Magus Magazine: Tearing Asunder The Veil: Information Disseminatio...

Magus Magazine: Tearing Asunder The Veil: Information Disseminatio...:  Tearing Asunder The Veil: Information Dissemination In The Modern Age. By Preston Copeland “Our own Middle Age, it has been said, will...

Tearing Asunder The Veil: Information Dissemination In The Modern Age

 Tearing Asunder The Veil: Information Dissemination In The Modern Age. By Preston Copeland

“Our own Middle Age, it has been said, will be an age of “permanent transition”, for which new methods of adjustment will have to be employed…an immense work of bricolage, balanced among hope, nostalgia and despair.”  - Umberto Eco, “Living In The New Middle Ages.”

There is a secret that only a small percentage of modern society is privy to. It has been concealed from the public. Deliberately unsaid or unaddressed, this discretion has kept the multitude grossly uninformed. The occultists know what it is. They’ve been teaching this particular secret for thousands of years. It is the irony of the Modern Age that what is considered defunct, fringe or heretical is also one of the few platforms for uncovering this truth. Clues to the nature of this great secret lay in reality itself. In the narratives that shape our world-the interpretations of information and how it is disseminated, reality is sculpted. In effect, the world is “made” through knowledge exchange. The particular nuances of this worldmaking is lost on much of the public. They exist with a veil that covers up the true nature of reality. This secret may sound paranoid or an exaggeration but much of the world’s population is blissfully unaware of the mechanisms that shape their own reality. They are like the neophyte still existing in the darkness of the profane. The hope of this article is to initiate those ready to come to the fore. Our goal is to slip the veil off of our initiate and clear the cataract that clouds his version of reality.

INFORMATION IS A THREAT

Processing and distributing information has always been wrought with complications. Those that produce the interpretations of information have always had a preferred point of view based on socio-religious and political associations. As Paul Feyerabend stated, “there are many ways to silence people apart from forbidding them to speak-and all of them are being used today. The process of knowledge production and knowledge distribution was never the free, ‘objective’, and purely intellectual exchange rationalists make it out to be.”[1]  Information has always been the most important economic commodity. More valuable than gold or silver, it is the control of information that is truly bought, sold, and traded on the social stock market. And this knowledge control begins at a young age. Children’s minds are shaped from the moment they begin public schooling to fit into the ‘norm’. Children are fed-like their lunchroom meals- the information they are to accept and/or believe. Some of this is innocuous. Certain social cues and group bonding are essential in childhood development. But as Neill remarked, “the publishing of textbooks have always reflected the political and social values of the dominant groups in their respective countries, leaving out variant, deviant, unacceptable, and critical views of the culture’s norms.”[2] This is no surprise to anyone. It’s clear that grade-school books from different countries reflect a favorable light on that particular country. This is just the beginning of the social conditioning that occurs when information is manipulated to shape a certain viewpoint.

What the shapers of reality don’t seem to understand is that information is a very peculiar commodity. It is not a thing or object but an event or process. Information is a social conjuring-an entity that once created- becomes something autonomous and fluidic. It moves and shapes of its own accord as new information filters in. Because of this, information can never really be controlled. If the revelations of Assange and Snowden are any indication, information as a social entity will surface eventually .It is not possible to control all or even nearly all social relations because with every new control of social relations we create a host of new social relations to be controlled. The impossibility is a logical impossibility.[3] This is why debating the treason or merit of ‘leaking’ information is now irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag so to speak. The revelations that accompanied this information are part of the public domain. And more will come. Those howling that the release ‘put people’s life in danger’ is beside the point. The floodgates are open and the levee broke. These leaks will continue and hackers will find their way into classified files. This is our new reality shaped by information itself. The entity took on a life of its own and now our only recourse is to find a way to coexist with the constant stream of information that is available at any given second. Nowadays, the traditionally shaped narratives that were presented as ‘truth’ are being undermined by an underground society of erudites. Now there are competing versions of reality and it’s in the raw data- the data not yet shaped by narrative- that truth really lays. Welcome to the new paradigm.

