Sissman and Sworder: Death, An Introduction

L. E. Sissman

Things sometimes, or often, or perhaps usually, come together in ways that seem odd. With the recent death of Roger Sworder (see here) the thoughts of many of those who were close to him turned not to his philosophy and his teaching - these things being outstanding and obvious - but to his poetry. It is likely, we know now, that he probably had some foreknowledge of his impending demise and this explains why, in his last few months, he wrote a series of long autobiographical poems in a very straightforward, unaffected narrative style of blank verse, a reflective poetry that looked back to important and lingering incidents in his younger days. He had dabbled in poetry over many years and a collection of his verse, along with several essays on poetry, was published by Connor Court Press. It is hoped that his final poems will be published in due course. When they are it will be seen that they are strikingly different to his earlIer poems; as death approached he adopted an entirely different style, seeking a naturalness of voice, a plainness and a simplicity not found in his more overtly intellectual earlier poetry. From being immersed in the high idiom of the English romantics, in his last year or two he had acquired a taste for American poets and was especially fond of Edwin Arlington Robertson. The influence of Robertson is evident in these last poems. 

Stop. Don't Read. - Essays and Poems by Roger Sworder, 

published by Connor Court Press.

An even more telling comparison can be made, however, with another American poet with whom, unfortunately, Dr Sworder was most likely not familiar, namely the little known L. E. Sissman. As it happens, the present author spent his last meetings with Dr Sworder discussing the advent of Neoreaction as a political philosophy, and they spoke explicitly about the labours of Mencius Moldbug. What they failed to discuss was Mr Moldbug's fine taste in poetry - a topic that would assuredly have roused Sworder's interests even more than the Moldbugean critique of democracy. Sissman is a Moldbug "discovery". In one of his posts on Unqualified Reservations he boldly proclaims Sissman to be his choice for poet of the XXth century, see here. It is a matter of great regret that Sworder did not live to become properly acquainted with either Neoreaction or Moldbug, and even more so with Sissman because, on the evidence at hand, he would surely have found a kindred voice. 

Sissman himself was influenced by and admired Edwin Arlington Robertson, and, remarkably, wrote a poetry of impending death in a style to which Sworder's last poems bear a striking resemblance. Sissman had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. He turned to poetry and published a book of poems entitled Death: An Introduction, in 1968. His poems are typically in blank verse, affect no poetic idiom and are characterised by what Moldbug describes as a "naturalness of voice." "Ours is an age of faux-unaffected verse, of contrived pseudo-simplicity," says Moldbug. "When you read Sissman you feel the difference." His poetry is "completely direct. It has no hidden meanings at all. There is zero Empsonian ambiguity. It is almost light verse...." These are exactly the qualities typical of Sworder's final poems too. The present author - and others in his circle - have struggled of late to place Sworder's last poems, so different are they to his others. There is some T. S. Eliot in there, certainly, and, as already noted, some Robertson - but their directness and "naturalness of voice" is so similar to that of L. E. Sissman it is hard to believe he was not channeling him from the beyond. 

Yet we can be fairly certain that he did not know Sissman's work. Sissman is, as Moldbug observes "untaught, unknown, and out of print." It seems, rather, that Sworder was able to avail himself a certain mode of American poetry, a mode of which Sissman is a shining, albeit obscure, example. Like Sissman, Sworder was a man of unusual verbal dexterity, a man with a vast vocabulary - the sort of man who could rip through a cryptic crossword in a matter of minutes. But the shadow of death brought a new concentration upon simplicity and directness and sincerity. All pretence and cleverness is gone. 

The present author finds it extraordinary - or at least odd - that an unlikely circle of connections (Moldbug - Sissman - Robertson etc.) might suddenly shine such a revealing light upon these poems. These are men somehow all on the same page. He is not at liberty to publish Sworder's last poems here just yet (they are being collected and edited by Brian Coman) and so in that absence he will instead offer a collection of some very fine Sissman poems below. It was while reading these that he encountered a strangely familiar voice. They are, no doubt, better than Roger Sworder's poems - Moldbug is right, Sissman is a great poet - but this is nonetheless the poetic voice to which the last poems of Sworder ought to be compared. 

* * * 

 

LOVE-MAKING; APRIL; MIDDLE AGE

A fresh west wind from water-colored clouds
Stirs squills and iris shoots across the grass
Now turning fiery green. This storm will pass
In dits and stipples on the windowpane
Where we lie high and dry, and the low sun
Will throw rose rays at our gray heads upon
The back-room bed's white pillows. Venus will
Descend, blue-white, in horizontal airs
Of red, orange, ochre, lemon, apple green,
Cerulean, azure, ultramarine,
Ink, navy, indigo, at last midnight.
Now, though, this clouded pewter afternoon
Blurs in our window and intensifies
The light that dusts your eyes and mine with age.

We turn our thirties over like a page.



THE MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY

Struck dumb by love among the walruses
And whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffing
Missing, the mastodons like muddy buses,
I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.

A general grant enabled the erection,
Brick upon brick, of this amazing building.
Today, in spite of natural selection,
It still survives an orphan age of gilding.

Unvarnished floors tickle the nose with dust
Sweeter than any girls' gymnasium's;
Stove polish dulls the cast-iron catwalk's rust;
The soot outside would make rival museums

Blanch to the lintels. So would the collection.
A taxidermist has gone ape. The cases
Bulging with birds whose differences defy detection
Under the dirt are legion. Master races

Of beetles lie extinguished in glass tables:
Stag, deathwatch, ox, dung, diving, darkling, May.
Over the Kelmscott lettering of their labels,
Skeleton crews of sharks mark time all day.

Mark time: these groaning boards that staged a feast
Of love for art and science, since divorced,
Still scantily support the perishing least
Bittern and all his kin. Days, do your worst:

No more of you can come between me and
This place from which I issue and which I
Grow old along with, an unpromised land
Of all unpromising things that live and die.

This brick ark packed with variant animals --
All dead -- by some progressive-party member
Steams on to nowhere, all the manuals
Of its calliope untouched, toward December.

Struck dumb by love among the walruses
And whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffing
Missing, the mastodons like muddy buses,
I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.

VISITING CHAOS

No matter how awful it is to be sitting in this
Terrible magazine office, and talking to this
Circular-saw-voiced West side girl in a dirt-
Stiff Marimekko and lavender glasses, and this
Cake-bearded boy in short-rise Levi’s, and hearing
The drip and rasp of their tones on the softening
Stone of my brain, and losing
The thread of their circular words, and looking
Out through their faces and soot on the window to
Winter in University Place, where a blue-
Faced man, made of rags and old newspapers, faces
A horrible grill, looking in at the food and the faces
It disappears into, and feeling,
Perhaps, for the first time in days, a hunger instead
Of a thirst; where two young girls in peacoats and hair
As long as your arm and snow-sanded sandals
Proceed to their hideout, a festering cold-water flat
Animated by roaches, where their lovers, loafing in wait
To warm and be warmed by brainless caresses,
Stake out a state
Of suspension; and where a black Cadillac 75
Stands by the curb to collect a collector of rents,
Its owner, the owner of numberless tenement flats;
And swivelling back
To the editorial pad
Of Chaos, a quarter-old quarterly of the arts,
And its brotherly, sisterly staff, told hardly apart
In their listlessly colored sackcloth, their ash-colored skins,
Their resisterly sullenness, I suddenly think
That no matter how awful it is, it’s better than it
Would be to be dead. But who can be sure about that?

