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Creation Mythology in Antiquity: Order out of Chaos

Introduction: Creation Myths in Antiquity Any cursory study of Egyptian and Sumer-Babylonian creation mythology yielded parallels and similarities, but was much less clear and open to debate was whether or not these similarities, these mythemes…
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Kali’s Child: A Case Study in the Limits of Freudian Psychoanalysis

As reluctant as I am to offer off an opinion on a debate that has been bantered about by scholars much more learned and experienced than I in comparative religion and scholars familiar with the source texts in Bengali, most notably the Kathamrita…
Sanskrit symbol for "Aum"
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The Philosophy of the East: The Legacy of the Indo-Aryans

Introduction Throughout academic parlance in the Enlightenment Era intellectual and philosophical development throughout mankind’s history has been divided into Eastern and Western branches.  The Eastern branch of thought and development…
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Mapping the Mind: Freud vs. Jung

A Brief History of Psychology: The Study of the Soul It must be understood that psychology as a discipline, at least how we think of it today, did exist in antiquity.  There were fairly well thought systems of belief however that framed psychology,…
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Buddhism 101

Origins of Buddhism Buddhism originated out of the Hindu and Vedic culture just as Christianity emerged out of and in reaction to orthodox Judaism.  The historical figure we know today as Buddha was raised on the northern Indian/Nepal border…

The Origins and Philosophy of the Islamic Faith

Despite Charlie’s Jewish heritage, at least Jewish by blood, and his penchant for the less rigid and orthodox theological systems of the East, his knowledge of Islam began with a fundamental aversion for its fundamentalist interpretation…
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The Gnostics: Jesus as the Revealed Logos

In contrast to what we would consider the more orthodox interpretation of Jesus through the doctrine of Logos, and incorporating the Wisdom tradition of the Jews at the same time, we find another influential Gnostic teacher who comes from the…
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Quantum Mechanics: The Death of Local Realism

From Pantheism to Monotheism Charlie had covered a lot of ground by this point.  He’d started in the age of mythology, at the dawn of civilization, looking at the cultural and socio-political forces that underpinned and supported the local…
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Sacred Geometry in Plato’s Timaeus

After Pythagoras, the next in line in the propagation of core mathematical constructs, not just numbers themselves but again geometry as well, as key elements of the universal world order, is Plato.  It is said that outside of the Academy which…
The tetractys of the Pythagoreans
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Pythagorean theology: Truth in numbers

In their quest for the ultimate symbols to represent reality the Greeks developed a theological system that although was analogous to the pantheistic tradition within which it coexisted, was relatively independent from it and was perceived to…
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The Seeds of Christianity: The Hellenization of Judaism

With light and insight shed on the competing philosophical and theological systems from the 3rd century BCE to the first few centuries after the death of Christ and the advent of early Christianity, Middle Platonism and Stoicism in particular,…
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Middle Platonism: Greek Philosophic Adolescence

Despite the emergence of metaphysics as we know it today in classical Greece, seen most clearly in the (interpretation of) the dialogues of Plato and then more clearly elucidated in the work of Aristotle, a product of Plato’s Academy, and…