The Syzygy of Conjoint Principle A Tribute to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Sati Shankar Global Synergetic Foundation, New Delhi, India [email protected]

Key Words: Regnum, Sacerdotium, Purohita, King, Male, Female, Conjoint, Duality, Unity, Unification, Evola I am honored to be the part of this Ananda K Coomaraswam Memorial Conference at this esteemed institution and am grateful to the organizers for giving me an opportunity to pay my tributes to AKC, whose contributions changed me as early as during my adolescence. Stand points discriminate, discrimination depicts states, states depict hierarchy, hierarchy determines organization and organization itself defines the way it is organized. This very statement, itself, presumes an observer who in turn, is enslaved by the stand point, the dichotomies...in microcosm as well as the macrocosm...in inner as well as the outer worlds. But what position States and hence organization might acquire when there is no discrimination? "The whole theory", says AKC,"is implied and subsumed in the words of the marriage formula, 'I am That,thou art This,...addressed by the BraAhman, the priest,the Purohita, to the King in Aitreya BrAhman,VIII.27." The marriage of the two, two opposites, is in perfect agreement with the common doctrine that,...from a progenitive pair,'a syzygy of conjoint principles',...'a state where ...the numerical ordering of the Persons is purely conventional and not a chronological or real order of coming in to being; for, the Persons are connascent (iteretarajanmAna) ,the Trinity(tridhA) which is an arrangement (samhitA), not a process." In this Principle, the Son creates the Father as much as the Father the Son, as Meiester Eckhart says,"He hath brought me forth His son in the image of His eternal fatherhood, that I should also be a father and bring forth Him." Likewise, in RigVeda, Agni,"being the Son of the Angels thou hast become their Father". Agni is the Father of His father, i.e., surpasses his Father. There can be no paternity without a filiation and the vice versa and that is what is meant by the "opposite relation". Similarly, there cannot be a person (Purusha) without Nature,(Prakriti) and vice versa. That is why, puts AKC, in metaphysical "mythology" we meet the " inversions." For example, in Rig Veda, Daksha, the personal name of the Progenitor, is born of Aditi as her son and she also as his daughter. Viraj is born of Purusha, and vice versa. Metaphysics are consistent but not systematic,we learn from AKC, systems are found only in religious extensions and extensions of other phenomenals where a given ordering of the Persons become a dogma, and it is precisely by such "matter of faith", and not by difference of metaphysical basis, that one religion is distinguished from another. That is truly a distinction

without a difference. it should be observed that the connascence of father-essence and Mother-nature,the two forms, though metaphysically spoken as "birth", are actually un-begotten, un-born and not a generation from conjoint principle, or where the origination of the conjoint principles called a "fallig apart", diremption or karyokinesis, where 'One became Two. On the other hand, their common son, being consubstantial with the Spirit, is at once unborn in the same sense, and born by the generation from the Conjoint principle. This paper aims to clarify the issue relating to Regnum, Sacerdotium, in the light of the conjoint principles in Julius Evola's controversial application of Tradition, for which Coomaraswamy's, primary objection was the emphasis of regality over the sacerdotal. Evola’s case is weakened by his misunderstanding of the rite of the purohita, the priest. The exterior is a reflection of the interior. AKC writes: The outer, active, feminine, and mortal aspect of our nature subsists more eminently in its inner, contemplative, masculine, and immortal side, to which it can and must be ‘reduced’, that is to say, brought back or reunited.

Abstract of paper written for Ananda Coomaraswamy Memorial Conference on Asian Art and Culture, 8–10 September 2012. Centre for Asian Studies at University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka

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