Transcription
The ringed planet, the seventh heaven, king of the golden age, old mankind, devouring father, overthrower of heaven, devil. Who is Saturn and what does he want?
This video is going to explore the pagan and later hermetic alchemical symbolism around the god Saturn, who has recently become very popular in conspiracy theory circles, or he's thought to be the principal deity worshiped by the elite. On a symbolic level, that's not absurd.
When we consider the lore, Saturn emasculates his father, the sky deity, rebelling against the old order. The violent overthrow of a reigning celestial father god occurs in several traditions. And it does suggest something like satanic propaganda where the rebellion in heaven succeeded and the devil replaced God.
But even from a non-theological philosophical perspective, reality here is up for grabs. It doesn't depend on a stable transcendent order, but on power. It's a rejection of metaphysics. Saturn then doesn't allow future rebellion, but goes to work consuming his own children. Thus, engorged, his belly is kind of like a symbol for counter-pregnancy. Saturn becomes a false woman. He's pregnant as a consuming tyrant, the opposite of a birthing mother. We have therefore a figure for today's generational vampirism. It kind of serves as a symbol for national debt burdening the young, the prevalence of abortion, abuse, and so on. All in the wake of emasculating the old order, the rebellion against patriarchy.
Saturn will suffer no father and allow no son. He resents all history. He is not a link in a great chain of being, but a perfect isolated individual, last man, the hyperliberal emancipated subject. He is symbolically descriptive of the present moment in western culture. Anti-patriarchy, anti-natalist, feminizing and feminized, generationally exploitative, emasculator and emancipator.
But that's not the real Saturn, as I'll get into. Like his rings, a negative aura has long surrounded Saturn, one that his modern mythographers have picked up on. David Ike, for example, proposes that he is essentially the Gnostic demiurge because it's from the rings of that planet that our false reality, the matrix in which we live, is being transmitted. So, being inside the simulation broadcast from Saturn, we are like the gods inside the belly of the devouring father. Obviously, I don't believe in these theories. I'm discussing them as symbolic recurrence of older themes. You can skip ahead if you're not interested in the modern conspiracy theory element.
Saturn once upon a time was the dominant planet, I would say star, sun in the earth sky. This is a permanent hexagon storm in the north pole of Saturn, and it rotates exactly in sync with Saturn's radio emissions. So a hexagon is also a cube, is also a six-pointed star in geometry. Now, coming from Saturn is a particular frequency recorded by NASA. And what the Saturn rings are, are they're made of sound. There's a thing called cymatics, which is creating patterns purely by sound. And Saturn is therefore, I suggest, a major part of the broadcasting of this fake reality, which we are decoding into a world we think is real, but is actually fake.
Candace Owens, for her part, believes that he is the god of the Frank Sabatians, a transgressive Ottoman-era offshoot of Judaism which has survived into the modern era and constitutes the religion of those in the highest positions of power. Half of the world's jewelry um converted or followed this guy who they believed to be the Messiah. His name was Sabbatai Zevi. Now, Sabbatai means um Saturn. Okay. And by the way, in case you guys didn't know, this is just another fun fact. There is a hexagon on Saturn.
Saturn's modern dark mystique builds on two books: The Saturn Myth by David N. Talbot, published in 1980, and the 1986 Ring Makers of Saturn by Norman R. Bergrund. Talbot builds on Immanuel Velikovsky's theories, arguing that in the remote past, Saturn was clearly visible from the Earth as a fixed point in the sky, being very close to us. Its rings appeared as the outline of an eye, and the planet itself like a pupil, inspiring the concept of an all-seeing sky god. Most solar symbolism would trace back to Saturn as well. The climate was better back then, so we associate Saturn with the golden age. But a cataclysmic event took place and altered our environment, shifting Saturn to where it is currently in the solar system. Bergrund suggested that based on certain photographs of the rings of Saturn taken in the '80s, there seemed to be giant vessels constantly flying around the planet, spaceships upkeeping the rings, in fact, creating the rings, which are artificial. David Ike, in particular, takes up Talbot and Bergrund for his version of history.
