Squatting the Chapel Perilous 2

"Here's to Waste !" Tarr announced loudly to the two waiters in front of the table. "Waste, waste; fling out into the streets: accept fools, compromise yourselves with the poor in spirit, it will all come in handy! Live like the lions in the forests with fleas on your back. Above all, down with the Efficient Chimpanzee ! "
-- Tarr (1928), Wyndham Lewis

1922, year one of the Pound Era, was also the year that James Joyce, with the immense aid of his editor Ezra Pound, published Ulysses. The themes and literary/historical allusions of Ulysses and The Waste Land are so interwoven, so mutually reflecting, that many commentators accuse Eliot of outright plagiarism. Joyce himself in a letter wrote a short parody of Eliot's poem.

But we shall have great times,
When we return to Clinic, that waste land
O Esculapios!
    (Shan't we? Shan't we? Shan't we?) 

And while Joyce played with this -- Eliot is one facet of the compound character of Shawn the Forger in the Wake -- he never made any formal accusations against the poet. A more interesting thesis is that Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and likely Yeats and others were in full cahoots, all consciously involved in advancing a certain agenda. In Jessie Weston's terms, they were forces and agents of evolution.

Dublin, on June 16th, 1904, is also portrayed in Ulysses as being a waste land. It is not until the the thunder claps, halfway through the book, that the long anxious wait for the summer rain is interrupted. This thunder is also heard in part five of The Waste Land, "What the thunder said." A single violent blast is heard three times: "DA."



In his notes, Eliot explains that this anecdote is taken from part 6 of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad. The story goes that (in Eliot's order) men, the Devas (gods), and the Asuras (demons) each interpreted the terrible syllable of the primal thunder as the wisdom they respectively most needed to hear.   

"Datta, dayadhvam, damyata" (Give, sympathise, control). 

In Ulysses, the coming of the Thunder and rain is followed by an incredible babble of voices, of styles of writing, and then by the complete breakdown of the conventional experience of space and time. This culminates, as I have written, in Stephen's shattering of the brothel's chandelier with his staff and the rupture into eternity -- "ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry." Pound describes the instant of rupture in a letter to his father:

The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidien into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc.

The voice of the thunder, then, conjures several things at once. It bestows a new, almost angelic or magical, language upon mortals, and simultaneously causes an incredible confusion of tongues, a complete breakdown in existing communication.



It is the combination, the overlay, of the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit first descended and granted the apostles the gift of tongues, and the fall of the Tower of Babel, the fourth fall after Lucifer, Adam and the Flood. Babel and Pentecost represent, respectively, the Fall and Redemption of language. The voice of the thunder reminds us that both are really simultaneous events. A gate or door that opens both ways.

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertoo-   
ryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.

It is within this electrically-charged clap of thunder, in the very thick of both confusion and grace, that we find ourselves. It is just before dawn of the third day, in the infinite space between collapse and renewal, between oblivion and utopia. It is as if we are hearing the command from the sky for the first time. Giambatista Vico, a major source for Joyce, arrives at the same story as the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, intuitively and in ignorance of the much older Indian scripture:

Thereupon a few giants, who must have been the most robust, and who were dispersed through the forests on the mountain heights where the strongest beasts have their dens, were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. [....T]hey pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus they began the natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder. --The New Science (1725)

Becoming first aware of the sky, in wonder, we learned generosity, compassion and self-control. These are lessons which we are being compelled to learn again. And, should we choose to listen, the voices can be heard from both the Overworld and the Underworld, from the gods or from the seers.  



Ulysses, being a literary metempsychosis of The Odyssey, also depicts a descent into Hades. Odysseus, as in the first Canto, descends to consult the seer, Tiresias. There is no obvious counterpart to Tiresias in Ulysses, but looking deeper we find that the threshold aspect of the blind prophet is shared by the mysterious "chap in the macintosh" in the "Hades" episode. This is a man who is unknown, both there and not there. According to critics like Nabakov, this man is none other than Joyce himself. So, to complete the equation, Joyce is Tiresias.

Tiresias (and I intend to write much more on this all-important figure) is central to the Waste Land. Admittedly central. Here is Eliot in his notes:

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

Tiresias, who had the unique opportunity of being both a man and a woman, was blinded by Hera for revealing to her divine husband, Zeus, that women enjoy far greater pleasure in lovemaking than men. Zeus in his compassion for Tiresias could not undo the spell of his wife, but he did grant him the gift of prophecy, of sight without sight.

The Duir Is Ajar

Many, including Robert Anton Wilson and even Joyce himself, have concluded that the nearly sightless author of Finnegans Wake also possessed prophetic vision. Was Joyce, as long as we are engaged in unhinged speculation, also blinded for revealing secrets of the hieros gamos, of hierogamy, to the uninitiated? And could this be another reason why Pound advised caution in his editing of Eliot's Waste Land?

There are several ways to approach the Wake as a prophetic text. One technique, which Joyce directly refers to in the Wake (insofar as he directly refers to anything!) is sortilege. This essentially consists of flipping through a major work, such as the Bible or Virgil's epic, and letting one's finger "randomly" fall upon a salient passage. This works very well with the Wake.

Another method to consult Joyce's oracle of the dark, however, is not as obvious, yet it has to do with the deliberate structure of his architectonic word cathedrals. The number of pages and the number of lines on each page of Joyce's books, it seems, were carefully considered and crafted. While Ulysses had several subsequent editions of varying page lengths, Joyce makes it clear that the original 732-page first edition was the most vital rendering. He refers to this first edition in the Wake:

...the cut and dry aks and wise 
form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but 
at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the pene- 
lopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than
seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso...

If the page numbers are significant then dates can be determined from them. The first time I saw this type of correlation is of page 111 of the Wake with Robert Anton Wilson's death on January 11th.

...peraw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the Jacobiters...

And if we can consult the Wake like this, as an oracle whose pages may correspond to specific dates, then what happens when we plug in, so to speak, extremely crucial dates like 9/11, one of the events that Green focuses on in his video?

There is no page 911 in the Wake -- it "ends" on page 628 -- but in Europe where Joyce was writing the Wake, 9/11 is written as 11/9. Accordingly, if anything is to be found it will be found on page 119.

Examining this page, there is nothing written there, seemingly, which could remotely be said to refer to 9/11. There is something, though, that stands out. Two sigla, part of Joyce's "scribbledehobble," are included on the page. A delta symbol is directly underneath an E with its three prongs pointing to the bottom of the page. The overturned E is HCE, the Mountain, just as the delta is ALP, the River.

If we view this pictogram with prophetic eyes, however -- with the perhaps crazed intention to allow the gods and ancestors to speak to us anew about our own time -- it is easy to squint and see a jet airplane flying towards a twin pair of towers in close proximity. The symbolism is really not that far from Joyce's.

A Delta Airlines flight, while not directly involved in the attacks, was also suspected of being hijacked and was ordered to land. The Towers, like the Mountain, are immobile and like HCE were brought crashing down by a fluid, feminine force traversing riverine courses in the sky.

There is one more notable element to this pictogram. Whether any of this was intentional or not, and it would stretch the bounds of the possible if it was, the delta and the E are not immediately adjacent on the page. They are separated by a lowercase d.

This d, in the present froth-mouthed analysis, is no randomly placed letter. It is the key to the whole glyph. D in the Old Irish alphabet, whose eighteen letters correspond to the eighteen chapters of Ulysses, is Duir, the Door. This is also the "DA" of the thunder, the portal -- "Lukkedoerendunandurra..." -- by which the will of the gods reach this Earth.

I've compared this previously to Da'at on the Tree of Life, the very barred gates of Paradise. Metaphorically, if in no other sense, and as Jake Kotze and others have long suggested, the jet that first hit the tower on 9/11 passed through a portal, a stargate, after which time and space were momentarily overthrown.



The wider context of this page surprisingly supports this interpretation. Page 119 is hugely significant for the entire Wake. The whole mystery may be unlocked here. In fact, this page is where the Tunc page of The Book of Kells is introduced, with the inference that it is a pictorial synecdoche of the entire Wake. In his Skeleton Key To Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell writes:

The reader of Finnegans Wake will not fail to recognize in this page something like a mute indication that here is the key to the entire puzzle: and he will be the more concerned to search its meaning when he reads Joyce's boast on page 298: "I've read your tunc's dismissage."

