Isidore Kozminsky: The Magic and Science of Jewels and Stones

An early photograph of Samuel Kozminsky's jewellery store, Melbourne, Australia

Kozminsky's at 421 Burke Street - sumptuous, tasteful, illustrious, iconic - has been the premiere jeweller in Melbourne Australia for over 166 years. The business was founded by Samuel Kozminsky, a Prussian Jew from London, during the gold rushes of the 1850s; Jews like Mr Kozminsky very sensibly realised that there was a better trade to be had in the Australian colonies making gold rings than there was in the backbreaking and largely thankless task of digging the stuff out of the ground like the Irish. Kozminsky prospered; the Irish didn't. Over the years, and with several relocations in the central business district of Melbourne, Kozminsky's became an institution serving the better end of the city's clientele. The premises at 421 Burke St. feature an upstairs Salon known to poets, artists, politicians and other notable persons. It is with great regret, then, to hear that the store has now closed its doors. The final day of trade was February 10th 2017. 

It is from this same family of Prussian Jews that one of Australia's  most important but least acknowledged occultists came - Isidore Israel Kozminsky. He was born in Mortlake, Victoria, in 1870 and, through the family business, developed a deep interest in the occult lore and properties attending the precious metals and stones. This gave him a good knowledge of astrology, numerology, Qabala and similar arcane arts, and it was on these matters that he wrote numerous books. Among them, most importantly, is 'Zodiacal Symbology and its Planetary Power' which concerns, as the title suggests, the esoteric symbolism of each of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the tropical zodiac. It is one of the few works that treats this subject in a systematic way and is preferred by many to the so-called 'Sabian Symbols' promoted by a certain group of American astrologers. Much is written on the twelve signs of the zodiac, on other divisions, and on the planets, but the most basic unit of astrological symbolism is the degree, symbolic of the ideal solar day. What are the powers and pitfalls of each of the three hundred and sixty zodiacal degrees? Isidore Kozminsky wrote a definitive account in 1917. 

The following are some samples of the so-called 'Kozminsky Symbols' each consisting of a simple static image of an allegorical nature. Although not traditional, and mostly mediumistic in origin, they present a certain cogency, resembling the type of images found in the Chinese and other systems of divination whereby cosmic forces are anthropomorphised for mnemonic purposes:

19 Taurus - An archer, dressed in red, firing arrows at the Moon. 

5 Gemini - Little children playing near an old wrecked ship on the seashore.

8 Virgo - A man, holding a pen in his right hand and a sword in his left, standing at the entrance to a palace.

24 Virgo - A colossal giant holding a woman in his hand.

15 Libra - A man who has just left the banquet table in a dazed condition, holding his hand to his head as if trying to remember something.

7 Sagittarius - A large ship on a calm sea in a dark starless night, a black bird of the raven order sitting on the mainmast top.

25 Sagittarius - A ruined castle by a waterfall, near which is a naked woman holding a bunch of grapes to an old philosopher who, seated on a rock, is studying a manuscript.

25 Cpricornus - A man, gaudily attired, opening a document in the centre of which is a dagger.
27 deg. Pisces - A horse running with flames issuing from his nostrils.

30 deg. Pisces - A man trudging along a rough road, dragging a mass of heavy chains. A strong horse in a cart standing idly near.

Kozminskly's masterwork, all the same, was his comprehensive account of the esoteric character of gems, crystals and stones, namely, The Magic And Science Of Jewels And Stones, first published in 1922. 

This is a hefty and encyclopaedic work extending over 434 pages and, as far as the present writer is aware, it remains the finest and most comprehensive book on the subject. No one had a knowledge of jewels and stones - both in science and in superstition - to match Isidore Kozminsky. It is a work of great erudition but, most impressively, of penetrating curiosity. Dr Kozminsky is quite evidently enchanted by the entire crystal realm and is convinced of the power and magic of it all; he has devoted his life to reading and pondering over the vast engagement of humankind with this realm and its extraordinary treasures, drawing upon every culture and all ages, in order to realise the identity of each jewel and to know something of its essence. Dr Kozminsky was awarded a doctorate in science, but his curiosity extends far beyond the usual confines of science and scientistic explanations. He has a great respect for what he calls "the philosophy of old" and thinks it just as likely that the ancient sages of Greece or Hindoostan can tell us about the reality of jewels and stones as much as can the modern geologist or physicist. The most endearing feature of the book is that accurate scientific data and scientific classifications are reported side by side with arcane accounts gathered from a vast assortment of cultural sources. 

