The Gnostic is Dionysus in the role of Adonis, trying to quit the field of the black game of self-delighting, infernal femininity. Recognizing that the creator of the world is a woman, the Gnostic rushes to that in relation to which Sophia is a woman, i.e. in the world of the Pleroma, to the apophatic, ineffable Father, concealed by a veil of black material marvels. That is a very subtle move: the Gnostic does not accept the Great Mother as an answer; he spiritualizes her as a question, co-suffers [empathizes with] its drama, theopathically lives the mystery of her insurrection and the revolution of the aeons, which is reflected in myths about Sophia, in particular in the teachings of Valentinus.
NS: You say that in describing the war of the Athenians with the Atlantids, Proclus in fact describes the battle of two Logoi (the Logos of Apollo and the Logos of Cybele). In the same way, do you think it is possible to view certain historical events in the context of noetic battles? Athens against Atlantis. Rome against Carthage. The primeval duel between Land and Sea. The furious clash of the Olympian heroic principle with the Titans of the Great Mother. Can we say that the application of the model of the three Logoi, in attempting to explain historical processes, will mean nothing other than contact with hiero-history, “sacred history”?
Political Platonism- the Philosophy of Politics Page 7
