“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
Adams came to this conclusion after he had read every ancient historian he could find, in the original Greek and Latin, before writing the constitutions of both Massachusetts and the United States.
He understood that every empire that has ever collapsed under the weight of its own mob has told the same story before it fell: the people demanded more power, more voice, more “freedom,” and in the chaos that followed, a strongman rose up to restore order.
This is not a modern anxiety invented by your favorite liberal democratic news pundits.
It is a pattern that Plato diagrammed twenty-four centuries ago, that Polybius watched play out in the streets of Greek city-states, and that the architects of the American founding studied line by line before they refused, deliberately and on purpose, to build a democracy.
Today, as political scientists at every major university document a rising tide of strongman politics on American soil, the ancient diagnosis is playing out on schedule: pure democracy does not end in freedom; it ends with a demagogue.
We all must ask a question that most modern civics classrooms have stopped asking honestly: why did the men who built the American republic go out of their way to avoid the word “democracy,” and why did the wisest minds of antiquity see unchecked popular rule not as liberty, but as the last stop before tyranny?
The answer runs from Plato’s Athens to Cicero’s Rome to Philadelphia in 1787, and it matters more now, in an age of plebiscite politics and mob-driven outrage cycles, than it has in generations.
Ancient Warnings About Pure Democracy
Plato lived through the trial and execution of his teacher, Socrates, by a democratic Athenian jury. That experience shaped everything he wrote afterward. In the Republic, Plato traces a five-stage decay of political regimes: aristocracy degenerates into timocracy, timocracy into oligarchy, oligarchy into democracy, and democracy, finally, into tyranny.
He did not consider this a hypothetical.
He considered it a law of political nature, as reliable as gravity.
Plato’s account of democracy is unsparing. He describes a society where “life has neither law nor order,” where an “unquenchable desire for limitless liberty” causes citizens to “cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten,” until “they will have no one over them.”
The demagogue, sensing the vacuum, exploits the fear the poor majority feels toward the rich minority, promises to protect the people, and uses that trust to seize absolute power.
“Democracy,” Plato concludes, is “the worst of all lawful governments, and the best of all lawless ones.”
The regime that follows it, tyranny, he calls “the fourth and worst disorder of a state.”
Aristotle, Plato’s student, was more measured but reached a compatible verdict. He rejected pure forms of any kind, rich and poor, one and many, as inherently unstable.
His answer was politeia, a mixed constitution combining features of democracy, oligarchy, and aristocracy, governed by a moderately wealthy middle class, “so that no group of citizens is in a position to abuse its rights.”
Aristotle’s mixed regime was not a compromise for its own sake. It was an engineering solution to a problem he considered mathematically inevitable: any single class left with total power will eventually use that power against everyone else.
The most influential ancient argument for a republic over a democracy came not from a philosopher in a lecture hall, but from a Greek historian watching Rome up close.
Polybius argued that every pure constitution carries the seed of its own corruption: monarchy decays into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into mob rule.
His solution, drawn directly from observing the Roman constitution, was a government that divided supreme authority among three competing elements at once: the consuls carrying the monarchic function, the Senate the aristocratic function, and the popular assemblies the democratic function.
No single body could dominate the others for long, because each held a check the others needed.
Cicero, writing a century after Polybius, made the case in his own voice with a formulation the American founders would later borrow almost word for word.
In De Re Publica, Cicero has the statesman Scipio conclude that a government “composed of an equal mixture of the three better forms,” monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, “united and modified by each other,” is superior even to the best of the pure forms, kingship.
Cicero was blunt about what happens without that balance:
“In communities and individuals alike, excessive freedom topples over into excessive slavery. Extreme freedom produces a tyrant.”
For Cicero, the mixed republic was not born of idealism. It was born of “weakness,” a mutual fear between classes that forces “a pact” between the people and the powerful, because no faction can trust itself alone with total power.
What the American Founders Actually Said
The men who wrote the United States Constitution had Polybius and Cicero on their shelves, and it shows. John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America returns explicitly to the Polybian model of divided power.
The founders were not vague about their preference. They were emphatic, and often harsh, about the difference between a republic and a democracy.
James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 10, described direct democracies as regimes that “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” incompatible “with personal security, or the rights of property,” and typically “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
In Federalist No. 39, Madison defined a republic as a government “which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” but administered by representatives, not by the unmediated will of a crowd.
Alexander Hamilton drew the same distinction to Gouverneur Morris. “Real liberty,” he wrote, “is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”
He favored “a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated,” with legislative, executive, and judicial power “vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people.”
Thomas Jefferson called the republican form “the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.”
Benjamin Rush called simple democracy “one of the greatest of evils,” bluntly equating it with “mobocracy.”
Noah Webster wrote that “a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”
And then there is the anecdote every American schoolchild half-remembers but rarely understands. As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, a Philadelphia socialite named Elizabeth Willing Powel asked him what the delegates had created: “a republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin’s reply, recorded by delegate James McHenry in his convention journal, was four words long:
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
The line survives not because it was clever, but because Franklin understood something the founders built directly into the Constitution’s text: Article IV explicitly guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” never once using the word democracy.
The Difference That Actually Matters
Strip away the modern confusion, where “democracy” and “republic” get used as interchangeable applause lines in speeches, and the ancient and founding-era consensus reduces to one structural distinction.
A pure democracy vests final authority directly in the unmediated will of the majority, with no institutional buffer between a passing popular mood and the machinery of the state.
A republic vests sovereignty in the people but forces that sovereignty through representative institutions, layered checks, and rule of law, precisely so that no single faction, whether a king, an oligarchy, or fifty-one percent of the electorate, can seize total control.
This is not an argument against popular sovereignty. Cicero, Madison, and Adams all agreed the republic’s authority flows from the people.
It is an argument against unmediated popular sovereignty, the specific condition Plato watched kill Socrates and the founders were determined never to reproduce in Philadelphia.
The mixed constitution that Polybius admired in Rome and the separated powers that Madison built into Article I, II, and III of the Constitution are the same idea wearing different clothes, eighteen centuries apart: divide power among competing bodies so that ambition checks ambition, and no faction, however popular, can rule unopposed.
How America Became the Democracy It Was Never Meant to Be
Here is the part of the story most civics books skip.
The republic of 1787 has been systematically democratized, firewalls removed one constitutional change at a time, until the system operates far closer to the pure democracy the founders rejected than to the mixed republic they bequeathed.
The single most consequential change came on April 8, 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified.
For the nation’s first 125 years, voters did not directly elect their senators; the Constitution of 1788 assigned that power to state legislatures, making the Senate a check on popular passion and a structural representative of the states.
The Seventeenth Amendment eliminated that filter entirely, converting the Senate into what the founders had deliberately refused to make it: a second, slower House driven by direct popular election.
Progressive Era reformers sold the change as a blow against corruption and a “millionaires’ club” Senate.
