SubscribeDecember 22nd, 2010
magical surrealism
I recently purchased The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century. I bought it based on the title alone and, to be honest, thought it was something else, so I was a little surprised when I first opened it. What the book actually does is provide a whole series of alchemical readings by different persons. So there are three pieces by Paracelcus (1493-1541) but there are also poems by Helen Ruggieri and an amazingly odd piece on the mystical powers of sea salt by Jacques de Langre, the founder of the Celtic Sea Salt company. So it’s a really mixed bag and I have to say it reminds me ever so strongly of reading surrealism, but without the sense of humor.
I am very glad to have bought the book. It will be delightful to dip into it periodically. It should trigger some humdinger dreams.
December 16th, 2010
struggling for objectivity
So here is what I hate about Jungian thought:
In the mythology of the moon, the moon is wicked, for it is unreliable. The alchemists frequently quoted a psalm which says that in the darkness of the new moon the wicked shoot with their arrows at ethical just people, which means that the new moon protects thieves and the wicked when they attack the righteous. Thus the moon has all the wicked poison and unreliability typical of the anima in her original condition and also for feminine beings in general, not only the feminine in man, for in the feminine there is that catty, unreliable cunning, and rather doubtful ethics—one could call it the ambiguity of nature. The moon says that she is the waxing, moist, and cold moon and the sun is warm and dry, and when they are coupled in a balanced state, then she is like a woman open to her husband. (Alchemy, Marie-Louise von Franz, lecture 5)
Jeez Louise. Where do you start with shit like this?
My struggle with objectivity comes because I know Jungians know this is a symbolic system and not to be taken literally but they seem to be unable to separate the cultural and historical images of women (especially in men’s writing) from the “feminine” and also from women. One of the things that really gets to me is that Marie-Louise is an intelligent, well-read, and naturally thoughtful woman. I want her to know better than to posit herself as the mutable moon to Jung’s sun. I wanted her to look at herself as the foundation of what it means to be human and not look to Jung as the first cause.
Anyway…
Jung’s anima may have been catty. This means, of course, that he was catty since the anima is a psychological collection of traits not deemed appropriate for the role he was to fulfill in life (i.e. male, of a certain class, ethnicity, etc.) Why he would think his suppressed side was what women were is mind boggling. Well, we do know why don’t we? It’s because the culture thinks of women as badly botched men (which really hurts when it is a woman doing the culture’s work for it), and thinks of mind/spirit/masculine/feminine as somehow existent independently of its material matrix (i.e. the idea of an archetype and the collective unconscious/conscious).
See! I am really struggling with objectivity here—and at present I am not winning. I can feel the value of the Jungian system but this deep chasm of projection, of unwillingness to see women as complete and whole infects nearly the entire corpus of thought. (This and the fact that von Franz is a god-fearer.)
She knows this stuff is anima projection. In lecture 4 there is a description of the psyche in symbolic history as related to steam or vapour.
In parapsychological reports, if a ghost appears there is first something like steam, or a nebula, so it can be said that one of the most archetypal ideas is that the psyche has to do with the quality of steam or vapour, which expresses the idea that it is somehow linked with, but not identical to, solid matter. There is probably a certain anima factor in it for this text was probably written by a man.
Steam, vapour, matter, moon – all thought of as feminine – described as “the wife,” the empty vessel to be filled with her lord’s light. The vapour is the psyche of matter, matter to be destroyed to release the constant, immaterial, unchangeable, pure psyche so she can marry her constant husband the sun. Meh.
The thing is there is a thread of truth in the alchemical system, but probably not the one you think. Take the white spirit (psyche) in the black earth (materia prima). Alchemy says this is the case (is it?) but then the fragile, imagistic insight gets filtered through the language (and therefore conceptual framework) of the time.
First the insight: Imagine there is a young girl with a black monitor on her ankle. She is terribly frustrated at its presence and wants it gone with a fierce desire. Because she can’t get it removed she lashes out in frustration trying to break everything black she can find. What she doesn’t understand is that while it does restrain her, it is also the reason she exists at all and if she were to remove it she would cease to exist. It’s like a black candle with a white flame. Imagine the flame’s frustration that the candle follows her everywhere. The candle stalks her and she wants to be free. But she can’t be and as long as she cannot see the connection between her existence and the candle, then she will be frustrated.