Symbolically speaking, this all congeals into a modern sci-fi materialist technological version of the themes already prominent in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, which is what I'm interested in. We should emphasize that the Western tradition long ago rejected the myth of Saturn as emasculator of his father and consumer of his son, as rebel and tyrant. Writes Plato, quote, "There is first of all the greatest lie about the things of the greatest concern, which was no pretty invention of him, Hesiod, who told of doings and sufferings of Kronos at the hands of his son. Even if they were true, I should not think that they ought to be thus lightly told to thoughtless young persons." End quote. Plato's instinct here is to reject these myths as inventions of the poets, providing early evidence for the split in the figure of Saturn that we're going to get into.
Fundamentally, for the Platonic tradition, Saturn is king of the golden age. Interestingly, as concerns the Roman name for this god, in Vedanta, the golden age is described as the Sanskrit Satya Yuga. It's been further suggested that Sat n relates etymologically to the Sanskrit sat, meaning being or truth, which is at the root of Satya Yuga. Saturn then would mean that which relates to sat. The golden age is that age during which persons had direct perception of their own being, felt immediacy, access to the present moment, the gratuity, the gift of present existence. They weren't distracted by their own thoughts. They didn't identify with the mind's activity. They hadn't lost their freedom, their inner detachment from mental content. They had not fallen under the spell of the false eye. Therefore, was it the age of Sat? Saturn is just the primordial state in which one is present to his own being, to the being of the world around him.
Hesiod provides the external view of this joyous inner state. Quote, "First of all, the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like the gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief. Miserable age rested not on them, but with legs and arms never failing. They made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things. For the fruitful earth, unforced, bore them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon the lands with many good things, rich in flocks, and loved by the blessed gods." End quote.
Saturn is essentially a positive figure, therefore representing the primordial blissful state. Contrasting this to the negative association, René Guénon writes, quote, "Nor must Saturn be considered as being solely or even primarily a malevolent power, which sometimes seems to be the tendency, for it must not be forgotten that he is before all else the regent of the golden age, which coincides precisely with the hyperborean period." End quote.
It's important that Neoplatonists or Pythagoreans like Proclus stress that Saturn and his wife Rhea are at one conjoined. If the gods are metaphysical principles and inner states, as they are for the philosophical tradition, this unity between Saturn and Rhea represents that of the male principle, present awareness, the penetrative faculty of consciousness, with the female principle, the field of possibility, dynamism, expansiveness, experience. These are not yet divided as they will be as a result of identifying with the mind's contents when we lose the sense of being.
Saturn's status as king of the golden age corresponds to his being the seventh planetary sphere, the top heaven in medieval systems, prior to the abode of fixed stars and angelic intelligences. Saturn is the seventh heaven, the heavenly sphere of the contemplatives. In the Divine Comedy, for example, Dante places St. Benedict in Saturn. We may understand the state of people who lived in the golden age according to Greek and Indian tradition as equivalent to the state of those saints who accessed the seventh heaven in Christian and Islamic mysticism.
We should note that Saturn is not connected to the hyperborea in Greek sources except implicitly. The hyperborea, or far north, is a paradisiacal realm somewhere on earth. We find accounts of it in Hesiod's Catalog of Women, Pindar's Paean Odes, and Herodotus' Histories. Crucially, it's described in terms very similar to the Golden Age. Seemingly, it's a hidden paradise where the Golden Age never ended. That's the implicit connection Guénon was drawing out in the passage I read. The denizens of the hyperborea live as humans lived in the golden age, writes Pindar, quote, "Neither by taking ship, neither by any travel on foot to the hyperborean folk shalt thou find the wondrous way. Forever in their beasts and hymns hath Apollo special joy, nor pestilence, nor wasting eld approach that hallowed race. They toil not, neither do they fight and dwell unharmed of cruel Nemesis." End quote.
