The modes are not always intelligible at first sight; for example, one might wonder what the relevance is of a discipline such as the Tea Ceremony, which combines ascesis with art, while being materially based on manipulations that seem a priori unimportant, but are ennobled by their sacralization. First of all, one must take into account the fact that in the Far Easterner, sensorial intuition is more developed than the speculative gift; also, that the practical sense and the aesthetic sense, as well as the taste for symbolism are at the basis of his spiritual temperament. In the Tea Ceremony, the symbolic and morally correct act — the “profound” act if one will — is supposed to bring about a sort of Platonic anamnesis or a unitive consciousness, whereas with the white man of the East and the WEST it is the Idea that is supposed to lead to correct and virtuous acts. The man of the yellow race goes from sensorial experience to intellection, roughly speaking, whereas with the white man, it is the converse that takes place: in starting out from concepts, or from habitual mental images, he understands and classifies phenomena, without, however, feeling the need to consciously integrate them into his spiritual life, except incidentally or when it is a question of traditionally accepted symbols. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
The Tea Ceremony signifies that we ought to perform all the activities and manipulations of daily life according to primordial perfections, which is pure symbolism, pure consciousness of the Essential, perfect beauty and self-mastery. The intention is basically the same in the craft initiations of the WEST — including Islam — but the formal foundation is then the production of useful objects and not the symbolism of gestures; this being so, the stone mason intends, parallel to his work, to fashion his soul in view of union with God. And thus there is to be found in all the crafts and all the arts a spiritual model that, in the Muslim world, often refers to one of the prophets mentioned in the Koran; any professional or homemaking activity is a kind of revelation. As for the adherents of Zen, they readily seek their inspiration in “ordinary life,” not because it is trivial, to be sure, but because — inasmuch as it is woven of symbolisms — it mysteriously implies the “Buddha nature.” Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
What is important to understand is that the “positivistic” rationalism of the WEST does not exclude the presence of a valid element that also pertains to reason, namely the habit of relying on reason in all the cases wherein it is normal to do so; thus of considering the nature of things rather than obeying conventional reflexes. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism
Howbeit, if finally the WEST had need of that messianic and dramatic religion which is Christianity, it is because the average European was an active type and an adventurer and not a contemplative like the Hindu; but the “Aryan” atavism had to resurface sooner or later, whence the Renaissance and modern rationalism. No doubt, Christianity presents elements of esoterism that make it compatible with all ethnic temperaments, but its formal structure, or its moral bearing, had to be in keeping with the fundamental temperament of the WEST, whether Mediterranean or Nordic. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism
In the WEST, such disciplines as the “science of religions” and “textual criticism,” whatever their errors of principle, benefit from extenuating circumstances, given the irrefutable documentary evidence; so that certain hypotheses may be valid, despite the falseness of their context. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism
The experience of the deceptive “liberty” which is propounded as an end in itself or as “art for art’s sake” – as if one could be really free outside the truth and without inward liberty! – this experience, we say, is only in its beginning phase, although the world has already reaped some of its bitter fruits; for everything still human, normal and stable in the world survives only through the vitality of ancestral traditions – of “prejudices” if one so prefers – whether it be a matter of the WEST, molded by Christianity, or of any Nilotic or Amazonian tribe. To have some idea of what the free man of “tomorrow” might be like, the man starting from zero and “creating himself” (NA: And creating the truth at the same time, of course.)- but in reality the man of the machine which has escaped from his control – it suffices to take a glance at the very “existentialist” psychology of most youth. If the profound and “subconscious” imprints of tradition are removed from man, there remain finally only the stigmata of his fall and the unleashing of the infra-human. sophiaperennis: Existentialism
Thus the man of the WEST became the slave of his speculations, whereas the Oriental spirit knew how to preserve its inward liberty and its seemingly backward superiority’ (A. M. Ammann S. J., Die Gottesschau im palamitischen Hesychasmus). sophiaperennis: Philosophy and Christianity
Some will certainly raise the objection that traditional metaphysics, whether of the East or the WEST, makes use of rational argumentations like any philosophy; but an argumentation a man uses to describe to his fellow men what he knows is one thing, and an argumentation a man uses on himself because he knows nothing is quite another. This is a capital distinction for it marks the whole difference between the intellectual “visionary” and the mere “thinker” who “gropes alone through the darkness” (Descartes) and whose pride it is to deny that there could be any knowledge which does not proceed in the same fashion. sophiaperennis: Scholasticism