The Tunc page depicts Christ on the Cross between the two, likewise crucified, thieves. One thief ridicules Christ and the other asks for Christ to remember him, and for this request is promised Paradise. The entire cycle, also revealed in the serpentine, ouroboric border of the Tunc page, is present. One thief descends and one thief ascends as the veil is rent, the thunder claps and the towers fall. It is accomplished.

What is the city over the mountains   
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air   
Falling towers   
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria   
Vienna London    
Unreal -- The Waste Land

It would be crass to call any of this "predictive programming." Nothing clear is being programmed, and it is highly unlikely that Joyce or Eliot or The Book of Kells predicted 9/11. Nonetheless, it is there. Instead, contemplation of the prophetic shifts perception to sight beyond sight. Traumatic and singular events, planned or not, cause us to "bust thru." The door suddenly opens.



This sequence loops like a vinyl record skip -- the statically charged instant between the clap of thunder and the coming of the rain, the last days of the Waste Land. And, by taking on the outwardly blind eyes of the prophet, the signs are everywhere evident.

All Go Into The Dark

Alan Green's "Suicide Kings" was, on this occasion, the augur leading back into the desert. After reading Weston's From Ritual to Romance, I decided to reread Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Living in Japan, I do a lot of my reading on the train. One day, just as I was about to finish Heart of Darkness and begin reading Eliot, I decided on a whim, as I had the afternoon off, to watch Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. I got through the Conrad on the train and was just wrapping up The Waste Land in the theatre as the movie started.

I was truly not expecting much from this film at all, and I was actually only there because I wanted to see Interstellar before listening to the (very sadly defunct) Moon Room Cinema podcast on it by Mark LeClair and Alex Fulton. Not long into it, though, I realized that Nolan's largely mediocre film was exploring precisely the same themes as were haunting myself.

The central "character" of this film is a black hole. At one point it is described as "the literal heart of darkness." This got me sitting straight up in my seat. Even more cortex-crackling was the fact that, in a key scene, a "ghost" knocks a book by T.S. Eliot among others off a bookshelf. In my slobbering astonishment came the instant recollection that I had just finished reading Eliot's poetry.

Later, not believing my senses, I checked online to see if this actually occurred in the movie. A review from the Telegraph informed me that it was even more uncanny, more improbable, than I had imagined:

Coop has faith that his daughter Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy, and later, as an adult, by Jessica Chastain) is one of them. She’s troubled at night by strange shufflings from her bookcase – a ghost, she believes, and one with a flair for foreshadowing, given the way it pointedly knocks volumes by Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot off the shelf.

I had literally, without previously knowing anything about Interstellar, just completed reading works by both Conrad and Eliot immediately before watching the flicking film! How is this possible? What dream realm had I entered into? Had the "ghost" also decided to contact me?

Further digging on the web confirmed that Nolan was very consciously playing with these themes. In an interview he stated:

I imagined Doctor Mann a bit like from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” You have Kurtz, this character that you hear about. Everybody says, “Oh, he’s great. Maybe you’ll get to meet him.” I really love the idea for an audience to go, when they see him, “Oh, it’s Matt Damon. It’s going to be okay.”

Dr. Mann, a brilliant yet twisted scientist/explorer stationed on an uninhabited planet orbiting the black hole, was also Kurtz. All of the pieces snapped into place.

I in no way want to defend Interstellar as a great work of art, or even less so to affirm its very questionable message. The conclusions of this film, when its surface is scratched, are quite disturbing. That it actively promotes a transhumanist agenda seems obvious, and there is no better exploration of this angle than in the LeClair and Fulton podcast I mentioned above. But, given the deep weirdness I was awashed in, this is by no means the entire story.

Nolan knows. It's hard to avoid this conclusion. The "ghost" of the bookshelf turns out to be Murph's father attempting to communicate to her via gravity waves from the heart of the black hole in a Borgesian labyrinth of the imagination apparently constructed by humanity's four-dimensional descendents. A few startling claims are implied here about the nature of the "conspiracy" which rules our present world.



It is "benign," or at least it is utilitarian -- it is willing to make huge sacrifices for the the greater good. The beings involved are explicitly "agents" of our "evolution." They also "exist" outside or beyond our usual conceptions of time. The entire past and future exists as an extended present for these hyper-advanced beings. They attempt to communicate to us, to orchestrate events for us, through synchronicity, through paranormal phenomena, through signs and wonders, through the pops and scratches of the programmed recording.

They dwell, in other words, in the prophetic space I've been trying to articulate throughout this essay. All mere human representatives of this shadowy hierarchy do no more than dissolve into the all powerful void.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, 
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, 
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, 
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, 
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, 
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
 -- "East Coker"

In the heart of darkness, at the core of the singularity, time is maximally condensed. All times and places are simultaneously present and not present. As we travel away from the dark centre, time slows, things begin to solidify. Nolan depicts various "levels" of time dilation within the film. Scant moments close to the black hole are equivalent to the passing of decades on Earth.

This portrayal of a multi-layered yet simultaneous continuum of time has an obvious resonance with another of Nolan's films: Inception. Inception is Interstellar turned inside out. As Spock sang, "Outer Space/Inner Mind." The profound implication is that the black hole, the ultimate singularity where all physical laws are overturned, is the exact same "place" as the deepest depth of our own unconscious.



And, as this is a point beyond and through all dichotomies, it is neither individual nor collective (as Jung taught), neither good nor evil. This "fourth-dimensional" conspiracy is identical to the wellhead of human/divine imagination. The transhuman, implying a hyper-technological control grid, is revealed to be no more advanced than the technologies of myth and language. It is the Word that emerges first, and perpetually, from the the void.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word. -- Ash Wednesday

Contemporaniety

The poet or artist, equipped with nothing more hi-tech or magical than a pen or a brush is the ultimate conspirator. If the poet senses the injustice of the dominant spell, he or she incants words and casts a new enchantment. This, as Robert Duncan asserts, is precisely the function of poetry.

The power of the poet is to translate experience from daily time where the world and ourselves pass away as we go into the future, from the journalistic record, into a melodic coherence in which words -- sounds, meanings, images, voices -- do not pass away or exist by themselves but are kept by rhyme to exist everywhere in the consciousness of the poem. The art of the poem, like the mechanism of the dream or the intent of the tribal myth and dromena, is a cathexis: to keep present and immediate a variety of times and places, persons and events. In the melody we make, the possibility of eternal life is hidden, and experience we thought lost returns to us.

The poet, insofar as he or she wishes to share this possibility of eternal life, cannot be considered, however his or her poetry is used and abused by the dominant illusion, as evil. This, though, becomes a Gordian Knot to disentangle. The conspirators, whoever or whatever they are ultimately, also operate from this timeless present. The rituals they enact, however, are intended to conceal rather than to reveal, to hide the truth of eternity in an endless Waste Land.

And yet, are they betrayed by their own machinations? Or are they, on a deeper level -- closer to the black hole, even more coterminous with the clap of the thunder -- acting at cross purposes to their own conscious intentions?



The singularity is its own poetry. As in the earliest Hindu verse, in fact the oldest known literature, it is unclear who came first, the Gods or the Rishis? Behind the Archons, dark poets themselves, are the blind seers, the visionaries, the makers. And what they see is the pointless point, the hieros gamos of Being and Nothingness.

If, as Pound began to see in The Spirit of Romance, "all ages are contemporaneous," our time has always been, and the statement that the great drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate is the statement of a crisis we may see as ever-present in Man wherever and whenever a man has awakened to the desire for wholeness in being. 

The crisis -- our crisis -- has always been present. There was never a time where the Waste Land did not entrap us all in its desolation. Sterility, winter and death are all pervasive. And yet so is everything else. Yet another genocide. Yet another flower blooms. Only the illusion has a sequence. Anything real does not recognize the bounds of cause and effect. Great literature, free and open art, can only reflect this.

These poems where many persons from many times and many places begin to appear -- as in The Cantos, The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, The War Trilogy [H.D.], and Paterson [William Carlos Williams] -- are poems of a world-mind in process. The seemingly triumphant reality of the War and State disorient the poet, who is partisan to a free and world-wide possibility, so that his creative task becomes the more imperative. The challenge increases the insistence of the imagination to renew the reality of it own. It is not insignificant that these "poems containing history" are all products of a movement in literature that was identified in the beginning as "free" verse.

