Sacred Magic and the Post-Modern Dilemma

[China Cat Sunflower]

“But it so happens that in human consciousness one separates the inseparable--in forgetting the unity. One takes a branch of the tree and cultivates it as if it exists without the trunk. The branch can have a long life, but it degenerates. It is thus that in forgetting gnosis and mysticism, magic has been taken separately which, being a branch separated from its trunk, ceased to be sacred magic and became arbitrary or personal magic. This latter mechanized to a certain degree and became what one understands as “ceremonial magic”, which flourished from the time of the Renaissance until the seventeenth century. It was par excellence the magic of the humanists, I.e. it was no longer divine magic, but human magic. It no longer served God, but man. It’s ideal became the power of man over visible and invisible Nature. Later, invisible Nature was also forgotten. Visible Nature was concentrated upon alone, with the aim of subjugating it to the human will. It is in this way that technological and industrial science originated. It is the continuation of the ceremonial magic of the humanists, stripped of its occult element, just as the former is the continuation of sacred magic, but deprived of its gnostic and mystical element.

…

Just as contemporary technological science is the direct continuation of ceremonial magic, contemporary profane art is merely a continuation of gnosis and magic which have lost sight of mysticism and become separated from it. Because art seeks to reveal and applies itself to do this in a magical manner.

The ancient mysteries were only sacred art--being in the background conscious of mysticism and gnosis. But after forgetting this background or, so to say, after this background receded too far into the background, there remained a gnosis (or a “revelationism”) deprived at root of mystical discipline and experience. In this way “creative art” originated, and the mysteries became theatre, revelationary mantras became verses, hymns became songs, and revelationary “pantomimic” movements became dances, whilst cosmic myths gave way to belles lettres.

Art, being separated from the living organism of the Tetragrammaton, is necessarily removed from gnosis as well as sacred magic--from which it springs, and to which it owes its substance and the sap of its life. The pure revelation of gnosis has become more and more a game of the imagination and the power of magic has degenerated more and more into aesthetics.

The religious life, as everyone knows, is not exempt from decadence--when it ceases to be founded in mysticism, illumined by gnosis, and actuated by sacred magic. It grows cold without the fire of mysticism, it clouds over without the light of gnosis and becomes impotent without the power of sacred magic. There remains then only theological legalism supported by moral legalism… This is the twilight which precedes its night, its death.

…


Love, hope and faith are at one and the same time the essence of mysticism, gnosis, and sacred magic. FAITH is the source of magic power and all the miracles spoken of in the Gospels are attributable to it. The revelation--all the revelations of gnosis have only one aim: to give, to maintain and increase HOPE. …For all revelation which does not give hope is useless and superfluous. Mysticism is fire without reflection; it is union with the divine in LOVE. It is the primary source of all life, including religious, artistic and intellectual life. Without it everything becomes pure and simple technique. Religion becomes a body of techniques of which the scribes and Pharisees are the engineers; it becomes legalistic. Art becomes a body of techniques--be they traditional or innovative--a field of imitation or experiences. Lastly, science becomes a body of techniques of power over Nature.”

From Meditations on the Tarot--a Journey into Christian Hermeticism

[bgruagach]

***Moderator warning***

Very interesting -- but is the post nothing more than quoted material?

We're much more interested in what our members have to say than reading quoted material. Please review our forum's Code of Conduct particularly item #5 - Copyrighted Material. When we allow posts to consist of merely large sections of quoted material we run the risk of violating copyright laws.

What are your thoughts on the material quoted? Do you agree or disagree? What are your own thoughts on the topics raised?

Ben Gruagach
moderator, Alternative section of Comparative-Religion.com

[China Cat Sunflower]

Sorry mang! I had intended to post my thoughts in a separate post, but my wife got home from work, and then it was dinner and bath time for the kids, and I spent a bunch of time reading the Catholic Encyclopedia so I can get back to Q on my other thread. The skinny is I didn't get to it. Now, I just got home from work, and I'm intending to start thinking about what I want to post. So, I beg your indulgence for a couple of hours.

Chris

[bgruagach]

No problem -- I just wanted to make sure that we didn't end up with the site shut down due to a misunderstanding of copyright issues (which unfortunately are a hot topic on the internet in general with rather draconian laws in place all over the world now.)

