“You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. Throughout our lives, we all find ourselves in situations in which we come face to face with the unknown, and the myth of the hero shows us how we should behave. We all have to face the final rite of passage, which is death.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Image: Valkyrie and a Dying Hero by Hans Makart

“The Goddess in all her manifestations was the symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers. Hence the holistic and mythopoeic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth.”
― Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess

Notes: Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe. Gimbutas also virtually single-handedly recovered the lost goddess-oriented societies of precivilization which provide the prehistorical background of the Sophianic vision.

Image: Goddess Ostara by Helena Nelson

"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal
society.”
— Aldous Huxley

Image: Sick Mood at Sunset, Despair by Edvard Munch

“Because the unity of life is the central phenomenon of the situation of psychic origination, every disturbance of this unity – the felling of a tree, the killing or eating of an animal, and so on – must be compensated by a ritual offering, a sacrifice. For early man all growth and development depend on man’s sacrifice and ritual activity, precisely because man’s living bond with the world and the human group is projected upon nature as a whole.”
― John Neumann

Notes: The meaning of the word ‘sacrifice’ in Latin is ‘to make whole or sacred’ – sacer facere – and this seems to have been interpreted in the sense of restoring to the whole something that has been lost in order to allow life to continue. It’s also interesting to note that the word ‘holy’ and ‘whole’ both derive from the same PIE root, *kailo- (whole, uninjured). Therefore in its original sense ‘holy’ and ‘holiness’ literally meant to be ‘whole’.

Image: Druids Cutting the Mistletoe on the Sixth Day of the Moon by Henri Paul Motte

“The gigantic stones of the Megalithic culture strewn across Europe stand as a visibly unanswered question in any attempt to reach back into the past with a modern mind. As [Mircea] Eliade observed, ‘Desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies’, and this makes it increasingly difficult for us to ‘rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies’. What we have lost is their understanding that the life of the cosmos and the life of humanity are one life. So we can approach the intention of these people only by trying to see through their eyes: experiencing the ground they walked on and the air they breathed as belonging to a world that was wholly sacred. Even now, few people can look upon stones like those of Callanish for example, without being deeply moved by them.”
― Anne Baring, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

Image: The Lights of Lewis by Artisan Felt Studio

“When we look to the character of Robin Hood, we see an archetypal woodsman who lives by an ancient primal code of honour. Rather than confronting the ruling class on their turf, he chooses to step outside of their matrix all together. He removes himself from economic dependence on the ruling class by living independently off the land, doubling down on the Teutonic ethnic traditional way of life. But he is not a lone-wolf, as it were. His ‘band of merry men’ remind us that while many of us today feel alone, we are not. There are others who see the tyranny, the social engineering, and who oppose it. Therefore we, too, can step outside of the matrix of these things and create our own communities based on shared values. We too, can take from the rich to feed the poor by way of choosing how we spend our own coin. If we begin to see our brethren as ‘folk’ once again, we can turn our eyes upon our own community building."
― Carolyn Emerick, Nothing New Under the Sun

Image: Robin Hood and his Merry Men by N.C Wyeth

“If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations.”
― John Taylor Gatto

Image: Confined by Lyndsey Vu

“Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood.”
― Antony C. Sutton

Image: The Great Flood by Nicolas Chaperon

“Our modern alienation from myth is unprecedented. In the pre-modern world, mythology was indispensable. It not only helped people to make sense of their lives but also revealed regions of the human mind that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. It was an early form of psychology. The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths and fighting with monsters, brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche, showing people how to cope with their own interior crises.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History Of Myth

Image: Theseus and the Minotaur by Edward Burne-Jones

“The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.
― Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966

Image: False Profits by Mear One (Kalen Ockerman)

“The landscape of Middle-earth England was both geographical and mystical. The hidden history reveals, for example, their belief in the existence of dragons. A creature of fantasy to us, the dragon is shown to embody philosophical views for them about the dark side of wealth, and the inevitable life-cycle of civilizations. Dealing death to dragons turns out to be a deep and subtle element of their understanding of life.”
―Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth, Magic and Mysteries in the Dark Age

Image: Conversations with Smaug by J.R.R Tolkien

Highly recommended explanation and interpretation of the Grail Legend by John Lamb Lash. For those who dispute a connection between John's Gnostic, Sophianic teachings and European religion, I'd say this is as good an example as you're going to get. Enjoy!

https://odysee.com/@ProjectSofia:2/John-Lamb-Lash-The-Legend-of-the-Holy-Grail:b

“The Messiah has not solved and will not solve any of the world’s problems, it is the cause behind all of them. The Messianic Egregore* is the main reason Western Civilisation is being destroyed, and only the opposite Egregore, Parsifal, ‘The Coming Man’, can fully restore it.”
― The Arkadian

*Egregore: an occult concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people. Anyone involved in a group, whatever kind of group it is, will be affected by the egregore of the group. The masterful manipulation of egregores is the primary source of power for the World Controllers. He who controls ideas, exercises power.

