Philosophy

Even if Climate Change Weren’t Real…We Should Still Support Renewable Energy

Climate change seems to become an edgier and edgier issue all the time. There seems to be an implacable rise in obscurantist pseudo-science and ideological hogwash trying to tell us either that rapid and destabilising climate change isn’t happening or that it isn’t the fault of human beings.

Well, I have little patience for such silliness, but even if these claims were correct, I am almost totally convinced that we should still be pursuing renewal energy development. There are many, many other good reasons to make the change other than global warming. Here are a few main ones that have occurred to me.

1. Peak Oil

Like it or not, fossil fuels are finite. We’re going to have to get more and more aggressive to find them, expending more and more technology and damaging the environment in new, cruel, and unusual ways. Cost will keep on mounting – can you say “diminishing return on investment?” Unless of course we just keep hiking up the prices (oh yeah, that’s what is happening).

And then, even after all that, they’ll still eventually be exhausted. Then what? Then we switch to renewal energy anyway.

So why not get ahead start and make the transition now? The sooner we get serious about solar, wind, and the rest, the quicker these options will be commercially viable in a major way and the sooner we can perfect the transition. The sooner we change, the sooner we get off the spiralling staircase of energy costs, and the sooner that “energy security” can be established for nations currently dependent on international fossil fuel supplies (no more stupid wars in the Middle East needed).

Clinging to a technology on the edge of obsolescence, especially out of laziness, fear, or simple lack of imagination, is bad science and bad business sense.

2. Environmental Degradation

Anybody remember a little disaster called Deepwater? Oil spills alone cause massive damage every year. Coal seam gas mining threatens to destroy drinking water supplies worldwide – and seriously folks, in the 21st century water is going the be the most precious resource of all, not oil or gas. Coal mining destroys massive swathes of land, and in the clutch of the Japanese crisis let’s not even talk about the horrors of nuclear power, which has erroneously been passed off as “clean and green” for some time now, but actually produces the most noxious and irreversible pollution of all (and requires more massively destructive mining, too).

Renewable power sources such as wind and solar, by contrast, stand to be far less destructive. They don’t need to consume more and more land and resources in order to keep producing energy. They don’t blow up or release vastly destructive toxins into the environment, the food chain, and our bodies. They’re not only better for the environment, it just makes so much more sense, economically.

3. Money

Speaking of economics, fossil fuel industries are some of the most heavily subsidised on the planet. The numbers on coal and oil just don’t stack up so well once the tax-payer’s dollar is removed from the fossil fuel barons’ pockets. That’s in part because they constantly have to move on to new territories and new reserves to keep producing even the same amount of power. Whereas solar and wind are far more economical and efficient – once you’ve got the solar or wind farm going, you’re in business, all you have to worry about is maintaining your equipment.

So there you go. There are other good reasons for getting serious about renewable energy than these of course, not least the threat of global warming itself. But even if you don’t take climate change seriously, I think the other three reasons I’ve offered above are sufficiently compelling that I’d like to think you’d be convinced of the benefits of abandoning oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power anyway.

Here’s one final reflection on these issues that seems really critical to me. We are not separate from our planet, but a part of it. Fossil fuels do not take this factor into consideration; their destructive consequences (global warming or not) are analogous to defecating in the water one drinks. Renewal energy, on the other hand, is able to reflect and even take advantage of the brutal reality that what goes around comes around.

The longer we try to pretend that this basic law of nature doesn’t apply to our actions, the worse the consequences will be when Mamma Earth calls to collect on the debt we’re racking up.

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Pagan Mourning: Heidegger on the Passing and Return of the Gods

Regular Elhaz Ablaze readers will be familiar with the name of one of our most consistent commenters: Von den Vielen Raben – meaning Of Many Ravens in English. Von den Vielen Raben is a gifted and rigourous thinker with a deep knowledge of matters philosophical and religious. He recently sent me the text of this article and I was bowled over and immediately asked if we could present it here at Elhaz Ablaze. It was originally presented in 2007 at a university conference.

Enjoy!

~ Heimlich A. Loki

Pagan  Mourning: Heidegger on the Passing and the Return of the Gods

By Von den Vielen Raben

§ 1        Preliminary Reflections

I am a neo-pagan by faith. My scholarly leaning, too, is toward the reaffirmation of the lost pagan meaning of being in Western philosophy, on which my PhD is based by interpreting the difficult works of Martin Heidegger. Fighting the metaphysical oblivion of the gods in philosophy on the one hand, and the oppressive pervasiveness of what Heidegger calls the “onto-theology” of the monotheistic traditions on the other, my self-esteem as a neo-pagan has for many years been bolstered by a sense of being on the progressive side of history, or the “history of being” as Heideggerians would call it. It was only in recent months that I came to realise that this understanding on my part was dangerously conditioned by the relative isolation of my Australian “being-in-the-world”. As Heidegger would have put it, Dasein, as the self-disclosure of individual existence, is nothing more than the inscription of finitude on being. It is the “there” of my mortal span on terra australis – or rather terra australis incognita in the history of philosophy. My Australian paganism appears to be a splinter phenomenon that is cut off from the wholeness of being that a pagan Dasein has always meant for me. In my needful reflection on the question of authenticity that now arises, melancholy comes into play. Can a pagan’s melancholy like mine be used positively to create what Heidegger calls mindful awareness (Besinnung) of the primordiality of being? Or is melancholy always determined by the abyss of loss, in this case the loss of the pagan gods in the modern culture of “universalism”, which Heidegger addresses in his private writings from the 1930s on the question of the “last god”?

It was mainly through my regular intellectual engagements with my German and Scandinavian friends in Sydney, most of whom live here only temporarily and therefore stay decidedly North European, that I came to learn of the complexity of the sheer historicity of being “pagan”. Introduced as a neo-pagan to North Europeans, I was asked on several occasions whether I was a neo-fascist. I am not one. Yet to many Germans who were born after the war, the word “Heidentum”, which can be translated into English as either “paganism” or “heathenry”, is associated with the reappearance of what some academics call “brown esotericism” on terra europa, but is no longer confined there. This kind of esotericism is “brown” because it is Ariosophy: the “folkish” occultism of the Aryan race which characterised the beginnings of pagan revival in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century, and which was eagerly appropriated by the Nazis. Today, riding on the currents of international anti-Semitism that defines the neo-Nazi scene, Ariosophy finds its supporters as far east as the non-Aryan land of Russians and even finds curious resonance in the Islamic heartland of Iran, once Aryan Persia. In postwar Japan and Taiwan, too, neo-fascist groups continue to strive for the never quite complete Dasein of “honourary Aryans”. And the transnational Aryan ties go further still. Christopher Hale’s Himmler’s Crusade, published not so long ago in 1993, educates us about the Nazi obsession with Tibetans as primordial Aryans; and vice versa, the Tibetans’ initial receptivity to the Nazis that was not at all unfavourable. In view of these bewildering lines of current and historical developments, paganism becomes more a question of race rather that of the gods; or that of a racial and racialist religion. If I were in Germany today, calling myself neo-pagan would be to risk becoming identified with the revival of conflict-driven Ariosophy in our strife-torn world. The same applies to scholarly discourse on new religious movements. Academics and students alike will be familiar with the groundbreaking work of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the Exeter professor of Western esotericism who valiantly tackles the question of the rebirth of paganism in this Ariosophical context. His two books, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (2002), are essential readings in any critical appraisal of pagan revivalism. Those who are timid at heart may be fully pursuaded by the didactice anti-paganism of Karla Poewe, the German-born Canadian anthropologist who in New Religions and the Nazis argues that any pagan revival in Europe ncessarily has a fascist agenda, in that it inevitably involves a radical struggle against Christianity, which is Jewish in origin. Published in 2005, Poewe’s book reflects the methodological leaning also of many German academics when it comes to the study of neo-pagans. Carl Gustav Jung’s controversial thesis on Germany’s deep fear of the return of Odin as descent into chaos and destruction may still be relevant today.

Already in 2003, Mattias Gardell from Sweden makes an assessment in his book Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism that nearly half of the Norse and Germanic neo-pagan movements in the USA harbour a racist worldview. In her recent article “The Goddess Eostre: Bede’s Text and Contemporary Pagan Tradition(s)”, Australian academic Carole Cusack makes a less disturbing assessment of the Asatru scene, claiming that only some of its organisations take part in “right-wing politics”, while most are scholars devoted to the study of runes and the Eddas, especially Asatruars who are “folkish”, i.e. those who believe that spirituality and race are interwoven and organise their groups accordingly. Given that countries such as America and Australia are multicultural democracy, such position gives rise to fierce debates in contemporary Norse and Germanic paganism concerning the “folkish” versus the “universalist” approach. The “folkish” Asatruars will insist that Asatru is for whites only, whereas the “universalist” Asatruars will accept members on the basis of spiritual receptivity, independent of someone’s racial and cultural background. The cultural politics of the Asatru Folk Assembly, the first Asatru organisation in America and openly “folkish”, cause some controversy as its leader Stephen McNallen views the increasing Hispanic population in his country in terms of a war between the Norse and the Aztec gods. Another controversy was created when McNallen entered into a publicised dispute with the Native Americans over the remains of the 9300-year-old Kennewick Man, claiming the skeleton, discovered in 1996 on a river bank in Washington State, to be of Norse origin when intitial testings indicated it to be not American Indian. Yet scientists argue that using morphometrics to determine the racial origin of any paleoamerican remains is fraught with uncertainties. To this date the question of verifying the genetic markers of the Kennewick Man remains an open one.

What these two “folkish” controversies certainly reveal is the difficult problem of grounding pagan identity in the biologism of race. The Kennewick Man case has opened up new possibilities in archaeological reflections that question the usefulness of “race” as a scientific concept for archaeologists. The formation of Native American nations, for example, was not determined by race, but by voluntary associations of people over a long period of time, who shared a common notion of sovereignty in a particular topos. If we call Native Americans “pagans” – and many Asatruars do liken themselves to Native Americans -, then they are so by virtue of their history and their culture, not a racial identity that they themselves try to construct and assert. “Folkish” neo-paganism, then, is confronted with the existential problem of the abyss of identity construction, since racial markers are ideological inscriptions on the factical embodiment of Dasein and are therefore readings, not explications. Race explains nothing. Over the Kennewick Man the Asatru Folk Assembly fell into the same methodological quagmire of the type of archaeology practised by Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, a SS institute founded in 1935 to carry out research on Aryan ancestry.

