the old man young followed by young man old
one after the other along Broad Street -
the two of them a mill a light-wheel rolled
of which the Gnostic Valentinus speaks -
left a desert of stone in their wake
where Wisdom begs in her stained sleeping bag
and pneumatology pumps a lake
of fire ; - for us Evolution drags
the mind (not Fortuna) to the aeon
or chains it to the abyssal city
lifting virtues powers dominions
then drowning them back in depravity -
to guess the name of the pair that filed
past - the name of the Father is the Child
Blackwells
Oxford
27 October 2018
As we approach All Souls Eve, it is appropriate to make a trajectory past W.B. Yeats, who lived on Broad Street in Oxford a hundred years ago, and review the gnostic lore of souls and ” sparks”. I did indeed see a senior man the other day, a political thinker and activist, followed down Broad Street by a young man, a student, perhaps fifty years younger, in even step, who could have been that man’s younger self.
Valentinus was a Christian gnostic, some of whose writings are extant, who flourished under Antoninus Pius and was almost elected Bishop of Rome about the year 157. Anicetus was elected instead. I refer to the Valentinian cosmological scheme of descending generative aeons and to fallen Sophia Acamoth, the lowest of the aeons, who must work her passage back, and through whom we are supposedly restored.
The Roman had great cascade watermills with multiple wheels at the Janiculum in Rome and near Arles. Perhaps these machines suggested Valentinus’ imagery of a mill that lifted sparks back up the Platonic pleroma. ” The name of the Father is the Child” is a quote from Valentinus’ own ” Gospel of Truth”, discovered in a Coptic text at Nag Hammadi. Curiously the Florentine painter Jacopo Carucci aka “Pontormo” (1494-1557) placed God below the Son in his ” Last Judgement”.
I am responding to the late Alex Danchev (1955-2016) the Professor of International Relations at St Andrews University in Scotland, who discussed Valentinus and Yeats in his essays in ” On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone” ( Edinburgh 2016). Seamus Heaney’s discussion on Yeats and ” The Government of the Tongue” are discussed on p. 2, and Anselm Kiefer and Valentinus on p. 47, of this productive text.
The ancients tried to “fix” or control the Rota Fortunae or Wheel of Fortuna through Stoic, and neo-Platonic and gnostic cosmologies. As the “Carmina Burana” notes, the name of Hecuba is inscribed on its axle, which got me thinking about Carl Schmitt. Of course we seek to modify “Fortune” through Natural Selection, and the effect of this can immanentize the ancient gnosis in a similar scheme. I won’t deny that Alexander Blok’s ” The Twelve” (1918) has long left a great impression on me.