Gangleri – bookreviews

But creation or radiation implies separation, and it is this ontological separation from the Source of all goodness that constitutes evil.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr in The Heart Of Islam

One would think that the cycle of revelation would have been terminated in the Axial Age. But the decadence of the Greek and Roman religions around the Mediterranean Basin and the weakening of the northern European religions created a vacuum that only a new revelation could fill.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr in The Heart Of Islam

The essential question to be asked is whether the traditional form one is thinking about does or does not, under present circumstances, actually provide the means for taking a man all the way in the spiritual life or not? In other words, are the formal limits such as to leave an open window looking towards the formless Truth, thus allowing room for the possibility of its immediate or ultimate realization? If the answer is in the affirmative then that form, however degenerate it may have become, must still be admitted to be adequate as regards the essential, which is all that, rigorously speaking, matters; if on the other hand that form, however pure it may have remained as regards its more peripheric aspects, does in fact fail to pass the essential test, then there is nothing further to be said in its favor.

Marco Pallis in Some Thoughts on Soliciting and Imparting Spiritual Counsel

The initiatic path is active by definition and therefore an active attitude, in the face of difficulties that might even outlast a lifetime, is the proper prelude to entering that path—herein is to be seen the difference between hope, in the theological sense, and mere desire. The true seeker does not only wait for Grace to descend upon him but he also goes out to meet it, he knocks continually at the door, while at the same time he accepts delays not of his own making in a spirit of submissiveness towards the Divine Will, whether this shows itself in bestowing or withholding.

Marco Pallis in Some Thoughts on Soliciting and Imparting Spiritual Counsel

For any human being, his “traditional attachment” can be regarded as a minimum condition defining him as human

Marco Pallis in Some Thoughts on Soliciting and Imparting Spiritual Counsel

For a tradition to fulfill its purpose in any given case, it must be “viable” in relation to the circumstances of the person concerned, that is to say it must be sufficiently accessible in time and space, as well as assimilable in itself, to render participation “operative.” It would, for instance, be useless to try and attach oneself to an extinct form such as the Pythagorean tradition; and even with a still extant form such as Taoism, it would be practically impossible to establish contact with it, save by rare exception, because of the immense physical and psychic obstacles standing in the way of any Occidental who wished to resort to a Taoist master—always supposing that such is still to be found hidden in some remote corner of the Chinese world, which today is not easy to prove or disprove.

Marco Pallis in Some Thoughts on Soliciting and Imparting Spiritual Counsel

Most of these people spend their lives in mosques and zawiyas sitting beside the Divine bride (the Truth, al-haqîqa), but alas they sit with her back to back!

Muhammad at-Tâdilî (quoted in The Essential Titus Burckhardt)

Consequently, we no longer know what men and women are, When hurricanes were named after women only, this represented a knowledge that stretched back to the beginning of the human race, a knowledge the Hindus designate by the word Shakti: the feminine, self-manifesting power of the Transcendent God. (The Hebrew Shekhina, the glory of God as revealed in the tent of the Tabernacle of the Temple at Jerusalem, carries the same basic idea, and is probably etymologically related.) Power appears in the form of vibration; light, sound, the waves of the sea, the cloud rippples in a mackeral sky. And so does Shakti. Every god in the Hindu pantheon (as well as the Egyptian and the Greek ones, and many others, under different names) was paired with his Skakti, his female consort. The English word “wife” is cognate with the word “vibrate, vibration,” with the German weib (woman), and also with “wave” [...] But now we have things like “Hurricane Larry”; In the name of a meaningless and childish idea of “sexual equality,” as well as fear of anything even remotely suggesting romantic heterosexual love, we have unknowingly destroyed a profound symbol-system stretching back to the dawn of human history. And this is exactly what is to be expected at the tail-end of the Kali-Yuga: as polarity is a clear sign of the pralaya, the dissolution of the manifest world.

Charles Upton in “Folk Metaphysics” page 20/1

There are certainly many remnants of Paganism and folk magic in traditional English, Irish and Scottish ballads, [...] and I wish the cultural historians, folklorists and mythographers all the luck in the world in their attempt to unearth and analyze these fragments. But I am not on the trail of the remnants of Paganism, but of what Paganism was when it was a living religious universe: not the bones of the ancestors, but something older, and deeper – and also newer: one more unique rendition of the sophia perennis, the perennial wisdom of the human race.
Charles Upton in Folk Metaphysics p. 129

The mystical truth which is realized in the sage is virtual in the folk. If the folk are the field, the sage is the fruit of the tree which grows in the center of it, a fruit which, even as it takes its place in the eternal domain of God’s attributes, also cyclically returns to the fields from which it grew, via its seed, to propagate wisdom.

Charles Upton in Folk Metaphysics p. 54.