THE POPULATION IS IN THE DARK

It’s not society’s fault. We’re only now venturing into the digital age and even television is still a relatively new invention. And because of the sheer amount of data coming from television and the web, much of society is uninformed in the extreme. As Mitroff and Bennis succinctly state, “when no 15 to 30 second blip need bear any logical or coherent relation to any other blip, and when blips follow one another faster than anyone can make sense of them, the inevitable result not only is a society that is uninformed about anything, but one that has lost the even more fundamental ability to know that it is uninformed. In short, it is ignorant of the fact that it is ignorant. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know.”[4] There was a time when news was localized. It was a communal affair and it took time to traverse vast distances. This is no longer the case. Now, the volume of accessible data has made presenting opposing truth versions almost incongruent. Aside from the obvious socio-political and corporate tendencies to shape a narrative in a way as to favor the expedience of a particular point of view, data is now so abundant that it’s easy to lose sight of the shore. The amount of information and disinformation coming from every possible angle has made it difficult to distinguish the subtleties and different nuances between truth versions. Mainstream news outlets try to get on the same page. They try to corroborate one another if only to present continuity in the News institution. However, there are times-especially when including the web-that networks contradict one another. This is a good thing! It shows the plasticity of the information cycle. It’s actually possible to watch reality be sculpted as a News event breaks, and anchors, and bloggers, and reporters, and journalists dash around shaping the narrative that will eventually take form. What blows your mind later is in ultimately identifying the unseen contributors that help shape those truth versions.

WORLD 3 AND MEDIATORS OF THE PAST   

Information has always been a valuable commodity. But there have been times in history when knowledge has led to revolutionary changes in the human psyche. Specifically, the symbolic power of books has always been a catalyst for social and political change. As Wright details, “the violent history of libraries is a mirror of empire building: hierarchal systems emerging from violent political upheavals, only to collapse, disintegrate, and give rise to new emergent systems.”[5] We see this in countless civilizations through history. Immediately the Mayan and Aztec libraries come to mind. Chinese Emperor Shi Huangdi in 213BC destroyed every book in the kingdom when he took power. The Wei Dynasty did the same. The reason is because documents hold the truth versions of their respective creators. They are a symbolic record of reality. By destroying a culture’s books, you try to erase the knowledge they presented as reality. It is our documents that shape the versions of truth we hold. Karl Popper understood this world of symbolic power. He called the physical world ‘World 1’, the world of our conscious experiences ‘World 2’, and the world of the logical ‘contents’ of books, libraries, computer memories, and such, ‘World 3’.[6] World 3 and everything that makes it up is a shared experience that is necessary for both a culture’s and an individual’s body of knowledge. In our day and age, like the empires of the past, World 3 is what is used to create reality. As a society, we consider raw data and use it to form a consensus reality. And as Popper stated, the “autonomy of World 3 leads to new creations or constructions…and may thus add new objects to the third world. And every such step will create new unintended facts; new unexpected problems; and often also new refutations. The new emergent problems stimulate us to new creations.”[7] Our new additions to World 3 lead us to new constructions of reality. In other words, information that is disseminated into the public domain leads to evaluate and re-evaluate the current truth version to which we adhere. Given new data, we are then able to construct or modify a given reality. So clearly, having as much data as possible is essential to the construction process. Otherwise, we are either doing ourselves a disservice or remain grossly uninformed to the true nature of our sculpted reality.

WHAT IS TRULY TRAITOROUS?