Connecting the golden age to the hyperborea, of course, also connects Saturn to Apollo, as Apollo is the god of the hyperborea, just as Saturn is the king of the golden age. It also provides some warrant for the strange idea that's become sort of widespread that Santa Claus is related to Saturn. The modern figure of Santa Claus dwells in the North Pole, the hyperborea, at the top of the earth's axis. It's like the stable center around which the earth rotates, a place beyond the cycles of history. So we can view the earth's revolutions, the rotating, as analogous to the cycles of history. The North Pole, the hyperborea, becomes the prehistoric golden age, unfallen, but in the midst of history. It's also true that Christmas falls around Saturnalia, the Roman festival honoring Saturn, held in mid-December, as well as near pre-Christian solar festivals, which again insinuates some affinity between Saturn and Apollo.
So the true Saturn is that primordial spontaneous perception of being, the spontaneous understanding that everything has to rest on the absolute, on that which is beyond it. And his war against the Titans, his rebellion, is more about subduing the titanic forces in us. When you become aware of being, when you enter into the present moment through prayer, through contemplation, you begin to gain power over the body's instinct and the mind's constant need for activity. Saturn is rebelling against the Titans as lower forces.
If we reinterpret the myth in a Platonic light, the god's eventual exile to Italy after his son casts him out of heaven, after Jupiter rebels against him in turn, represents our becoming identified with the mind's ever-churning. Because if Saturn is the primordial sense of being, present awareness, Jupiter is the self-reflective consciousness, our ability to reflect upon objects, to separate from and reflect upon our own being, which is wonderful. It's what makes humans human. But it also opens up the door to becoming identified with the mind and losing our perception of our own being, becoming estranged from ourselves. So Jupiter ends up exiling Saturn, and you have the mythic relating of this. Quote, "I remember how Saturn was received in this land. He had been driven by Jupiter from the celestial realms. From that time the folk long retained the name of Saturnian, and the country too was called Latium from the hiding latente of the god." End quote. The primordial state becomes merely latent within us, dormant, such that it dwells in Latium, which for the purpose of this instructive myth is said to derive from the root for latent. The Italians, believe the Romans believed Saturn had been exiled to Latium, the land of the Latins. And once that's happened, once Saturn has been exiled, we stop perceiving reality properly, and we begin to perceive the body and matter as our origin, as our father, a false father, a false being. The body has to consume constantly and eventually falls into decrepitude. And for that reason, Saturn now appears as a devouring time god, devouring time personified. The body is understood as supreme over the inner life, to the point that we now even have modern philosophers of mind that believe consciousness is a mere accident of matter, an epiphenomenon. Matter is supreme.
I disagree with a lot of his worldview, but Julius Evola, in the hermetic tradition, provides an excellent study of alchemical symbolism. So I'm going to quote from it. Quote, "In man, before everything else, there is a celestial being, also called a Saturnian being or simply Saturn. It's through him that the earth force acts, which determines and maintains the density or heaviness, our lead. In alchemical terms, this is the hard and tangible animal body. This entity is seen as the power of devouring and yearning, the root of all thirst and desire. Even though it's the eternal matrix of individual bodies, at the same time, since they are so ephemeral, it appears as the god who, after having created them, devours them." End quote.
Saturn as hard, tangible body corresponds to astrology's understanding of this planet as bringing solidity, concretization, which can be positive, or it can go too far, by the way. And concerning Saturn's duality, Evola also writes, quote, "Thus in alchemy we encounter a duplication: Saturn is the ancient and the divine, and at the same time the inverted gold, lead, the vulgar body." End quote. Once we lose perception of the former, we come to feel the latter is our only origin, in whom we have our being. Of course, we need the body in order to experience the world. This lower Saturn is only a devil when we confuse him for the Saturn of contemplation. When the body's instincts are no longer aligned with anything higher, because we don't believe in anything higher or don't perceive anything higher, they feel like they're supreme.
On the double meaning of Saturn, we should consider his festival, the Roman Saturnalia. Because Saturnalia was precisely a carnival, a ritual of inversion where slaves would order masters about and so on. So it's the inversion from Saturn as contemplation being to Saturn as the lower, the body, matter. Carnival also derives from carne, meat, the body. So Saturnalia serves to illustrate the idea that the true Saturn has been lost. We've inverted metaphysics, whereupon we end up with the meat. The body is supreme. Its instincts hold sway over us, writes Guénon.
