quotes

Consequently, we no longer know what men and women are, When hurricanes were named after women only, this represented a knowledge that stretched back to the beginning of the human race, a knowledge the Hindus designate by the word Shakti: the feminine, self-manifesting power of the Transcendent God. (The Hebrew Shekhina, the glory of God as revealed in the tent of the Tabernacle of the Temple at Jerusalem, carries the same basic idea, and is probably etymologically related.) Power appears in the form of vibration; light, sound, the waves of the sea, the cloud rippples in a mackeral sky. And so does Shakti. Every god in the Hindu pantheon (as well as the Egyptian and the Greek ones, and many others, under different names) was paired with his Skakti, his female consort. The English word “wife” is cognate with the word “vibrate, vibration,” with the German weib (woman), and also with “wave” […] But now we have things like “Hurricane Larry”; In the name of a meaningless and childish idea of “sexual equality,” as well as fear of anything even remotely suggesting romantic heterosexual love, we have unknowingly destroyed a profound symbol-system stretching back to the dawn of human history. And this is exactly what is to be expected at the tail-end of the Kali-Yuga: as polarity is a clear sign of the pralaya, the dissolution of the manifest world.

Charles Upton in “Folk Metaphysics” page 20/1

There are certainly many remnants of Paganism and folk magic in traditional English, Irish and Scottish ballads, […] and I wish the cultural historians, folklorists and mythographers all the luck in the world in their attempt to unearth and analyze these fragments. But I am not on the trail of the remnants of Paganism, but of what Paganism was when it was a living religious universe: not the bones of the ancestors, but something older, and deeper – and also newer: one more unique rendition of the sophia perennis, the perennial wisdom of the human race.
Charles Upton in Folk Metaphysics p. 129

The mystical truth which is realized in the sage is virtual in the folk. If the folk are the field, the sage is the fruit of the tree which grows in the center of it, a fruit which, even as it takes its place in the eternal domain of God’s attributes, also cyclically returns to the fields from which it grew, via its seed, to propagate wisdom.

Charles Upton in Folk Metaphysics p. 54.

So the Primordial Tradition mostly comes down to us through the religions of the world. But there are still remnants of this universal wisdom that come to us through other channels, some of them almost inconceivably ancient. In myth, folklore, folk songs, riddles, superstitions, hand gestures, jokes and dances, the way we nod “yes” and shake our heads “no”, great secrets are sometimes hidden […] certainly not in all of them, but definitely some of them.

Charles Upton in “Folk Metaphysics” p. 6, 7

The Primordial Tradition alone can’t save us, it can’t be a Spiritual Path for us; only the true and revealed religions of the world can do that. The nourishing fruit of the Tree of Religion grows on the branches, not on the trunk. But the Primordial Tradition, the original story of the way things are, told in its original language, can let us see (God willing) deep, deep into those religions, all the way back to the Garden before the Fall.

Charles Upton in “Folk Metaphysics” p. 6