Occult Latin Quotes

Those very superficial sensualists and profligates who lead the dance of Latin decadence have not seen, among their dancing girls and their pennies, that the disappearance of symbols was a precursor to the ruin of a people; communities only have abstract reasons for existing...

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

It struck me, even at the time, that the basic hope of the conference was a very scholarly one. Many of the contributions and lectures were motivated by a touching faith in the collective memory of Christianity. They believed that the writings of the age of the Fathers could be sifted by scholars in such a way as to bring healing to the present. Understanding the Patristic age was like a remedium (to use a late Roman Latin term). A remedium was a homeopathic poultice—like a modern medical patch—which was thought to work slowly, and with almost occult power, to heal: to redress deep-seated imbalances; to fortify good humors; to smooth away the cramps and to soften the hard constrictions that wracked the body. It was hoped that a remedium could be concocted, from our renewed and ever-deeper knowledge of Patristic Christianity, that could be pressed against the fevered body of the church in our own times.

You ever see that thing on old tombstones, that Momento mori? That’s Latin. You know what it means?” The roommate gave a negative grunt. “It means something like, ‘Remember you gotta die.’ And that’s what this whole thing is like, like one great big reminder that we’re all gonna go sooner or later, so we better be damn good to each other while we’re here.

Peasants brought up on a tradition of superstitious magic could hardly be expected to distinguish between such ostensibly Christian rituals and the mumbled incantations of the local wizard. And so, to the discomfort of the priests, many came to regard elements of Christian devotion as simple magical spells. The Latin Mass was, after all, incomprehensible to the common people, so it already had the aspect of an occult formula. It came to be seen, like magic, as an essentially mechanical rite through which absolution was achieved by observing the correct procedures. In that case, there was no real need for faith.

Occult’ may perhaps sound somewhat sinister in the ears of some modern readers, but its original meaning is not connected to black magic or any other evil; the word is derived from the Latin occultus, meaning ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’, and is a neutral term for phenomena that are obscure to us. For example, Isaac Newton, who first formulated the law of gravitation, describes gravity as having ‘occult’ qualities, as it cannot be seen and it exerts its power at a distance and in a secret way.

The word “occult,” derived from the Latin occultusanum, literally means “secret.

The subject of 'perennial philosophy' is currently one of the many misleading themes employed in vulgar mysticism. Emanating from enthusiasts of traditional religion, this topic has been appropriated by new age communities and figureheads, to the extent that even Huxley can appear profound by comparison. The Latin phrase is often associated with Leibniz, who may be credited with a more genuine attitude, though it is clear that he did not resolve the issue involved. The term philosophy is currently so confused in application that it can mean anything saleable or novelistic.