Notes on alchemy

Mercury was, for them, the seminal essence of a god who (pro-)creates the universe sexually; indeed the origin myth of mercury tells us that quicksilver first arose when Siva spilled his seed at the end of a long bout of lovemaking with his consort, the goddess Parvati. This seed once spilled, became polluted through its contact with the earth. The alchemist’s craft therefore consists of returning mercury, through a series of chemical reactions of incredible complexity, to its original pristine state. Once he has perfected it in the laboratory, the alchemist may then ingest this mercury, which then transforms him into an immortal human, a “second Siva”.

-David Gordon White, “The Ocean of Mercury: An Eleventh-Century Alchemical Text” in Religions of India in Practice

The Church as Machine

It has been two and a half years since I posted the following essay, but I still think it makes some good points. While I have expanded quite a bit on what I think the answer is, I think I conceive of the problem in similar terms: a mechanistic and technocratic drive in man that infiltrates even religious thinking itself.

Originally posted here

Recently, I finished reading Pierre Hadot’s newest book, The Veil of Isis, which is a thought-provoking reflection on the concept of Nature from Heraclitus to the present. More specifically, Hadot uses the fragment of Heraclitus, “nature likes to hide itself”, to trace how man has approached the world around him from ancient Greece to the present day. As a paradigm, he uses the two mythological figures of Prometheus and Orpheus to analyze how poets, philosophers, and scientists have either viewed nature as a mystery to be revered or a specimen to be dissected. The book thus centers on the dichotomy that emerges between veiling and unveiling, personified in pagan iconography of the veil of the goddess Isis/Artemis/Diana.

New to the blogroll

From The Lonely Goth’s Guide to Independent Catholicism

Found this essay, on fairies in early modern Scotland, from of all people, David B. Hart, and from all places, First Things. Seriously, I like what they are smoking over there, because this essay is completely jaw-dropping. Maybe the world is finally coming around after all.

Secondly, a comment by the blogger himself, on the book, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism:

The author makes an ugly and sharp high magic/low magic distinction (also going back to his Neoplatonic sources – the old distinction between theurgy in which magic is transformational and sacramental and witchcraft in which magic is directed towards instrumental goals). I think this betrays serious class bias, since only the most elite have the luxury to divorce their practice of magic entirely from practical concerns in order to realize this absolute distinction. It also amounts to a kind of slick polemic – my magic, the magic of the right and authorized group of people, is spiritual and good, but everyone else’s magic is mere technical trickery and a manifestation of technological will-to-power rather than spiritual Gelassenheit. (He didn’t claim to have read Heidegger or directly reference him, but the basic Heideggerian opposition between techne and Gelassenheit and critique of modern technological society seems operative in much of his work). In the end, it’s not necessarily that I thought anything the author came up with was wrong or dreadfully uninsightful. It’s just that the implicit spirituality came across as tedious, over-codified, and ideologically-overdetermined – pretty much exactly how I feel reading medieval scholastic commentaries on Indian philosophy like the Tattvasamgraha.

This is something that I have also perceived as a problem in the Neoplatonic system: the completely hierarchical, ordered descent of all things from the One, and the stark distinction between theurgical or sacramental acts and their dark, “superstitious” counterparts. Basically, if we like you and you are from a civilization we consider “civilized” (i.e. you’re white), you practice theurgy, or at the very least, you have a “real religion”. If we don’t like you, and you are black or brown, what you practice is demonic and dangerous. Athena and Zeus, good. Yemanja and Erzulie, bad. Get how this works?

Similarly, if a priest prays some weird prayer in Latin, baptizes bells, or excommunicates locusts, that is God-given, real religion. If a curandero sweeps you with rue or a Creole treater whispers a French prayer over you, that is superstition. No wonder people think religion is such bullsh*t. The categories that we often consider obvious these days are really very arbitrary.

Interesting quote about God

What is it that motivates today’s Christians? It really is not God… It is rather their egos that motivate them, their social diversity, their worship, their relationship to Revelation, and the restoration of the unity of the Church. All of these are indeed important aspects, but they will not become stale only so long as the salt of the passionate relationship with God preserves its freshness.

-Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Why we need Nicholas of Cusa”

I agree with this statement, as I agree with much of von Balthasar when he speaks of the thought of others. I think there is unnatural, enclosed subtext in much of Christian discourse that is really unsure of how much it can encompass the totality of human experience. And this has to do with an understanding of God, fundamentally. For if God is only conceived of as a function of my own ideological and political necessity (either as the ens causa sui upholding a particular social order, or a “fire in the bosom” affirming my own presuppositions regarding my personal experience, or what have you), we are not really thinking about God, but of a particular axiom needed to uphold our own superstructure of choice. That is a problem of both the left and the right, and it crosses confessional lines.

