Did you know that English is the only language in which the 1st person singular pronoun is capitalised? I only learned this recently and haven't confirmed it but, according to my limited knowledge of other languages (je, ich, yo, io, ego), it appears to be true. It undoubtedly has some significance, reinforced by the fact that the letter 'I' is like the numeral 1.
The significance, as I see it, is that the English-speaking peoples were those who were most conscious of themselves as individuals and, by extension, most concerned with personal liberty. These are actually highly spiritual matters because individuality is what makes a created being start to become a god in its own right and the sense of personal liberty is what gives a material being release from the control of matter into the freedom of spirit. This is why the Creator created, to make, to put it somewhat naively, friends and companions as opposed to mindless slaves.
Now, the process can go wrong. If individuality becomes important for its own sake and seeks to serve itself rather than God it has, so to speak, gone bad. But if it aligns itself with the creative purpose of the universe and seeks harmonious interaction with other individuals, it is carrying out God's will and furthering its own spiritual fulfilment.
By this line of thinking it would be no accident that English became a kind of universal language in the 19th and 20th centuries and continues to be so. The gift of individuality, hitherto present but relatively undeveloped, spread throughout all the nations of the world. This was a major step forward in human evolution. Now what is needed is for this individual sense of self to connect with the greater Self of the universe. Having become conscious of itself it needs to learn to go beyond itself but it could not do this without first knowing itself. It is the sense of separation that allows for fully conscious union.
I is the basic reality if the universe. It is how God would describe himself. I, the 1 without a second. It is what consciousness reduces to. The eternal subject. God's great gift to his creation was to bestow his supreme sense of self on us human beings so that we could become like him. This is what being made in his image means and it is an idea expressed in English more fully than in any other language. This was the task of the English speaking peoples, to give the world a full sense of what it is to be an individual.
That's a very interesting thesis - and I think it is probably true. It chimes with some things I have read by Steiner, Barfield and in a rare but very interesting book I reviewed on Albion Awakening:
ReplyDeletehttps://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2016/08/women-and-english-spirit.html
Interesting that "I" is homonomous with "aye," which can mean both "yes" and "evermore."
ReplyDeleteI really don't think these things are accidents or coincidences any more than the striking parallel between 'sun' and 'son'. The significance of the Word extends further than we might think.
ReplyDeleteThe opposite polarity to the Materialists at the moment are the “spiritual -but-not-religious” people. They romanticize Gaia, indigenous peoples, and the ‘compassionate’ feminine. They see the Christian Bible as a wicked concoction of Male Supremacy and so on. So, you have said what IMO such folks need to hear: “Having become conscious of itself (the I) needs to learn to go beyond itself but it could not do this without first knowing itself. It is the sense of separation that allows for fully conscious union.” This is such an important point – and I thank you for articulating it so simply and clearly.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Isbe. The spiritual but not religious path is very tempting because it appears to offer all the joys of spirituality but none of the responsibilities and none of the demands to sacrifice, to take up the cross you might say. But it never goes beyond the creation even if the part of the creation it goes to is the psychic, non-physical part. The real spiritual is not simply the non-material or the demons would be spiritual. It is God and God told us what he is through the Incarnation.
ReplyDeleteExcellent initiative in reconquering the symbolism which is so vital to reality, and not, as popular Christians might do, an extroverted hubris which stresses self-effacement.
ReplyDeleteBloody spellchecker kept bringing this up. I was in the process of 'ditching google' anyway.
ReplyDeleteEnglish has some magical qualities to it, literally.
It makes sense that whatever seems to become the 'dominant language' is affected by wyrd processes. Hard to keep tabs on that process though since it happens in dozens of places at once.
I do doze off into dreamworlds now and then when a dutch alternative history novel comes into focus. The dreams can be very enticing;
Not because of unbridled nationalism, but the freedom and possibility my little country represented back then, and still does. Nautic words entering global dictionaries stem from that.
We had to fight wars against 4 countries at once multiple times, had a prince desert into the first central bank in history, and alternative history novels make me sad now.
None of this matters in the grand scheme of things obviously, but the spirit of life took a wrong turn in the last couple hundred years.
I had a strange attraction to the Cathars long long ago, before understanding what that could possibly mean. Different language but some similarities to be had. Same speech towards the world. Despite my romanticizing my nation, i can feel about it whilst staying stoic.
Language now being 'solved' by apps and google and such will enable us to order a hotel room, but never understand the lands and culture. English is my favorite language by habit, yet i recognize it is the most meddled with. And i lack idiom to be a poet or even script-writer. I would like to figure out English magic. I think Dutch is a better version of German but it will never be a global thing in this universe. So lets make English better then it used to be ;)