We will also mention the Roman Saturnalia, from which, moreover, the modern carnival seems to have been directly derived, though in fact it's no longer anything but a very diminished vestige. During these festivals, the slaves ordered the masters about and the masters served the slaves. One then had the image of a truly upside-down world wherein everything was done in reverse of the normal order. Although it's commonly claimed that these festivals were a reminder of the golden age, this interpretation is clearly false. It's a question of the reversal of hierarchies, which is something completely different. And such a reversal constitutes, generally speaking, one of the plainest characteristics of Satanism. We must therefore see here something that relates much rather to the sinister aspect of Saturn, an aspect which certainly does not pertain to him as god of the golden age, but on the contrary.
There is a true Saturn, the primordial state, and there is the incorrect view of our being as mere body: golden age versus Saturnalia. Guénon describes the Saturnalia as a satanic festival in the sense of inversion, materialism replacing metaphysics, where the body's titanic instincts, the mind's disordered thirst, is best represented by the symbol that's usually attributed to the devil: ground-dwelling, limbless, basic life, a mere devouring head and belly, the serpent, basic reptilian instinct, which is not bad if it's in proper relation to the higher, but it is if it's in rebellion against the higher, detached from the higher. So for this reason, serpents ended up becoming a symbol for Saturn, and he became identified with the devil in a Christian medieval context, writes Carl Jung, quote, "In medieval astrology, Saturn was believed to be the abode of the devil. Saturn is a black star, anciently reputed as Maleficus. Dragons, serpents, scorpions, vipers belong to Saturn," says Bidez in his Greek Astrology. End quote.
Our true self sleeps, and we are assailed by the serpent. The assimilation of Satan and false Saturn also occurs in John's Apocalypse, where the dragon means to consume the child as it is born. So Christ is a Jupiter figure, and the devil repeats the Saturn myth as devouring father, false father.
As a slight aside, Saturn also relates to Abraham, because in Islamic mysticism, the seventh heaven belongs is assigned to this patriarch Abraham. And we indeed find a parallel to the god's myth in the account according to which Abraham was set to sacrifice his son, like Saturn eating his son. But in being stopped by the angel, he comes to represent the correcting of the Saturn archetype. His story illustrates the transition from false father, false Saturn, to true father, true Saturn. And indeed, the father has to be rescued. The true father has to be raised up. We have to return to the golden age, ascend to the seventh heaven.
You can think of the injured king in Holy Grail stories, who's restored by his descendant, the knight Galahad. The king is said to be injured on his side, sometimes his loins. Clearly, there's a symbolic meaning there. Just as Saturn is said to be emasculated by Jupiter when he gets exiled, as he did to his own father, Uranus, making the injured king of the Grail saga a Saturn type, the wound represents the wasting of energy. Let's say the loss of virility and divorce from the feminine principle, Rhea. In biblical terms, Eve came from Adam's side. But now, that coming forth of the female is a wound because we've been alienated from Eve. The present moment is alienated from our perception. Male and female are divorced, which is also the wounding of the new Adam, Christ, on his side on the cross. He manifests the wound of humanity. But then through the blood and water flowing out, the new Eve, the church, his bride, comes forth. This is the Christian symbolism. We also have stories of the father becoming weak or blind. Tobit, in the Bible, restored by his son Tobias. In the Quran, Jacob goes blind and is restored by his reunion with Joseph. We may also think of Aeneas carrying Anchises, his father, who's injured on his side, his foot, out of the burning city of Troy. In pop culture, you have Darth Vader finally reconciling with Luke Skywalker. You get it all over the place. Also in Spanish Reconquista romances.
Evola again, quote, "The golden child is hidden by Saturn behind a black cape. It's the tomb of Osiris, the body turned into the sealer of the living. In Hermeticism, it's never a question of separating from the body in order to escape, but of separating in order to reestablish a causal and dominating relationship of the solar principle, free of passion." End quote. So, we separate from the body because we've become too identified with the body and the mind. But in doing so, we establish our supremacy over them again and then repossess them. We're not escaping the body in a final tragic sense because we reject the physical world or anything like that.
