Not that Versluis is a comic, although he can be comical. I’ve written about Versluis before and you may be wondering why I keep reading his stuff since I sometimes appear to have a “hate-on” for him, at least according to an email I received from a Tailfeather reader. The thing is I adore magic, the way magical belief systems work, the power of magical narrative in human life, and especially, the way magical systems are transforming themselves in the contemporary West. And yes, I am an atheist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the power that the concept of magic has on the human mind. And remember, like all art forms, this power is not a bad thing. It’s only when narrative is confused with empirical reality that it gets hairy.

So I keep reading Versluis (and others like him) because he is a magician, and one that clearly that has some deep knowledge of his chosen path. Reading him is instructive with respect to how such belief systems work; how true believers function conceptually to enable magical systems in their life and world.

Having said that, the other reason I read Versluis is because he is also an academic. That I find particularly engaging because I have always associated academia with intentional rationality and Versluis just blows that fucking right out of the water. I mean how cool is that to get blown away and reminded that all is not what you expect. At least for me this disturbance pushes me to attempt understanding, to read, to think, to reason.

The thing is though, that this book is actually a little scary. Or at least, reading it because I couldn’t sleep last night, at 2 AM and 3 and 4, the book took on a kind of horror, like the thought of one of the current batch of mad-dog Republicans becoming the US president and devastating the sanctuary of Western democracy.

Why so scary? It’s not the overall stated purpose of the book. He just wants to say that magic (alchemy, et al.) can only really be understood and practiced properly from within the tradition that gave it birth. OK. His idea is that magic, ripped from the larger tradition (belief system) is like a sick person dealing with symptoms and not the root cause of the illness. That’s just going to cause more problems. Health – in this case spiritual – comes from walking a hermetic path and using magic when appropriate to that path. The assumption, of course, is that walking a hermetic path is synonymous with working for spiritual development and with that bringing on emotional and behavioural adulthood. Of course the biographies of such seekers in history tends to undermine the veracity of such assumptions, but that is something Versluis doesn’t seem to address. (At least in my readings so far. If you have a reference or two that contradicts this, I would absolutely love to follow it up.)

Where it starts to get scary is what he considers to the true path, which, of course, is hermeticism for those of us in the West. What is scary is the disdain, the anger and fear, and the apparently concomitant severe lack of factual historical knowledge or analysis that underlies such a belief in the existence of “true”.

Although it is difficult for us – bound as we are to the dualistic, Cartesian view of existence as consisting in the purely physical and in external series of coincidence – to rightly understand the more organic and unified vision of the traditional cultures, reflected in the West by the Hermetic tradition, it is precisely this which is most necessary, for it is only within such a tradition that magic and alchemy arose, and through which they can be understood.

(As if, even were it true, that a “more organic” understanding of our ancestors resulted in better behaviour with respect to the earth, its indigenous peoples, or non-human animals. I mean what does he think this “organic” understanding really achieved in the functional lives of the society?)

He’s just as mad at modern manifestations of magical religion as he is at the church and science. He names, for example, neo-shamanism. Versluis feels that without the “protective shell” of hermetic tradition, Westerners who practice magical technologies like shamanic drumming and alchemy are in danger. What danger?

For this reason, to the extent that magic and alchemy exist outside a tradition they are – as is the traditional orthodoxy – increasingly subject to malevolent and infernal influences, manifested in greed in the former case and hatred in the latter.

In other words, the fact that we have left behind the traditional belief system of Hermeticism has caused us to be at risk for what the Christians would call the devil and his lesser demons.

I shit you not.

…because the modern era has consisted in a ‘hardening’ against the Divine protection which traditional cultures afforded those within their sphere – in the ‘unchaining’ of the inferior or infernal forces against which modern man has virtually no higher protection, having cut himself off from the traditional.

Dude.

Has he read any actual history? Any idea of what women (or any other power-minority) suffered under those “traditional” cultures? The devastation done to the earth because of the assumptions of such  belief systems. The idea of “purity” for example. The horrendous and morally bankrupt idea that error equals “deformity”. Has he read anything at all about the position of the disabled in our history? Is he really suggesting that “infernal” dangers are something worse than what was done exactly because of those traditions? Does he not understand that those traditional horrific acts were in fact the infernal and malevolent forces he perceives as endangering us today?

