Monday, August 27, 2018

Philosophy - Part I

Part I


The Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from Plato and Philo, the Zend-avesta, the Kabbalah, and the Sacred books of India and Egypt; and thus introduced into the bosom of Christianity the cosmological and theosophical speculations, which had formed the larger portion of the ancient religions of the Orient, joined to those of the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish doctrines, which the Neo-Platonists had equally adopted in the Occident..It is admitted that the cradle of Gnosticism is probably to be looked for in Syria and even in Palestine. Most of its expounders wrote in that corrupted form of the Greek used by the Hellenistic Jews...and there was a striking analogy between their doctrines and those of the Judeo-Egyptian Philo of Alexandria; itself the seat of three schools, at once philosophic and religious, the Greek, the Egyptian, and the Jewish. Pythagoras and Plato, the most mystical of the Grecian philosophers (the latter heir to the doctrines of the former), and who had travelled, the latter in Egypt, and the former in Phoenicia, India, and Persia, also taught the esoteric doctrine...The dominant doctrines of Plutonism were found in Gnosticism...
The Jewish-Greek School of Alexandria is known only by two of its chiefs, Aristobulus and Philo, both Jews of Alexandria in Egypt. Belonging to Asia by its origin, to Egypt by its residence, to Greece by its language and studies, it strove to show that all truths embedded in the philosophies of other countries were transplanted thither from Palestine. Aristobulus declared that all the facts and details of the Jewish Scriptures were so many allegories concealing the most profound meanings, and that Plato had borrowed from them all his finest ideas.
Philo, who lived a century after him, following the same theory, endeavored to show that the Hebrew writings, by their system of allegories, were the true source of all religions and philosophical doctrines. According to him, the literal meaning was for the vulgar alone...The Jews of Syria and Judea were the direct precursors of Gnosticism; and in their doctrines were ample Oriental elements.
These Jews had had with the Orient, at two different periods, intimate relations, familiarizing them with the doctrines of Asia and especially of Chaldea and Persia...Living nearly two-thirds of a century, and many of them long afterward, in Mesopotamia, the cradle of their race; speaking the same language, and their children reared with those of the Chaldeans. Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, they necessarily adopted many of the doctrines of their conquerors...and these additions to the old doctrine were soon spread by the constant intercourse of commerce into Syria and Palestine...
From Egypt or Persia the new Platonists borrowed the idea, and the Gnostics received it from them, that man, in his terrestrial career, is successively under the influence of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, until he finally reaches the Elysian Fields.“ (Morals and Dogmas, Albert Pike)


„The same basis of a State: opposing interests balanced by combating each other, is wanting. In its place passions animating popular masses, passions deprived of the corrective of the consideration of realities, passions let loose at the will of mere psychic factors...these factors which agitate the masses muting their material power of reason, which those who take no account of imponderables will find mysterious. Like a compass needle, influenced by a magnetic storm, imperceptible to our senses, becomes erratic, sending astray the vessel which trusts to its indications, losing it in the mysterious ways of the ocean...
In a general way, almost everywhere, the Jews are Republicans. The Republic tending towards levelling has always been one of their most cherished aspirations. Not the Republic which affirms and consolidates the privileges of the possessors, but a Republic...whose theoretic mission is to make most social inequalities disappear. For them the Republic is not crystallized in a constitutional formula: it is a constant progress, a slow but sure march towards the meeting of the heights and abysses, unification, individual, social, and political equalization...
Finally, a phenomenon of contradiction attests to the existence of the Jewish concept of unity: it is that of anti-Semitism...An anti...ism shows the reality of the thing, the system. We do not mean that vulgar anti- Semitism, fermentation of hate and calumnies, composed of errors and absurdities, factor of injustice and crimes...We speak of that anti-Semitism which is untroubled by passion, a particular form of judgment, claiming logic, reasoned and rational. Such an anti-Semitism has its own contention, its intrinsic value, its force of ideas and action. Qualified representative, champion of a determined order of thought, of sentiments, beliefs, and results, it has, thanks to the powerful extension of Christianity...established a mode of civilization almost universal. If it is opposed to the Jewish concept of unity in almost all domains, if it rises up against it on almost every ground, it does not ignore it, it does not deny it: it affirms by contrast the substance, the consistence, and constance of this concept.“ (Nomades, Kadmi Cohen).