This is not to say that in determining the ontological meaning of neo-paganism, “folkish” ideas do not correspond to a hermeneutic horizon that requires a careful examination and engagement, especially for any Dasein who has a self-understanding to be “pagan”. In this regard, pagan scholars have much to learn from Heidegger’s attempt to wrest the primordial meaning of das Volk away from the contemporary racism and biologism of the Nazi society that he lived in. Heidegger is particularly relevant to a thoughtful approach to pagan revivalism, in that the profound distress caused by what he called the “gigantism” of the Nazi war machine led him to produce the first philosophical writings on the gods in Western modernity. Heidegger was the first pagan thinker in modern Western philosophy, yet his writings – they number over 90 volumes in the Gesamtausgabe – have not even been taken up in neo-paganism.

§ 2        The “Godding” of the Gods

In 1989 the editor of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrman, published Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis (Volume 65). It consists of Heidegger’s writings that were written in secret between the years of 1936 and 1938. It is therefore a sigetic work. Before his death in 1976, Heidegger placed great hope in its eventual publication, believing that it will be revealed to the world as his second magnum opus after Being and Time. The English translation of Beiträge did not appear until 1999, as Contributions to Philosophy: Of Enowning, and its impact on Heidegger scholarship in the English language has only just begun.

In Beiträge Heidegger moves away from the existential resoluteness of Dasein in Being and Time as the promising ground of authenticity in face of the ever-present possibility of death. In its place is the near-mystical appropriation of Dasein by the epochal unfolding of the meaning of being to Dasein qua being itself, which nevertheless stays away from being understood as any kind of being, including God. The ground of being is abyssal; its history, an interplay of nearness and distance, of memory and forgetting. Heidegger uses the emblematic notion of Ereignis – which in ordinary German means “event” but this is carefully avoided by Heidegger – to hint at the interpretive fusion of appropriation, resonance and opening that characterises the history of being and Dasein’s projection upon it. What Heidegger calls “being-historical” thinking, which he attempts to outline in Beiträge, is to be distinguished from historiographical research on the meaning of historical events. However, the disappearance of pagan gods from European life through the Christianisation of the West is one major historical occurrence that reveals a great deal about the nature of the understanding of being in the Dasein of Western men and women. It is the overall appropriation of this understanding by monotheism, which posits God as the creator of all beings, the summum bonum of being itself. To conceive of being outside God is impossible in Christian thought – and similarily in Judaism and Islam. But according to Heidegger, what this divine schema overlooks is the dualism of transcendence and immanence that has its origin in Plato’s doctrine of forms. Earth can never be that good, for it is only an imperfect copy of an original image that is not accessible to mortal perception. Existence on earth is a lack rather than fulfilment.

The attractiveness of paganism for many is the dwelling of the sacred in immanence. Sacred mountains and sacred rivers are existential truths. Seasonal changes and summer and winter solstices generate a yearning for connection with the divine; the same with major stages in human life such as birth, marriage and death. The gods and the goddesses that neo-pagans follow have qualities that humans can relate to, even if they are negative ones, as in the case of the Norse god Loki. While the Aesir deities are far superior to the mortals, their speeches and actions as recorded in the Eddas and the sagas that can enter the hermeneutic circle of Dasein’s understanding, providing a clearing in being that Dasein can project upon in its existential possibilities. Pagan theurgy is temporal, not eternal, but it is no less sacred because of that. For a pagan, no attempt is made to worship perfection. He or she understands the work of time, which is change. Death is embraced as a part of life, as a transition to the other world, or the beginning of a new journey; it is not seen as an imperfection in existence.

In Beiträge, Heidegger describes our fundamental attunement to the gods in terms of our guardianship of the sacred on earth. At the very least, this involves a distressing recognition of the struggle of world against earth in the rage of the “gigantic”, fueled in his time by the Nazis’ ambitions for planetary domination and control. Heidegger is against both political and technological imperialism; the idea of the Aryan “master race” repels him. For Heidegger, the pagan Dasein calls for creating conditions on earth that will see the re-establishment of the fourfold of gods and mortals, sky and earth, which is envisioned in Hölderlin’s poem “Germanien”. Heidegger sees in Hölderlin the finest example of philosophical thinking in the gathering power of poetic language. Unlike his Romantic contemporaries Goethe and Winckelmann, Hölderlin actually believed in the pagan gods as living beings and loved them, and his continued devotion to Christ caused an inner conflict that eventually claimed his sanity. Heidegger never declared himself to be a neo-pagan. Yet through the significance that he places on Hölderlin, it is very possible that the pagan character of Heidegger’s Beiträge was shaped by his reading of this great poet. “Germanien” was important enough for Heidegger to devote a whole lecture course to its interpretation in 1934. In this poem, Germany is depicted as a priestess who serves the gods and provides spiritual hospitability to all those who come to her:

Yet at the centre of time
In peace with hallowed,
With virginal earth lives aether
And gladly, for remembrance, they
The never-needy dwell
Hospitably amid the never-needy,
Amid your holidays,
Germania, where you are priestess and
Defenceless proffers all round
Advice to the kings and the peoples.

By 1934 Heidegger was sufficiently disillusioned by his initial involvement with the National Socialist restructuring of universities to come up with some form of resistance against the Ariosophical madness all around him. Through his lecture on “Germanien”, Heidegger offered an understanding of the German Volk that was radically different from the official Aryan revisionism that saw in the same poem the heralding of a pan-German nationalism. In “Germanien”, Germany is a Volk of the gods and their land is a gateway to the sacred. In another of Hölderlin’s famous poem, “Der Ister”, on which Heidegger also gave a lecture, this time in 1942, the Germanic goddess of earth Hertha is mentioned. Hölderlin describes the Germans as children of Hertha, a Volk with a profound relationship with nature. In this poem, too, Heidegger sees hospitability as essential to Dasein’s attunement to the sacred: Hölderlin describes the secret dwelling of the Greek god Heracles by the Danube – Ister is its Roman name -, to which the German people belong as much as the Rhine. The stranger Heracles has made his home in Germany through the graciousness of Hertha.

Hertha and Ostara are both Germanic goddesses linked to the fertility of earth and of those who dwell upon it. Ostara, unfortunately, was used as the name of the most rabid Ariosophical journal that was circulated in Vienna in the early 1900s. The editor of Ostara was Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who made some name in the “folkish” milieu through the racial dualism of his “theozoology”, which depicts a worldwide struggle between the Aryans and the “inferior” races and the former’s eventual victory and hegemony. Prior to his rise to fame Adolf Hitler was a keen reader of possibly every issue of Ostara. Lanz’s choice of Ostara was based on his vision of Aryan eugenics. Ostara in Ariosophy is the divine mother of the master race to come. Himmler’s Lebensborn program was the later political manifestation of Lanz’s ideals. Both were anti-feminists obsessed with their fear of Aryan women losing control of their lust and producing children of mixed races. This fear has its resurgence in the “folkish” neo-paganism of the Asatru Folk Assembly, which discourages interracial sex and marriages. While not openly racist, this leading Asatru organisation believes in the separation of peoples so that the Norse and the Germanic blood can survive. Such racial politics is also advocated by the Thule Seminar, a rather secretive institute of the German New Right. Its founder Pierre Krebs claims in Im Kampf um das Wesen that multculturalism in Europe is a conspiratorial program of global forces encouraging the “ethno-suicide” of Germans and other Europeans. In this aspect Krebs is supported by Alain de Benoist from the French New Right, whose writings are translated into German by the Thule Seminar. Both men recommend a politics of difference based on “ethno-pluralism”, which in the meaning of the New Right is “folkish” separatism: they see any celebration of diversity on the same soil of Europe as dangerous and misguided. They also advocate neo-paganism as an anti-thesis to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but without actual adherence to any revived or reconstructed pagan tradition. In Krebs’ view especially, paganism is a metapolitical strategy aimed at bringing about a symbolic war between “Greece” and “Jerusalem”, such that Europeans will be reawakened as children of the Iliad and the Eddas, not of the Bible. This is nothing short of a violent rebirth in Christian Europe. In this process, Krebs sees Germany playing the role of the “inner Reich” of all European nations, instead of different European peoples deciding their own destiny. Hence the “folkish” appropriation of the ancient meaning of the “all-father” in the leading god figure of Odin, also known as Wotan in German.

All this is far cry from the paganism of Hölderlin and Heidegger. The biologism prevalent in some neo-pagan circles, potentially fascist, will find its critique in Heidegger’s Beiträge, who nevertheless is not against the notion of Volk as such. Volk for Heidegger is the proximity of Dasein to being, since it is what comes most ready-to-hand in Dasein’s being-in-the-world. It is the proximal access to Dasein’s selfhood. Yet in the present age of what Heidegger calls the abandonment of being, when the abyss beckons at Dasein for going under instead of surpassing and mastery, the existential nearness of the Volk is an illusion that can further distances Dasein from the primordial question of being. This is because the nearness and the distance of the Volk to Dasein is historicised in accordance with Dasein’s own understanding of being, which is highly problematised in modernity. Instead, it is through the uncanny of the stranger, and not the familiarity of the Volk, that Dasein can come to understand its selfhood. The stranger is not necessarily a member of the other Volk or race, as “folkish” thinking would want us to believe, but one who is aware of the daimonios topos of the truth of being, like the warrior Er in Plato’s Republic, who returns from the land of the dead to tell the living about the allotment of destiny to those who are to be born on earth. The stranger is someone who understands, and it can be anybody. For example, a “witch”. Or the ghostly loner that introduces anxiety and trembling into the question of the race (Geschlecht) of humanity in Heidegger’s postwar reading of Trakl. Our question is the encounter of this stranger among our midst and how we relate to him or her. Only then can a Volk be renewed in the clearing of being. Hospitality, however, is the essential condition for the stranger to exist; xenophobia, on the contrary, drives him or her to extinction. It is important for a Volk to be hospitable.

The Hölderlinian-Heideggerian axis of pagan revival is founded upon an understanding of being that has the openness and the reception of hospitability as its essence. And this renewal, which is also remembrance of being, cannot take place without the gods.

Reading Heidegger’s philosophy, then, opens up possibilities in neo-pagan thinking that are vital to the future directions of neo-paganism as a whole. This is a challenge when the philosophy of the New Right is enthusiastically taken up by neo-pagan organisations such as the Asatru Folk Assembly as justification of a pagan traditionalism.

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But Does it Work in Theory?

I recently saw a brilliant slogan on a t-shirt. It read “sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” What a wonderful inversion! It made me laugh. And think. And that’s a dangerous thing.