A DEATHPLACE

Very few people know where they will die,
But I do; in a brick-faced hospital,
Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,
Into three parts; the Dean Memorial
Wing, in the classic cast of 1910,
Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian
Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which
Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch
Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees
In World War I, and won enlisted men
Some decent hospitals, and, being rich,
Donated her own granite monument;
The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent
With marble piping, flying snapping flags
Above the entry where our bloody rags
Are rolled in to be sponged and sewn again.
Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain
(If only my own tears) will see me in
Those jaundiced and distempered corridors
Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close.
White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe
Before the pinpoint of the least syringe;
Before the buttered catheter goes in;
Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins
Inside my skin; before the rubber hand
Upon the lancet takes aim and descends
To lay me open, and upon its thumb
Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum;
And finally, I’ll quail before the hour
When the authorities shut off the power
In that vast hospital, and in my bed
I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red,
The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead.
Then will the business of life resume:
The muffled trolley wheeled into my room,
The off-white blanket blanking off my face,
The stealing secret, private, largo race
Down halls and elevators to the place
I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased
In artificial air and light: the ward
That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue.
Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,
A booted man in black with a peaked cap
Will call for me and troll me down the hall
And slot me into his black car. That’s all.



THE TREE WARDEN

I.

A FAREWELL TO ELMS

In late July, now, leaves begin to fall:
A wintry skittering on the summer road.
Beside which grass, still needing to be mowed,
Gives rise to Turk's caps, whose green tapering ball-
Point pens all suddenly write red. Last year,
The oriole swung his nest from the high fan
Vault of our tallest elm. Now a tree man
Tacks quarantine upon its trunk. I hear

An orange note a long way off, and thin
On our hill rain the ochre leaves. The white
Age of a weathered shingle stripes the bark.
Now surgeons sweat in many a paling park
And bone saws stammer blue smoke as they bite
Into the height of summer. Fall, begin.

II.

THE SECOND EQUINOX

Perambulating his green wards, the tree
Warden sees summer's ashes turn to fall:
The topmost reaches first, then more, then all
The twigs take umbrage, publishing a sea

Of yellow leaflets as they go to ground.
Upon their pyres, the maples set red stars,
The seal of sickness unto death that bars
The door of summer. Bare above its mound

Of leaves, each tree makes a memorial
To its quick season and its sudden dead;
With a whole gale of sighs and heaving head,
Each ash attends its annual burial.

The warden, under a boreal blue sky,
Reminds himself that ashes never die.

III.

DECEMBER THIRTY-FIRST

The days drew in this fall with infinite art,
Making minutely earlier the stroke
Of night each evening, muting what awoke
Us later every morning: the red heart

Of sun. December's miniature day
Is borne out on its stretcher to be hung.
Dim, minor, and derivative, among
Great august canvases now locked away.

Opposed to dated day, the modern moon
Comes up to demonstrate its graphic skill:
Laying its white on white on with a will,
Its backward prism makes a monotone.

In the New Year, night after night will wane;
Color will conquer; art will be long again.

IV.

MAY DAY

Help me. I cannot apprehend the green
Haze that lights really upon the young
Aspens in our small swamp, but not for long.
Soon round leaves, as a matter of routine,

Will make their spheric music; and too soon
The stunning green will be a common place.
Sensational today runs in our race
To flee the might of May for willing June.

To reach a bunch of rusty maple keys,
Undoing a world of constants, more or less,
I tread on innocence. The warden sees
In May Day the historical success
Of labor; a safe date for planting trees;
A universal signal of distress.

NOTES TOWARD A TWENTY-FIFTH REUNION

"And what do you do?" Mrs. Appoplex,
Fat dam of some dim Story Street savant
In baggy Marimekko muumuu and
Barbaric Inca necklet, asks my wife
At some dream sherry party packed with ham-
Strung academics swaying gently in
The wind of Babel. "Why, just cook and fuck,"
My wife does not, so sweetly, tender in
Reply, although I wish like hell she would.
Whose world is real, for Christ's sake, anyway?
Their sculpture gallery of images
That move mechanically in circumscribed
Tangents and - this is a recording - talk
In selfsame selfsongs all the livelong day?
(I must say I have just enough of a
Foot in that world to see its tiny point
Flash in the haystack of irrelevance.)
Or my free-form theatre of absurd,
Unaugurable happenstance, in which -
For gain, my lads, for gain - we businessmen
Risk all upon a nutty and divine
Idea of weal and on our con-man's skill
To sell it to each other, I'll back that
Frail matchstick pyramid of barest will,
On which to balance, one exposes all
To the black, hithering eye of the abyss,
As realer than the static autoclave
Of academe, full of blunt instruments
Becoming sterile as they sit and steam.
And yet, when I return in steaming June
To my Reunion in the pullulant
Hive of the Yard, I'll look with shuttering
Eyes on my unknown classmates, businessmen
Who have no business with me, and greet
The likes of Mrs. Appoplex and her
Effete levée with a glad, homing cry.
The question is, what kind of fool am I?

****

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Revitalizing the Humanities: A Course in Western Traditions

The degenerate state of universities, and especially the Humanities and the Arts, requires no account. The free-market conservatives who argued, from the 1970s onwards, that an end to free tuition and the exposure of institutions of higher learning to market forces would end the leftwards rot were wrong. On the contrary, universities are now almost wholly strange little colonies of leftist liberal ideology the product of which, as Mencius Moldbug astutely remarked, is not knowledge or skill or wisdom but cadre. The rot has advanced apace. The long march through the institutions is done. 

The purpose of this post is not to lament this state of affairs - lamentable though it is - but to celebrate what once prevailed in the Humanities in by-gone days. The present author had the great fortune to teach in a traditional Humanities course in Australian higher education for the better part of two decades. He was asked recently how, if he had his way, he would construct a coherent Humanities course today. It is a matter he sometimes discussed with the late, great Platonist and pedagogue, Roger Sworder. The answer, on the whole, is that he would return to the structure of the 'Western Traditions' Bachelor's Degree first designed by Sworder, along with the poet Clive Faust and Mr Maurice Nestor, which was taught at a regional College of Advanced Education beginning in or around 1981. It was beautifully conceived and very successful and still suggests a model of what an integral, generalist Humanities undergraduate course ought to be like. 

Needless to say, our Marxist and progressivist academic colleagues fought relentlessly to prevent its accreditation, first, and then to bring it to an end thereafter, and eventually they succeeded. But not before it produced hundreds of graduates and demonstrated the good sense of a structured, integrated curriculum based on the classics and 'Great Books' model. It should be stressed that, while it was undoubtedly conservative in its principles and assumptions, it was not by any means just a tool of conservative propaganda. One of its principles and assumptions is that students require exposure to a wide range of points of view in their undergraduate years. Accordingly, the staff who taught the course included among their number classicists, Platonists, Epicurians, Christians, Marxists, atheists, Buddhists, secular humanists and traditional Catholics, among others. Such diversity, in fact, is a conservative value. It is the so-called liberals and progressives, the cultural Marxists, the feminists and the globalists, who have since created intellectual monocultures - complete with 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings' - in our Arts courses today. 