The Rosebud, The Rosebud

Inevitably, I was also compelled by my journey up the river to rewatch Apocalypse Now. Colonel Kurtz, in the throes of fever and final disintegration, reads aloud the poetry of T.S. Eliot:

   I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

This is another image of the Waste Land; ragged claws, cancer. After this I watched for the first time, Hearts of Darkness -- the excellent documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now.
It appears that by invoking the Chapel Perilous, the journey up the river, the harrowing of hell, one invites dissolution. Go figure. Martin Sheen has a heart attack and nearly dies, the film's production teeters on the edge of collapse, and Coppola himself suffers a near total breakdown, envisioning himself as the doomed Kurtz. The ragged claws uncover the blackest nightmares.

And from this documentary I learned that Coppola's was not the first attempt to translate Conrad's vision into film. It first was tried by none other than Orson Welles. Welles was eventually thwarted by budgetary restraints and the outbreak of World War Two, but Heart of Darkness continued to dominate his imagination.

Many critics have suggested, in fact, that the next film he would produce and direct, Citizen Kane -- considered by some to be the best film ever made -- is largely a reworking of Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, no longer a company trader in a remote outpost in the Congo, becomes Kane, one of the richest and most powerful men in the U.S.A., the postwar centre of world empire.



This is far closer to the opening pages of Heart of Darkness. The real Fall, the real slide into darkness, is not into wilderness but to the apparent heights of civilization. It is Babylon, not Eden, which is the true site of our downfall.

The River in Citizen Kane is not as obvious, but it is actually partly alluded to in the initial newsreel announcing Kane's death:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Kane is Khan and his pleasure dome, Xanadu, containing all the beautiful art objects of history, brings no real pleasure to himself or anyone else. He is alone. He is forsaken like the Sibyl of Cumae. The River Alph is, of course, ALP the ever-flowing, delightful yet indifferent. HCE is Kane is Khan is Kurtz is Coppola is Welles and even Nolan, creators who fail to properly revere the River.

And for both Kurtz and Kane the epiphany of their utter foolishness arrives at the bitter end. They are united by their last words: Kurtz's "Horror" becomes Kane's "Rosebud." These words represent different angles on an identical scene, opposite sides of the portal to Paradise. The Horror is without and Rosebud is within. Kane beholds his lost innocence, represented by carefree winter sledding and the warmth of his mother's love, while Kurtz looks to the utter devastation just beyond the threshold.

Both, though, show the way back. Rosebud also implies the Rose of Dante's Paradiso, a vision of lost eternity but an eternity still in bloom. This is a vision that for Dante is only beheld after emerging Christ-like from three days in darkest Hell. Once more this powerful imagery surfaces. That Conrad was also alluding to this is shown just before Kurtz's revelation of "the Horror."

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair.

And They Blink

"As though a veil had been rent." Kurtz's face in private apocalypse is being compared to the supernatural ripping of the veil of the Temple of Solomon at the precise moment of Christ's death, accompanied by thunder and earthquake. For this brief instant the blazing light of the Holy of Holies, the light of lost Paradise, shone blindingly on all the world. Flashes of this occasionally shine anew. Kurtz experiences it as total horror.

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;

Marlow, the sole witness to Kurtz's terrible passing, is tasked with returning to London and meeting with Kurtz's bereaved fiancée. Marlow is haunted by Kurtz's last words. He can hear them emanating in hoarse whispers from somewhere just behind of or from within the disgustingly quotidian street scenes of the Empire's Necropolis.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.

Still in Saigon. Marlow, initiated by the death of Kurtz, is alone awake within the Waste Land. Eliot, also aware of this cursed transcendence, returns to it directly in his epigraph to the The Hollow Men (1925). No longer advised against it by the editing pencil of Ezra Pound, he points to the immediate aftermath of Kurtz's death:

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead 

Back to the whimpering hollow men, the stuffed men. We are, in his poetic progression, still in the Waste Land. And yet Kurtz is now dead, and the world ends without a bang. This condition is still being explored in his final and monumental epic, Four Quartets (1945), yet ultimate release is yet to come. Like Kurtz's Marlow, his critique of the oblivious denizens of the sepulchral city is brutal:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker 
Over the strained time-ridden faces 
Distracted from distraction by distraction 
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning 
Tumid apathy with no concentration 
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind 
That blows before and after time, 
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs 
Time before and time after.

  
Time is not conquered here, in the modern Waste Land which even now persists, dazzling by technology and the ecstasy of meaningless communication.

        Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world. 

I can't help but be reminded here of Nietzsche's words from Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), which surely must have pierced the mind of Eliot as well:

"Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
"'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.
"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.
"Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.
"One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
"No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
"'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink..." 

A horrible prophecy fulfilled! The inability, and even an ironic and self-conscious disinterest, to give birth to a star, to possess chaos within. Men and bits of paper whirling about. Take a selfie as you commit yourself to the asylum. Blinders to the horror. Rosebud completely forgotten. Distracted by distraction. And is that it? The last man, the stuffed man, in ceaseless perpetuity? This is Pound's reign of usura, of universal sterility and sanitation, bringing whores to Eleusis, conducting rituals and spectacles to perpetuate the Waste Land.

Pound often recalls that Dante had those guilty of usury and sodomy suffering in the same circle of the Inferno. Both, according to Pound's reading, have committed offenses against the fecundity of Nature, both have contributed in the attempt to block Her energies, to transform bounty into scarcity and waste.

To be generous to both poets, we can interpret "sodomy" not as any particular proclivity or orientation -- a dancing star need not be a child, the union of opposites need not come from those of different genders -- but as a symbol of the waste of productive or creative potential. The name of this sorcery is usura, its means are sodomy. We are all getting shafted.

As Marlow reluctantly meets Kurtz's fiancée, the inevitable question surfaces: what were his last words? Marlow is on the razor's edge of revealing the whole terrible mystery, but he can't.

I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!' 

He ends up lying: Kurtz's last word was her name. In tragicomic contentment, she remains asleep. Marlow has committed the unforgivable sin. He has bore false witness to vision. He has blasphemed against the Holy Spirit. He has used love to perpetuate a falsehood and, like Perceval at the Grail Castle, his failure to state the truth perpetuates the binding illusion. 

It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether....

And in this the terrible secret of our enchantment, of the Waste Land, is revealed. Even with the traumatic events of recent history that Green explores, the heavens did not fall. We continue to blink. They are designed to perpetuate the lie, to bind us in fear yet also in "love." Usury and "sodomy." Real justice comes only in full, open-eyed acceptance of the darkness. The veil has been rent and we are in hell, but only by awakening to this do we arrive at the dawn of the third day.

Dancing Lizards

And at this moment many things happen at once, all of the stories converge. The castle becomes disenchanted, the beast is slain. Northrop Frye explores this:

Another monster slain by Jesus in his Easter victory over death and hell: the leviathan of the old Testament, a sea-monster who is the sea, as he is death and hell, and also the devil, the serpent of Paradise, described in [Eliot's] The Rock as "the great snake at the bottom of the pit of the world." In the the Bible he or a similar monster is also identified with the kingdoms of tyranny, Egypt, Babylon, and the Phoenician city of Tyre. Thus the world that needs redemption is to be conceived as imprisoned in the monster's belly, whence the Messiah, following Jonah, descends to deliver it.

The triumph over death and hell is also the conquest of Leviathan. This is our old enemy -- the State and Church, space and time, the confining monster's belly of our own perception. This is what has been transcended. The hieros gamos of subject and object. Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, points to another three-day battle against the beast in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590):

In Spenser's account of the quest of St. George, the patron saint of England, the protagonist represents the Christian Church in England, and hence his quest is an imitation of that of Christ. Spenser's Redcross Knight is led by the lady Una (who is veiled in black) to the kingdom of her parents, which is being laid waste by a dragon. The dragon is of somewhat unusual size, at least allegorically. We are told that Una's parents held "all the world" in their control until the dragon "Forwasted all their land, and them expelled." Una's parents are Adam and Eve; their kingdom is Eden or the unfallen world, and the dragon, who is the entire fallen world, is identified with the leviathan, the serpent of Eden, Satan, and the beast of Revelation. Thus St. George's mission, a repetition of that of Christ, is by killing the dragon to raise Eden in the wilderness and restore England to the status of Eden.  