This text is a manifestation of a golden-age longing, apparently completely divorced from any real understanding of how those traditions functioned in the real economic, political and ethnic worlds.

I understand why neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and Pythagorian systems hold on to the spiritual movements today. They provide a sense of rootedness, a belief system that is deeply Western and therefore feels like home. The problem is that they are just wrong. Empirically wrong. It’s like holding on to the ideology of the celestial spheres because you just know you are the center of the universe and that damn Copernicus is placing you in infernal danger.

I am not sure I can be said to worship anything, but if I were to have to name something it would be the earth. It is, after all, my life blood, my source, my future. The thing is that exactly because it is so important to me I would rather actually come to know it. Not what my 2600 year old ancestors thought of it (although that is also valuable in a narrative way), but what reality is like from the point of view of the Other, from the Now.

So I balance narrative and science. Currently it is the only way to access something close to the truth, in particular a workable truth for the contemporary world and the world of our children. Traditions won’t cut it. Belief systems alone won’t do. The earth is not the center of the universe. Neither is the sun. It’s better to know this than pretend otherwise. I suspect we’ll live longer as a species if we can come to grips with this.

So, again, why keep reading Versluis and others like him? Because at some point, some academic (believer or not) will find a way to honour his or her “spiritual” tradition in such a way as to not violate the actual facts of the case – whether empirical or narrative. I suspect this might come out of eco-spiritual traditions since many of them are also science majors. Someone, somewhere, will find a way to pull scientific reality and narrative together and then a new, workable, tradition will have had its birth. I hope I live long enough to see it, and am astute enough to recognize it when it happens.

That may not seem much in the way of praise, but it is really. Not that there aren’t things about the book that I find “interesting,” there are and I will tell you about them shortly but let me digress just a bit before I do.

There is another author the I have have spoken of here, Arthur Versluis. While I find his subject area fascinating, what I could never get past is the fact that his books read like apologetics while taking the shape of a scholarly examination. These are not the same thing at all. I don’t care at all what the beliefs of the scholar are about his subject area. I do care if he or she is able to think past them for the purposes of a clear examination of what is in fact the case. Versluis doesn’t seem to be able to do that very well and Clifton can.

Still (and here is where I find “interesting things” in the text), Clifton’s personality and personal beliefs do pop up occasionally throughout the book and, I should say, I was delighted by the appearance of those because otherwise the book, while good research, is written with a rather dry style. But I think there is a reason for that. Whether conscious or unconscious, I suspect Clifton is compensating for the somewhat precarious position pagan studies has in the academic world, and the even more delicate position out-pagans have in most academic departments. It’s like the first woman doctor – I bet she had to really work hard to prove she was as good as her male colleagues. It’s not rational, but change stirs up some deep wells of irrationality and taking pagans and paganism seriously is asking for a pretty big change for most academics. It’s this, I think, that explains Clifton’s writing style.

So here’s one of the twinkly bits. In chapter five (West Coast Wicca) there is this:

Two other legacies of the feminist Witchcraft of the 1970s are the concept of consensus-based decision making and, as noted above, a free-form approach to history and mythology that valued “empowerment” over documentation. The consensus decision-making process, already familiar to Quakers and to political anarchists, and modeled in some instances on tribal practices, offered a challenge to hierarchical coven structure and lineages. (On the other hand, people who have studied with famous feminist Witches such as Starhawk and Budapest usually manage to work that fact into their conversation.) Occasional critics of the consensus process will note that strong individuals seem to get their way even through consensus-based decision making, but the model of more egalitarian, fluid leadership is now firmly in place in many Wiccan circles. (emphasis mine)

A moment please: snort, giggle…OK

There’s Clifton the community member and participant. It speaks to his experience as a believer and adds an evaluative touch to the work really only possible for those who are both insiders and academics. And while such a tone transgresses the cautious scholarly (dry) tone he has so carefully established, it does no harm at all the the value of the study. This, I think, is because while his personality shows through (his insider status appears at these moments) what never happens — his belief never overshadows his scholarship. This is what Versluis does (over and over), why I think of his work as apologetics, and what irks me when reading his books, since I see the facts of the subject area as important.

