Esoteric Coffeehouse

As mentioned last time, I will now talk about the identity of the Navi and their religion from a Paracelsian perspective. Just as a reminder, Paracelsus was a revolutionary philosopher, alchemist and physician living in the 16th century (I already touched upon some elements of his life and philosophy here and here). Now, I’m not saying that Cameron was necessarily acquainted with Paracelsian speculation, but it must be kept in mind that the ideas of Paracelsus had a strong impact on the development of Western culture, though the extent of his influence still awaits research.

One of the first things that you notice about the Navi people is their size. They are approximately twice as big as the ordinary humans. They live in the thick forest, in brotherhood with all animals and plants. They are able to ‘fly’ by becoming one with their dragons and have developed a keen ability of falling from huge heights without really getting hurt.

All these characteristics made me think straight away of the mythology of the sylphs, originating in Paracelsus’ speculations. Paracelsus wrote a strange little work called ‘The Book of Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies and Salamanders and the Other Spirits’. According to the Book of Sylphs, there are spirits in nature which live in each of the four elements: water, fire, air and earth.

The water creatures are called undines (or nymphs), the fire ones salamanders, the air ones sylphs (or sylvesters) and the earth ones gnomes (aka pygmies). Each has its own characteristics and rapport with humans. Of all of these, the sylphs appear most humanly; Paracelsus informs us that they are ‘like men’ except they live in the forest, and are ‘cruder, coarser, longer and stronger’ than the human beings. They have intercourse with men, except, Paracelsus maintains in Renaissance vein, they have no soul since soul is reserved to human beings only. Otherwise, they don’t seem to differ very much from men: they work, eat, converse in similar ways to humans.

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The history of the Knights Templar may be fascinating, but it does not compare with the history of their legend. It is hence regrettable that insufficient research has been done in Knights Templar mythology. Whether the Templars were truly in possession of some wondrous knowledge, the Grail, or they were devil worshippers, we will probably never know. What we can record is what the people believed, and some continue to believe, about the Templars.

From what I have been able to fathom, the Templar-mania is no coincidence. Even during the existence of the knighthood, they were the object of an intense medieval propaganda. At the beginning, the propaganda was positive, even idealistic, initiated by high church figures and popular troubadours. Then, as Philip IV and Pope Clement began to defame the order, the publicity became very negative. The story they told about the Templars resembled a modern ‘conspiracy theory’. In any case, in the 13-14th centuries, the Templars were, as it were, “big news”. Today, books like those of Dan Brown or Michael Baigent only perpetuate a medieval news story.

The positive propaganda was initiated by an influential monk, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. St Bernard was an amazing figure: he single-handedly organized the reformist Cistercian order in Europe, preached the Second Crusade and even arbitrated the choice of the Pope (for more on him, see 1). In addition, St Bernard was a staunch supporter of the Templar order. In fact, much of Templar ideology came from St Bernard’s vision. In 1128, at the Council of Troyes, he penned down the outline of the Templar Rules, which became a standard of chivalry in the epoch (2). Later on, he wrote “In the Praise of the New Knighthood”, which portrayed the Templars as an ideal knightly order that combined military chivalry and monk dedication (3). In his view, the Templars were probably meant to be more than an order – but an archetype of the ‘new knighthood’. In this spirit, he urged the entire European knightly class to join the Templars (4).

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The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a short treatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Tale of the Western Exile”, the story follows the saga of a wisdom-seeker in the “Western” lands (1). In this story of esoteric initiation, the “West” stands as a negative symbol of materialism and bodily pleasure. Suhrawardi was heretic philosopher who was executed in 1191 by the Sultan. Yet, if you ask an average Middle Eastern man today, chances are that he will hold similar views regarding the West being decadently materialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East is remarkable. Yet the views of the West in Europe were often different. Let’s now briefly switch to another mythical tale, this time written on the other extremity of the medieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saint sailed to the fairy islands in the West. The voyage takes him to the borders of Christian paradise whence he must return (2). Here we have a dramatically different view of the West as a spiritual, if real, land of the blessed.