Pragmatism has become the iron-clad law of this age. Anything can be justified if it is done as an appeal to practicality. The most artless, destructive, useless activities can be passed off as strictly necessary. The most idiotic, contemptuous, miserly, and shallow behaviour in corporations and institutions can be justified to infinity through an appeal to practicality.

Don’t be idealistic, don’t be a dreamer. After telling children through their childhood that they “can do anything they want,” after filling them up on films and media that encourage them to dream big and be ethical, we dump them in early adulthood into the grown-up world of shallow, cut-throat sociopathy. Ideals? Theory? That’s for the kids. Grow up.

Consequently we live in a time where the art of deep reflection is disappearing. University degrees are little more than vocational tick-a-box exercises that seek to turn fresh new students into mentally stereotyped drones. Gone are the days when educated people knew about literature, or poetry, or history, or art, or philosophy, regardless of their vocation. Now all they know about is Facebook, and Xbox, and television sitcoms so poorly conceived that the audience needs a laughing track so they can figure out which bits are meant to be funny.

Why does theory matter? Who really cares? Because “what works” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Consider the case of milk pasteurisation, for example. What hey, we start pasteurising milk and people stop getting sick. Since that procedure “worked” we conclude it must be fine and don’t both to think through the larger context.

Of course milk making people sick was a new advent in the early 20th century due to the adoption of unsanitary farming practices and the feeding of cows with waste sludge from breweries which they could not digest. Sick cows = bad milk. Yet organic, free range raw milk, when tested against industrially prepared, pasteurised milk, actually resists infection and bacteria more effectively!

But in our limited paradigm of “that works, do that!” we never pause to consider whether it only seems to work because we have no theoretical imagination to look beyond the immediately obvious.

Theory, then, enables us to consider the limits of our interpretation of the meaning of events. To say that something “works in practice” is not an objective description of a circumstance; it is a more or less subjective value judgement. It implies we have thought through other possibilities. Yet if our only criterion is pragmatism then chances are we have not.

The invocation of practicality is all too easily a tool to silence dissent, or even to suppress open communication. “Well,” we are told, “it just has to be this way because that’s how the real world works.” Who said? When? Why? Should we therefore endure miserable consequences? We are all too willing to cover over life’s fleeting passage; in the name of practicality we make and conform to frivolous and wasteful decisions at a societal or technological level without the slightest hesitation or sense of irony.

Yet there is a more important point at stake here: aesthetics. Who cares about aesthetics? What practical value does aesthetics have? Aesthetics is about acknowledging the fragile and delicate art of existence. It is about remembering our uniqueness and our transience. An aesthetic approach to life recognises the mysteries and horizons of our existence; it offers no room for the false confidence and clumsy bravado of pragmatism.

Who says that efficiency is best? Who says that “getting it done ASAP” is the best attitude? Why? Did the world miraculously not function before we had the Internet? Mobile phones? Faxes? Even land lines? No, no it didn’t. Some things took longer and people were a lot more relaxed, which meant it was easier for them to fill their bodies and minds with knowledge and experiences of useless but soul-nourishing character.

I’m not saying that an aesthetic approach impels us to disregard practicality of course. I am saying that it tempers it by reminding our will to automation and haste that there is a bigger picture: “we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos” (Tim Leary). Is anyone really, seriously going to argue that claim? Good luck trying.

Taking our time, seeing how things interlock, tracing out the subtle webs of thought and implication, asking whether something is artful, these are not frivolous undertakings. They cause us to make more rational decisions, individually and collectively, because the hysteria of haste has no purchase. The mad panic of money markets, for example, would be impossible in a world that accorded theory and aesthetics as much status as pragmatism.

In fact, one could say that the obsession with pragmatism was a major contributor to the global financial crash, which is infinitely ironic to say the least, but also, I suspect, rather paradigmatic of the effects of the pragmatic mentality.

Obsession with “getting results” can very easily produce anything but results, or produce only the most shallow semblance of results (consider again those tick-box university degrees, in which students learn how to go through the exact motions of learning in order to satisfy university administrators, without actually developing a deep grasp of either thinking or of their course content).

Hegel proposed some two hundred years ago that the will has two “moments,” the first which is finite but active in the world, and the second which is infinite but powerless. He proposed that when we draw these two, action and thought, together then we begin to be human. Pragmatism unchained from human understanding, however, can produce only disaster, for action without the guidance of reflection on a mass scale weaves little more than chaos.

It is necessary for change to begin. It is necessary for one-sided pragmatism to be recognised for the self-defeating shibboleth that it is. It is time to reject the “faster, faster” sleight-of-mind that all-pervades the world today. And perhaps as we learn how to think again we might realise that much of what we thought “worked” in our practicality-obsessed mania was little more than water-treading and back-sliding anyway.

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Death and Dagaz

I recently declared that I wanted to embrace the idea of memento mori. The universe obliged. An old ring from childhood reappeared, a skull that I can carry on my hand, a silent and implacable reminder of mortality and perhaps the freedom that comes when one is released from the illusion of eternal existence.

It is important not to trivialise mortality in the name of spiritual or philosophical reflection of course. There are others far more qualified to write about the subject than I. Nevertheless, mortality has been a leit-motif throughout my life and it is a theme that figures importantly for me. Thus I am moved to write.

Death provokes fear. Fear provokes the desire to escape the threat of death. Since we are unavoidably mortal, fear therefore resorts to the deployment of belief as a bulwark against our inevitable demise. This is the essence of what in psychology is known as Terror Management Theory. In order to manage our terror in the face of the awful dark horizon we construct beliefs which simplify the world for our brains, reduce it to digestible symbols that paper over the screaming horror of our infinitesimal powerlessness before the frightful majesty of creation.

Hence, when we make the commitment to live a spiritual life and embrace the horizon of the unknown, we offer ourselves up to a state of tremendous vulnerability. It is here that the double nature of mythology, on one hand door, on the other refuge, is revealed.

Myth is a door. What is a door? A door is an opening in a wall through which we may pass. The door is an invitation into a larger world beyond the limits of the walls we immediately perceive. Even when closed, it is a constant reminder to us of a bigger picture: there is more to be experienced than just our immediate existence.

What lies through the door? It could be anything. A larger world, a different perspective. It could be dark or light, joyous or miserable. It could be a cul de sac or a road that ever ends. Likely enough all of these things await those that step through the door that is called myth.

For where the myth itself is done, safe, secure in its form, recognisable in its character, shaped and regulated by convention, the world that awaits us on its other side is wild, unpredictable, untameable. It is one thing to read about the fury and ecstasy that Odin inspires; another to be swept into a tide of poetic frenzy. It is one thing to praise Jord’s bounty; another to sink your hands into the soil, to plant a tree, to be lost in wild country, to be tossed by storm or tremor.

How does myth open itself? How do we step through? It opens itself when we slow down, when we listen to our heart beating, when we give space for its secrets to give themselves. When we open ourselves to uncertainty, when we put aside our fear of death and the need for control and faith that this fear impels.

Myth is by itself mere words. It can be justified only by the worlds into which it opens. Myth is not property, cultural, intellectual, or otherwise. Myth is a seduction, a lover, an agent provocateur set on unsettling our settled, death denying articles of faith. Myth is always in motion. It is a verb, an action carried out endlessly by the horizon of mystery – Runa – herself.

And so those that want to control myth, to make it dead, predictable, to make it into property, to make it into a rigid template for the construction of stale identity – these we accuse of impiety. If we use myth as nothing more than a vehicle for mere belief – and not as an opportunity to open our spirits to the unknown – then we blaspheme.

I am not afraid, therefore, to declare that it appears that many Heathens blaspheme against their own professed faith without so much as realising it. Yet such folk should not be blamed, unless of course they know better but are too cowardly to embrace the dare of the door. Unless of course, though knowing better, they bar the door up and declare that it is the thing to be worshipped, not the infinite magic that glowers beyond it.

Yet myth is also a refuge. For if we were to stand, naked and purged, before the raw intensity of this mystery-woven universe without any railing to grasp then we would be swept away in the torrent. The universe is so incredibly vast, and often as cruel and arbitrary as she is loving and rational, at least from the narrow glimpse of her secrets that we mere mortals are afforded.

How then are we to cope with true piety – with steeling ourselves against our fear of death and stepping through the door of myth? What protection might we give ourselves?

Myth is redolent with symbolism, with endless layers of associations, connections, refractions, reflections. We find ourselves making sense of the world in the truisms of Havamal, or putting words to the ineffable art of creation when we invoke the subterranean skulduggery of Bolverkr. In the rune poems we find endless fractional images of reality, metaphors which offer moments of order and sense in this vast chaotic carnival of life.

Thus myth invites us to shed all form and embrace the pure unknown, and myth provides language and sense for us to recover and integrate the experiences we find beyond the mythic door. When too distilled our experience becomes, myth offers a refuge, a stable retreat and ward. It helps us to recover from the shock of being finite in this infinite cosmic passion play.

And thus is the art of the alchemist, the magician, the saint, the shaman: to move back and forth across the very threshold of myth. To step out into the unknown, to drink its thick, roaring waters; and then to step back into the warm embrace of mythic refuge, to clothe oneself in the images and metaphor, the traces and patterns which are ultimately inspired by the Unknown and which help us to integrate the Unknown into our finite forms.

In other words, the spiritual art, the art of stepping back and forth through the doors of myth, is the art of living on the threshold of death, which is the ever-present spectre of the Unknown in life. We can only taste the gush of our lifeblood if we are willing to shed it.

Yet we continually lose ourselves in the small doings of daily life, the invisible but compelling stories we tell ourselves: lose ourselves in a futile attempt to avoid facing death’s gaze. Therefore, to surround oneself with memento mori, with reminders of death, is to continually draw oneself back to the door of myth, and the Beyond, and to the refuge of myth, and the need to care for one’s finitude even amid infinity.

To those who dare to remember myth:
Drink deep of the Well!

To those who dare to remember death:
Dance joyous on the threshold!

To those who have ears to hear:

Carpe Diem!

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“Everything fornicates all the time” or: Goddess, let our minds copulate with Infinity!