Image: Knight Parsifal in front of the Grail Castle by Hermann Hendrich

“I believe that most of what was said of God was in reality said of that spirit whose body is the Earth.”
―Æ (George William Russell), The Candle of Vision

Notes: George William Russell (1867–1935), known by his pen name Æ, a name he coined when he first encountered the word Aeon, a gnostic designation for god or divinity. Russell was a writer, painter, and social visionary who played a significant role alongside his close friends William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory in the Celtic Revival, a cultural and spiritual movement that emerged as part of the broader European occult revival.

Russell was known for his mysticism and exceptional clairvoyant abilities, coupled with his profound spiritual insight. One of his most salient contributions was the observation that the rigid dichotomy of good and evil serves to constrain human consciousness and perception, thereby precluding the full and authentic appreciation of beauty.

Image: The Spirit of the Pool by George William Russell

“Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us.”
― Chief Seattle, 1855

Image: Grandfather by Susan Seddon Boulet

Notes: The reverence often shown by Western cultures towards ‘indigenous peoples’, such as Native American tribes, represents a longing for a past connection with nature and an attempt to reconnect with pre-industrial, pre-Abrahamic animistic and polytheistic spiritual beliefs. This animistic worldview, in which spirits are believed to reside in all elements of nature, was not confined to ‘indigenous communities’ but was the universal state of human beings before the imposition of external worldviews and Archontic perceptual frameworks.

“The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
― Mark, 12: 29–31

Image: God the Father by Guercino Giovanni Francesco Barbier

Notes: The idea that love must be commanded is widely held by Christians, yet it is incompatible with the intrinsic qualities of love. Love is a spontaneous and internal emotion, originating from within and not contingent on external mandates. This notion that love must be commanded contradicts the very essence of love and the experiences of those who have known love. The source and authenticity of the commandment are thus brought into question, calling for a closer examination of the entity making such pronouncements and those claiming to speak on its behalf.

“When today we glimpse the breathtaking beauty of a woodland setting, it is hardly surprising to us that the people of the historical Middle-earth imbued nature with a spiritual presence. But, of course, for them it was far more than a matter of aesthetic beauty. Landscapes are taken in by the eye but actually perceived with the brain. That is where interpretation and meaning make sense of the signals from our sensory receptors. And they saw more than we would, gazing at the same scene. They thought of nature not only as an objective world, external to themselves, but as also reaching internally, with magical powers and imbued with the full richness of their imagination. Features of nature had many layers of meaning, levels of significance, allusions and messages. The forest was alive with the chatter of another world.”
―Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth, Magic and Mysteries in the Dark Age

Image: Deer in a Pine Forest by Gustave Doré

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
― Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines, 1863

Image: Demon Cyborg by AtlasAiArt

Notes: The quote above highlights that for generations we have wrestled with the scourge of automation with its cold, unfeeling grip. In the lastest episode of The Fyrgen podcast Dave Martel draws upon the work of Ted Kaczynski, Jacques Ellul and Dmitry Orlov to explain his fascinating theory of the Mechanurge while charting a potential course for us to thrive through the treacherous torrents of automation in the Wolf Age. Listen here.

“The order-follower always bears more moral culpability than the order-giver, because the order-follower is the one who actually performed the action, and in taking such action, actually brought the resultant harm into physical manifestation. Order-following is the pathway to every form of evil and chaos in our world. It should never be seen as a 'virtue' by anyone who considers themselves a moral human being. Order followers have ultimately been personally responsible and morally culpable for every form of slavery and every single totalitarian regime that has ever existed upon the face of the earth.”
― Mark Passio

Image: Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya

“Judeo-Christian monotheism set out to demystify and desacralised the pagan world by slowly supplanting ancient pagan beliefs with the reign of the Judaic Law. During this century-long process, Christianity gradually removed all pagan vestiges that co-existed with it. The ongoing process of democratisation and the ‘Entzauberung’ (disenchantment) of life and politics appear to have resulted not from Europeans' chance departure from Christianity, but rather from the gradual disappearance of the pagan notion of the sacred that coexisted for a long time with Christianity. The paradox of our century is that the Western world is saturated with Judeo-Christian mentality at the moment when churches and synagogues are virtually empty.”
― Dr Tomislav Sunic, CLIO, A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History vol. 24

Image: A Ruined Gothic Church beside a River by Moonlight by Sebastian Pether

“Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.”
― Plato

Note: We have all no doubt encountered individuals who, despite our well-crafted arguments and provision of near endless amounts of irrefutable evidence, remain absolutely immovable in their beliefs. We know that it’s not a matter of their intellect, morality, or critical reasoning abilities, but some other property that appears to mysteriously cloud their perception of truth.

Plato's insightful observation highlights a common yet inexplicable phenomenon that many have encountered, suggesting perhaps a continuity in the nature and source of these deceptions. The Archons of gnostic lore are portrayed uniquely in all of mythology as possessing an unparalleled ability to manipulate human perception and deceive individuals through their supreme powers of illusion. Their influence is said to be so seamless and convincing that the false realities they create become near indistinguishable from reality itself.

Image: Manifesto by Eliran Kantor