Another brief digression: one of my favourite books is Awash in a Sea of Faith by Jon Butler. The chapter in there on the occult in American religion is both important and very well done. Partly this is the scholarship (very good), but partly this is the fact that Butler is there as a person while never straying from his choice to place facts in precedence to whatever his personal beliefs may be. His writing style allows for the natural assimilation of personality and a dedication to a factually-based reality.

This balance of a personality-based style and scholarship is what Clifton misses, but I suspect this has nothing to do with his capacities as a writer and everything to do with the position pagan studies holds in the larger academic world—and Clifton’s ideas about how to compensate for that tenuousness. And you know this isn’t a problem, because as I said, I am glad I read the book. I have a couple of new things to think about and a couple of resources that were brought to my attention that I now want to check out. But it is interesting, this example of how belief and scholarship resonate in the larger culture and how one can work past the obstacle that an unfortunate conjunction of those forces can become.

It reminds me of some advice a professor gave me once. He said a PhD isn’t the place for outrageous things. It’s the time to prove yourself. Once you’ve done that then be as out-there as you want. Good, solid advice given the nature of the academic world. And I suppose pagan studies (especially by pagans) is there still, still proving itself.

For this restoration of paradise to be literally true requires (at least) a three-layer reality that is unified through language and where the imagination is a place apart from the human brain. On one page he divides reality into “humanity, the cosmos, and the divine,” where the divine “transcends and links both humanity and the cosmos.” As a system it seems to have the habit of expanding so that by the time you get to the end of the book, the layers look to be at least four-part (and at an earlier place at least five).

Above we have the point of origin, the origin not only of language, but of the cosmos itself. This transcendent point gives birth to duality, the yes and the no, the light and the dark, love and wrath, and these in turn give birth to the qualities or archetypes inherent in the entire cosmos. From these archetypes then emerge the natural and human realms, where they are incarnated or manifested in the everchanging panoply of history.

Divine Unity—the No-thing
*
Duality: The Yes and the No, Love and Wrath
**
The Archetypal Realm of the Imagination: Divine Language
***
The Manifested or Elemental World
****

Language belongs above all to the archetypal realm, intermediate between nature below and the divine above. Thus language belongs also to the intermediate human realm, for it is only humanity that can mediate between sky and earth, between the divine and the natural. Language is the means by which this process of mediation or reconciliation is effected: it is, in other words, divine in its origin. As are nature and humanity. Indeed, as we have see, in Western esotericism generally, language is said to inhere in the entire cosmos. If humanity and the cosmos itself are fallen, or divided from the divine, then language must reflect this division, just as, conversely, a path beyond this separation and suffering must go through language.

This hierarchy of creation flowing down from the “origin point” reminds me very strongly of Plotinus and (I’m afraid) triggers all my alarm bells. Restoring Paradise is really a book of theology.

So what of it? It is what it is. (Can I get another platitude in here do you think, without tripping the irony alarm?)

The philosophical difficulties of such a view of the world are logically insurmountable (not to mention the biological and neurological problems of seeing humans as “the only” with respect to our abilities), so to get around that I would have to pan logic — as many of the authors Versluis cites do (and ignore everything I have learnt from biology and other sciences). Yet, I think Restoring Paradise shows that the basic belief structures of Western Esotericism, and probably, I think the Western mind altogether, display most clearly in full-on esoteric literature and that they are not limited to those examplars.

Take (well thought of and even philosophically and scientifically central) ideas of the singular value of language in determining the nature of human kind (as one example) to the extreme, and esotericism is where it ends up. I mean think about Wittgenstein’s recourse to language as the shining and defining structure that is what it means to be human: reading him on the structure of language is a bit like reading a prophet of some arcane symbolic faith. Still, I don’t think there is much doubt that language, numbers, symbols and text are key structuring elements of the Western Mind.

What does this say? Does it say that the received notions of a hierarchical reality emenating from a unified origin are actually the case, as Versluis seems to believe?  Or does it say something much more interesting, and perhaps even true?

It’s this second that will have me running down the books he suggests in his “Suggestions for Futher Study,” but it is the first that requires me to take a break from Versluis for the nonce.

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.