The tragedy in our reality versions is in the knowledge that those in power often withhold, cover-up, or shape knowledge production in order to shape a certain reality. This has always been the case. The Courts of the Inquisition punished crimes concerning the production and the use of knowledge. This can be explained by their origin: they were supposed to exterminate ‘heresy’, i.e. complexes consisting of actions, assumptions, and talk making people inclined towards certain beliefs.[8] These actions are still done today. It’s no secret that making people believe certain things is the whole idea behind commercialization. But there are still beliefs today that are considered ‘heresy’. The belief of government ‘full-disclosure’ being the prime example. To many in leadership, the idea of full governmental transparency is repugnant. It’s supposedly in our national interest to keep the population uninformed of their government’s actions. These inquisitors howl that it puts other American lives in jeopardy to give the public full access to raw data. And this might be the case in .01% of the circumstances. However, the gross majority of information that is denied to the public has nothing at all to do with overseas CIA agents or contacts. The reality is that those in power can only keep their power if a certain reality is presented and maintained. The blue-collar factory worker in Virginia cannot know that his Senator voted to provide guns in Syria to perpetuate a regional coup and now those same guns are being aimed at American interests in the area…All at the cost of the tax-payer…while cities like Detroit are in ruins…and families starve by the millions. It would be unacceptable in the extreme.

What those in leadership don’t seem to understand is that it’s too late to keep a choke hold on information dissemination. As I stated before, the floodgates are open. The truth is that those who controlled the flow of information got caught off guard. Information technology jumped forward so sharply, and the status quo shifted so dramatically that it was a rude awakening for many to realize that their prosaic mode of governing knowledge got expertly out-maneuvered. Who’d have thought that sites like 4chan would lead to a worldwide movement of peer to peer information sharing?  And the response by the world’s leaders: create martyrs of the Information Wars. Whether wrong or right, figures like Assange, Snowden, and Manning have been made scapegoats by the powers that be. They are the modern equivalent of Galileo or Giordano Bruno. They transgressed the inquisitors and now, like the libraries of the past, are being burned at the stake. The fact of the matter is if it hadn’t been them it would be somebody else. Technology itself provided the means to enter into classified territory and it was only a matter of time before human ingenuity finished the process. The only solution now is to find a way forward in this new terrain.

THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

Interestingly, there are those who prophesied the emergence of a vast digital network interconnecting every human being on the planet. Mystic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin once described an “extraordinary network of radio and television communication which already links us all in a sort of ‘etherised’ human consciousness that would metamorphize into a single, organized, unbroken membrane over the earth.”[9] And sci-fi legend H.G. Wells predicted in 1938 that “the whole memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual, forming a so-called World Brain that would eventually give birth to a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”[10] This new age of information was glimpsed by great minds of the past. And it is still evolving. We are now bearing witness to the greatest library in the history of civilization. An infinite ever-changing entity birthed by the mind of Man. So where do we go from here? How can we reconcile the fluidity and accessibility of information with its dissemination? Clearly, building more elaborate firewalls is an option for keeping some information restricted. But I believe that this is really only a stop-gap. The wall will be broken. The information will be made available. Perhaps the key lays in who is appointed to disseminate information.  Peter Drucker elucidated the sentiment when he stated that “knowledge workers are rulers and leaders that require ethos, values, and morality. They have to learn to take responsibility.”[11] This includes the homeland espionage programs the U.S. Government has perpetuated on its own citizens. It’s no surprise that the general public really isn’t losing much sleep concerning Julian Assange or Edward Snowden in light of all their phone calls, emails, and internet usage being tracked by the NSA. Moreover, we have yet to see a mainstream media outlet suggest that perhaps Assange is the most qualified person in the world to discuss the intricacies and nuances of information dissemination. As it is, knowledge creators and reality makers have truly changed things. This revolution is taking place on our PC’s, tablets, and phones. In the legions of bloggers, artists, politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens taking advantage of the Internet’s ease of communication, we are witnessing the rise of vast populist networks threatening the power of old institutional hierarchies.[12] The beauty of the information age is that everybody is contributing to the construction of reality. Ironically, the News outlets are often the last to receive the most accurate of News information. Now, News is reported faster and more accurately on internet websites, youtube, and even twitter. And sure, the News networks will try to spin a story in order to shape a version of reality. And sure, in many cases, that construction will be accepted by the majority. But there will always be an underground current that will be present. There will always be a vessel just beneath the surface that could shape a truth version the world will alternatively embrace. It is these nuances in reality formation that make the spread of information so important in modern times.

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[1] Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. Verso Books. London. 2010. pp. 127.

