This is an open letter to all the pompous fools in the Heathen and occult scenes who insist on clogging the airwaves with fatuous rubbish, thus preventing themselves and everyone else from benefiting from the riches of these worlds.
2,500 years ago Socrates established that he was the wisest man in Athens. How did he know? Because whereas everyone else claimed to have some knowledge of the world – yet in the face of his questions proved to be thoroughly confused and ignorant – Socrates made no such claims. He might have only known one thing – his own lack of knowledge – but this modest achievement was nevertheless more than anything that anyone else had managed.
Nothing has changed in 2,500 years. People insist on spouting off on all manner of subjects they are utterly ignorant about. You can pretty much apply the following formula: as stridence and certainty increases, intelligence and knowledge decreases.
For example currently doing the rounds of the Heathen presence on Facebook is a healthy done of Islamophobia. How can people whose religion suffered near destruction at the hands of religious intolerance proceed to adopt exactly the same kind of intolerance?! Invariably the characters involved reveal their utter ignorance of Islam as a historical, cultural, or religious force. If this is really such an evil religion, how come hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world manage to live perfectly peaceful, sedate lives? Are you really telling me that it wasn’t ok for the Christians to burn down the Heathen groves and temples, but that it is ok for you to want to burn copies of the Koran?
Of course any major organised religion, Islam included, is riddled with tremendous flaws, but that isn’t the point I’m debating here. The point is that these sorts of ignorant people, by indulging in shallow stereotypes and self-congratulatory hubris, have found a fantastic way to make themselves feel elite without having to lift a single finger or make the slightest effort. In fact, the more stupid, shallow, and pathetic they make themselves, the more elite they feel. What a perversely brilliant achievement.
On the other hand there are the spiritual demagogues who claim to be elitists, to be above the herd. Jung dismissed such silliness as an “inflation” – the sign of an ego that doesn’t have the maturity to handle cosmic forces. Invariably, however, such characters are of staggeringly modest achievements. Scratching at the fringes of society, looking over the threshold with envious resentment, these characters tend to become pickled in their own vile spite.
Or worse, they manage to fool enough hangers on that they get a reputation as some kind of guru. Their modest abilities and powers are diverted almost entirely into grandstanding, self-promotion, and self-congratulation. Either way, it’s an easy way to make yourself feel elite without having to make any kind of real effort…let alone actually be elite.
Well, to all these sorts of people, I am here to say: You Are Not Elite.
Want to know how I know? Cause the truly elite people don’t need to project all their hatred and fear onto an absent Other in a welter of hypocrisy and wilful ignorance. Cause the truly elite people don’t go on and on about how wonderful they are, don’t complain about how the world is out to get them, and don’t bother trying to attract slavish followers.
So the next time you feel the slightest bit of a delusion of bigotry or grandeur coming on, I invite you to reflect on the following examples of what “elite” actually means.
Carl Jung had a major hand in inventing modern psychotherapy. He healed thousands of lives personally, and maybe millions through his art and writing. He wrote 20+ HUGE volumes of earth-shatteringly profound writing, and was an insanely gifted painter. He opened the modern world to the question of spiritual life amid the mechanised horrors of two world wars. Carl Jung was elite.
Milton Erickson overcame the paralysis of childhood polio to become one of the most important figures in the history of psychiatry. Resurrecting hypnosis from the junk yard of stage show chicanery, he pioneered therapeutic techniques of such power, humanity, and sheer joy that it is hard to imagine his equal. Erickson could cure stroke-induced paralysis with a few minutes of (very intense) conversation. He could, while giving a speech, hypnotise just one person in the audience and give them a post-hypnotic suggestion and no one else in the room would even know. Erickson’s work and writing has transformed and healed potentially millions of lives, not least because other cool stuff like NLP evolved from his work. Milton Erickson was elite.
Beethoven composed the Ode to Joy when he was stone deaf. Carl Lewis won eight Olympic gold medals. Mozart wrote more music in his scant decades than most people could in a thousand lifetimes. Eugen Sandow was so strong he could wrap himself in chains and then shatter them just by flexing his torso. And 2,500 years later Socrates’ afore-mentioned analysis of the human predicament is still 100% accurate.
Get the picture? Unless you have these kinds of personal, professional, artistic, and spiritual accomplishments under your belt to back up your talk, you are not elite. You are just gas bagging. And the more empty bullsh*t you spout in the public spaces of the spiritual communities you inhabit, the more you prevent the actual magic and beauty of this vast and brilliant cosmos from manifesting in those communities, thus utterly defeating their purpose.
I am not elite either. But I am like Socrates: I know that I am not elite, and therefore instead of resting on self-satisfied, idiotic laurels, I strive to improve myself. Everything I do, whether I succeed or not, is aimed towards healing, growing, evolving, creating. I am no “better” than the morons I am here criticising: I will fall vastly short of the example of people like Jung or Erickson. And yet by acknowledging my limitations I will fly so much higher, humbly inspired by their example.
The next time you feel tempted to ignorantly attack an absent, excluded Other; or puff yourself up with a lot of victim talk or arrogant strutting, please instead come and read this little article. Think about what the people you admire (really admire, not just sort of admire) did with their lives.
And never forget: you are not elite. Keep that in mind and you, ironically, might give yourself a better chance of becoming so.
Transmission complete.
Harigast out.
I am so elite.