I think this allowance for multiple realities (i.e. other readers) is always critical for a book that purports to speak about the way the world is, which Versluis does by the way, but I think it is essential to any book that comes out of academia. I know, I know, my standards are unrealistic. Still. There they are.

I suppose that the reason I feel that this bracketing is critical for academics is because their words come with more weight. Even in a culture that supports an intolerance for the “ejukated,” even the most anti-intellectual person is going to cite some authority to support his or her point, point to some book as a reference, even if it the Koran, the Talmud or the Bible. Academia, the culture of the literate, is in our bones now. No getting it out. One would think Versluis would know this because this is what his book is really about – how the word is, for us, the philosopher’s stone, the Alpha and the Omega.

The thing is Versluis mixes up (often in the same sentence or paragraph) some important insight with a (way-left field) concept that comes straight out of his practitioner’s heart. For example:

“Active imagination” refers to the meeting of an individual and transcendent beings on an intermediate field that belongs completely neither to the transcendent nor to the mundane world. But such a term suggests that imagination is otherwise passive, and I do not believe this to be true. Rather, I believe that literature, mythology, and visionary experience all emerge on a spectrum in the field of imagination.

So here, way cool the insight that imagination is not passive. This bit reminded me forcibly of Descartes’ Error by Damasio, a really good book about the mind and its workings. Yet, this “field” — Versluis appears to mean this literally. And of course, if he does, this comes with a rather large host of intellectual and philosophical problems and drops the book right out of academic discourse and into the discourse of the practitioner.

Let me hasten to add: it is not the belief that this “field” is real, it is the lack of argument for it. This is not a standard or unproblematic belief and as such must be presented with support and argument. Just as Darwin had to do with his new notions, so Versluis is going to have to do if he wants this idea of a literally true mesocosm (his word) or field of imagination to work as a support for his presentation. He has to give his readers some help and not just obliquely accuse one of being a closed reader. At least I think so. I mean if you are going to posit something like the earth is round, today that isn’t something you have to support. It is an accepted idea and no one has successfully argued otherwise at this point. (Not that it couldn’t happen, I suppose.)  But the mesocosm, no. This idea needs support.

Still, I keep reading. The idea of magic, the magical mind, is such an endemic notion that I think it really deserves the very best of our attention and part of that is a scrupulous attention to the rigors of academic discourse. That is the heart of academic practice. I mean what if Darwin had said “Well fuck all the evidence, I just know it to be the way the world is and if you don’t agree, then that is because you don’t have the wit to understand what is, to me, patently evident.” If he did creationists would have every right to scorn the idea. But he didn’t and there was a reason: evidence is the heart of the academic’s view.

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.

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.

I don’t mean that academics should go all wishy-washy, touchy-feely with their subjects. That’s often the cruelest writing, abounding in sentimentalism but lacking any real empathy, and therefore negating any chance of presenting the subject’s world with the passion that it evoked in the subjects and made it interesting to the author in the first place. To understand alchemists and magicians if you are not one, you need to walk willingly into an adjoining emotional room: feeling, as Damasio has shown, is a necessary corollary to good thinking.

Ozick constructs the “adjoining room” for the reader in her essay on Virginia Woolf. That’s one of the reason’s I so admire the work. She starts it by acknowledging the difficulty that we have understanding what it was like be a part of that literary time and place, of that peculiar mind, and then, given we are primed with a sense of our limitations as empathetic readers, Ozick presents us with a series of photo-clip moments that promptly drop us into a sense of vivid life, but life cut-up, parceled, with a sense of shared limitations and the preset idea that like a photograph, life will gradually fade and we will diminish. Very between-the-wars. Very Virginia. This is what I call compassionate writing.

Perhaps it is too much to expect from Verluis’ book, that I come to feel the world of those practitioners he studies, but I think that history, in order to be assimilated in any meaningful way into our consciousness and our current sense of self and society must be presented in such a way as to evoke the feeling-sense of the subject’s world.

Anyway, it is not enough just to have the facts – which Versluis presents with admirable thoroughness – to really do justice to a subject, the writer has to provide a window through which the reader can at least peer, if not crawl, to establish a empathetic connection with the mindset of the subject. As Atran and Medin show in their study (the subject of several recent posts), knowledge while essential, cannot break us open from our customary assumptions, our prejudices. To do that we must understand the values that motivate; we must come to the possibility of empathy.