What it actually did, as the Heritage Foundation’s constitutional analysis notes, is remove the states’ last structural seat at the federal table and “make the Constitution more democratic,” exactly the direction every founding document warns against.
The Electoral College faced a parallel erosion. While the amendment process could not touch it directly, state after state has joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, pledging their electors to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, a mechanism designed to nullify the founders’ indirect filter without ever repealing it.
Meanwhile, the direct primary system replaced party conventions as the engine of candidate selection, pulling nomination power away from deliberative bodies and placing it in the hands of mass electorates primed for personality-driven, passion-driven contests. In the states, ballot initiatives and referendums now let transient majorities write law directly, bypassing the representative process altogether.
None of this happened by conspiracy. It happened by reform movements convinced, sincerely, that “more democracy” automatically meant more justice. That is precisely the faith Plato warned against, and precisely the mistake Tocqueville saw Americans making a century and a half ago: mistaking the will of the majority, however loudly expressed, for the rule of law.
Modern Political Science
Contemporary political scientists have now measured what the Funders knew would happen once the mob and democracy took over the government..
Freedom House’s global index shows the United States falling from a score of 92 in 2014 to 83 by 2021, and some assessments reclassify the country from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” altogether.
Scholars of democratic backsliding define the process as “the process of removing constraints on accountability for democratically elected executive leaders,” a dynamic they now document unfolding through weak commitment to democratic rules, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, tolerance of political violence, and executive aggrandizement, patterns observed under recent administrations of both parties.
Political Science Quarterly notes that observers now warn “democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history.”
This is not a partisan talking point; it is the conclusion of the academic establishment that measures regime health like doctors measure blood pressure.
A Practical Conclusion
Every generation that forgets the difference between a republic and a democracy tends to relearn it the hard way, usually by watching institutions erode under the pressure of a majority convinced its cause justifies bypassing the rules built to restrain it.
We have seen this happen in real time during our democratic era.
The remedy the ancients and the founders converged on independently, across a thousand years and three languages, is not more direct rule by referendum or mob sentiment.
It is the deliberate friction of representative government: elected bodies, independent courts, staggered terms, and constitutional limits that outlast any single election cycle’s passions.
Strip away the republic’s intermediate institutions, the state legislatures in the Senate choice, the indirect presidential election, the party conventions that filtered demagogues from nomination, and what remains is a direct line between a mob moment and the executive chair.
Each reform that removed friction to serve “the people’s voice” cleared one more obstacle from a demagogue’s path.
The founders were right about the disease; modern reformers forgot the vaccine.
Franklin knew a republic survives only as long as its citizens understand what they were given and refuse to trade its checks and balances for the momentary comfort of majority rule.
That understanding, not a slogan, is the actual inheritance.
But the Republic as went to sleep as the Democratic mob has taken the helm leading us into a liberal hell in a rainbow covered hand basket.
And only one thing is left to save us.
The strongman tyrant who has been waiting in the shadows.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
Since ancient times, many philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians have said that the monad or number one represents a secret principle of a sacred central fire that unites all things forming our realities.
This concept has a profound significance in both philosophy and cosmogony for well over 2,000 years.
The Greeks called it the “monad or monas,” meaning “unity” or “oneness,” which represents the fundamental building block of existence. It was associated with the belief in the “prime mover” or the first cause that set the universe in motion.
This concept can be traced back to the teachings of ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato, who believed in the existence of a fundamental substance that underlies the diversity of the material world.
According to Pythagoras, who some consider the Father of Math and his followers, the Pythagoreans, the monad is the ultimate source of all existence.
In this philosophy, the number one or monad is considered the origin of numbers, as numbers are seen as the building blocks of reality. It stood at the pinnacle of this numerical hierarchy.
For the Pythagoreans, the Monad represented the source from which all other numbers and mathematical relationships were derived.
It symbolized unity, indivisibility, and the essence of all beings.
ORDO AB CHAO
The monad is seen as the creative force, fire or energenetic force that brings order out of chaos, giving rise to the intricate web of interconnectedness that defines our reality. It is the principle that brings about the principles of symmetry, proportion, and harmony that permeate the natural world.
In Pythagorean cosmogony, it serves as the guiding force that organizes or more appropriately, magnetizes the chaotic elements of the universe into a harmonious order. According to their teachings, each number possessed its own unique essence and vibrational frequency, and these vibrations were considered to be the very fabric of reality.
They believed that it gave rise to the dyad, which then generated all other numbers and the material world. It is the indivisible and immutable essence that underlies the entire cosmos.
This embodies the idea that everything in the universe can be reduced to a singular, fundamental unit. In its essence, it is the ultimate unity, the indivisible entity from which all things originate. Hence, the monad represents the primary building block of reality, the seed of creation, and the spark that ignites the cosmic order.
For Plato, this force or fire was called ether and was the substance by which the Craftsmam had created the universe and world. The Freemasons represent this with their motto, ORDO AB CHAO and the concept of the Great Architect of the Universe (T.G.A.O.T.U.).
This concept of the monad is often depicted as a circle, symbolizing its perfect and infinite nature.
THE MONAD IN ESOTERIC PHILOSOPHY
In the realm of ancient and esoteric philosophies, the concept of the Monad holds a significant place in Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Alchemy. These mystical traditions, intertwined with deep spiritual wisdom, have long sought to understand the nature of existence and the interconnectedness of all things.
In Gnosticism, the monad is at the root of the pleroma, the infinite fount of matter and energy in the universe.
In Hermeticism, the Monad is seen as the ultimate source of all creation, the divine spark from which everything springs forth. It represents the timeless and indescribable essence that permeates all levels of reality. This concept aligns with the idea of the One in Neoplatonism, emphasizing the unity and oneness of the universe.
Alchemy, on the other hand, views the Monad as the primordial substance or the original matter from which the alchemical transmutation takes place. It is the raw material that undergoes various stages of refinement and purification, ultimately leading to the attainment of perfection or the Philosopher’s Stone.
It symbolizes the potential for transformation and the inherent unity of all elements.
33rd Degree Freemason and author, Manly P. Hall wrote;
“The number one was the point within the circle , and denoted the central fire , or God , because it is the beginning and ending ; the first and the last . It signified also love , concord , piety , and friendship , because it is so …”
Hall said, “The sun is a great dot, a monad of life, and each of its rays a line – its own active principle in manifestation.
The key thought is: The line is the motion of the dot. The dot, or Sacred Island, is the beginning of existence, whether that of a universe or a man.”
It is seen as the unity that precedes duality, representing the transition from the formless to the formed.
Just as the concept is a single entity, it is also considered the harmonious union of opposites. It represents the synthesis of opposites such as light and darkness, male and female, unity and multiplicity, and harmony, balance or order.
As Plato wrote, “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.” (Plato, The Symposium)
From Plato, Neoplatonism, placed great emphasis on the concept of the Monad, particularly through the teachings of one of its prominent figures, Plotinus.
