A Genealogy of Perennial Wisdom Perennial Philosophy / Transcendental Existentialism A journey from Zarathustra to the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, the Neoplatonists, and finally the Renaissance movement This three-part series, whose MP4 files and YouTube links are presented below, and to which further supplementary parts will probably be added in the future, is a summary of a project I have worked on over the past several years and which, God willing, will soon be published as a book under the same title. The project examines Suhrawardi’s claim that the origin of Platonic thought and tradition in world philosophy is fundamentally Mazdayasnian: that it began with Zarathustra, travelled through Pythagoras to Greece and through Hermes to Egypt, continued historically among the Neoplatonists, and was then reborn after Islam in Iranian mysticism. This tradition of thought can, in this view, be understood as the historical spirit of Iranian culture and civilization. Suhrawardi gave his life to articulating and recovering this historical tradition, which he called Khosravani Wisdom, and his project remained unfinished after his premature death at the age of thirty-seven. The first part of this series, published earlier—and shared again for friends who have not seen it, together with the two new parts—looked at Suhrawardi’s life, his unfinished project, and historical sources that have been taken to support a connection between Plato and the Platonic tradition on the one hand and Zarathustra and the Persian Magi on the other. Sources ranging from Seneca to Pliny are presented as supporting Suhrawardi’s view that this historical line of connection existed. The second part of A Genealogy of Perennial Wisdom, entitled “Zarathustra and the Pre-Socratic Philosophers,” examines the widespread assumption that Greece, understood by the West as the cradle of its earliest civilization, arose entirely from within itself as the sole ancestor and birthplace of philosophy, without a prior background and without borrowing from earlier civilizations—and that a wave of philosophers suddenly appeared there after 550 BCE, at the same time as the conquest of Lydia brought the Iranian world into direct proximity with Greek lands. The purpose of this series is in no way to diminish the great civilization and culture of Greece or its irreplaceable role in the history of world thought. It addresses instead a form of absolutism that has, above all in the Western world seeking to trace its roots through Rome and Greece, acquired a political function. Nor is the aim of this series a retreat into the past or nationalism in its closed form. More than anything, my aim is to recover historical lines and construct a coherent historiography whose content might, in a later step, be articulated in a modern form as a philosophical school of Iranian origin. Thought is the heart of every civilization. Our true civilization is not made of soil and stone or of kings of the past. What must be understood and expressed in a modern language is that which gave life to all of these and, beyond them, produced the literature and magnificent world of Iranian thought: a philosophy that forms their common line, has never been adequately understood or retold, and which I am trying to express for the present by rereading this ancient philosophy within the history of world philosophy. This approximately thirty-minute selection examines written and historical evidence presented as demonstrating the influence of Zarathustra and the traditions of the Magi on pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Pythagoras, Protagoras, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. Alongside these historical sources, by considering the dates and places of birth of these philosophers and comparing them with the new proximity between Iranian lands and Greek civilization following the conquest of Lydia in 550 BCE, it seeks to trace lines through which knowledge may have been transmitted into the Platonic philosophical tradition that Suhrawardi called Khosravani Wisdom. The third part of the series, presented below, turns to the ideas of the founders of the Renaissance Neoplatonic school, from Plethon to Cosimo de’ Medici and Marsilio Ficino, and examines a movement that sought to revive this philosophical tradition while acknowledging what it understood to be its Mazdayasnian roots. The movement’s call for reform of the Church, culminating in the final efforts of the Vatican scholar Agostino Steuco around 1510, came to no decisive result before Martin Luther’s Protestant movement changed the future of Europe and the Renaissance. These three parts focus fundamentally on genealogy and historiography rather than on explaining the philosophical content of this tradition—perennial wisdom—itself. A modern articulation of that content might perhaps be called a form of Transcendental Existentialism. My larger project is to articulate, and in truth revive, this as a modern expression of an ancient philosophy that I understand as the essence and heart of our historical civilization and culture. With thanks, Aydin Areta