Month: June 2020
The symbolism of the two solstices, from two-faced Janus to the two Johns
The ancient solstitial cult, centered on the figure of two-faced Janus, was "Christianized" around 850 and included in the liturgy with the names of the two Johns: St. John the Evangelist on December 27, at the winter solstice and St. John the Baptist on June 24, at the summer solstice. On the other hand, the initiatory doctrine had recognized in the symbolism attributed to the Saints a coincidence of images with the pagan divinity, which went beyond the merely occasional datum.
"When the stars will be right": HP Lovecraft between prophecy and Apocalypse
In tales such as "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) and "Nyarlathotep "(1920) Howard Phillips Lovecraft foresaw the crisis of Western civilization that we are witnessing today, a century later: from this point of view, the boundless sequence of horrendous crime reports, spy of a world in prey, should be framed to an incurable and pervasive anguish, in which the seasons have altered their natural cycle and in which wars and revolutions follow one another continuously, throwing humanity into a situation of apparently irreversible crisis, destined to lead, "when the stars have returned to the right position β, in aβ New Dark Age β.
William Butler Yeats, navigator of the Great Memory
Going upstream in the opposite direction, WB Yeats became a bard in an age that had banned all poems, forgotten Arcadia, denied and ridiculed the knowledge of the ancient Druids. His entire work - and even before that his entire existence - was consecrated to a Vision, founded on the so-called "Great Memory", a sort of Anima mundi of the Neoplatonists, "reservoir of souls and images and a meeting point between the living and the dead", which the Seer must access to fill theirremediable distance between the ideal and the real, between the divine and the human.
Underworld civilization in science fiction fiction
The topos of underground civilizations seems to be recurrent in the history of human thought, whether it is myth, folklore, esoteric knowledge, alternative reality or "simple" science fiction, to the point that sometimes it is difficult to label the various versions of the topos in a rather category. than in the other. Here we will deal with the variations of the topos in science fiction literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Abyssal Thought: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Eternal Return
Through the revelation of doctrines such as the eternal return, the death of God and the transvaluation of values, Nietzsche undertakes to show us how only by understanding history as something alive and which constitutes us insofar as we are already always inserted in a historical world, we can have before us a future that is a Future, therefore a future herald of History and not of mere random events.