According to Plotinus, the One is beyond all categories and distinctions. It is ineffable and transcendent, beyond the grasp of human comprehension. It is the origin and cause of all things, the pure essence from which everything else derives its being.
Plotinus taught that through contemplation and philosophical inquiry, individuals can come to realize their connection to the One and experience a sense of oneness with the ultimate reality.
In Neoplatonic philosophy, the journey towards understanding the One, or the Monad, is seen as a spiritual ascent. This journey involves transcending the limitations of the material world and ascending through the various levels of existence, ultimately reaching a state of unity with the One.
This realization brings about a transformative spiritual awakening, leading to a higher understanding of the self and the universe.
THE MONAD IN EASTERN PHILOSOPHY
In Chinese philosophy, the concept of the monad is reflected in the teachings of Taoism, where it represents the ultimate source of all things. Taoism, rooted in the profound wisdom of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, delves into the fundamental principles of existence and the interconnectedness of all things.
At the heart of Taoist philosophy lies the concept of the Tao, often described as the “Way” or the “Ultimate Reality.”
It is the underlying force that governs the universe, encompassing both the seen and unseen aspects of existence representing the unifying essence that flows through all things, connecting them in a harmonious and ever-evolving dance.
According to Taoist teachings, it is the eternal and unchanging essence that transcends the duality of existence, encompassing both yin and yang, darkness and light, movement and stillness.
The Taoist sages emphasize the importance of aligning oneself with the flow of the monad, harmonizing with its rhythms and embracing the natural order of the universe.
It was also explored in Indian philosophy, particularly in the school of Hindu philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta. Here, the monad, referred to as “Atman,” is considered the eternal, unchanging essence of the self, which is indistinguishable from the ultimate reality, known as “Brahman.”
This idea of the monad was incorporated within monotheism, and the monotheistic religions symbolized as God or the universe.
It served as a metaphorical representation of the divine spark present within every individual. The Monad was seen as the innermost essence of the human soul, connecting each individual to the universal cosmic order.
It embodied the idea that each person possessed a unique and irreplaceable role within the grand tapestry of existence.
Hence, One God. One Lord. One Faith and One Baptism by Holy Fire (monad) – Not water.
To reunite with the One of God was to be Born Again.
The Prodigal son who was lost is now found.
THE MONAD IN MODERN SCIENCE
In the field of science, the notion of a unified theory that explains the fundamental workings of the universe has been a longstanding pursuit.
From the Ancient Pythagoreans and Plato to Leibniz’s monadology and modern science and philosophy, the concept of the monad has provided the unifying framework for the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics, understanding consciousness, free will, and the nature of reality itself.
In the 17th century, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz revived the concept of the monad. His magnum opus, “Monadology,” provides profound insights into the nature of reality, metaphysics, and the interconnectedness of all things.
In “Monadology,” Leibniz presents a metaphysical framework that explains the nature of existence and how monads relate to one another. He argues that they do not directly interact but rather harmoniously coexist in a pre-established harmony, orchestrated by a divine entity.
Leibniz’s modern concept of monadology challenges the traditional understanding of causality and suggests a synchronized universe where every monad’s actions align with the actions of other monads, creating a grand cosmic dance.
Influenced by his studies in mathematics and metaphysics, Leibniz proposed that monads were the basic units of reality, each possessing its own unique properties and experiences. He said they were indivisible and could not be influenced by external forces, but rather, they interacted with one another through a pre-established harmony.
According to Leibniz, they are indivisible, immaterial substances that are the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
Each is unique, representing a distinct perspective on reality.
These monads are not passive entities but rather possess inherent qualities and capacities that allow them to perceive, act, and interact with other monads.
He suggests that each one possesses a unique perception of the universe, which he calls “apperception.”
This individualistic perspective shapes the experiences and consciousness of each monad, making them active participants in the construction of reality. Hence, each individual substance is seen as a unique monad with its own perception and consciousness that are co-creators or builders of the world in which we live.
Epistemologically, Leibniz’s monads provide a unique perspective on the nature of knowledge or Gnosis.
Since each monad is a separate and distinct microcosm of the universe, it possesses its own unique perspective and experiences. This notion of “pre-established harmony” suggests that each monad has access to a specific set of truths, forming the basis of its individual knowledge.
Hence, no two humans are exactly the same.
Furthermore, Leibniz proposes that they are not confined to the physical realm but also exist in the realm of immaterial substances. This duality allows for a deeper exploration of the connection between mind and matter, challenging the Cartesian mind-body dualism prevalent during his time.
In the realm of physics, the concept of the Monad resonates with the fundamental building blocks of the universe. In particle physics, for instance, the notion of elementary particles can be seen as analogous to monads.
These indivisible units, such as quarks or electrons, possess unique properties and interact with one another to form the complexity we observe in the physical world.
In biology, the concept can be related to the idea of the cell as the fundamental unit of life. Just as monads are self-contained entities, cells possess their own internal structures and functions, while simultaneously interacting with other cells to compose the complex organisms we observe.
Moreover, the concept of the Monad has also sparked intriguing discussions in fields such as psychology and consciousness studies. Some theorists propose that the monad can be associated with the individual consciousness, representing a unique and self-contained center of experience within each person.
Additionally, the concept of monads has found resonance in cosmogony, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe. They are seen as the primordial entities that give rise to the diversity and complexity of the cosmos.
Monads represent the underlying fabric from which everything emerges and are seen as the driving force behind the dynamic unfolding of the universe.
In the realm of mathematics and computer science, the concept of the Monad has found its home in the paradigm of functional programming. Functional programming is an approach to software development that emphasizes the use of pure functions and immutable data.
In functional programming, a monad represents a computational context or a sequence of computations. In functional programming, it provides a clear separation between pure computations and impure actions, promoting code that is easier to reason about and test.
It allows developers to encapsulate side effects, such as reading from or writing to a database, handling exceptions, or dealing with I/O operations, within a controlled and composable structure. This enforces an explicit and disciplined mathematical approach to handling effects, ensuring that their impact is predictable and managed within the confines of the Monad.
At the core of the Monad in functional programming lies the bind operation, often represented by the symbol “>>=”, which allows sequential composition of computations within the Monad. This enables developers to chain together a series of operations, each dependent on the result of the previous one, without explicitly dealing with the underlying data transformations or side effects.
Hence, ALL IS MATH.
By leveraging the Monad, functional programmers can write code that is concise, modular, and reusable, which simplifies complex operations and promotes a declarative style of programming. It enables them to leverage the principles of functional programming to write elegant and efficient code, while also appreciating the historical and philosophical roots of this powerful concept.
Today we can see this in real time with social media platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram that are monotheistic hosts to billions of people, each living in their own multipolar worlds.
Worlds that are not defined by biological traits, genetics, and common characteristics, but by various degrees and categories of knowledge, ideas and wisdom or a lack thereof.
Let me remind you that in modern monadology, monads are individualistically magnetic and like attracts like.