Similar examples can be presented almost without end. As Frazer and Weston taught, this is at the heart of all myth. In its simplest parallel this is the turning of day into night, of summer into winter. From the work of Weston and Pound and Joyce and Eliot, however, comes word of another cycle, both larger and more intimate. There arises the sense that the winter of our collective psyche is unseasonably long and cold. And, more alarmingly, that there is nothing "natural" about this. The "King" continues to be killed, but the Waste Land only expands.

And yet that is the biggest lie of all. The cycle has not become stuck. There is a point beyond it, a point encompassing the total cycle of cycles. Poetry, as Duncan affirms, is the counter-magic. Eliot, in Four Quartets, finally and beautifully shows us the way out of the Waste Land:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.   

The still yet dancing point is the Resurrection, but I think we miss out by confining this vision to the relatively narrow bounds of orthodox Christianity, even though Eliot identified with this himself. As in the Naasene teachings, the Mystery of the Christ is really the culmination of all the Mysteries -- the divine marriage of Matter and Spirit within history -- and Eliot is keenly aware of this. He goes on to match this "still point" with Krishna's revelation of the vishvarupa, his "universal form" containing all gods and demons, to Arjuna on the eve of battle.

Out of countless eyes beholding,
Out of countless mouths commanding,
Countless mystic forms enfolding
In one Form: supremely standing
Countless radiant glories wearing,
Countless heavenly weapons bearing,
Crowned with garlands of star-clusters,
Robed in garb of woven lustres,
Breathing from His perfect Presence
Breaths of every subtle essence
Of all heavenly odours; shedding
Blinding brilliance; overspreading-
Boundless, beautiful- all spaces
With His all-regarding faces;
So He showed! If there should rise
Suddenly within the skies
Sunburst of a thousand suns
Flooding earth with beams undeemed-of,
Then might be that Holy One's
Majesty and radiance dreamed of!

This vision, as related in the eleventh chapter of The Bhagavadgita (Edwin Arnold trans. 1885), is as beautiful as it is terrifying. Krishna, in his universal form, is all life and all death. This glimpse of a "sunburst of a thousand suns" was famously evoked by Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity atomic bomb testing on July 16th, 1945. Oppenheimer quotes Krishna from Chapter 11, Verse 32 (Wake fiends take note!) of the Gita:

 Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Once more, we witness a manifestation of Matter conjoined with Spirit to become pure Light. The Vishvarupa, the Resurrection, the voice of the Thunder. The door briefly opened and yet still the heavens did not fall. Progress stomps on. Arjuna, like Achilles at Troy, is convinced by the gods to wage world-annihilating battle, bringing to a close the Bronze Age and ushering in the present iron age of Kali. The Trinity test is at once an echo and a foreshadowing. This age will also pass.



But history does not end. We drop out of it, one by one. We slip away from its nightmare. We bear true witness, even to horror. We at last heed the words of the Thunder: become generous, sympathetic, in self-control. Only with these do we exit the Chapel Perilous.

Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called "I," cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn't seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher's Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness. -- Cosmic Trigger

In a collective sense, this is all of history. Everything we fear and love is here. The events and rituals that perpetuate this necessarily resound with the Thunder. All of this proceeds from the same creative power, the same Word, and so it has the ability to both fully awaken and to frighten back into sleep.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, where Eliot's Thunder is summoned from, presents one of the earliest (c. 700 BCE) and most excessive accounts of hierogamic ritual. According to Mircea Eliade:

In the procreation ritual transmitted by the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, the generative act becomes a hierogamy of cosmic proportions, mobilizing a whole group of gods. 

In Book 6 of this work, a husband (HCE) solemnly intones to his wife (ALP): "I am heaven and you are earth." The ceremony is about to begin:

Then he spreads apart her thighs, repeating the following mantra:
"Spread yourselves apart, Heaven and Earth."
Inserting the member in her and joining mouth to mouth, he strokes her three times from head to foot, repeating the following mantra:
"Let Vishnu make the womb capable of bearing a son! Let Tvashtra shape the various limbs of the child! Let Prajapati pour in the semen! Let Dhatra support the embryo! O Sinivali, make her conceive; O goddess whose glory is widespread, make her conceive! May the two Atvins, garlanded with lotuses, support the embryo!"

Here it is one last time. Inluminatio coitu. The grand finale: the rent veil, conception, birth, death, vishvarupa, resurrection, singularity, nuclear blast and falling towers. The rains come, the long drought ends and the dragon is slain. Eliot signs off his Four Quartets with a flash of the Paradiso:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Squatting the Chapel Perilous 1

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, originally published in 1899, is the account of a story told on the deck of the Nellie, "a cruising yawl, " which is anchored on the River Thames and awaiting a journey to the sea. The heart of darkness, geographical and psychospiritual, is no one particular place. The story unwinds itself deep into the Congo, but the seaman Charles Marlow, our narrator, makes it clear from the outset that it is London, the capital of Empire, which is the real heart of all existing darkness.

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

 He continues,

I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day .... Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday....

 
Marlow asks his listeners, all of us, to imagine the original Roman explorers making their way up the Thames. The commander of such an expedition was tasked to lead his men into unknowable darkness.

Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink.

They become the unwilling subjects of a terrible initiation:

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

And this is really the whole tale, ending in the first few pages of Conrad's novella. Did the Empire bring Light to the riverside of the Thames, to the Congo, to Vietnam, to the banks of the Potomac or the Tigris, or was it only the bearer of a much deeper Darkness? Conrad is not vague about his answer.

Near the close of his tale, after the death of Kurtz, Marlow tells of his return to "the sepulchral city." The imperial metropolis is a tomb built on plunder and murder. The perspective is flipped. Turned inside out. The "wilderness" is full of light. The Empire, which never ended, is a Waste Land, the true wilderness of pain.

Yet the heart is also a heart. An emotional sun is at the core of us all, now mostly occluded and eclipsed by the very same lead and smoke. A river also runs through this, a snake which invites us to ride. For a while, along the river, the sky clears and things begin to shimmer, locations in time and place begin to coalesce and to take on meaning.

They Never Left

Ezra Pound, a big fan of Conrad and an even bigger devotee of Confucius, used to often quote these words of the Chinese sage:

Observe the phenomena of nature as one in whom the ancestral voices speak. -- The Analects

Pound echoes this in his Cantos placing it in the context of Greek and Roman mythology:

The Gods have not returned. "They never left us."
  They have not returned.
Cloud's processional and the air moves with their living.

Gods and ancestors of West and East still await us. In nature they can be found ready to speak, happy to blow our minds, but they also inhabit, mostly undetected, the phenomena of culture. Sync is a movement up this river, observing and letting the living voices speak, portents and auguries of the mediascape.

 

This most recent journey, for me, began on Nov. 23rd of last year. The entry point is often unexpected. This was the day I first watched Alan Abbadessa Green's incredible video, "Suicide Kings Part 1."

The video is part of a larger and ongoing book project by Green to document the relevance of James Frazer's massive study of the killing of the King ritual, comprising the twelve volumes of The Golden Bough, to the highly charged events of our modern era. The "King-Kill," Green presents, may be the dominant subtext behind the assassinations of Lincoln, JFK and Osama bin Laden as well as the attacks of 9/11. The King-Kill is the hidden link between parapolitics and occult ritual.

This is not a "Truther" video. Green refreshingly does not reach any conclusions. He, as Confucius advocates, is only observing phenomena. And when this happens with a clear eye and with the intent to report back in good faith, intensely interconnected weirdness begins to surface. The production of this video perfectly mirrors the complexity and sheer bafflement of its themes. A facebook review (on Nov. 24th) by the sinister and sagacious Mark LeClair puts this best:

This IS the New Cinema & I phucking LOVE IT!
No easy answers, GREAT & brilliant questions & thus the essence of Life & Expression....The dramatic tension of narrative allegory plus the direct mining of a dead art form to create a new one. Goddard is trying to do the same right now, but this is better, more real, more dangerous. Positively gripping & oh so well imagined AND executed. 

There is really nothing to add here. It should have come as no surprise that embedded within a piece of media about signs and portents embedded in media was a sign for myself. A sync is a sign. And yet it did surprise me.

The video features a scene from Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic adaptation of Heart of Darkness, which focuses on a couple of books lying on Colonel Kurtz's bedside table. One is an abridged copy of The Golden Bough, which is why Green highlights this scene, but the other is Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920).