Now the influence of the cultural myth of incorporeal permanence: replace the image of the young girl with a young boy. What did that do to your head?
Imagine there is a young boy with a black monitor on his ankle. He is terribly frustrated at its presence and wants it gone with a fierce desire. Because he can’t get it removed he lashes out in frustration trying to break everything black he can find. What he doesn’t understand is that while it does restrain him, it is also the reason he exists at all and if he were to remove it he would cease to exist. It’s like a black candle with a white flame. Imagine the flame’s frustration that the candle follows him everywhere. The candle stalks him and he wants to be free. But he can’t be and as long as he cannot see the connection between his existence and the candle, then he will be frustrated.
Think about it. How does the gender of the character effect the way the story would go if this were the seed of some Tolkienian movie?
In addition to whatever you’ve discovered about how gender effects your narrativizing, how many of you think that there is a “psyche” inside “matter” or “body?” It certainly feels like that, at least most of the time; but my question is how much of that sensation of separation is a result of the cultural narrative reifying the existence of a divide?
To get back to the story: From the flame’s point of view, it sees itself as the flame, not as an addendum to the candle. Easing the frustration would only be possible (so it is said) if the flame can come to see itself as a emanation of the candle. This, I take it, is (metaphorically) what Katagiri is saying with respect to impermanence. But what if neither permanence or impermanence is the bottom of the universe? What if the “bottom” is the relationship between the wax and its shape, the wick and the presence of oxygen, of the heat trail, of the combustion? What I’m saying here is that positing the bottom of the human universe as either permanence or impermanence is a male thing to do. It comes from the structure and functioning of the male mind working in a world where they are not the only progenitors, which, apparently, the male mind finds annoying. (I know that this isn’t fair, but that is exactly the point.)
The Western mind (currently with a distinctive male bias) is traditionally built around a core narrative character that we know as god. We posit this character as the protagonist and pose it in opposition to the fluctuation and impermanence of either the earth or some personification of those qualities (gaia, satan, e.g.). Western cultural narratives: God is most often associated with being masculine; the earth is feminine. Even for those of us that don’t buy the literal truth of the narrative, it is really hard to get outside this sense of duality, of opposition, of the existence of a foundation which does not change, does not alter—and of our genderized version of the tale. Take the ethical question, for example. If there is no absolute standard then how do we know what is good? It’s a silly question really, but it is taken seriously because we really like that permanent vs impermanent narrative—and we like the idea of god/man vs earth/woman (well some of us don’t, but we’re the minority)—and that generates its own silly questions. Does a woman have an “anima,” for example. Such a question irritates me in much the same way as an argument I overheard recently between two men about the size of angels. Really, I did. And they were serious. In 2010! (I really, really wanted to ask them how they measured a metaphor, in inches or centimeters. But I didn’t.)
There is resistance to this basic (masculine) Western narrative of course. (Hopefully not futile.) Wicca is an example: goddess as the divine principle, the god as the one who sacrifices himself, who dies and is reborn each year. It is not simply a reversal of the absolute/impermanent narrative but a reworking of it built around the sense of life that comes with being female, and taking herself as the human norm. Not that this means she escapes the mistakes that come with fictionalizing facts. But at least it is a different story that starts with other presuppositions.
What am I suggesting? Jungianism without the gender tags. No anima, animus stuff, but a language reworked to deconstruct these paradigmatic frameworks and give the young white flame a way of conceiving itself that does not also lock it into a hierarchy (neither the true life principle (soul/spirit/psyche), or as an emanation of the true nature of time and being, what Katagiri calls arising.
Come to think of it, that might be fun. Write an alchemical text for that express purpose. A witch’s alchemy! FFO!
Reading can be such a struggle. You’re given a whole cloth, and really what you need is the threads – even better the uncombed wool – the sheep? How far back do you go with the process of taking apart a thought system to get at its insight? And it isn’t better to leave it as it is – to take it “whole cloth.” If I had to do that then there wouldn’t be any philosophy that I could learn from because they all have these cultural fallacies and idiotic presuppositions. Especially with regard to the reification of male-felt gender categorizations. And of course that’s not the real problem is it? It’s that these categorizations are considered human when they’re not.
