“Freemasons, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucius, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids — always by a Freemason.”

— Ambrose Bierce, book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

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Ambrose Bierce204

American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabu… 1842–1914

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“In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosm. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered — because of inhabited and organized — space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners — in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

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“The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

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“The reign of chaos is over. He has imposed order. Knives cut again”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

section IV
The Waves (1931)
Context: Now,’ said Neville, ‘my tree flowers. My heart rises. All oppression is relieved. All impediment is removed. The reign of chaos is over. He has imposed order. Knives cut again.’ [... ]
‘Here is Percival,’ said Bernard, ‘[... ] We [... ] now come nearer; and shuffling closer on our perch in this restaurant where everybody’s interests are at variance, and the incessant passage of traffic chafes us with distractions, and the door opening perpetually its glass cage solicits us with myriad temptations and offers insults and wounds to our confidence — sitting together here we love each other and believe in our own endurance.

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

In allem Chaos ist Kosmos und in aller Unordnung geheime Ordnung. <br class="br">http://books.google.com/books?id=hOUkAQAAIAAJ&q=%22in+allem+Chaos+ist+Kosmos+und+in+aller+Unordnung+geheime+Ordnung%22&pg=PA41#v=onepage <br class="br"> p. 32 http://books.google.com/books?id=Yc5PlU9MyDwC&q=%22in+all+chaos+there+is+a+cosmos+in+all+disorder+a+secret+order%22&pg=PA32#v=onepage (1981 edition) <br class="br"> Originally presented http://books.google.com/books?id=-5oJAAAAIAAJ&q=%22in+allem+Chaos+ist+Kosmos+und+in+aller+Unordnung+geheime+Ordnung%22&pg=PA213#v=onepage at an Eranos conference. (1935) <br class="br">The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934)

“It is necessary that every thing which is harmonized, should be generated from that which is void of harmony, and that which is void of harmony from that which is harmonized. …But there is no difference, whether this is asserted of harmony, or of order, or composition… the same reason will apply to all of these.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book I, Ch. VI, p. 57.
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“It is not among extraordinary and fantastic things that excellence is to be found”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

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Context: It is not among extraordinary and fantastic things that excellence is to be found, of whatever kind it may be. We rise to attain it and become removed from it: it is oftenest necessary to stoop for it.

“Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 48

“Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 81-82
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As a nation we have made peace and war: as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies: as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign States.
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“Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

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