In reality, the philosophia perennis, actualized in the WEST, though on different levels, by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the Fathers and the Scholastics, constitutes a definitive intellectual heritage, and the great problem of our times is not to replace them with something better – for this something could not exist according to the point of view in question here – but to return to the sources, both around us and within us, and to examine all the data of contemporary life in the light of the one, timeless truth. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle
One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks “attained” to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates –Plato –Aristotle represents the summit of an entirely “natural” thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms. There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of “humanism” more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic – and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual “pedagogy” and have something of the provisional in them – this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a “natural” character to intellections that are “supernatural” by definition, or “naturally supernatural”. On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profane – profane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind – whereas Aristotle placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and “humanistic” plane. The originality of Aristotle and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a “two-edged sword” precisely be-cause truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms. The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense. (NA: With Pythagoras one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East – in reality neither “Eastern” nor “WESTern”, that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe – but neither is one wholly in the WEST; whereas with Aristotle Europe begins to become speci fically “WESTern” in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East – or a particular East – forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean WEST finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both Aristotle and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all modern theological attempts to “surpass” the teaching of Aristotle can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary ” scientism”, before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before modernism in all its forms – that modernism which is less and less a “humanism” since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The moderns, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of Aristotle.) What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle
It has been said that the flaws characterizing the modern WEST are rationalism, materialism and sentimentalism. According to the first, reason alone brings about all knowledge; according to the second, only matter gives meaning to life; as for sentimentalism, one ought to rather speak of psychologism, besides the fact that one should not confuse a given emotivity with emotivity as such, nor wish to minimize the defects of the East by exagerrating those of the WEST. According to psychologism, the spiritual and the intellectual are reduced to the psychic, hence in a certain way to the infrahuman: quite paradoxically, it is some rationalists who say so. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times
Be that as it may, we should like to point out here that the chronic imbalance that characterizes WESTern humanity has two principal causes, the antagonism between Aryan paganism and Semitic Christianity on the one hand, and the antagonism between Latin rationality and Germanic imaginativeness on the other. (NA: From the point of view of spiritual worth, it is contemplativity that is decisive, whether it is combined with reason or with imagination, or with any kind of sensibility.) The Latin Church, with its sentimental and unrealistic idealism, has created a completely unnecessary scission between clergy and laity, whence a perpetual uneasiness on the part of the latter towards the former; it has moreover, without taking account of their needs and tastes, imposed on the Germanic peoples too many specifically Latin solutions, forgetting that a religious and cultural framework, in order to be effective, must adapt itself to the mental requirements of those on whom it is imposed. And since, in the case of Europeans, their creative gifts far exceed their contemplative gifts – the role of Christianity should have been to re-establish equilibrium by accentuating contemplation and canalizing creativity, – the WEST excels in “destroying what it has worshipped”; also the history of WESTern civilization is made up of cultural treacheries that are difficult to understand, – one is astonished at so much lack of understanding, ingratitude and blindness, – and these treacheries appear most visibly, it goes without saying, in their formal manifestations, in other words, in the human ambience which, in normal conditions, ought to suggest a sort of earthly Paradise or heavenly Jerusalem, with all their beatific symbolism and stability. The Renaissance, at its apogee, replaces happiness with pride; the baroque reacts against this pride or this crushing coldness with a false happiness, cut off from its divine roots and full of a bragadoccio that is both exaggerated and frenzied. The reaction to this reaction was a pagan classicism leading to the bourgeois ugliness, both crude and mediocre, of the 19th century; this has nothing to do with the real people or with a popular craftsmanship that is still authentic, and which remains more or less on the margin of history and bears witness to a wholesomeness very far from all civilizationist affectation. (NA: Popular art moreover is often the vehicle of primordial, especially solar, symbols, and one finds it in peoples very far removed from one another, sometimes in forms that are identical down to the last detail.) sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