This is why in the monotheistic religion of Christianity, the great teacher Jesus said;
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.” – Hosea 4:6
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the significance of monads in modern philosophy lies in their role as fundamental entities that shape our understanding of existence, consciousness, and the interconnected nature of reality.
It invites us to question the nature of the world as we contemplate the interplay between unity and multiplicity, and delve into the depths of our own existence.
As we embark on this monadic journey, we open ourselves to new insights and perspectives that can enrich our understanding of the profound mysteries within the cosmic tapestry (filamental web) that surrounds us.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
There are many holidays we celebrate across the world, and especially here in America that very few people truly understand.
Today, January 1st is one of those holidays many people think is just about partying and bringing in the New Year with some new resolutions that they never keep.
But in reality, this day has a deeper meaning you are probably unaware of…
The name of the month January, is derived from the two-faced god with the Latin name of Janus.
The reason he has two faces, is because one face looks back into the past, and the other face forward to the future.
This is essentially what happens on New Years Eve when you countdown to midnight which is the ending of one year, and the beginning of a brand new year filled with new hopes and dreams.
A time to put an end to the past year which is now old, and begin fresh with a new year.
To the ancient pagans and Greeks, he was their custodian of the key to the Temple of Wisdom.
Plutarch had written; “For this Janus, in the most remote antiquity, whether a demi-god or a king, being remarkable for his political abilities, and his cultivation of society, reclaimed men from their rude and savage manners; he is therefore represented with two faces, as having altered the former state of the world, and given quite a new turn to life.”
The Greek historian and geographer, Strabo, had said that the original worship of Janus had come from the priesthood of the Curetes of Crete who were accustomed to celebrate annually the rites of Juno and Latona, on Solmissus. (1)
The Roman advocate, rhetorician, and Christian apologist, Minucius Felix had said Saturn fled from Crete to Italy and was received hospitably by Janus. Out of gratitude, since he was a Greek of culture, he taught the rude and uncivilized Italians many things, among them, to write, to coin money, and to make tools.(2)
The ancient Romans had adopted him as their god of time, doorways, new beginnings, coinage, war and peace. The double face of Janus was often placed on Roman coins.
During the time of war, the Gates of Janus would be left open, and when a war was about to commence, lavish wartime ceremonies were performed throughout the Roman Empire.
It was during the time of Pax Romona (Peace of Rome), when Augustus Caesar had officially “closed the gates of Janus,” instituting a time of peace which ended 200 years of constant war.
The Pax Romana started after Octavian (Augustus) beat Marc Anthony in the Battle of Actium. He became princeps, or “first citizen”.
Lacking a good precedent of successful one-man rule, Augustus created a junta of the greatest military magnates and stood as the front man. By binding together these leading magnates in a coalition, he eliminated the prospect of civil war.
The Pax Romana was not immediate despite the end of the civil wars, because fighting continued in Spain and in the Alps. Nevertheless, Augustus closed the Gates of Janus (the Roman ceremony to mark world Peace) three times,[2] first in 29 BC and again in 25 BC.
The third closure is undocumented, but Inez Scott Ryberg (1949) and Gaius Stern (2006) have persuasively dated the third closure to 13 BC with the Ara Pacis ceremony.
At the time of the Ludi Saeculares in 17 BC the concept of Peace was publicized, and in 13 BC was proclaimed when Augustus and Agrippa jointly returned from pacifying the provinces.
The Ara Pacis ceremony was no doubt part of this announcement. Augustus faced a problem making peace an acceptable mode of life for the Romans, who had been at war with one power or another continuously for 200 years. Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but the rare situation that existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist.
Augustus’ challenge was to persuade Romans that the prosperity they could achieve in the absence of warfare was better for the Empire than the potential wealth and honor acquired when fighting a risky war.
Augustus succeeded by means of skillful propaganda. Subsequent emperors followed his lead, sometimes producing lavish ceremonies to close the Gates of Janus, issuing coins with Pax on the reverse, and patronizing literature extolling the benefits of the Pax Romana.(Wikipedia)
For these changes, he would be deemed by the priesthood of the Curetes as the successor to his father Julius Caesar who was known as “Divus Iulius” (Latin for “Julius is God”) ,and he would be given the title of Divi Filius (Latin for the “Son of a God”).
He would be known as the Savior to the Romans, and over time, savior to much of the world.
This was after he had conquered Egypt and thus “began the rule” of the Romans.
It was in 8 B.C. when Augustus had instituted a “new Roman calendar” adding “two new months.”
One for the month of July which is the birthday of his father Julius, and another month called August which would be honored as the birth month of Augustus. In addition to these changes with new times, dates and the end of the old age, came the beginning of a New Age called the 6th Age in which we are currently in the year 2014 of this same age.
Saint Bede, the Father of English History and Doctor of the Church had written in his Biographical Writings and Letters;
“In the forty-second year of Augustus Caesar, in the twenty-seventh from the death of Antony and Cleopatra, when Egypt became a Roman Province, in the third year of the 193rd Olympiad, and in the 752nd from the building of the city, in the year when all the commotions of nations were stilled throughout the whole world, and by the appointment of God, Caesar had established real and durable tranquility, Jesus Christ consecrated by his advent of the 6th age of the world.”
33rd Degree Freemason, Manly P. Hall had said Janus would later become Saint Peter who is often depicted holding keys, which symbolize the keys to heaven.
To mark the beginning of this age, we know St Peter was crucified upside down.
The Devil’s Chord, the devil’s interval, the tritone, the triad, and the diminished or flatted fifth are a combination of musical notes that are designed to create a chilling or discordant sound that makes for a foreboding atmosphere.
After all, music is hypnotic and activates specific neuro cortical structures in the brain inducing whatever emotion the musician desires in their listeners.
This is why the interval has been used for centuries as a way to scare people or subvert religious music. In medieval times, it was associated with the Devil and referred to as Diabolus in musica (the Devil in music) – so much so that some composers have tried to banish it entirely from their compositions.
It has been said that in the Middle Ages people were forbidden from using flattened fifths because of the evil tone it creates and brings demonic forces.
The devil’s tunes were the antithesis of godliness. It has been called the Devil’s Interval since at least the 16th century.
Over time, the sound has wound up in classical music, jazz, rock, heavy metal, rap, and even Broadway musicals in some of the most popular songs of the 20th and 21st centuries.
THE SCIENCE OF THE DEVIL’S TRITONE
It is used to create tension, discord, or suspense in music and more importantly, it has also been connected with inducing a ‘hypnotic state’ in the listener.
The use of music and sound for inducing ‘hypnotic’ and ‘subconscious’ states and capacities etc. is used to artificially produce a build up of emotions, energy and tension within the listener. Meaning, it is the musician controlling the energies and we can say the minds of their listeners with hypnosis via certain musical tones rather than the listener themselves.
Musicians can be compared to the flute playing snake charmers of people.