„The Rose-Croix grade is a complete perversion of Christian symbolism and sacred beliefs; ‘Three major events should fix the attention of the Rose-Croix: the creation of the world (generation), the deluge of Noah (destruction), and the redemption of mankind (regeneration). The triple consideration should be, in fact, ever present in the mind of all Freemasons, since the royal art has, like the ancient mysteries, no other aim than the knowledge of nature, where all are born, die, and regenerate themselves...This regeneration of man was and will always be the work of the philosophy practiced in the mysteries...the eagle is liberty, the Rose-Croix, humanity, symbolized by the pelican...The rose was also the emblem of the woman, and as the cross or triple phallus symbolized virility or the sun in all its force, the combination of these two emblems offers one more meaning expressing, as the Indian lingam, the union of the two sexes, symbol of universal generation...Fire (or vital energy) is concealed everywhere, it embraces all nature, it produces, it renews, it divides, it consumes, it maintains the whole body...heat and light are but its modifications, fecundity, movement, and life the effects (of the letters I.N.R.I., he says). Their combination formed a mysterious meaning long before Christianity and the sages of antiquity had attached to it one of the greatest secrets of nature; that of universal regeneration ...All ancient mystagogies were terminated by all breaking bread and tasting the wine from a common cup, to recall among themselves the community of goods and that initiates have nothing of their own. The bread and wine are consecrated. This mystic nourishment, which should feed body and soul, was an emblem of immortality.“ (Jewish writer Ragon (Dragon), Cours philosophique (1841), The Trail of the Serpent, Miss Stoddard, pp. 83-84).


„Much of the old love for Isis, and especially for Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, was taken over into the church and translated into the worship of Mary, the Mother of Christ...Similarly the worship of the old deities was made a part of Christianity. The pagan gods and goddesses were discreetly made over into Christian saints, as is instanced by the case of St. Bridget.
Their ‘relics’ were sold far and wide in Christendom as fetishes guaranteed to ward off evil; and their ancient festive days were made part of the Christian calendar. The Roman Parilia in April became the Festival of St. George, and the pagan midsummer orgy in June was converted into the Festival of St. John; the holy day of Diana in August became the Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin; and the Celtic feast of the dead in November was changed into the Festival of All Souls (Halloween). The twenty-fifth day of December, the winter solstice according to ancient reckoning, celebrated the birthday of the sun-god of Mithraism, was accepted as the birthday of Christ, and the spring rites in connection with the death and re-birth of the mystery gods were converted into the Easter rites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.“ (This Believing World, Rabbi Lewis Browne, pp. 294- 295).


„Much of the old love for Isis, and especially for Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, was taken over into the church and translated into the worship of Mary, the Mother of Christ... Similarly the worship of the old local deities was made a part of Christianity. The pagan gods and goddesses were discreetly made over into Christian saints, as is instanced by the case of St. Bridget. (Here Browne reproduces a sketch of St. Bridget which resembles an obscene cartoon far more than a Saint of the Church). Their ‘relics’ were sold far and wide in Christendom as fetishes guaranteed to ward off evil; and their ancient festive days were made part of the Christian calendar. The Roman Parilia in April became the Festival of St. George, and the pagan midsummer orgy in June was converted into the Festival of St. John; the holy day of Diana in August became the Festival of the Assumption of The Virgin; and the Celtic feast of the dead in November was changed into the Fast of All Souls. The twenty-fifth day of December, the winter solstice according to ancient reckoning, celebrated the birthday of the sun-god of Mithraism, was accepted as the birthday of Christ, and the spring rites in connection with the death and re-birth of the mystery gods were converted into the Easter rites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.“ (This Believing World, by Rabbi Browne, pp. 294-295)


