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Early Spring, 2014. In the garden, the tall, old, Cherry tree is once again in bloom: from bursting buds to a dome of white within three days. Such a reminder, each Spring, of how so very numinous so many aspects of Nature can be when we, relucting, rise above such selfish self-absorption as keeps us beasts within. Such beauty, harming none. Such beauty to pause my life at least for a moment: one moment of innarrable sadness brought forth by so many aspects of my past.
A Vagabond In Exile From The Gods
A pdf version of my now defunct davidmyatt dot info website (as of February 2024) is available enabling the complete site to be accessed, and searched, by means of a stand-alone pdf reader or by opening the file in a web-browser such as Firefox.
Website: Portable Document Format
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Image credit:
κρατῆρ ἡ μονάς, Tractate IV, Mercvrii Trismegisti Pœmandres, Paris (1554)
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What have we in over four and a half centuries to compare, in terms of presencing the numinous, with Missa pro defunctis by Francisco Guerrero? Perhaps some music by JS Bach?
Here I am almost half a century since I as part of a choir sang in a public performance of Mozart’s Requiem having possibly in those intervening years learnt some things about myself and about our human nature. Who reads, who even cares about such pathei-mathos? Yet such numinous music remains to remind, if only a few, while we en masse as a species seemingly move on to new diversions which betake us further and further from such presencings of the numinous as may ineluctably change and rebirth us as individuals.
David Myatt
September 2023
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The following is taken from a handwritten letter I wrote in 2002, addressed
to an Oxfordian friend who later transcribed it.
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The Greatest Joy,
The Greatest Sadness
It is a very cold day at the start of my second week living in this tent. Last night it was so cold that there was ice on my beard and the inside of the tent, and I could not sleep. Warmth came only by walking to the top of a nearby hill, hours before dawn. But it was good, to be there, in the frosty silence, viewing the dome of stars and wondering about our future as a species. Will we be ever be “out there” – among those stars? Will we ever reach the worlds around, the life upon, some of them? This prospect, the very stars themselves, certainly put our petty personal and Earth-based squabbles into perspective.
As for myself, the days of coldness have worn me down, a little, and I am again like I once was, decades ago, at peace in my homeless world: enjoying the simple joy that a warming mug of tea brings when I sit, on a plastic bag, outside my tent and listen to the silence. There is plenty of time to reflect upon the past. I have been both above time and in time – to use the words of Savitri Devi – enjoying and seeking violent action-in-the-world, and the challenges and stirring of the blood, the soul, that such action, born of duty, brings, and yet also seeking and finding a beauty, a contentment – at least for a while – in peaceful, numinous Nature, while always in the past returning, in some way, to the struggle because this struggle vitalizes, making me treasure even more the beauty, the numen, of the world. Never sufficiently against time to remain with action, and yet never sufficiently above time to scorn the doing of deeds.
There is beauty, certainly, here in this coldness and rural place where my every breath can be seen and where I have to stop often to warm the hand which holds this pen. There is certainly an intimation of such beauty, such numinosity, in some women: a beauty which many times has brought me to tears as I shared with a woman one of those sometimes strange wordless moments when, together, we become more than we are, were, as individuals, as if, together, we are an intimation of the stage of human evolution which awaits. I often feel that some women embody the beauty, the numinosity, the joy, the sensuality, of Nature; as if they are Nature made manifest – an aspect of Nature’s living being, a presencing, and one which, alas, so few it seems seem to know let alone appreciate.
And yet: I have always returned to this other, ordinary world of involvement, of action. Was it only duty – a duty to strive to make my vision of a better, more empathic, more honourable, world real – which drew me back? Or was it also that by so returning I knew, and treasured this other, numinous, world which one day we might make real here on Earth? Was this a knowing as when we have loved one person so deeply we miss their very presence and only realize how much we loved them, needed them, should have treasured them, when they were gone: when for some reason – often our own fault – their love for us was no more and we had to learn to be alone, again?
Will I ever, for more than a few months, a few years, and as I often dream and desire, live only in the world of the numen? Will I, for this, need to be alone, isolated, as I am now? Distanced from people by a physical distance, a rural isolation, and distanced in my very being, as if I am some strange alien from another world who finds it difficult to be enclosed in some city or some town or even a vehicle and who, many times, can only be with people for a limited time since I often feel their feelings, their sadness, their hopes, their joys, their anger, their despair, as if they are my own. And if I do so live, in, with, the numen, will it be because I have turned away from duty – too old and burdened by sadness to care about the world – or because I have truely transcended to that compassion, that understanding, that species of time, which, being acausal, is the real genesis of genuine change?
Such ramblings, created by days alone. And are you now my random audience? And do you mind? How many years – well over a decade – since I, by the public then unknown, stumbled into you in the Classics Bookshop that hot humid Summer day in Oxford when the very air sweated us and we went to sit, tree-shaded, by the river to talk of books read, music heard? How many sultry nights since that concert of Vivaldi’s Gloria, shared? How many lives have I, you, lived since then? How many stored feelings, impressions, images, memories, waiting for some means of release? How many regrets of what might have been?