At this point, the myth of Jupiter exiling Saturn acquires a new meaning from the one that we've been discussing before. It's probably clear, but I think these myths have different meanings depending on what phase of the spiritual quest we look at them from. So the separation from the body, perceived as devouring, is represented by Jupiter casting the false Saturn, the devouring Saturn, out of heaven. So now Jupiter is a St. Michael figure. Saturn is a Satan falling figure. But it's not enough to cast out the false. You have to regain the original. Which is why in the Holy Grail stories, you gain the Grail, which originally was a gem on the crown of Lucifer, separated as he fell. It's a piece of heaven that you have to get back. Cast out the false Saturn, regain the true Saturn. And by the way, if you want a rundown of the myth as I would reinterpret it, my own Saturn allegory, you can check my Substack for that. I'm going to publish that there.
Jung writes that Saturn in alchemical symbolism is called the black sun and has a double nature, being black outside like lead, but white inside. That white inside is Eve's golden child. The golden child who must come forth from behind the black cape is the Jupiter who breaks out of the false Saturn's periodic womb, the false womb. And so he's reborn. He overcomes the apparent primacy of the body and the instincts over the mind, the consciousness. Thus, the solar symbolism often overlapping with Saturn, like Jesus returning from Hades in Christian tradition, exposing the lie of Satan's dominion and raising the true father, the original human condition, Adam, from that murky depth. Remember in Christian tradition, Jesus goes to Hades during the three days after the cross and then restores Adam, brings the soul of Adam and Eve out of Hades. So symbolically, the original human state is restored. It's a rescue and a rebirth. The Adam of Eden is the Saturn of the golden age. The Adam that emerges from Hades is like Saturn awakening in Latium.
To the degree that the false Saturn devours the child, the sun covers him with the black cape. He also produces a distorted version of the self, a false ego. Right? So instead of the solar champion of many traditions, you get a negative sun. Plutarch warns that those who equate Typhoeus with the sun should not be believed. And then in the Apocalypse, you've got the angel of the abyss, Apollyon, whose name, apart from other meanings, is a distortion of Apollo. Once the reflexive consciousness, Jupiter, overcomes its false self-identification with thought, it slays the false father, the body misperceived as supreme, comes out of the belly of the false Saturn, and recovers its sense of being, the Adamic state. The true Saturn comes from Latium. We now have the true sun, a solar hero conquering Christ, Apollo, imitatio Christi in the proper sense. We imitate Christ.
So what about the black cube that is so often identified with Saturn in modern conspiracies? Well, the cube has six faces. So that's the six spatial coordinates: up, down, forward, back, right, left. The six points of space plus the seventh center. You can think of the cube as a folded-up cross, the sign of Jesus pointing in the four directions: north, south, east, west, plus a center. The essence is the fifth point in the middle. That's why in Latin you have the term quintessence, quintessence. The quintessence is the fifth essence, the center, physical space with a center. The cube is a Platonic solid. For Plato, the cube represents the earth, the earthly equivalent of the dome of the sky, the heavenly sphere orb. If the cube is isolated from the sky, then it represents the earth as a prison cut off from what's above it. The sphere is thought of as being at the beginning, and then the cube is at the end, writes Guénon. Quote, "At the end of a cycle, the circle is replaced by the square. The sphere, which represents the development of possibilities by the expansion of the primordial point, is transformed into a cube when this development is completed." End quote. So in the beginning you have the sphere, and the cube represents the end, completion, the final symmetry of creation. The traditional theme of history ending with the cube is parodied by the black box of AI as this kind of techno singularity. It's like the dystopian, anti-human bad ending for the timeline, so to speak. It's the parody feminine instead of the earth as cube, as mother earth. Saturn pretending to be the woman swallowing up the child, right? The [ __ ] of Babylon, the perverted feminine. Think of Nick Land in his early manifesto, Meltdown. He really emphasizes the feminization of the male form. Male-to-female transgenderism becomes symbolically significant in phases of decline. Just as a bit of an aside, and I don't want to go down this road too far.