* * * 

What follows is a flight of fancy. The question is: if you could construct a Humanities undergraduate degree anyway you'd like, carte blanc, without institutional restraints and with unlimited resources, how would it be done? 

The main variation of the degree structure below compared to what was actually offered is that it is expanded from three to four years of study and is thus more demanding. A mere diploma once required some twenty-five semesters of study. These days you can manage an entire Bachelor of Arts in Australia for just twenty units. This has been one of the unforseen consequences of 'market forces' - academic inflation and a race to the bottom. What is clearly needed, if an Arts degree is to have any value, is to make it much more onerous, much more difficult, much more rigorous and only open to students of real quality. 

The abiding assumption underpinning the course is that students ought to know the great treasures of Western civilization. The pedagogical assumption is that a planned, structured sequence of studies is better than a smorgasbord of random and disconnected subjects. In the end, let it be noted, the Western Traditions course with which the present author was associated was brought undone in the name of "student choice". This is the war cry of educational relatvists, and they were empowered by the free-market-will-fix-everything cuckservatives. Freedom be damned. Freedom is the prerogative of post-graduates after they have mastered a discipline.

Similarly, the programme is not "research driven". The "research" fetish in higher education - propelled by the "market's" demand for incessant innovation - is deeply corrosive. What do we need more, an education system that fosters a deep and sensitive appreciation of Shakespeare, or one that encourages reckless speculation about whether or not Hamlet was written by a woman? The purpose of education, to put it plainly, is the transmission of a body of wisdom and ways of understanding from one generation to another. Education, not "research".   

* * * 

Studies in Western Traditions: Compulsory Core

The central feature of this structured degree programme is a compulsory core consisting of semester-length studies of important "nodes" in Western civilization. These run roughly chronologically and each has its own emphasis. Greek Mythology features the mythic mode and symbolism. The Biblical World in the following semester features close textual study. Medevial Civilization features gothic architecture. Renaissance Studies features painting. Romanticism, poetry. And so on. Other "nodes" can be substituted for those listed. The present author added a semester-length subject called 'Islam and the West' - the Crusades "node" - to this sequence, for instance. 

1. Greek Mythology
2. The Biblical World

3. Medieval Civilization
4. Renaissance Studies

5. Enlightenment & Romantic
6. Modernity & Post-Modernity

Communications

As well as the compulsory core, students are required to take a year-long semiological unit called 'Communications' (or similar) which features reflective studies on different modes and languages. This subject includes cinema (German Expressionism?), advertising, social media and, importantly, an obligatory component of formal grammar. 

Major Studies

For our purposes, the traditional Humanities disciplines are reckoned to be Literature, History and Philosophy. Students must major in one of these. Wherever possible, these disciplines are structured in concert with the compulsory core. Thus, for example, the History discipline begins with Ancient and Biblical history to be studied at the same time as Greek Mythology and the Biblical World. And so on. These disciplines can draw on the compulsory core which frees them from having to provide students with background and context. The emphasis throughout is on 'Great Books' and classic texts.

*Literature
*History
*Philosophy

Minor Studies

Outside of the core disciplines there is, of course, a wide range of other disciplines that might be included: Religious Studies, Theology, Economics, Geography, Anthropology, Art History, and so on. These, however, must be regarded as second-tier studies vis-a-vis the core disciplines. 

Narcissistic victim-based pseudo-studies - an education in resentment - such as 'Queer Studies' and 'Post-Colonial Studies' have no place in a programme like this.

Creative Arts

Students are required to study and practice (to the level of a sub-major, at least) one of the creative arts: story writing, poetry, painting, photography, film-making, a musical instrument, etcetera. 

European Languages

Students are required to study and attain proficiency in (to the level of a sub-major, at least)a European language: Greek, Latin, French, German, Spanish, etcetera. 

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Socrates at the Piraeus: Voegelin on Plato

One of the keys to a full and proper understanding of the Platonic dialogues is the setting and the time signatures – the time and the place - given to the work by Plato. In particular, festivals, with their presiding deities, are especially revealing since, in many cases, if not all, the content of the dialogue will be appropriate to the festival and to the god in question. Particular festivals have particular themes, are dedicated to particular deities and are usually centred in particular locations. All of this is carefully crafted by Plato. The dialogues are crafted works of art in which nothing is accidental. If a dialogue takes place at a particular time in a particular place and a particular god or goddess is invoked, mentioned or alluded to, then it is all to a definite purpose, and we then find that the philosophical content of the dialogue is illuminated by the given context. 

There is a tendency among classical scholars and philosophers to ignore the framing of the content and to consider the arguments of a dialogue out of the context in which Plato has placed it. This is always a mistake. A dialogue is a complete package. Nothing is extraneous. Plato provides clues and signals to his meaning, and to how the work ought to be approached, and he does so in many forms, some of them extremely subtle or even cryptic. This is even more the case for modern readers since we are likely to miss signals that ancient readers would have found plain and obvious. For a start, we almost always treat the dialogues of Plato as secular works and see them through a secular lens, when in fact they were, in their time, embedded in the sanctity of Athenian institutions and the Athenian religion, along with other more esoteric institutions such as the Mysteries and the Pythagorean brotherhood. 

This was the subject of the present writers doctoral dissertation where he argued that the Platonic cosmology, especially as found in the dialogue called Timaeus, needs to be read through the lens of the cultus of Athene and that the fact that that dialogue is set on the Panathenaea, the principle festival of the goddess, is of primary significance. We are very likely to misread the dialogue if – as many classical scholars have done and still do – we skip the first five pages and overlook its setting. In fact, as a general rule of thumb, the present author proposes that each of the dialogues of Plato is dedicated to a certain deity and that the first task in reading the dialogue aright is to determine which deity and why.

Such an approach to the dialogues, however, leaves us confronted with a conundrum when it comes to the greatest of all Plato’s works, the Republic. There are clear signals regarding time and place, festival and deity, but it is hard to say how such signals relate to the subject matter of the work itself. It begins with Socrates leaving the city proper and walking the several miles down to the docks at the Piraeus in order to witness a new festival sacred to the goddess Bendis. It is rare for Socrates to venture that far, and the circumstances of him doing so are very carefully constructed and described in some detail by Plato. There is to be a torch race and Socrates is persuaded to stay and it is in this context that he becomes engaged in a discussion regarding justice. It is unclear, though, how this setting – and the Bendidia festival and the goddess Bendis – are related to the subject matter of the work. Bendis is not even an indigenous Athenian deity. She is a Thracian goddess whose cult has been recently incorporated into the city’s religion to appease the immigrant workers resident in the port. The question is: why is the Republic set on the Bendidia and how is the topic of justice related to the goddess Bendis?