I have no music now – no Bach, Brahms, Schubert – to connect me to that world which entwined us then, that Summer, with its intimations of the greatest sadness, the greatest joy; but there are memories, yes there are memories which bring the tears of such sadness and joy and which remind me of how much I do not know, how many times I have been wrong, and of how far we all have to go to reach where we can reach given the faculties of empathy, reason and honour which we can and indeed must develope. Mea culpa; mea culpa; mea maxima culpa.
I am so cold now I have to move, and will walk the many miles to post this letter while the daylight lasts…
David Myatt
Selected Letters of David Myatt
In context, the first two letters in the collection were written during the period, January to just past the Summer Solstice, spent as a vagabond in the county of Westmorland in 2002. Apart from Bringing Back The Numen, the remaining letters were written between August 2002 and late Autumn 2008 when I lived on a farm and worked on the land in a rural part in England. Bringing Back The Numen was written during a brief period when out of necessity I worked in an industrial concern and lived in a nearby town. Such letters, and such working on the land, were the genesis of what became, post 2012, my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, qv. Development Of The Numinous Way
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Nearly a decade ago I considered a particular question: what opinion would a hypothetical visiting alien from another star-system form about us? [1] My answer was that the alien would consider us an aggressive, still rather primitive and very violent, species best avoided until such time as we might outwardly demonstrate otherwise.
Subsequent to that I pondered four related questions. First, is there any land on planet Earth, any of what are now called countries and nations, that over the past three thousand years that has not been fought over or subject to the clash of opposed armed violent groups of mostly men? Second, how many countries or lands now, for whatever reason or because of whatever excuse or whatever supra-personal causal abstraction, are not the subject of some armed conflict domestic or foreign? Third, how many countries are still plagued by homicides, robbery, theft, fraud, rape, domestic violence, subsuming hatred, poverty, dishonesty, and corruption political or otherwise? Fourth, have we as a supposedly consciously-aware species capable of reason and of honour [2] learnt anything from thousands upon thousands of years of such conflict, hatred, and such violence personal and impersonal?
In seeking answers to such questions I was and am painfully aware of my own, decades-long, past of violence, extremism, conflict, intolerance, hatred, incitement, and selfishness. Of whether my own fallible ‘learning from experience’ and attempt at expiation, as manifest in my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, [3] has any meaning or relevance external to myself.
But that weltanschauung is all I have in answer. The answer of a personal, a non-interfering, empathy, compassion, humility, and of a personal honour in the immediacy of a living moment. [4]
Will we, can we, as a species change? Evolve away from the violence, the mistakes, the hatreds, the dishonours, of our past and of our present?
David Myatt
July 2023
[1] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/non-terrestrial-view.pdf
[2] Sophocles, Antigone, v. 334 & vv. 365-36:
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλε […]
σοφόν τι τὸ μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχων
τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει
There exists much that is strange, yet nothing
Has more strangeness than a human being […]
Beyond his own hopes, his cunning
In inventive arts – he who arrives
Now with dishonour, then with chivalry
[3] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf
[4] Honour, The Numinous Balance, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/honour-the-numinous-balance/
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Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
Beside the stone wall that marks one of the boundaries of what has for several years been my home is an evergreen Oak; almost a dome of spreading branches and so tall it might well be an hundred or so years in age. The tallest tree around from near where several other and various and tallish specimens of arboreal life provide perches for those whose Dawn Chorus becomes, was, is, a hymnal to such natural Life as has for centuries pleased us.
Two months ago, the Oak was sad; with leaves dry and dying and infested. But now, as clouds break to reveal sky-blue, bringer of early Summer warmth: the tree has that light green of leaf rebirth, and catkins heralds of acorns an English season hence. So there is joy within as this aged man “his foliage drying up and no stronger than a child, with three feet to guide him on his travels, wanders – appearing a shadow in the light of day.” [1]
Would that he might hear one more Dawn Chorus to so remember those, these, simple natural beauties of life which he as so many others so easily forgot enwrapped as he, they, were in believed in, in felt, selfish concerns which all will, must, die with us while the Sun again warms each year as it warms and life-sprouting rain seeds rebirth without any interference from us at all.
So I sit, windows of sky and trees to enlighten again my life, listening to a heartbreaking, suspended moment in my measured out so very limited timespan of causal life: the 12th century Cistercian Répons de Matines pour la fête de sant Bernard.
DW Myatt
6th June 2023
[1] τό θ᾽ ὑπέργηρων φυλλάδος ἤδη κατακαρφομένης τρίποδας μὲν ὁδοὺς στείχει, παιδὸς δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἀρείων ὄναρ ἡμερόφαντον ἀλαίνει. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 79-82. My translation.