On superficiality

If you can’t be in the age you love, love the one you’re in

One of my favorite Nietzsche aphorisms is one I have cited many times before in my essays, and it is the following:

Oh, those Greeks! They knew about living: for this, it is necessary to stop courageously at the surface, at the drapery, at the skin, to worship appearances, to believe in forms, sounds, and words, and the entire Olympus of appearances! Those Greeks were superficial- out of profundity!

Window – Roof – House – Soul

Michael Carroll in his book, Veiled Threats, tells of the following:

Gian Matteo Gilberti, bishop of Verona… instructed his priests to root out superstition, and singled out in particular “the practice of uncovering the roof so that the soul [of the dead] can get out, something that suggests the soul could be held back by a roof.” In fact, Italians have long believed that the human soul has a physical substance and so can be blocked by physical barriers like a roof. This is why those present at a death leave an exit for the soul of the dead person by removing a slat from the roof or opening a window. The fact that diocesan synods throughout Italy continued to condemn these practices into the modern era… is an indication of just how rooted and widespread this view was.

“A quaint superstition”, you might think. Mircea Eliade, however, further elaborates:

… the soul of the dead person departs though the chimney or the roof and especially through the part of the roof that lies above the “sacred area”. In cases of prolonged death agony, one or more boards are removed from the roof, or the roof is even broken. The meaning of the custom is patent: the soul will more easily quit the body if the other image of the body-cosmos, the house, is broken open above. Obviously all these experiences are inaccessible to nonreligious man, not only because, for him, death has become desacralized, but also because he no longer lives in a cosmos in the proper sense of the word and is no longer aware that having a body and taking up residence in a house are equivalent to assuming an existential situation in the cosmos.

-The Sacred and the Profane

If we are to give any creedence to Eliade, institutional spiritual institutions are not always the best apparatus in preserving the ancient religious ethos. It is probably not to be doubted that such an Italian practice originated with paganism, but the reasoning behind it (again, if we give Eliade creedence) transcends even the tired pagan/Christian divide.

For Eliade, reality only has meaning insofar as it conforms to the symbols of the divine. Once the language of these symbols breaks down, even the spiritual gatekeepers begin to conceive of the universe in increasingly desacralized terms. That is perhaps behind the sectoralized and atomized character of religion today, “orthodox” or not. In a place where even basic religious paradigms are separated from everyday life, any sense of continuity with the past becomes boderline farcical. Quomodo sedet sola civitas…

More on the microcosm

Assuredly, man is a small world in such a way that he is also a part of the large world. Now, a whole shines forth in all its parts, since a part is a part of a whole. Just as the whole man shines forth in the hand, which is proportioned to the whole, but, nevertheless, the whole perfection of man shines forth in a more perfect manner in the head: so the universe shines forth in each of its parts, for all things have their respective relation and proportion to the universe, but, nevertheless, the universe shines forth more greatly in that part which is called man than in any other part. Therefore, because the perfection of the totality of the universe shines forth more greatly in and through man, man is a perfect, but small, world and is part of the large world. Hence, a man has particularly, specially, and distinctly the things which the universe has universally. And because there can be only one universe but there can be a plurality of particular and distinct things, many particular and distinct men bear an image of, and a specific resemblance to, the one perfect universe. Thus, the stable oneness of the universe is unfolded quite perfectly in such a variegated plurality of small transient worlds that succeed one another.

-Nicholas of Cusa, De Ludo Globi

The story of the decline of many things

Thus a Muslim holy man has said: “in the beginning Sufism was a reality without a name, today it is a name without reality.”

-Jean Borella, The Secret of the Christian Way

Another look at Lenin

Some quotes I found on Farasha Euker’s blog:

The men­tion of Freud’s hypoth­e­sis is designed to give the pam­phlet a sci­en­tific veneer, but it is so much bungling by an ama­teur. Freud’s the­ory has now become a fad. I mis­trust sex the­o­ries expounded in arti­cles, trea­tises, pam­phlets, etc. — in short, the the­o­ries dealt with in that spe­cific lit­er­a­ture which sprouts so lux­u­ri­antly on the dung heap of bour­geois soci­ety. I mis­trust those who are always absorbed in the sex prob­lems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed in the con­tem­pla­tion of his navel. It seems to me that this super­abun­dance of sex the­o­ries, which for the most part are mere hypothe­ses, and often quite arbi­trary ones, stems from a per­sonal need. It springs from the desire to jus­tify one’s own abnor­mal or exces­sive sex life before bour­geois moral­ity and to plead for tol­er­ance towards one­self. This veiled respect for bour­geois moral­ity is as repug­nant to me as root­ing about in all that bears on sex. No mat­ter how rebel­lious and rev­o­lu­tion­ary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analy­sis thor­oughly bour­geois. (Clara Zetkin, Rem­i­nis­cences of Lenin, p. 101)