The synchronicity for me was that I had just found this book by accident, as I do, a week before at a second-hand shop. It was the same Doubleday yellow cover edition as is shown in AN. I remembered this book from the movie, and it had recently come up in my study of the Modernists, but its appearance in Green's video right after I had bought it was as if it was crying out "read me!" So I did.

Stimulating the Energy of the Vegetable

From Ritual to Romance is probably best known for being cited in the notes of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Here is what Eliot writes about Weston's book:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. 

Eliot goes on to further direct his readers to The Golden Bough, revealing the close relation between his own celebrated poem and the studies of Frazer and Weston. All three, he unveils in his notes, are intimately concerned with certain "vegetation ceremonies." Weston's book applies Frazer's theories on the killing of the King ritual to the myths and legends of the Holy Grail.

 

Weston's major thesis is that the Grail is something far more profound, more ancient, than simply the cup that Christ drank from at his Last Supper. It was through her study of Frazer that she arrived at her wider conclusions:

Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer's epoch-making work, The Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described. The more closely I analysed the tale, the more striking became the resemblance, and I finally asked myself whether it were not possible that in this mysterious legend--mysterious alike in its character, its sudden appearance, the importance apparently assigned to it, followed by as sudden and complete a disappearance--we might not have the confused record of a ritual, once popular, later surviving under conditions of strict secrecy?

And yet what is this secret and surviving ritual? Its roots are archaic. As Frazer explains it stems from the sympathetic magic of so-called primitive tribes across the globe:

They commonly believed that the tie between the animal and vegetable world was even closer than it really is--to them the principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible. Hence actions that induced fertility in the animal world were held to be equally efficacious in stimulating the reproductive energies of the vegetable.

From this awareness of the fundamental sympathy of all the realms of nature (and we can question Frazer's downplaying of this) emerged rituals in order to reenact and perpetuate the indivisibility of life.

Weston traces the development and continuation of these rites from the ancient Magna Mater mystery cult of the Near East, to the mysteries of Eleusis, to the later Hellenic mystery schools including early Christianity. While, with the establishment and hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, the fertility rites were suppressed within orthodox Christianity their essence and symbolism reappear through the medieval legends of the Grail.



In her introduction, Weston claims:

...we can now prove by printed texts the parallels existing between each and every feature of the Grail story and the recorded symbolism of the Mystery cults. Further, we can show that between these Mystery cults and Christianity there existed at one time a close and intimate union, such a union as of itself involved the practical assimilation of the central rite, in each case a 'Eucharistic' Feast, in which the worshippers partook of the Food of Life from the sacred vessels.

The form of this cult is remarkably similar across the ancient world. Again Weston refers to Frazer's research:

As Sir J. G. Frazer has before now pointed out, there are parallel and over-lapping forms of this cult, the name of the god, and certain details of the ritual, may differ in different countries, but whether he hails from Babylon, Phrygia, or Phoenicia, whether he be called Tammuz, Attis, or Adonis, the main lines of the story are fixed, and invariable.

And this is also where the basic structure of the Grail legend conforms to the larger pattern. The Grail King, either suffering from a wound to the leg or groin and/or experiencing sexual impotence, is effectively dead to the world. His infirmity, his infertility, causes through sympathetic magic the decay of his kingdom. The Fisher King and the Waste Land. The afflicted or dead king is, in the wider mythology, either revived to full power or replaced by the equivalent of his younger, more virile, self. And the cycle continues.

Always he is young and beautiful, always the beloved of a great goddess; always he is the victim of a tragic and untimely death, a death which entails bitter loss and misfortune upon a mourning world, and which, for the salvation of that world, is followed by a resurrection. Death and Resurrection, mourning and rejoicing, present themselves in sharp antithesis in each and all of the forms.

The Full Eidous

Clearly this is the turning of the seasons, of the utmost importance to agricultural societies. The new flowering of Spring ripens to the abundance of golden Harvest. The land then becomes brown and withered in the Winter cold to be followed, God willing, by the rebirth of a fresh Spring. The Waste Land is trapped in endless Winter, in decay without new growth.



This, as Weston points out, is really only the exoteric form of the archaic mystery. What close contemplation of the Grail myth reveals, however, is something that appears to go much deeper than even Frazer explored.   

Sir James Frazer, and those who followed him, have dealt with the public side of the cult, with its importance as a recognized vehicle for obtaining material advantages; it was the social, rather than the individual, aspect which appealed to them. Now we find that in the immediate pre- and post-Christian era these cults were considered not only most potent factors for assuring the material prosperity of land and folk, but were also held to be the most appropriate vehicle for imparting the highest religious teaching. The Vegetation deities, Adonis-Attis, and more especially the Phrygian god, were the chosen guides to the knowledge of, and union with, the supreme Spiritual Source of Life, of which they were the communicating medium.

"The most appropriate vehicle for imparting the highest religious teaching" -- this was the full esoteric function of these cults. Weston refers to the work of G.R.S. Mead to fully flesh out this idea.

Mead undoubtedly was an initiate himself. He was at one time the private secretary of Helen Blavatsky. He became the head of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. He was the author of over twenty books on arcane subjects. And he was the founder of the very instrumental Quest Society, of which Jessie Weston was a member and lecturer. Mead was also a huge influence on Ezra Pound and, in all likelihood, Carl Jung.



Weston cites a section from Mead's translation of the Hermetic writings, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, which includes a document from the Naassene Gnostic sect. Weston quotes Mead's introductory remarks to this "secret" document:

The claim of these Gnostics was practically that Christianity, or rather the Good News of The Christ, was precisely the consummation of the inner doctrine of the Mystery-institutions of all the nations: the end of them all was the revelation of the Mystery of Man.

Weston interprets this to mean that the teaching of the Naassenes was "practically a synthesis of all the Mystery-religions." With this document, according to Weston, the esoteric aspect of the Mysteries becomes clear and the final meaning of the Grail legends is explained.

The Exoteric side of the cult gives us the Human, the Folk-lore, elements--the Suffering King; the Waste Land; the effect upon the Folk; the task that lies before the hero; the group of Grail symbols. The Esoteric side provides us with the Mystic Meal, the Food of Life, connected in some mysterious way with a Vessel which is the centre of the cult; the combination of that vessel with a Weapon, a combination bearing a well-known 'generative' significance; a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life. 

The Vessel and the Weapon, the Grail and the Spear, the yoni and the lingham, point to a whole other dimension of the esoteric that Weston does not shy away from: sacred sexuality. Sex is, of course, obvious throughout this entire story. We have all heard of pagan peasant orgies on the fields in order to ensure the fecundity of their crops. The journey up the river, with its inevitable Oedipal undercurrent, is also a sexual journey. But all of this is still at a lower sphere of life. It is what Leon Surette, in his study of Weston's influence on The Waste Land, calls palingenesis, rebirth.

In a palingenetic rite one must pass through death in order to reach the divine revelation -- much as Dante passes through Hell and Purgatory, or as Odysseus nearly drowns before being rescued by Leucothea. Being born again involves "dying" first and typically includes all of the fear and loathing that we associate with death. Weston distinguished between the palingenetic rite, which leads only to a lower initiation into the mystery of life, and the hieros gamos, which leads to a higher initiation into the mystery of death. -- The Birth of Modernism

Sex can lead to reproduction, to rebirth, to palingenesis, but this alone is only concerned with the cycle of life. Hieros gamos, divine marriage -- the sexual union of a god with a goddess or, even more significantly, a deity with a mortal man or woman -- both culminates and transcends this cycle. Rebirth is a profound outcome of this act, of this vision, but even more so is redeath. The Spring will bless and the Winter will curse, but this singular union initiates the lover into physical and spiritual knowledge of the entire cycle, at every scale within the cosmos, all at once.



This takes us well beyond the fertility cults of Frazer -- or at least what Frazer publicly expressed. Surette explains:

In Frazer, the symbolism of sexuality is given a positivistic, not an esoteric, reading. Sexual rites are literal and involve the transmission of political or clerical power, not of noumenal revelation of metaphysical energy. 

Sexuality invoking a "noumenal revelation of metaphysical energy" rapidly reminds one of the doctrines and practices of Taoism and Tantra, but it should be kept in mind that the light of sacred sexuality, though stomped down to a faintly glowing ember, was never entirely extinguished in the West. Ezra Pound in his Cantos called it "the full eidous" -- thus linking it intriguingly to Pythagorean number mysticism -- and also "Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu," or "Sacred, sacred the illumination in coitus."