Some have supposed that the setting of the dialogue may have been motivated by Plato’s patriotic xenophobia. In that case, he has Socrates go down to the Piraeus and describe the Ideal State – an idealized Athens – in the face of and counter to the influx of foreigners. The festival, then, is ironic: Socrates delivers his account of an Athenian utopia not on an Athenian festival but on a festival sacred to an alien deity as a way of underlining the declining integrity of the Athenian state. This is the explanation offered by those who, like Karl Popper and his followers, regard Plato as a type of proto-Nazi. Such a setting turns the entire dialogue into one long racial slur. This is an unsatisfying explanation on a number of grounds, not least of which is that it would be a clumsy and artless prologue to what is otherwise a masterpiece of subtlety and finesse. Are we really to suppose that Plato had Socrates go down to the Piraeus as a way of taking a cheap shot at the Thracian “wogs” who worked there? Surely there is some more noble design we are overlooking?

The problem lies with the goddess Bendis. We know relatively little about her and her cultus, except the fact that she was assimilated to the Greek goddess Artemis. There are archaeological depictions extant that show her in the attire of the goddess of the hunt, so we know with some certainty that the Greeks (Athenians) regarded her as the Thracian version of Artemis much as they understood the Egyptian goddess Neith as a version of Athene. The assimilation of alien (barbarian) cultures was accomplished in this way, by matching pantheon to pantheon. But how is the Republic and its treatment of justice related to the goddess Artemis? And if it is, why then this (alien) version of Artemis? It is a conundrum that has occupied many readers of the Republic, and for many years it confounded the present writer, convinced as it was that the setting of the work on the Bendidia, with its nocturnal torch race at the Piraeus must be a key to understanding the Republic as a whole. No amount of creative interpretations of Artemis/Bendis helps. It is difficult to find any sense in which the Republic is appropriate to a festival of Artemis/Bendis and how its discussion of justice should be framed by the setting of the Bendidia.

We can only make headway on this problem, then, if we accept that we are missing something important or that our assumptions are incorrect. Reading through the introductory passages of the dialogue once more, we must ask what clues are outstanding? What peculiar and unusual features stand out? The answer to this is the torch race that Socrates says he wants to see. This is why he has uncharacteristically ventured from the city down to the docks. It is an unusual event, a strange spectacle, a torch race on horseback at night. The question becomes, why is this the central rite of the festival and what does this tell us about the new goddess? Once again, the standard comparisons of Bendis with Artemis draw a blank. There is no conceivable way that such a torch race conforms to the classical cultus of Artemis. So this, in that case, must be our problem. Plato’s text gives otherwise unaccountable emphasis to the nocturnal torch race; the Republic begins with it and, on any sensitive reading, we are to keep it in mind while moving through the dialogue. As Socrates discourses on justice we are given the image of the torch race, sacred to the goddess Bendis. This is surely a key.

The difficulty is resolved when we abandon the parallel of Bendis with Artemis and understand, instead, that by other assimilations this Thracian goddess was considered by the Athenians to be a version of Hecate, the underworld goddess, as well. We know this from other archaeological evidence and specifically a temple at the Piraeus. Bendis may well have been understood as the Thracian Diana in some contexts, but the Bendis of the Piraeus seems to have been equated to Hecate. The polytheistic pantheons are complex like that. Local variations are all-important. It seems that the goddess of the Thracian workers of the Piraeus was specifically a goddess of the dark moon and so a parallel not to Artemis but to Hecate. This is why she was honoured by a torch race at night. The torches point to Hecate. Plato’s emphasis on the torch race underlines this. Socrates is curious about the torch race. That is why he has made to journey down to the docks. There is a new festival being instituted, and it is characterized by the spectacle of the torch race which, as Socrates says, is an unusual thing. Plato has given emphasis to the torch race for a reason. Again: no details are superfluous in a Platonic dialogue. Some suppose that this detail is simply to provide a dramatic date for the work, since Athenians would have known what year it was the Bendidia was inaugurated. True enough, this device lends the dialogue historical verisimilitude. It is located at a specific point in time. Plato is always careful to walk the line between history and fiction. But there is surely more at play in this motif. The question becomes: why is the dialogue prefaced by a torch race sacred to Bendis/Hecate? 

Bendis shown in the attire of Artemis, votive stele, Piraeus circa 400BC. Artemis is a moon goddess, but it is more specifically in the aspect of Hecate (sub-lunar) that Bendis is relevant to the Republic of Plato.

* * *

The most intelligent and insightful answer to this question, and along with it the most perspicuous reading of the Republic as a whole, is offered by Eric Voegelin in volume III of Order & History. There can be little doubt that his reading of this issue is correct. It is sensitive to all the right matters, including the mythic framing that is typical of Platonic dialogues. Too many readers of Plato suppose that the mythological motifs are superfluous or – as per Leo Strauss’ often bizarre misreadings – insincere gestures to popular religion. In the case of the Republic, many readers dispense with the prologue and the setting, making nothing of it, and at the same time excise the conclusion, namely the so-called ‘Myth of Er’ with which the dialogue ends. Voegelin, on the other hand, understands perfectly well why the discussion on justice has these particular book-ends at start and finish. Socrates’ journey down to the Piraeus is, as Dr Voegelin has it, a journey into Hades, and so it is framed by the procession sacred to Hecate at the start and the eschatological visions of Er the Armenian at the end. Only a reading of the Republic that gives a full and contextual reason for the whole of the dialogue and all its features, from start to finish, is of any worth. We cannot lop off the start and finish in order to demythologize it and so make it conform to our horizontal and secular assumptions and our impoverished notion of what constitutes philosophy.

As Dr Voegelin says, the key to the Republic is announced in its first word: kateben = I went down. This, as Plato’s contemporary readers would have known very well, is the word Odysseus uses to describe his descent into Hades. Voegelin’s instincts as a reader, sensitive to the mythological keys, are exactly right. He writes:

The first chapter of the Republic sets the dialogue into motion. Its opening passage… assembles symbols that recur in its course. And the first word, kateben (I went down), sounds the great theme that runs through it to its end.

Voegelin gives a lesson in how to read Plato correctly. Far from being incidental and irrelevant to the serious business of political philosophy that constitutes the core of the dialogue, the prologue – like the conclusion – is replete with symbols that are keys to a proper understanding of the dialogue. Socrates’ sojourn down to the Piraeus to see the new rites of Bendis/Hecate is a symbolic journey into the underworld and the discourse on justice that follows must be understood in that context. Herr Voegelin’s account of it is worth reproducing here in full, as follows: 

Socrates walked down the five miles from the town to the harbor. Down went the way from Athens to the sea in space; and down went her way from Marathon to the disaster of the sea power in time. Socrates was a man of his people and participated in its fate. With the people, streaming down on the festive occasion, he went to the Piraeus with its mixed population of citizens and foreigners. For, with the unfolding of Athenian sea power under Pericles, the Piraeus had grown through the influx of foreign traders and workers. The Thracian businessmen, seamen, and harbor workers had brought with them their cult of Bendis. It had been recognized by Athens as a public cult, at least since 429/8, and found adherents among the citi- zens. Cult fraternities of Thracians and citizens had formed and now they had organized a great public festival in honor of Bendis with rival processions.4 Socrates went along to watch the spectacle; and while he found the effort of his co-citizens excellent, the foreigners proved their equals in putting up a dignified public appearance. Athens and Thrace had found their common level in the Piraeus. As a citizen, with due respect for recognized cults, he offered his prayers to the foreign goddess who had come to the polis over the sea—but then he wanted to go back to Athens. At that point, however, he was detained. He had gone down, and now the depth held him as one of them, friendly, to be sure, but with a playful threat of force by superior numbers, and a refusal to listen to his persuasion to let him go (327c). In the depth that held him he embarked on his inquiry; and he used his persuasive powers on his friends, not to let him free to go back to Athens, but to make them follow him to the polis of the Idea. From the depth of the Piraeus the way went, not back to the Athens of Marathon, but forward and upward to the polis built by Socrates with his friends in their souls.