They have the ability to charm women to become raving lunatics who will do anything to see or get a piece of their favorite musician and command men and women to act like their porn stars and gangsters. This is why corporations use music in advertising and why they employ musicians to sell worthless consumer items to the masses.
They are magicians who through their music control their “raving mind controlled fans.”
The Devi’s tri-tone invokes an automatic and mostly un-noticed tension and energy in a being who in turn may themselves invoke this same kind of tension in themselves through various means. If the listener is unaware or unconscious of what is happening, they may misdirect and misuse this energy towards their own self destruction and that of their family or the community and nation to which they belong.
You can clearly see this in the punk rock and rap music scenes whose adherents regularly destroy themselves through their destructive and violent lifestyles.
The lyrics and music have now been programed into their minds to the point that their thoughts, words and actions play like a schizophrenic tape recorder of their favorite playlist. In a sense, their minds and spirits have been purposely inverted by music which is manipulating their unconscious thus increasing ‘egoism and selfishness’.
Musical tones that have the potential to be used for both suggestions for inducing a sleep like trance state to mind control people as well as for awakening conscious development.
The Devil’s Tritone is meant to do the former by inducing an artificial tension and friction that builds up of negative emotions in the listener that can lead to destructive behaviors if not able to be expressed in a positive way.
Scientists have found that emotions induced by music activate similar frontal brain regions compared to emotions elicited by other stimuli. Fearful and sad music is associated with increases in right frontal EEG activity and joyful and happy musical segments were associated with increases in left frontal EEG activity and the more intense the music, the more frontal brain activity.
It is interesting to note that when unpleasant music is played, the posterior cingulate cortex activates, which indicates a sense of conflict or emotional pain in the listener which is associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. Anyone who has listened to heavy metal, punk rock and even gangster rap understands that it invokes certain emotions and energies.
This is why since the days of Anceint Greece, emotion has been linked with tonality. For thousands of years music has been viewed as being both potentially creative and destructive to the listener.
A powerful creative force that can implant thoughts and ideas into people’s minds unbeknownst to the ignorant listener who is unaware of this knowledge and science.
HOW IS THE DEVIL’S TRITONE PLAYED?
The tritone is made up of two tones that are six half-steps apart. It consists of two notes that are three whole steps apart, such as “C” to “F#.”
For example, if you take any note on a piano or guitar and play it along with its fifth (a half-step above) or seventh (a half-step below), you’ll hear a tritone.
In classical music theory, it’s called an augmented fourth (two whole steps plus a half step), a diminished or flattened fifth (a half step more than a whole step).
In music theory, consonance refers to sounds that fit together well. A major third — the distance between two notes on a piano keyboard — feels pleasant because it’s in harmony with nature: The sounds we make when we hum or sing are based on harmonics that have a frequency ratio of 2-to-3 (for example, A to C).
Consonance also has to do with how stable or unstable a sound is — whether it feels permanent or fleeting. This is why minor keys often seem sadder than major ones; they’re less stable because there isn’t enough consonance to create a sense of resolution after each chord change.
WHAT MUSICIANS AND BANDS PLAYED THE DEVIL’S TRITONE?
The tritone is often heard in classical music when composers want to create tension or foreshadow danger — like in the Dies Irae section of Mozart’s Requiem Mass to symbolize the descent into hell or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre.
In 1666, German composer Heinrich Schutz wrote Cantata No. 12 “O süßes Jesulein” (O Sweet Little Jesus), which includes a passage using a tritone called “the Devil’s interval.” The piece caused such a stir that the Catholic Church banned it from being played during mass services.
Beethoven’s 1805 opera Fidelio is flush with triads, as is Richard Wagner’s 1848 composition “Gotterdammerung.” French composer Claude Debussy loved using tritones in his music and used them heavily in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902).
The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams used them extensively in his symphonies and concertos. Modern composers like Hans Zimmer have also used them extensively in film scores like Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014).
In jazz terminology, it’s often called an “outside” chord. That’s because it tends to sound dissonant against other chords in a tune — especially when played by a saxophone player who has been improvising too long without knowing where he is going to end up .
It was used often — especially Miles Davis and John Coltrane who used it frequently in their recordings together.
For example, Miles Davis’ use of the tritone in “So What” from Kind of Blue is considered one of his most important contributions to modern music.
The blues were regarded as the Devil’s music. Talented people like guitarist Robert Johnson were considered to be influenced by dark forces like the faustian myth that the musician disappeared to Highways 49 and 61 in Mississippi, where he met the Devil and exchanged his guitar for the bluesman’s soul.
The godfathers of metal, Black Sabbath built their music careers using the Devil’s chord. The primary riff used in “Black Sabbath” from the band’s 1970 self-titled first album, which is based on (and begins with) the tritone interval, can be credited to guitarist Tony Iommi.
“He came to rehearsal one day,” Ozzy Osbourne remembered of Iommi’s innovation in 2001, “and said, ‘Isn’t it funny how people pay money to watch horror films; why don’t we start playing scary music?’ And then he came up with that ‘Black Sabbath’ riff, which was the scariest riff I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Iomni developed Sabbath’s sound after listening to a piece of classical music he and bassist Geezer Butler enjoyed by Gustav Holst called “Mars, The Bringer of War” from the suite The Planets (written in 1914).
Iommi began experimenting with the sound on guitar by slowing it down to a crawl, and he liked the unsettling feeling it created. Then he added a trill to the flatted fifth, repeatedly wavering from Db to D and added vibrato to the other notes playing at different speeds and with varying chord combinations to emphasize the tension of the music.
“I was particularly interested in The Planets and ‘Mars’ by Gustav Holst. There’s a sort of tritone in that and I was always playing that on bass funnily enough before we even started writing songs and I think subconsciously it may have influenced Tony,” Butler recalled.
Iommi recalled, “Just one day we were in the rehearsal room and I started playing, as I did, ideas and this riff came out and I thought, ‘God!’ I really liked it and the other guys said, ‘Ah, that’s really good. We really like that.”‘So, I put more to it and that was it, it became ‘Black Sabbath.'”
“We built it up, but that was immediate — once we’d done that song, that was the direction and we knew where we were going then from that first riff. It just gave us a certain feeling,” the guitarist continued.
The feeling that was instilled in him when he first played that riff is quite vivid as Iommi looked back, “I remember when I first played that riff, all the hairs stood up on my arm and I knew that was it. ‘That’s it, this is where we’re at, this is what we’re doing.’ It was just like being told, ‘This is what you’re doing and this is where you’re going.'”
Iommi used the Devil’s tritone in many Sabbath songs, and when the band became successful, the tritone became a staple of the heavy metal genre.
Countless bands such as Judas Priest, Metallica, Slayer, Marilyn Manson, and Slipknot have all used this technique to their music.
Slayer even named their 1998 album Diabolus in Musica in homage to the technique.
Dave Mustaine, founder and frontman for the metal band, Megadeth, was featured on ABC News’ Nightline for an episode called “Battle With The Devil,” which detailed the occult, and belief in the devil.
