The Full Creation

People care about origins and purity for several important reasons. The former is important because it is about where you come from and what gives you your identity. That's a really important part of our humanity, since, if your identity is broken in some way, you may not know exactly who you are. If you don't know who you are, if your identity is fragmented, then you will have difficulting figuring out exactly how to act. Purity is about maintaining an identity over time, since an identity, by definition, is something that is marked out by boundaries. When formally articulated, these boundaries are rules or laws. By sticking to the rules that define you, the esse ntials that define the essence of your being, you maintain an identity from its point of origin. In a normal traditional world, this is not a problem, because traditions are deliberately about preserving identities. However, the modern world is clown world. Traditions and conventions of one kind or another are continu...

 Captain Marvel recapitulates stock-standard postmodern storytelling. To understand this, let us consider that, traditionally, the centre of society is ordered and that the identity ordering it is masculine. This is the structure at the start of the film: the Kree civilisation is clearly masculine, having hyper-organised cities of light. The orderliness hints at a 666 level of organisation (for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM_kQjpAK6g) and the hexagon space portals echo this also. The main representative of the Kree civilisation we encounter is a white male. In the beginning of the film, the Kree are presented as good. Opposite this centre of ordered identity, we have the Skrull, who are shape-shifting green aliens. Typically, you expect trouble from such characters, and that is exactly how the film presents them at the beginning. But then the story turns both these ideas on their heads. It turns out that Captain Marvel has had her memory suppressed by the Kree, as sh...

It is a feature of modernity, including modern discussions of theology, to not speak of reality, but to speak of theory, of the merits of this or that hypothesis. Conversation is conducted in an artificially constructed world of platonic concepts. It is for this reason that praxis and doxa, or application and theory are separate. Drawing the line from theory to practice becomes very difficult, because the two are in different realities. Traditional theology makes no distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy: the traditional liturgy is both theology and practice at the same time. It is difficult to live in the geometric world of modern thought, endlessly pushing ideas around and never landing in what is truly real. Traditional Christianity breaks this shell in the incarnation of Christ: we mystically participate in Christ's body and can commune with the angelic abstract. We can finally see the abstract properly land in a body without producing a terrible utopia or a horrific mons...

Rock-a-bye baby in the tree top. When the wind blows the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. And down will come Baby, Cradle and all. One theory about the meaning/origin of this poem is that it is about the heir to the throne being lost (specifically James II). Symbolically, I thought this makes perfect sense: the tree as a symbol of hierarchy, the baby at the top, and the cradle is something like the royal house. Further elaborations link the wind to a revolution (the timing suggests it could be the Protestant Reformation), a change in the spirit of the times that decapitates the hierarchy. In symbolic terms, this is also an incorrect and destructive meeting of heaven and earth.

 When King David numbered the people of Israel, the consequence was a plague. In our excessively moralistic age, we think this is just an arbitrary punishment, because morals are not rooted in reality for us. However, no consequence of sin is ever arbitrary in the Bible. The move to account for all the fighting men is prideful, but specifically because it is attempting to set up a totalising system, something that totally accounts for fighting strength in Israel. Pride, in essence, is the drive for self-sufficiency apart from God. When you attempt to create a totalising system, however, you cannot explain everything. There are things that don't fit, that pose a question to your system - how do I fit in? As the system moves to accommodate these anomalies, it becomes more fragile. In addition, the pile of questions grows larger. At some point, the system has to collapse, because it can no longer handle the exceptions, resulting in social confusion. It's also worth noting that in ...

A version of the story can be found here: http://www.authorama.com/english-fairy-tales-30.html The story involves a lazy guy called Jack who lives with his mother. Eventually, she is fed up with his laziness and gives him the ultimatum: work for your keep or get out. So Jack goes off to work. There follows a week of him being paid, but every day losing his pay, and it is always in a consistent manner. For instance, he brings home a cat, but it jumps out of his hands. His mother scolds him and tells him he should have walked it home on a string. The next day, he is paid with a leg of mutton and drags it home on a string, ruining it. Things flip around the next week, however, for the last instruction his mother gave was to carry home the mutton on his shoulders. He is paid with a donkey, which he carries home on his shoulders. On the way, there is a girl who cannot speak or hear, and the doctors have said this will be so until she laughs, and her father has promised that whoever makes he...

A version of the story can be found here (a version of the story is also in Grimms Fairy Tales): https://www.worldoftales.com/.../Russian_Folktale_22.html... The story starts out with the Tsar requesting a flying ship. This image puzzled me a great deal. However, I think it is something like the Tsar asking or looking for a kingdom, a vessel to hold his identity. A ship is generally feminine, and a flying ship is something like a very high version of the feminine. Only a fool can construct such a ship, as the story shows. The reason is that such a kingdom must be able to contain the lowest and the highest. The fool shows hospitality to the lowest person, and it seems that the old man was an angel, who in response revealed how to obtain a flying ship. The impossible task can only be accomplished with heavenly insight. Thus we have the fool, who is the lowest, reaching up to the highest. The ship appears while the Fool was asleep, and in this respect is like the Elves and the Shoemaker: ...

