Category Archives: Dante

Dwellers on the Threshold: The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 5-Drawing the Circle

A symbolic representation of the compounds of the human soul as illustrated in the “Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum Et Theosophicum” by Georg Von Welling

 

“For all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding. A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been.”–China Mieville writer of the New Weird genre

The Night Land, a weird alchemical blend of the eschatologies depicted in The Time Machine and the drama of cosmic angst playing out in The War of the Worlds, confects an occult and symbolically analogical landscape of the human psyche.

One of the keys perhaps in understanding the metaphysics behind the nature of the soul as conceived in Hodgson’s literary formulations and even just the basic concept of an “Electric Circle” in The Night Land in the first place, is, as we hinted previously in this series, probably found in Marie Corelli’s 1886 novel,  A Romance of Two Worlds.

Continue reading Dwellers on the Threshold: The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 5-Drawing the Circle

Ragnarök, Lucifer and the War in Heaven Part 2: Dante’s Lucifer and the Mesopotamian Nergal

CORNELIS GALLE'S ENGRAVING OF DANTES LUCIFER
CORNELIS GALLE’S LUCIFER FROM SAN FRANCISCO FINE ARTS MUSEUM

“Now mark how vast must be the whole of him

To be in scale with parts of such proportions!

If he was once as fair as now he ‘s foul

Yet lifted up his brows against his Maker,

Well should all tribulation come from him:

And what a monster he appeared to me

When I perceived three faces on his head!

The one in front was of a crimson hue…”

From Dante’s Inferno, L.G. White Translation

What in the medieval Hell is going on here!? Is this simply a political satire or an Anti-Trinity of the Godhead as is generally assumed by scholars? Is Dante rather describing a private nightmare he had of the “evil one”? Is he describing something he is under duress or mandate to describe akin to the three faced Baphomet of the Templars? Continue reading Ragnarök, Lucifer and the War in Heaven Part 2: Dante’s Lucifer and the Mesopotamian Nergal

RAGNAROK, LUCIFER AND THE WAR IN HEAVEN: PART 1

Luciferparsons

A long time ago, there is said to have been a war. A war responsible for the fall of gods, (note small “g”) the fall of angels, the fall of Lucifer and the fall of man, the fall of basically–everything.

According to late Brother, Dr. Manly Palmer Hall D.Litt, in his “Secret Teachings of all Ages”, the War in Heaven referred to the destruction of the planet called “Ragnarök”.  He may have wanted to tie the exploded planet event to the Nordic saga of Ragnarök, the “Twilight of the Gods”,  for specific reasons of his own or perhaps for the preservation, or formulation, of a particular esoteric narrative. Continue reading RAGNAROK, LUCIFER AND THE WAR IN HEAVEN: PART 1