There is a continuous attraction, beginning with God, going to the world, and ending at last with God, an attraction which returns to the same place where it began as though in a kind of circle. -Marsilio Ficino
The end of the Robert Wilson / Philip Glass “opera”, Einstein on the Beach
Man is an earthly star enveloped in a cloud, but a star is a heavenly man….
Therefore leaving behind the narrow confines of this shadow, return to yourself; for thus you will return to spaciousness. Remember that there is an immeasurable space in the spirit, but in the body one could say infinite constriction. This indeed you can see from the fact that numbers, which are akin to the nature of spirit, increase without limit but do not diminish; whereas there is a limit to the expression of the physical, to its contraction there is no limit.
But, that there is some light, though small, in the eyes and brain, many animals which see at night can attest. Their eyes glow in the dark. And also, if anyone has pressed the corner of his eye in some certain way with his finger and twisted it, he seems to see a certain luminous circle inside himself. And it is said that the deified Augustus had eyes so bright and shining that when he stared at someone very hard, he forced him to lower his eyes, as if before the glow of the sun. Tiberius also is said to have had very large eyes which (this would be amazing) saw at night and in the dark, but only for a short time, and when they first opened from sleep; then they grew dim again.
In Mexico, it is said that people who give small children the evil eye (el mal de ojo) have la vista muy fuerte (a strong sense of sight). It is even said that a person can kill someone if his sense of sight is strong enough. This is almost always completely involuntary. Spanish speakers can see the short documentary, El Mal Visto, regarding this phenomenon. One wonders if such beliefs are remnants of the esoteric sciences of the Renaissance and earlier.
Saturn is the supreme intellect among the angels by whose rays souls in addition to the angels are illumined and inflamed and are raised continually with all their might to the intellectual life. Whenever souls are converted to this life, they are said to be under Saturn’s rule in that they live by the understanding. Consequently, in this life they are said to be regenerated by their own will because they choose to be reformed for the better. Again, they are said to grow young again daily (that is, if days can be numbered then) and to blossom more and more. Hence the words of the Apostle Paul, “The inward man is renewed day by day.” Finally, fruits are said to be supplied men in abundance, produced unbidden and in a perpetual spring, and this is because there- not by way of their senses and laborious discipline but by way of inner light- men enjoy to the highest degree the tranquility of life and pleasure, along with the wonderful spectacles of truth itself.
This is not enough. For multiplicity still remains in the soul. There is added, therefore, the mystery of Dionysius, which by explanations and sacrifices, and every divine worship, directs the attention of all the other parts to the intellect, by which God is worshipped. In this way since all the other parts of the soul are reduced to the intellect alone, the soul has already been made a certain single whole out of the many.
-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love
Moreover, we think that from the swift and orderly revolution of the heavens originates musical harmony; that eight tones are produced by the motions of the eight spheres, and a ninth, a kind of harmony, is produced from all of them. And so we call the nine sounds of the heavens, from their musical harmony, the nine Muses. Our soul was endowed from the beginning with the Reason of this music, for the celestial harmony is rightly called innate in anything whose origin is celestial. Which it later imitates on various instruments and in songs.
Wherefore Plato judges twelve to be the governor of the universal world form, of the human form, and the form of the state. He judges it to accord most with the propagation or mutation of things, since, as we shall show later, it is the first of the increasing and abundant numbers. Twelve is made from the number six twinned, from six the perfect number as we call it. In other words, twelve is more than perfect… The Sun and Venus each complete their orbits in 12 months, Jupiter in 12 years. Daily the moon passes through twelve degrees “in middle motion”, and she has her [28] mansions of twelve degrees; and she enacts twelve months with the Sun. Not without weighty cause has this number been observed in the Prophets and in sacred writings.
But why do we think that Love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature. But the parts of the world, like the parts of a single animal, all deriving from a single author, are joined to each other by the communion of a single nature. Therefore just as in us the brain, lungs, heart, liver, and the rest of the parts draw something from each other, and help each other, and sympathize with any one of them when it suffers, so the parts of the great animal, that is all the bodies of the world, similarily joined together, borrow and lend natures to and from each other. From this common relationship is born a common love; from love, a common attraction. And this is the true magic.