This over-simplistic analysis is not meant to say that the Westerners always looked to the West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicated than this, and they probably go to the core of what we feel about the cardinal points of East and West. They are obviously linked with the Sun’s path in the sky. In the East, the Sun is just rising, foretelling a new day. Hence the East is about renewal, hope, the promise of a new beginning. The West is the mysterious end – the unknown at the end of the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently about the hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.

Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction souls departed after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue to dwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of the Blessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where dead souls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds at the time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’s Island (3).

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We’re barely out of the Chinese New Year and the next celebration is almost here: Valentine’s Day. Since I can’t miss an opportunity to investigate a festival’s origins and mythology, I will proceed without much further ado.

A quick search on the internet will immediately inform you that the Valentine’s Day originates from the Roman festival of Lupercalia. But what was Lupercalia and how did it evolve into our modern Valentine’s Day?

In its classical manifestation, Lupercalia (“The Wolf Festival”) was a bizarre ritual where skimpily clad young men would run around whipping women with goat skin thongs. The women were also almost naked (1). The running men were called Luperci, the wolf people, and were divided into two “colleges” (2). The festival had enough importance to have Julius Caesar establish a third college, the Iuliani, which was first headed by his loyal general, Mark Anthony, of Cleopatra fame (3). The celebration perpetuated well into Christian Rome, before an archbishop of Rome forbade it.

Despite the fact that numerous Roman writers left testimonials about the Lupercalia, scholars are divided about the origins and meanings of this tradition. For instance, it is not clear what god was celebrated at the Lupercalia, if any at all. Some writers associated the celebration with the Luperca, the she-wolf who fed the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus (4). Other times it was associated with Evander, a legendary Greek hero who came to Rome from Arcadia (5). Most often, however, the celebration was associated with the god Pan, or Faunus as the Romans called it (6). In light of evidence, this is by far the most likely possibility.

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It is so bitterly cold outside, that it must be New Year’s Eve. Chinese New Year is here, heralding the year of the Ox. So I thought I’d switch gears a bit and analyze the image of the Ox to get an insight as to what this symbol means and what we can expect from an “ox year”.

Dictionary tells us that the ox is a castrated version of  bull (1). In other words, it is a bull whose wild, unpredictable energy has been converted to useful, manageable strength. Therefore, I will proceed by taking a look at the religious image of the Bull to decipher its general meaning.

Today, we associate bulls with energizing drinks, company logos, the astrological sign and rising financial markets. Chances are, unless you live on a farm, there will be very few instances in your life where you would actually meet a bull. Probably the only places that can still give you an idea of the force and stamina of the bull are rodeos and Spanish bullfighting. Therefore, we can only imagine the type of religious awe that this animal exercised in the early days of human history. The bull was an image of brute, untamable force that could destroy anything or anyone in its path. Thus, it was one of the first, and most pervasive religious symbols of mankind.

The Bull first appears on the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux in France, and most scholars accept that the images implied a cult of the bull (2). During the High Neolithic period, stylized bulls appear on pottery from the so-called Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey (3). In Sumerian-Assyrian culture, god Gugalana, the “Bull of Heaven”, is slain by hero Gilgamesh; the deity was no doubt associated with the Taurus constellation (4). The bulls are also prominent in Egyptian and Minoan Greek culture. The cult of the Apis bull was widespread in ancient Egypt, being associated with the slain god Osiris (5). The Bull also figured prominently in the religion of ancient Crete. The famous myth of the Cretan Labyrinth and the Minotaur must be a pale recollection of an earlier bull-cult. The Minotaur, the half-bull half-human creature destroyed by Greek hero Theseus, appears to have embodied the underworld god Minos, the archetypal king of Crete. Significantly, Minos was the offspring of the love between virgin Europa and Zeus in the shape of a bull god (6).

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