Hello everybody, here is the promised second part of deitic rite of passage. Since my lunacy is something both expected and irritating, I'll let you enjoy the article and welcome all comments. I've been flailing around trying to develop the idea for a few months. Feel free to be openly disgruntled.
btw currently working on the 'evolution of deities' but I'll annoy you with that in a few weeks.
RITUAL AND TRANSI TION
STATES IN NON-HUMANS: HOW THE GODS ALSO UNDERGO
RITES OF PASSAGE
PART II
We already know that transition states lead to
re-presentation of the initiate. What isn’t as readily discussed is the effect
ritual has on the deity. After all, ritual is an interaction. In the past, the
deity has enjoyed a central place in this interaction. As Bastaire &
Bastaire have remarked, non-humans had a central place in theology, in
spirituality, in rituals, and of course in art which they have almost totally
lost.[1]
Nowadays, a crisis of representation has nearly left the deity completely out
of the ritual equation. Uncertainty about adequate means to interact with these
non-humans has led many religious systems to forget their presence entirely.
The ritual may be performed without god even in mind. When the process
becomes mindless, re-presentation doesn’t occur and the ritual fails.
Moreover,
ritual interactions are the most successful when both the ritual specialist and
the non-human connect personally. I don’t mean pure anthropomorphism although
the deity may take on human or animal qualia. I refer to a metaphysics of
presence that functions as an ontological foundation. This gift of presence is
consciousness. And it is this presence, this re-presentation, that forms part
of the fabric of social reality. Until now, we have viewed the present crisis
of representation as one distinctive, alternate swing of the pendulum between periods
in which paradigms, or totalizing theories, are relatively secure, and periods
in which paradigms lose their legitimacy and authority-when theoretical
concerns shift to problems of interpretation of the details of a reality that
eludes the ability of dominant paradigms to describe it, let alone explain it.[2]
We have
conjured a reality where non-humans exist but lack any ontological ethos. We
are quick to assert that god exists but ascribe no autonomous status to the
concept. Our interactions with non-humans are without any interaction at all.
Yet it is us that provides meaning to the deity. We imbue it with qualities and
characteristics and even a personality. We give it presence and in so doing,
renew its importance in reality. The same concept is used by quantum physicists
to describe the position and momentum of particles in the universe. These
postulated entities are defined and given meaning through the techniques used
to measure them. Like deities, they wait on us to give them an ontological situation.
And we have
many ideas as to what makes up the qualities of our deities. Some cultures say
that god resides in caves, others in forests; for many, god is in the sky while
others suggest underground. And still others would persuade us that god is a form
of consciousness while their counterparts argue for an entity outside of the
human universe. The prevailing thought is that either god is out there
or in-here. We call this relationship transcendence and immanence.
Transcendence
refers to our deities as being outside of human influence. God then, is beyond
anything that is other than god. This form of thought is indicative of
monotheistic religions. However, polytheistic and ‘nature-religions’ also
experience moments of grace or enlightenment characteristic of transcendence. A
transcendence deity is beyond thought, ‘above’ physical things and apart from
the world we live in. In the Kantian sense, transcendent means beyond al the
forms and categories of experience and knowledge: space and time, as well as
quantity (unity, plurality, or universality), quality (reality, negation, or
limitation), relation (substantiality, causality, or reciprocity), or modality
(possibility, actuality, or necessity). All these things are the preconditions
or presuppositions of human experience and thought. Hence to imagine creation
(causality) and creator (first cause) of the universe is only to project the
categories of human experience and reason beyond their field. [3]
On the
other hand, Immanence refers to the divinity being near or within.
In eastern orthodoxy, it is hypostases or energies of god. Immanence finds god
in this life and in the world around us. According to Joseph Campbell, the
immanence of god is in the faces, personalities, loves, and lives all around
us, in our friends, or enemies, and ourselves.[4]
Furthermore, immanence takes place in the mind and is entirely subjective.
Perhaps the best way to understand the immanence of god is in its experiential
qualities. When we experience the divine or what if feels like to be the
deity.
One is also
reminded of the subject object relationship in philosophy. The subjective
immanence seems to sit in stark contrast to the transcendent object until we
realize that a unitive experiential understanding of the divine dissolves any
distinction between immanence and transcendence. Spetnak remarks that what is
emerging now is the nondualistic understanding of immanent and transcendent
long seen as opposites in western cultural history, transcendence is coming to
be understood as “beyond” but not “above” the material plane we can see in
everyday life. Our minds will never be able to map the endless networks of what
I call “relational reality”, so spirituality that seeks to commune with either
immanence or transcendence now sees that they are no apart. This realization is
not new to eastern philosophy or indigenous cultures, of course; we were simply
late coming to it in the modern west because of our dualistic and mechanistic
worldview.[5]
Understanding god as both immanent and transcendent was also proposed by
Plotinus when he asserted that “we should not speak of seeing, but instead of
seen and seer, speak boldly of a simple unity for in this seeing we neither
distinguish nor are their two”.[6]
And also by Flemish alchemist Theobald de Highelande when he says that “this
science transmits its work by mixing the false with the true and the true with
the false, sometimes very briefly, at other times in a most prolix manner,
without order and quite often in the reverse order; and it endeavors to
transmit the work obscurely, and to hide it as much as possible”. [7] We
understand then that the deity and what it feels like to be the deity
are one in the same. Just as the object and subject, seer and seen, even god
and man enjoy a unitive relationship, we can expect that a rite of passage
would effect the deity equally as much as the neophyte.
