THE GREAT TRADITION
OF BORDERLAND SCIENCE AND
ONE WHO CARRIED IT FORWARD
IN THE FIFTH CENTURY
"To the lovers of the wisdom of the Greeks, any remains of the writings of Proclus will always be invaluable, as he was man who, for the variety of his powers, the beauty of his diction, the magnificence of his conceptions, and his luminous development of the abstruse dogmas of the ancients, is unrivalled among the disciples of Plato."
Thomas Taylor, "The Fragments That Remain of the Lost Writings of Proclus"
"There are many classical scholars," writes Robert Temple, "that the Golden Age of Greece was the only significant era in Greek philosophy. Within this period one can conveniently place Socrates, Plato (427-347 B.C.), Aristotle, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon.
"These brilliant names tend to blind one into accepting the false notion that Greece at any other period in its history was merely second rate in the intellects it produced . . . there is no denying the tendency to ignore or belittle -- even to suppress and deny -- Greeks who preceded or followed the 'Glorious Greeks' who are most familiar to us. It certainly is an embarrassing fact, then, for certain classical scholars to have to face that the Platonic Academy continued to function in Athens for over nine hundred years."
THE ENDURING LIGHT OF THE WESTERN WORLD
And in those nine hundred years thousands of students of Platonic philosophy placed their feet on the path of Divine wisdom and occult science. Plato founded his school in the grove of Academus in Athens around 388 B.C. and taught mathematics, philosophy and occult science there until his death. His most apt pupils carried on, as Temple observes: " . . . the duration of the Academy (apparently on the same site) in Athens . . . for the 916 years of the life of the Academy as a philosophical institution was equal to the amount of time which will have elapsed from the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 to the year 1982. We thus see that Plato's Academy existed longer on one spot Britain has existed since William the Conqueror."
In the Nov-Dec 1982 Journal we briefly reviewed the writings of the French initiate, Louis Charpentier, on the great cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres. There he speculates on the mysterious origin of the sudden outbreak of Gothic architecture in the 11th Century in France, and suggests that the Knights Templars brought the new ideas with them when they returned from the Middle East, the land of Zoroaster. We find the answer in the Annex to Temple's book on the Sirius Mystery, which suggests that Temple himself is a reincarnated Templar and before that a student at Plato's Academy! This is the normal sequence of incarnations as outlined in Theosophical literature and in the Edgar Cayce life-readings, as the Life Wave moves from East to West.
"The Platonic tradition in the broader sense, with its Gnostic and heretical overtones and its myriad manifestations in later ages in such bizarre and fascinating figures as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, John Dee and even Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Leicester -- not to mention the troubadours of Provence, Dante in Italy and the massacred tens of thousands of Albigensians in France, the Knights Templar, and an infinite range of hopeless causes over two and a half millenia, is an agonizing and impossible problem for the orthodox mind, whatever its creed.
"For Platonism in the general sense is a creed which denies creed, an anti-institutional tradition known to those who adhere to it as the Great Tradition. It resembles the Society of Friends (Quakers) [10] in insisting on nothing by way of doctrinal dogma. It is truly free; it has no membership, no tithes, no rules which are enforced; it has no Pope, no Caliph. It terrifies those weaker mentalities which crave a structural belief system; they always try to destroy it, but succeed in only destroying individuals and individual 'movements' within the larger tradition.
A PERSECUTED UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS
"How can any 'intellectual establishment' conceivably admit that this undercurrent of spirituality has flowed outside the orthodox boundaries of the official religion of Christianity since the third century and the time of Origen? And how confess that Proclus, who lived seven hundred years later than Plato, had a mind as luminous in his own way, as Plato's? What happens to the 'hermetically sealed Greek miracle' then? If Platonism is seen to continue as a persecuted underground movement for two thousand years and more, what conclusions must we draw from the supposed openness of orthodox Western culture?
"If our commonly accepted pattern of civilization is seen to be based on a lie, based on the denial of the non-orthodox, the implications are so immense that nothing short of a total intellectual upheaval could result. No person with a vested interest, whether a chair at a university or a weekly newspaper, a large corporation or a television station (or a Diocesan see) would be completely isolated from the results which would follow.
"The results need not be destructive in the sense of a political or social revolution; but they would be more fundamental, and hence more far-reaching in the end. It is fear of constructive change (which means fear of the unknown) which is here involved. These indeed are problems. And they go some way to explain why the reader hears nothing of a great many subjects which have a direct relevance in the matter. One of many such subjects is Proclus. No one dares discuss what Proclus really stood for and what he represents beyond his own specific ideas. Even to raise the subject of a figure such as Proclus is to bring the skeleton from the closet and rattle it with a vengeance."