Lines and Streams

Hieros gamos can be found throughout the Cantos -- which can be read as an epic of the flow and blockage of sexual and creative energy throughout myth and history -- and it seems clear that it was experienced by Pound himself. While confined to a tent within a U.S. military detention camp outside of Pisa, Pounds records a vision of the goddess Aphrodite, who he also equates with Isis and the Chinese/Japanese bodhisattva, Kuanon.



The story of sexual union of a mortal man with the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite or Venus, is very ancient. Anchises, the father of the Trojan hero Aeneas, was the lover of Aphrodite. Aeneas, with his divine mother's guidance and protection, was able to escape with his father from the fiery ruin of Troy and went on to lay the foundations of Rome. Julius Caesar, and the emperors who followed in his lineage, claimed to be a successor of Aeneas and thus the goddess.

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136), Brutus, the discoverer of Britain and the original founder of London (the heart of darkness, remember?) was the great-grandson of Aeneas, and the legendary King Arthur was the direct descendent of Brutus. In this way, through Arthur, there is a unbroken narrative from Troy to the Holy Grail. All of this results from the divine marriage with the lustrous goddess of love and beauty.

Beyond this progenitive, yet largely mythical, lineage is a very historical initiatic lineage which the line of kings appears to be the exoteric expression of. The Holy Grail is a key symbol of this underground tradition. In an earlier book, The Quest for the Holy Grail (1913), Weston writes explicitly of this tradition:

There is a stream of tradition, running as it were underground, which from time to time rises to the surface, only to be relentlessly suppressed. It may be the Troubadours, the symbolical language of whose love poems is held to convey another, and less innocent, meaning; or the Albigenses, whose destruction the Church holds for a sacred duty. Alchemy, whose Elixir of Life and Philosopher's Stone are but names veiling a deeper and more spiritual meaning, belongs to the same family.   

This "stream of tradition," with Weston's mention of troubadours, Albigensians and alchemists is practically identical to the "celestial tradition" that Pound delineates. There are slight differences of emphasis between the two. Pound celebrates the Eleusinian mysteries and the Fedeli d'Amore, involving Dante and Cavalcanti. Weston, in contrast, focuses on the even more ancient Phrygian mysteries, the Gnostics, the cults of Attis and Mithras, and the Grail literature.



Both Pound and Weston, however, had close ties with G.R.S. Mead and his Quest Society. It is plain that their varying notions of the esoteric tradition stemmed from this common source. It is also evident that at least Weston, and very likely Pound as well, believed that this tradition was still playing a crucial yet clandestine role in the modern world. In her "Preface" to From Ritual to Romance she refers to certain "agents of evolution."

I was no longer engaged merely in enquiring into the sources of a fascinating legend, but on the identification of another field of activity for forces whose potency as agents of evolution we were only now beginning rightly to appreciate.

What these forces and agents happen to be, Weston does not readily disclose in this fairly academically cautious book. But, as the poet Robert Duncan -- another great link in this chain -- indicates and quotes, even by the introduction she is openly admitting that much of her information was derived from contemporary initiates.

No inconsiderable part of the information at my disposal depended upon personal testimony, the testimony of those who knew of the continued existence of such a ritual, and had actually been initiated into its mysteries.

The rituals, mysteries and initiates still exist -- in 1920 and there is much evidence to believe even now -- and in hidden ways act as agents of human evolution. The rites of palingenesis and hieros gamos persist and influence much of what is happening. Certainly rituals of this apparent type are everywhere evident. The question is to what extent these mass media events, such as those Green spotlights in his video, are authentic rituals of the the type Weston and Mead write about, and to what extent they are counterfeits of this type, intentional inversions and falsifications?



Many streams are converging on one point. It's easy to imagine that a program is being enacted. And yet there seem to be both spells and counter-spells battling in the aether. Which are aiding in "evolution," in Weston's sense of the word, and which are designed to perpetuate stagnation, to guard and expand the Waste Land? And could there be any way in which these two could be the same?

Poured We Libations

The principal editor of The Waste Land was none other than Ezra Pound. The critic Leon Surette (The Birth of Modernism) has uncovered an interesting pattern in Pound's editing of Eliot's vastly influential poem. By observing what Pound advised Eliot to elide or alter in the poem a clear intention is discernible.

If we look at Pound's editing, we shall find that it tends to remove the esoteric of mystical elements of the original draft -- particularly the linking of eros and apotheosis implied in the hieros gamos topos. When the poem issues from the hand of Pound, sexuality no longer has a transcendent function. It is merely spiritually and emotionally barren, even when, paradoxically for the fertility cult motif, it is progenitively fertile. 

Pound's editing assures that The Waste Land remains a waste land. A particular phase of the cycle is portrayed, the decay of the land and its people, and any possible transcendence from this state is obscured, remaining illusive. The published poem stops quite short of the initiation through eros that Weston focuses on. Surette reiterates:   

Pound's editing greatly reduces the palingenetic and erotic representations of transcendence that Eliot seems to have adapted from Weston's characterization of the ancient initiation rites in Ritual to Romance. The elisions have left a poem that depicts a bleak, hopeless, and wasted world occupied by the spiritually dead.

One important example of how Pound's editing altered the tone of Eliot's poem is in the substitution of its epigraph. Originally, Eliot wanted to include a key passage from Heart of Darkness as his epigraph:

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

'The horror! The horror!'

Kurtz, at the very moment of his death, fully awakens to the meaninglessness of his own life, to the total darkness that envelopes the modern, so-called "enlightened" world. It is a instant of horrible transcendence, and yet it is transcendence. Only in experiencing the sheer terror and despair of existence could he ever hope to move beyond it.



We are never sure that he did move beyond, and it is probable that he did not, but Kurtz's devastating epiphany reveals, at least, that there is something beyond. He had, at the very end, woken up within the Waste Land, while most still sleep. 

This epigraph, at the insistence of Pound, is replaced by a passage from Petronius' Satyricon. The quote is in Latin and Greek in The Waste Land, but it can be translated as such:

For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a bottle, and when the young boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?', she replied, 'I want to die'. 

The Sibyl of Cumae requested to Apollo, and was granted, maximal longevity -- as many years as the grains of sand that she grasped in her hand -- but she forget to also ask for eternal youth. As a result, she could not die even as her body became increasingly shriveled and decrepit with extreme old age.

She diminished to a point where she could do nothing except hang in a jar and speak. She was also granted the gift of prophecy, but she could foresee no escape for herself. Even Kurtz's terrifying transcendence was denied to her. She remained trapped within the Waste Land.



This Sibyl is also a crucial figure in the wider story, the story of stories, examined here. It is the Sibyl of Cumae who escorts Aeneas to the Underworld, instructing him first to gather the "golden bough" -- possibly mistletoe -- to present to Proserpine/Persephone, the goddess of the dead.

Virgil's account of this story is an obvious retelling of the tale of Odysseus's own descent to the Underworld, as relayed in the eleventh book of The Odyssey. This nekyia section of The Odyssey, which Pound considered to be its oldest, was translated by Pound and became the very first of his Cantos.

Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-head;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.  

The Cantos began to be published after 1922, the year of The Waste Land''s publication. As Pound's epic begins in the Underworld, in the Inferno, in the Waste Land, and only several decades afterwards is his full vision of Paradise published, it is possible that he wanted Eliot's poem to also focus on the image of this world as fallen and not yet redeemed.



It could be that Eliot and Pound intended to present a clear image of a singular moment within the greater cycle of death and rebirth, a moment which happens to encompass all of history. 1922, assuming that there was a plan or a conspiracy behind this, was not to be the time of resurrection. That was to come later. Surette explains this in terms of The Waste Land and the poem's allusions to the Grail myth and the story of Christ:

The Waste Land, of course, does not fulfil the palingenetic pattern. There is no resurrection, only death and perhaps a descent. In Grail terms, the poem stops in the Chapel Perilous; in terms of Christ's passion, it stops on Easter Sunday while Christ is, according to tradition, harrowing Hell. The reader is left in doubt, as the apostles were, with the Saviour dead, and only obscure and ambiguous messages left as a guide -- messages typified in the poem by the voice of the thunder. 

