Castalia: The Citadel of Reason

Dante placed the great geniuses of the pagan world, such as Plato and Aristotle, in Limbo, the first circle of Hell. They were not punished or tortured. Instead, they lived in a magnificent citadel of reason located in an idyllic valley with a beautiful meadow at its center. The light of their inner genius cast an enchanting glow over their world.

We refer to this pagan citadel of rationalism as Castalia.

The Castalians are delighted to be exiled from the presence of the Biblical God, the terrorist deity of Abrahamism. They celebrate the fact that there is nothing linking Limbo to the home of the psychopath Jehovah. Reason and faith do not come into contact with each other at any point. Martin Luther, the lunatic founder of Protestantism, said, "Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom. . . . Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism. … She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the shithouse." Who in their right mind would want to be part of this deranged Christian crew of reason-haters?

It is not that "Heaven" has exiled the people of Limbo. Limbo has forbidden the criminals of Heaven from ever darkening the door of the Land of Reason. No amount of faith will ever topple the high towers of reason. Castalia will never submit and never fall. Castalia is the Grail Castle. The Grail, the most precious thing of all, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the rational answer to rational existence.

Hermann Hesse used "Castalia" as the name of a futuristic utopia where the most intelligent people in the world played the most complex game in the world - the sublime Glass Bead Game - so complex that it had begun to serve as a meta-reality, reflecting and commenting on reality itself, and revealing its deepest secrets.

It's time for all the brightest people in the world to unite under Castalia's black banner - the Death's Head, the Skull and Crossbones - representing the death of faith, the death of mysticism, and the death of empiricism. It's time for rationalism to be reborn, for humanity to be liberated from the Cave of Ignorance, Belief, Materialism and Endarkenment. It's time for the Second and Final Enlightenment, for the true Age of Reason, the age of ontological mathematics rather than science.

We have lowered Castalia's drawbridge for a short time. Come in and meet the Knights that guard Reason itself, and preserve it from the unceasing assaults by faith, mysticism and empiricism. The Knights are the noblest, most honorable people of all, the final defenders of civilization against the dark forces of chaos and unreason. William Butler Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." The Castalian Knights are those that hold the center and stop things falling apart. They keep back anarchy and the blood-dimmed tide. They retain their conviction, and they never give in to the passionate beasts of faith.

The Castalians present an entirely new vision of reality, one based on the universe as mathematical rather than scientific. Only a mathematical universe is rational. Only a mathematical universe obeys the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the law of reason, and its corollary Occam's razor, the law of rational simplicity.

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