You must be aware of the famous the­ory that in com­mu­nist soci­ety the sat­is­fac­tion of sex­ual desire, of love, will be as sim­ple and unim­por­tant as drink­ing a glass of water. The glass of water the­ory has made our young peo­ple mad, quite mad…I think this glass of water the­ory is com­pletely un-Marxist, and more­over, anti-social. In sex­ual life there is not only sim­ple nature to be con­sid­ered, but also cul­tural char­ac­ter­is­tics, whether they are of a high or low order…Of course, thirst must be sat­is­fied. But will the nor­mal man in nor­mal cir­cum­stances lie down in the gut­ter and drink out of a pud­dle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? But the social aspect is the most impor­tant of all. Drink­ing water is of course an indi­vid­ual affair. But in love two lives are con­cerned, and a third, a new life, arises. It is that which gives it its social inter­est, which gives rise to a duty towards the com­mu­nity. (Clara Zetkin, Rem­i­nis­cences of Lenin, p. 49)

Long time readers will know of my youthful career as a Trostskyist provocateur, and as I wrote three years ago now, I think Marxist thinking has ultimately helped me as a mature adult to be able to think of and analyze reality in terms of deep causes rather than superficial trends based on sloganeering. Even still, I am fond of the Marxist hermeneutic tool of discussing the “laws of motion” of how an idea, object, or person moves through space and time. It makes you “think on your feet” rather than stay in one place and “reify” an object as if it were already dead weight.

But Marxism ultimately proved disappointing because the real old authors, or rather the ones that didn’t slaughter too many people (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mandel, etc.) were too “old school” when it came to culture. They believed too much in reason and the power of culture to transform the human psyche. Indeed, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would teach his proletarian revolutionary workers Latin because he knew that it would teach them how to think. This is a far cry from what the “New Left” degenerated into: a bunch of loud-mouth, uncouth people obsessed with their bodily functions and personal “self-expression”.

Take the above quotes for example. Here is Lenin, the only Marxist who brought about a real, bonafide dictatorship of the proletariat according to Marxist orthodoxy, condemning Freud for being too obsessed with sex. Here is the ultimate revolutionary discussing sex in the context of “duty towards the community”. Would that the Christopher Wests’ and Karol Wojtylas’ of the world follow this atheist’s example in not trying to “sexualize reality“, making it the prism through which we see the mystery of Creation!

Alas, such common sense is not so common anymore, especially amongst the would-be Lenin’s of today. As I said three years ago, I admire my time as a Marxist not for how revolutionary it taught me to be, but rather how traditional. Vyperod!

On religion and power

As many know, I have a great affinity for the scholarship of the French philosopher, Pierre Hadot. The focus of his academic career is to return philosophy to its ancient function of being a “way of life” and not merely a series of convoluted doctrines that express what a particular person thinks about reality. I have not yet obtained Hadot’s latest book, The Present Alone is Our Happiness, but some digging on-line resulted in my finding a quote from this book:

I do not think that the fundamental desires of humans can change. The ruling or rich class seeks wealth, power, and honors, in antiquity just as in our day. All the misfortune of our actual civilization is in effect the exasperation of the desire for profit, in all the classes of society, for that matter, but especially the ruling class. Common morals can have simpler desires: work, happiness at home, health. The invocations of the gods in antiquity were the same ones that are now made to the Virgin Mary. One asked the same things to soothsayers as we ask of our horoscopes. It is not a question of the epoch. But when Epicurus distinguished natural and necessary desires, natural desires that are not necessary, and desires that are neither natural nor necessary, he did not want to enumerate all legitimate desires and explain how they could be satisfied; he wanted to define a style of life, taking conclusions from his intuition, according to which the pleasure corresponds to the suppression of a suffering caused by the desire. There is an analogy with Buddhism, very much in fashion these days. To be happy one must thus maximally diminish the causes of suffering, that is, the desires. In this manner he wanted to heal the suffering of humans. He thus recommended renouncing desires that are very difficult to satisfy in order to attempt to be content with desires that can more easily be satisfied – that is, finally and simply, the desire to eat, to drink, and to clothe oneself. Under an apparently down-to-earth aspect, there is something extraordinary in Epicureanism: the recognition of the fact that there is only one true pleasure, the pleasure of existing, and that to experience it one merely has to satisfy the desires that are natural and necessary for the existence of the body. The Epicurean experience is extremely instructive; it invites us, like Stoicism, to a total reversal of values.