“If I cast my eyes before me, what an infinite space, in which I do not exist, and if I look behind me, what a terrible procession of years, in which I do not exist, and how little space I occupy in this vast abyss of time.” Blaise Pascal, “Pensées ”

“All beings are buddhas … there is no being that is not enlightened, if it but knows its true nature.” Hevajra Tantra

“I have been waiting beyond the years
Now over the skyline I see you’re travelling
Brothers from all time gathering here
Come let us build the ship of the future
In an ancient pattern that journeys far
Come let us set sail for the ‘always’ island
Through seas of leaving to the summer stars

Seasons they change but with gaze unchanging
O deep eyed sisters is it you I see?
Seeds of beauty ye bear within you
Of unborn children glad and free
Within your fingers the fates are spinning
The sacred binding of the yellow grain
Scattered we were when the long night was breaking
But in the bright morning converse again.”

The Incredible Stringband, “The Circle Is Unbroken”

The method to enlightenment according to Crowley, who has boiled down the Eastern teachings to its essence after having travelled to India and other places in the Orient, is very simple: Sit down, shut up, stop thinking, and Get Out! It’s simple, but not easy. Even the Tantric scholar, Hugh B. Urban, admits that Crowley had a fairly well-grounded understanding of Yoga, as his book, Eight Lectures on Yoga (a book still worth reading), proves. Let’s look closer to what Crowley meant by his formula.

Sit down: This refers to Asana, a term in Yogic literature for posture. It needs to be solid, but also comfortable. After all, you are supposed to sit in this posture for about half an hour. (You should be able to sit like this for hours. One hour is the most I reached once. However, don’t be too masochistic.)

Shut up: This one is hard. At least for people like me. I like to talk a lot. Most westerners are talking or are listening to talking people most of the time. (Here talking includes singing, making sounds, listening to the radio, watching TV etc. Even reading is talking, as whilst you read those words an internal voice is speaking to you. Isn’t it?) So, this one is really hard. But, after we have sat down we have to invite silence into our heads.

Stop Thinking: This is impossible, you say? I hear you, my friend. I know, it’s next to impossible. But hey, haven’t we began our quest for magic, myth and mystery because we strive for that which is miraculous and fills our hearts with Joy and Awe? Isn’t magic the science of the extremes and the impossible? The violation of probabilities? Haven’t they told you sigil magic doesn’t work, it cannot happen, but IT DID!!! In the same way we must push our boundaries of Achievable Reality with every breath we take. We learn slowly. Magic cannot be learned at a retreat or weekend workshop. We learn by applying our insights in daily life. This is an endless process. On this way we must accept our imperfection, stop worrying, stop wishing, yes, stop thinking! We must learn to watch our thought patterns and thus become aware of the origination of thoughts. We must not strive for anything, we must not force our minds to do anything, but just watch. „Breath in, breath out,… thoughts… breath in, breath out …“ asf. Finally, we will establish mental silence, or to be more accurate, it establishes itself. And even a few seconds of this mental silence are like a short glimpse at eternity, a foretaste of real inner peace.

Get out: This leads to profound stages of gnosis. It doesn’t make really sense to talk about it, because one gets there easier when one “shuts up” and “opens up” to silence. The idea of “getting out” ultimately points to the experience of illumination. But what is illumination? Well, the short answer: I don’t know. But we can look closer to what has been said how magic and illuminated states of consciousness are linked up.

Beside Yoga another fundament of Crowley’s teachings is the modern version of Qabalah / Kabbalah. Though I respect Qabalah as a mystical current in Judaism I think that too many ‘occult masters’ turned qabalah into a rather intellectual exercise without any real spiritual value. The study of correspondences is an ancient art that belongs to the great Arts of Imagination, that was practised back in the days when Imagination was not just seen as unreal and put on a level with fantasy. One of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance and a reviver of Neoplatonism, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), rediscovered this ancient art during a time when Florence was the place to hang out for hip artists and ‘avant-garde’ intellectuals, an important centre of the ending Mediæval Ages, where cultural innovations and developments took place that led to an end of the dominance of the Church. New ideas began to spread that resulted in intellectual transformations of a grand scale. The Renaissance is viewed today as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. The Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, but what I find most fascinating is that it was inspired by the past, the classical age: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. So it doesn’t come with a surprise that this was also a revival of Magic. Humanists asserted “the genius of man… the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind.” In that special intellectual environment Ficino taught what he considered to be ‘Natural Magic’, and so laid the foundation for what is called ‘Ceremonial Magic’ now, known to us through such magical authors like McGregor Mathers, Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley and Israel Regardie. This form of magic is still practiced in their occult orders all over the world today.

“Ficino’s magic was grafted on to an existing tradition of medieval magic, which in turn had derived from Arabic sources such as the notorious manual of spirit evocation called Picatrix. The fundamental idea was the doctrine of correspondences, which teaches that everything in the universe corresponds to other things on higher or lower levels of being.” (Godwin 2007: The Golden Thread – The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery Traditions, p. 99)

This idea is really old. It seems it never disappeared completely. With the rise of modern science in the 17th century Kepler (1571 – 1630) and Newton (1643 – 1727), both deeply into the occult, have cut through the band of nature and psyche, man and the world, the subjective and the objective universe, that has existed since the rise of human consciousness, known to the ancients as the world-soul, anima mundi. (Actually both, Kepler and Newton, saw the harmonious order of the divine creation in the physical laws they discovered, a kind of clockwork universe (instar horologii) and ‘world machine’ (machina mundi). However their physical laws made the idea of a divinely ensouled universe (instar divini animali) obsolete.) For the ancients the world-soul was the vinculum amoris, the band of love, that connected the inner world with the outer world, man and nature. Three centuries later we would come to conclusions that allowed us again to re-imagine this sacred bond between man and nature. We needed quantum physics and a swiss prophet to re-member again. This prophet was, yes you guessed it, Carl-Gustav Jung. His ideas of the archetypes and a collective unconscious made magic possible again. He wrote in 1916, after a spiritual crisis:

„Man is a gateway, through which one enters from the outer world of the gods, demons, souls, into the inner world, from the greater world into the smaller world.” (Jung [1916]: Sermones ad Mortuos, in: Jung 1963: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 380)

That means that we can enter deeper, hidden realities by finding pathways through which we can communicate with our unconscious, which Jan Fries calls the “Deep Mind.” When we open up to that possibility we begin to interact magically with our environment, and a sacred psychogeography is thus created: “It is through the human unconscious that one passes from the ‘greater world’ to the ‘smaller world’ of the interior universe. The God of the ‘exterior’ universe is the sun; and the interior world is, accordingly, illuminated by the sun of man’s personal inner divinity.”(Hanegraaff 1996: New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 503)

Hence the archetypes of the collective unconscious are simultaneously part of the macrocosmos (the outer world) and the microcosmos (the inner world), which leads to the fascinating, magical conclusion that the world of the psyche and the world of “outer” reality are ultimately only reflections of a higher reality, the unus mundus, the “One world,” or to put it differently: the world and the psyche are each mirroring the one reality. This means that Jung assumed a monistic meta-level behind or beyond the subjective (psychical) and objective (physical) reality – the unus mundus, a term which refers to the concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and returns to.


To me this conception is the fundament of magick. Being a modern learner on the magical path I always imagined that connection more in scientific terms. My thoughts were running along those lines: If there was a Big Bang (even if Carroll says this idea is nonsense) everything in the physical universe has the same origin. And when we then look to quantum physics we can see that it proves that two particles that have the same source behave somehow as if they were still connected, even though they are seperated by a huge distance. This means that if one of the two particles gets affected by certain events, the other is affected in the same way though it’s physically somewhere else. One must be blind, if one doesn’t see a connection between these new discoveries and the old conceptions of correspondences, even if we cannot conclude from this that science is now accomodating some of the conclusions magicians have reached millenia ago. Or can we? Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900 – 1958), an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics, was examing the synchronicity principle with Jung, and he argued that there must be a psychophysical unified reality that connects the psyche and the world. He thought of it as an invisible, potentially existing reality that could only be unlocked by studying its effects on the visible world. He was looking for a “new language” that could describe that reality. I think he found it in Jung’s theories. We have found it in magical systems and terminology. It’s no mere accident that Jung became so popular in magical circles. There is a sublime truth in his psychology. It points at an underlying unified reality, the unus mundus, a term Jung borrowed from the alchemist Gerardus Dorneus (1530 – 1584).

It’s also not a coincidence that when scientists (Metzner, Leary, Grof etc.) took LSD, Mescalin, asf. they entered these wyrd inner landscapes, where the ‘laws’ of the unus mundus reign. Certain drugs can lead you to the experiences of unitary consciousness. When these psychedlic drugs reveal that underlying unified reality, it happens sometimes that when an unprepared person takes LSD – has a ‘wrong set’, as Leary said (a wrong attitude, f.e. feels bad or is depressive or anxious) or is in an unappropriate environment (like a disco, a ‘wrong setting’) – that such a person gets a ‘bad trip’, which mainly means paranoia: everything in the universe, strangely connected in weird ways, is a conspiracy against you. There is, however, a way of perception that inverts that process and it’s an effective method to communicate with the Universe, and experience a “communion”. For that purpose you can conceptualise the Universe, like the Tantrics did, as the body of the Goddess – known to me as Eternity, or Nuit. That’s a form of gnosis that Satanists and Setians will never know: it’s called pronoia. I came across this term in Humphries’ and Vayne’s fascinating Grimoire Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick. ‘Pronoia’ is a state of consciousness that is intimately connected to the Holy Guardian Angel concept. Here the seeker experiences that the Universe is actually alive and that it cares for you and it tries to help you in any way possible to get closer to your Self that, in essence, – on a profound, meaningful and transcendent level invisible to the eye – is One with the Universe. The realization of this Oneness implies a particular attitude on the part of the adept toward cosmos, like in Ficino’s Natural Magic or in Hindu-Tantra, whereby s/he feels integrated within an all-embracing system of micro-macrocosmic correlations. The Universe here is not just a thing ‘out there’, but Her – She, the Mysterious Universe being the Goddess Herself (for mystical monotheists it’s mostly Him, God the Father or Christ). Every attempt to conceptualize Her / Him / It leads to an anthropomorphisation of Her: the Goddess in Her various forms: Nuit, Freyja, Kali, Virgin Mary, the Holy Whore.

