Since my previous journal update I’ve had time not only to reflect more on this idea and project of perfecting the vessel but also a fair bit of very stimulating correspondence with various insightful folk I have the pleasure to be in contact with.
There’s nothing like the sympathetic exploration of other points of view to help you develop, expand, or clarify your own. In this case, I feel might be in a position to find a point of agreement between my own rather anti-ego model of spiritual development and the more ego-focussed models of modern Satanism, Rune Gilders, etc… and also perhaps the more subtle considerations of ego made by Jung and others.
As I have previously illustrated, my spiritual philosophy boils down to a few simple propositions, informed by the old heathen worldview of memory and ørlög:
1) Everything is interconnected, yet each individual entity is unique and divine;
2) Any individual being requires nourishment from the flow of the water of life throughout the worlds (yes folks, that is a metaphor!) if it is to flourish;
3) Isolation and separation cause amnesia, confusion and death;
4) Opening to connectedness is (or can be) terrifying because it forces us to confront our finitude, no matter how good for us it might be or even how good it can feel;
5) Therefore the spiritual task is to develop one’s capacity to sustain connection to what is beyond one – to become a good vessel and conduit for the flow of the waters of life throughout the World Tree.
A corollary of point 5 might be that we need to find our right place in the order of things in order to facilitate good flow of the waters, but this is a new idea to me and I don’t yet know what it means.
Now I generally take a dim view of the ego, that is, the physical and psychological sense of being a separate will or being, a sense which can run the whole gamut from reptile brain reactivity to hyper-cerebral intellectualising. I suppose I have generally regarded the ego as armour, blockage, analogous to the hardened arteries that bad diet and poor exercise cause.
The ego on this view prevents us from being good vessels for the flow of the water of life because it occludes our connection to that flow. Rather than embrace ego magic as a model for growth or transformation, my view seems to imply that the opposite of ego magic – ego destruction – is the door to positive change or evolution.
However in the process of dismantling the ego (which is an ongoing process as the ego is very durable) we risk also destroying the integrity of our vessel, which is after all a finite being. In order to be truly connected to the whole of the Tree we need to retain some specificity, some particularity. In this way the age old philosophical problem of universal and particular is transcended in an almost Hegelian fashion.
A word at this point is called for in relation to the terms Left Hand Path and Right Hand Path. These days in the western world Left Hand Path seems to refer to spiritual practices related to ego development; where as Right Hand Path seem to refer to spiritual practices related to devotion. People like to think of the Left as ‘evil’ and the Right as ‘good’, though such Manichean ideas need have little place in heathenry or magical practice more generally.
This distinction irritates me for two reasons. Firstly, it implies that unless you are a budding ego-maniac you cannot be interested in your own spiritual (or other) growth or development. Clearly a load of rubbish! Secondly, it implies that if your spiritual focus is largely devotional then you are more of a dim-witted follower than an exciting maverick. Again, a load of rubbish.
However there is a deeper reason why the distinction irritates me – that being that these terms, Left and Right Hand Path, do not refer originally to the goal of spiritual practice, but more the journey taken.
The Left Hand Path is the quick but dangerous road to union with God; this is the road that the well-known Sufi Irena Tweedie took under the tutelage of an Indian Sufi master. The Right Hand Path is the slower, but surer, road to union with the divine.
Of course, some Left Hand Path practices involve the use of transgression in order to free the individual from slavery to their received social mores, but if anything this sort of practice is part and parcel of ego destruction – dismantling the individual’s concrete sense of identity and throwing them into a much more vast ocean of possibilities.
Coming back from my digression – how do I find a rapprochement with ego magic? David Tacey makes the point that the ego is an archetype too. Ego has its mythic patterns of manifestation and withdrawal just like any transpersonal being, deity, or indeed the tides of history or the flow of the waters.
If that is the case then a simple linear determination to shatter the ego becomes itself an egotistical project. As I’ve quoted before – “the struggle to free myself of restraints becomes my very shackles” (Meshuggah).
In order to perfect the vessel – to effect a union of universal and particular within our being – we need to have a more organic – and less egotistical – relationship to the ego.
Now my impression of most self-professed ego magicians is that they really don’t grasp this point at all. That isn’t a surprise, since I am suggesting that we need to develop the ego in non-egotistical ways!
Since we cannot do away with our particularity (not if we want to stay alive) we need to find a way to prevent it from occluding our capacity for opening to the flow of waters; but also to find a way to house it in our lives so that it might even enhance our ability to see the forest for the trees, to be good conduits for the flow of waters.