At the opposite pole to this utilitarian sophism is situated another error, which paradoxically resembles the former in its exaggeration and intolerance, and has even contributed to its development in conformity with the undulatory movement of so-called progress, and this is “classical” and “academic” aestheticism. (NA: It has also provoked the art called ” abstract,” which proves once again that the ” evolution” of the WEST consists in descending from one extreme to the other. It is ridiculous to despise ” academicism” in the name of the art that is at the moment accepted as “modern”; all such judgments depend on fashion and proceed from no objective criterion. Critics no longer work with anything but wholly extrinsic pseudocriteria, such as contemporaneity or novelty, as if a masterpiece were a masterpiece for a reason situated outside itself.) According to this way of looking at things, there exists a unique and exclusive canon of human and artistic beauty, an “ideal beauty” in which beauty of form and of content and of kind coincide. This third point is contestable, if not wholly false, for the “kind,” in direct proportion to the elevation of its rank, comprises a whole scale of perfect types, diversified so far as their mode is concerned, but aesthetically equivalent. There can be no question, therefore, of a combing out of individuals so as to obtain a single ideal type, either within humanity as a whole, where the point is self-evident since the races exist, or even within a single race, since the races are complex. The “canons of beauty” are either a matter of sculptural or pictorial style, or a matter of taste and habit, if not of prejudice. In this last case, they are connected more or less with the instinct of self-preservation of a racial group, so that the question is one of natural selection and not of intelligence nor of aesthetics; aesthetics is an exact science and not the mental expression of a biological fatality. These general remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to the whole domain of the beautiful, and they have a bearing even beyond that domain, in the sense that there may be affinities, and a need for complementary compensations, on every plane of intelligence and of sensibility, and notably on the plane of spiritual life. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
It has often been noticed that Oriental peoples, including those reputed to be the most artistic, show themselves for the most part entirely lacking in aesthetical discernment with regard to whatever comes to them from the WEST. All the ugliness born of a world more and more devoid of spirituality spreads over the East with unbelievable facility, not only under the influence of politico-economic factors, which would not be so surprising, but also by the free consent of those who, by all appearances, had created a world of beauty, that is a civilization, in which every expression, including the most modest, bore the imprint of the same genius. Since the very beginning of WESTern infiltration, it has been astonishing to see the most perfect works of art set side by side with the worst trivialities of industrial production, and these disconcerting contradictions have taken place not only in the realm of ‘art products’, but in nearly every sphere, setting aside the fact that in a normal civilization, everything accomplished by man is related to the domain of art, in some respects at least. The answer to this paradox is very simple, however, and we have already outlined it in the preceding pages: it resides in the fact that forms, even the most unimportant, are the work of human hands in a secondary manner only; they originate first and foremost from the same supra-human source from which all tradition originates, which is another way of saying that the artist who lives in a traditional world devoid of ‘rifts’, works under the discipline or the inspiration of a genius which surpasses him; fundamentally he is but the instrument of this genius, if only from the fact of his craftsman’s qualification. (NA: ‘A thing is not only what it is for the senses, but also what it represents. Natural or artifi cial objects are not . . . arbitrary ” symbols” of such or such a different or superior reality; but they are.., the effective manifestation of that reality: the eagle or the lion, for example, is not so much the symbol or the image of the Sun as it is the Sun under one of its manifest ations (the essential form being more important than the nature in which it manifests itself); in the same way, every house is the world in effigy and every altar is situated at the centre of the earth . . . ‘ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: ‘The Primitive Mentality’ in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, August-September-October, 1939). It is solely and exclusively traditional art – in the widest sense of the word, implying all that is of an externally formal order, and therefore a fortiori everything which belongs in some way or other to the ritual domain – it is only this art, transmitted with tradition and by tradition, which can guarantee the adequate analogical correspondence between the divine arid the cosmic orders on the one hand, and the human or ‘artistic’ order on the other. As a result, the traditional artist does not limit himself simply to imitating Nature, but to ‘imitating Nature in her manner of operation’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. I, qu. 117, a. I) and it goes without saying that the artist cannot, with his own individual means, improvise such a ‘cosmological’ operation. It is by the entirely adequate conformity of the artist to this ‘manner of operation’, a conformity which is subordinated to the rules of tradition, that the masterpiece is created; in other words, this conformity essentially presupposes a knowledge, which may be either personal, direct and active, or inherited, indirect and passive, the latter case being that of those artisans who, unconscious as individuals of the metaphysical content of the forms they have learned to create, know not how to resist the corrosive influence of the modern WEST.) Consequently, individual taste plays only a relatively subordinate part in the production of the forms of such an art, and this taste will be reduced