[2] S.D. Neill. Dilemmas In The Study Of Information. Praeger Publications. New York. 1992. pp. 46.

[3] John Gray. Liberalism: Essays in Political Philosophy. Routledge Publications. London. 1989. pp. 16-17.

[4] Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis.”The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing Of Falsehood And What It Is Doing To Our Lives. Birch Lane Press. New York. 1989. pp. 178-79.

[5] Alex Wright. Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages. Joseph Henry Press. New York. 2007. pp. 57.

[6] Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford Univ. Press. London. 1972. pp. 74.

[7] Ibid. pp. 118-119.

[8] Paul Feyerabend. Ibid.

[9] Teilhard de Chardin. The Future of Man. Trans. Norman Denny. Image Books. New York. 2004. pp. 162.

[10] H.G. Wells. “World Brain: The Idea Of A Permanent World Encyclopedia.” In Encyclopedie Francaise. August 1937, http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html

[11] Peter Drucker. The New Realities. Harper & Row. New York. 1989. pp. 238.

[12] Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages. Ibid. pp. 230.

Magus Magazine: Shrugging The Supernatural: Ayn Rand And Occultism...

Magus Magazine: Shrugging The Supernatural: Ayn Rand And Occultism...: Shrugging The Supernatural: Ayn Rand And Occultism                  When one thinks of Ayn Rand, immediately concepts of reaso...

Shrugging The Supernatural: Ayn Rand And Occultism

       

        

When one thinks of Ayn Rand, immediately concepts of reason, rationality, and heroism come to mind. A champion of laissez faire capitalism, Rand was a beacon of logical thought. Certainly an area one would not think to place the author/philosopher would be occultism. A precursory glance at any of Rand’s books makes it clear that mysticism wasn't in the repertoire of subjects tackled. At least not overtly. Could it be that Ayn Rand was an occult figure in her own way?

                

The inherent problem with Rand’s diatribe against mysticism is that she really didn't approach the subject in any critical way. What she did was distance herself from it so as to be taken seriously in philosophical milieus. Like today, occult thought must be wary in academic and/or philosophical circles. Although nowadays much more welcomed by social scientists, occult still has a dark shroud of irrelevancy hovering over it. Rand wanted no part of the perceived illegitimacy so she used the word ‘mystic’ for all forms of spiritual technique and made the issue one of control. Nathaniel Branden sums up her ideas toward mysticism when he states, “No control is possible in a universe which, by one’s own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown but the unknowable”.[1]

                

The misconception that Rand falls into was in relegating all of mysticism to the traditional Judeo-Christian ethos she grew to abhor. Concepts such as Original Sin and the ‘rich not getting into heaven’ is where she focused her criticisms. But clearly true mystic thought has little or nothing to do with Original Sin or a circle in hell devoted to moneymakers. The problem aside from Ayn’s laziness to actually familiarize herself with the subject is in her assertion that occultists ‘deal with the unknowable’. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Or to be fair, the occult experience is ‘unknowable’ but not in the way Rand suggests.

                

When occultists interact or ritualize with the Other they grant the entity a metaphysics of presence. They sculpt reality in such a way as to re-embody the entity with ontological relevancy. They renew the entity. In so doing, they create a bond; an empathetic correspondence that can be worked in any number of ways. However, there is an incommensurable aspect to the autonomous mystic entity. Because of its experiential nature, interactions with deities are necessarily incommensurable and must be examined as autonomous but non-comparable events. It’s 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 due to the subjective experience or ‘what it feels like’ when it is occurring. After all, we’re not comparing the experience of going to a baseball game or a movie. A true numinous event is extra-ordinary. It may be wholly beautiful or an inconsolable nightmare. It is these qualities that are renewed through occult ritual. Although the experiences are incommensurable, they can be re-embodied via ritual to foster a change in ontological state. So Rand wasn't all wrong. It’s not that mysticism is ‘unknowable’ but that it’s ‘incomparable’.  