I don’t really care if Jung saw his catty side as female. All that means is that his world had associated the undesirable social position (relative powerlessness) as “naturally” female and also categorized cattiness as undesirable and then conflated the two. The deal is to realize that that’s what you’ve done and not mistake a narrative for reality, and I do care that Jung wasn’t able to do that, and care even more that von Franz wasn’t able to either.
Why care? Partly because if one does that, mistake one’s own narrative for the human (or even material) truth then all kinds of people get caught under the tracks of that tank. And I don’t like blood baths, even if red is such a pretty colour.
December 14th, 2010
dreaming in colour
I think I’m reading too much alchemy. I’ve taken to dreaming in red, black and white. For days now. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
And I met Thanatos in one of the dreams. He’s a really nice guy and he likes washing dishes, white tea cups in particular. He thinks it’s delightful that my hair is green.
December 13th, 2010
why read such an illogical thing as alchemy?
Someone inquired of me, if I know that most alchemy (and other assorted) texts have an “abysmally poor logic” underpinning the thought system, why do I bother with them?
Here’s my reply:
Apart from the sheer enjoyment of another mind there is the issue of the difference between reason and efficacy. Imagine you are visiting with a friend in her kitchen. You complain of a headache and she gives you a cup of tea to drink. The tea is bitter but you trust your friend and so drink the tea. You carry on a slow but pleasant conversation and after about 30 minutes you notice that your headache is much less severe and after a further 20 minutes or so of more animated conversation you realize your headache is gone.
At this point several more people show up and enter the kitchen. After introductions, conversation turns to the pot of tea on the table out of which you drank. Someone begins to pour a cup for themselves but your friend demurs saying that it is willow bark and she will make some plain black tea for everyone. As she begins this the group starts relating their various stories about why (and if) the willow bark tea cured your headache. Someone says that it is the spirit of the willow that takes the pain. Another person talks about poison in cells and the cleansing effect of natural remedies upon the body. A third speaks of acetylsalicylic acid and it’s naturally found variants. A fourth says it was the conversation that did it; a person says it was just coincidence – uttering the word “monad”. There are other stories involving djinns, angels, astrological alignments and heavy metals in our atmosphere.
Do any of these stories have anything to do with the relationship between your drinking the tea and your headache’s recession? That is, if you hadn’t heard all these stories would it have made any difference to the fact that your headache left?
Of course there are problems with many of the explanatory stories. One of those is that none of them will test well experimentally except for one. There’s another problem, too. Say on another occasion you have a headache again, you drink willow bark tea but in an hour you still have a headache. Does this mean the tea didn’t work the first time or that there’s another problem? The only way to know is through understanding and experimentation. At this point the stories and their reliability and testability does matter. But still, knowing the actual explanation for how something works does not change the fact that it works.
The real problem is if people come into things through the story rather than the efficacy (or lack thereof) of something. So if I started with the spirit story and doggedly stuck with it, I’d be propitiating willow tree spirits when my headache didn’t go away instead of experimenting with (say) meditation as a relaxation technique, or exercise, or eliminating getting drunk every night. I’d not take the time to figure out under what actual conditions the willow bark worked and when the different kinds of head pain required differing kinds of responses. This is what makes the acetylsalicylic acid story different from the rest. That story is founded first and foremost on testability and repeatability whereas the other stories are based on narrative delight. This means the acetylsalicyclic acid story will happily change itself to fit the facts whereas the other stories will expect the facts to fit the narrative.
Here’s the thing with alchemy and such like systems of explanation—you need to separate the story from the bits that have some effect in the world and go with the bits that work. Then you need to match them up with other bits that have come to your attention through completely different stories. If you do that then you can find great value in human narratives like alchemy without losing your analytical mind to the illogical abyss.
December 12th, 2010
liminality, impermanance and Aker
When reading a section in von Franz’s Alchemy I came across a reference to the Egyptian god Aker and it forcibly reminded me of the principle of impermanence that is central to Katagiri’s zen. I wrote about Katagiri a little while ago, but to briefly summarize, substance as we know it has no permanent identity. One cannot really say what there is, because “is” is a verb in English that references an idea of permanent substance and that’s just what isn’t. The phrase in Katagiri that is used to talk about the nature of reality is “arising only.” This phrase is best thought of as a verb, and reality is always, incessantly, moment by moment, coming into “to be” and then again coming into “to be.” What I mean by that is that the universe arises and then arises again 60 odd times in the time it takes you to snap your fingers. This is impermanence: constant arising and, I suppose dissolution or dismemberment, then arising.
