The purpose of Western esoteric tradition, writes Versluis, is “the restoration of paradise, which could also be expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other.” For this to occur, a change of consciousness (or rather a transcendance of consciousness into awareness) is required. In the Western tradition, this change is codified in text providing both the means and the method of personal transformation. The word (lettter, number, glyph, what have you) is sacred because it is both the method of transformation and the desired outcome.
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I am struggling with Versluis. I keep running into things that tick me off. Why keep reading then? For a couple of reasons. The first is that the subject matter is important to understanding the Western mind and because he is an academic writing about a subject I consider to be important (I expect a certain quality and tenor to his presentation based on this.) It is this last bit, my expectation, that keeps getting nicked by the jagged edges of his presentation.

The thing is he appears to be a practitioner. Not that this is a problem in itself. Every human being comes to a subject with a point of view, with a set of beliefs and ways. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to be able to bracket his beliefs to allow for the reader’s, nor to take into account that some of his beliefs may need support. At least that’s what I think is the problem.

For me writing about the magical mind requires this bracketing as much if not more than any other subject. For one thing, the magical mind by its very nature posits more than one reality. To understand it, to get a glimspe of its workings as part of the human mind, multiple realities must be maintained, not just the belief in multiple realities.
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aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh…………….

Ok. That’s better.

I find I am having to read this book of Versluis’ in the same way I read Bachelard. Let me give you an example from his book.

In setting up the thesis that text has become a primary route for initiatory transmission of esoteric understanding in the Western tradition, Versluis has come up with a three-fold description of readers (i.e. potential receivers of this proffered understanding). These are:

1.Closed readers—those who come to a work with predetermined theses that disallow their imaginative entry;
2.sympathetic readers, who enter into a work imaginatively; and
3.Initiates, who see the work as mirroring a process that they seek to undergo in themselves.

While I agree with Versluis that text is being used as a tool for esoteric transmission, and while I agree that to understand these texts as intended one must imaginatively allow the world entry in one’s imagination, I think number three above would be more accurately stated as

3.Open readers—those who come to a work with predetermined theses that allow their imaginative entry. (And perhaps permanent residence if these readers tend to think of themselves as initiates. –perhaps this last coda is a touch uncharitable of me, but I am irritated–)

And perhaps number 2 might be better if it read:

2.Sympathetic readers, who enter into a work imaginatively but also maintain simultaneously an active recognition that the world of the text is provisional.

OK, Mary, calm down. (Breathe, breathe, breathe….)

Having got that little hissy fit over and done with, I will now proceed to read the rest of the book.

I’ve been thinking about my mixed feelings with Verluis’ book. Around 3 AM today I found myself thinking about that book and about an essay I deeply admire by Cynthia Ozick called “Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Her Nurse“. When I caught myself thinking of them together, I searched for the connection I had subconsciously perceived, because apart from the fact that they are both in English, they are very different bits of work. What came to me was was the phrase “compassionate writing.” I now think that I didn’t respond whole-heartedly to Verluis’ book is because it isn’t what I think of as compassionate writing. So, in fact, it wasn’t a connection I was seeking between Ozick and Versluis but a difference.

When reading Verluis, I got the strongest sense that he was hiding something. Not data, of course. And no, I do not think he misrepresents his study. Rather, I think he is hiding himself, hiding something essential about his response to his subject, and by doing that he is unintentionally hiding his subject from me.
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So I finished Versluis’ The Esoteric Origins of The American Renaissance. I’m a long way from synthesizing it and I find myself experiencing mixed reactions. It is an academic book. Its style of prose, its pursuit of detail and evidence, all mark its genre and of course this is not a bad thing but it does effect the way the subject comes across the page.  I mean my experience of magic as it is practiced, of alchemy and the secretly borne passionate intensity of alchemists has led me to associate these topics and practices with drama and the excitement of a piece of art newly born. And the book doesn’t carry this sense. Also, to be fair, it is a survey book; one that is necessary given the state of academic research into this topic, but surveys are by necessity books that cannot deeply grapple with the implications of a subject let alone practice the art of literature as the words are laid down – the literary art which must always take you deep somewhere.  And of course, this stuff is something I already had some familiarity with, so perhaps it is unfair of me to have expected more. In fact it is unfair, but still, I did.
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I’ve started reading Arthur Versluis’ book The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance. It’s clear that the author is going to bring to bear many of the magical strains that populate the early American mental landscape – alchemy, gnosticism, theosophy, Hermeticism and Swedenborgianism – on authors such as Emerson, Poe, Alcott, Whitman and Dickinson (can’t wait until I get to that chapter!).
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