Most impressive is Dr Kozminsky's vast command of the relevant symbolism of heraldry, this forming a significant part of the book. Then there is an entire chapter concerning 'Stones in Shakespeare's Plays' which is surely the last word on the topic. Learned in Jewish law and familiar with Jewish esotericism, Dr Kozminsky also provides a brilliant in-depth account of jewel symbolism in the Bible, most especially in the Torah and the scriptural attribution of certain stones to certain tribes and modes of the Israelite priesthood in the Book of Exodus. These are famous Biblical passages, and much-loved by occultists of every age, but Kozminsky's must surely be one of the most proficient and capable accounts ever composed. Yet his inquiry also extends just as capably into oriental religions: the chapter entitled 'Stones in Various Mythologies' stands out for special praise. Certainly, Dr Kozminsky has no great insight into the metaphysical significances of the stones he so loves, but the breadth of his inquiry as a testament to man's enduring fascination with such stones and their magickal allure, and we can forgive him for being theosophical rather than, say, Guenonian. It is a beautiful book; a treasury of treasures. 

These days, as readers will be aware, crystals and gemstones form a staple of the New Age movement with crystals used for healing and sundry purposes by New Age savants. The Magic and Science of Jewels and Stones concerns the same matters but from an era prior to the 'Aquarian' constructions of the 'New Age' in popular occultism during the 1960s and 70s. In this, it is rather more substantial and sane than almost every new work on the subject one could possibly examine. The New Age is spiritual sago, and few areas of the New Age are as sloppy and mushy as crystals and stones. Who has not walked into a New Age bookstore, or come across a New Age stall at a market or fete, and seen the array of expensive coloured stones and gems sitting on display ready to bring atunement and balance to your chakras? Dr Kozminsky offers much more. This is a work of scholarship which is at the same time made interesting by the author's open mind to the subtle and esoteric powers of the many sublime wonders of mineral formations in the strange bosom of the Earth. Any reader who would acquire a serious knowledge of stones and gems and the like, beyond the syrupy sludge of New Age charlatanism and neurotic delusions, would do well to start here and to regard Kozminsky as the standard text. 

The attributions of gems to nations according to "old philosophy" is as follows and differs considerably to more recent accounts of such attributions:

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One of the most interesting features of the book, and the one feature above that that makes it a work of enduring importance, is Dr Kozminsky's analysis of various famous nativities in terms of astrological correspondences with gems and precious stones. In these sections the author reveals a truly unique astrological talent that, as he well understands, conforms to the fact that astrology and alchemy, the astral and the mineral, are, as it were, sisters. The modern astrology is too fixed upon the stars or upon some mathematical abstraction; how many astrologers approach their art through the lens of the planetary metals and the world of astral gemstones? This is actually the place where an integral astrology ought to begin. Dr Kozminsky, that is, has an alchemical understanding of the mineral realm and is able to apply it to astrology since the ancient and occult teaching is that these treasures which we find in the Earth are seeds of the stars, embryonic forms derived from stellar essences. This fable is at the core of astrology and alchemy both. Dr Kozminsky is able to read a horoscope through the agency of and in terms of the planetary and zodiacal gems and stones, the stellar through the mineral. In this book he demonstrates through many examples how it is done. One does not expect to find such an important key to astrology in a book on gemstones, and yet here it is. If one studies it carefully, The Magic And Science Of Jewels And Stones provides a master key to an integral mode of astrological analysis. Unless it is linked in this or similar ways to the mineral world, astrology is a phantasm of the night. 