The connection to the god Aker is the liminality of that. The way von Franz talks about Aker, he seems to me to be very much like “arising only,” although von Franz never mentions the phrase. Aker is really more like a verb than a noun, or perhaps a sense of the pre-linguistic world—prior to the separation of a unified reality into categories like action and object, which is how “arising only” should probably be conceived. This god is fluid. It is the underworld itself, the prime matter that always underlies life and consciousness, but also the god of the underworld; Aker is the dead and the re-memberment of the corpse that is necessary for Osiris (and the rest of us) to arise from the dead. So in effect, at the moment between being dead (dismembered) and arising (being re-membered) one is in Aker, is Aker, is impermanence, is “arising only.” There is no separation between place and time, life and death. And the interesting thing from the alchemical point of view is that although Aker is often associated with the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice, the time when the sun is liminal, just before it breaches the horizon (another representation of Aker), the sun is Aker and therefore both masculine and feminine in the Jungian sense since Aker is associated with prima materia – is prima materia, the alchemical lead. But more of that in the next post on the role of the feminine in the alchemical practice.
Isn’t the link between Aker and Zen cool!
December 10th, 2010
Jungian theory vs practice
As a preliminary remark I should say that I have undergone Jungian analysis and found it profoundly helpful. Having said that I find the reasoning behind it suspicious at best and some of actually makes me mad. Some systems are really meant to be experiential and not theoretical. That might be mostly because while the system is efficacious, the logical underpinning has the feel of something hastily devised to answer nay-sayers. Much, in fact, like Luhrmann’s subjects were prone to do.
I am reading Alchemy by Marie-Louise von Franz. It’s a very Jungian book: packed with symbolism, full of dubious reasoning, sprinkled with the “in-crowd” assurances of perceptive superiority and extraordinarily fertile ground for self understanding. In that it’s rather like any religious text.
[Ouch. I can feel my old analyst calmly staring at me with those eyes.]
You judge:
As you know, there was a famous quarrel between Max Planck and Einstein, in which Einstein claimed that, on paper, the human mind was capable of inventing mathematical models of reality. In this he generalized his own experience because that is what he did. Einstein conceived his theories more or less completely on paper, and experimental developments in physics proved that his models explained phenomena very well. So Einstein says that the fact that a model constructed by the human mind in an introverted situation fits with the outer facts is just a miracle and must be taken as such. Planck does not agree, but thinks that we conceive a model which we check by experiment, after which we revise our model, so that there is a kind dialectic friction between experiment and model by which we slowly arrive at an explanatory fact compounded of the two. Plato-Aristotle in a new form! But both have forgotten something—the unconscious. We know something more than those two men, namely that when Einstein makes a new model of realty he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories.
But what role does the unconscious play? The unconscious seems to deliver models which can be arrived at directly from within without looking at outer facts, and which afterwords seem to fit outer reality. Is that a miracle or not? There are two possible explanations: either the unconscious knows about other realities or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter. If a wonderful idea as to how to explain gravitation comes up from within me, can I say that it is the nonmaterial unconscious giving me a wonderful idea about material reality, or should I say that the unconscious gives me such a marvelous idea about outer reality because it is linked with matter, it is a phenomenon of matter and matter knows matter?
There we are at our wits end as to how to proceed, and have to leave the question open and say that the great X is that we do not know how to proceed. We can make two hypotheses. Dr. Jung is inclined to think—though he has never formulated the thought, or only hypothetically, because we cannot do more, we can only speculate or make a hypothesis—that probably the unconscious has a material aspect which would be why it knows about matter, because it is matter, it is matter which knows itself, as it were. If this were so, then there would be a dim or vague phenomenon of consciousness even in inorganic matter.
Gack.
