These personae have been there from the beginning

          Perhaps the separation – their distinction as separable ‘individuals’ – is a function of the ‘external’ context, the socio-cultural phenomenology, shall we say, into which our heroes were born – the other land of the Other Land.

          But that does not obviate their final ‘reality’.

          The ‘fiction’ is the lesser world.

the Hermit

            I have synthesized several traditions, some more specific than others.

            The most ancient character of my emergence begins in the voice of the Teacher.

            Immersed in extraneous noise establishing the institution altogether alien and contrary to the Teacher’s dicta, nevertheless the text still now and again embodies his authentic voice.

            And, while the spider religion held me over the flames of Hell because I could not believe that a man became God, the opening window of his unique sound made promises beyond the blank walls of my enclosure.

            The promise is fulfilled by Thomas, prophetic student of the prophetic Teacher.

            The West begins in Greece.

            The urgency of the prophetic is only fulfilled in the Teacher, but the urgency apparently drives the eastern divisions of that insular sea. The Greeks take it up in their primitive way, a clarity unsurpassed in the nature of the mind’s eye. But what we project back is largely garbage. Plato saw the corollary nature of whole consciousness and thing. Aristotle misinterpreted this instance as the syllogistic word.

            His mistake changes history; but the key to the tool he misidentified is the elemental description he both completed and rejected. Aristotle ‘discovered’ the fifth element, Aether, thus creating the only viable structure for Plato’s spherical insight.

            Greek philosophy begins in Thales and Water, proceed to Anaximenes’ Aer, thence to Heraclitus’ Fire and, finally, with the tacit addition of Earth, to Aristotle’s Aether – his ascription for the differing motion of the Heavens, being circular, as opposed to the linear motion of the sublunar world.

            Only the five elements and their subsidiary developments can explain the empirical nature of inference and analysis.

            But the five elements are one of the greatest discoveries in the evolution of history – not something one can keep under one’s hat. The record of their dispersion leaves fragments and whole responses across the civilized regions of the East. Upanishad, the epitome moment of the classical Sanskrit, coincides with Greek thought. And three, then four and finally five elements appear in the Upanishad texts, their dating paralleling the discoveries, if somewhat later.

            When, after the Buddhist subversion, the subcontinent regains its original impulse, particularly the Upanishadic tradition in which Gautama himself appeared, the penultimate incarnation, Shankara, has a unique student who becomes immersed in the elemental tradition. While the philosophical Vedantins become enmeshed in the dualistic toils of their anti-dualist philosophy, Sureshvara receives a brief teaching of the core trinity opening out into his own understanding, his fivefold intuition concerning the spherical nature of reality or experience.

            Apart from the various modes of trinitarian interpretation that Vedantins have followed out from Shankara’s keys, Upanishad opens out into a description of the moment of experience. As such, all numbers are subsumed up to Five. Dualism finds its moving base in the appositive dance of Prajapati and Hiranyagarbha, here as the causal light and the golden egg. The dance begins from the whole and point of awareness.

            But, while Upanishad touches clearly on the reflective nature of the moment of experience, the causal light only transcends the whole in terms of the whole. From the point of view of mind, pure cause is still the gift of the Greeks, the sidereal gift of the prophetic tradition.

            The five elements are latecomers in Europe. But, here, Five and Three meet together to produce, once again, the unique experience of the Teacher. But now, for the first time, the experience becomes separated from direct lineages of transmission, teacher to disciple. The word enters the text. The text becomes the world. But Aristotle’s syllogism becomes the imprisoning gift, liberating the Eye by allegory, but imprisoning the Eye in an artificial reason, an arbitrary One of attenuated Symbol, as if only the word, and not the value, were the parallax of dipolar vision.

            Pick the Idealists to break through the gateless gate of the West, the thousand foot wall that wraps around us, like a planetarial cinema for the Eye, until the Eye itself breaks free, recognizing Eye and eye and the self-awareness that stands between them.

            This gate can only be defined by Five.

            Fichte breaks through, between the Idealists of reason and ‘unreason’. The ‘irrational’ round that this breakthrough Eye shows us can never be lineal, never be sequentially causal alone. But Fichte cannot go beyond this ‘self-positing of the self’. The revered ghost of Aristotle stands in the way.

            At the outset, it is not at all obvious that the five elements stand behind the Tarot Cards. The only direct indication is in the Suits, each of which contains four Face Cards and ten Numbers or numbered Cards.

            The Tarot is intended as a self-explanatory text. The fact that the Golden Dawn, among other traditions, perverted the Major Arcana and exploded the Minor Arcana in terms of an essentially artificial synthesis, does not change the elemental cogency of the Cards in terms of their own tradition. While the Cards consist in twelve sets of Seven (including the Fool as an ‘empty’ set), all of the numbers and subsets contained within this frame hold equal value. Each becomes definitive and embracing at its own location.

            The division between Ten and Squire not only points to the separation of the second set of Seven, but also acts as the division for the whole Suit. Ten is Five doubled, a primary meaning. Five is the natural cogency of the mind, the wholeness of the field of awareness and the moment of awareness.

            But field and moment are defined reflectively: Five doubled.

            Even if it were not self-evident in the Cards, Five is the necessary condition of Unity or the One. When we understand that the One is created by consciousness in the act of reflection (however much it may have prior roots), we begin to understand that the One itself is necessarily ‘composite’. But it is like Henry Miller breaking a piece off the cabbage leaf he finds in the gutter – every piece is ‘an infinity’ as well.

            The five elements are five causes. Because Aristotle lacked the formally prophetic that would have carried him beyond the moment of experience, he defines Cause as Four rather than Five, an error paralleling his abandonment of the elements in favor of the syllogism and the categories.

            The moment can only be defined in terms of the five causes. Every moment is five causes operating simultaneously, with the five elements or substances manifesting simultaneously as the apparent corollary for the five causes.

            And only in terms of these moments can we explain the actual moment of objectivity, a moment characterized both ‘subjectively’ and ‘objectively’ by Einstein’s awakening into the Special Theory of Relativity, which shows not only that the speed of light is simultaneously finite and infinite, but also that this is the necessary corollary for the moment of observation, a.k.a., the moment of experience. Light defines moment. The dualism is empirically valid because experience begs both Cause and Spirit. But defining the shared polarities becomes defining the shared spheres, the mutual fivefold nature of the five locating elements and the five transforming causes, working simultaneously.

            This is one of the gifts of Seven and Twelve, the peculiar potencies of prophecy.

            My friend and mentor, the poet, sent me on this journey, by his desire to understand the consciousness we shared, the peculiar gift of Science. But, in his mind, it was always the prophetic key at the source of his poetry, something that seemed to him to be peculiarly modern, uniquely contemporary. So we have shared this journey, although he, for all his otherworldliness is far more immersed in the world than I.

            Sometimes, he seems ancient, my friend the poet. But what is poetry, if not eternal youth?

– the Hermit