Discussing non-humans 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 design, and plenty of transcendence to go on, that is, to reproduce” (Latour, Bruno. Will Non-Humans Be Saved?2009). Although many non-humans 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 seems missing. This something in terms of non-humans is evolutionary and experiential.
Truth be told, non-humans aren't so much ineffable or
infallible as incommensurable. Much like biological organisms, there is an
evolution of the supernatural. Deities that are fittest or created
with a favorable evolutionary trait tends to be more successful over time.
These genetic variances may mutate and shift as in the case of the Holy Tree.
According to what is known as the “Golden Legend”, the true cross came from
three seeds from the ‘tree of mercy’ in the Garden of Eden. These three seeds
were placed in the mouth of Adam’s corpse by Seth. After many centuries, wood
from the tree was used to build a bridge that was used by the Queen of Sheba on
her travels to meet King Solomon. When she walked across the bridge, Sheba was
struck with a portent and began to worship. After reaching Solomon, she told
the king about her omen of the holy-wood that would eventually lead to a new
covenant between God and his people. This terrified the king and he had the
timber buried. However, fourteen generations later, it would be wood from this
bridge that is fashioned to produce Christ’s cross.
The narrative shows how non-humans have an evolutionary
trajectory. The tree (object) went from being a seed, to a tree, bridge,
crucifixion cross, and holy relic. But its symbolization, or what it means
epistemologically, also evolved as centuries passed. This non-human’s meaning
changed as it was imbued with the numinous. In fact, the severity of its
numinous qualities ebbed and flowed through time. It was certainly a sacred
object when it was in seed form and placed in Adam’s mouth. However, it lost
some of its sacred power when Solomon buried it underground. Not till it was
fashioned into Christ’s cross did the object reach its evolutionary potential.
As a religious determinate, the true cross underwent an epistemic trajectory
wherein its power as a religious symbol changed.
Self-determining deities also show evolutionary prowess as they
move through time and space. However, there is an incommensurable aspect to the
trajectory that keeps us from making oblique comparisons of sacred narratives.
Because of its experiential nature, interactions with deities are necessarily
incommensurable and must be examined as autonomous but non-comparable events.
Its like comparing an entheogenic psilocybin experience with the visitation at Fatima by
the Virgin Mary. Both are numinous events but they cannot be compared in any
way. The experience of psilocybin-its affective qualities and pure unmitigated
surrealism cannot be compared to any other numinous experience in any
way because every experience of the sacred is new. Every
numinous event is different in every way from other religious events due to the subjective
experience in a sacred event. After all, we’re not comparing the experience
of going to a baseball game or a movie. An experience of the deity is something
extra-ordinary. It can be wholly beautiful or awful and terrifying. But the
interaction will be unique and the experience new. And these are the qualities
that are renewed or re-embodied through
religious ritual. Although the experiences are incommensurable, they can be
renewed subjectively to foster a change of state.
In the work of trajectories, the re-presentation of gods are
a form of ritual economy. The rite of passage involves Man and the Deity to be
successful. As Chris Knight and Camilla Power have remarked, “The gods do not
just appear and then replicate themselves autonomously through being
‘attention-grabbing’. Rather, the immortals need organized communal help”
(Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute. 4(11) March 1988. pp 129-132.
Comment). Through the rite of passage sequence, the Deity and Man exhibit a
ritual exchange of goods and services. But it is Man that performs the
high-cost activities of conjuration. It is Man that does the dancing, and
chanting, and trance exploration. They must in order to be embodied. And every
occultist knows this.
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 the 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 metaphysics of
presence that function as an ontological foundation. This gift of presence is
consciousness. And it is this presence, this re-presentation, which 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 provide 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 all 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 affect the deity
equally as much as the
neophyte.
It’s
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,
by 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 bring 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 is 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 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 one 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 and
the Telesterion; She is temporally identified with the Thesmophoria and the
festival of Chthonia. But Demeter is also a mystery. She is
the goddess of the harvest and responsible for the frigid winter months. When
she is renewed or re-embodied through a rite of passage, the harvest is also
renewed. Her determinate qualities are inherent and a part of her, and they too
become re-embodied through the ritual. In this way, man’s transformation that
occurs as part of the 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.
[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 Press.
1999. Chicago.
[3] Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God:
Creative Mythology. Penguin Arcana. 1968. New York.
[4] Ibid pp 578
[5] Spretnak 2011
[10] Carl
Jung, Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. by R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen
Series XX, vol. 12. Pantheon Books. New York, 1968.
[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. Duke University
Press. 2007.
[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. 1977.
[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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