-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love
You asked me yesterday to transcribe for you that maxim of mine that is inscribed around the walls of the Academy. Receive it: “All things are directed from goodness to goodness. Rejoice in the present; set no value on property, seek no honors. Avoid excess; avoid activity. Rejoice in the present.”
But it is as if two people were living in the same well-built house; one of them criticizes its structure and its builder, although he keeps on living in it all the same. The other, however, does not criticize; in fact, he affirms the builder has constructed the house with consummate skill, and he awaits the time when he will move on, and no longer have need of a house… He who finds fault with the nature of the universe does not know what he is doing, nor how far his arrogance is taking him. The reason is that they do not know about the successive order of things, from the first to the second to the third, and down to the last things; nor do they know that we must not abuse those things which are lower than the first, but gently acquiesce in the nature of all things.
-Plotinus
Boys cannot understand the counsel of their elders, nor peasants the thoughts of the wise. However, with unbecoming arrogance, the earthly creature Man often presumes to fathom the reasons of divine nature, and search into the purpose of its providence. And, what is worse, men of all ages blasphemously discuss the divine mysteries at banquets, even in brothels. Pythagoras justly prohibited speaking of these mysteries without divine insight. No man, but the divine, Campano, perceives the divine… It should therefore be enough for man to know that the beautiful working of this single universe is governed by a wise architect, on whom it depends. From goodness itself only good can spring. And what proceeds from that can only be ordered well. Therefore, everything should be accepted for the best. Who thus understands the divine, and loves it, is divine by nature, good in practice, joyful in hope, blessed in reward.
-Marsilio Ficino
Of the most ridiculous of people who pretend to be philosophers, the most foolish are those who toil over the “problem of evil”. This most of all is like chasing your own tail. If you want to understand evil, look at yourself, at your own fears, and your own mortality. The chaos in your own heart is the cause of the chaos outside of it.
The only satisfactory resolution to the problem of horrible things happening to us is, to echo Plotinus, to realize that this house that we live in now is only a temporary stop in our pilgrimage towards eternity. We are, as both of the divines say, called to a higher life, on the cusp of eternity and time, eternal life and temporary death. There is no other way to make sense of the atrocities and tragedies experienced here; providence is beyond the grasp of the human mind. Only the invoking of the divine in ourselves can save us and bring back light from the darkness. The only way to escape the evils of our animal existence is to leap over the human towards the divine. This is more a ritual, a surrender to the One using the things of this world to recognize our own falleness, than a puzzle to be solved by the humanly clever.
The Renaissance Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino tells two stories from his family’s history to define some philosophical principals. The first story is how his maternal grandmother appeared to her mother in a dream to bid her farewell, even though she lived in the town over. The next day, his grandmother was dead. Some years later, his mother had a child and entrusted him to a wet nurse. She then had another dream where her mother came to comfort her telling her not to grieve. When she awoke, someone told her that her child had died that night, having been smothered by the wet nurse. Then she dreamt that her husband would fall from a horse, and it happened just as she dreamt it.
We probably all have stories of these types of premonitions. We have been taught to dismiss them as coincidences or freak occurences. The mind of man now presumes that human beings exist in an anti-metaphysical bubble, that our animal sensory world is all there is and all that affects our regular lives.
Ficino has a different explanation for these occurences. He explains as follows:
…the souls of men that are almost separated from their bodies because of a temperate disposition and a pure life may in the abstraction of sleep divine many things, for they are divine by nature; and whenever they return to themselves, they realize this divinity. The second thing that these stories confirm is that the souls of the dead, freed from the chains of the body, can influence us, and care about human affairs.
For Ficino, the fact that the soul is immortal means that it has a potential to absorb and dominate all things. (It is Aristotle I believe who said that the soul is in a sense all things.) Because we are immortal, because there is the spark of the divine nature in us, the potential of human beings is almost infinite. It is no surprise then that people can have such dreams, or can heal people using only an egg, or can create works of genius that approach audaciously the throne of Divine Beauty. That is just who we are. There is in this sense no such thing as the “paranormal”; such frenzies are part of our everyday life. We have just become blind and deaf to them in our society full of artificial lights and noise.
Maya Plisetskaya as Odette in Swan Lake
(Appropriate since the Greeks thought that the swan was one of the sacred animals of Apollo since they could divine when they were going to die.)
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