And there’s a lovely seeming contradiction for you – how to invite the ego to serve us in remembering the bigger picture of the World Tree in its full all-encompassing and connecting (and ego humbling) glory?
If anything, Woden is a master of dissolving impossible conundrums. Perhaps he has an answer to this almost alchemical conclusion that my reflections on heathen cosmology and spirituality have led to? Feel free to drop by and make some suggestions, One Eye… and in the meantime the practices outlined in my last post could all provide a good start.
Oh yeah, one final thought, a realisation I had after one of my bands (Sword Toward Self) recently shared the stage with Aleister Crowley-inspired progressive death metal act Aeon of Horus (who incidentally have just released an utterly astounding album).
Crowley on the one hand seemed an inveterate ego-magician; yet on the other hand he seemed obsessed with the fine art of dissolution. I wonder whether his method of keeping the ego groomed for maximum flow was to indulge its excesses – then shift just as dramatically to something new?
Perhaps by playing the ego up to the hilt he absolved it of its power, not unlike a paradoxical injunction in Ericksonian style psychotherapy. If so, then once again it seems we can draw yet another straight line through from Crowley to chaos magic. I have to go back and re-read the Book of Lies perhaps… here are some of Crowley’s own comments about the writing of said marvellous book:
“One of these chapters bothered me. I could not write it. I invoked Dionysus with particular fervour, but still without success. I went off in desperation to `change my luck’, by doing something entirely contrary to my inclinations. In the midst of my disgust, the spirit came over me, and I scribbled the chapter down by the light of a farthing dip.. When I read it over, I was as discontented as before, but I stuck it into the book in a sort of anger at myself as a deliberate act of spite towards my readers”.
I hate to say it… but this sort of thing reminds me of me.
Hermeneutics of the self: the ego is an interpretation made by the mind of its experiences of the self, which fluctuate according to an individual’s, or a community’s, engagement with the world at the time. Sense impressions and thoughts (words and images) constantly shape our understanding of the self and form “rivers” of experience that constitute the phenomenon of the living.
A “hardening” of the self in the form of an “armoured” ego, or a “cultivation” of the self in the form of a “refined” ego – the latter can be used for occult enhancement, as in ceremonial magic – is a choice, perhaps never fully voluntary, that an individual, or a community, makes while always already “swimming” in the river of life. We can continue to draw heathen inspirations from Norse mythology and folklore as we negotiate our ways in the increasing complexity of postmodernity, and in face of the dire challenges that it poses (which include the question of species survival – ours).
A Norse hermeneutics of the self – with Yggdrasil as its central metaphor – is a philosophical project that is definitely worth pursuing, Heimlich. Keep delving deeply into this topic – abyssal depth is paradoxically the ground of the self. Our hands cannot reach it and touch it – even though they are what guide us in our everyday orientation in the world (what Heidegger describes in Being and Time as the oscillation between Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein).
Yggdrasil contains the Greek meaning of metra – cosmic measure is what sustains being. In the historicised awareness that human consciousness is, the spatio-temporal metra of Yggdrasil keeps the dissolution of madness at bay. Pagan polytheology, too – hence your emphasis on human existence (Dasein) as the “vessel” for a higher reality is in fact what grounds the impermanence of life. When a tantric Buddhist looks at Norse cosmology, he or she may preceive Yggdrasil as an European form of mandala. It is the mandala that prevents an adept from bursting asunder with all the tantric energy that he or she has raised, for in its centre is the “house” of being. Yggdrasil symbolises the Norse understanding of the house of being. Heidegger says it is language; I say it is more than language: a language of a certain kind, of specific as well as unnameable power, which we call myth (mythos). And through the creation of art, such as music, Heidegger extols the power of mythopoiesis.
The ancestors of northern Europeans were, in my view, as familiar with the mythic way of thinking (in the sense of reflection on being) as the ancient Greeks. (Today we are all struggling against what Heidegger calls the “onto-theology” of Christian metaphysics.) Yggdrasil was the central, most profound symbol in Norse understanding. The All-Father Odin himself was supposed to have obtained the wisdom of the runes from a sacrificial relationship he established with it. Yggdrasil also refers to a profound dimension of temporality, in that the three Norns – Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld – together weave the destiny of gods, giants and humans. Destiny, for Heidegger, is the “destining” of being – how each and every one of us is going to exist in the “being-towards-death” (Sein zum Tode)that is inseparable from Dasein. It can be either a passive consumption of time – the inauthentic life of distractions – or a fusion of will and life, where our mortal Dasein can become a vessel for the gods. In Contributions to Philosophy (1936-1938), which was written in secret, away from the prying eyes of the Gestapo, Heidegger talks about attunement to the sacred as the guardianship of being for the gods, so that they may one day return and live among us again.