The kateben opens the vista into the symbolism of depth and descent. It recalls the Heraclitian depth of the soul that cannot be measured by any wandering, as well as the Aeschylean dramatic descent that brings up the decision for Dike. But above all it recalls the Homer who lets his Odysseus tell Penelope of the day when “I went down [kateben] to Hades to inquire about the return of myself and my friends” (Od. 23.252–3), and there learned of the measureless toil that still was in store for him and had to be fulfilled to the end (23.249–50).

All of the associations have their function in the Republic, as we shall see, but the Homeric kateben is the one more immediately intended in the construction of the Prologue. For the Piraeus, to which Socrates descends, is a symbol of Hades. The goddess whom he approaches with prayer is the Artemis-Bendis, understood by the Athenians as the chthonian Hecate who attends to the souls on their way to the underworld.5 And the immediately following scene confirms and clarifies the meaning of the symbol insofar as the old Cephalus is moved to his reflections on justice by his impending descent to Hades. For “there,” as the tales (mythoi) go, men must pay what is right in compensation for the wrong they have done “here” (330d–e). To be sure, the interest of Cephalus in justice, while sincere, is not less shallow than his motivation by tales about punishment in Hades; and the old man, when the debate becomes more strenuous, retires to sacrifice and sleep. Nevertheless the little scene illuminates the profounder concern of Socrates, as well as the function of the Piraeus as the Hades that motivates his inquiry into the nature of justice and right order.

The descent of Socrates to Hades-Piraeus in the opening scene of the Prologue balances the descent of Er, the son of Armenius the Pamphylian, to the underworld in the closing scene of the Epilogue. Moreover, Plato underlines the parallel between the underworlds of Socrates and Er by a play with symbols. For the festival of the Piraeus in honor of Bendis is characterized by the equality of the participants. Socrates can find no difference in the quality of the processions; a common level of humanity has been reached by the society of which Socrates is a member. In Hades, in death, again all men are equal before their judge, and Er, the teller of the tale, is a Pamphylian, a man “of all tribes,” an Everyman. In the organization of the dialogue the symbolic byplay on the pamphylism of both the Piraeus and Hades, thus, confirms and strengthens the parallel. At the same time, however, it leads back to the great issue that sets the dialogue moving. For it is the pamphylism of the Piraeus that makes it Hades. The equality of the harbor is the death of Athens; and at least an attempt must be made to find the way up to life.

The Descent formulates a problem and the judgment provides a resolution. In the Descent the human condition appears as existence in Hades, and the question arises: Must man remain in the under- world, or has he the power to ascend from death to life? In the Judgment Plato expresses his conviction of the reality of the power and describes its modus operandi. The Pamphylian myth tells of the dead souls who in afterlife receive reward or punishment according to their conduct in life. The bad souls will go to their suffering below the earth, the good souls to their blessed existence in heaven. After a thousand years they come up, or down, from their abode to the seat of Lachesis at the center of the cosmos, there to draw their lot and to choose their fate for the next period of life. When they are assembled, the Herald of Lachesis steps up to a platform and announces to them the rules governing the proceedings (617d–e):

Ananke’s daughter, the maiden Lachesis, her word: Souls of a day! Beginning of a new cycle, for the mortal race, to end in death!
The daemon will not be allotted to you; but you shall select the daemon. The first by the lot, shall the first select the life to which he will be bound by necessity [Ananke]. Arete has no master; and as a man honors or dishonors her, he will have her increased or diminished. The guilt [aitia] is the chooser’s; God is guiltless [anaitios].

The cosmic law is terse, but its meaning is clear. Plato restates the problem of freedom and guilt, with slight variations of Homeric and Heraclitian symbols. With Homer he shares the aetiological concern. More radically than the poet he declares God, the one God, to be guiltless (anaitios). Divine substance has found its symbol, in the Republic, in the idea of the Agathon. And the Good can cause only good, not evil. The position is an impoverishment of the problem of theodicy, compared with Homer and Aeschylus, who both recog- nized evil that was caused neither by the gods of right order nor by man. And, let us hasten to say, it is not Plato’s last word in the matter either, as we shall see in the analysis of the Statesman and the Laws. Still, in the Republic he insists uncompromisingly that the souls lead the lives they have chosen for themselves. Recalling the Heraclitian B 119, “Character—to man—daemon,” Plato declares the daemon, to whom man is bound in life by necessity, the result of his free choice. For the Arete of the soul has no master; and when man bewails the consequences of his contempt for Arete, he has nobody to blame but himself.

The choice is free. And man has to bear the responsibility for the daemonic necessity of his life. But the choice cannot be wiser or better than the character that makes it. The aetiological speculation on the sources of good and evil has radically eliminated the gods, but the dialectics of freedom and necessity falls now with its full weight on man and his character. Man’s choice of his daemon in the other world is guided by the character he has acquired during his preceding life in this world. And the souls in Hades make odd choices. Those who formerly have led a dubious life, and as a consequence not only have suffered punishment themselves but also have seen the suffering of others, generally are cautious. Those who previously have lived a good life in a well-ordered polis, and participated in Arete from habit rather than from love of wisdom (philosophia), are apt to make foolish choices. They will jump, for instance, at a glittering tyranny and discover too late the evil of the soul in it (619b–620d). This is the great danger in the terrible hour of choice. And in order to reduce, if not to avert, the danger, man in this life should concentrate all his effort on one thing: to find the man who will enable him to distinguish between a worthy and an unworthy life, so that he can make a reasonable choice, with his eyes fixed on the nature of the soul, not diverted by the circumstances and events, pleasant or unpleasant, of a life. He will be able to make the right choice when he can recognize as bad, a manner of life that pulls the soul down and makes it more unjust, and as good, a manner of life that leads the soul upward toward a higher state of justice. When a man goes down to Hades, he must carry with him an adamantine conviction (doxa) that the quality of a life must be judged by its suitability to develop the Arete of justice in the soul (618b–619a).