It seems to me, the elite will be very angry with you, Harigast! :-) However, everyone seems to think something else concerning what “elite” means.
I am glad you wrote this. I might not have been so diplomatic. ;-)
I think you hit the spot at the end. Most of the hate mongering stems from a victim mentality. Hardly an elite attribute.
People should be forced to read and memorize this before being allowed on the internet.
Wow, I should channel Harigast more. Between these responses and the stuff this post has triggered on Facebook…he sure got people’s attention!
A spiritually potent article which is also very true about the real nexus between the cosmos and the life-world (Lebenswelt). May we hear from Harigast more!
In relation to our comportment to the Other we should steer clear of the extremes of both demonisation and romanticisation, which cloud our judgment. What will be helpful is the clarity of a warrior who can intuitively discern between friends and foes. This question runs deeper than any debate about whether a religion itself is desirable or not in a society.
It is difficult not for a religion to be judged in the public sphere where open communication takes place. Then also comes the question of demographics.
As heathenry concerns itself mainly with the preservation or revival of a “folkway” and its ties to the old gods, demographics will always come into discussion, especially with the globalisation of immigration in the background. In liberal societies we leave it to market forces to sort it all out, but this is an illusion. There are other issues at stake.
I had a look at a couple of heathen Facebook pages: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heathen-Nation/332703158329 and mk-mk.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=29072822611&topic=12199&perpage=30&post_index=1&start=-58&post_id=122661&hash=8db507f210f9388c2b96987514435250. Among heathens there are different positions on the growth of Islam in Western society and their arguments come in different shades.
Your statements regarding the ridiculous pretensions to elitism present in the occult field are spot on. They seem most painfully made among “Satanists”. However..
I’d welcome you to openly declare Heathenry or set up shop as a public Chaos Magician in most Muslim nations and see what transpires. You’ll either be subject to civilian violence and/or stiff blasphemy laws (extending to execution in certain countries).
I’ve read widely and deeply regarding historical Islam and its modern manifestations, and I am convinced it is *fundamentally* antithetical to human freedom due to its basic memes. There are inescapable reasons the Bill of Rights or anything remotely like it didnt evolve in any Islamic society.
Delve more into Islamic history (ie India’s), and you’ll see its body count rivals that of Christianity’s. Islamic Toleration for the other Peoples of the Book (christianity/judaism) has and does run the gamut , but the status of “pagan” and other religions? forget about it.
Dear hanging fire,
In reply I’d like to quote my article:
“Of course any major organised religion, Islam included, is riddled with tremendous flaws, but that isn’t the point I’m debating here. The point is that these sorts of ignorant people, by indulging in shallow stereotypes and self-congratulatory hubris, have found a fantastic way to make themselves feel elite without having to lift a single finger or make the slightest effort. In fact, the more stupid, shallow, and pathetic they make themselves, the more elite they feel. What a perversely brilliant achievement.”
This article makes no judgement either way about the virtues and vices of Islam. It is a furphey, a straw man, to respond in the way you have, and a furphey that I expected someone would attempt to foist.
That said, to make a generalisation about a religion as incredibly varied as Islam such as “it is fundamentally antithetical to human freedom” is rather cavalier to say the least, and suggests to me that you are not as well informed as you would like us to think. I have in mind, for example, the not uncommon harmonious pagan/Islamic syncretism in Indonesia, and even the many Hindu/Islam fusion myths (which with the rise of Indian and Pakistan nationalism [a product of modernisation to be sure] have fallen out of favour funnily enough).
But as I say, the post was not about Islam in any but the most circumstantial fashion. It was about the way in which folk project their shadows onto others in order to avoid facing themselves. You might like to consider getting off your podium of pomposity – the view is actually much better from the ground.
Harigast
I think Harigast is a rather sensible young man!
Heimlich is, Harigast is not, dude! Never heard of the “many selves” paradigm? Sensitivity and our principle of Fearless Honesty should not be misjugded as weakness or “sensibility” in a pejorative sense.
The whole anti-Islam kind of thing has much to do with ignorance. An ignorance that humanity likes to repeat that leads, after final analysis, to the same results again and again and again: suffering and violent death. We at Elhaz Ablaze identify with the higher principle of the Sophia Perennis, not the idiot’s hear-and-say. We are the Ain in the Eye of the Storm, riding the waves of the curative self-suspension, walking the edge between the “I” and dissolute unity, where the wild gods abide – forgotton, but not forsaken, once asleep, but now awaken.
Ok, so much for freestyle poetry. Back to the matter at hand: The whole issue is an old one in the west and we can call it Orientalism Reloaded.
“Orientalism is the 1978 book by Edward Said that has been highly influential in postcolonial studies. In the book, Said writes that “Orientalism” is a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of scholarship is marked by a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture.” He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and the American colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists’ ideas of Arabic culture.
So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.” (wiki)
For further information go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
Hail, sophia perennis, you blue-lidded goddess! Come to me, come to me! Embrace the dark night of deep knowing and unknowing.
Thank you, thank you, oh my dear sweet gods and goddesses THANK YOU for writing this.
This has been such a discouraging year to be Pagan… not because of the actions of others, but because what a few blow-hards from our own communities are saying and doing.
Hey, its my pleasure.
My principle is simple: there’s nothing wrong with throwing stones, so long as you don’t forget you’re standing on the doorstep of your glass house.
But as you can see, most of my windows are already broken, and these sorts of rants are my revenge ;)
Harigast