Image credit: The Day’s Consecration – from a painting by Richard Moult
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One of the pleasures I have found in old age – beyond my three score years and ten – is recalling alone or reminiscing to others about times past. One especial memory is of when a younger version of me was cycling home from work one Summer in Shropshire [1] when I chanced upon someone – a celebrated cycling time-trial champion whom I seem to recall at one time held every RTTC record from 25 miles to 12 hours – while he was out training. We chatted as the comradeship of cycling decreed, and together cycled along together for many miles at over 20mph. A pace I intuitively knew from years of competing in local club and RTTC Time Trials.
But then he gradually increased the pace up to almost 30mph until after a few miles I made some excuse and turned left onto some minor road to collapse onto the grass verge. But it was wonderful, lying there, in the quiet isolation of a country English lane with only the breeze rustling trees and birdsong for company. Then, in those moments, that was my simple, my entire, life. If only – if only – it had lasted; if only – if only – I had somehow in some way managed to make it last so that it and similar moments became my life thereafter.
But it was not alas then to be, for I soon, so soon, returned to the world of extremism, of causal abstractions with its dialectic of opposites which so engendered a supra-personal certitude of knowing and the inevitable suffering of others. And it would take some twenty years for me to recall that – and similar – moments again following the most traumatic incident of my life: the unexpected suicide of my then fiancée, genesis as that incident was of my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos.
Mea Culpa; Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa. But even now saying that, and Κύριε ελέησον, out loud does not help in these twilight years of my life. For there seems to be no expiation for my extremist past with its certitude of knowing. A certitude of knowing which is glorified even unto this day by others with their -isms and -ologies and the causal abstractions, the often suffering causing dialectic, on which they are based.
[1] I was riding my hack work-bike; a Mercian 531 frame, Cinelli bars and stem; TA double-chainset; Mavic G40 rims with Campag Record hubs; and – a concession to comfort – a Brooks well-broken in leather saddle.
Orestes and the Ἐρινύες
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It is the hour before Dawn on the Spring Equinox, dark outside, with
the Blackbird in the tree at the edge of the garden already singing.
No other sounds, as yet, and there arises within me questions I have
felt several times in the past few years.
Which are: is what we in a land such as this – a modern Western land
such as England as Spring dawns even within, upon, urban
conurbations – have acquired, developed, manufactured over the past
few hundred years worth the suffering that has been inflicted upon
other human beings, upon our forebears, and upon Nature? Is that suffering the price of such societies as we have developed and now seek to
maintain?
Numerous overseas conflicts; two World Wars with millions upon
millions dead, injured, traumatized, and cities, towns, Nature,
destroyed. Numerous invasions and wars since then. Poverty,
homelessness, injustice, inequality, crime, still within our lands.
Has anything in terms of our humanity, of we being self-controlled,
rational, honest and honourable – of ourselves as causes and vectors
of suffering – really changed?
It is not as if I am exempt from having caused suffering. My past decades long suffering-causing deeds are my burden and will be until I die.
My personal, fallible, answers born of my pathei-mathos, is that
unfortunately we as individuals have not as yet en masse
changed sufficiently so as to cease to be a cause and a vector of
suffering. Tethered as we still apparently are to causal
abstractions, to -isms and -ologies, and thus to denotata and the
dialectic of opposites, to the conflict that such denotata is the
genesis of.
Perhaps we need another hundred, two hundred, or more years. Our
perhaps we will continue, en masse, are we mostly now are,
the eventual extinction of our sometimes stable causal societies of
human beings acausally inevitable, fated; until the planet we call
Earth finally meets its Cosmic end as all planets do, with we human
beings never making real the visionary dream of a few to venture
forth and colonize the stars. And even if we did somehow realize
that dream, would we venture forth as the still savage,
dishonourable, war-mongering species we still are?
Yet all I have in answer, in expiation for my own past
suffering-causing deeds, is my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos; [1]
so insufficient in so many ways.
David Myatt
March 2023 CE
[1] The
Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos
Sarigthersa
(pdf)
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A compilation of some philosophical and autobiographical essays, and extracts from private letters, 2014-2015. It was first published in a printed edition in 2015 and for this reformatted gratis Open Access version I have corrected some typos and updated the references to my translations of and commentary on tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum.
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Image credit:
κρατῆρ ἡ μονάς, Tractate IV, Mercvrii Trismegisti Pœmandres, Paris (1554)
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Memories Of Manual Labour
(pdf)
Geniture of the Weltanschauung of Pathei-Mathos
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Image Credit:
To The Distant One, A Painting by Richard Moult
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David Myatt 
The Dreams Of Strangers
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A reprint of an autobiographical missive from 2010; lost, then forgotten, then over a decade later found again courtesy of a copy sent by a friend. I have slightly amended one of the footnotes.
Filed in David Myatt, David Myatt: Pathei Mathos, David Myatt: Personal Comments, DW Myatt, Pathei Mathos, Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos, Philosophy of The Numinous Way
Tags: David Myatt, David Myatt: Pathei Mathos, DW Myatt, Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos, The Culture of Pathei-Mathos, The Numinous Way, Way of Pathei-Mathos