THE CALL OF FIRE: THE HERMETIC QUEST OF RENÉ SCHWALLER DE LUBICZ
René Adolphe Schwaller was born on 30 December 1887 in Strasbourg—the vignoble region of France that straddles the border of Rhineland Germany. [3] Schwaller would acquire two more names in the course of his life: the chivalric title « de Lubicz » and the initiatic appellation « Aor ». The story of these names will reveal much. For now, however, it is important to realise that he was first and foremost Alsatian. His nature is a precise reflection of the land—or rather, borderland—into which he was born: Alsace, the longitudinal strip of land defined by the Vosges in the West and by the...
Christopher Hitchens: the best of his writing online
The loss of Christopher Hitchens leaves the world a far poorer place, but perhaps Salman Rushdie's tribute to him – "A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops" – is only half right. Of course we can only imagine what he would have gone on to say if he had been spared another day, another week or another year, but a voice like that of Hitchens never really falls silent.Readers around the world will be turning to their shelves today to consult his elegant memoir, Hitch-22, his anti-religious polemic, God Is Not Great, and his campaigner's manual, Letters to a Young Contrarian, bu...
We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now
During the years I spent in the company of Alexander Graham Bell, at work on his biography, I often wondered what the inventor of the world’s most important acoustical device—the telephone—might have sounded like.Born in Scotland in 1847, Bell, at different periods of his life, lived in England, then Canada and, later, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. His favorite refuge was Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he spent the summers from the mid-1880s on. In his day, 85 percent of the population there conversed in Gaelic. Did Bell speak with a Scottish burr? What was the p...
Who Is Epictetus? From Slave To World's Most Sought After Philosopher
Part of what makes Stoicism fascinating to study is that three of its most well-known practitioners ranged widely in terms of where they stood in society. Think of Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of the Roman Empire holding one of the most powerful positions in the world. Think of Seneca, who was an adviser to an emperor, renowned playwright and one of the richest people in the Roman Empire. And then there is Epictetus, on the complete opposite, who was born as a slave. That’s what makes Stoicism so powerful: it can provide timeless principles to help us in both good and bad fortune, no matter...
Woodrow Wilson in Perspective
TOWARDS the close of Woodrow Wilson's campaign for reëlection to the Presidency of the United States, at a moment when prospects seemed unpromising, he remarked: "As compared with the verdict of the next 25 years, I do not care a peppercorn about the verdict of 1916." When those 25 years had passed, the verdict, if taken, would have been blurred by our intervention in the Second World War. How far has the situation been clarified at the present moment, 32 years after Wilson's death, 100 years after his birth? In the case of Abraham Lincoln, the perspective of far less elapsed ti...
