The Golden Chain

“The philosophers who influenced Suhrawardi came from pre-Islamic Persia, ancient Greece and Egypt. Together their ideas formed a potent blend of Zoroastrianism, Plato and the wisdom traditions of Alexandria, what Suhrawardi called a ‘philosophy of light’, a tradition of esoteric metaphysics that was handed down from sage to sage, Suhrawardi believed, through the ages. In 1186 Suhrawardi tried to capture its essence in Hikmat al-Ishraq, translated, as mentioned, as Oriental Philosophy and also as The Philosophy of Illumination, the book that set [Henry] Corbin on his hermeneutical quest. Suhrawardi wrote of an initiatic chain, a school of adepts reaching back into the dim past, and which included the fabled Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and others. All were informed by the same primal revelation, the prisca theologia or ‘primal theology’, which it was his task to resurrect.”

~ Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36086531 

“Throughout their lives W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung sought out precedents for, and affinities with, their visionary — their daimonic — standpoints. Between them they uncovered and studied just about every major proponent of our tradition. This is not surprising, because it is a feature of the tradition that it threads together all who discover it, to form a series of historical links. The alchemists called it the Aurea Catena, the Golden Chain; and to grasp one link is to be connected to all the others.”

~ Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/920181.Daimonic_Reality 

Perennial Philosophy and the Golden Chain

“The Renaissance magi consciously placed themselves in a tradition which harked back, as they thought, to the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Orphics and Pythagoreans – essentially the same tradition as the Golden Chain of alchemy which anticipated the Romantics from Goethe, Schelling and Coleridge, for example, to W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and C. G. Jung. Whatever the differences in their expressions of the tradition – this ‘perennial philosophy’ – certain tenets (if I may recapitulate for a moment) remain constant: that the cosmos comprises a system of correspondences, notably between microcosm and macrocosm; that the cosmos is animated by a world-soul which links all phenomena together; that the human soul is but an individual manifestation of the world-soul; the chief faculty of the soul is imagination; and that, finally, the experience of personal transmutation, of gnosis, is of the essence.”

~ Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/664216 

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Image: Gold jewellery / Terabass / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0.