Both Heidegger and Crowley saw the abyss as transcendence. Abyssal dissolution of the conditioned constructions of the self – our ego in all its overt and secret manifestations – is pursued in many esoteric traditions. Abyssal descent is actually renewal. To hasten the process, Goetia can be accessed – the Norse equivalent is the wisdom of the Niflheim. But the process is not the end itself.
With Yggdrasil as the ground of the “not-ground” of ego dissolution, we can be certain that the gods and goddesses are with us along the journey. Any fear is transformed into the “not-fear” of affirmation – Nietzsche had a taste of it in the ecstasy of amor fati. For Nietzsche was one who was in love with the Norns and left all mortal women behind.
Hi John – you are right up my ally with these thoughts! Its been so long since I studied Heidegger, even though his though animates so much of my life, and I am feeling the call – of my conscience perhaps? – to return to his well and dip again into his writings.
I haven’t read Contributions to Philosophy but it sounds extremely exciting.
H
The English translation of “Contributions to Philosophy” only came out in 1999. One has to be very patient with it as the translators did not manage to capture the evocative style of Heidegger’s most distressed writings. The abyss is one of the main themes in “Contributions”. The original edition – “Beitraege zur Philosophie” – appeared in 1989 and Heidegger was long dead by then. In his old age, Heidegger did an evaluation of his works and claimed “Contributions” to be his most important. It was written when he became utterly disillusioned with Nazism – and Heidegger did some bad things when he espoused it. But as a thinker Heidegger is certainly the greatest in modern times, and one of the reasons is that he was a seminal pagan thinker. It was a pity that he relied only on Greek and not also Norse mythology.
Hi,
Just a few thoughts leading from what John said about Crowley and the concept of transcendence through the ‘Abyss’.
The Qabbalistic Tree of Life shows us the Magicians ‘path of return’ from Malkuth to Kether (10 to 1). At Tiphareth (6), the Magician has the choice to follow the remaining Sephirot to the top, or to take a shortcut straight to Kether, via the 13th Path, or ‘The Abyss’. This experience is symbolised by the 10th AEthyr of the Enochian system, Choronzon. A rather entertaining and enlightening account of Crowley’s encounter with this AEthyr can be found in his ‘The Vision and The Voice’.
You ‘cannot take anything with you across the Abyss’, ego and the false self are stripped away to prepare for dissolution into Kether (Divinity, Ecstasy).
I think it was Gurdjieff who said, ‘Pain is Dynamic, Pleasure is Static.’
Which also puts the Christian ideal of ‘transcendence through sacrifice’ in a rare light.
Yet a foundation is necesary, a known and well defined ego needs to be built and fortified before it can be successfully destroyed. Crowley’s A.`.A.`. System of Initiation is set out as such (6 Degrees, corresponding to the Sephirot, once completed the Magician is then considered ‘prepared’ to cross The Abyss.)
A snake shedding its skin must form a new skin over its body before shedding the old one, or it dies.
In that sense the ego can be seen as a tool for purification of the self. A map of ‘known unkonowns’ that we can use to distinguish the false self from what remains.
93 93/93
Stewart
I am reminded, in a roundabout way, of something my Buddhist mum was talking about a while back – the problem faced by Buddhists of becoming attached to non-attachment.
Student: “I have worked for years to rid myself of desire. At every turn I crush, destroy and annihilate every desire that arises in my being.”
Teacher: “But you still desire not to desire!”
Hehe, but as they say, ‘The Fool who persists in his Folly becomes Wise.’ And Buddhism seems to have a great affinity for Folly.
Indeed! I think this is why James Hillman stands up and declares that the mythology of heroic overcomings – which in many ways have shaped modernity – are not enough.
There is a silent power in acquiescing, enduring and suffering. In my own personal mythology this is the mystery of the transformative power of salt…
Or as Jung paraphrased: “give up what thou halt and then thou wilt receive”.
Or my personal favourite: Odin swinging on the tree…