Plato
Damiani had a lifelong love of Plato and great respect for the Platonic tradition that flowed from him. In the classes at Wisdom’s Goldenrod, certain ideas from Plato were seminal. Although he read the dialogues in their entirety on his own, in classes he focused on just a few key ideas he found in Plato and certain crucial passages from the dialogues. Here are some of them (though this is not meant to be an exhaustive list).
Text items highlighted in yellow below are links into the archive for the topics, keywords, and search methods being discussed. Use them as a starting point to explore the archive, and as a shortcut to doing the searches.
Platonic Ideas as Real Beings
Platonic Ideas are real Beings, more authentic than the things that participate in them. They are not abstractions in the human intellect but one with the substance of the Divine Mind—the Intellectual-Principle, in Plotinian language. Platonic Ideas have the power to effectuate themselves and bring about sensible images of themselves. They are the exemplars, or archetypes, of everything in the cosmos and constitute wisdom, intelligence, the activity of goodness, and beauty. Damiani symbolized them using the twelve zodiacal signs and regarded the sidereal and tropical zodiacs as a functional image of these Ideas. The sidereal zodiac receives the power and wisdom of the Ideas, transmits it in a stepped-down form to the tropical zodiac, which in turn uses them to fabricate the creatures on Earth.
The Divided Line
The Divided Line, discussed in Republic, Book 7, is the archetype of all knowing and known objects. Its fourfold nature represents four ways of knowing and the objects coordinate with them, arranged in a hierarchy from the truest level, which is most unified and most inclusive, to the least true, which is most dispersed and most partial. These four ways of knowing are (1) intellectual intuition or contemplation, (2) intuitive reasoning, (3) perceptual belief, and (4) imagining. This fourfold archetype, since it is itself an Idea, can manifest at many different levels.
See the class series titled “Plato: The Divided Line,” if this topic interests you.
Also, search the document archive using “Divided Line” as keywords, to find more transcripts and papers on the Divided Line.
There are also many diagrams in his sketchbooks on the Divided Line, many of which correlate some of the dignities of the metaphysical chart with the four ways of knowing (or four gnostic functions). Select “Divided Line: Plato” in the drop-down topic menu to find them.
The Sensible Sun as an Image of the Idea of the Good
According to Plato, in Republic, Book 7, the sensible Sun is an image of the Idea of the Good. One way Damiani elaborated this was in terms of each star being the body of a solar logos, a cosmic soul rooted in the Nous that provides the unity to its own solar system. In 1976-77, in his first attempt at writing a book introducing the astrological mandala, he began with a discussion of this passage, which precedes the Divide Line passage. He unfolded the idea that the Sun was a solar logos with its unity in the Intellectual-Principle, using Plotinus’s and Emperor Julian’s remarks about the intelligible Sun. This approach was later superseded by the approach he took in Astronoesis, which begins with a discussion of the Transcendent One instead.
The Demiurge and Its Contemplation of “Animal Itself”
The Demiurge fabricates the cosmos by bringing number and form to a primeval chaos by contemplating an intelligible paradigm, “Animal Itself,” in the Timaeus. He generates the universe as a single living creature animated by the soul of the universe. Damiani was intrigued by this notion and wanted to know in more detail how the Demiurge assimilated the intelligible paradigm, which Damiani conceived as the twelve Ideas, represented by the twelve houses of the astrological mandala. He also connected the Demiurge to the meaning of the various placements of Jupiter in the metaphysical chart (that is, the dignities of Jupiter). The importance of Number as a structuring force in the universe was another idea he found in the Timaeus, which we discuss below in this section on Plato.
To find transcripts about the Demiurge, search the document archive using “Demiurge” or “Twofold Zeus.” There are also many diagrams in the sketchbooks that use the astrological symbolism to depict how the Demiurge receives the Ideas and uses them to fabricate the universe. Select “Twofold Zeus” in the drop-down topic menu to find them.
Twofold Soul
Soul is twofold: one that is permanently part of the intelligible world and one that is intimately bound up with the functioning of the planetary spheres, is an idea that can be traced, in part, to the Timaeus. In the Timaeus, the Demiurge supplies the immortal origin of soul, but he commands his progeny, the planetary deities, to fabricate another form of soul to animate all the creatures whose archetype is to be found in the intelligible paradigm. This secondary form of soul is similar to the World Soul but less perfect in its constituents, and the irrational powers of appetite, emotion, and the ability to feel pleasure and pain are rooted in it. Damiani thought it was crucial for the spiritual aspirant to understand this second soul because its functioning can either obscure or manifest the knowing of the deeper immortal soul. Initially this second soul must be developed on the path to self-knowledge, but then later it must be purified and trained to be still so as to attend to the intimations of the higher soul. And since its temporary states or affections are connected to the motions of the planets, understanding the workings of one’s natal horoscope and how one’s mind is continually being transformed by the transiting planets is part of the quest for truth. There are several series that focus on this topic, for example:
Paul Brunton’s Notebooks: Category 20, What Is Philosophy? Series 1
Paul Brunton’s Notebooks: Category 20, What Is Philosophy? Series 2
Paul Brunton’s Notebooks: Category 22, Inspiration and the Overself
How the Demiurge Compounds Soul Essence
According to the Timaeus, the Demiurge “creates” the soul by “mixing” together three constituents: (1) a sameness that is indivisible and a sameness that is divisible about body, (2) a difference that indivisible and a difference that is divisible about body, and (3) a being that is indivisible and a being that is divisible about body. Thus the soul is midway between the intelligible and sensible worlds, able to comprehend both because of its nature, which is metaphorically represented as being “mixed” from the indivisible and divisible forms of the three genera—sameness, difference, and being. Damiani thought this conception of soul was revelatory and of immense value to those in quest of self-knowledge.