Mustaine, who is a Christian, now, shows the ABC host the chord progression of the Devil’s Tritone and says; “The devil’s tritone is made up of these three notes, and this note right here drops down one, so it goes…
So listen to the difference. It just sounds evil, doesn’t it.’
‘It sounds darker.’
Which is why the progression is used so frequently in death metal.”
Mustaine says he is a Christian now, but wasn’t always.
The opening bars of the Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night” feature a tritone progression: C# – F# – Bb – D
Today, we have examples like Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” and Trent Reznor’s “Something I Can Never Have.”
This sequence is basically a dissonance, that is, an apparently “unstable” sound that needs to be resolved into a more “stable” consonance.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee Devil.” – Shakespeare
The secret history of spirits and alcohol is a long and fascinating one.
Many ancient cultures were very well acquainted with alcohol. The use of it has been linked to religious ceremonies as well as being used as an offering to gods or spirits so that they would provide good harvests or protection for crops from pests and disease.
Another reason why alcohol was used in many religious ceremonies and held to be sacred when used appropriately. It was used in ceremonies because it allowed the person to have communion with the spirit world. Hence, the name spirits when referring to alcohol.
Paracelsus (1493-1541) used the word spirit to refer to a fine powder but also a volatile liquid. By the 1670s it was being used in English for “any sublimated substance, the pure spirit of anything,” including liquids.
For example, when an ancient alchemist made wine, it was the “spirit of the grape” being extracted and served as a drink. Beer would be the “spirit of barley or hops.” They believed that through alchemy, the transmutation of a substance to its original state was its spirit, just like the human spirit.
It was called a spirit of the original material because it contained the essence or nature of the material it was distilled from. In much the same way that humans were thought to have a spiritual essence because of their souls.
It has been said that the use of the word “spirit” in connection with the distillation process first came about in the Middle East;
“The term “spirit” in reference to alcohol stems from Middle Eastern alchemy. These alchemists were more concerned with medical elixirs than with transmuting lead into gold. The vapor given off and collected during an alchemical process (as with the distillation of alcohol) was called a spirit of the original material.” (Wikipedia)
This is why the word spirits can be used interchangeably with alcohol.
Ancient alchemists generally believed in three kinds of spirits: natural spirits (responsible for growth and nutrition), animal spirits (responsible for sensation and movement), and vital spirits (responsible for life itself). Through this supposed spirit, the realm of air passed into oceans of liquid.
In our modern era, we sometimes call various alcoholic drinks such as wine, “spirits of wine” or other alcoholic beverages are simply called “distilled spirits.”
This is described in the 18th century book; “The pure Substance of anything separated from the more Gross. It is more especially taken for a most subtil and highly refined Powder, and sometimes for a very pure Spirit: Thus the highest rectified Spirit of Wine is called Alcohol Vini.” (1706, Phillips, Alcahol or Alcool)
In the 17th century book of Philsophy, it was also called the essence or quintessence;
“By extension to fluids of the idea of sublimation: An essence, quintessence, or spirit, obtained by distillation or rectification; as alcohol of wine, essence or spirit of wine.” (1672, Philosophy Translation)
All alcoholic spirits go through at least two procedures – fermentation and distillation.
Fermentation is where all alcohol is created and it requires two simple ingredients: a raw material such as grapes in liquid form that contains sugar, followed by the addition of fungi/molds/yeast. Fungi are a living organism that feeds on sugar and it poops out the bi-product of this consumption, which is ethanol, AKA alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2).
Wine and beer is a creation of humankind that is made from growing molds/fungi on grapes and or barley and wheat. Then through the fermentation process, which simply means to artificially create the ideal conditions to grow mold on these same commodities, to then be distilled in order to extract the spirits of the mold for human consumption, drunkenness, illness, disease, and death.
The molds/fungi convert these substances to sugars, and the sugars are consumed by added yeasts through distillation to produce a volatile substance – alcohol or what we should simply call “mold spirits” because that is what exactly they are.
It is from ancient alchemy that we get the notion of a “volatile substance”, in which the vapor given off from the fungi/molds is ethanol and collected during the alchemical process (as with the fermentation and distillation of alcohol) was called a spirit of the original material – fungi/molds.
Distillation is the process of separating alcohol from water via evaporation and condensation. The base alcohol is heated, and certain parts of it are captured. This process purifies and concentrates the remaining alcohol, which will ultimately be the final spirit produced.
These spirit drinks contain a poisonous substance that is released by the molds/fungi through the distillation process known as ethyl alcohol, which is the same chemical element that is present in all beers, wines, and other alcoholic drinks.
Meaning that molds/fungi are the ONLY living organism and common ingredient that produces the ethyl alcohol among all these various drinks.
In the early 19th century, Winfield Scott Hall, former Chairman of the American Medical Association (1905) and President of the American Academy of Medicine (1902-1910) had said the biology of ethyl alcohol may be thus summed up, “Ethyl alcohol is the excretion of a fungus.” (Bulletin of the American Medical Temperance Association)
The alcohol that we know and love (found in beer, wine, hard liquor, etc.). also called ethanol, it is actually the waste (poop and pee) produced by unicellular fungi called yeast. Yeast loves to eat/react with sugar, and when that happens ethanol and carbon dioxide are expelled.
Just like when people expell gas (fart).
Humans LOVE and make use of both of these products. When you bake a loaf of bread, it is the carbon dioxide bubbles that make it rise as the alcohol is evaporated away.
It is commonly known today that to alchemically extract the essence of a plant will give you what we call its “essential oil.” For example, the essence extracted from a grape will give you what is called “grape extract or grape oil” and to extract the oil from a grape seed will give you “grape seed extract” or “grape seed oil.”
This is is a reflection of its essence and what is sometimes called the plant’s unique spirit.
The word spirit is much less used today than in times past, but is still commonly found when describing various alcoholic drinks. However, I have found that how we describe this essence or oil from the fermentation of various fruits, grains, and or barley, is actually a misnomer.
The origins of the word spirit come to us from the Latin spiritus “breath, spirit,” from spirare “breathe.”
It was an ancient belief for thousands of years that supernatural beings or things fly and float in the air and they could enter a person’s body simply by breathing in these beings or things.
These spirits have been known over the last few thousand years by various names through various cultures such as “elementals, demons, devils, succubi, incubi, ghosts, specters, phantoms, unclean and impure spirits” to name a few.
As it relates to alcohol, we can examine the ingredients to find that the only living organisms used in its creation are fungi or molds that are also referred to as yeasts.
Alcoholic beverages are made by fermenting sugar or starch-based materials, such as fruit like grapes and grains such as barley. The sugars are converted by spirits, i.e., fungi/molds/yeasts into ethanol (the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages and your vehicles gasoline) and other chemicals that give the beverage its flavor and aroma.
During the process of distillation, the alcohol concentration is increased through the evaporation of water and then the alcohol is condensed down, leaving only the base liquid produced by the fungi/molds.
