It seems incredible that what our minds produce can affect us
in such powerful ways but it’s true. Sometimes what ‘was’ or ‘is’ are less
important that ‘what could be’. To a magician, what could be is thought of as in the process. It is an intermediary
step between thought and being. The Stoics called it the lekton or expressible. It
is an incorporeal state lacking presence. Without ontological form, it is
liminal or in-between. Just like the middle period during a rite of passage,
when an initiate enters this state they communicate the expressible. In addition, the exchange that occurs between the initiate
and the deity takes the form of conjuration.
This operation or birthing is always more important than how we describe
the process. Origin is not intended to describe the process by which the
existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the
process of becoming. [1]
During ritual, there is a permanent bond that forms between the
initiate and the deity. Benjamin went so far as to suggest that part of the
creator dies in the ritual process. He states that, “the origin of the great
work has often been considered through the image of birth. This is a
dialectical image; it embraces the process from two sides. The first has to do
with creative conception and concerns the feminine element in genius. The
feminine is exhausted in creation. It gives life to the work and then dies
away. What dies in the master along-side the achieved creation is the part of
him in which the creation was conceived. In its achievement, creation gives
birth anew to the creator. [2]
Although a part of the magician is lost to the entity summoned, in turn the
entity gives something back to the evoker. This something is the gift of
presence. The magician is renewed by having the entity there and present. It is
always the hallmark of a successful occult operation.
Now what do we mean by saying the magician is renewed by
losing a part of himself in the ritual? Only that there is a part of himself
that must be released when summoning the supernatural entity. Artisotle
expressed the idea in his ethos anthropoi
daimon. The usual translation of this phrase is “For man, character is the
demon.” Ethos originally referred to
what is proper in the sense of “dwelling place, habitat.” In addition, daimon means etymologically “to divide,
lacerate.” So daimon was he who
lacerates or divides. We shouldn’t consider this a negative connotation because
only in what divides could the daimon
be thought to destine or thread a fate. So ethos
anthropoi daimon translates into ethos, the dwelling in the ‘self’ or that
which is most proper for him, is what lacerates, divides, assigns, or destines.
In other words, for man to be himself, he must necessarily divide himself.[3] Man must divide and lose a part of himself if
he seeks the presence of an occult entity. But in doing so, he becomes renewed
by having the entity close.
The idea of division isn’t a new concept. Gershom Scholem has
discussed it at great length concerning Jewish prophets in the 13th
century. In his ‘On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead’, he writes of a
cabalistic anthology called the Shushan Sodoth. In this work, prophesy appears
as one’s own doppelganger. The complete secret of prophesy consists in the fact
that the prophet suddenly sees the form of his own self standing before him,
and he forgets his own self and ignores it and that form speaks with him and
tells him the future. As it is necessary
for the prophet to “divide” in order to “divine”, the occultist must also
separate from himself to exact a successful ritualistic interaction. This
separation is also the first state of the rite of passage. When the initiate
divides, he is then ready to enter a liminal time.
The doppelganger is also the difference between actuality and
potentiality or ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’. Potentiality then is the ability
to do something. It could happen. For example, a magician has the ability or
potentiality to perform ritual. But he also has the ability to not-ritualize or
to not pass into actuality. It is these changes from potentiality to actuality
that embody ontological trajectories of the supernatural. To refer again to
Aristotle, the philosopher called it a harmonizing part of nature. He
interpreted actuality (energeia) as
light and potentiality as darkness (skotos).
What is sometimes dark and sometimes light is one in nature.[4]
These stages of light and dark are the perfect metaphor for describing the
liminal. In many societies the liminal initiates considered to be dark,
invisible, like the sun or moon in eclipse or the moon between phases, as the
“dark of the moon.”[5]
Those in the liminal state traverse what is and what could be. Describing the
initiate in terms of light and dark is only a short step from comparing them to
gods or ghosts. It’s essential we understand these various ideas of being when
we attempt to understand critically what is happening during the occult
process.
[1]
Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1 Pt 1 pp226.
[2]
Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 4. Pt 1. pp438. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann
& Maini Suhrkamp 1974-89.
[3]
See Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Potentialities’ for a more detailed account of
Aristotle’s ethos anthropoi daimon.
[4]
Aristotle. 418. B-419 e 1
[5]
Victor Turner. From Ritual to Theatre. PAJ Publishing. New York. 1992.
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