“All our ancient ways are wrought with love of Her, lifting up Her skirts and showing off Her irresistible flesh, our flesh, all flesh… For only a real fool, the worst drudge, would ever refuse Her come-on. Even those with little wisdom know in their hearts that She has but one aim: to bring you ecstasy, to destroy the illusion of seperateness…” (Dave Lee 2006 [1997]: Choatopia!, p. 203)

I don’t know why, but I feel very attracted to the perception of the Goddess (on one level of reference) as Nuit. Probably it’s because it’s the first Goddess I encountered on my Path when I discovered The Book of the Law. Nuit has been described by Crowley in various ways. First of all he equated this Egyptian Goddess of the Night Sky with the Qabalistic concept of Ain Soph Aur, the Limitless Light: the Godhead, prior to Its Self-Manifestation,  before It emanates into manifestation on verious levels of existence and thus creates the world(s). This idea probably derived from Ibn Gabirol (1021 – 1058), an Andalucian Hebrew poet and Jewish philosopher, who coined the term, “the Endless One” (she-en lo tiklah). Ain Soph may be translated as “no end,” “unending,” “there is no end,” or “the Infinite.” Hence a term like Ain Soph Aur (אין סוף אוֹר) means “Endless Light.” Ain Soph is the divine origin of all created existence, which emanates out of infinite no-thing-ness (Ain). Another way to approach the Mystery of Nuit (at least in Crowley’s sense, I’m not concerned with Old Egyptian religious conceptions here) is to understand it as a certain state of being that the Buddhists called Nibbāna in Pali, known as Nirvāna (Sanskrit: निर्वाण) to most. It is a state of being free from suffering (dukkha). In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme Being (=God) through Moksha (Sanskrit: मोक्ष) or Mukti (Sanskrit: मुक्ति), which literally means “release” in the sense of “letting go.” The concept of Nirvāna is often associated in Western minds with the false impression of a nihilistic, life-denying stance, because it means “blowing out.” However, in truth things are more complicated. It might have been a world-denying concept, but basically it refers to the blowing out of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. Over centuries this concept was transformed in Tantric Buddhism to the idea that Nirvana is a purified, non-dualistic “superior mind,” unclouded by any dualistic perceptions. In Western occultism we now have the confused impression that the ideas of “Self” and “No Self” are somehow contrary, and certain so-called “LHP” adepts assume that the RHP traditions lead to “self-annihilation” and that the LHP traditions lead to a “preservation of the self.” Don Webb, an initiate of the Temple of Set, writes:

“Crowley believed that when one left the Adept Grade, one could either give up one’s ego or become a Babe of the Abyss, being at one with Nuit OR one could shut himself away from the universe and become a Black Brother, a follower of the Left Hand Path. These unfortunate SOBs were eventually destroyed by the universal tides acting upon them, much like stones being worn down by sea waves. We in the Left Hand Path (LHP) see this matter differently. If we didn’t we would scarcely have an interest in the First Beast [the “Second Beast” being Aquino for Setians, my remark]. Crowley believed that the Master of the Temple obtained a true Union with the objective universe and by so doing could interpret any event in that universe as a communication from its meaningful and purposeful side. Ultimately one would realize the unity of spirit and matter, and the folly of believing one’s thoughts to be seperate from the Cosmos. Crowley saw himself as a teacher of the Right Hand Path.” (Webb 2005: Aleister Crowley – The Fire and the Force. p. 32)

This is just a terribly confused position (resulting from Descartes’ cogito ergo sum hypothesis, and Mr. Kepler’s and Newton’s destruction of the vinculum amoris, which I have mentioned above) that has no relation to any deeper or ancient Tradition, but is more or less a modern, neo-satanic myth that somehow developed between the antagonistic positions of Mme Blavatsky’s and LaVey’s (and his pupils’) occult ideas, who both got it all wrong, because the RHP’s and LHP’s goal is the same: the Unio Mystica, the sacred marriage of homo and deus. The aim is shared by both paths. What is different are their methodologies. The same confusion arises when Hinduistic and Buddhistic concepts are compared. Whilst Advaita Vedanta (Advaita means literally “non-duality”), a monistic school of Hindu philosophy, promotes the idea that the Self (Atman) and the Whole / “God” (Brahman) are identical, and thus presupposes a True Self, Buddhism describes exactly the same phenomenon, but calls this discovery No Self (Anātman), and thus presupposes an Emptiness (Suñyatā). The truth is that both, True Self and Emptiness, are descriptions of the same thing, but we less insightful seekers with not enough meditative experience get lost in concepts and conceptions. And, as so often, the truth gets lost in translation, too. We must keep in mind that these things are very very hard to grasp, and it’s even harder to put those experiences into words.

But to come back to Nuit: She, as a Goddess of Eternity, embodies these concepts of Ain Soph Aur and Nirvana in a beautiful and unique way, beyond words and reason. The HGA, then, is that kind of entity that tries to re-connect you with Her. Here the idea of Angels as intermediary beings, as the „messengers of God“, the Pleroma or Nous, must come from, I assume. For that concept to be of any use to a sane modern individual today, we need a very clear and grounded understanding of what the nature of that Angel is. It’s been stated by Crowley several times that he incorporated the notion of a Holy Guardian Angel into his system of magick, because he found it so ‘ridiculous’ that, he assumed, noone would ever confuse it with Angels in a literal sense, but look for the higher and deeper meaning of the necessity of that experience.

“The Holy Guardian Angel is everything you are not. It is other. It cannot be described, for if it could it would be part of you. The search for it is therefore not the search for a specified goal, but a great search for other. It is the search for some kind of metaphysical experience and unity, bliss and joy. As you grow and your knowledge increases ; so the Holy Guardian Angel changes, leading you further along the path into the unknown. The magician is aiming to establish a set of ideas and images that correspond with the nature of his genius, and at the same time receive inspiration from that source. It is your purpose in existing. It is what you are here for, it is why you chose to incarnate at this time, in this place. Its goals become your goals, it cares about what you do and wants you to achieve them. To ally your desires with its desires is to enter into a divine communication … .” (Humphries & Vayne 2004: Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick, p. 141)

This idea has totally seeped into my Life a long time ago and it is connected to my deep drive to re-connect with the Divine, a hidden, deeper reality that lurks behind the outer forms of the visible, measurable world. It was exactly this mystical fire that burned in my heart, when I entered the magical path. It was just later that I came to know that such concepts as sigils, magical power, and in some contexts the exaltation of the ego, are part of what is called magick. It’s the mystic’s passion that pushes me forward on my magickal journey that I identify as the main purpose of my Life. But Life and Magick are the same, “and both can only be about a spiritual journey, a path towards a Re-Union with a Supreme Creator, with God, with the Divine.” (Genesis P-Orridge) Even if I do consider the idea of a “Creator” as an utterly useless concept that is unnecessary in my understanding of the Divine, and even if the concept of “God” sounds heavily Christian or monotheistic, it’s always been clear for me why I have entered the magical arena: to re-unite with the source of All. Nothing else is serious. And that source of all is No-Thing or Nuit , “the Boundless Light,” as modern qabalists put it. In this sense I consider the modern, neo-satanic conceptions of the LHP with their notion “Preserve the self at all costs! Resist the evil mystics!“ rather misleadinging. I do not believe that this mystical process known as Coincidentia oppositorum (“coincidence of opposites”) leads to “self-annihilation” as Aquino and other promoters of that modern form of the “LHP” formulated it. The principle of the “uniting of opposites” is an ancient one and constitutes a fundamental element of what Aldous Huxley baptized Perennial Philosophy. The experience of the Coincidentia oppositorum was used in describing an alchemical process, to be exact, its fourth stage, rubedo (“reddening”): the unification of man with God. In Thelemic mysticism this is the unification of the limited (individual consciousness), or Hadit, with the unlimited (cosmic consciousness), or Nuit , ”the Boundless Light.” In this regard the mystical experience can be seen as a revelation of the oneness of things previously believed to be different. Such insight into the unity of things is an experience of a transcendent reality, a meta-level, the unus mundus, as described above. This level of being (actually transcending being and non-being) shouldn’t be regarded as “foreign” to magic, but as its fundament – the origin and aim of all magic – that helps us to explore the metaphysics of our practice. The experience of the coincidence of opposites is known in Germanic spirituality, albeit in its Christianized version. It can be found in various descriptions of German mystics that constitutes a religious current known as German or Rhineland mysticism, which was a late medieval Christian mystical movement, that was especially prominent within the Dominican order and in Germany. Although its origins can be traced back to Hildegard von Bingen, it is mostly represented by Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, Rulman Merswin and Margaretha Ebner, and the Friends of God (“Gottesfreunde”). Actually this “golden thread” (Jocelyn Godwin) can be traced back to magico-mystical traditions all over the world. The idea occurs also in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism. These mystical features are shared by the esoteric teachings of many religions. They do not seem to be just bizarre or irrelevent products of the fantasies of certain religious enthusiasts, but rather the lived and embodied knowledge of each religion that is central to its thorough understanding.

“Just as previously our deficient understanding of Christianity has been corrected by considering mysticism and such figures as Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross and our understanding of Judaism has been corrected by the study of the Kabbalah and such figures as Isaac Luria, so our understanding of Hinduism will be revised when Tantrism and its key historical figures are given appropriate scholarly attention. Issues and individuals that were once considered bizarre or irrelevant must now be considered essential; without them our understanding is not merely intellectually impoverished but historically negligent.” (Douglas Renfrew Brooks 1990: The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta Tantrism, p. ix)

In the same way it is true that our understanding of Islam will be transformed, when Sufism is taken into account. These essential, dare I say, eternal truths, are also known in the various Tantric schools of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, and in Daoism. Already in my teenage years I was aware of the significance of the mystical experience on the magical path, even if in an overtly romantic and “psychedelicized” way. This might be the reason, why in the beginning I didn’t understand what the point of Chaos Magic (CM) is, with their emphasis on “results” and why LaVeyean Satanism made me only shake my head in disgust or shrug my shoulders in apathy. The “old” systems of Western Magic (the Golden Dawn-style approach developed in the 19th century), then again, seem to loose themselves in table of correspondences and intellectual exercises for climbing up “Jacob’s Ladder” towards abstract conceptions of the Divine. (Though I know an initiate of the G.’.D.’. who is the living proof that these approaches still work and are valid today.) This is why the Chaos approach popularised by Pete Carroll became necessary and why the chaotes developed such a rigorous, “technocratic” approach to magic, where results are of main interest, not mystical mumbo-jumbo and cosmic foo-foo (with which New Age became obsessed in an unhealthy way). Over the years / decades some chaos magicians became drawn towards mystical experiences, despite Carroll’s exclusion of mysticism in the CM Current. This can be explained rather easily from my point of view. It’s because magic and mysticism are connected in profound ways. They are two sides of the same coin. If you exclude one from the other you do so at your own peril. It seems that the accumulation of gnoses, of many altered states of consciousness, leads to a mystical longing in a magician.