The Waste Land here is equated with the Chapel Perilous, of which Weston writes at length, and Christ's harrowing of Hell -- His descent into the Underworld to free the souls of the righteous. Northrop Frye, the colleague and rival of Marshall McLuhan (and a synthesis of these two may lead to salvation), also notes this overlay:

In the final section of The Waste Land the Chapel Perilous represents the underworld of death and burial, the tomb from which Christ rises.

Before Daybreak

The Chapel Perilous, Klingsor's castle, the Black Iron Prison, the nightmare of history -- ominous terms that circle and cackle like crows at sundown in the pages of this blog -- all point to the same point. It is the instant just before resurrection, the resurrection that is continually deferred, "to come." The righteous have not yet all been loaded onto the lifeboats. The heart of darkness is the endless obscurity before the triumphant dawn of the third day. As Frye notes, Dante is another who undertook this arduous journey:

Dante's journey through hell begins on Good Friday evening, and he emerges on the other side of the earth on Easter Sunday morning. Thus his journey fits inside the three-day rhythm of the redemption, where Christ is buried on Friday evening, descends to hell on Saturday, and rises on Sunday morning.

Surette, another cautious scholar, does not speculate on why Pound tended to pencil out transcendent elements in his editing of The Waste Land, but does it not appear that he was intent on crystallizing an image -- a freeze frame of everything "modern"-- for maximal impact?

The other option, terrible to consider, is that Pound and Eliot and the other Modernists were essentially casting a spell over culture through their art. The aim was to prolong the enchantment, to keep the sawdust in our eyes, to extend the reign of the impotent king who deceptively projects his omnipotence. 

Or could it be that both are occurring at once? The story is simply unfolding and it is not the tellers of the tale, however it seems in the thick of it, who are trying to prevent the pages from being turned. The heart beats elsewhere.

Hermetic Anarchism and Uddering the Author 3

The poets, in this instance Shelley on the "Left," all recognized that political and spiritual freedom were identical and impossible to sever:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise. -- "Prometheus Unbound"

"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, nationless" -- this is what liberty truly consists of. The individual imagination is subject to no xenophobic or provincial limitations and boundaries. We are creators, makers, poets. The very act of sensing and perceiving, to refer to Nietzsche again, make us all better artists than we realize. We are the Unique Ones, as the individualist anarchist Max Stirner declared, and it is only through our own particular and unique visions that we sneak a peak at eternity.

The Scornful Aristocracy of Tramps

The age of revelations never ended. There are countless gods. We reject both the rigid monotheism of the Abrahamic orthodoxies and the equally suffocating monotheism of scientific materialism and reason. Sterner acolyte, Renzo Novatore, proclaimed the end to all -ologies and -isms. The only principle wide enough to encompass all of our desires and imaginings is life itself:

History, materialism, monism, positivism and all the isms of this world are old and rusty tools which I don’t need or mind anymore. My principle is life and my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely and embrace my death tragically. 

You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!

Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society, unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thought — those who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them!...

All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of tramps, inaccessibles, unique ones, rulers over the ideal and conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances. So, come on, iconoclasts, forward!

Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent! -- "Iconoclasts, Forward"

The sublime conquest of nothing! The only ground that truly exists, the only firmament where our stars can be hung, is nothingness itself. And nothingness is itself not a thing. Flowing emptiness -- endless, timeless, vacuumous and ecstatic. Beyond Church and State, Time and Space, Ear and Eye, Saturn and Jupiter. Hermetic anarchism should be first to be tossed on the intellectual bonfire of the vanities.

But of what practical use is this? How is this in any sense realistic? How does this help the suffering masses of Syria -- to name just one topical hellhole in a world full of dire agony? But anarchy dances on all floors. It is the closest thing we have to a liberation from all politics -- the terrible game that could be defined as the science of concentrating and wielding power. Anarchism, the reverse of this, is simply the process of maximally distributing and decentralizing all forms of power. And it is a process that does not end.

The miserable masses of Syria may in fact be best off in PKK-run Kurdish villages that are apparently (fingers crossed) practicing an effective form of "libertarian municipalism," as advocated by Murray Bookchin. Unfortunately, and this should come as no surprise, these Kurdish villages are precisely those under vicious attack from the U.S.'s latest bête noire, the terrorist supergroup, ISIS. The veil tends to fall hard quickly after it is raised even a sliver.

But, as in the anarchist city of Barcelona briefly during the thirties, these Kurdish experiments in anti-authoritarian living actually function. There is no shock here. History, or more accurately the cracks and margins within and outside the official pages of history, is dripping with similar stories of communities who were successfully able to become, at least temporarily, truly free.



Peter Kropotkin wrote an anarchist masterpiece on the immense influence of mutual aid on both the natural and social worlds. Kropotkin points out that the medieval city, free from feudal domination, with its craft guilds and other voluntary associations was a model of mutual aid and liberty.

In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization. -- Mutual Aid

Kropotkin goes on to say that much, in our own time, of what even anarchists consider to be utopian was already realized in the High Middle Ages.  

More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact.

The point being that by no means are these ideals unachievable. Official history is only a fraction of the whole human story. And much of this story involves people living beyond the grasp of Church and State.

Imbecile Illusions

By now, though, it is difficult to even imagine a condition of freedom. Usura determines even the aesthetics of our our society. Everything has become utilitarian, mass-produced, conformist, disposable. Only those items which can easily be resold for a profit are not designed to be almost immediately obsolete. Nothing is built to last. All "products" are useful, convenient, unoriginal, ugly.

To overthrow usura is to qualitatively transform reality. Something like the medieval guild system would be restored. Objects would be crafted with pride, stamped with originality, made to please the eye and elevate the spirit. Cities transformed into collective works of art.

This is the polar opposite of the automotive hell that most of us somehow persist within today. Lawrence Ferlinghetti captured this best:

They still are ranged along the roads   

          plagued by legionnaires

                     false windmills and demented roosters

They are the same people

                                     only further from home

      on freeways fifty lanes wide

                              on a concrete continent

                                        spaced with bland billboards   

                        illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

"This could be anywhere, this could be everywhere." To break this dark spell, a necrotic curse that materially binds us, has deep spiritual effects. Creation, reality construction, for the highest values sets off an upward spiral towards the eternal. Robert Duncan explains that everything taken from the commons is a step away from eternity and one more enmired in the suck of time.

It is toward what I have called the eternal that time is disturbed to awaken the workers of the world to the virtue, the power, that lies in their labor. The poet, too, is a worker, for the language, even as the field and the factory, belongs to the productive orders and means in which the communal good lies. All that is unjust, all that has been taken over for private exploitation from the commune, leaves us restless with time, divorced from the eternal. -- The H.D. Book

This process, though, can be reversed. It also provides a third option, a new direction. Beyond and outside of both private property and state control, with all the devices and mechanisms of oppression and imposed misery implied by these two, is the commons. This is an archaic place of freedom, now reduced to back alleys, weedlots and the unexploitable wild.

And yet this is the same place in which we all imagine. And in this fashion it is infinite. The commons stretches back through the free cities to the cave sanctuaries of the old stone age. And when it wells up again, first in the imagination, matter itself will be transmuted.

A Balance of Contradictions

Anarchy is the struggle for and celebration of the commons. It is not bound by property. Only a (non-)space of no limitations is able to satisfy it. And let us not be limited either by rigid categories. There is a plurality of anarchisms. Neither communist, nor individualist, nor both, nor neither. Robert Anton Wilson, as always, along with Robert Shea lay out the terms in sparkling lucidity. They begin by contrasting the free market with the state:

FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.

THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).

They go on to list and define the most prevalent forms of privilege -- taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs -- and the dominant political-economic systems -- capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism -- which are constructed around these varying forms of privilege. They finally arrive at anarchism itself:

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. “Right” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate; “left” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete. -- The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Thus, long before the current and sham craze to get beyond the left-right paradigm, Wilson and Shea were already pointing to anarchism as a system which both encompasses and transcends both. Their definition quickly karate chops both participants in the debate, sadly still continuing, between individualist and communist anarchists. True anarchy is both and neither. Both the individual and collective dissolve into what Kropotkin, and Proudhon earlier, termed the mutual. Proudhon's philosophy of mutualism is very solidly carried on and made new in the writings of Kevin Carson.

