There is a great and pressing need today in general for a new and genuine aristocracy, especially among the European peoples and nations. Over the past centuries the old aristocracy has declined, degenerated, lost sight of its guiding Principle and has finally been destroyed by both intrinsic and extrinsic forces. Today we can hardly talk of there existing any true aristocracy. There exists a hierarchy which has been subverted and infiltrated, leading to “counter-aristocrats” sitting on key positions of power. (…) If we are to survive this present Götterdämmerung we will have to recover our guiding sacred and traditional principles that once, in our ancient past, gave rise to that true and genuine aristocracy that built all great cultures as reflections Below of that which is Above and filled them with the Light of the Divine.
Author Archives: Kartavirya
Symbols And The Interpretation of Symbols: Two articles by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
SYMBOLS and signs, whether verbal, musical, dramatic or plastic, are means of communication. The references of symbols are to ideas and those of signs to things. (…) The language of traditional art—scripture, epic, folklore, ritual, and all the related crafts—is symbolic; and being a language of natural symbols, neither of private invention, nor established by conciliar agreement or mere custom, is a universal language. The symbol is the material embodiment, in sound, shape, colour or gesture as the case may be, of the imitable form of an idea to be communicated, which imitable form is the formal cause of the work of art itself. It is for the sake of the idea, and not for its own sake, that the symbol exists: an actual form must be either symbolic – of its reference, or merely an unintelligible shape to be liked or disliked according to taste. (…) The scholar of symbols is often accused of “reading meanings” into the verbal or visual emblems of which he proposes an exegesis. On the other hand, the aesthetician and art historian, himself preoccupied with stylistic peculiarities rather than with iconographic necessities, generally avoids the problem altogether; in some cases perhaps, because an iconographic analysis would exceed his capacities. We conceive, however, that the most significant element in a given work of art is precisely that aspect of it which may, and often does, persist unchanged throughout millennia and in widely separated areas; and the least significant, those accidental variations of style by which we are enabled to date a given work or even in some cases to attribute it to an individual artist.
Interview with Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CBE, director, filmmaker, author, painter, pianist and theater man to the bone, is a giant of world culture. Born on the spring equinox in 1925, Brook produced an acclaimed Faust at Oxford at 17 and at 20 became the youngest-ever director of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He has since directed over 40 major stage productions, created ten films, and with multiple stage, cinema and television versions returned the dramaturgically languishing gods of India’s Mahabharata to full-time international employment. Although he has produced works as varied and bizarre as Marat Sade, Lord of the Flies, Conference of the Birds, and The Ik, the Paris-base Brook constantly cycles back to the Shakespearean canon for renewal. His primary legacy to the modern stage is a sense of immediacy bordering on possession, taking theater back to the numinous ground where ritual, seance and coven convene.