I'd encourage people who wish to post longer quote-based messages to consider composing them offline in a text editor first and then copy-and-paste them into a post on the messageboard when they're actually ready for public consumption. That way you can take your time and avoid posting half a message when the whole is much more interesting!

[China Cat Sunflower]

Right. Well, I think this quote demonstrates the hermetic solution to the post-modern dilemma. And I'll be right back after this commercial break to tell you why.

Chris

[China Cat Sunflower]

Behind the baroqueness of images lies the eminence gris of politics.

This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange--God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum--not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference of circumference.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Here is the problem of post-modernity: that signs and symbols, mythology and allegory, can no longer be exchanged for the Real. That they are self-referential copies of copies looped together in “an uninterrupted circuit without reference of circumference.” In the above quote Baudrillard is referring to the debate over whether or not icons like those venerated in the Eastern Orthodox were essentially idolatrous since they had the effect of substituting a sign, an icon, for God. Post-modern theory says that, at the core, the foundation of all apparent reality is really this matrix of self-referential signs.

So, if we’re living in this matrix world where our personal and collective mythologies, our archetypes, icons, symbols, our sense of ceremony and ritual, our arcane roots is based on a tangled and ever fading tape loop of self-referential echoes, how do we paddle back upstream?

In the quote that was my OP, the author makes the interesting point that technology is the product of the ultimate humanistic employment of ceremonial magic. Ceremonial magic, defined by the author as sacred magic deprived of gnosis (direct revelation) and mysticism (contemplative revelation), is one step in the evolutionary degredation of sacred magic into self-referential simulacra, ultimately resulting in the technological revolutions where it became merely a means to exert the human will over “visible nature.” Similarly, states the author, profane art is sacred magic and gnosis without mysticism.

The ancient mysteries were only sacred art--being in the background conscious of mysticism and gnosis. But after forgetting this background or, so to say, after this background receded too far into the background, there remained a gnosis (or a “revelationism”) deprived at root of mystical discipline and experience. In this way “creative art” originated, and the mysteries became theatre, revelationary mantras became verses, hymns became songs, and revelationary “pantomimic” movements became dances, whilst cosmic myths gave way to belles lettres.

So here is tie-in with post-modernism because the hermeticist is saying the same thing as Boudrillard about the essential nature of the matrix. Boudrillard describes the state of the postmodern philosophical landscape by saying that it’s like a huge 1:1 scale map which is laid out on top of the territory it represents. But over the course of millennia the map slowly disintegrates and rots away so that only fragments of it remain here and there in the deserts of the surreal. Religion and the arts, history, philosophy, even science, are the faded vestiges of gnosis, magic, and mysticism.

Enough for now.

Chris

[17th Angel]

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

Sorry mang! I had intended to post my thoughts in a separate post, but my wife got home from work, and then it was dinner and bath time for the kids, and I spent a bunch of time reading the Catholic Encyclopedia so I can get back to Q on my other thread. The skinny is I didn't get to it. Now, I just got home from work, and I'm intending to start thinking about what I want to post. So, I beg your indulgence for a couple of hours.

Chris

lol, gotcha

[flowperson]

Chris:

After digesting what you have posted here, I would tend to agree with you that human perceptions of the realities that they deal with in the world are some sort of projections that tend to wither away with time, leaving only symbolic clues as to what the "original" visions of the "visionaries" might have been. For some time now I've been trying to conceptualize a holographic-based paradigm for this phenomenon, and I'm still quite a distance away from grasping it, but your descriptions here go a good distance in describing the process side of it all over time. Marietta has also touched upon it all in some of her posts, and has incorporated concepts of harmonic structural aspects that I have long held to be an obvious aspect of what we're all after here.

That is, what you describe details the philosophical underpinnings of the physical/spiritual systems that present our realities to us over the passages of time. And I'm sure that our perceptions are all different for most people because our genetic make-up and thinking modes differ so much in their nature. Human educational modes and methods have attempted to "standardize" all of this over time, but that is still an imperfect set of attempts. That is... Einstein, Newton, Heisenbeg, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, Galileo, Jesus, DaVinci, Beethoven, Handel, Marley, Lennon. Zappa all perceived the world/Universe differently and passed on their versions of their observances to us in their work. But that doesen't make any of them more "right" than others. They were just more "sensitive" to the truths of the unseen structure and were enabled to pass on some of the aspects of what they sensed to us. All we know is that they were all "unique" and "true" in their own respects and in their "windows" of time. The trick is to tie them together into some sort of system matrix phenomenon that makes scientific sense. Up until now, only artistic works of science fiction and fantasy have seemed to do this in a cultural sense, and some of it all even eventually comes "to be" in a cultual sense.