The liberal Platonic philosophy of Proclus aroused the animosity of the Roman Catholic Bishops of Greece after he took over the Chair of the School from Syrianus somewhere around 450 A.D. He had to flee Athens for his life, probably across the sea by boat, to Lycia, the near west coast of Asia Minor. This part of the ancient world was familiar to him as he had been brought up there by his wealthy Greek parents, in the city of Xanthus.
That year of exile no doubt was put to good use in contacting the Hierophants of the Chaldean and Persian Mystery Schools still active at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. His parents had sent him to Alexandria in Egypt for his higher education. He studied grammar under Orion and philosophy under Olympiodorus the Peripatetic in the "public schools" at Alexandria; but of his private studies and initiations in occult science, nothing is said; for those were taken at Memphis and Thebes, no doubt, where he was sworn to secrecy. But Proclus [11] made no secret of the results of those initiations! These put him in conscious touch with the Masters of the Occult Hierarchy of the planet, and with Visitors from Outer Space.
THE "SONS OF MILU" WERE HIS COMPANIONS
His biographer in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911 Edition) writes: "Proclus led a most temperate, even ascetic, life and employed his wealth in generous relief to the poor. He was supposed to hold communion with the Gods, who endowed him with miraculous powers. He acted up to his famous saying that 'the philosopher should be the hierophant of the whole world', by celebrating Egyptian and Chaldean as well as Greek festivals, and on certain days performing sacred rites in honour of the dead."
Temple says that in his 35 years as head of the Platonic School in Athens, Proclus wrote twelve volumes of commentaries on Plato's philosophy. We are approaching our 25th year as a "professor" of Platonic philosophy, and have a five-foot-shelf of Journals of Borderland Research to prove it. Other literary endeavors of Proclus included hymns to the Gods, seven of which are extant: to the Sun, Helios, to Aphrodite, to the Muses, to Athena, to the Lycian Aphrodite, to Janus, to Hecate -- who appears to have been his favorite. To modern Cabalists Hecate is known as the Queen of childbirth and of witchcraft, but to the Greeks she was much more than that. Proclus claimed he could invoke Her to physical appearance, at least as a cloud of luminous mist. This indicates he had some abilities as a materializing medium, as well as clairvoyant and clairaudient powers.
"As an upholder of the old pagan religion Proclus incurred the hatred of the Christians and had to take refuge in Asia Minor," says the Britannica; but after a year he did return to Athens and stayed there to head the Platonic School for the rest of his life. There must have been other attempts over the years, character assassination, subversive students, legal wrangles, poisonings, etc., all unsuccessful because Proclus had suffered martyrdom in a previous life and had thus earned the right to protection from the Gods.
We learn from Leadbeater's "The Masters and the Path" that Proclus' previous life was as a Roman, Alban, now the English St. Alban. He was born in the ancient capital of England, Verulam, now St. Albans, around 240 or 250 A.D. Manly Hall writes that Alban's parents were affluent enough to send him to Rome to school. He may have met a young French Roman there, Amphibalus. When they returned to England, Albanus chose the military, Amphibalus the priesthood. Church historians claim Amphibalus was martyred because of one of Roman Emperor Diocletian's sweeping edicts against the Christians, the one of 301 A.D. Actually, the edict was Diocletian's attempt to control wages and prices in the Empire, especially the price of food; but his local satraps used the edict as an excuse to settle old political scores. Thousands of liberals, dissidents and religious leaders were rounded up and executed, depending on the religious preference of the Commissar. If the word Christian applied to Amphibalus it was because he was a priest of the Light.
THE HOLY WARS OF 300 A.D.
Today's newspapers are filled with stories of the Holy Wars in Lebanon and the Philippines between Catholics and Moslems, and in Afghanistan between Moslems and Communists. In the early Fourth Century there was endless violent religious strife between the priesthoods and devotees of Krishna, of Apollonius of Tyana (the prototype of the mythical Jesus), of Hesus of the Celtic Druids, of Mithra, and of other sects too numerous to mention. There was no Christian Church until after the Council of Nicea, 325 A.D.