So many assumptions. Did you read that post “being time“? In that I talk about a completely different potential explanatory rubric which bases reality not on matter but on time. Of course Jung and von Franz are Westerners and so naturally assume that the thing that has to be the most real, that which is fundamental to any process must be matter or related to matter in some way. Not that I necessarily disagree but it is an assumption and one which constrains the choices von Franz sees to explain the power of the apparently non-corporeal unconscious to effect the conscious and thereby reality. Sort of a re-deal of Descartes’ cards. But enough of that.
What of this idea that the unconscious has “a material aspect.” I don’t actually disagree with that since the unconscious, what ever it actually is or does, is certainly a function of the body-brain just as consciousness is. But look at where she goes with it! The idea that because the unconscious is somehow related to matter must mean that matter itself has a “vague phenomenon of consciousness” is just outlandish and most deeply mystical and religious in assumption. The thing that underlies this is the idea that matter is somehow particulate. It assumes a kind of alchemical reality where there is a solid particulate reality which is also the site of some kind of mind or soul—that these two exist and are intertwined. And I’m sorry but you can’t assume alchemical reality to prove alchemical reality and call it a real argument.
What if, for example, that it is the organization of matter, and not atoms that produce the thing we experience as the unconscious (or the conscious)? Take the wiring in my home. I have alternating current running through the walls because of the organization of the system. If I were to pull out the wires and heap them on the kitchen floor, I’d have wires but no A/C. I don’t think you could fairly say that the heap of wires had “a vague phenomenon of” alternating current within it. If I cut the main line coming into the house and leave the wires in the wall I still have wires but no A/C. It’s a matter of systematic organization and connection, not of the wire itself, although, granted, if I replaced my wiring with tubes of milk I also wouldn’t have A/C, so the nature of the wires is important to the process.
Anyway, my mini rant done, I can go back to the book for what it was really intended, as a primer on alchemy as a psychological practice. It’s sort of like Zen or witchcraft in that way. These things are for practice, for the experience of them, for the narrative mind to construct (or deconstruct) meaningful experience so that we can feel. Just feel. Really it would be better if the practice of rationalization was just left aside as not apropos to the project.
November 28th, 2010
doing nothing
Early this morning I read a few pages of Hitchcock’s book on alchemy and alchemists. The section was dedicated to showing that alchemy is in fact an elite form of Christianity (I kind of think of Christianity as a plebeian form of alchemy, but there you are). Remember the book was published in 1857 so that was probably a good thing to do since his audience would have been largely (at least nominally) Christian. What was wondrous about the section was the logical framework he sets up to make it happen. It says so much about him and about the mindset of the time that it is a bit like being present as reality was folded and jiggled to allow for his passion, his belief.
I put the book down to think about it and went out for coffee. I spent much of the rest of the day out. After coffee, I walked with the dog in the park and watched the ducks croon to each other, packed as they were in the little bit of open water. I watched a puppy splash excitedly after them, stirring them to deeper quacks and ruffling wings. I did nothing but that kind of thing for the rest of the day.
Hitchcock’s argument retreated to just below the surface but it did start me thinking about what it is I like in the rather disparate kinds of books I read. My conclusion is that they aren’t really disparate. ASL poetics and Spinoza are really not so different. They are both ways of making the world fall into meaningful order. That’s what interests me in all of the books I read. It is utterly fascinating for me to watch minds organize reality and make of it something human and meaningful. It doesn’t matter to me whether I agree with the found meaning. It’s the process that blows me away. It is so fundamentally beautiful.
Of course the author’s created conceptual framework can be problematic. Payne Knight’s for example and the inbuilt need for women to be passive receptacles for god’s/man’s seed. Blooey to you Mr Payne Knight. I reject such a categorization.
And of course that’s the thing that makes conceptual patterning so beautiful – it is a group art project. We do it together. We compare, we contrast, we argue, we agree. There are harmonies and conflicts but we all invest our lives in the process. We name reality childhood on to death.
Adam named. Payne Knight named. Qunqun names. I name.
Do you know the greeting namaste? The fundamentally respectful address recognizing the otherness of another is how I think of this salutation and of our naming. I name and Qunqun names. There are as many names as there are namers. The multitude circle in our shared mental space and even though we often individually miss the reality of another’s names, they are all there, circling. Namaste: one name to another.
My mind drifts on the tide of this kind of thing: this is what happens when I do nothing. Dangerous.