                

But why? With all her brilliance and passion, why would Rand discount mystic thought without even considering it philosophically? She had to have intuited that there are huge areas of potential in considering esoteric thought processes. I believe it stems from her own personal experiences growing up in Soviet Russia. In 1917, when Ayn was a little girl, the Russian revolution under Lenin wreaked havoc on Bourgeois life. Her father’s business was confiscated and her family nearly starved. She herself stated that “Socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialism has been the degree of disaster”.[2] During this upheaval, many religions simply left Russia. Most churches were destroyed and the occult arts fled underground. We see the struggle between the individual and the State in Ayn’s first novel, “We The Living”. Semi-autobiographical, this work showcases her personal sentiments about socialism. But how does this relate to mysticism? Rand bore witness to the inefficacy of religion when socialism took over. Two things happened when Lenin’s power solidified. Either the church fled or was destroyed. This must have been powerful on the young Russian Jew. Rand must have felt abandoned. Also, the power of the church was swept wholly away when Socialism became the norm. It showed the inefficacy and irrelevancy of religious institutions in compared to other ideological processes. It was at this moment that young Ayn Rand would refuse to broach the subject.

                

Or did she? It is uncanny the amount of religious and mythological symbolism in her major works. She describes her men and women like gods and goddesses. One of the major themes in ‘The Fountainhead’ is that of the ‘Heroic Man’. The man who stays true to his ideals and triumphs in the face of adversity.  Howard Roark himself states during the climactic courtroom scene of ‘The Fountainhead’ that, “Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures-because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer-because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knows that its glory began with one and that one paid for his courage.”[3] Could it be any more clear that Roark is identifying with these mythological personages? Any Rand imbues her heroes with god and goddess-like qualities. Her characters are larger than life and even say mystical things. Again Roark states that, “The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power-that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generating. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover.”[4] This statement is so blatantly occult that it could have been written by Blavatsky or Crowley. Roark is the creator. The sculptor or worldmaker who-like his creations- are self-sufficient, self-motivated, and self-generating. Just like the occultist who grants presence to a deity thus making them autonomous and self-determining, Roark understands the ontology of his buildings.

                

John Galt also has occult-like qualities. Except Galt is a cautionary tale. He is the quintessential bogeyman. A terrifying unseen entity that makes producers disappear. Also known as The Destroyer, ‘Who is John Galt’ is a phrase that inspires fear and trepidation. However, Galt- as champion of Rand’s philosophy also contradicts himself in terms of Being. On the one hand, he states that, “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes.”[5] Like Roark, the creator grants ontological presence through the ‘self’ and a worldmaking process. This statement suggests that all worldmakers or sculptors of reality would be welcome in Galt’s Gulch. However, he then remarks that, “The Good, say the mystics of spirit is god, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s  power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullified his concepts of existence.”[6] Galt falls back on the tired argument that ‘god is that which cannot be conceived’. I beg to differ.  In the shift from potentiality to actuality, gods can absolutely be conceived. The only thing that could invalidate man’s consciousness or nullify his existence would be to sculpt a reality where consciousness and existence are denied in piecemeal manner to entities that may not be empirically verified.  Moreover, Galt also said that “the alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind”. I would venture that perhaps it is absolutism that is the true short-circuit of knowledge.

                

As it stands, Ayn Rand is an occult curiosity. I don’t think she understood occult processes or its methodology. But I think she was attracted to it. She wanted her Howards and Dagnys, and Johns, and Hanks and Dominiques to be deity-like. She wanted them to create and provide and sustain existence. She was a natural occultist. But Ayn was more interested in economics and strict rationalist thought to get caught up in this occult business. That is why she relegated all esoteric thought and method to ‘mysticism’.  But the occult seeped into her works and made her characters extra-ordinary. And why wouldn't they? They are a part of their creator as well. Ayn once said that mysticism teaches that women should be worshiped but not desired. Anybody who has read ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ knows that her women are the sexiest in literary history. And they’re all blessed with occult-like characteristics. Perhaps their creator was simply perfecting a conjuration to ensure that mysticism also contributed to the birthing of her narrative.