Speaking of time, if I can ever grab more chunks of it out of my hairy work schedule, then maybe I can make some more progress on this. Thanks for your work and thoughts.

flow....

[China Cat Sunflower]

Hey Flow, thanks for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate it! This is hard stuff to write about. I had a stream of consciousness going when I was transcribing the OP quote, but then I lost it and was just drawing a blank. What I wound up writing was quite different from what I was originally planning, I think.

One piece of background info that I didn't mention, but one might wonder given the title "Meditations on the Tarot", is that the author is referring to the Empress card. The Empress is the path that forms the base of the uppermost "Supernal Triad" on the kabbalistic Tree of Life. It connects the Chokmah and Binah. So in one sense you could see it as the path of communication between the Great Father and the Dark Mother. Anyway, I don't want to bore you...

I want to revisit the analogy of the huge fading map for just second. The map itself is a an accurate symbolic representation of the territory which it is literally laid out upon, and which it perfectly, and entirely covers. Now all that's left are a few scattered scraps of the map here and there. What's important isn't the map, but that there was a real territory underneath when the map was new, and the territory that exists now, after the map has decayed away to almost nothing, is the same territory. We hold those scraps of the old map as the most sacred of relics, but we can't deduce from them what the pristine territory would have looked like.

The map was supposed to preserve the original territory in a way not unlike how my grandma used to protect her good sofa with a sheet all tucked in around the cushions. But it was also meant as a means of preserving and transmitting an accurate representation of the Real. However, as far as I ever knew that sheet was the couch. I never saw what was under it! And now we have these scraps of a map, and scraps of information about times long ago when there were, supposedly, bigger scraps available which have since themselves been mapped in symbols and subsequently lost.

Here's the thing, though: I don't see this as a process that necessarily happens in a linear, or chronological fashion. In fact I'm sure that it doesn't. I don't think that there was once upon a time a pristine vision which has slowly degraded atomically, or started to distort and fade out like analog audio on tape recordings. That's the conservative ideal. I also doubt that a synchretic effort to find, cross reference, and catalog all the map framents into a new symbolic codex will result in anything more than added tape hiss. Universal brotherhood is a worthy ideal, but I don't think comparing broken mythologies is going to make that a reality.

For some time now I've been trying to conceptualize a holographic-based paradigm for this phenomenon, and I'm still quite a distance away from grasping it, but your descriptions here go a good distance in describing the process side of it all over time.

A holographic paradigm which self generates like a fractal? I should read that holographic universe book again. I like the idea Amit Goswami has about self-referential hierarchies. He calls them tangled hierarchies. They're essentially liar's paradoxes that keep bumping you down to a lower level so that you can never reach an entirely objective perspective. You can't get out of the illusion because the way out is like one of those Escher staircases.

I'm starting to ramble.

Chris

[flowperson]

Hi Chris:

Actually your map analogy seems to be in synch with some advanced research done to validate the Big Bang paradigm first elucidated by Arno Penzias and his co-workers at Bell Labs years ago. They were the first to detect the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. There was a Nobel awarded this year to the Physicists that were the prime movers in the KOBE satellite research project which did a lot to verify the earlier work of Penzias et al. The KOBE found and recorded the universe's ambient energy patterns from about 200,000 years after the bang and found the lumping patterns in it that are presumed to have later evolved and resulted in the fragmented universe that we observe today, 15-20 billion years later, which exhibits galaxies, sunsystems, planets, dust, and lots of seemingly empty space. A lot of these cosmological theories have been evolutionally simulated in great detail on supercomputers and seem to hold water as far as reasonable imaging timelines go.

Yes, it seems that there were once discernable, if helter skelter, patterns to observable universe reality at one time, but it seems that this has been steadily and acceleratingly (is this a word ?) degraded and destroyed by the 90% of reality that is thought to be dark matter and energy over the lifetime of the observable universe. There is an underlying paradigm somewhere here that relates to light-based reality. It is likely holographic, multi-dimensional, seems to fleetingly exhibit harmonic attributes in its organizational attributes, but is inherently susceptable to decay and destruction by the unseen dark components of the universe's bulk.

