To whom would you entrust the state?
Plato, “that great priest” as Meister Eckhart calls him[1], in Chapter Seven of his Republic writes:
“[T]hose whose hearts are fixed on the true being of each thing are to be called philosophers[.]”
How does one fix oneself on ‘true being’ rather than opinion? How does one become a philosopher?
Plato answers:
“[A] man must combine in his nature good memory, readiness to learn, breadth of vision and grace, and be a friend of truth, justice, courage, and self-control[.]”
To be a philosopher is to be a lover of wisdom. To rule the inner state, we need the above values just as much as we would if we were governing the exterior state. Julius Evola, in Revolt Against the Modern World, explains how during the Middle Ages knights would embody values of honour, truth, courage, and loyalty. He goes further comparing the cult of truth to which the knights’ oath was “In the name of God, who does not lie!” to the Aryan cult of truth.[2] Suffice to say this fact among others points to the Middle Ages as the last Traditional Aryan civilisation closest to us in time and space. Now there are different paths to enlightenment, that of the knight is different from that of the sage, but what we see here in both Plato and Evola is a unity of purpose. While both can be read as referring to what Evola says is ‘a superterritorial and supernational community’ beholden to the values previously mentioned and a ‘spiritual authority of a universal type’ or ‘the Empire’ for short, they are also speaking of an interior disposition. We see this quite clearly in the Arthurian epics of the age, in which men of worth proved themselves in daring quests which symbolise an ascension to God through stages.[3]
The Lady of the Lake
“[T]he earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” ~ Genesis 1:2[4]
In the beginning there was nothing or rather nonbeing. This became being by a movement of the spirit of God. Meister Eckhart explains:
“God works beyond being, in breadth, where He can move, and He works in nonbeing: before there was being, God was working: He wrought being where no being was. Masters of little subtlety say God is pure being. He is as high above being as the highest angel is above a midge. I would be as wrong to call God a being as if I were to call the sun pale or black. God is neither this nor that. And one master says, ‘Whoever thinks he has known God, if he has known anything, it was not God he knew.’ But when I have said God is not a being and is above being, I have not thereby denied Him being: rather I have exalted it in Him. If I get copper in gold, it is there and it is there in a nobler mode than it is in itself. St. Augustine says, ‘God is wise without wisdom, good without goodness, powerful without power.’”[5]
And as Fra Girolamo Savonarola states:
“It is, likewise, evident that God is not a complex Being, but Pure Act and Simple Substance; for every complex being depends on others, and composite bodies depend on those that are simple. Since, therefore, God is the First Cause, independent of all others, and the one on whom all things depend, He cannot be a complex Being, but must be Simple Act. Again, were He a complex Substance, He could not be the First Supreme Being in the universe; for complex bodies do not precede their parts, but result from them; and the union of these parts could not take place, had not some first cause preceded them. We must conclude, therefore, that God is Simple Substance and Pure Act.”[6]
It is this pureness of action we wish to imitate. To be the copper elevated by the gold. To actualise the potential within ourselves. Returning to the analogy of water, it is in addition to the spirit a powerful indicator for our redemption. Previously I said that “the water is the action in which we are still and receptive to the Divine Will” as Valentin Tomberg likens the stillness to a mirror-like lake without ripple mirror. How can one not think here of the Lady of the Lake bringing forth the sword from the depths? It is when we are still and silent that we receive the spiritual weapons to defeat our foes. The Lady of the Lake doubles as Lady Wisdom or Philosophy who visits Saint Boethius in prison, who as Beatrice prepares Dante on his journey to Paradise, and became his guide to the highest realms of Heaven, who we venerate in the Blessed Virgin as man’s yearning for the feminine divine as C. G. Jung puts it in his Answer to Job.[7]
The Knight of the Swan
The story of the Knight of the Swan, or Swan Knight, is a medieval tale about a mysterious rescuer who comes in a swan-drawn boat to defend a damsel, his only condition being that he must never be asked his name. His name must not be known for that would be to know his essence and thus disarm him. The earliest versions (preserved in Dolopathos) do not provide specific identity to this knight, but the Old French Crusade cycle of chansons de geste adapted it to make the Swan Knight (Le Chevalier au Cigne, first version around 1192) the legendary ancestor of Godfrey of Bouillon.[8] Who, no doubt in his position as Protector of the Holy Sepulchre, Dante sees, together with Roland, in the Heaven of Mars with the other “warriors of the faith”.
Evola claims the Knight of the Swan to be a Hyperborean, one who like the Arthurian Knights committed to their quest for the Grail, is part of a ‘heavenly order of knights’.[9] Hyperborea in other words, while it might or might not have been an actual place is symbolic of the Primordial State.[10] So while we might not be able to – or wish to – return to the icy white vastness of the far northern part of the known world, we can say with Friedrich Nietzsche that:
“We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. “Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans” … Beyond the north, ice, and death — our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? “I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,” sighs modern man.
This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of the heart, which “forgives” all because it “understands” all, is sirocco for us. Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!