If you conceive of all reality as consisting of a fundamental interplay between these two principles, what process calls pas and aon, limit and unlimit, or expansiveness, boundlessness, the single point of the pyramid and the ever-expanding base, singularity and infinitude as two ways to approach contemplation of God, two principles that manifest in everything, which you can identify with the eternal masculine and the eternal feminine. Then the sphere, the sky, the sky principle, and the cube, the earth principle, are two ways in which these fundamental realities interact with each other. And the first, you have the point that expands, right? The sphere, the orb is an expanded, a dilated point, a single point. The fact that its surface is featureless, you can trace infinite circumferences on that surface. There are no limits on that surface. Signals back to the singularity of the point. But it also expresses expansiveness. You can think of this as the yang containing yin. Masculinity realized through femininity. Masculine limit realized through feminine expansiveness. The cube is the eight directions, the vertices, or the six directions, the faces, right? Spatial possibility, multiplicity, because you have the number six, eight, twelve, but as bounded up space. It expresses plurality, the numbers, feminine expansiveness through masculine limitation, through the finitude, the limit marked by those edges and vertices. Though yin containing yang, the feminine given form to, realized by the masculine. And Guénon identifies the sphere with Eden and the cube with the heavenly city that finally comes down to earth in Christian tradition. So they're both masculine and feminine. It's just that in the case of the sky principle, what predominates is the masculine, the sky father archetype. And in the case of the earth, it's the feminine that predominates, or that is clearest, the mother earth archetype. Sky rains down. The earth receives and gives forth life, like a woman receiving seed and giving forth life. But each contains the other. There's a lot more to get into there. I don't want to, though, because it takes us too far away from Saturn. Maybe a whole video about gender symbolism.
But back to Saturn. Guénon doesn't think the name Kronos derives from the root for time, as in chronology, but was originally a heavenly deity. Quote, "It's only by a later phonetic assimilation that the Greeks identified Kronos with Kronos, time, although the roots of the two words are really quite different." End quote. And even if he were a god of time, it would not be time as a devourer, mortality, but as the eternal moment, the golden age before history, contemplation above the other spheres. Guénon finds the name Saturn, Kronos, in two Greek deities. Quote, "There was a dissociation of the names of Kronos and Karnos, which originally were one. Concentrating this malevolent aspect on the name Kronos, while the benefic, the benevolent aspect remained attached to the name Karnos. Karnos is the god of the K, that is to say the high place, symbol of the sacred mountain or the pole, and relates to the cubic stone. The stone also had a particular relationship with Kronos." End quote. Karnos is a Doric version of Apollo, or a god who eventually fused with the cult of Apollo, the sun god worshiped in Sparta, whose name is linked to Karnos, the ram. He's a horned god. He has the ram horns. He's Apollo with horns. He's a sun god with horns. His festival was the Carnea, which sounds like carnival. It sounds like the Saturnalia, the carnival, but it's a harvest celebration focused on atonement. It's not an inversion festival like Carnival, like Saturnalia. It featured races and other sports competitions, and it required the Spartans to abstain from war.
Guénon's connection between Karnos and Kronos is really his own. I haven't seen it supported anywhere personally in my research. Still, the symbolism is interesting. Viewing Karnos as the golden child of alchemy that rejects the false Saturn, the solar Jupiter. Remember, for Robert Graves, the [ __ ] Jupiter, the bull Jupiter, is a solar god. There's evidence for that. That does make sense, right? Karnos is the initiate who discovers the true Kronos. That's the way to think about it. Writes on, quote, "The name Karnos, as well as Kronos, to which it is closely related, have the same root which expresses essentially the idea of power and elevation. In its meaning, elevation, the name Kronos is perfectly appropriate for Saturn, who in fact corresponds to the highest planetary sphere. The word horn itself is linked with the root KRN, and the same applies to crown. In English, you can think of cornucopia, the horn of plenty, the cornucopia." End quote. Guénon continues, "These two words in Latin, cornu and corona, are very close to one another." End quote. Both the crown with its ornamented spikes and horns are the high place, the summit. They represent also rays, like emanations from the sun or from a weapon. So it's also solar. Crown of thorns. If you think of the crown of thorns on Jesus, it has a solar meaning as well. These are rays. They emanate out. They also, in the case of horns, represent the animal self being tamed and integrated. You're a king because you have subdued the animal self. So you wear its horns.