„The Bolshevists have therefore a philosophy. Let us ask from whence they got it? To be frank, they have drawn this philosophy from L’Encyclopédie, which was a vast enterprise of atheism and which, politically speaking, expressed itself in a precise way at the end of the eighteenth century by the French Revolution. They are attached to a philosophy which we find at the root of all socialist systems propagated during the nineteenth century, and particularly at the root of the Marx system. Thus its early source: L’Encyclopédie; later source and very diverse: the series of contemporaneous socialist systems...Such are the deep origins of Leninism and of the Soviet revolution.“ (La République, Pierre Dominique)


„So also here, when the Male is joined to the Female, they both constitute one complete body, and all the universe is in a state of happiness because all things receive blessing from their perfect body. And this is an arcanum.“ (The Visionary on the Mountain Top).


„I think the secret of it is found in the ‘imperium in imperio’ matter in the common program towards which each ‘imperium in imperio’ moves, and has been moving for forty centuries.“ (The Visionary on the Mountain Top).


„A nervous excitability, a chronic exaltation of the passion, in which commingle the inferior life of the individual and its exterior manifestations, a state in which sentiment, idea, and will are confounded together, where for the lack of the powerful corrective of logic, the flights of imagination know no bounds, where life and human activity are deprived of a regulator, and move outside of material and concrete factors, by the sole interior force of the soul.“ (Nomades, Kadmi Cohen, (1929)).


„All idealistic considerations lead in the end to a kind of conception of divinity, and are, therefore, pure nonsense in the eyes of Marxists; even Hegel saw in God the concrete form of everything good and reasonable that rules the world: the idealist theory must put everything on the shoulders of this unfortunate graybeard, who, according to the teaching of his worshippers, is perfect, and who, in addition to Adam, created fleas and harlots, murderers and lepers, hunger and misery, plague and vodka, in order to punish the very sinners whom he himself had created, and who sin in accordance with his will, in order that this comedy may be played to all eternity before the eyes of the wondering world. >From the scientific standpoint, this theory heads to absurdity. The only scientific explanation of all the phenomena of the world, is supplied by materialism...
When men eat, carry on the class war, pull on their boots, pick flowers, write books or marry, it occurs to nobody to doubt the existence of the external world, and therefore the existence of the food which they consume, the boots they pull on, or the women they marry.
This imbecility, however, follows from the principles of idealism. If the spirit is the basis of everything, how was it before any men existed? Either we must assume the existence of a superhuman and divine spirit, such as is described in the old Hebrew fairy tales of the Bible, or we must say that the distant past is also merely a creation of our imagination. The first way leads to the so-called objective idealism, which recognizes the existence of an external world independent of our consciousness, but nevertheless sees the nature of this world in a spiritual principle, in a God, a high reason, a world-will, or some similar spook, which, in this case, takes the place of God. The second way leads direct to solipsism, through subjective idealism, for which there are only spiritual feelings individual thinking subjects. It is easy to see the solipsism is the most consistent form of idealism. Idealism takes the spiritual principle as original and fundamental, because it believes that only our perceptions are given to us directly. But if that is so, then the existence of a block of wood is as doubtful as the existence of any man, even that of our own parents. Here solipsism destroys itself and at the same time kills the whole of idealism in philosophy, since when consistently thought out to the end, it leads to complete absurdity and absolute nonsense, which at every turn contradicts all human experience.“ (Bukharin, Quoted by Rene Fueloep Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, pp. 53-54).


„...is so important that it is not possible to pass it over in silence. Is it not sufficient to recall the names of the great revolutionaries of the nineteenth century and twentieth, the Karl Marxes, Lassalles, Kurt Eiseners, Bella Kuhns, Trotsky, and Léon Blumes, in order to find thus mentioned the names of all theorists of modern socialism?...Further, in Europe in the same years, the rìle played by the Jews in all revolutionary movements was considerable...’Revolutionarism’ exacts, at least technically, a very strong dose of passionalism together with the ‘esprit de masse’ of the crowd. The different individuals, in principle autonomous, blend even to disappearing in the whole, and the ‘magma’ thus created takes on an aspect entirely different from the individual figures, however characteristic each may be, of which it was primarily composed.“ (Nomades, Kadmi Cohen, (1929)).

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