Though you didn’t state it explicitly, it sounds to me - particularly since you started by presenting the context of moving into 2025 - that you take these lines from Savitri as having something profound to say about this “moment in time.”
If that is the case, I see it much the way you do.
“Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom [..] there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labours quarried the stones which Michelangelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.”
This hideous wolf, referred to by the masterful Tawney (Religion And The Rise of Capitalism, II.1, 1922, p.76) is obviously:
“«Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe!», cominciò Pluto con la voce chioccia; e quel savio gentil, che tutto seppe, disse per confortarmi: «Non ti noccia la tua paura; ché, poder ch'elli abbia, non ci torrà lo scender questa roccia».” (Inferno, VII.1-6)
One has to wonder still, as much as we insist in descending the abyss, whether it was entirely necessary after all, or in any case unavoidable, to have “emptied religion of its social content and society of its soul.” No study of history has ever proved it in the affirmative, and we will soon discover why.
Though you didn’t state it explicitly, it sounds to me - particularly since you started by presenting the context of moving into 2025 - that you take these lines from Savitri as having something profound to say about this “moment in time.”
If that is the case, I see it much the way you do.
I did refrain from making some implications explicit.
A wise move:>))
“Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom [..] there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labours quarried the stones which Michelangelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.”
This hideous wolf, referred to by the masterful Tawney (Religion And The Rise of Capitalism, II.1, 1922, p.76) is obviously:
“«Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe!», cominciò Pluto con la voce chioccia; e quel savio gentil, che tutto seppe, disse per confortarmi: «Non ti noccia la tua paura; ché, poder ch'elli abbia, non ci torrà lo scender questa roccia».” (Inferno, VII.1-6)
One has to wonder still, as much as we insist in descending the abyss, whether it was entirely necessary after all, or in any case unavoidable, to have “emptied religion of its social content and society of its soul.” No study of history has ever proved it in the affirmative, and we will soon discover why.
Thank you as always!
There unreality was Nature’s lord:
It was a space where nothing could be true,
For nothing was what it had claimed to be:
A high appearance wrapped a specious void.
Yet nothing would confess its own pretence
Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:
A vast deception was the law of things;
Only by that deception they could live.