The Legend of the Cake-Baking Islanders

or "The king who divined his fortune"

A king who was also an astrologer read in his stars that on a certain day and at a particular hour a calamity would overtake him. He therefore began to stockpile all manner of raw ingredients such as flour and eggs and milk and posted numerous guardians outside, stacking the materials from floor to ceiling until he could no longer leave the warehouse he had built-up. By this time he was beginning to have second thoughts about the whole matter, but he could no longer conceive of any means of escape.

Then one day a Sufi, passing by, looked in through one of the remaining small openings, took in the situation and called to the King:

'Friend, if you wish to escape, you must first of all use some of these provisions to bake me a cake.'

Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics: Book Review

★★★★★ Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf is a fabulous book.

In the late 18th century, what we now call Germany consisted of a great many large and small self-governing principalities and fiefdoms, and the authorities rigidly controlled a great many aspects of their subjects' lives, not least ruling on who could marry whom, or divorce, and requiring permission to travel.

The book is about the lives and works of the first Germanic Romantics, a group of philosophers, poets, artists and thinkers, who gathered for a number of years in the small and relatively free town of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, around the turn of the 18th century, and whom the author terms the Jena Set. These were people like Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling and her daughter Auguste; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Alexander, Caroline, and Wilhelm von Humboldt; Novalis; Friedrich Schelling; Friedrich Schiller; August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel; Friedrich Schleiermacher; Ludwig Tieck, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel.

If there's one takeaway from this compelling and well-rounded history that tells it “warts and all”,  it is that the wonders the German Romantics of the Jena Set wrought so energetically perfectly illustrate that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – in their case far greater – when creative folk come together to chat and discuss a wide, inter-disciplinary range of topics, and collaborate in producing literary or artistic works. All the more so when such meetings of minds are facilitated by someone as intelligent, perceptive, informed and energising as the Jena Set's muse, Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling.

Be Still My Beating Heart: Cultivating Sakina

Well, what do I know, but it seems to me that what the writer, thinker and Sufi mystical exponent Idries Shah was doing was conducting an innovative (or should I say relatively unknown?) experiment in long-distance learning, knowing that most would have no physical contact with a Teacher, knowing that most would not convert to Islam. To re-hash what I've written about in the past, I think that working with the materials (both didactic materials and the teaching stories, which some ignore) works on the commanding self and delinquent or depraved nafs, and the self-accusatory nafs. And I sense that there is then sporadic, but increasingly reliable, activation of the inspired nafs.

However, there comes a point when looking back on the depraved nafs and self-accusatory nafs becomes counter-productive. Even at the stage of the inspired nafs, there is an element of pride involved in what one sees as ones own accomplishments, when in reality these are things which one is gifted. There needs to be a turn around.

The question is (and I think this is a gamble that Shah took) is whether working with the materials, and on ones self is sufficient to induce a self-sustaining reaction and open up the heart, the heart and other lataif, (latent organs of subtle perception), and allow one to come in contact with, and work with, something outside ones limited self; an inner guide, if you like, with whom one may engage in inner dialogue (and here there is common ground with Western esoterica, contemporary depth psychology (eg active imagination), and illuminationism (eg imaginal world, 'al am al-mithal)).

Nile Green’s “Fantastical” Hatchet Job About Ikbal and Idries Shah: Book Review

★☆☆☆☆ Nile Green's “fantastical” book, Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, about Ikbal Ali Shah and his son, the writer and thinker Idries Shah who helped establish the Sufi mystical tradition in the West, comes in the same ignoble tradition as James Moore and L.P. Elwell-Sutton's hatchet jobs, and they will hardly get a footnote in history. Had the author taken a less adversarial and scornful stance and been able to gain the confidence and cooperation of members of the Shah family that he evidently desired and sought, the work, and its sources, might have been greatly improved.

According to a recent and uninspiring review in the New York Times by Robyn Creswell, “Ikbal and Idries are tricky subjects for biography. They kept no diaries and left only scattered correspondence”. And yet Tahir Shah managed to collect and publish an 8-volume set of information to coincide with the centenary of his father, Idries Shah's birth, on 16 June 2024. So a great deal of interesting and useful material has been left out of this work.

The evidence appears very damning. However, with the sparse use of citations, it's difficult to tell where Nile Green's imaginative re-enactment and speculation delivered as statements of fact leave off and where hard evidence begins. This gives the illusion of intimate acquaintance.

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods: Book Review

★★★★★ 444 pages it may be, but I actually gobbled this novel up in one long sitting, putting everything else apart from dinner, coffee, and smokes on-hold. Not only is The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods a page-turner, though, it is so rich and rewarding, with many literary references, and the elements of magical realism are most welcome in this disenchanted, materialist – and hopefully passing – era.

Sure, the work tackles serious real-world issues like alcoholism, domestic violence, and systemic misogyny, but it's full of hope.

No wonder this work (by a previously self-published author) was snapped-up by HarperCollins imprint One More Chapter, and that it has already gone on to sell more than one million copies – a heart-warming and inspiring story in itself.

Will now re-read and savour the book at a more leisurely pace.