to nothing as soon as the individual finds himself face to face with a form which is foreign to the spirit of his own Tradition; that is what happens in the case of a people unfamiliar with WESTern civilization when they encounter the forms imported from the WEST. However, for this to happen, it is necessary that the people accepting such confusion should no longer be fully Conscious of their own spiritual genius, or in other terms, that they should no longer be capable of understanding the forms with which they are still surrounded and in which they live; it is in fact a proof that the people in question are already suffering from a certain decadence. Because of this fact, they are led to accept modern ugliness all the more easily because it may answer to certain inferior possibilities that those people are already spontaneously seeking to realize, no matter how, and it may well be quite subconsciously; therefore, the unreasoning readiness with which only too many Orientals (possibly even the great majority) accept things which are utterly incompatible with the spirit of their Tradition is best explained by the fascination exercised over an ordinary person by something corresponding to an as yet unexhausted possibility, this possibility being, in the present case, simply that of arbitrariness or want of principle. However that may be, and without wishing to attach too much importance to this explanation of what appears to be the complete lack of taste shown by Orientals, there is one fact which is absolutely certain, namely that very many Orientals themselves no longer understand the sense of the forms they inherited from their ancestors, together with their whole Tradition. All that has just been said applies of course first and foremost and a fortiori to the nations of the WEST themselves who, after having created – we will not say ‘invented’- a perfect traditional art, proceeded to disown it in favour of the residues of the individualistic and empty art of the Graeco-Ro mans, which has finally led to the artistic chaos of the modern world. We know very well that there are some who will not at any price admit the unintelligibility or the ugliness of the modern world, and who readily employ the word ‘aesthetic’, with a derogatory nuance similar to that attaching to the words ‘picturesque’ and ‘romantic’, in order to discredit in advance the importance of forms, so that they may find themselves more at ease in the enclosed system of their own barbarism. Such an attitude has nothing surprising in it when it concerns avowed modernists, but it is worse than illogical, not to say rather despicable, coming from those who claim to belong to the Christian civilization; for to reduce the spontaneous and normal language of Christian art – a language the beauty of which can hardly be questioned – to a worldly matter of ‘taste’- as if medieval art could have been the product of mere caprice – amounts to admitting that the signs stamped by the genius of Christianity on all its direct and indirect expressions were only a contingency unrelated to that genius and devoid of serious importance, or even due to a mental inferiority; for ‘only the spirit matters’- so say certain ignorant people imbued with hypocritical, iconoclastic, blasphemous and impotent puritanism, who pronounce the word ‘spirit’ all the more readily because they are the last to know what it really stands for. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
In order to understand better the causes of the decadence of art in the WEST, one must take into account the fact that there is in the European mentality a certain dangerous ‘idealism’ which is not without relevance to that decadence, nor yet to the decay of WESTern civilization as a whole. This ‘idealism’ has found its fullest, one might say its most ‘intelligent’ expression in certain forms of Gothic art, those in which a kind of ‘dynamism’ is predominant, which seems to aim at taking away the heaviness from stone. As for Byzantine and Romanesque art, as well as that other side of Gothic art wherein a ‘static’ power has been preserved, it might be said that it is an essentially intellectual art, therefore ‘realistic’. The ‘flamboyant’ Gothic art, no matter how ‘passionate’ it became, was nevertheless still a traditional art except in the case of sculpture and painting which were already well on the way to decadence; to be more exact, it was the ‘swansong’ of Gothic art. From the time of the Renaissance, which represents a sort of ‘posthumous revenge’ on the part of classical antiquity, European ‘idealism’ flowed into the exhumed sarcophagi of the Graeco-Roman civilization. By this act of suicide, idealism placed itself at the service of an individualism in which it thought to have rediscovered its own genius, only to end up, after a number of intermediate stages, in the most vulgar and wildest affirmations of that individualism. This was really a double suicide: firstly the forsaking of medieval or Christian art, and secondly the adoption of Graeco-Roman forms which intoxicated the Christian world with the poison of their decadence. But it is necessary here to consider a possible objection: was not the art of the first Christians in fact Roman art? The answer is that the real beginnings of Christian art are to be found in the symbols inscribed in the catacombs, and not in the forms that the early Christians, themselves in part belonging to the Roman civilization, temporarily borrowed in a purely outward manner from the ‘classical’ decadence. Christianity was indeed called upon to replace this decadence by an art springing spontaneously from an original spiritual genius, and if in fact certain Roman influences have always persisted in Christian art, this only applies to more or less superficial details. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
