But he who neither perceives by himself nor takes in a lesson from another, he on the other hand is a worthless man.

Hesiod, Works and Days

"Apollo is the god who directs the harmony, and makes all things move together, whether for gods or human beings."

Plato, Cratylus 405d

"There are many kinds of gods, of whom one part is intelligible, the other sensible. ... The heads of all classes are gods, after whom come gods who have a head-of-essence; these are the sensible gods, true to both their origins, who produce everything throughout sensible nature, one thing through another, each god illuminating his own work."

Asclepius 19

"...[The] Plato of our classrooms would scarcely have been recognizable to the Platonists of antiquity, because the Plato we have inherited is an invention of our own habits of thought, and the dualism we attribute to him reflects our own existential estrangement from the divinity of the world. In contrast to our inherited caricature, the Platonists of late antiquity believed that Plato was 'divine and Apollonian.' For them, 'philosophy was conceived as a sacred rite' and Plato was a hierophant who revealed the world as theophany. Before Christian dualism blinded us to that world, and before materialist science erased it altogether, the supernatural was not elsewhere but here, in the natural world. The gods were everywhere: in plants, in rocks, in animals, in temples, and in us. And it was precisely the aim of the later Platonists to ensure that this integration of the supernatural and the natural, of the divine and the human, remains alive."

Gregory Shaw, Hellenic Tantra p. 22

"We said that sight tries at last to look at the animals themselves, the stars themselves, and in the end, at the sun itself. In the same way, whenever someone tries through argument and apart from all sense perceptions to find the being itself of each thing and doesn't give up until he grasps the good itself with understanding itself, he reaches the end of the intelligible, just as the other reached the end of the visible. ... Don't you call [this] dialectic? ... And when the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it upwards, using the crafts we described to help it and cooperate with it in turning the soul around."

Plato, Republic 532a - 534b

"Athena is the intelligence of Zeus, being the same thing as his providence [pronoia], which is why temples are founded to ‘Athena Pronoia.’ She is said to have been born from the head of Zeus perhaps because the ancients got the idea that the ruling part of our souls is there—as others after them have thought—but perhaps because the head is the highest part of the human body, as the aether, which is its ruling part and the substance of its wisdom, is the highest part of the cosmos. ... Her virginity is a symbol of her being pure and unstained: that is what virtue is like. Athena is depicted armed, and the story is that she was born like that, which points out that wisdom is sufficiently well equipped for the greatest and most difficult deeds—for martial [deeds] strike us as the greatest."

Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, Greek Theology 20

"Hence the world is the statue of the intelligible Gods ... But it is a statue in motion, and full of life, and deity; fashioned from all things within itself; preserving all things, and filled with an at-once-collected abundance of all good from the father."

Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato 239B

"Hail unto you, O Lord Jupiter, you blessed one, happy and serene, Lord of Law, Justice, Fairness and Conscientiousness, you who are wise in religion, ascetic [sic], mighty, high-minded, bringer of good fortune, noble, elevated, powerful, subjugator, granting honour, you who keep treaties, who are upright in love and of noble nature! We ask you, O father, by your noble, beautiful attributes and your precious deeds, grant us wealth and prosperity, and a portion of that which one desires in this world, O source of good deeds, fulfiller of wishes. Hail unto you, you exalted magnificent great star, good-natured, you who take care of the concerns of the wise and who prepare a way for the spirits of the pure and who help those drowning in the depths of the sea and calling for help! From your light, from your spirit, from your pneuma, overflow on us, that thereby our concern may be furthered, that the completion of our affairs be good and the impurity of our nature washed from us. O Rufija'il, you angel who are set over Jupiter, Lord of the Sixth Sphere, joyful and serene, complete, consummate, pious, lord of beautiful garb, of dignity and of insight, far from all that is filthy, far from vulgar speech! We invoke you by all your names: in Arabic O MUSTARI, in Persian O BIRGIS, in Iranian O HURMUZ, in Greek O ZEUS, in Hindi O WIHASFATI! By the Lord of the Highest Edifice, of good deeds and mercy, let flow upon us and our children and those who belong to us your peace and the light of your noble pneuma, which is bound to higher powers, that thereby you may watch over our affairs, increase our goods and take away from us all care for our earthly sustenance, that our life be blessed, comfortable, pleasant, and overflow with fullness. Come, grant us a sign of thy presence!"

This very Indo-European prayer is actually preserved in a medieval Arabic book of astrology called Picatrix but which evidently preserved ancient European traditions.

"[Dialectic] is actually the capacity to say what each thing is, and in what way it differs from other things, and what it has in common with them, and in what and where each of these is, and if it is what it is, and how many Beings there are and, again, how many non-Beings there are, different from Beings. ... Then, it remains still, in stillness to the extent that it is in the intelligible world, no longer busying itself with many things, but having become one [with its objects], it just looks."

Plotinus, Enneads 1.3.4

I'm begging you to stop proclaiming your strong opinions about ancient philosophical traditions if you have not made a serious, good faith effort to learn about them on their own terms. You are being irresponsible.

- CWT Admin

"The reason it is hard to fight against passion is that it buys what it wants at the expense of the soul."

Heraclitus, fragment KRS 240

Where are the Vedas of Europe?