Gnosticism (very roughly) is the belief that the 'spiritual' is uncorrupted, while the material world is fallen. We extend our being through the use of technology. For instance, when you drive, the car becomes an extension of you: you 'feel' through the car. Technology allows us to do more and faster - but this means it also acts as a buffer between you and what you are doing. Your attention to the things on your journeys is more fleeting when you drive than when you walk. Your connection with the world around you becomes attenuated with the use of technology. This is most accentuated with digital technologies, where it is possible to inhabit a virtual reality for hours on end, extending your being to every corner of the globe, but in a severely limited way. It is in this sense that technopoly (ironically, given its intense materialism) favours the gnostic point of view, since it allows the mind to remove itself to a very large degree from the actual experience of physi...

If you come across something strange enough, it will transform your identity.  Emelian the fool was a fool and lazy. He was given the chance to better himself by working, but only after some haranguing did he consent to work. His task was to carry water, but when he drew up the water he also drew up a pike. In exchange for not being eaten, the pike said he would grant any wish. And it was so: Emelian wished the buckets to carry themselves home, and they did. In this, we see the ability of a marginal character, the fool, being able to harness chaotic feminine potential, as there is a closeness between the fool and chaos. It is harder for chaos to get the better of the fool because he is too simple, contains too little higher meaning and thus cannot be easily questioned. And so Emelian becomes the identity that directs the potential whereever he desires, and the carrying of water is a perfect representation of this.  The choice to eat the fish is analogous to naming it, integrat...

  There are various rumours on the internet about ways in which COVID vaccines could cause sterility. Generally, it turns out that these claims are not based on evidence, but the fact that so many people have this intuition makes it interesting to ask why this is so. I think this is due more generally to the breakdown of trust in our public institutions, and more specifically to the desire that is seen, though not necessarily actualised, to make the vaccine mandatory. During the response to COVID we have seen what might be termed an imposition of identity from above, in the form of lockdowns and extremely strict control of the population so that people conform to particular patterns of being, which are apparently intended to control the virus.  The tyrannical imposition of identity from above tends to obliterate the smaller identities below it. It is thus not possible for these smaller identities to reproduce authentically, as they are now, in some measure clones of the higher...

Numbers are immaterial. Numbers are essential for the measurement of physical reality. All scientific principles and discoveries are based on measurement of physical reality. If numbers are a human construct, then all scientific discoveries are also. If reality is only physical, the only means by which you can know this objectively is by immaterial numbers, which is contradictory.  Therefore reality is both material and immaterial.

Image by Jonathan Pageau Every year, when we celebrate one of the festivals of the Church, articles explaining how some tradition or feast day is really not Christian at all and is just pagan. In many cases, these claims turn out to be false or historically tenuous, put together by people who are just a little too happy to take a jab a Christianity. But in other cases, the festival or tradition does reflect and may have originated from a pagan practice. The problem with this is at least two-fold. In the first instance, Christians in the early centuries of the church were so careful to keep their faith pure that, for example, they would not even offer a pinch of incense to Caesar at risk of martyrdom. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that such people would appropriate 'pagan' traditions willy-nilly.  There is also a certain attitude which assumes that Christians had no traditions of their own, nothing to offer the world, and so behaved in a purely parasitic manner. This is manifes...

Tom Holland's book, Dominion, clearly establishes that Christ's death radically changed the ancient world. No longer could the Tyrannosaurus rex approach of the ancient empires, whose modus operandi was to despise the weak and praise the strongest, be practiced openly. Rene Girard argues that instead, power must now be disguised with some Christian virtue. This is what he takes to be a central meaning of Antichrist: something that tries to appear like Christ, but is inwardly demonic.  It should go without saying that the secular world displays antichrist characteristics all the time, but most clearly and recently in the form of social justice (or responses to COVID). This takes the form of elevating the care of some particular group and identifying the source of the oppression, then seeking to eliminate it. This is scapegoating, loading one group of people with collective sins (real or imagined) and immolating them to remove their oppressive influence. It is clear that that pow...

I hate to say it, but almost every time I see a secular person comment on religion like the above event, it's a revelation of ignorance. The reason why there are all kinds of weird and wonderful things *in the margins* or *on the edges* of medieval church architecture and fittings is because they are the fringe things. They aren't the things that should be the central focus of attention. You will not find these things associated with the 'heart' or centre of a church building. But they exist, so they need to be portrayed, since medieval churches were intended as 'microcosms', that is, miniature representations of the entire universe. Once this is said, the headline above looks stupid. Medieval people could deal with sex and idiosyncratic or aberrant behaviour more sensibly than we can. Our modern focus on control and purity (especially moral) means we leave nothing alone, and therefore go a bit kooky when confronted with things that cannot be rationally explaine...