Boven ons Herkomstland na een landing Hier

Ik las vanmorgen wat oude literatuur over kosmologie en vond dit artikel. In de oudheid was voor grote zielen het directe contact met de Werkelijkheden een makkelijker gebeuren dan in deze Materialisatietijd, waar de toegangen ogenschijnlijk gesloten lijken. Gebruik deze zomer eens meer om de kosmos te aanschouwen, de plaats waar onze Wezens mogelijk vandaan komen en weer naar terug reizen.

"Plato’s Cosmos MISREAD OR DISTORTED?

Sepp Rothwangl & George Latura

In Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (2012), Campion writes that of Plato’s works “two contain explicitly cosmological material: The Timaeus includes his cosmogony, and the Republic details the soul’s origin in, and return to, the stars.” Cicero held a similar view: he translated a portion of Timaeus – the part where the Demiurge creates two intersecting cosmic circles – and he reinterpreted Plato’s Vision of Er at the end of Republic as his Dream of Scipio at the end of On The Republic. Through the theoretical framework posited by Campion, divergent views of Plato’s cosmology are explored.

 

In Plato’s Vision, departed souls arrive at a pillar of light in the sky while in Cicero’s Dream, Scipio meets his adoptive ancestors in the Milky Way.

The Galaxy was seen as the heavenly abode by Heraclides of Pontus (a pupil of Plato, c. 300 BC), by the Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. AD 280), by Martianus Capella (c. AD 400), and by Macrobius (c. AD 400) who, in his Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, located the gates of the afterlife at the intersections of the Milky Way and the zodiac, the constellations along the ecliptic – the path of the seven Wanderers.

 

This Neoplatonist cosmology is traced back from Macrobius to Cicero and thence to Plato himself. Yet Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, wrote about the Milky Way not in On The Heavens, but in Meteorologica, ascribing the ‘galaxias kyklos’ to atmospheric phenomena and thus removing it from the heavens. By the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s view was predominant and Michael Scotus would claim that the Milky Way was the abode of the ‘demon meridianus’ that mortals should fear. Through a comparative analysis of relevant texts, we examine how and why such different cosmological views emerged.

 

In Republic’s Vision of Er (c. 370 BCE), Plato writes about the journey of departed souls to a celestial light that girdles the heavens. ‘…they discerned, extended from above throughout the heaven and the earth, a straight light like a pillar, most nearly resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer… this light was the girdle of the heavens… holding together… the entire revolving vault.’ (Republic, 616b-c, tr. Shorey)

 

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