The Outsiders

“They were outliers; they no longer cared for the kind of society that would not accept them. Instead, they inhabited a world of artists and free spirits who chose the vicissitudes of a nonconforming life over the comforts and security of the status quo.”

~ Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop.

The Lost and Found

“Lost is not a hopeless place to be. It is a place of patience, of waiting. Lost does not mean gone for ever. Lost is a bridge between worlds, where the pain of our past can be transformed into power. You have always held the key to this special place, but now you are ready to unlock the door.”

~ Evie Woods, ibid.

Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist Rescue Plan

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

In Plato's allegory of the cave, a number of prisoners have been imprisoned since childhood in a cave, chained so they cannot move, nor turn their heads, so that all they can see before them are shadows on a wall, and all they can hear are echoes around the cave's walls, that they take to be coming from the shadows. These shadows and echoes they take to be real, for they have known only these.

Let us say that one prisoner manages to break free from his shackles and looks around. He sees now that behind the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, and that behind that is a bright fire. He notices that people walk behind the wall so that they do not cast shadows from the light of the fire, and that they hold aloft objects or puppets of men and other living things. It is these that cast shadows against the cave wall in front of the prisoners, and which the prisoners have taken to be real, just as they have mistaken the echoing voices of the puppeteers to be emanating from the shadow puppets.

Our books at the the Internet Archive library

All the mystical adventure novels by Etienne de L'Amour, soft sci-fi and psi-fi by H.M. Forester, and some short non-fiction documents by Eric Twose are now available to view, read or download for free at the Internet Archive library: https://archive.org/details/@esowteric?tab=uploads 

Also available for free download at our web site: https://sherpoint.uk/ 

Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (or Rehab?)

 I've just finished reading Paul Robichaud's excellent work, Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return, and it's left me with a great many impressions. Not least: I would dearly love to read an autobiographical account of the pastoral protector; something along the lines of “I, Pan: The true story of a much-misunderstood, maligned, and neglected elder god” (or daemon).

On a more serious note, however:

I gather that the Arcadians, from the Peloponnese region of Greece, were an ancient and simple rustic people; indeed, according to the concept of proselenos, they were said to be older than the Moon, Selene, herself. Hence, by implication, pre-dating the Olympian gods of the Greek classical era.

In his address “On Pan’s Iconography and the Cult in the Sanctuary of Pan on the Slopes of Mount Lykaion”, in which Ulrich Hübinger reports on archaeological discoveries in Arcadia, he asks (given that the first written mentions of the god Pan only begin to appear in the fifth century BCE):

“Does Pan’s strange goatish appearance on Attic vases from Late Archaic and Early Classical times reflect earlier iconographical traditions from Arcadia? Did the ancients picture him in the beginning simply as a goat, which revealed its divine status by walking on its hind legs like a human being? Are connections even to be suspected with animal worship in the Mycenaean age?”

This was the very question I had been asking myself (albeit with scant knowledge or reading of the field, and quite without evidence).

ishraqi institute: Modus Operandi and Raison D’Etre

“I think I'm quite ready for another adventure.” ~ Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings.

In this era of global communications and instant connectivity, we're saturated, even inundated, round the clock by sensationalist news and tempting “fast foods” of consumerism, as well as egotistical, even narcissistic, self-promotion and “media influence”, and drowning in shedload after shedload of information. As a consequence, we are suffering cognitive and emotional overload. I trust that a little hopefully quality “time out” will alleviate that, rather than exacerbate matters, and point you in the direction of others who can offer greater help in what is, as Henry Corbin stated, an ongoing Battle for the Soul of the World. Rather than a course following a logical progression from A to Z, this is a deliberately open-ended exploration, and exercise in mental fluidity, learning as we go along.

The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal: Book Review

★★★★ Crikey, for me it's certainly a “spiritual ordeal” to get my head round Joshua Ramey's The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. Understanding perhaps 0.1% of Ramey's interpretation, I should perhaps have eased my way into the terminology (which often reads like a highbrow wine-tasting review with which I have difficulty relating to the reality of actually drinking) via Deleuze for Dummies, or Finnegan's Wake. I was, however, more at home with the author's scattered references to the art of “learning how to swim”, which was, quite possibly, metaphorically one of the main reasons for writing and having interested parties read this and related works.

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 

Meeting the Shadow: Book Review

★★★★★ Meeting the Shadow is not one of those books to read, tick off the list, and casually cast aside: it's a real eye-opener.

Meeting the Shadow is a potentially life-changing, psychoactive work; a potent initiatory experience; and the first, necessary step on the winding path not toward betterment, godliness or some unattainable perfection but toward more wholeness of being.

As Jeremiah Abrams writes in the Epilogue: “We each contain the potentials to be both destructive and creative. Admitting to the dark enemies within us is really a confessional act, the beginning of psychological change. Nothing about ourselves can change unless we first accept it and grant it reality. Shadow-work is the initiatory phase of making a whole of ourselves.”

And he concludes: “Here is the golden opportunity in realizing the shadow: the gold is in the awareness of choice, made possible by mediating the tension between our shadow and our ego. If we have choice about who we enact in the world, then it follows that we can take responsibility for the kind of world we create.”

Enjoy!