We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum — the abundance, the tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, “resignation.” In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark — for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”[11]
To return to the Knight of the Swan, whose origins are quite interesting, we find the earliest mention included in Johannes de Alta Silva’s Dolopathos sive de Rege et Septem Sapientibus (ca. 1190), a Latin version of the Seven Sages of Rome. This latter is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins. What is certain is that it is of Eastern origin, possibly Indian, so it would be fitting if it was of Aryan generation. The story is as follows:
A nameless young lord becomes lost in the hunt for a white stag and wanders into an enchanted forest where he encounters a mysterious woman (clearly a swan maiden or fairy) in the act of bathing, while clutching a gold necklace. They fall instantly for each other and consummate their love. The young lord brings her to his castle, and the maiden (just as she has foretold) gives birth to a septuplet, six boys and a girl, with golden chains about their necks. But her evil mother-in-law swaps the newborn with seven puppies.
The servant with orders to kill the children in the forest just abandons them under a tree. The young lord is told by his wicked mother that his bride gave birth to a litter of pups, and he punishes her by burying her up to the neck for seven years. Sometime later, the young lord while hunting encounters the children in the forest, and the wicked mother’s lie starts to unravel. The servant is sent out to search them and find the boys bathing in the form of swans, with their sister guarding their gold chains. The servant steals the boys’ chains, preventing them from changing back to human form, and the chains are taken to a goldsmith to be melted down to make a goblet. The swan-boys land in the young lord’s pond, and their sister, who can still transform back and forth into human shape by the magic of her chain, goes to the castle to obtain bread to her brothers. Eventually the young lord asks her story, so the truth comes out. The goldsmith was actually unable to melt down the chains and had kept them for himself. These are now restored back to the six boys, and they regain their powers, except one, whose chain the smith had damaged in the attempt. So, he alone is stuck in swan form.
The work goes on to obliquely hint that this is the swan in the Swan Knight tale, more precisely, that this was the swan “quod cathena aurea militem in navicula trahat armatum (that tugged by a gold chain an armed knight in a boat).”[12] This last part about the boy who remains a swan brings to mind Saint Hugh of Lincoln and his loyal swan.
Saint Hugh of Lincoln
Hugh of Lincoln (c. 1135-1140 – 16 November 1200), also known as Hugh of Avalon, was a French noble, Benedictine and Carthusian monk, bishop of Lincoln in the Kingdom of England, and Catholic saint. At the time of the Reformation, he was the best-known English saint after Thomas Becket. His feast is observed by Catholics on 16 November. Avalon – coincidental in name with the mysterious realm where King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged and later where Arthur was taken to recover from being gravely wounded at the Battle of Camlann – is a small village in eastern France where Hugh was born. Like so many of the clergy at this time he was a nobleman. This is important when we consider saints like Bernard who embodied the ideals of the Knights of the Grail and the Templars. Hugh, as a Carthusian, can be placed among their ranks. The focus of Carthusian life is contemplation. To this end there is an emphasis on solitude and silence. Hence the similarity with the stillness and silence of the lake metaphor above.
Hugh was consecrated Bishop of Lincoln on 21 September 1186 at Westminster. Almost immediately he established his independence of the King, excommunicating a royal forester and refusing to seat one of Henry’s courtly nominees as a prebendary of Lincoln; he softened the king’s anger by his diplomatic address and tactful charm. After the excommunications, he came upon the king hunting and was greeted with dour silence. He waited several minutes and the king called for a needle to sew up a leather bandage on his finger. Eventually Hugh said, with gentle mockery, “How much you remind me of your cousins of Falaise” (where William I’s mother Herleva, a tanner’s daughter, had come from). At this Henry just burst out laughing and was reconciled. As a bishop, he was exemplary, constantly in residence or travelling within his diocese, generous with his charity, scrupulous in the appointments he made. He raised the quality of education at the cathedral school. Hugh was also prominent in trying to protect the Jews, great numbers of whom lived in Lincoln, in the persecution they suffered at the beginning of Richard I’s reign, and he put down popular violence against them—as later occurred following the death of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln—in several places.
Hugh’s primary emblem is a white swan, in reference to the story of the swan of Stow which had a deep and lasting friendship with the saint, even guarding him while he slept. While Hugh loved all the animals in the monastery[13] gardens, it was this wild swan that would eat from his hand and follow him about and would attack anyone else who came near Hugh. The swan followed him and was his constant companion while he was at Lincoln.
I give you Saint Hugh of Lincoln, a true Swan Knight, a man to whom you could entrust the state.
N.B. Some might also find this interesting: Edith the Gentle Swan.
[1] Cf. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge.
[2] See Chapter 13 ‘The Soul of Chivalry’, p. 79.
[3] Cf. Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, Ch. 23 ‘The Grail as a Ghibelline Mystery”, pp. 119-123.
[4] Cf. An Interpretation of Genesis.
[5] Sermon Sixty-Seven; cf. The Metaphysics of Non-being.
[6] The Triumph of the Cross, Ch. 7.
[7] Cf. summary of Answer to Job; Mary, Seat of Wisdom.
[8] 18 September 1060 – 18 July 1100) was a French nobleman and one of the pre-eminent leaders of the First Crusade. He was the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1100. He apparently avoided using the title of king, choosing instead that of princeps. Older scholarship is more fond of another title, that of “advocatus (defender, protector) of the Holy Sepulchre”.
[9] See Chapter 13 ‘The Soul of Chivalry’, p. 7.
[10] Cf. Hyperborea and the Primordial Tradition.
[12] Cf. The Six Swans (German: Die sechs Schwäne) a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1812.
[13] Presumably Stow Minster, sometimes referred to as the “Mother Church of Lincolnshire”.
What Matters Most 