[Andrew Frisardi]

What AE said.

Schuon is excellent although I think he and his Traditionalist associates (Guénon, especially) don’t give Jung enough credit. They do tend toward the same old mind-body dualism that we talked about earlier in this thread. Really, the poets have been the best cure for that.

Which brings me back to Philip’s topic, ecstatic poetry. Here’s a phenomenal one on noumenal experience:


The Annunciation

The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steadily there.
He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time.
Immediacy of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So greater wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered voice.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

---Edwin Muir