Its hard
for many to accept this basic occult principle. The tendency is to see god
outside of ourselves or as something greater than us. We grant him extraordinary
powers and omniscience. We are taught that man is flawed or wicked and must be
separated from god. At least for now. And this separation is the definition
of hell. Our dualistic frame of mind places us, be default, in an experience of
eternal punishment by refusing to acknowledge the one-ness or at-one-ment of
god and man.
This wasn’t
always the case. Scotus Erigena discussed divine ignorance in the 1800s when he
stated that there is yet another kind of ignorance of god, inasmuch as he may
be said not to know what things he foreknows and predestines until they have
appeared experientially in the course of created events. [8] Just
as the initiate must undergo experientially the rite of passage that confers a
new state of consciousness, so too the deity must wait until events play out in
order to know what the ritual accomplished. Erigena goes on to say that there
is another kind of divine ignorance, in that god may be said to be ignorant of
things not yet made manifest in their effects through experience of their
action and operation; of which, nevertheless, he holds the invisible courses in
himself, by himself created, and to himself known.[9]
Just as man has nascent potentialities that must be unlocked via ritual, so too
the deity is ignorant of things not yet made manifest. A rite of passage
must unveil or bright to light aspects of himself.
Furthermore,
sometimes the rite of passage involves man awakening nascent potentialities in
the deity. Carl Jung one stated that, “For the alchemist the one primarily in
need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter
only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to
himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica,
just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or “sick” metals, etc… His
attention is not directed to his own salvation through god’s grace, but to the
liberation of god from the darkness of matter”. [10]
Here man acts as initiator to the deity. Object and subject
although unitive are also autonomous entities that reveal parts of the whole to
the other. It is a paradox. Object- subject immanence-transcendence, man-god
are both unitive and separate. They are mutually exclusive yet
inseparable.
This
classic example of religious of religious paradox is best seen in the idea of
light in darkness and darkness in light. When consciousness becomes unitive or
objectless, we are left with a consciousness not of anything. It is a
pure or “cosmic-consciousness”. There is nothing empirical in this state of
mind. Unitive consciousness is both something and nothing. Sometimes it is
described as there and not-there. Merleau-Ponty has remarked that this state of
being is experienced not from the depths of nothingness but from the
midst of itself.[11]
Religions
have many names and describe “cosmic-consciousness” in a myriad of ways.
Christians identify it with god. The bible calls it a “desert” or “wilderness”.
Dionysius the Areopagite stated that god is “the dazzling obscurity which
outshines all brilliance with the intensity of its darkness”. Buddhism also
recognized this paradox by labeling it the void. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
speaks of “the clear light of the void.”
It is the darkness of god. It is called darkness because all physical
distinctions disappear. It is the same as the Indian Brahman and identical to
the Atman. Object-subject distinctions simply dissolve. Therefore, we can’t say
that there is a light in the darkness because there would then be no
paradox. The light is the darkness and the darkness is the light.
Philosophers
have also identified with unitive experience brought about by a metaphysics of
presence. Schopenhaur called it the ‘Will’. He stated that,
Up to now, the concept Will
has been subsumed under the concept force; but I am using it just the
opposite way, and mean that every force in nature is to be understood as a
function of Will. For at the back of the concept force there is finally
our visual knowledge of the objective world, i.e. of some phenomenon, something
seen. It is from this that the concept of force derives…whereas the
concept Will, on the contrary, is the one, among all possible concepts,
that does not derive from the observation of phenomenon, not from mere
visual knowledge, but comes from inside, emerges from the immediate
consciousness of each of us: not as a form, not even in terms of the
subject-object relationship, but as that which he himself is; for here the
knower and the known are the same.[12]
The Will then, is without empirical
content. It is pure “cosmic” unitive experience. This is not a new or radical
concept. It is simply experiential. Our metaphysics of presence is one in which
personhood is granted to the deity. In other words, there is not one deity in
the mind and one in the physical world. As Neils Bohr once remarked in terms of
the Quantum, “Theorizing should be an embodied practice, rather than a
spectator sport of matching linguistic representations to preexisting things”. [13] When
we unite object-subject, we unite matter and meaning and man and deity.