November 23rd, 2010
mental chaos and intellectual growth
The last few days have been rather odd mentally. Partly it’s the cold. This nasty little cold snap has me holed up inside struggling to stay warm. When I took the dog out this morning I found myself grumbling internally – Calgary, this is just like frakking Calgary, sunny and frakking cold. So I went back in, divested myself of the gloves, scarves, extra socks, extra sweater - don’t like this, don’t like – made lemon tea and put on my slippers to keep my feet from getting so cold; I resolved to stay inside until this passes over on Friday. (But coffee, my stomach whinges.)
So you see I’ve been a bit techy of late. You understand that this mood plays its part because intellectually I feel like when I came back in with the dog, into the more-or-less-warm, that I found the house littered with a stunning array of bones. Now you realize this is a metaphor, but it really did feel like that. The thing is that I can’t tell how many critters (ideas/theories/bits of understanding) are scattered in my*house* and so the process of sorting is taking time.
Here are some *critters* that I think are almost certainly disarticulated across the *house*.
I’m reading Carl Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy. I haven’t read it in over two (maybe three?) decades so it is as if I am reading it again for the first time. I can feel myself remembering Oh yes, I remember his obsession about how others might disrespect his insights and bleh, the Christian thing to dive under – again, but I think I totally missed the implications of his assumptions about the reality of a god-force and how the god-within will probably relate to the god-without. This is odd, since it is the fundamental similarity between Jung’s theories and Western esoteric practices like alchemy. I suppose this lack of comprehension is understandable in one so young reading a book like this and what’s true is that reading this book of his is rather like reading an alchemical treatise. I have to keep sorting, sifting out the above-below assumptions endemic to this kind of thought and re-articulating them in some more coherent pattern and I probably didn’t have the mental wherewithal or ancillary knowledge to do that when I first read it. Still, I must have had some glimmer because I’ve never really trusted the idea of a collective unconscious and archetypes, regardless of how useful they can be as concepts, because I cannot locate them. I mean, where does Jung think these *things* rest and how do they come to be in each mind? Archetypes, in particular, remind me too much of Platonic Ideals and that is a bad thing.
I’m also reading Harlan Lane’s When the Mind Hears, which is a history of the struggles of the Deaf to survive the good intentions of the hearing world. Not that Lane really sees the good intentions. He’s angry in much the same ways as the AIM boys were/are angry at the non-Indian world. Minority community suffers and one of the consequences of that is rage. It’s a superb book in that it is the result of devoted and first-class scholarship and it most definitely provides a window into at least this one aspect of the embattled Deaf world (the one you will experience as a hearing person – if you are one – is rage and its behavioural script – exclusion – if you spend any time in the Deaf world). In Jung’s terms, the hearing world is the projection site of the Deaf shadow.
Henry Real Bird’s Horse Tracks is another book that is *falling apart* under the strain of multiple connections. I have to say this book is having a profound impact on my thinking about both poetry and philosophy. I’ve rarely met a book that is so exactly right for the moment that I can feel its working so clearly. I do think that this poetry is the key to the *bones* littering my house. It’s like a chemical that dissolves muscle and ligament to leave the pristine bones ready for re-articulation.
I’m also reading moon in a dewdrop, writing of zen master dōgen and Each Moment Is the Universe zen and the way of being time. I have to read these books like I read Real Bird. Slowly. The thought system is so fundamentally different from my own that to have any hope of absorbing such ideas I must approach them delicately, like I would the nest of a spring robin. Here’s an example from dewdrop:
As usual
cherry blossoms bloom
in my native place,
their color unchanged—
spring.
This poem, called “Inconceivable Mind of Nirvāna,” takes up the theme of cherry blossoms, which in Japanese poetry typically symbolize the world’s transiency. But Dōgen, contrary to our expectations, suggests that something about the cherry blossoms goes beyond change.
In contrast with birth and death, which constantly appear and disappear, the tranquility of nirvana is timeless. Yet according to Mahāyāna Buddhist teaching, nirvāna is experienced only in birth and death. Thus timelessness is experienced in momentariness.
I’ve been working through this passage for over a week now.