The souls of the dead choose a life, and with the life the daemon that of necessity goes with it. Into their choice they can put no more wisdom than they have acquired. And on that occasion is revealed, as we have seen, the value of certain types of life. Those who have suffered punishment for the evil they have done, and have gained wisdom through suffering (in the Aeschylean sense), are likely to make a better choice than others who have led a righteous life and were rewarded with heavenly bliss. The relation between Arete and the course of a life is complicated. In the dialogue Socrates must face certain blameless characters who will arouse sympathy. There is old Cephalus, who furnishes an instance of the man who leads a reasonably righteous life and is willing to compensate for the minor offenses he committed by means of his wealth. He represents the “older generation” in a time of crisis, the men who still impress by their character and conduct that has been formed in a better age. The force of tradition and habit keeps them on the narrow path, but they are not righteous by “love of wisdom,” and in a crisis they have nothing to offer to the younger generation, which is already exposed to more corruptive influences. The venerable elder who arouses our sympathy will not lose it on closer inspection, but the sympathy will be tempered by a touch of condescension, if not contempt, for his weakness. For the men of his type are the cause of the sudden vacuum that appears in a critical period with the break of generations. All of a sudden it appears that the older generation has neglected to build the substance of order in the younger men, and an amiable lukewarmness and confusion shifts within a few years into the horrors of social catastrophe. In the next generation, with Polemarchus, the understanding of justice is already reduced to a businessman’s honesty. And it comes almost as a relief when in the sophist Thrasymachus there appears a real man who pleads the cause of injustice with luciferic passion. He at least is articulate, he argues and one can argue with him, and Socrates can come to grips with a problem that remains evasive when represented by respectability and venerable tradition without substance. A pattern, a paradigm of life, thus, is not easy to choose, for the conventional standards of desirability do not apply to the divine substance of order in the soul, to the daemon. Hence, Plato does not offer recipes for moral conduct; and with regard to a right paradigm of life he does not go beyond a hint that in such matters the mean (to meson) is preferable (619a). The point must receive some emphasis because it will recur in the interpretation of Plato’s construction of a right order for the polis, which all too frequently is misunderstood as a recipe for a good constitution...

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Few have written so well on the Republic. The point of this post, finally, is to draw attention to the work of Eric Voegelin and most especially Voegelin as a reader of Plato. Mention was made earlier of Karl Popper: Voegelin is akin to Popper in having devoted his intellectual life to explaining and understanding the roots of XXth century totalitarianism. But whereas Popper offered only a superficial misreading of Plato in order to identify him as the 'father of fascism' in the western Tradition - a slur that has marred Plato's reputation throughout the second half of the XXth century - Voegelin offers a deep and insightful reading that does justice to Plato's foremost position among Western philosophers. In short, Voegelin is a much deeper thinker than Popper. It is a travesty that he is little known while Popper's influence upon post-War intellectuals has, regretably, been extensive. The work of Herr Voegelin is championed by the Eric Voegelin Society, a link to which follows:

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Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Neoreaction Explained

Frederich the Great - a Neoreactionary hero

Several associates of the author of these pages have expressed some mystification regarding the contemporary phenomenon known as Neoreaction (or NRx for short).  They are aware that it is a political philosophy occupying a place on the Right (or Dexter) half of the political spectrum, and that it is perhaps related to the so-called 'Alt Right' (i.e. 'Alternative Right') and/or that mode of conservatism prefixed with paleo- (meaning old or primal or archaic), but just what it is and what it espouses escapes them. What exactly is Neoreaction? Can you explain it in fifty words or less? Why are NRx blogs and webpages so frustratingly dense and opaque? 

The topic was treated in a very introductory way on these pages recently, here, and as the new year (2017) dawns and the author's sojourning through India and Asia has come to an end and he has settled again into a domestic routine, it is hoped that further matters relevant to NRx can be treated in more detail in future posts. Indeed, it is hoped that Out of Phase might become more explicitly neoreactionary than it has been in the past. Neoreaction is a lively intellectual movement, and one entirely in keeping with the tenor and assumptions of this author. Just look at the content of these pages: neo-colonial, neo-orientalist, neo-this and neo-that. And whether it is matters of art or matters of esoterica, the author shows an abiding preference for the ways of by-gone days and a consistent aversion to modern innovations. There is no harm in making these pages more forthright in their intellectual affiliations. 

Let us, therefore, attempt a brief and demystified explanation of the Neoreactionary viewpoint. It is, admittedly, not an easy matter because the NRx community is never in any hurry to make it easy. The entire business is, to be sure, elitist, and Neoreaction has adopted an opaque posture and vocabulary as a deliberate strategy against entryism, which is to say against infiltration by hostile or just unworthy characters. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the prime movers in the movement are longwinded, while others are prolix and obscuritanistic. People complain: "I've read lots of Neoreactionary stuff, and I'm still none the wiser! What does it all mean?" Here is what it means:

A reactionary is someone who advocates a return to a status quo ante, a return to a previous status quo. Specifically, as a political proponent, a reactionary is someone who advocates a return to a political system from the past. This is different to a conservative, who merely wants to defend and preserve the current status quo. A reactionary wants to restore a status quo long since gone. In popular parlance, they want to turn back the clock, go against the tide of so-called "progress", and rebuild and restore something of value that has been lost.In reaction we find a rejection of the ideology of "progress", a critique of the conditions of modernity and a determination to recover a lost virtue. 

A neo-reactionary, therefore, is one of a new breed of reactionaries. In recent times the label has been applied especially to a diverse group of thinkers and advocates who have coalesced around a blogger known pseudonymously as Mencius Moldbug.

To be yet more specific, Neoreaction, as a political position, values and seeks a return to many of the things which prevailed in the past but which were swept away recklessly by such watersheds as the French and American Revolutions, including: monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, fealty, heroic values, vocation, loyalty, classical international law, hierarchical organisational structures, family, patriarchal social relations, localism, ethnic identity, religious observance and religious morality. It follows that, in general, Neoreactionaries are opposed to the corrosive, flattening, quantifying modern cult of equality and all the related the assumptions of progressive (Whig) ideology.In particular, Neoreaction is anti-democratic. It sees democracy as an inherently Leftist mode that is counted as the worst and least stable form of government. 

As someone explained it, Neoreactionaries want to return to the 50s. The 1450s. 

This is not to say that there is a single programme of Neoreaction. Not all Neoreactionaries are monarchists, for instance. And not all of them are religious, by any means. Ethnic identity is more important to some than to others. But they all share a determination to learn from the pre-modern era, share a rejection of progressive historiography and a belief that a great many pre-modern institutions were better than what has replaced them. In general, they subscribe to the view that traditional (pre-modern) societies were founded in realities, the stuff of nature, and that the modern project, on the contrary, is founded in delusions, wishful thinking, and serious, diabolical miscalculations of the human predicament. 

Mencius Moldbug - the face of Neoreaction

While its opponents might present Neoreaction as "Far Right" it is not, it should be stressed, a movement of political activists and agitators. No one supposes that the wished-for Restoration of Tradition and historical norms can be brought about through the ballot box or collecting petitions or staging street marches. Contemporary Neoreaction is an intellectual movement that has grown out of the above principles, largely based in a careful reading of old (pre-modern) texts and a meticulous re-reading of history. Neoreactionaries read old books. That is mainly what they do. They read old books without the lens of modern liberalism. Foremost among their favoured authors is the XIXth century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, the great spokesman of old Europe. 