In John's Apocalypse, chapter 5, Jesus appears, or Christ appears, as the lamb with seven eyes and seven horns. Seven, the number of Saturn. The lamb in the Apocalypse is like the ram, representing Karnos. When we are Karnos, the solar hero reborn, the solar Jupiter who liberates himself from the belly of the false Saturn, we recover our primordial sense of being, our innocence, the true Saturn. You can consider Mithras as well, the solar hero who slays the bull. The story of the so-called two-horned one in the Quran, the dual Qarnayn, who follows the sun to its birth in the east and its setting in the west. Sometimes identified with Alexander the Great by interpreters, is I think a Karnos figure. He is associated with the sun and with understanding the east and the west, which represent birth and death, time, in order to look beyond time, beyond chronology, the devouring time god, and to the present moment, to eternal things, the primordial state, the true Saturn.
Jupiter is the reflexive consciousness, our ability to reflect on things and on ourselves, to kind of unfold or separate from our own being and look at it, which is great, unless it leads to us becoming enmeshed and identified with the mere content of our mind, with our own thoughts. Apollo is the realized personality. Apollo Karnos is the true personality, distinct from the false self. Once reflexive consciousness recovers present awareness, rescues the father rather than allowing mental activity to alienate it from its own being, the mind clarifies. The personality becomes luminous, Apollonian. The hyperborea conquers the world, so to speak, the rest of the self, right? The golden age is restored, but not as an innocent Eden. It dawns on everything we've gained through history. All the knowledge we've acquired, all of the contents of the mind become ordered. New heaven and new earth, as the Bible puts it. These are parts of the human being. They're simultaneous with each other. The idea is to inhabit the clarified mind while exercising the reflective faculty, while remaining aware of that contemplative core.
We could have also discussed these in terms of metaphysics. In Neoplatonism, Saturn or Saturn-Rhea is the monad, is the unity of the One, the transcendent, as it manifests. It's the first hypothesis. And then Jupiter is the demiurge, the active, which contemplating the monad, contemplating its source, is able to produce the cosmos with his female counterpart Juno, who is the receptacle, the matrix prior to the world soul. We would say in Indian terms, sat, being, or contemplative consciousness, chit, reflexive consciousness, and ananda, bliss, or experiential consciousness. But this kind of thing makes for a whole other video. In terms of the Bible, in Daniel's vision, Saturn proper is the Ancient of Days. The dynamic aspect is the Son of Man, the demiurgic, the reflexive. I don't take either of those anthropomorphic images to be God proper, but they stand for his presence, aspects of consciousness. Of course, this is also my interpretation of these symbols. Lot more to talk about there. I also consider Apollo and Dionysus to be two aspects of the same archetype or the same inner process, which Plutarch believed as well. But again, that's for another video.
I cite from different traditions, biblical as well as old myths, because I think that the divine reveals himself in these different contexts. And also because I think you can reinterpret stories in the light of edifying spiritual principles. The human mind is always on some level yearning for the good, the true, and the beautiful. So the stories that come out of the human mind contain that. Even if in a perverse form, you can flip it over. You can transform it. You can find the truth in it. And the ones that became very prominent, defining for cultures in particular, can be, let's say, baptized. It's important to understand the depth dimension, the inner meaning, and also to conquer them on behalf of a righteous culture, perhaps a future righteous culture yet to come. And of course, there's this massive heritage of Hermetic and esoteric interpretation that we can mine, that we can go back to.
Okay, thank you very much for watching. As always, subscribe if you would like to. Very much appreciated if you did. Join me on Substack. You can become a paid member there. You can buy me a coffee. Join me on Twitter. Thanks again, and until next time.