Verluis has the doubly-difficult task of getting us to jump the prejudicial barriers to understanding simultaneously the mindsets of those distanced by time and life-style (history) and in addition radically different assumptions about how the world works (esotericism). After all, that is why we call such practices esoteric in the first place. To the people who practiced them, who thought it obvious that “as it is above so below,” planting by the moon was no more esoteric than watering the garden through a dry spell is to us. That sense of obviousness, that “of courseness” is what I miss from Verluis’ book; I want to understand his subjects like that. I want to feel what was simply obvious to them, for the duration of my reading, to share a conceptual room with those whose lives made the world in which I live.

The final chapter of the text has the same title of the book, and here there is some attempt to draw to the reader’s attention the implications of the history he has outlined. Essentially, he is showing that the basic belief structures of Western esotericism, “chiefly couched in terms of profound correspondences between humanity, nature, and the divine” came to be expressed in the cultural forms that arose in response to the pressures of industrialization.  He is clear to remark upon the practical emphasis of Western esoteric traditions and the later pick-and-choose attitude taken by the authors he chooses to represent the American Renaissance. Versluis is quite right when he says (talking about alchemy in this case) “it represents…a particular discipline that the individual seeks to understand and practice properly: the individual exists in relation to the particular tradition he practices.” This is how the practice was to those who came before the Renaissance. After this more traditional phase, as his middle chapters show very clearly, the authors felt free to disengage esoteric detail from the tradition out of which it originally came. As a consequence these authors created something new, yet based on the basic belief structures which gave rise to practices like magic, gnosticisim and alchemy.

The very last paragraph of the book mentions his Western Esotericism, Literature and Consciousness “which argues that the Western esoteric traditions, including alchemy, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and theosophy, all emerge out of and reflect what we may call a gnosis of the written word.” Oh yes.  This is most definitely true.  This idea that the word is magic, that has obvious long-term links in Western magical traditions. I mean even god did that kind of magic. This idea mixed with the notion of the individual, the critical subject, and the role of the object with respect to the subject, these together go a long way to explain the basic mind orientation of the Western person. Versluis’ book is an important study, no doubt about that. Understanding ourselves better, our history, our conceptual origins, these things can only advance our facility with our future.

So what did I expect?  I’m not sure yet.  I’m still thinking about the book as a whole and specifically the claims he makes about Dickinson (and the implications of those claims.)  It’s very likely that I will buy the book (have a library copy right now) and I have already ordered his Western Esotericism, Literature and Consciousness. So clearly I find value in the data he has worked so hard to give us. I guess I just keep reading and hope that out of somewhere, the little gold nugget of understanding will precipitate out.

In the introduction to the book Versluis remarks that until recently the currents of esotericism in American history have not been much researched. What he says is that “there was not much reliable scholarship on Western esotericism.” Delightful.

The subtext, of course, is that there is much unreliable scholarship on the subject. Hence, my difficulty when first contemplating graduate school. I wanted to study the practice of magic amongst white middle class people in North America and my faculty wouldn’t let me. They were doing it to protect me of course. It was not a respectable topic: it was one that would have ended my academic career before it began. I could study Indians (and did) because I had familial links to Indian Country and because everyone knows that Indian magic is something suitable for academic discourse. Sometimes!: What a silly world I live in: just sayin’.

Perhaps Verluis’ book marks a change? It was published by Oxford University Press afterall.

What fascinates me about the academic taboo is that it takes place in a world that is heavily into magical thinking. Think about the percentage of Americans that claim for themselves religiosity. Even more telling to me are the number of people deeply afraid of atheism – as if it were some kind of magically infectious understanding – as if being an atheist is the result of some kind of demonic possession that can spread like an air-borne virus. I can’t help but think that only someone who cannot break the back of magical thinking needs to be so afraid of someone else’s ability to do so.

So if Verluis’s book does indicate something about the mental state of academia then perhaps all the work done by “rabid” atheists is really having some effect. Interesting if so. Might explain some of the recent resurgence of the religious right – the traditional flailing of the drowning man. Then again the resurgence could just be another of America’s “Great Awakenings.” The only way to tell is time and rigorous study.

Maybe I’ll do a PhD afterall?