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Dr Kozminsky married outside of the Jewish faith and appears to have used the name 'Francis Coton' during his married life. Members of his family grew up unaware that they were Jewish and that the Dr Kozminsky to whom Francis Coton might sometimes refer was in fact himself. He was a man, in that sense, with a double life. This forms some of the background to Tangea Tansy's lovely family history, 'A Break in the Chain' (The Early Kosminsky's), the 'break' referring to the break in Jewish lineage that occurs when a Jew marries a Gentile woman. See here. 

Suitably, there is no authoritative account of Dr Kozminsky's demise. He moved with his family from Australia to London in 1935. By one account he died in 1940 after tripping down an escalator in the London underground. A different account relates that he died of pneumonia in a bomb shelter in 1944. It has not been possible for the present writer to find evidence to support either account, nor any to confirm the report - mentioned here and there on some dubious webpages - that Kozminsky was ever a leading member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This is not an outlandish proposition in itself - a man of his station and interests would have been welcome in that company, and there was no obstacles to a Jewish gentleman joining such an irregular masonic organisation (as we see in the case of Israel Regardie) - but the Kozminsky's did not relocate to England until 1935 which is some decades after the period in which the Golden Dawn was a viable occult fraternity. He was certainly not a member of the Order in its heyday. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

Edmund J. Sullivan's depiction of Mr Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is deemed by many to be the great masterpiece of philosophical English in the XIXth century and a work of surpassing profundity. It is, in any case, Mr Carlyle's personal masterpiece; strange, dense, cryptic, convoluted, but the essential Carlyle. It is among the numerous obscure works listed as Out of Phase reading in the relevant section of this web journal, see here. The present author relates there that he attempted to read Sartor Resartus in his teens but found the task overwhelming. It is a strange book, indeed; one like no other. Even for a mature and educated reader it poses a considerable challenge. For a start, the narrator - an anonymous English reviewer of uneven temper - affects a so-called 'German' style and much of the book is supposedly being translated from the German. The XXIst century reader has no way of knowing that, in Carlyle's time, 'German' was an exact synonym for 'mysterious' and to write English in the 'German' style was meant to impart a tone of mystery and deliberate obscurity to a text. 

So here we have a work, written by Thomas Carlyle in Carlylean prose - which is to say, already torturous and obscure and florid as it is - affected to be 'German' since Mr Carlyle was by then Britain's greatest admirer of the Germanic arts and intellect. Today, this makes the style of Sartor Resartus especially inaccessible and perplexing. Carlyle is dense: Carlyle affecting an early XIXth century German English - with all things 'German' understood to be beyond understanding - is exceedingly tricky. 

Why bother? Because this is an extraordinary work of philosophical fiction. The title means 'Tailor Patched' - the text as a patchwork of woven cloth - but the title also introduces the central philosophical metaphor throughout, namely clothes as the forms which the Spirit weaves and wears in manifestation and by which,"it both conceals itself in shame and reveals itself in grace." Carlyle has written a novel in which clothes are a metaphysical symbol. The reader needs to understand this from the outset. It is a book about clothes - or rather a book about a book about clothes. (Carlyle - master of the metanarrative!) And clothes are a symbol of the many forms (appearances) taken by the incarnate spirit of man. The spirit clothes itself in matter. The whole work is an exploration of that metaphor.

Nevertheless, it is not an easy book to appreciate. They say it is autobiographical. The plot: the hero is rejected in matrimony which provokes a spiritual crisis in him and so he sets out to travel and reflect and thereby frames his philosophy of life. This was Carlyle's fate in a romance prior to his marriage. But the autobiography is buried deep under layers of narrative devices and distancing. Mrs Carlyle does not seem to have noticed that it concerns the author's loss of a love prior to her, and after reading it is reported to have said, "It's a work of genius, dear." Others agreed. In the United States it was embraced enthusiastically by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendalists and published under their auspices.