That’s not to say that the deity is
solely a part of man. Again, they are mutually exclusive yet inseparable. When
we experience the deity, we experience a corporeal or bodily component to
experience. At the same time, the object(body) gives us access to subjective or
numinous experience. And in this state, we cannot articulate the experience
because we are embodied by the deity. You could say we are possessed. Mystics
are used to this idea. As Stace remarks, “the mystic, of course, expresses
thoughts about his experience after the experience is over, and he remembers it
when he is back again in his sensory-intellectual consciousness. But there are
no thoughts in the experience itself”.[14]
Philsopher Merleau-Ponty also states that “He who sees cannot possess the
visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it”.[15]
Those who possess the numinous cannot see it because they are, at that second,
part of it. They are experiencing the unitive.
This is exactly what is occurring
as man and deity undergo the rite of passage. But there is once crucial
difference. Whereas man embodies the unitive and experiences subjectively what
it feels like to be the deity, the deity itself is re-embodied.
While man is transcendent and immanent undergoing a change of consciousness,
the corresponding deity is also unitive yet because of their inherent divinity
being renewed through the ritual. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep identified
three stages to the rite of passage. First, the initiate is separated from his
or her group. This separation is also one in which they abandon their previous
social niche and head into the unknown. This unknown is a state of liminality.
Here the initiate is betwixt and between or without any social status at all.
It is during rites of liminality that the initiations actually occur. The rite
then culminates with the neophyte being reintegrated into society. They return
a new person with a new social role and identity.
The deity also experiences a rite
of passage as the initiate undergoes a change of consciousness. During the ROP ,
the deity is sent into a liminal state and is also betwixt and between.
However, this liminality is unitive or at-one-ment. The deity cannot transcend
or enlighten because they are already transcended; they are already
enlightened. There is nothing for the deity to become for the deity has already
become. The ROP is a renewal of the
numinous. In it, the deity is ‘made anew’ or ‘re-embodied.
Furthermore, a deity is both a
determinate and self-determining. As well as being able to decide their own
course of action or fate, the deity is also a fixed or distinct symbol. For
example, the goddess Demeter is a mother to Perseophone, daughter of Cronos
& Rhea, and part of the triple goddess manifestation. She is spatially
identified with Greece ROP also acts as a renewing
agent for the harvest and agriculture. Moreover, as his state of consciousness
changes, man renews not only the transcendent qualities of the goddess but his
own immanent determinate symbols.
Discussing non-human characteristics
has many more implications than just anthropomorphism. As Latour has remarked,
“Non-humans have not been emerging for aeons just to serve as so many props to
show the mastery, intelligence, and design capacities of humans or their divine
creations. They have their own intelligence, their own cunning, their own
design, and plenty of transcendence to go on, that is, to reproduce”.[16]
Although many nonhumans do have human-like qualities or tendencies, they are
autonomous entities that have their own trajectory and hold their own agency.
Attributing only anthropomorphism to deity production is like trying to play a
three-note guitar chord with only two strings. Although there is a familiarity
with the sound, something is missing. This something in terms of nonhumans is
evolutionary and experiential.
Truth be told, nonhumans aren’t so
much ineffable or infallible but incommensurable. Much like biological
organisms, there is an evolution of the supernatural. Deities that are
“fittest” or created with a favorable evolutionary trait tend to be more
successful over time. These genetic variances may mutate and shift as in the
case of the Holy Tree……
TO BE CONTINUED
[1] Bastaire & Bastaire
2004
[2] George E. Marcus and
Michael M.J. Fischer, ed. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental
Moment In The Humans Sciences. 2nd edition. University
of Chicago Chicago
[4] Ibid pp 578
[5] Spretnak 2011
[6] Plotinus reference
[7] Theobalde de Highelande
reference
[8] Scotus Erigena 1838. 594c.
[9] Ibid 596c.
[10] Carl Jung, Psychology
and Alchemy. Trans. by R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, vol. 12. Pantheon
Books. New York
[11] Merleau-Ponty 1968. pp
113
[12] Schopenhaur, Die welt
als Wille und Vorstellung, II 21; Samtliche Werke, Vol. 2 pp 152-153
[13] K. Barad, Meeting the
Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
Durham , NC
[14] Walter T. Stace,
“Subjectivity, Objectivity and the Self”, Religion For A New Generation 2nd
edition. Ed. Jacob Needleman, A.K. Bierman, and James A. Gould. Macmillan
Publishing Co. New York
[15] Merleau-Ponty, The
Visible and the Invisible. A. Lingin Trans. Evanston. Northwestern
University Press. Pp134. 1968.
[16] Bruno Latour, “Will
Nonhumans be saved? An Argument in Ecotheology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute. (N.S.) 15. pp 459-475. 2009.
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