Quite sometime ago, I found that the ancient mantra "that which is above is like unto that which is below" describes the entire picture most reasonably from a systemic viewpoint. We seem to be encased and embedded in systems that are highly reflective of each other's nature from top to bottom. Darkness in matter and energy is all around, accelerates the destruction and decay of light-based realities over time, and surprisingly we see these patterns at both the largest and tiniest scales of light based reality that we may access. The human brain is structured in this way with both neurons and the glial cells which they are embedded within, as are urban areas, human bodies, genomic structures, galaxies, and loaves of bread before they are baked. The entire picture is definitely non-linear on the macro scale, and can be linear on the micro scales depending upon what system attributes are being focussed upon. As observability morphs from level to level, then one tends to experience more of the Escher paradoxes in images that you mention.

Of course conservatives try to snap pictures of reality and save such images forever as proofs of realities since it provides "concreteness" in time and also separates-out something seemingly "real" to identify with. Me...I'd rather be in the orchestra that is playing and improvising the music that carries the light into the future of changes. I like to imagine G-d as the conductor of the orchestra, and Jesus as turning the pages of the score as the song continues on, and as long as we members of the orchestra are able to keep playing our individual songs into the future that everything will have a better chance turning out to be ok for us and our children.

flow....

[wil]

as above so below....the fractal cauliflower section v. the tarot v. tree of life v. astrology v. the pattern of me walking down the street or observing an ant colony...Mike having the nerve to paint a corss section of the brain with a thought reaching out to create a navel laden Adam.

If we look it seems the synchronicity is everywhere or we can percieve it be no where, happenstance.

I love stream of consciousness, we just need to be able to figure out how to build the dam to collect it as it flows down and gets tossed by the rapids so, er rapidly.

The cushion covers are the couch. Traditional chinese medicine derived from looking at nature and applying it to the human condition...5,000 years ago and just now NIH is seeing validity in acupuncture, which is tied to life force and meridians...which we've denied for years.

We were looking in the universe everywhere for evidence of blackholes only to find one one million miles in diameter at the center of where, the milky way, our own galaxy and then we looked...oops the center of every galaxy....

G-d as the orchestra conductor, I still don't buy it, the orchestra is G-d. We are a living organism which is the higher being that is evolving ourcellves. Jesus is that level of understanding, that I and the father are one.

Of course that is my current conceptual continuity and the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.

[flowperson]

Hi Wil:

Thanks for the thoughtful post. When I visualized G-d as the conductor of the orchesrtra, I was by no means implying micromanagement or control of the musicians on the part of the conductor, but rather guidance and reflective leadership of us as the people who are burdened with interpreting and performing the compositions of the Creator of the music, which is in reality continuous and without end.

I had the great and good fortune to be invited to practice and perform with an adult symphony orchestra for two years at the unripened age of seventeen. It was an accomplished group who invited and played with guest soloists of the caliber of Isaac Stern.

Through that experience I learned that if things in a performance are going the right way the conductor cannot dominate the process, but must emotionally and technically lead the musicians in their performance and interpretive rituals. In reality the conductor reflects upon the musicians' efforts and becomes the musicians. The musicians observe and reflect upon the conductor's signals in order to bring order to their combined efforts, and to an extent become self directed through this process of exchanging talents and recognition with the conductor. Both the conductor and the musicians surrender the self to the music so that it makes emotional and cognitive sense to the audience.

It is in this sense that we all must live our lives as observers of our environments so the we can absorb and interpret the signs and wonders that G-d provides us all with almost continuously. In this way we are enabled to stay on the same pathway as we dance to the music into the futures that await us all.

flow....

[wil]

Namaste flow...

talk about flow...I envision the conductor getting pushed by the music, he waves to remind the horns it is time and their blast pushes him back over to bring up the violins...obviously I am not musically anything...but your analogy the second time around lends credence to your point the first time around and is music to my ears...

[flowperson]

Namaste wil:

You must have gotten your opinion and vision of conducting by watching that Bugs Bunny cartoon of him aping Arturo Toscanini (the conductor of the RCA Symphony back in the day) a few times too often when you were a kid. Realistic cartoons will do that to susceptable and receptive young humans which, as a loving father, you know quite well.

Thanks...flow....

[Raksha]

Chris,

Just kicking this and letting you know that I'm going to be spending a lot of time on this topic, reading and playing catch-up before I post anything. Wonderful work...absolutely amazing!

--Linda