“Repeated experience of higher states of consciousness eventually leads to some experience of the core paradox of individual being. The mind starts asking questions like: Why don’t I always feel this ecstatic? Why don’t we just get ecstatic when we finished our day’s work? What is the origin of individual consciousness? Why does the ego keep wittering on in its tedious internal monologues of past-oriented identity, and what can I do about it? How can I get to an unconditioned mind? The occasional extra bit of money, sex, personal power and healing no longer satisfy; everything is muddied by the taste of the ego. Transformation and ecstasy become urgent.” (Dave Lee 2006 [1997]: Chaotopia!, p. 151)

The Self in Ecstasy, by Austin Osman Spare

The Genius of the chaos-mystical stance is to me that all descriptions of these higher states of consciousness (all these Nirvanas, Ain Soph Aurs, Nuits, Pleromas, Shunyatas, Gods, Holy Ghosts asf.) are regarded as descriptions or “maps” invented or developed by other psychonauts, who made their journeys to the hidden chambers of the Soul before us (mystics, tantrics, yogis, senseis, magi, gurus, enlightened teachers asf.). And their “maps” are not the “territory” itself. A chaos mystic does not accept any theories about enlightenment, immortality, eternal bliss and “Big Daddy up there.” These are all theories. There are then two types of seekers if you like: those “working from a top-down / theoretical perspective (presumably because the reports they read resonate with some deep part of their own experience) and those who need to proceed from bottom up, proving the reality of the stages of higher consciousness to themselves at each stage, without assuming a pre-determined endpoint of enlightenment.“ (Dave Lee) To me this is the true difference between a LHP and a RHP initiate, if we still consider these categories to be useful. Well, I do. To me the LHP magician really is the seeker who goes out and looks for himself what is behind the curtain and afterwards develops his own psychocosm, psychogeography and magico-mystical system. In this sense I still agree with the definition of the LHP I have given in my first post one and a half year ago, namely that the best definition of the LHP to me is that one does not follow anyone or any fixed routes to enlightenment, but rather that one follows one’s own path. The Chaotick Path makes more sense. Amen.

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You Are Not Elite

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.

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Death is not an end

This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. (AL I, 30)  The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect and not two; nay, are none!  Nothing is a secret key of this law. (AL I, 45 – 46)

In the centre of the cosmos there is no throne, but the sound of thunder! (Hubert Veðrfölnir)

Life behaves as if it were going on. The universe behaves as if Gods exist. The Psyche is not bound by the laws of time and space…

“I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.

In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.

CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.

Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous. Only figuratively, therefore, do I speak of created being as part of the pleroma. Because, actually, the pleroma is nowhere divided, since it is nothingness. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point (assumed only, not existing) in us and the boundless firmanent about us. But wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus everything and nothing?

I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative. That alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change.

What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore is it the one thing which is fixed and certain; because it hath qualities: it is even quality itself.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura: since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctivness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Wherefore also he distinguished qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore he must speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not.

What use, say ye, to speak of it? Saidst thou not thyself, there is no profit in thinking upon the pleroma?

That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the pleroma. When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. But we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities.

What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistictiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature.

We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as:

The Effective and the ineffective.
Fullness and Emptiness.
Living and Dead.
Difference and Sameness.
Light and Darkness.
The Hot and the Cold.
Force and Matter.
Time and Space.
Good and Evil.
Beauty and Ugliness.
The One and the Many.

The pairs of opposites are qualities of the pleroma which are not, because each balanceth each. As we are the pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us. Because the very ground of our nature is distinctiveness, which meaneth:

  1. These qualities are distinct and separate in us one from the other; therefore they are not balanced and void, but are effective. Thus are we the victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.
  1. The qualities belong to the pleroma, and only in the name and sign of distinctiveness can and must we possess and live them. We must distinguish ourselves from qualities. In the pleroma they are balanced and void; in us not. Being distinguished from them delivereth us.

When we strive after the good or the beautiful, we thereby forget our own nature, which is disinctiveness, and we are delivered over to the qualities of the pleroma, which are pairs of opposites. We labor to attain the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and the ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely, into nothingness and dissolution.

Thou sayest, ye object, that difference and sameness are also qualities of the pleroma. How would it be, then, if we strive after difference? Are we, in so doing, not true to our own nature? And must we none the less be given over to the sameness when we strive after difference?

Ye must not forget that the pleroma hath no qualities. We create them through thinking. If, therefore, ye strive after difference or sameness, or any qualities whatsoever, ye pursue thoughts which flow to you out of the pleroma: thoughts, namely, concerning non-existing qualities of the pleroma. Inasmuch as ye run after these thoughts, ye fall again into the pleroma, and reach difference and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. If ye had this striving ye would not need to know anything about the pleroma and its qualities, and yet would ye come to your right goal by virtue of your own being. Since, however, thought estrangeth from being, that knowledge must I teach you wherewith ye may be able to hold your thought in leash. … God is not dead; he is as much alive as ever. God is the created world, inasmuch as he is something definite and therefore he is differentiated from the Pleroma. God is a quality of the Pleroma and everything that I have stated in reference to the created world is equally true of him.

God is distinguished from the created world, however, inasmuch as he is less definite and less definable than the created world in general. He is less differentiated than the created world, because the ground of his being is effective fullness; and only to the extent that he is definite and differentiated is he identical with the created world; and thus he is the manifestation of the effective fullness of the Pleroma.

Everything that we do not differentiate falls into the Pleroma and is cancelled out along with its opposite. Therefore if we do not discern God, then the effective fullness is cancelled out for us. God also is himself the Pleroma, even as every smallest point within the created world, as well as within the uncreated realm, is itself of the Pleroma.

The effective emptiness is the being of the Devil. God and Devil are the first manifestations of the nothingness, which we call the Pleroma. It does not matter whether the Pleroma is or is not, for it cancels itself out in all things. The created world, however, is different. Inasmuch as God and Devil are created beings, they do not cancel each other out, rather they stand against each other as active opposites. We need no proof of their being ; it is sufficient that we must always speak about them. Even if they did not exist, the created being would forever (because of its own differentiated nature) bring them for out of the Pleroma.

All things which are brought forth from the Pleroma by differentiation are pairs of opposites; therefore God always has with him the Devil.

This interrelationship is so close, as you have learned, it is so indissoluble in your own lives, that it is even as the Pleroma itself. The reason for this is that these two stand very close to the Pleroma, in which all opposites are cancelled out and unified.” (C. G. Jung 1916: The Seven Sermons to the Dead)

Listen to the message of a modern prophet: Carl Gustav Jung.

There can be many reasons and triggers that can wake you up — wake you up to that kind of awareness, where the higher and hidden levels of the spectrum of human consciousness are experienced. I can remember a week some years ago, when I fasted for five days (no food at all, but much water and juice) and I meditated a lot and did other spiritual excercises from Crowley’s curriculum. And in one moment I realized my mind was so clear that I thought to myself: “How can life be any different again? It’s so easy to attain such a clear mind. I will never loose it again.” Believe me, it’s easier to fall asleep than to wake up again. The mind is such a tricky and sneaky thing! I guess nothing is easier than to travel the road of life asleep until one dies. Hence the need for a spiritual discipline. Nothing else helps. I tried it. Pills, thrills, drills and stuff that kills. But only slow and steady wins the race. Not the extreme and radical, but the golden middle. Neither this master nor that teaching, neither this order nor that secret ritual, neither this drug nor that technique. All that is needed is Here, all the that you have is the Now, the only one who can do the Work is you. “Who is the Great Master that makes the grass green?” You, the silent Watcher, you, the Ultimate Observer.

However, some times are special, when we feel that Wyrd leads us and just everything falls into place. Such times are often characterized by unusual events, books you find or get, people you meet, things you discover, music you hear and all kinds of weird / wyrd synchronicities.

There are many songs I remember that influenced me during that time of sheer beauty and madness. (Literally one friend of mine later had a psychosis, because the things we were experiencing and ‘consuming’ were just too much and too heavy.) Two songs I remember vividly and still love are Fokstua Hall and Svartálfar by Fire + Ice (like many other songs by this magical band) and now I found out that Sweyn has written these two songs! Things like that are magical, meaningful and empowering on a personal level, because it gives one’s life a direction and purpose. They confirm on a personal level that you were and are on the right track.

The Inmost Light and This Shining Shining World (read the text below) are my favourite songs by the band Current 93, a band that was also very important on my path for some time. This Shining Shining World kind of ‘converted’ me with the help of magic mushrooms and the Tibetan Book of the Dead from nihilism to the beauty and awe of Mystery. And thus I broke on through to the other side that greeted me behind the dead end of existentialism, which I thought (in my youthful arrogance and ignorance at age 15) was the last answer to all questions. But since I could gaze at the spinning of the Wyrd Sisters on “the other side” (or behind the curtain and beneath the obvious) I decided to open up to the possibility of magic and pantheism. To put it rather roughly: I concluded that we may be — maybe — more than a chunk of meat. Since then my interest for mysticism and the Occult became a vital part of my life. I came to know, rather than to believe (like Mr. Jung, listen to his words above), that we are more than we seem. The idea that there are secrets which are eternal mysteries — that is what I am interested in. And I am still going. Still seeking…

(In this process after having been a member of a rather known occult franternity I came to be opposed to so-called occultism, because the occultists assert that there are secrets, but what they think of as mysteries are rather conventional things that I now put in my pocket. These people just make any arbitrary thing a secret and simply conceal it from you for the sake of keeping it a secret to manipulate people or to simply create a commodity and they will tell you that these “secrets” can only be revealed to you if you become a member of this group, read this book or do something along those lines. This is utter nonsense. True mystery does not belong to anyone nor can it be taught, shown, revealed or attained.)

However, since then I was touched by the Ansuz flame. And I remember that when I had my second trip and looked through the Looking-Glass I did my first Staða of Dagaz — my absolutely most beloved Rune and the central mystery of a certain God, who is said to be a great Poet, Magician and Master of ecstatic Consciousness.

“But to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. … Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!” (AL I, 61).