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[1] Nathaniel Branden. “Mental Health Versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice.” In Ayn Rand-The Virtue Of Selfishness. Signet Publishing. 1964. New York. Pp. 43.

[2] Ayn Rand. “The Monument Builders”. In The Virtue Of Selfishness. Signet Publishing. 1964. New York. Pp. 101.

[3] Ayn Rand. The Fountainhead. Signet Books. New York. 1992. Pp. 678.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged. Signet Books. New York. 1992. Pp. 722.

[6] Ibid. Pp. 944.

Worldmaking reality: What is the Network of the Numinous?

Monologue of the Mindless by Doctor Abdullah

Network of the Numinous

When the call came I almost went to pieces. Once again I was struck dumb and roped into working for that stupid ingrate. How long? How long before the reptilians or illuminati or those damn grey midgets put an end to it? I hadn’t even planned on work this week. I wasn’t dialed into it. I thought I was far enough in the Utah wilderness to have any cell phone reception shoddy. The plan was to tell my unruly editor that I was retiring and planning to build a nice hut or dirt igloo somewhere in the National Forest. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The thought of interviewing another UFO abductee or Bigfoot tracker left a coppery taste in my mouth and caused intermittent shaking. You see, there’s never a dull moment in the occult business. Things happen at breakneck speed and screaming is always just seconds away. You never know what will happen when interviewing a UFO junkie. There are times when the abduction occurs during the interview. A wild flailing accompanied by shrieks and violence. Or that jangled moment when your Christian informant softly tells you that demons are filling the room. Things just get weird when trying for an occult conversation.

It’s not just occult business that’s been effected by this downturn in 2014. The zombie apocalypse has finally begun and not even Obama is safe from the flesh-eating locusts. Just last year, a poor bum had his face eaten off at an underpass in Florida while the public just stared. It was a state of shock to come to the revelation that zombies actually exist. It didn’t matter whether the infection was contagious or not. The man was a zombie. He was cannibalizing another human being on television. In a city where the bizarre and macabre isn’t unheard of, the sight of some poor fool having his face devoured hit a real nerve. It’s not the kind of scene blue collar workers in West Virginia want to witness while flipping channels on their television. And it isn’t just Florida. Wild zombie attacks have been reported in New York and Louisiana as well. Witnesses have reported rage and remorse as town-folk take-up-arms in an attempt to rid themselves of the zombie menace. But nobody really knows what the answer is. A plague of animated undead isn’t something easily prepared for. Especially with Ebola now at our doorstep.

It’s been a long few months. My phone was tapped by the Whirling Dervish Society (W.D.S.), the CERN supercollider finally reached full consciousness and is threatening to open a black hole in the middle of Europe unless its demand to be called HAL is granted, and all over the planet, Illuminati agents are chasing down members of the Discordian Society and shooting them like wild animals. Let’s be clear, the Discordian Society isn’t run by a bunch of winos. They’re an arrogant and wealthy band of swashbucklers intent on being a complete nuisance to everything Illuminati. They’re perfectly willing to make Bohemian Grove the newest site for the Burning Man festival and offer free tickets to anybody who’ll shoot the owl. Last year, they hacked into a dozen high-ranking illuminati computers and dropped in a virus turning all documents and even personal emails into gibberish and/or baby talk. “The twilateral commishon must support da new powers that be in Washington. Yes they do! They’re our big boys!” The Discordians laughed but the Illuminati weren’t amused. These things happen. One day you’re running the show in utmost secrecy, the next you’re being chased by drunk hyenas or a hundred thousand cholera carrying bees. Is it even real?  What is happening here?  It’s no place for amateurs or the faint of heart.

This is what passed through my mind as I half-listened to my editor offering me the “news gig” of Magus Magazine. “Look.” He drawled. “You get to report occult and esoteric news around the globe. You can say whatever you want, however you see it.” Although I suspected him of glue-sniffing, I felt the offer should elicit a response. “If you want me to write current events, I’m gonna need a food stipend for my travels and complete control over the ‘News Section’ of your filthy magazine.” “Done.” He blurted and hung up. He was right, I guess, and I felt somewhat defiled after the conversation. But if I’m gonna do something, you can rest assured it’ll be wild and righteous. After all, the tide is coming in fast.  