So we’re drinking the spirit of fermented liquid, which is the essence or quintessence of the fungi/molds and not the fruits or grains, which are only associated with forming the flavor of the specific alcoholic beverage.
This is what the word spirit is referring to when it is associated with alcoholic beverages.
It is the fungi that feed on fruits and grains that then expels their waste, i.e., urine and feces that gives the alcoholic drink its particular aroma and taste.
THE MEANING OF ALCOHOL
In the etymology of the word alcohol, we find the secret meaning of what happens when you drink fungi/mold spirits. Alcohol is a compound word comprised of the words al, co, and hol.
The first word al describes how the action is performed or when and where something is done.
The next compound word co means “together, mutually, in common,” as used in words like co-exist, co-worker, and co-pilot.
The meaning of the last word hol is “whole or entire.”
When you drink alcohol, which we know is the essence or spirit of fungi/molds, you are performing the action to come together to live mutually in common within your body with the spirits of the fungi/molds and you now become one of whole.
An unholy communion.
Think about this for a moment.
When you or someone drinks enough alcohol to become drunk to the point that they are just wasted and out of their mind, we find that true nature and essence of how we humans become one or whole with the very fungi/mold spirits in our behavior and actions.
Drinking alcohol reduces your inhibitions and impairs judgment, so it is easy to say or do things that you wouldn’t normally do when sober.
Drunkenness is the state of being intoxicated by alcohol and often leads to risky behavior and bad decisions, such as becoming violent, aggressive, sexual promiscuity, and driving while intoxicated.
Alcohol also affects cognitive processes such as memory, attention span and reasoning ability. This means that you may forget what happened while you were drunk or not remember someone else’s actions very well.
People who are drunk are more likely to forget where they’re going and get lost. They can also become disorientated in crowds or unfamiliar places.
It’s as if when people consume alcohol or spirits they perform the very action that allows fungi/mold spirits to coexist or become one/whole with their body.
As a result of communing with the unseen spirit world and not knowing the true implication, these fungal spirits may be able to high jack our neuro systems and brains to become a type of co-pilot within our bodies.
But it is not us who are truly in control.
Quite the contrary.
It is the spirit of the very fungi/molds we just consumed, who are in control of our minds and bodies and who are hell-bent upon our destruction, and everyone around us from transgressing against these natural laws in which they are God’s legislators working within our very blood.
For Saint Peter hath said, “Be sober-minded and alert. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
The word devour means to consume or eat up, and that is exactly what molds/fungi do to humans who are not sober-minded and alert.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
The Etheric Body is one of the various names given to what has also been called by various esoteric authors as the Astral Body, Light Body, Body of Light, Human Energy Field, or Aura, which all mean the same thing and can be used interchangeably.
The etheric body is part of the human constitution in the form of light energy or luminous fluid. It is considered the energetic template of the physical body that has the ability to act as a mediator between the soul and body and can also record and store information.
The etheric body is made of a material known as ether (aether) that comes from the heavens (cosmos or space). In a similar sense, the term astral body refers to the stars. Very similar descriptions and words such as the light body and aura have been used throughout traditional history to modernity.
This mysterious and luminous material has been described as the light or energy field of the body to be both liquid and gaseous in nature. It is not visible to the naked eye, and some people claim that it can only be seen with spiritual sight or when it interacts with physical matter in some way (i.e., through magnetism).
As I researched this subject, I found that we can use modern science to identify what exactly the etheric body is and I can provide examples of my studies. In this article, I will detail the various aspects of its history with various quotes from people who have written on the subject and also the results of my research. I also believe today that we can witness, measure and record this phenomenon with magnetic image resonance machines, which I will explain in my next article on the Science of the Etheric Body.
The first people to write about and debate what aether was were the Ancient Greeks through the writings of various philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Proclus. This tradition continued among many of the world’s greatest thinkers, such as Descartes, Paracelsues John Dee, Eliphas Levi, Issac Newton, Rudolph Steiner, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla, who have all written and or debated about its existence.
As I explained in my previous essay, according to the Greeks, aether (Greek αἰθήρ, aithēr), also spelled ether, is the fifth element that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere. It is a type of heavenly fire, light, or luminous substance that is always in motion. But they claimed that it is not to be compared to real fire, and is distinct from the other four classical elements (Platonic Solids), Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.
Both Plato and Aristotle also referred to ether as “Idea” (Greek ίδέα), or ίερόν, (Greek hieron “a divine thing”) because it was thought to be heavenly, i.e. not of the material world (matter) and have the power of life. Plato, in his Timaeus, described Aether as that “which God used in the delineation of the universe.”
As it relates to the Ancient Greek concept of the human and the etheric body, I have found that pneuma, topa, and vital heat were used interchangeably by fellow Platonists in the exoteric sense by some authors, such as Aristotle and Proculus. Today, as I mentioned above, we also have the terms Astral Body, Light Body, Body of Light, Human Energy Field, or Aura, which all represent the same phenomena of the creative fire within humans and all life.
In Aristotle’s biology, pneuma is mentioned in connection with the soul and a number of bodily functions. It is compared to ether, the fifth element from which the heavenly bodies are composed. In explaining the abilities of the soul within the context of functional transmission, he describes pneuma as analogous to ether (the upper fiery-air).
Aristotle states that the hot substance or vital heat included in the semen is a “natural principle in the breath [pneuma], being analogous to the element of the stars” (i.e., the Aether). He wrote;
“Now, so far as we can see, the faculty (δύναμις) of Soul of every kind has to do with some physical substance which
is different from the so-called ‘elements’ (στοιχεȋον) and more divine than they are …….
In all cases the semen contains within itself that which causes it to be fertile (γόνιμα)—what is known as ‘hot substance’ (θερμόν), which is not fire nor any similar substance, but the pneuma which is enclosed within the semen or foam-like stuff, and the natural substance which is in the pneuma; and this substance, is analogous to the element which belongs to the stars. (De generatione animalium, Book II, Peck 1949, p. 171, II 736b30-737al)
The next authority after Aristotle to speak on this subject, but using a different word than pneuma or aether was the Neoplatonist Proclus of Athens (412–485 C.E.). He was the most authoritative philosopher of his time and is said to have been the first person to speak of place (topos) as the intermediary between the soul and body, or what is also known as the “etheric body.”
Proclus had a theory that place (topos) was a three-dimensional extension, and it was a luminous body (soma). He believed that this place had life (empsukhos), which moved other bodies. Proclus said there were subtle “planes”, and these planes had two bodies or “carriers” (okhema) intermediate between the rational soul and the physical body. He claimed that topos as the medium between soul and body, and identified it with the luminous “vehicle” of the soul.
One of the last Neo-Platonists, Simplicius of Cilicia, tells us that Proclus’ hypothesis was novel and unique.
The Greek Stoics had called the divine creative fire by the names pneuma or aether. They believed that the cosmos was ruled by a divine mind (nous) and permeated by pneuma, an aether composed of fire and air.
