Observations placeholder
Cirlot on boats
Identifier
004804
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
A Dictionary of Symbols – J E Cirlot
Pompey the Great remarked ‘Living is not necessary, but navigation is’. By this he meant that existence is split up into two fundamental structures; living, which he understood as living for oneself and sailing or navigating, by which he understood living in order to transcend – or what Nietzsche from his pessimistic angle called ‘living in order to disappear’. The Odyssey is basically nothing but a navigation myth in the sense of victory over the two essential perils of sailing; destruction – or the triumph of the ocean corresponding to the unconscious – and withdrawal – regression and stagnation….
Navigation as envisaged in any philosophy of the absolute, would deny even the hero his triumphant return to the homeland and would make of him a perpetual explorer of oceans, under endless skies..
Guenon suggests that the attainment of the Great peace is depicted in the form of sailing the seas.