Since then I had only one sincere wish: to seek for spiritual liberation. Sounds naive, probably. But who doesn’t want to be free? Free from what, one is inclined to ask? Freedom is a myth, the Buddhist Master and Tantric teacher of “Crazy Wisdom”, Chögyam Trungpa, once said (in: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism). By showing, in true Buddhist fashion, the interdependence of everything that exists, the dependence of any thing on some other thing is demonstrated (pratītyasamutpāda = „dependent origination“), including the ego, resulting in the realization that all things are ‘void’ or empty of any characteristic. So freedom in the way the usual Westerner imagines it doesn’t exist according to the philosophy of Shunyata (“Emptiness”), invented by the Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna (c. 150 – 250 CE). Though I’ve always been humbled and fascinated by Buddhist philosophy (not knowing a lot about it), I reject its world- and life-denying implications. That’s why I’m mostly interested in the Left-Hand Path manifestations of Tantric Buddhism and of the manifold sects (used here in a positive sense) of the complex religious phenomenon in India that the British colonials called rather unimaginatively “Hinduism”. Already Crowley observed:

“The essence of the Tantric cults is that by performance of certain rites of Magick, one does not only escape disaster, but obtains positive benediction. The Tantric is not obsessed with the will-to die. … [H]e implicitly denies the proposition that existence is sorrow and he formulates the postulate … that means exist by which the universal sorrow … may be unmasked.” (Crowley, in: Grant 1991 [1971]: The Magical Revival)

So freedom for an orthodox Buddhist or a Gnostic was reached when they were freed in a state of bliss (Nirvana or Heaven), delivered “from the body of Death” (Saint Paul). For a Tantric (spiritual) freedom was already here, for those who were strong, determined and courageous enough to grasp it. It is reached by developing what the chaos magician Julian Wilde once called Vajra Awareness. My brother and me had lastly a conversation and we were talking about god(s), the world(s) and all that stuff and then I misheard what he said, when a car drove by. And what I heard was: “In the centre of the cosmos there is no throne, but the sound of thunder!” Kaos Keraunos Kybernetosthe: The Chaos Thunderbolt Steers All Things. To hear the thunder and the silence at once, to see with the all-pentrating eye of the true nature of the mind, it is necessary to reach vajra awareness:


“The first necessary (and much misunderstood) stance is the need to remain ‘centred’, self-aware, to retain one’s ‘spirit’, … to seek an uninterrupted stream of consciousness/awareness whatever may happen, be it calamity, death or rebirth/becomings. It is a channelling process/tendency, an identification of the self as separate/disengaged from the rest of the universe.

The second is the need to transcend the human view-point, to realise the narrowness, arrogance and ultimate impotence of one’s present perception and to seek a re-alignment of one’s will/vision to that of the universe/void/chaos flow. It is a diffusing process, an identification with something larger than the human perspective (that can, unchecked or abused, lead to false bliss, a nirvanic torpor, a capitulation of drive/energy).

Held/practised together these two polar opposites create a third, highest stance. As usual the tantrists have a word for it. The word ‘vajra’ or ‘dorje’ can either mean a diamond ie- that which is compact/focused, symmetrical/crystalised, unbreakable, immutable, untarnishable (part of the drive to eros/control, order, possession) or a thunderbolt ie- that which is frightening, all-powerful, ego-destructive, disintegrating (part of the drive to thanatos/disorder, ego-death). ‘Vajra’ therefore may also be held to mean both stances (diamond-eros and thunderbolt-thanatos) together/simultaneously. This captures nicely the feel of the third stance so let us call it the vajra-awareness. As a bolt of lightning (the thunderbolt) strikes the earth, swift, random, brilliant (ILLUMINATING!), so too must the vajra-awareness be instantly in response, cultivated to be active/reactive to changing emotional states, rebirths, disasters and environments, being one with the lightning, being the lightning, flowing at one with all but retaining the diamond-hard yet infinitely flexible self-ness in the midst of conditions, manifestaions and becomings. The vajra-awareness is what it touches yet it retains its self-ness, wherever it alights there is totality and purity, where it is not are ignorance and eventual suffering.

The vajra-awareness, then is a conscious integration/inter-action with all that is – an eternal balance between self-knowing/posession and immersion in the ceaseless flux of the universe.“ (Julian Wilde 1999: The Grimoire of Chaos Magick)

This is what has to be done. One of the most important tasks of that Great Work is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. In terms of Germanic Soul-Lore this part of the Magician’s Psyche is called the Fylgja or Fetch. It can be contacted by certain methodologies like this one. The relationship to that entity (HGA, Augoides, Dæmon, Genius, “Totem”, Deep Mind or Fylgja) is a vital part of one’s initiatory process. The HGA / Fylgja is often thought of as a non-human intelligence or a seperate being that carries in it all the ancestors’ pasts and holds the individual’s fate.

“As to why such a relationship is vital to cultivate, even in early stages of one’s Rune Work, that’s perhaps easier.  I’d say that the idea of the complex, multifaceted Self — the plural Soul — is one that is absolutely key to deep understanding of and practical work with the Northern Mysteries (and Indo-European mysticism in general). It’s also one of the ideas that has been most thoroughly abolished from the modern, materialist concept of the self.  We clearly yearn for it though, and it consistently emerges in pop culture and fantasy literature (think of the daemons in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and I’m sure other examples will come to light).  It is a very difficult task to learn to think of ‘One’s Selves’ rather than ‘Oneself,’ but when we can do so, we come to know, rather than to believe, that we are more than we seem.  And we move farther and faster along the road of personal transformation in the Germanic Tradition.” (Ristandi)

Such a transpersonal guide is hidden in the soul-complex and to be discovered by those who travel along the Runic pathways that lead down, around and up the Tree. This part of the Soul is non-local in the sense of quantum mind. To say it more accurately: it’s here in Midgard and there in Asgard simultaneously — the ‘Realm’ of Awakened Consciousness that might be (according to “metaphysics of ‘substance'”) / do (according to “all things flow”-process philosophy) in non-local ‘hyper-space’ beyond time, connected with the other eight worlds of the map of the multiverse, f.e. as represented by the Chaos Star (the multi-directional expansion of consciousness from a central still-point). Um mik ok í mér Ásgarðr ok Miðgarðr! From the point of view of the Germanic Soul-Lore, that C. G. Jung helped to dig up, this entity, the Fylgja, does not die because it already exists in an eternal dimension not bound by the laws of time and space, like Jung already suggested. And, apparently, most cosmological and psychological maps, especially those influenced by shamanic lore, implied something along those lines. Michael Kelly, who worked a lot with the Celtic soul model, says:

“We may now gain a perspective on what may cause an active shade or ghost to linger, if an attachment is still felt toward a loved one who embodied the deceased’s Other on the physical plane. But as I considered the soul in the context of Desire, I realised that the féin does not pass from this world into the magical realms upon physical death. Why not? Because it is already there and it always has been. The sense of Self is not and has never been bound to the physical body. Even in the most dull and unimaginative of people, it indulges in daydreams, it dreams while the body sleeps and it creates new worlds within the imagination. The féin resides permanently in the magical realms and it interfaces with the physical body through the other parts of the soul that we have described. Upon death, it draws several of those parts back to itself to one degree or another.”(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis)

In Sweyn Plowright’s book True Helm Ian Read puts forth the idea (in the foreword) that upon following the guidelines in this book “you may create such a strong being (that we call hamingja) and may even, upon death, join those greatest warriors … in Valhalla.”  Ultimately, I come to understand it in such a way that the Hamingja — the life force and soul power of the magician — may become so strong in the process of individuation that even upon death it will survive.

“But exceed! exceed! Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine — and doubt it not, and if thou art ever joyous! — death is the crown of all. Ah! Ah! Death! Death! thou shalt long for death. Death is forbidden, o man, unto thee. The length of thy longing shall be the strength of its glory. He that lives long & desires death much is ever the King among the Kings.” (AL II, 71 – 74)

So, from a Germanic point of view, the Fylgja (unique to an individual, but nevertheless completely independent of him / her) and the Hamingja (later to become associated with one’s indwelling luck) are (semi-)autonomous ‘entities’ and yet portions of the individual’s psyche that are immune to physical death. What happens to the Self? Can it unite with the Fylgja and Hamingja? Does it continue to exist after death, like Kelly suggests in his Celtic soul model? Or is it rather an illusion as suggested in the teachings of Nagarjuna and as expressed in the idea of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination)? I don’t know, fellow traveler. It’a Mystery hidden in your Soul. Seek it!

“Consider the lillies of the field…” (Matt. 6: 28)
Consider the carnage and massacre
Consider the love and embraces
Consider the hangingred skies
Consider the pain of your enemy
Consider the hatred of your friend
There, oh there, there is the land
All the musics shall combine
All the daughters are no longer brought low
They are araised
In brightfiregodgiven they rejoice
And those who deny this world
Is the soul of the unbroken one
Lie
This is indeed Paradise
(Come I shall show you where
The stars give birth and sleep)
And all around you is the warm bluegreen breath of heavens
Do not fear
Around you is the vast blueblack space of stars
Do not fear
This is the great ocean
On which the endless waves crash down
God is not dead
There is no death I say
(Come I shall show you where
Dreams go to when they die)
Hurry now; the sun is descending
The shadows wait to play

Current 93, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre — The Broken Heart Of Man (1994)

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The Antichrist

Having read those words I had to share them. Of course, I could quote whole books from this greatest of all German philosophers. Nietzsche had his flaws. Every philosopher has. There have been many thinkers who said things of importance. But only a few have the courage, the strength, the fearless honesty, the fire and the force, the will and the stamina to ask of the truth whether it brings profit or a fatality to him… But there are truths and there is Truth. Find out for yourself, if you are a Hyperborean. And don’t forget: “Your karma is your Dogma.” (Dr. Hyatt)

Taken from “The Antichrist”, by Friedrich Nietzsche (of course Nietzsche in English will never equal Nietzsche in German, but you still get the spirit):

“This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my “Zarathustra”: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?–First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me–I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops–and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him… He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner–to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm…Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self…..

Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?–The rest are merely humanity.–One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,–in contempt.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE.

1.

–Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans–we know well enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar1,in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death–our life, our happiness…We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?–The man of today?–“I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in”–so sighs the man of today…This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,–we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate–it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation” . . . There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast–for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal…

2.

What is good?–All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?–All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness?–The feeling that power increases–that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the ill-consituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.
What is more harmful than any vice?–Practiced sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak–Christianity…

3.

The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (–man is an end–): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors ;–and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man–the Christian. . .

4.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This “progress” is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

5.

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts–the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!–

6.

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used–and I wish to emphasize the fact again–without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”–and it is possible that I’ll have to write it–would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will–that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.”