The work, deep with satire, consists of three parts, three books. An English reviewer, the narrator, considers a work by a German philosopher on the philosophy of clothes. In the first part the narrator gives an account of this philosophy but admits to finding it perplexing. In the second part, the narrator, hoping that the biography of the author might shed light on this philosophy, gives an account of the life of the German philosopher concerned. In the third part, returning to the format of the first part, the narrator reconsiders the philosophy in light of the philosopher's life. 

The second part, then, is autobiographical in relation to Carlyle, while the first and third sections give an account of his philosophy. In this it is not systematic: it is, as the title intimates, a patchwork, like a garment patched by a tailor. What we are given here is the philosophy of a man who had once been crushed in love and who thereafter wandered in the world in sorrow and contemplation. Importantly, the work grows as it is told. The Editor (narrator) becomes engrossed in this case and pursues it further and further.

There are many curious complexities to the work. For example, in the final chapter of the first book the narrator receives material concerning the person of the German philosopher (Who's name is Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.) It arrives in a set of bags arranged according to the signs of the Zodiac and in the bags are scraps of paper on which the philosopher has scribbled loose, unconnected pieces and fragments of autobiography. The biography of the philosopher that makes up the second book is thus assembled from these fragments. Thus does Carlyle supply readers with a marvellous cosmology. Its precedent is in the relevant articles of Plato's Timaeus where the elements of matter are said to be "stoicheon" (letters of the alphabet) and so the cosmos is compared to a written text. The Zodiac supplies bags of text which constitute a lived life. Mr Carlyle's symbolism reaches far and deep. Text as 'woven cloth' is a symbolism as old as the Vedas, integral to the Indo-European mind, even the source of 'surah' (weaving) as a name for the chapters of the Mahometan Koran. 

The novel begins in typical Carlyle style, replete in irony:

Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.

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The finest edition of Sartor Resartus is that featuring some seventy-eight illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan. This was Mr Sullivan's greatest undertaking as an illustrator. He had illustrated other works, but not of such high repute. The original publication of the book was in Fraser's Magazine where it was serialised and presented without any indication to readers that it is a work of fiction. The work's first readers, that is, were under the impression that the entire account is true. The original full edition of Sartor Resartus sold some 30,000 copies - a huge readership at that time. Edmund J. Sullivan's 1898 edition also sold in great numbers. It is remarkable that such a work, once so celebrated, is now rated as irredeemably obscure. Carlyle is reviled; Sartor Resartus is forgotten.

Reproductions of Mr Sullivan's illustrations follow:

The Schoolmaster of the Future

The Bedlam of Creation

The Everlasting Yea

Chaos

Attorney Logic

The Old Adam and Eve

The Aboriginal Savage

A Fool's Paradise

Teufelsdröckh's Reverence for Empty Clothes

Blumine

According to the scraps of paper with autobiographical notes supplied to the narrator, in his circles of German nobility, the hero Teufelsdröckh encounters a beautiful woman named Blumine, a name meaning Goddess of Flowers. The tragic tale of Herr Teufelsdröckh has him smitten, giving up his teaching post in order to pursue her, and then to be rejected for a British aristocrat named Towgood. In this crisis, Teufelsdröckh flees and wanders around Europe, but even there - tormented - he encounters Blumine and her new husband on their honeymoon.

The philosophical adventure described in Sartor Resartus goes in three stages: the hero comes first to the Everlasting No. He eventually escapes this place of despair and comes to the Centre of Indifference. Then, finally, he accomplishes affirmation; he comes to the Everlasting Yea. It is a philosophy with a happy ending. 

The most interesting illustration by Edmund J. Sullivan is this one, above, entitled The Real and Its Ideal. In a philosophy where clothes are the central metaphor nakedness must therefore have a special significance. It is an interesting illustration because it violates the conventions of the nude. Here we see a naked woman with her nakedness juxtaposed with clothing. The classical nude, though, is an abstraction kept apart from the reality of clothing. This illustration by Sullivan raised eyebrows because the female figure is not 'nude' but 'naked', as indicated by the contrast of the clothing. What does the caption 'The Real and Its Ideal' do to the illustration? What exactly is being said about nakedness and clothing - reality, appearance, purity, exposure, society, convention, nature? Such is the symbolical and altogether indirect manner by which Mr Carlyle imparts his philosophy in this quite extraordinary work. 

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Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

A Grammar of Ornament

      

Among the important technical works written by XIXth century Orientalists in the English tongue, none has had such a deep and lasting influence as The Grammar of Ornament (see here) by the architect Owen Jones. Published in the 1850s it is a work that had a pervasive influence upon all aspects of design in England and beyond right through into XXth century, and even today it continues to influence designers in sundry fields. It is the classic work of its type: a systematic account of the principles and modes of ornament across a range of styles, periods and cultures. Principally, it gives the classic account of oriental styles of ornament with special attention to the Persians, ancient Egyptians, the Arabs, Greeks and Italians, as well as attention to the art of savages and primitive motifs. 

It was written during a time when the British Empire was fascinated with and eager to imitate and acquire oriental styles. Victorian era design - whether carpets, wallpapers, book covers, furnishings - adopted strong elements of oriental ornamentation. This was in large measure due to this book. The Grammar of Ornament collects, systemises and refines oriental decoration with the express mission of bringing oriental beauty, with its sense of pattern and geometry, to industrial production. Jones was strongly of the view that decoration is the necessary complement to architecture and that, on this account, the Empire needed to develop its own contemporary style based on oriental models instead of the increasingly old fashioned Neo-classical style then standard in English design. The purpose of the book, that is, was to set down the rules and framework - the grammar - for this new style. In the course of pursuing this purpose Mr Jones developed bold new theories of flat patterning and was a pioneer of colour theory. 

It is remarkable that, in his pursuit of a defining XIXth century style, Mr Jones turned naturally to oriental patterns and especially those of the Mahometan world. This was not in any sense an act of collusion with a cultural enemy, as anti-Mahometan sentiment would have it in today's context. This is a measure of the degree to which  things have changed. For Jones, drawing upon the patterned decorations of Islaam was an act of appropriation made from within the security of the British Empire. Rather than a measure of cultural capitulation made through a weakened sense of self, Jones looked to appropriate oriental design from a position of cultural confidence. Confident cultures engage with and appropriate from 'others'. Weak and weary cultures don't appropriate, they surrender to and are absorbed by the 'other', they apologise for their past, or else they over-compensate with vocal xenophobia, always a bad sign. The position of the West (and Britain) is different today. The encounter with the orient is torn and problematic. When we look at the Mahometan East now we do not see a world of sumptuous patterns and geometric beauty to be admired and desired, as did Mr Jones; instead we have reverted to the counter vision, the narrative about the bloodthirsty pretender and his satanic hordes. Pro-Mahometan opinion in the West, against this age-old reservoir of hostility, is insincere, uniformed, sentimental, self-hating and grows out of cultural exhaustion, not a confident encounter. It is pathological. There was no such pathology in the deeply sympathetic encounter Owen Jones and his fellow orientalist made with the East. 

The present writer, as many of these pages show, loves synergies and fusions of East and West, but the most fruitful of these were never made on equal terms. It is a case of occidental civilisation extending itself into alien worlds, usually after their military or economic subjugation. Cultures and civilisations do this all the time in history. It is one of the motors of civilizational history. Strong cultures absorb and integrate outside influences without feeling the 'other' as a threat. And appropriation is an act of humanising, because instead of being the vile styles of savages and heathens, the appropriation of cultural wealth involves giving that which is appropriated value.  Imitation, as they say, is a form of flattery. The fact is, that the orientalist admired the Mahometans and wanted to appropriate and integrate the best of Mahometan ways. The fact that this was done largely through the imagination - Europeans projected aspects of themselves upon the Mahometan 'other' - is not a fault in the project but rather one of its most beautiful features as a movement of cross-cultural fertilisation and historically exceptional. 

