
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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Orestes and the Ἐρινύες
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Understanding And Rejecting Extremism
(pdf
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A new pdf of my 2013 text Understanding and Rejecting Extremism has been issued to improve its readability with sub-headings added to the headings of parts two and three to clarify the content, and the Creative Commons license updated. Otherwise, the work is unchanged.
David Myatt
August 2022
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A Non-Terrestrial View Of Planet Earth
(pdf)
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Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
Memory Of A Beautiful World
0
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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 B33 well-broken in saddle.
Filed in David Myatt, David Myatt: Pathei Mathos, David Myatt: Personal Comments, DW Myatt, Extremism, Letters of David Myatt, Pathei Mathos, Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos, Weltanschauung of Pathei-Mathos
Tags: David Myatt, David Myatt: Pathei Mathos, Extremism, Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos, Philosophy of The Numinous Way, The Numinous Way, Way of Pathei-Mathos