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The Mystical ‘Not’

“Not [the word as such], in this case, represents Crowley’s Qabalistic Zero, defined as 0=2. It is the Fool of the Tarot. It is a condition of Being unbound and unfettered, utterly outside of time and space. Thus it is not part of the Universe as we Understand it, it is the Absolute … It can be given no coherent definition, hence it is No-Thing, Nothing. It is every potential and possibility which we have within ourselves but have not yet made manifest. Thus it is all that … implies the omnijective perspective. … [W]e ourselves contain this Absolute and are Nothing, for we our Essence is not bound by the Universe.

‘There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not’ — The declaration taken as a whole has two meanings, one obvious and one esoteric:

1. All of time and space, i.e. eternity and infinity, is imprinted with your presence and influence.

2. There exists a timeless Void in which you are All-Potential.”

(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis, p.172/3)

 


“And if all things come from One Thing, then send your prayers to the Sun.” Boyd Rice


Everything is one, when 0=2, I pondered once, when I first grasped Crowley’s idea of the mystical Nothing, Zero or the Tarot trump The Fool. I remember that realization very vividly. My friend Henrik and me were on a trip, on shroooms, in the woods and he quoted a sentence from a Current 93 song: “Nothing shall fresh spring again.” And I said: “Isn’t that rather heavily pessimistic?” And he went: “No, don’t you get it? It’s about Nothing of which All springs.” Well, I’m quiet sure that the band was talking about apocalyptic visions and meant literally what they said. But with an overdose of Crowley and magic mushrooms things can connect quiet differently in your brain. However, it’s also encoded in the Qabalistic Ain and I think it’s behind the Germanic idea of the “magically charged Void”, Ginnungagap. The equation of the mystic then might be 2=0, changing duality into No-Thing, uniting duality, transcending the whole show (of duality and thus illusion), as it were, by returning to the source of all, to the primordial state of being (or non-being?). God to some (monists and monotheists), shunyata (’emptiness’) to others (Buddhists). In Qabalistic terms it means to return to the Abode of the Nous, the higher triad of the Tree of Life (‘City of the Pyramids’), where the spiritual world, the Real, which is ideal, is seperated from the material one, the Unreal, which is actual (in neo-platonic thought). Hence the world-denying tendency in mystical currents (not all currents). The magician, in turn, plays with duality, with Maya, with Ginnung, or Chaos — an undifferentiated ether that longs to be formed into substance by the will of the magician. (Of course, this division between the mystic and the magician is arbitrary and unnecessary.)

“Ginnung or Ginning becomes a word for ‘delusion’ at a certain point in Old Norse. One of the sections of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson is called the Gylfa-ginning, usually translated Gylfi’s Delusion. But in the Rig Veda we see that Maya is the creative power wielded by Varuna, who with his pashas [bonds] can bind or loosen, destroy or create anything he can imagine. In both cases what we are dealing with is the idea that this is ‘powerful stuff — and power can equal mortal danger. In essence Ginnung is the undifferentiated energy/matter which preexists creation, and which underlies the forms of all phenomena. What had been ‘magical power’ to the trained elite, became ‘bad ju-ju’ as its practices drifted down to the masses. The amount of training and discipline necessary to wield Ginnung in a reliable way is so great that the vast majority of humanity, when they try to ‘use’ it, simply end up confusing themselves and devolving into a morass of illusion. Hence the use of the substance becomes more or less taboo.” (Edred Thorsson)

This is an interesting explanation of what this ‘stuff of Chaos’, this Ether, Maya or Ginning might be. Anyway, when I began to write this article today I thought of writing a short persiflage of the Lord’s Prayer, using the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but my poem, including the whole article, turned into something completely different and took a strange direction in the last few hours. It’s rather weird to write poetry in your non-native language, similar to playing an instrument you can’t play. But also, it opens new angles and one can use words differently, create word-plays that don’t exist in one’s own language and new meanings emerge. That’s one of the many reasons why learning Old Norse will be very rewarding to any true Runer, I guess. And why learning new languages in general is a rewarding activity. “To learn another language is to possess another soul”, said Karl the Frank. After the poem I quote one of my absolute favourite passages from Hakim Bey’s famous Temporary Autonomous Zone that puts his idea of ontological anarchism across. He was also, like some of our contributors, inspired by Sufism.


The Mystical (K)Not

Primal Chaos — permeating Heaven and Hell,
Shape wisdom erupting from Urðr‘s Well,
As above, so below,
Eternal Mystery I strive to know.

Eagle King, spread thy wings,
Thou art the Shaper of all things,
Thou who art No-Thing and have no Name,
Inventor and Player of the Master Game,
Thy Intelligence come, thy Word be done,
I am thy Son of the the Black Sun.

Let feverish dreams rain down from the skies,
Teaching false truths and true lies,
Give us frenzy, make us divine or insane,
Push us to change ourSelves and to unchain
us from false divisions and Single Vision.

Lead us into temptation with Her — Runa,
I came to court Her, She’s my Fortuna.
And deliver us from mere Beliefs,
They are for priests and other thieves.

Death is the Warrior’s Wife and ultimate Bliss
The bloody Knife and the Valkyrie’s kiss,
And Life is Power, Beauty and Desire
We are the Dragon’s Eye, arosen from Fire.

For thine is Intelligent Chaos and Noetic Gnosis,
I don’t care, if you teach by thorns or by roses,
Thou art God’s Golden Shower
Magic is Love and Will to Power,
Thy Glory is the Cosmos’ Story
Of the Eternal Copulation of Kia and Zos,
Pulsating in Dagaz and the Elhaz Cross!

Blessed be their Child that dances and sees
Eternal Forms ascending in Ecstasies.
With formless Fire I create from mud,
I know I’m drunk on Kvasir’s blood.
Thou exhaled wisdom and divinity,
Now I bathe in thy Eternity,
For what is Thine is also Mine,
I Am as Thee and thou Art as Me.

Thou gave me Life-Breath, thou gave me Form,
Holy Madness pours from thy Horm,
Thou art the violent, upcoming storm
That tears all apart to again be reborn.

And to grow and to dance and to love and to fight
To rise in thy Might, seek for Darkness and Light
Is to love Mystery and to wear Her Sign
Man’s  incomplete, but man is Divine,
Do not fear, Eternity is here,
The only crime is not to notice Her,
And I think to myself, lying dead on the floor
Oh Life, oh Death, you are but one Door
Man cannot cut this Gordion Knot
There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not


Hakim Bey, ontological anarchist and prophet of Chaos

“CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin–your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age–shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they’d call it an act of terrorism–so let’s take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.”

Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.


 

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Believing In…

I have always found the term “to believe in” rather annoying. I will try to analyse why.

Firstly, there are so many ways this term is generally understood. To believe in a principle or cause, is to have confidence in its value to society. To believe in an individual, is to have confidence in their ability to be successful in some way. To believe in X, is to have confidence that X is literally true or real, no matter what the evidence may indicate. It is this last sense that is most troubling, although many religious folk define religion by all three.

But is religion really about “believing in”? Certainly for Christianity, and Islam, this is the case. In our long domination by this influence, most Westerners define religion as something you believe in. More than that, it requires the third mode of belief, as faith in the literal truth of unprovable statements. I would contend that this view of religion is highly limiting, not at all universal, and somewhat dangerous.

For the majority of religions, belief has always been secondary. Individuals within a society tend to share similar beliefs, but it was never an explicit requirement for participants in most religions to believe in particular unprovable things. Most religions are more about celebration, symbolism, and social cohesion. The Abrahamic religions are unusual in requiring a belief in the unprovable. This view of religion as belief has unfortunately influenced many other religions that have, over time, become more inclined to place more importance on belief.

The negative consequences of belief-based religion are manifest. The requirement to “believe in” unprovable propositions opens the door to interpretations of those propositions, and the concepts of heresy, and blasphemy. These are essentially “thought crimes” historically, and in some countries still, punishable by death. Even where there are no longer official punishments, the questioning of orthodoxy is often met with social sanctions and even physical abuse.

Less extreme, but perhaps more destructive in the long run, is the tendency of those reliant upon revealed belief to ignore evidence-based knowledge. Denial is the most common position of religious and political groups who find some truths inconvenient to their cherished beliefs. Climate change denial, evolution denial, and holocaust denial, are just a few examples. These groups are not skeptics in the sense of being undecided and requiring more evidence. They have a predefined position, and are selective in their acceptance only of evidence that seems to support their beliefs. They create and exploit public confusion, delaying urgent action, or casting doubt and suspicion on the legitimate pursuit of knowledge.

A more insidious consequence of stressing belief in the unprovable, is that it is a short step to enforcing belief in the demonstrably false. Fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, and other religious cults discovered the power of coercive psychological techniques long before they were adopted by communist re-educators, or described in George Orwell’s “1984”. By immersing people in an environment where unquestioning belief and obedience are required, individual conscience and rationality can be suppressed. Cult survivors are often horrified at how easily they were lead into actions and ideas that were totally out of character.

It may be useful here to define the difference between a sect and a cult. A sect is merely a subgroup of a religion that may have unusual ideas, and may have intense hostility toward other sects, but is not necessarily a cult. A cult is a group, religious or otherwise, that uses coercive psychological techniques to control its members’ actions and beliefs.

The signs of cult behaviour in a group usually include; an authoritarian leadership, often with outlandishly grandiose titles, a hierarchical structure where promotion and status are rewards for adherence to the dictates of the leadership, psychological isolation of members from the wider world, often reinforced with physical isolation and a degree of paranoia, the insistence that members are special or better than the outside community, and particularly the enforcement of belief in unprovable dogmas involving punishments for doubt or questioning.

The key to getting a cult to work is the control of belief. This is most easily achieved if it is done in stages. Once the members have modified their beliefs sufficiently far from reality, they lose their ability to discern the difference between truth and fiction, or between what they would previously have seen intuitively as right or wrong. The process can produce profound changes in an individual’s behaviour, and lasting psychological damage.

By overstating the importance of “believing in” things, Western culture has really set itself up for the proliferation of cults. In the Islamic world religious cults are less tolerated, but belief can still be politicised and turned toward extremism.

The only antidote to our susceptibility to cults, is to stop defining religion as “believing in..”. Define it as a practice, a philosophy of life, a way of communing with the Universe, a tradition. Once we are free from the tyranny of “believing in”, we are able to accept evidence-based knowledge, or reject misinformation, without fear or guilt.

The problem of belief seems to have polarised society, with rationalist atheists on one side, and superstitious religionists on the other. In reality, there is a silent majority of rational and quietly religious folk, as there always has been. Many of the divisions and problems of religion and society would vanish if we just stopped “believing in …”.

Recommended Reading

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China by Robert Jay Lifton

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

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