The Seven Deadly Sins Today

The unholy alliance between a globalist capitalism that treats human beings merely as economic units and a leftist ideology that insists everyone is equal is destroying the West, something no doubt intended by their demonic sponsors. The one is motivated by naked greed, the other by envy which leads to hatred as you can easily see by its reaction when scratched or even threatened. These forces are extremely powerful in the modern world, supported as they are by the political system, the media and the establishment in general whose only interest is self-preservation. Even so, they can be resisted, not always outwardly but certainly inwardly which is what matters if one would defend one's soul from spiritual attack. The question is how?

To begin with, do not try to attack them on their own ground. They have sewn up the discourse so if you use their own framework and language to challenge them you will fail as both of these things have been designed to render their position impregnable. You have to disregard the assumptions they put forward as baseline truths and introduce a new approach that starts from a new standpoint, one outside their assumptions. And that is a simple three part question. "What are we, where do we come from and where should we be going?"

Neither capitalism nor the liberal ideology that has given rise to modern leftism can answer any part of that question but until you do you cannot understand how life should be lived. The answer to the first part has long been known but is currently ignored. A human being is made up of body, soul and spirit, and any culture or civilisation worthy of the name must take this threefold being into consideration, dismissing no part of it. Any that doesn't will collapse. And once you have answered this first and primary part answers to the other two parts will follow.

The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. You can see from this list that the primary drivers of the current state of Western civilisation are the second and fourth but pride and wrath are also big motivators for the globalists on the one hand and the leftist activists on the other. Traditionally, greed or avarice is countered by charity or generosity and envy by kindness, and this is interesting because the major players often disguise their true motivations by  exploiting the good in these virtues which they wear with ostentation, so much so, in fact, that charity is now often seen as a form of self-promotion and kindness as a mask for destructive impulses. And while all this is going on, the populace is stimulated by the media to lust and gluttony and a large segment of it by the ruling powers to sloth (ever greater dependence on welfare payments).

It seems that the seven deadly sins are in full play today but when have they not been, you may ask. Certainly, they are always there as a basic part of human nature but they are now often actively encouraged and are becoming increasingly acceptable in our modern world. Is this not yet another indication of the end times? I don't offer this as a black pill as it is termed nowadays but, perversely enough you might think, as a sort of encouragement. The rewards for those who see through the lies and hold fast to the truth will be great. This is the test of our times.

The 2026 Eclipse

On 11th August 1999 there was a solar eclipse which was about 90% of totality in the south of England where I saw it. This coming 12th August there is another eclipse which will again be seen at about 90% of totality in much of the British Isles. The 1999 one was at 18 degrees of Leo and this one will be at 20 degrees of Leo which might seem a coincidence but apparently has something to do with how sun, moon and Earth realign over multi-year cycles.

Be that as it may, there is still a significance to this phenomenon. I have long thought that the 1999 eclipse was an important one in that it heralded radical change. It was the last eclipse of the 20th century, and something really did change with human consciousness in the new millennium. We became different people in many respects, moving from a mentality largely based on past thought and attitudes, though with modern influences, to one where modern attitudes became central and past beliefs moved out to the periphery to become fringe. This change has carried on ever since, not in a smooth and straight line as things never go like that, but with a direction of travel that is unaltered. You might say that this is always the way of the world but look at how so many fundamental beliefs that had endured in various forms for centuries have been jettisoned over the last 25 years. It is quite extraordinary.

Perhaps this new eclipse will bring that particular cycle to an end. Not that we will go back to how we were. That is neither possible nor even desirable, but some kind of change in mental attitudes over recent years might be expected. The end of one cycle means the beginning of another, and there will always be several other processes going on at the same time. Even so, I venture to suggest that, in Europe especially which is on the direct path of these two eclipses, changes might come in the coming months. I am not speaking in terms of improvement. This eclipse cycle, if such it be, is a minor event in terms of the greater descent into the Kali Yuga/End Times phenomenon and the forces associated with that and they will continue to gather pace. But it is still an event.

These two eclipses also interest me because of personal involvement. As those who have read Meeting the Masters will know, the 1999 one coincided with the death of my friend Michael Lord whose Jupiter was on the exact degree of that eclipse. Jupiter in my birth chart forms a very close conjunction to the degree of the upcoming 2026 eclipse. I take that in a positive sense.

Note: I am not saying that it was only the 1999 eclipse that prompted the radical changes that have occurred since 2000. Merely that it may have been one factor among several, and that the new eclipse may be bookending a particular period that started then.

From Siegfried to Tristan to Parsifal

 Last year I wrote a post called The Spiritual Failure of Tristan about the character in Wagner's famous opera. In it I maintained that Tristan represents the failure of a spiritual test though, if failure is too strong a word, one might also interpret the opera as showing how a soul can only learn and grow through experiencing the intensity of desire for perhaps in order really to know the fullness and depth of spiritual love you must experience earthly love in its highest form, just as only a strong self can reap the deeper benefits of transcending ego. To renounce fully you must know completely.

I had forgotten about this post but a couple of days ago someone added a comment disagreeing with my interpretation. I then disagreed with his disagreement, though I wasn't entirely sure on what basis he was disagreeing, but this made me reflect further and I recalled something I had once seen, and maybe even came from Wagner himself, about how Siegfried, Tristan and Parsifal can be seen as the same character at different stages of development. I would like to explore that idea a bit further here.

The premise is that these three characters depict successive stages in the same soul's spiritual evolution. It is already the soul of a hero so not an everyman but one who has been brought to the apex of worldly achievement and is now ready to move beyond that into spiritual consciousness.