Chrysippos took the lead in ascribing the generality of natural phenomena to tensions in the pneuma, an aether-like blending of air and fire that he held to pervade the cosmos.
The Greek term pneuma was later used in religious contexts and was associated with the spirit and the divine.
This opposition of theories led to many Greek philosophers to examine and comment upon the subject.
In the 17th century, René Descartes (1596-1650) said ether was the medium of space in Principia philosophiae (1644). His theory was in a similar line with the Anceint Greeks concept of ether as the 5th element that made up the World Soul or what is also called the Noosphere today.
Descartes’ was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist and is best known for his philosophical writings, which include several essays on optics, the philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics.
He claimed that ether was the elements of vortices that transmitted forces between bodies at a distance, were also transmitted by direct contact. When two bodies were not touching each other, such as two magnets, or the moon’s influence upon the tides, he believed they were still in direct contact through intermediate contiguous matter I ether.
Descartes said that force is transmitted through ether by two agencies, pressure and impact. He believed that space was occupied by ether. Although it was imperceptible to the senses, it was capable of transmitting forces on the material bodies immersed in it.
Descartes said the ether particles are in constant spinning motions of closed chains of particles (vortices). He believed that matter is made up of extremely small particles called “corpuscles” and that these corpuscles are attracted to each other by ether.
The difference between Descartes’ theory and modern theories is that he believed that this attraction occurs because of the motion and rotation of matter, not because mass attracts mass.
Descartes also developed three laws of motion:
The law of inertia – objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
The law of action-and-reaction – every force has an equal counter-force, so if one body exerts a force on another body, then that body exerts a force back on the first body equal in magnitude but opposite in direction.
The third law – if one body exerts twice as much force on another body than it experiences from that
Descartes’ theory was never accepted by his contemporaries, who adhered to Newton’s theories of action at a distance. Descartes’ theory remained forgotten until James Clerk Maxwell rediscovered it in 1864, which I will discuss below.
Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) dedicated much of his career to analyzing and developing further the ether theory. He called ether an elastic medium that carried vibrations and had pervaded the pores of all material bodies. Newton wrote:
All space is permeated by an elastic medium or aether, which is capable of propagating vibrations. This aether pervades the pores of all material bodies and is the cause of their cohesion; its density varies from one body to another, being greatest in the free interplanetary spaces.
One of Isaac Newton’s major theories was that ether played a major role in gravity and light in the Third Book of Opticks (1st ed. 1704; 2nd ed.) He described it as the medium that “flows” continually downward toward the Earth’s surface and is partially absorbed and partially diffused as an elastic, invisible, strong, and subtle matter that existed everywhere in different forms.
In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell showed that electricity and magnetism were related phenomena. He proposed that light waves were electric and magnetic waves traveling through an electromagnetic field called ether. This led to theories about a luminiferous (light-bearing) ether, which became popular during this period.
Maxwell developed a mathematical theory of electromagnetic waves that propagated through the luminiferous ether, which permeates all space. He had used ether to explain electric and magnetic phenomena, now called Maxwell’s equations, for the understanding that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Maxwell (1878) wrote:
“Aethers were invented for the planets to swim in, to constitute electric atmospheres and magnetic effluvia, to convey sensations from one part of our bodies to another, and so on, until all space had been filled three or four times over with aethers. The only aether which has survived is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the propagation of light.”
Rudolph Steiner (1861-1935) considered the etheric body as distinct from the physical material reality, being intermediate between the physical world and the astral world. He believed that it was formed as a result of thinking and contained a person’s thoughts.
Steiner said:
“Only if I could perceive how the percept of an object affects the percept of the subject, or–conversely–only if I could observe the construction of a perceptual form by the subject, would it be possible to speak like modern physiology and the critical idealism built upon it…The link between the subjective and the objective is not built…by any perceptible event. It is built by thinking alone.”
For Steiner, it was also part of the earth’s biofield and all living things—plants, animals, and humans. Without the etheric body, one only has left a dead physical body whose structure and organization are now subject only to entropic forces and decay. He often referred to the etheric body (Ätherleib or “Life Body”) in association with the etheric formative forces and the evolution of man and the cosmos.
According to Steiner;
“Memory is a subconscious reading activity. In memory remain the signs which the etheric body engraved upon the physical body. You may have lived through something years ago and gathered from it the necessary experience; what remains behind is the impression which the etheric body engraved upon the physical body, and when you remember this past experience your memory process is a subconscious act of reading.”
It is an energy field composed of millions of tiny particles called etheric cells that are constantly interacting with each other to create all the different structures and functions of the body. Each etheric cell contains information about how to build certain parts of the body, such as muscles, bones and organs.
The etheric cells are organized into groups called chakras that are responsible for different aspects of our health and well-being, such as digestion or sexual function. Each chakra has a specific purpose and role within our bodies, which is why we feel pain or discomfort when they aren’t functioning properly or if they become blocked by negative emotions or thoughts.
Its color varies from individual to individual, but ranges from bright white to deep purple depending on your state of being. When you’re healthy, your etheric body can be seen as an aura surrounding your physical form has a vibrant, colorful aura that reflects its energetic functioning.
According to Steiner, the etheric field can be perceived by a person gifted with clairvoyance as being of “peach-blossom color”.
If it’s damaged or unhealthy, it may appear dull, cloudy, gray or blackened in appearance due to disease or trauma.
Russian Esotericist, Madame Blavatsky
The etheric plane (see also Etheric body) is a term introduced into Theosophy by Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant to represent one of the planes
According to Max Heindel, the Grand Master of the American Rosicrucuans (AMORC), the etheric body, composed of four ethers, is called the “Vital Body” since the ether is the way of ingress for vital force from the Sun and the field of agencies in nature which promote such vital activities as assimilation, growth, and propagation.
It is an exact counterpart of our physical body, molecule for molecule, and organ for organ, but it is of the opposite polarity. It is slightly larger, extending about one and one-half inches beyond the periphery of the physical body.
It is a template that holds the knowledge (gnosis), information, and our memories, that allows the physical body to function and exist in the world, i.e., this dimension. It has been described as a “blueprint” for the physical body, and contains all the anatomical designs on a cellular level.
Freemason and author, Manly P. Hall calls ether the sacred 5th element, and says it represents the brain. Hall wrote;
“As man’s physical body has five distinct and important extremities–two legs, two arms, and a head, of which the last governs the first four–the number 5 has been accepted as the symbol of man.
By its four corners the pyramid symbolizes the arms and legs, and by its apex the head, thus indicating that one rational power controls four irrational corners.
The hands and feet are used to represent the four elements, of which the two feet are earth and water, and the two hands fire and air.
The brain then symbolizes the sacred fifth element–æther–which controls and unites the other four. If the feet are placed together and the arms outspread, man then symbolizes the cross with the rational intellect as the head or upper limb.”
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