By this time Albanus had risen to the position of Governor of the Works there at Verulam. When Amphibalus was rounded up with other liberals and dissidents there under Diocletian's decree, Alban used his power and position to protect the priest, his longtime friend. This gave Alban's political enemies the opportunity they had been looking for. He was charged with sedition and executed along with Amphibalus and the others. But this effort to bring some semblance of order to the declining Roman empire failed and Diocletian gave up the throne in 305 A.D. at the age of 59; however, Diocletian gave England its first saint and ancient Verulam became and still is the town of St. Albans -- while Alban himself set his feet on the Path -- to re-enter the physical world again 108 years at Byzantium as Proclus, through a Greek mother.
By that time Constantine's state religion had become a political power to be reckoned with. That Roman emperor determined to resolve the endless religious conflicts by creating a state religion; so he called the various high priests together to a council at Nicea to form one. In Oahspe it says that the high priests wrangled together for seven long years before Constantine finally had to knock their heads together" and force them to come up with a state religion, thus the Roman Catholic Church and the compound or composite "god", Jesus Christ, to satisfy the followers of Krishna and of Hesus.
Constantine turned eastward rather than westward, against the tide of evolution, and moved the capital of the Empire from Rome to Byzantium, and renamed that Oriental city Constantinople. On his way from Rome to Byzantium he stopped at Delphi in Greece to consult the oracle of the Gods. For good luck he swiped the holy chair on which the oracle sat while delivering, her messages and took it to his new capital city with him. Manly Hall says the three-legged stool is still on display in an Istanbul museum.
COPERNICUS A NEO-PLATONIST?
The famous Polish astronomer of the 16th Century is likely to have been a graduate of the Platonic school in a past life. He is credited with establishing the Heliocentric system in modern times, with the planets revolving around the sun. This in contradistinction to the Geocentric system of orthodox science and the Church, with the earth as the center of the universe. But Proclus was teaching the [13] Heliocentric system in Athens over a thousand years earlier. It is likely that copies of Proclus' Greek texts were available when Copernicus studied and taught in Italy and thus shaped his radical ideas about the solar system.
Robert Temple tries mightily to prove that Proclus had specific information about Sirius as a binary system and Sun to a hundred suns, but could find no supporting references in the Proclus literature available today. There is abundant proof, especially in Proclus' commentaries on Plato's Timaeus, that his astronomy is surprisingly modern in its understanding of the stars as suns with the planets orbiting around them and also spinning on their own axes.
"Proclus speaks with full authority in insisting that certain invisible heavenly bodies definitely exist," writes Temple. "These bodies are the moons of planets and the planets of other stars." Furthermore, Proclus seems to have an incredibly enlightened view of celestial phenomena in many other ways as well.
"THE MOON IS CELESTIAL EARTH"
"In Book III of 'In Tim.' Proclus says (I, 425) that the Moon is made of celestial earth. Or why does the moon, being illuminated, produce a shadow, and why does not the solar light pervade through the whole of it? . . . we shall find that fire and earth subsist also analogously in the heavens; fire indeed, defining the essence of them, but each of the other elements being consubsistent with it . . . The elements being conceived in one way as unmingled, but in another as mingled, the first mixture of them produces the heavens, which contain all things according to a fiery characteristic . . . for all things are in the heaven according to a fiery mode . . .
"'Hence the fire which is there (in the heavenly bodies) is light; and it is not proper to disturb the discussion of it, by directing our attention to the gross and dark fire of the sublunary region the below-the-moon or earthly region)', And to make it beyond the slightest possibility of misunderstanding, he adds (page 282) that fire in the heavens is 'fire which is not perfectly fire' but rather, star-fire is more properly 'fire which is energy'.
"These conceptions are astounding in the light of modern science . . . Proclus views the stars as congealed bodies in a celestial medium and that between them lies 'fiery matter' which is invisible to us (and that) the planets move in orbits which are clearly conceived as trajectory spaces . . . " ("The Sirius Mystery" by Robert K. G. Temple, 1976)
References
- Temple, Robert K.G. The Sirius Mystery. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976. Print. <http://amzn.to/1uFXPm8> [Re-ed., 1987: <http://amzn.to/1oZG0LL>]
- Proclus, and Thomas Taylor. The Fragments That Remain of the Lost Writings of Proclus. London: Printed for the author, and sold by Black, Young, and Young, 1825. Print. [Digital: <http://sacred-texts.com/cla/flwp>]
- "Proclus." The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. Vol. 22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. 417-418. Print. [Digital: <https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabri22chisrich>]
- Leadbeater, C W. The Masters and the Path. Chicago: Theosophical Press, 1925. Print. <http://amzn.to/1rFLaun> [Re-ed., 2010: <http://amzn.to/Lhqrax>]