It has just been stated that European ‘idealism’ allied itself to individualism and ended by identifying itself with the crudest expressions of the latter. As for those things that the WEST finds crude’ in other civilizations, they are nearly always only the more or less superficial aspects of a ‘realism’ that scorns delusive and hypocritical veils. However, one should not lose sight of the fact that ‘idealism’ is not bad in itself inasmuch as it finds its place in the minds of heroes, always inclined towards ‘sublimation’; what is bad, and at the same time specifically WESTern, is the intrusion of this mentality into every sphere, including those in which it has no place. It is this distorted ‘idealism’, all the more fragile and dangerous because it is distorted, that Islam, with its desire for equilibrium and stability – in other words ‘realism’- wished to avoid at all costs, having taken, moreover, into consideration the restricted possibilities of the present cyclic period, already far removed from its origin; herein lies the reason for that ‘earthly’ aspect with which Christians are wont to reproach the Islamic civilization. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
The morality and mysticism of the WEST see carnal sin exclusively in concupiscence, which is one-sided and insufficient; in reality, sin here lies just as much in the profanation of a theophanic mystery; it is in the fact of pulling downwards, towards the frivolous and the trivial, that which by its nature points upwards and towards the sacred; but sin or deviation is also, at a level which in this case is not deprived of nobility, in the purely aesthetic and individualistic cult of bodies , as was the case in classical Greece, where the sense of clarity, of measure, of finite perfection, completely obliterated the sense of the transcendent, of mystery and of the infinite. Sensible beauty became an end in itself; it was no longer man who resembled God, it was God who resembled man; whereas in Egyptian and Hindu art, which express the substantial and not the accidental, one feels that the human form is nothing without a mystery which on the one hand fashions it and on the other hand transcends it, and which calls both to Love and to Deliverance. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
In order to understand certain error of neo-bhaktism, or of neo-Hinduism in general, it is necessary to recall that unfortunately the opposition between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ does not always coincide with the opposition between ‘piety’ and ‘worldliness’; this paradox is a favorite haunt of Satan, for there he finds a fruitful ground for all sorts of seductions and hypocrisies; it amounts, in short, to dishonest speculation on the difference of plane separating doctrinal truth from virtue. Nothing is more agreeable to the Evil One than the cries of indignation of the heretic against the occasional vice of the orthodox, or the pharisaical condemnation, by some orthodox-minded person, of a spiritual value not properly understood; the genesis of the modern WEST and the easy and rapid modernization of the East are largely to be explained in terms of these inseparable oscillations.(Gnosis Divine Wisdom, p. 64) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
A pernicious error that must be pointed out here — one which seems to be axiomatic with the false gurus of East and WEST — is what could designated by the term “realizationism” : it is claimed that only “realization” counts and that “theory” is nothing, as if man were not a thinking being, and as if he could undertake anything whatsoever without knowing where he was going. False masters speak readily of “developing latent energies”; now one can go to hell with all the developments and all the energies one pleases; it is in any case better to die with a good theory than with a false “realization”. What the pseudo-spiritualists lose sight of only too easily is that, according to the maxim of the maharajahs of Benares, “there is no right superior to that of the truth”. (The Play of Masks, p.13, note 7). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
A few words should be said here about the ancient American religion, or more precisely that of the Plains and Woodland Indians. The most eminent manifestations of the “Great Spirit” are the Cardinal Points together with zenith and nadir, or with Heaven and Earth, and next in order are such as the Sun and the Morning Star. Although the Great Spirit is one, He comprises in Himself all those qualities the traces of which we see and the effects of which we experience in the world of appearances. The East is Light and Knowledge and also Peace; the South is Warmth and Life, therefore also Growth and Happiness; the WEST is fertilizing Water and also Revelation speaking in lightning and thunder, the North in Cold and Purity, or Strength. Thus it is that the Universe, at whatever level it may be considered, whether or Earth, Man or Heaven, is dependent on the four primordial determinations: Light, Heat, Water, Cold. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian
A most striking feature of the North American branch of the Primordial Sanatana Dharma is the doctrine of the four years: the sacred animal of the Plains-Indians, the buffalo, symbolizes the Mahayuga, each of its legs representing a Yuga. At the beginning of this Mahayuga a buffalo was placed by the Great Spirit at the WEST in order to hold back the water which menace the earth. Every year this bison loses a hear, and in very Yuga it loses a foot. When it will have lost all its hair, and its feet, the water will overwhelm the earth and the Mahayuga will be finished. the analogy with the bull of Dharma in Hinduism is very remarkable; at every Yuga, this bill withdraws a foot, and spirituality loses its strength; and now we are near the end of the kali-yuga. Like the orthodox Hindus, the traditional Red Indians have this conviction, which is obviously true in spite of all the mundane optimism of the modern world; but let us add that the compensation of our very dark age is the Mercy of the Holy Name, as it is emphasized in the Maneuver Dharma Shasta and the Trimmed Bhagavata and other holy scriptures. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian