In its later articulations, the legend of the holy grail is an essentially ecclesiastical myth. According to these iterations of the tale, the grail is identified with the chalice from which Christ drank at the last super and into which his blood spilled later as his side was pierced on the cross. Likewise, these versions …
Marcus Manilius’s Astronomica is one of our oldest and most detailed historical sources for how ancient astrologers conceptualized the twelve places. Manilius is believed to have composed this work in the early first century, probably around 14 A.D.1 In contrast, Valens, whom astrologer Chris Brennan acclaims as “the single most important surviving source for studying …
The Timaeus is one of Plato’s most historically influential dialogues, because it, unlike the others, was translated into Latin1 and preserved in the medieval world. Yet it is also one of the hardest to understand. The bulk of this “dialogue” consists of a monologue by Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher from Locri, who tells an imaginative …
In my previous essay, I examined Plato’s four arguments for the immortality of the soul set forth in The Phaedo. Through these arguments, Plato sought to justify a rational faith in the soul’s immortality. Yet Plato did not restrict himself to this rational approach, but also attempted to construct a mythological philosophy to bolster our …
The Soul and its salvation are central to various systems of religion and esoteric philosophy. Yet, despite its centrality, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is often implicitly assumed rather than explicitly argued for. Plato’s Phaedo, which recounts Socrates last dialogue before his execution at the hands of the Athenians, makes an important …
The twelve signs of the Zodiac are fundamental to Western Astrology. Each sign is identified with a thirty degree segment of the ecliptic, the sun’s apparent path through the fixed stars, and is said to signify various states of affairs.[1] A sign is, as St. Augustine observes, “a thing which, over and above the impression …
“No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre… not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet.”—Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The concept of the Ascendant is pivotal to Western Astrology, representing the Eastern horizon over which planets and stars step forth into visibility. It marks the boundary …
This essay concludes our discussion of the Republic by elucidating Plato’s closing arguments for the contention that justice is an intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, good. After setting forth a taxonomy of constitutions and the types of individuals that correspond to them, Plato is now in a position to return to the central question of the …
This essay explores Books 6-7 of The Republic and explains Plato’s theory of the forms through his famous analogies of the sun, the divided line, and the cave. Plato’s theory of forms is an extension of the older Pythagorean view that the visible world is grounded in an unseen world of number. One villager, for …
This essay examines books 5 and 6 of Republic and explicates Plato’s notorious doctrine of the philosopher king. Near the end of book 5, Socrates is asked whether the ideal city sketched so far is politically possible. Is it a city that can exist in the physical word like Athens or Sparta or is it …