Those who would ponder the present vexed state of Mahometan/European encounter - the so-called 'Clash of Civilisations' - would acquire new and deeper context to their inquiries if they viewed Jones' Grammar of Ornament and asked what mode of culture can produce such a rich fusion? And what has changed? What has gone wrong? It is important to position the 'Clash of Civilisations' in this way. This is exactly what leftist post-colonial narratives - Edward Said etcetera - prevent. Poisoning the past is no foundation for its study. There is much to be learnt through the study of Owen Jones. The Grammar of Ornament is a key work of East/West synergy from a richer and less dangerous era. 

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SAMPLES

The standard editions of Grammar of Ornament feature extensive colour plates. The following are some examples:

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The Grammar of Ornament is prefaced by a series of eighteen propositions or axioms that set out the principles and philosophy of ornamentation as Mr Jones conceived it. This is an important declaration of objective principles, and it served to guide Victorian and early XXth century styles in all facets of decoration. Its wise principles can be applied to the arts in general. The text of the eighteen propositions follows:

GENERAL PRINCIPLES IN THE ARRANGEMENT OF FORM AND COLOUR IN ARCHITECTURE AND THE DECORATIVE ARTS

EIGHTEEN PROPOSITIONS

1.The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon, Architecture.

2. Architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created. Style in Architecture is the peculiar form that expression takes under the influence of climate and materials at command.

3. As Architecture, so all works of the Decorative Arts, should possess fitness, proportion, harmony, the result of all which is repose.

4. True beauty results from that repose which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, and the affections, are satisfied from the absence of any want.

5. Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed. That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful.

6. Beauty of form is produced by lines growing out one from the other in gradual undulations.

7. The general forms being first cared for, these should be subdivided and ornamented by general lines; the interstices may then be filled in with ornament, which may again be subdivided and enriched for closer inspection.

8. All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction.

9. As in every perfect work of Architecture a true proportion will be found to reign between all the members which compose it, so throughout the Decorative Arts every assemblage of forms should be arranged on certain definite proportions: the whole and each particular member should be a multiple of some simple unit.

Those proportions will be the most beautiful which it will be most difficult for the eye to detect.

Thus the proportion of a double square, or 4 to 8, will be less beautiful than there subtle ratio of 5to 8; 3 to 6, than 3 to 7; 3 to 9, than 3 to 8 3 to 4, than 3 to 5.

10. Harmony of form consists in the proper balancing, and contrast of, the straight, the inclined, and the curved.

11. In surface decoration all lines should flow out of a parent stem. Every ornament, however distant, should be traced toitsbranchandroot. Oriental practice. 

12. All junctions of curved lines with curved or of curved lines with straight should be tangential to each other.

13. Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the in- tended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate.

14. Colour is used to assist in the development of form, and to distinguish objects or parts of objects one from another

15. Colour is used to assist light and shade, helping the undulations of form by the proper distribution of the several colours.

16. These objects are best attained by the use of the primary colours on small sur- faces and in small quantities, balanced and supported by the secondary and ter- tiary colours on the larger masses.

17. The primary colours should be used on the upper portions of objects, the secondary and tertiary on the lower.

18. The primaries of equal intensities will harmonise or neutralise each other in the proportions of 3 yellows, 5 red and 8 blue - integrally as 16. The secondaries in the proportions 8 orange, 13 purple, 11 green - integrally as 32. The tertiaries, citrine (compound of orange and green), 19; russet (orange and purple)—, 21; olive (green and purple) 24 - integrally as 64.

It follows that:

Each secondary being a compound of two primaries is neutralised by the remaining primary in the same proportions: thus - 8 of orange by 8 of blue, 11 of green by 5 of red, 13 of purple by 3 of yellow.

Each tertiary being a binary compound of two secondaries is neutralised by the remaining secondary, as 24 of olive by 8 of orange, 21 of russet by 11 of green, 19 of citrine by 13 of purple.