Siegfried appears first as a child soul linked to the world of nature and the instincts. Born and raised in the forest, he has no contact with the world of men and lives in a state of pre-conscious innocence. He cannot, certainly does not, reflect because his ego is directed only outwards. He is free and fearless but also insensitive to others and totally ignorant. And yet he is a hero which means he has on some level reached a certain degree of achievement. Nevertheless, he is only awakened to himself by his mountaintop encounter with Brunnhilde, demonstrating how we can only know ourselves and become fully self-conscious through experiencing the other. That is one of the fundamental meanings of the division into two sexes. Siegfried, however, betrays his other half through his lack of self-awareness, and this same lack leads to his downfall and death. 

Tristan is Siegfried reborn. He too is a hero but a more self-aware one. He loves Isolde from the beginning but obeys custom and convention and the mores of society, things that would have meant nothing to the pre-adult Siegfried, until the magic potion breaks down his resistance. The potion, by the way, could just as well be water as it is not magic that makes it no longer possible for Tristan and Isolde to conceal the truth of their love but the belief they are about to die. 

Henceforth, Tristan is consumed by passion, first the passion of Eros and then the passion for Thanatos. This passion is so intense it reveals to him the nightmare of the separate self, isolated but desperate for completion in the other. His sense of the pain of duality means he can find no resolution except through annihilation in death and darkness. Tristan is the earthly self brought to the realisation that it must go beyond itself to escape pain and suffering, but he seeks this outwardly in another created being rather than on a spiritual level. He must go through the fire of having all his earthly attachments burnt out before he can progress.

And so we come to Parsifal. To begin with Parsifal is Siegfried reborn, perhaps showing that we must recapitulate past experiences before we can move on to a higher level. He is the pure fool and must go through many trials before he gains wisdom. Unlike Siegfried, who fails through lack of thought and self-awareness, or Tristan, who fails by surrendering his will to desire, Parsifal resists temptation when he refuses to succumb to Kundry in the pivotal Act 2. By transforming sensual passion into divine compassion, he overcomes the desire that brought down Tristan and moves out of the state of ego-driven will into that of the redeemed self who can now become a saviour for others. It is no coincidence that the spear which killed Siegfried now becomes the holy spear that heals the wounded Amfortas who also may well stand for Wotan whose original sin in seeking power rather than love led to the whole corrupt state of the world which can only be healed by compassion.

In the light of this, perhaps my anonymous commenter was right after all in that Tristan's failure was not so much a failure as an inevitable stage that all souls must go through on their journey from the Adamic innocence of Siegfried through Tristan's full human immersion in self-consciousness which he sought to escape in the wrong way, to the transcending of that in Parsifal's eventual union with God. 

I don't know how much Wagner was conscious of this and how much came from his profound artistic intuition, but I believe he was aware of the significance of his characters. I would still have a bone to pick with him in that, even in Parsifal, he downplays the importance of Christ and God who are both shadowy figures in the opera, almost peripheral to its development when they should be central. That is a weakness, but then Wagner was writing in the 19th century when the weight of official Christianity may have been artistically stifling. He sought to break free from the trappings of religion to find its essential source, and in these operas he depicted the progress of a soul with extraordinary beauty and insight.

I could stop here but before concluding it is worth looking at the three female protagonists because they are far from being mere passive foils for the male hero. They are actually crucial to the whole story, and they have their own progression too. 

Brunnhilde represents the descent of the soul to the human state. She loses her spiritual qualities and knowledge but gains the capacity to suffer which may not seem like a gain but is because it opens up the heart to love. She becomes vengeful and bitter when betrayed but in the end, purged by suffering, in the great immolation scene, a Viking sati, she transcends both her human condition and her earlier immature spirituality (immature because it knows nothing else) to reach a kind of omniscience based on universal compassion. To love all is to know all.

Isolde's evolution is similar to Tristan's in that she starts off trapped by duty, the marriage to King Mark, but she is also consumed by pride and anger until her ego is rent asunder by her love for Tristan after that love can no longer be denied. Her trajectory is different to his in that she does not seem so consumed by her passion but she too ends up by dissolving her individual identity into the universal sea which may be seem a spiritual transfiguration but is actually a return to the pre-creation state so spiritually regressive from the Christian point of view. It ends suffering but does not bring true divine union. It doesn't appear that Wagner thought of it like this but it may be that on some level he knew he could not leave his female archetype there and had to move on to Kundry.

Kundry is Wagner's most developed female character, the one he had been reaching towards in all his previous operas. She is the eternal feminine at its most powerful and its most destructive before being transfigured by submission to divine will. After laughing at Christ on the cross she is condemned to wander through the centuries, acting as a despised servant by day and a demonic temptress by night, the one in payment for her sin, the other as the direct expression of the psychic state behind it. This sin cannot be atoned for until she meets someone who can resist her. Only when Parsifal does resist her kiss, which he does out of compassion, that is important, is she freed from her curse which is basically the prison of her own ego. 

This is not the end, either for her or for Parsifal himself, because she must endure many more years of purifying servitude, and he must undergo many more trials during which he cannot use the holy spear as a weapon however much he is attacked. But it is the beginning of the end, and it is brought to its conclusion when Parsifal returns to Montsalvat (Valhalla again, but built this time to support spiritual renunciation rather than worldly power), and she bathes his feet, in return receiving baptism from him. Her spiritual journey is complete and, though this is not brought out in the opera, she can now serve in the lineage of the Virgin Mary who is the eternal feminine fully spiritualised.