Saraphim

Miles Cleveland Goodwin, “Ghost of the Cherokee”

“The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.”

“Few people know anything about the ancestral soul, and even fewer believe in it. Aren't we all the carriers of the entire history of mankind? Why is it so difficult to believe that each of us has two souls? When a man is fifty years old, only one part of his being has existed for half a century. The other part, which also lives in his psyche, may be millions of years old.”