There are some ways in which zen is like Real Bird’s underlying philosophy and so I feel a kinship, but there are fundamental differences that disrupt that. I suppose what is happening is that my mind is rebelling and trying to gather the pieces in a way that feels coherent. I’m trying, in other words, to make meaningful a disparate group of *bones* and perhaps this isn’t the best plan. I expect I’ll go ahead with it though.
I’m also reading about ASL poetics and a novel about deaf people and being Deaf, then there’s Mitchell’s Iconology and Hitchcock’s Remarks on Alchemy and this odd little study (from 1786) called A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Maybe I should put it all down and go get a Harlequin romance. Or better yet go see Harry Potter. (I am really, really looking forward to that.) So I recognize my *bone* filled *house* is my own fault but at least it’s interesting. I do expect the current chaos to resolve eventually and out of it, probably, will come some intellectual understanding of how the parts fit, and if not that, at least some better understanding of the parts themselves.
November 20th, 2010
tarot, alchemy, the soul and the concept of impermance
As a tarot reader and reader of alchemy I have a long interest in the idea of human transformation and the assumed relationship between the material world and that which seems to speak of the incorporeal. Yet, for consistency’s sake, for logic, and human compassion and just plain common sense, I cannot underwrite a belief in the immortal, in any kind of living permanence – no soul as we in the West have come to think of it.
Still, there are seeds of deep worth and beauty in the Western esoteric traditions. The valiant belief in Man is above all things a crucible that bubbles shimmering hope, golden stories shared amongst friends, a purple rapt history of a shared ideal.
Look at Hitchcock’s Remarks Upon Alchemy for example. He conceives of alchemy as a religious pursuit, one that is for the true purpose of the realizing in oneself “the union of the divine and human nature, expressed in man by an enlightened submission to God’s will.” Given the times in which he wrote (published in 1857) his preface alone is remarkable for its enlightened view of religious and intellectual freedom. It is also a book designed to be an exemplar of the civilized man: kindness, civility, dedication, commitment to truth and tolerance. Nevertheless, for this “union” to be a true goal for humanity certain assumptions made by the statement must also be true. That there be a God, for example, that there be some sense by which mortal man can be in union with (e.g. the same as) the divine. This seed of God within us is commonly called the soul, and while it can apparently develop or learn, it is, nevertheless also eternal – barring God’s wrath. It’s a beautiful idea, but like the unicorn and the virgin, it is also a cultural myth and empirically nonsensical.
Can the beauty of sulfur and salt as a symbolic system withstand the disinterment of the concept of a soul?
I asked this before in an earlier post on tarot (the Death card), and while I still have a long way to go, I’d like to begin exploring the question. Some attempts have been made of course. Jung’s book on alchemy, for example, uses alchemy as a metaphor for the psychological process of individuation and by doing so moves away from Hitchcock’s religious framework. The idea that all humans have an inbuilt (did he imagine this as cerebral?) predisposition to certain kinds of image orderings (archetypes) goes a long way to providing a material framework to support the pursuit of esotericism without having to fall under the spell of our tendency to anthropomorphise our longings and fears. If we can see these archetypes as materially based we do not have to imagine that “mother” exists somewhere in the universe apart from in the working of the human mind/brain and body as it moves through life.
So some inroads have been made, yet Jung still has a teleological core, the idea of individuation as a maturation goal for human beings, for example. One of the besetting problems with a history of the absolute at the heart of the Western mind is the need for a goal, for “evolution” to have a purpose and an end point, for the narrative arc to have a denouement with all story lines tied up. I think that this need for an end-of-times will have to be unburied along with the concept of the soul in order for us to be able to revitalize Western esotericism in any way other than as a soporific to escape the mental and emotional consequences of a less than noble present and past.
The question is what would human development look like without the “development” part? That is, can we see human psychological change as a kind of evolution? Let me be clear: the human mind, emotional body, psyche changing to better suit the environment we actually live in with no sense that this represents anything more profound than a better fit. We are not becoming enlightened. We are not purifying our spirits or souls. We are simply changing what was developed as a tool for a hunting-gathering primate to gauge success (using happiness as a measuring scale?) to a tool for an urbanized, visually and informationally inundated primate. I think something like this would be far more in accord with the concept of impermanence than anything I’ve read heretofore with regard to the Western traditions. However, there must be other possibilities.
Anyway, my headache is back so that’s all for now.