So far, I have really not been very bold as regards the topics that I have
dared to write about on this blog. Upon querying the ‘bowels’ of my computer
for a file containing a quote by an Egyptian-Russian esotericist who spent
the bulk of his life in France (and who thus also wrote in French), I
realised that I had clean forgotten about the entry below, left as I had
last saved the file, namely on the 1st of September of last year. So just
for the fun of it, I am going to publish the entry as it stood on 1-9-2020,
including with the last paragraph, which has nothing to do with Marcus
Aurelius, as it is simply a remnant from the file I had copied (i.e. my
entry on Apuleius)
so as to be able to write my new text in it. In a way, an electronic palimpsest...
Lausanne, 16th March 2021
Marcus
Aurelius’s three rules (liber XII, 24-27)
According to some (e.g. esotericists, survivors of a near-death experience,
‘Tibetan anthropologists’, etc.), the blue or silver ‘umbilical cord in
reverse’ (my coinage) which (it is claimed) connects our fleshly body to our
etheric body breaks (or, should I write, ‘is severed’) just before the point
of death, thereby liberating the soul to set off on to its next
journey. Upon reading typed
proofs available on the Internet related to the only book I know of that
shows a picture of this so-called ‘silver cord’ (which, it is claimed,
was taken on the death-bed of a woman; the picture, it is alleged by
third parties, was reproduced in a book written by a now deceased French
author of Egyptian and Russian parentage, Wilfried-René
Chettéoui, and published in 1979), I came across a reference to the
work of an early researcher of this phenomenon, written in French. The book
is called L’extériorisation de la sensibilité: étude expérimentale et
historique and it was penned by Colonel Albert de Rochas d’Aiglun.
It did not take me long to find a digitised version of the book on Gallica,
a repository of French texts in the public domain which have been
digitised by the French National Library and which can be downloaded in
electronic format free of charge. Given that this book deals with
experiments that the author and others conducted in the nineteenth century
in connection with a field of investigation which it is easier to describe
as ‘the paranormal’, one can understand
that Albert de Rochas felt that the following ‘musing’ (or meditation) by
the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius would remind the reader to approach the
subject of L’extériorisation de la sensibilité: étude expérimentale et
historique [The exteriorisation of sensibility: an experimental
and historical study – note that ‘sensibility’
means rather something akin to ‘the power of sensation’] with some degree of
intellectual openness, maybe even some intellectual audacity.
The quote, taken from book 12, section 25 of that Roman emperor’s famous Meditations,
reads as follows on the front page of L’extériorisation de la
sensibilité: étude expérimentale et historique:
Βάλε ἔξω τὴν ὑπόληψιν: σέσωσαι
Rejette l’opinion, tu seras sauvé.
Marc-Aurèle [the original has block letters here.]
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5516173k/f6.item.texteImage
Need I translate it given that the words are so similar? English, after all,
has many words with are derived either from Latin or ancient Greek. Yes?
Then here is a literal translation: ‘Reject [the prevailing]
opinion, you will be saved’.
Given the curious (or rather ‘highly troubled’) times we are going through
(in many aspects, I would opine that it is highly reminiscent of the period
between the two world wars, with the continued civil unrest, the
polarisation of society, the world economy being in shambles and also the
moral decay, but now so ingrained in our societies that we simply no longer
notice it), the above meditation of the emperor Marcus Aurelius struck me as
very pertinent.
So I decided to find the full quote. This did not take me very long, thanks
to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=Marcus+Aurelius&and%5B%5D=languageSorter%3A%22Ancient+Greek%22&sort=-date.
In ancient Greek, the full quote reads as follows (courtesy of Tufts
University’s Perseus
– Marcus Aurelius, M. Antonius Imperator Ad Se Ipsum, Jan Hendrik
Leopold. in aedibus B. G. Teubneri. Leipzig. 1908):
Βάλε ἔξω τὴν ὑπόληψιν: σέσωσαι. τίς οὖν ὁ
κωλύων ἐκβάλλειν;
I do not know ancient Greek, so here are three translations.
‘ ’
‘ ’
‘ ’
This was enough to spur me into wanting to read the passage in the oldest
surviving manuscript which I was sure could only have been digitised and
have been made available to all over the Internet given the influence
Apuleius’s famous asinine story had on European literature in the Middle
Ages, in the Renaissance and at least up to the seventeenth century.
Lausanne,
13th August/1st September 2020