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As well as the Grammar, Jones wrote numerous other works, include the 1869 illustrated book The History of Joseph and his Brethren. Jones produced the illustrations. He used the work to demonstrate the practical application of the principles set out in the Grammar. Examples follow below:

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

  

Marine Le Pen Unveiled

The previous posting to these pages (here) regarded matters related to feminine attire and especially the so-called heejab worn by Mooselmen women. The concerns of the post, let us reiterate, were primarily aesthetic - we lamented the decline of the feminine in the West, the degradation of the vestimentary arts generally, the masculinisation of women (and the corresponding feminisation of men), and so forth, and noted that the Mahometan woman has retained a feminine elegance that, regardless of other factors, is admirable and attractive. Readers were invited to compare any well-dressed Mooslima with Hillary Clinton as evidence that the Muslim woman is often less degraded by the dissolute agents of modernity than her Western sisters.

Nevertheless, there are other factors, and one of them is the context of reckless mass immigration promoted by globalists and self-vandalising multiculturalists, while another is the plain fact that Mahometan women are under repressive strictures and enforced compulsion in matters of attire as well as in other aspects of life. Heejab may be elegant but there is no gainsaying the fact that Mahometan social codes are oppressive. They need not be in theory, but they are in practice. The present writer might find the veil attractive in the right context, and certainly has no sympathies for feminism, but he is not about to apologise for the stoning of adulteresses in Saudi Arabia. 

In the meantime, pertinent to this, the leader of the French National, Madame Marine Le Pen, on a visit to the Lebanon, cordially declined to wear the heejab as a requirement for an audience with the Grand Mufti of the Sooni sect. As she says in the video of the encounter (below) there was no such requirement from the Grand Mufti of Al-Azaar University in Cairo who is the notional head of the Soonis worldwide. Quite properly, given that, Madame Le Pen resisted this gesture of humiliation in Beirut. Her stance underlines yet further the acute polarisations between Islaam and the West at this present time. 

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In his study of the cult and mythos of the goddess Athena, the German mythographer Karl Karenyi makes the observation that there are two great feminine archetypes active in the European soul: one is the Virgin Mary, maternal and compassionate, and the other is Athena, combative, intellectual, heroic, wise, severe. In general, he surmises, the former is more deeply rooted in southern Europe and the latter in the north. These are two contrasting modes of the female typical of the Western tradition.

There can be no doubt that Marine Le Pen - her Marian first name notwithstanding - is a manifestation of the second of these types. Indeed, she is one of the most strongly Athenan women to emerge in European politics in recent times. There were certain Athenan qualities one might identify in Mrs Thatcher - the appellation 'Iron Lady' distinctly alludes to Athena, the warrior goddess, clad in her armour - but in other respects Mrs Thatcher falls short of the type and was probably more Nordic or at least Wagnerian. Frau Merkel, who has opened her arms to countless refugees and engineered the immigration crisis that now besets Europe, is, it seems, some beastly perversion of the Marian archetype: Europeans will be gagging on the bitter milk of her teats of succour for decades to come. 

The true Athena type is both attractive and formidable. The male gods of Olympos are attracted to her beauty, but she can beat any of them in battle if she is ever assailed. Mrs Thatcher was formidable, but no one could ever accuse her of being beautiful. Marine Le Pen is a very attractive woman, but one knows that, true to type, it is not a beauty to be messed with. She is not maternal, by any means, and is, in fact, somewhat masculine - exactly the characteristics of the goddess Athena. Athena represents a certain potentiality in the European soul. More than any other female politician of recent times, Madama Le Pen is the warrior maiden. It is a type with deep roots in the French psyche, of course. Joan of Arc is the pure type, but it is not an accident that the French erected temples to the goddess Athena after the Revolution. It is a strongly Gallic archetype deliberately counteracting the Marian archetype in French Catholicism. 

The following pictures offer views of the many faces of Madame Le Pen. Given the structure of the French electoral system, it is unlikely that she will succeed in her quest to become President of the Republic. No doubt she will excel in the first round of ballots, but in the second round the unholy alliance of the Left and the Centre-Right will collude to defeat her. It would be very surprising - the result of extraordinary events - for there to be any other outcome. C'est la vie.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black