Regression

Regression. Is good! You can go back to that more primitive time, that more nebulous realm of the past that when you read about it, you know there was, as is now, much more going on than was and is manifestly reported. I began with the ancient greeks, then went further back to the presocratics, and have now moved forward to the middle ages, where I think I shall stay for a bit. Virtue. The four ancient ones, Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice. The ancient psychology of the tripartite soul, the spirit, the soul and the animal. The trivium and quadrivium of the seven liberal arts. Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, these three being the expression of intellect, continuing on to arithmetic or number, music or time, geometry or space, astronomy or harmony and dynamics. These seven liberal arts, in the order I have listed them, are associated with the seven ptolemaic planets, which I once again will list: moon, mercury, venus, sun, mars, jupiter, saturn. Heaven was that active agent, with it's own personalities that 'fixed' the passsive feminine earth on which we abide. Temples, sacred spaces, were laid out with a cosmological view in mind, where the doors of the heavenly winter and summer solstices were mirrored in the south and north tympanums of Chartres Cathedral. Where it is recalled, that the arabic nomadic desert tribes, found their stellar heaven to be a circle, or a dome, and thus arranged their tented sanctuaries in circular form, while in the cities, the more sedentary people found earth to be solid, best represented by the cube or the square, and incorporated the circle (stellar) into the square (earth) in order to create sacred spaces. There was a harmony that existed between heaven and earth, where the ladder Jacob saw in his dream, was still standing on the face of the rock and terminating into the firmament of heaven. And the angels did rise and descend! It is not unnatural to regress. Doesn't the old man become but a boy? Don't the planets go into retrograde motion? Nature herself regresses in order to go back and pick up some of the pieces that before were not noticed or were ignored. So regression is good. Especially, perhaps for the degenerately reminiscent soul, but it is a tonic that turns that reminiscence into something greater than itself. It's called History, and more, a remembrance.