Also worth mentioning here is that contemporary Neoreaction - based as it is in the analysis of Mr Moldbug - proposes that the roots of Leftism are to be found in Calvinist Protestantism and that Leftism is itself essentially religious (eschatological) in its motivations. Progressive democracy, the human rights cult, egalitarianism, feminism, radical environmentalism, Whiggism of all stripes: all these related phenomena constitute a religion. They are more than political, they are religious in nature. This is an important feature of Neoreactionary thought. The NRx analysis goes much deeper than garden variety right-wing sloganeering. Finally, it is a metaphysics. 

In conclusion, contemporary neoreaction is anything but empty nostalgia. It is a rigorous field of genuine politico-philosophical inquiry, albeit conducted almost entirely outside of the formal structures of academia. The following links will take the reader to some of the more illustrious and rewarding NRx blogsites active today:

Unqualified Reservations

Outside In

The Future Primeval

Neocolonial

The Froude Society

Social Matter

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Lord Curzon

“If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of a pagan art or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind. Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara, and the Mohammedan Musjid as the Christian Cathedral. There is no principle of artistic discrimination between the mausoleum of the despot and the sepulchre of the saint. What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask off the face of the past and helps us to read its riddles and to look it in the eyes—these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, are the principal criteria to which we must look.”
— Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India

A Classical Horoscopy

In response to a request from a correspondent who had noted the several astrological posts on these pages the author has prepared a brief summarised account of his personal approach to the gentle arts of horoscopy. His method is largely gleaned from classical Hellenistic sources and quite deliberately deviates from many of the established norms of modern astrological practice. Each of the points below could warrant a lengthy rationale, but they will suffice for the time being, together constituting a coherent praxis based in a certain symbolic conception that the author regards as exceedingly ancient. 

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A CLASSICAL HOROSCOPY

1. There are seven and only seven planets, namely those known to the ancients and visible to the naked eye. They are, in order of velocity along the ecliptic: Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturnus.

We take no account of the so-called “modern” or trans-Saturnian planets. 

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2. The seven planets have certain established relationships as recounted in many traditional sources and are to be considered according to such relationships. The most important of them are the following pairings, noting the complex relations between Luna, Sol and Saturnus:

Luna – Saturnus

Mercury – Jupiter

Venus – Mars

Luna – Sol

Sol – Saturnus

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3. The aforementioned pairings of the seven planets is reflected in the traditional rulerships of the twelve signs of the zodiac, according to the following diagram (Thema Mundi):

Note that Sol and Luna rule one half of the circle each, which is to say day and night respectively, and that each of the other five planets have a diurnal rulership and a nocturnal rulership. The most basic determination in the analysis of the powers of the planets is according to this binary division. That is, it is of fundamental importance, in any given case, whether a planet is in a diurnal or nocturnal phase.

Note that, contrary to modern attributions, the sign of Aquarius is ruled by the nocturnal Saturnus and is Saturnine in quality. 

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4. The structure in which the seven planets are considered is the fourfold matrix of the geocentric cosmos. The four points of definition are:

The Ascendant (where the ecliptic meets the eastern horizon),
The Descendant (where the ecliptic meets the western horizon),
The Medium Coeli (the highest arc of the ecliptic in the sky, and
The Immum Coeli (the lowest arc of the ecliptic in the underworld. 

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5. There are thus eleven steps on a ladder of determinations extending from the lowest of chthonic regions to the highest of supernal regions, as follows:

Medium Coeli – Supernal
Descendant – Stellar/Extra-Saturnine
Saturnus – Ring-pass-not
Jupiter
Mars
Sol
Venus
Mercury
Luna
Ascendant – The Sub-lunary/Terrestrial
Immum Coeli – Chthonic

Note that the four coordinates (two axes) of the geocentric cosmos are co-related to vertical determinations, as follows:

Ascendant - The Sub-lunary/Terrestrial, the Earth
Descendant – Stellar/Extra-Saturnine, the realm of fixed stars
Medium Coeli – Supernal, the dark light beyond the stars
Immum Coeli – the Chthonic realm, the underworld

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6. For practical purposes, and according to an important order of symbolism, the horizontal axis of Ascendant/Descendant is considered both in itself and in terms of two other markers, namely:

Pars Fortuna, a synthetic point representing the Sol/Luna/Terra relationship marking, as it were, a “pot of gold”, the Ascendant realized in its geocentric potential.

The star Sothis, representing the essence of the stellar realm. Sothis as ‘The Star’ par excellence.

Thus, as well as the seven planets we also take account of the Pars Fortuna (an essentialization of the terrestrial realm and an extension of the Ascendant) and Sothis (an essentialization of the fixed stars and an extension of the Descendant).

(Note that these determinations are reflected in the three tarot cards Star/Moon/Sun.)

The calculation for the Pars Fortuna differs according to diurnal and nocturnal events. The calculations are:

Diurnal: Ascendant + Moon - Sun

Nocturnal: Ascendant - Moon + Sun

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7. A diagram of the heavens – called a Theme (Thema)– is constructed according to the above dterminations. It is foursquare, it is defined by Ascendant/Descendant, Medium Coeli/Immum Coeli and within those axes are marked the seven planets along with the Pars Fortuna and Sothis.

The foursquare structure of a Theme is located on the tropical ecliptic with the zodiacal coordinates of Ascendant/Descendant, Medium Coeli/Immum Coeli marked thereupon. We take account of the zodiacal significances indicated by these four points. 

The zodiacal positions of the seven planets are assessed in terms of their rulerships as indicated in the diagram (Thema Mundi) above, taking account of diurnal and nocturnal determinations. 

An example: The horoscope of mad rocket boy Jack Parsons.

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8. All factors, the seven planets, Pars Fortuna and Sothis, are considered in terms of the risings, settings and culminations indicated by the Ascendant/Descendant and Medium Coeli/Immum Coeli axes. The nearer a planet (or star or other factor) to rising, setting or culminating, the more amplified its importance in any given Theme. 

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9. We do not take account of the twelve so-called ‘Houses’ or ‘Temples’ often used in Occidental astrology. Our scheme is fourfold, as already described, and thus a so-called ‘Quadrant’ system. But of the twelve divisions marked in a Theme – which we calculate using the method of Ptolemy – we determine the various “Faces” (or “Aspects”) of each planet (or star or other factor) in relation to the others. The “Aspects” therefore are: semi-sextile, sextile, square, trine, quincunx and opposition.

Note that we do not give heed to the modern system of “Bodily Aspects” and their “orbs”. 

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10. The Ruler of a Theme, in the first instance, is the planet that rules the zodiacal sign marked by the Ascendant. Particular attention is given to this planet in terms of risings, settings and culminations, and the Faces it makes in regards the other planets and especially its complementary pair. 

In addition to the Ruler of a Theme – the significance of which is terrestrial - particular attention is given to the Ruler of the Heaven (which is to say the ruler of the vertical or celestial axis, the significance of which is spiritual) this being the planet that rules the zodiacal sign marked by the Medium Coeli. It is assessed in terms of risings, settings and culminations, and the Faces it makes in regards the other planets and especially its complementary pair. 

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11. Analysis of the seven planets, additional to the framework of the Theme, may be made in terms of the following schemes:

The sequence of the seven planets (crossing the Ascendant following their proper motion) commencing with the Ruler of the Theme.