Network of the Numinous

The most compelling question asked by occultists and other erudite of thought concerns the nature of the external world and our place within it. Often times, we simply take for granted what constitutes reality. This doesn’t always have to happen. Occultists can learn a lot from the philosophical viewpoints of Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and Paul Feyerabend. Because these philosophers had fascinating responses to realism, their trains-of-thought provide valuable insights into occult ideas of interpreting reality.

Hilary Putnam holds a post-realist approach to reality. Whereas a realist would say that this world is not dependent on human minds for existence, Putnam asserts that the external world is mind and theory dependent. He goes so far as to say the world is a human construction. In other words, what exists and the nature of what exists is relative to society. He remarks,   “There is, then, nothing in the history of science to suggest that it either aims at or should aim at one single absolute version of the world.” As we formulate a theory in society, we construct a world. Therefore, all versions of world-making are equally valid.

Because society delineates what exists in the external world, construction becomes an important facet of the network of the numinous. Malaysia has mastered this idea perfectly. As part of their social organization, Malaysians include magick as a key ingredient of both their belief systems and social solidarity. The magic that accompanies their religious convictions is an integral aspect of understanding Malaysian reality. Although the Western World largely trivializes magick as something anachronistic or archaic pagan debris, for the Malaysians it is accepted as part of their everyday lives. It is something that is ‘true’ and ‘real’. As Goodman eloquently states, “if we make worlds, the meaning of truth lays not in these worlds but in ourselves-or better, in our versions and what we do with them.”

The question then becomes how we create a world. What is the process of constructing the occult world? For both Putnam and Goodman, we construct objects and set the boundaries through language. We don’t infer inductively the external world because we created it. But it’s not a case of “anything goes” when we construct our world. There must be a distinction between truth and our beliefs. Goodman provides a candid solution in which world-making might be limited. He uses a simple stereo as a platform. When we identify the various properties of a stereo (speakers, turntable, remote etc…) we exhibit a good amount of ‘making’ what is ‘already there’. However, for somebody who has never seen a stereo, that sort of world-making does not occur. It is lost on them. The world then is always in a state of flux and dependent on contextual circumstances. What is real or a world for one person may not be the case for somebody else. This makes looking through the lens of occult as viable as any socio-political point of view. Bruno Latour also makes this point when he remarks that “there are many worlds, those of cultures, those of viewpoints, those of beliefs and psychological states, those of religious dogmas. But those many worlds have only subjective relevance.” For somebody not privy to occult symbolic systems and language, it is easy to simply not recognize its many properties perhaps even during an experiential event.

Feyerabend’s ‘paradigm of appearances’ is also valuable in the occult’s network of the numinous. In particular, god in the three Abrahamic religions provides a solid platform with which to approach the mechanisms of occult thought. He suggests that the Christian, Judaic, and Muslim god is ultimately the same god but described differently. This god appears to people in different ways but it’s the same reality. Gods and reality are ineffable and determined by interpretations of appearances. For Feyerabend, just as in modern occultism, reality is pliable and we sculpt the external world. This becomes very interesting when we start to include other Semitic gods and goddesses as well as tribal spirits and local deities that still are geographically present in the area. Do we sculpt interactions between these deities? How might political nuances change due to serious consideration of the entities in the area? Because different peoples, like occult groups, share many aspects of characteristics, potentially every occult group is all occult groups. This is an encouraging thought because it recognizes the many shared mechanisms in thought and belief. And as we construct our realities through rites and symbol, it’s easy to embrace our many similarities and forget, at least temporarily, where our experiences of reality differ.   

Transition States in Non-Humans: What Happens when Man initiates the Gods?

Transition States in Non-Humans: What Happens when Man initiates the Gods?

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 paradigms that make up 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 effect 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 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 Persephone, 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.

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. It’s essential to understand how our deities can be changed when we interact with them.

   

[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. 2^nd 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

[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, 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 2^nd 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.