See the two series on Soul in Plotinus, which contain several papers on the essence of soul:
The Receptacle of the Timaeus
The matter, or the receptacle, of the Timaeus plays an important role in understanding the nature of the sensible world because the latter is a reflection in matter of the Ideas. Damiani elaborated the meaning of matter through his study of the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy (that is, their notion of prakriti and its three constituents, the gunas of sattva, rajas, and tamas), the Indian conception of vasanas (that is, habit-energies as the traces of the mind’s previous activity stored in mind substance), and his exposition of Plotinus’s ideas about matter.
The Eight Hypotheses of Parmenides
The dialogue Parmenides was of great interest to Damiani because of its insights into the meaning of oneness. This dialogue is usefully considered as having two parts. In the first, Plato places a devastating critique of the Theory of Forms in the mouth of an older Parmenides as he questions a young Socrates. In the second, there is apparently a response to this critique that involves a new method of dialectic, which involves various permutations of hypothesizing that something is the case and hypothesizing that it is not the case, and then examining what consequences can be deduced from each hypothesis. As an application of this method, Parmenides offers to demonstrate the consequences of supposing the One is and the consequences of supposing the One is not. What follows is a stunning demonstration that involves four ways of understanding the positive hypothesis and four ways of understanding the negative hypothesis, and the numerous deductions that follow from each. Although Plotinus has a few hidden references to the “eight hypotheses of the Parmenides,” the dialogue was extensively commented on by Neoplatonists following him, such as Iamblichus, Syrianus, and Proclus, who found in the eight hypotheses a hierarchy of both the degrees of being and the orders of the gods.
Damiani devoted many classes to understanding the eight hypotheses. He thought it contained the key to both understanding how Platonic participation in the Forms is possible (thus answering Parmenides’s critique in the first part of the dialogue) and how anything that is truly a one relates to the multiplicity internal to it. Thus it applies, for example, to the One, the Intellectual-Principle, each and every Idea, and Soul (both Absolute soul and all individual souls).
There are many classes on the Parmenides that have not yet been transcribed. To find the ones that have been transcribed, as well as some papers on the Parmenides, search the document archive using the keyword “Parmenides” and examine the class series titled “Plato’s Parmenides: Eight Hypotheses Applied to Soul” for transcripts and papers on this topic.
The Sophist and the Five Genera of Being
In the Sophist, in order to clarify how it’s possible to speak about what is not, Plato unfolds both the nature of nonbeing by articulating what “difference” means and the five “greatest kinds,” also called the “five genera of being”: essence, sameness, difference, rest, and motion. Damiani elaborated the former in several papers exploring how sensible being is a form of image-being and the latter in his discussions of the various kinds of categories: Platonic (ontological), epistemological (Kantian), and imaginal (Jungian and those found in the natal horoscope).
The Arithmetization of the Ideas
Aristotle attributed to his teacher, Plato, the view that Forms are Numbers. Aristotle claimed this teaching was transmitted orally and never written down. In the so-called unwritten doctrines, ascribed to Plato by Aristotle, Plato was also said to have derived all the Forms from two principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad. J. N. Findlay, in his book Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, refers to this as the “arithmetization” and “mathematization” of the Ideas. Damiani too believed that Forms are Numbers. He led many classes that explored the different levels of Number: divine (superessential), essential, psychical, and monadic, and there is an entire section of Astronoesis on Number, focusing on the ten Divine Numbers, each a different way of viewing the One. He also intensely studied Plotinus’s tractate on Number, VI.6, and tried to expound this difficult text in classes.
Damiani saw psychical number at work in astrology, since the aspects between planets are based on the number of degrees of arc between them (for example, a square between two planets is formed when there is 90 degrees of arc between them), and even the 360 degrees of the zodiac were identified with reason-principles, the psychical form of Ideas. He was adamant that just as Ideas are not creations of our conceptual thinking but are living Intelligences with the power to structure our very existence, so too are Numbers.
To find relevant transcripts and papers, search on “Number” in keywords in the document archive.
There are also several diagrams in the sketchbooks that symbolize the Divine Numbers using configurations of the essential dignities found in the metaphysical chart. You can find these by searching on “Number” in keywords in the diagram archive.
All of these fertile ideas found in the Platonic dialogues are also elaborated in the Enneads of Plotinus, and Damiani often investigated and meditated on their Plotinian formulations and expressions.