The shape and complexities of the heptagram formed by the seven planets in order of their velocity from Luna to Saturnus.

The shape and complexities of the heptagram formed by the seven planets in order of the arrangement preserved in the days of the week and the planetary hours, namely: Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturnus, Sol, this heptagram being complementary to that taken from the order of velocity as active is to passive according to the following model:

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12. In any given Theme there is a key, this being the peculiar and unusual feature of the celestial configurations depicted. The first and most crucial task of the astrologer is to discern this feature and place it at the centre of his analysis and prognostications. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Socrates, Sworder & a Bad Omen

Roger Sworder 27th Dec. 1946 - 27th Oct. 2016

A BAD OMEN

Several days after the present writer returned from a year’s wandering around India, China and South-East Asia, and only a few weeks before Roger Sworder died, he walked around to Dr Sworder's house, two streets away. Dr Sworder came to the front door, but since it had been an unusually wet winter in southern Australia the wooden door had swollen with moisture and was jammed. The two men pushed and pulled but couldn’t open it. Finally, Sworder called out from inside, “You’ll have to go around the back!” So the visitor went around to the back door. When he walked in, Dr Sworder said to him, “That’s a very bad omen, my friend. We haven’t seen each other for a year and we couldn’t open the door.”

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In the Phaedo we see Socrates in jail awaiting his execution. His friends visit him and are confounded by his composure and his refusal to take any steps to escape. The immediate problem that the dialogue proposes is, ‘Why is Socrates not afraid to die?’ Fear of death is natural in human beings, surely, but Socrates again shows himself to be strange specimen. Not only is he not afraid to die, but he welcomes it. This is because, as he explains to his comrades, he has been preparing for death throughout his entire life, and he has been doing this by way of philosophy. Indeed, he says, philosophy is nothing else but a preparation for death, and the true philosopher spends his whole life in pursuit of death, seeking death, yearning for its consummation.

The interlocutors, Cebes and Simmias and the others, are taken aback by this, but Socrates insists it is so and much of the dialogue is concerned with presenting this doctrine: philosophy is a preparation for death. In philosophy, Socrates explains, we are concerned not with the ephemeral and accidental qualities of the physical realm and of things apprehended by the senses, but rather with the eternal and unchanging paradigms – Forms – upon which the world of becoming is modeled. The things of the physical realm serve to remind the philosopher of their eternal models and the whole of philosophy is the study of these models, first through their physical copies and thn in themselves. These models reside in the great darkness of eternity beyond the gates of death. Why then should someone who has spent their life contemplating the eternal Forms fear death? Instead, they should welcome it. This is how a philosopher ought to live their life. Contemplating the eternal forms, the Real, and, in this, pursuing death, release from the realm of change and flux.

At 62B, however, Socrates adds an important proviso. Although philosophy is the study of death and the philosopher seeks death with his whole being, he is forbidden from doing anything to directly hasten it. We are, says Socrates, like guards standing watch at our posts, and we have a binding duty to stand at our watch until we are relieved of that obligation. Taking our own lives is strictly forbidden. It is an allegory that the mystics tell us, Socrates says, that “we men are put in a sort of guard post from which one must not release oneself or run away”. It is, he says, “a high doctrine with difficult implications.”

This is the paradox that is at the heart of the Socratic life. On the one hand the philosopher must pursue death, love death, want nothing more than death – death, the realm of the timeless Forms; the telos of life lies beyond the horizon - and yet on the other hand he is forbidden from doing anything to bring it about. In this paradox lies the fullness of a life well lived, the philosophical life.

Roger Sworder spent his life teaching philosophy but also – more than any other man the present writer has ever met – practicing a life of philosophical contemplation. He was reclusive. Hhe dedicated his time to thinking the best thoughts about the best things. He pondered mathematics, music, astronomy and geometry. He trained himself in Pythagorean arithmetic until he had an uncanny ability to compute numbers mentally. He read and pondered the dialogues of Plato over and over. He immersed himself in the epics of Homer, memorizing them in the original Greek. He would spend weeks, months, tackling fundamental philosophical questions. The present author recalls the weeks, months, Dr Sworder spent sitting at his piano carefully constructing and studying and contemplating the musical proportions described in the early sections of Plato’s Timaeus. He wrote little but what he did write was deeply considered and concerned essential matters.

When the present author last saw him Dr Sworder proposed that they write a book together with the working title: Plato & the Philosophy of Ecstasy. In the Phaedo, where Socrates is confronting death, we are given a strongly dualistic rendering of the Theory of Forms. The Forms are eternal, unchanging, singular: the particulars of the created world, on the other hand, are ephemeral, ever-shifting, composite, and so on. There is the eternal soul on the one hand and the temporary housing of the body on the other. Sworder's interpretation of Plato went beyond this. He would point out that students typically read the Phaedo first among Plato's works, and come to the Parmenides - Plato's most difficult work - last. And yet chronologically this is topsy-turvy. In the Phaedo Socrates is at the end of his life. In the Parmenides he is a very young man. Plato has constructed his dialogues to be like this. As we read them we journey back through time, and philosophically we travel from the dualism of the Phaedo backwards to the ontological unity announced in the Parmenides. This is a consequence of the paradox described above. 

Plato, Sworder believed, is the philosopher of the ecstatic. The culmination of Platonic philosophy is an ecstatic vision of an optimum world. Sworderean Platonism is not world-hating. The created realm is, as the Timaeus puts it, the best of possible worlds, and to fully realise this - to appreciate just how best this best is - is an ecstatic experience. He felt that Nietzche was almost exactly wrong about Plato in this respect. Nietzche casts Plato as the dour and joyless Apollonian, but is not Socrates a pre-eminently Dionysean figure?, Sworder asked. “Socrates drives people mad!” he said. He wanted them to write a book on the theme of divine madness in Plato. He and the present author sat and catalogued many of the passages they might discuss in such a work. One of them is the death scene in the Phaedo where Socrates drinks the hemlock like it is a draught of honey. 

* * * 

When Roger Sworder was in a critical condition in hospital the doctors brought him out of his coma and asked him how he wanted them to proceed. He asked to be let go. He knew that his time had come. His watch had ended and his obligation done. A greater compulsion had intervened. As Socrates puts it to his comrades in the Phaedo, a man must stand at his post "until the gods send some necessity upon him..." Roger Sworder recognized that such a necessity had come to him. He might have opted for futile surgery, chemotherapy, a few more years subsisting on machines, clinging to life as if death is a mournful oblivion. Instead, he didn’t flinch. Whenever he talked about death he would tell people, "I can't wait!" In others this sort of talk is just bravado and jest. In a philosopher it is a studied attitude. Accordingly, the moment he had the chance he was gone. This was only proper for a man who had spent his life practicing the philosophy of Plato, and his fearless leap into the darkness of eternity is his ultimate lesson for all who studied under him.

Plato tells us that a soul is free of rebirth and achieves liberation if it lives three lives in a row as a philosopher. We might doubt that this was Roger Sworder's third and final incarnation devoted to philosophy, but all who knew him would agree that it was surely not his first. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black