They are in front of us and have been with us for millennia: we only need to recognize them for what they are.

Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Virgil, Ovid, Plotinus, Proclus, and all the rest - these form the Golden Chain of Western spiritual wisdom.

- CWT Admin

"Then Lucilius said: 'The first point seems scarcely to need affirming. What can be so obvious and clear, as we gaze up at the sky and observe the heavenly bodies, as that there is some divine power of surpassing intelligence by which they are ordered? If this were not the case, how could Ennius have won general assent with the words

Behold this dazzling vault on high, which all
Invoke as Jupiter!

and not merely as Jupiter, but also as the lord of creation, governing all things by his nod, and ... as 'father of gods and men', an attentive and supremely powerful God?'"

Cicero, The Nature of the Gods 2.4

"Bacchus therefore, is the mundane intellect, from which the soul and body of the world are suspended."

Thomas Taylor/Proclus, Theology of Plato 7.33

"A man was chopping wood by a certain river when he dropped his axe and it was carried away by the current. The man then sat down on the riverbank and began to weep. The god Hermes finally took pity on the man and appeared before him. When Hermes learned the reason for his sorrow, he brought up a golden axe and asked whether that was the man's axe. The man said that it was not his. A second time, Hermes brought up a silver axe, and again asked the man if this was the axe he had lost but the man said that it was not. The third time Hermes brought up the axe that the man had lost and when the man recognized his axe, Hermes rewarded the man's honesty by giving all of the axes to him as a gift. The man took the axes and went to tell his friends what had happened. One of the men was jealous and wanted to do the same thing, so he took his axe and went to the river. He began chopping some wood and then intentionally let his axe fall into the whirling waters. As he was weeping, Hermes appeared and asked him what had happened, and the man said that he had lost his axe. When Hermes brought up the golden axe and asked the man if that was the axe he had lost, the greedy man got excited and said that it was the one. Not only did the man fail to receive any gifts from the god, he didn't even retrieve his own axe."

Aesop, The Man, Hermes, and the Axes Perry 173

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God isn’t wonderful because he is fabulously wealthy, or because he’s so powerful he can control the thunder and lightning. What makes him so great is his limitless knowledge and awareness. The purpose of our work as priests and priestesses is to attain knowledge of him, the first, the supreme ruler, the ideal one.

The search for truth requires intense study and concentration. This quest is more holy than any other and is most pleasing to the goddess you worship. Indeed when Typhon, her enemy, rips the sacred texts to shreds, it is Isis who collects them together again, and entrusts them to those initiated in the holy mysteries.

Plutarch (Priest of Apollo) to Clea (Priestess of Isis)

"[Gobryas] learned from some bronze tablets, which Opis and Hecaerge had brought from the Hyperboreans, that the soul, after its release from the body, goes to the Place Unseen, to a dwelling beneath the earth. Here the palace of Pluto is not inferior to the court of Zeus ... The gates on the way to Pluto's palace are protected by iron bolts and bars. When the gates swing open, the river Acheron, and then the river Cocytus, receives those who are to be ferried across to Minos and Rhadamanthus, in what is called the Plain of Truth. There sit judges who interrogate everyone who arrives about what kind of life he has lived and what sorts of activities he engaged in while he dwelled in his body. It is impossible to lie.

Now those who were inspired by a good daemon during their lifetimes go to reside in a place for the pious ... There is a certain place of honor for those who are initiated, and there they perform their sacred rites. ... Legend tells us that Heracles and Dionysus, before their descents into the realm of Hades, were initiated in this world, and supplied by the Eluesinian goddess with courage for their journeys yonder.

But those who have wasted their lives in wickedness are led by the Erinyes to Erebus and Chaos through Tartarus, where there is a place for the impious ..."

pseudo-Plato, Axiochus 371a-e

The three core dogmas of classical theology:

1. The Gods exist.
The Gods really exist. They are not metaphors or social constructs, nor are they merely anthropomorphic depictions of natural phenomena. This does not mean myths should be understood literally.

2. The Gods govern the universe well and justly.

3. The Gods cannot be corrupted.
Gods cannot be bribed, manipulated, or tricked. They cannot be influenced for evil by anyone or anything.

I do not claim that all classical pagans accepted these three things, only that they are true, that there was something close to a consensus on them (especially in the philosophical literature) and that they are an excellent set of parameters for us to operate in.

- CWT Admin

"But what good and virtuous man can be miserable? Truly this is an ill-governed universe if Zeus doesn't set out to ensure that his own fellow citizens should be happy like himself. No, that is unthinkable; it is sheer impiety to suppose any such thing, and if Odysseus shed tears and wept, then he wasn't a good man. For how can someone be good if he doesn't know who he is? And who would know that if he'd forgotten that everything that comes into being is bound to perish, and that it isn't possible for one human being to live with another for ever and a day? What follows, then? That to desire the impossible is the mark of a slave and a fool; it is the behaviour of one who is a stranger in the world, and is fighting against God through the only means that is available to him, through his own judgements."

Epictetus, Discourses 3.24.18-21

"If a good man sacrifices to the gods and keeps them constant company in his prayers and offerings and every kind of worship he can give them, this will be the best and noblest policy he can follow."

Plato, Laws 716d