All individuals are always already members of collectives and all collectives are composed of unique individuals. Again, only through the particular is glimpsed the universal. There is no final stage in history, no ultimate ground upon which we all, humanity in general, will behold eternity. The difference, then, between Proudhon and Marx is essentially metaphysical.

James Billington, in his compelling history of radicalism, Fire in the Minds of Men, argues that the key split between Proudhon and Marx can be traced back to their diverging takes on the philosophy of Hegel.

Their different views of history were evidenced in the contrasting
uses they made of Hegel's thought. Broadly stated, Marx turned Hegel
upside down, making his theory materialistic rather than idealistic;
but he maintained the basic Hegelian view that reality was monistic and
that history was moving necessarily and dialectically toward the
realization of an ideal future order. In contrast, Proudhon left Hegel
right side up, maintaining the Hegelian image of history as a process
of ideas unfolding through contradictions.

But Proudhon insisted that the agony of contradiction would not lead
to despair or resignation as long as man did not look on the situation
with complacency or cynicism. The real answer for society was not
the mythic conclusion of some future, final synthesis; but the realistic
possibility that at every stage the contradictions which are part and
parcel of life itself could be held in equilibrium. Proudhon spoke of a
dynamic ever-changing equilibrium: an "equilibration" between forces
that would never either vanish or lose their venality. The balancing of
such rival forces, though always tense and precarious, was the highest
good that man can hope for on earth. -- Fire in the Minds of Men

A dynamic ever-changing balance of contradictions -- this is anarchy. It itself is a process and not a state. It is never completed. There is no ability for a monopoly of power to congeal. It makes no sense to say that anarchy or anarchism would never work. It is working right now. It will never be total, this is correct, but if it was it would not be anarchy. The final socio-political synthesis that the Marxists pine for is anathema to any anarchist worth his salt.



Even revolution is totalizing in this respect. The revolution is ongoing or it is nothing -- it is only the means for a new faction of power heads to seize the reins of the state. Lenin himself recognized this incongruity within classical anarchism. In The State and Revolution, Lenin quotes Engels on just this point:

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction. -- quoted in The State and Revolution

The authoritarian nature of revolution is hard to deny. The dire necessity of using force in order to remove force is one way that violent revolution is justified by classical anarchists. Another possibility, though, is to change our understanding of revolution. The revolution, or perhaps a more neutral term like "the ruckus" is preferable, could be defined as any action that moves towards individual autonomy and freedom and away from authoritarian control.

The ruckus, in this sense, is perpetual and all-pervasive. It continually creeps closer to anarchy but it never entirely reaches it. And yet it is not dissatisfied. The moment of ruckus itself is a "break thru" to eternity.

Outcast and Vagabond

Totality can only exist in the imagination. The anarchists, like the mystics, have had a vision of this, but they cease to be anarchists or mystics when they attempt to force their formulations of this vision upon others. Yet as vision alone it is pure and it inspires action toward liberty -- the ruckus.

One of the greatest of these visions came from an early anarchist, a friend and comrade of William Godwin, the poet William Blake. Blake also viewed secular revolutions as being mere steps to something greater which could only culminate in eternity. Revolution must lead to revelation or it must fail. The ultimate goal is apocalypse. Northrop Frye explains Blake's view:

If there is greater imaginative power in the revolutionary impulse, it is not so much because of what it accomplishes as because of what it is in itself. Revolution is always an attempt to smash the structure of tyranny and create a better world, even when revolutionaries do not understand what creation implies or what a better world is. The apocalypse will necessarily begin with a slaughter of tyrants, and Christ came, Blake says, to deliver those bound under the knave, not to deliver the knave.

Therefore the real war in society is the “Mental Fight” between the visionaries and the champions of tyranny. -- Fearful Symmetry

The "slaughter of tyrants" is general. It includes the deposing of earthly despots and psuedo-democrats, but it reaches beyond this to the principalities and powers in high places, the Archons, Jupiter and Saturn, space and time. The fight is mental. The battle field is the imagination and the final outcome of this great struggle is one world, really one man:

Once the heart and stomach of a larger human body appear, a larger human brain will soon follow them, and the Golden Age of Atlantis, when "all had originally one language, and one religion," will be restored. The religion will be the religion of Jesus, the Everlasting Gospel, and the language will be the tongue of Albion. Blake does not mean by one religion the the acceptance of a uniform set of doctrines by all men: he means the attainment of civilized liberty and the common vision of the divinity and unity of Man which is life in Jesus. By one language he does not mean English: he means, quoting the Bible and repeating Milton in Areopagitica, that all the Lord's people will become prophets: speak the language of the imagination, and the perception of the sun as a company of angels will be the rule rather than the exception. Further, he does not say that all were originally of one race or kingdom or empire, and though he symbolizes humanity by the name of his own nation, his has nothing to do with the frantic jingoism which a confused idea of the same symbolism might easily develop, and has developed in our day.

One language and one religion -- this sounds dangerously close to the most horrible projections of NWO paranoids. But this has nothing to do with the New World Order. The language is of the imagination and the gospel is everlasting. Both are are beyond representation. Both resist definition and monopolization by priests or kings. Both only exist in the particular and the singular, and both are embodied and rooted in the sounds and scents of untamed nature.

The one man is all men and women -- at once singularity and teeming multitude, universal but bewilderingly diverse. Blake called this man, Albion, and later Joyce named the same man, Finn and H.C.E. -- Here Comes Everybody. Adam Kadmon is another one of his names. And he is not only "he." The veiled exile returns. Shiva and his Shakti fucking eternally, always on the brink of orgasm and annihilation.

Robert Duncan, the anarchist and poet, extends Blake's vision even further. Beyond tribe, beyond nation, beyond race, beyond even the human species -- yet at the same time in the celebration of all of these. Finn manifests a universalism of all nature, of Pound's "stone alive, wood alive," a universe of singularities.

To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure -- all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man -- must return return to be admitted in the creation of what we are. -- The H.D. Book

Prism Planet

All attempts at summary, while welcomed, are inadequate and if taken as authority are intolerable. In the collapse of the priests and kings proper, science has taken on this authority for many. Hermetic anarchism accepts it as metaphor, as a practical means to limited ends, but as only one facet of the imagination. The scientific method is merely one method of many, useful in certain instances and pernicious in others. Paul Feyerabend called this embrace of a plurality of methods, epistemological anarchism.

Epistemological anarchism differs both from scepticism and from political (religious) anarchism. While the sceptic either regards every view as equally good, or as equally bad, or desists from making such judgements altogether, the epistemological anarchist has no compunction to defend the most trite, or the most outrageous statement.... His favourite pastime is to confuse rationalists by inventing compelling reasons for unreasonable doctrines. There is no view, however 'absurd' or 'immoral', he refuses to consider or to act upon, and no method is regarded as indispensable. The one thing he opposes positively and absolutely are universal standards, universal laws, universal ideas such as "Truth", "Reason", "Justice", "Love" and the behaviour they bring along, though he does not deny that it is often good policy to act as if such laws (such standards, such ideas) existed, and as if he believed in them.

The anarchism of being conjoins the anarchism of knowing. The so-called "new science" can be lucratively plundered for inspiring metaphors. Non-locality, self-organization, indeterminism, uncertainty, self-similarity, holographic structure, etc. are attractive not because they somehow, as scientific terminology, add credence and respectability to similar concepts within visionary traditions, but because they "make new" very ancient, even archaic or "primitive," understandings.



We did not, however, overthrow the authority of the church and its dogma only to accept the new mediation of scientists/specialists/experts. Instead, each is the exclusive expert of their own perception and reflection. The new science may resonate with much older mystical sources, but these latter go far deeper and explore the entire spectrum of human experience.

William Blake was one of the first to sound the alarm against the new dogma of scientific materialism. Blake called it "Newton's sleep," the "natural religion," an extreme narrowing of the range of the imagination and perception.

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. -- "There Is No Natural Religion"

Other romantic poets followed in Blake's wake. Romanticism, in this sense, was not a new movement. It was a return to a a poetic understanding of life based on the primacy of the imagination. The only disagreement within the Romantic movement was whether, as Blake taught, nature was merely a facet of the imagination or, following Wordsworth, the imagination and nature perfectly mirrored one another. All Romantics, however, and all genuine poets of all countries and ages, are in agreement on the oppressive limitations of scientific materialism.

An anecdote of John Keats and William Wordsworth wonderfully reveals this critical spirit. The two poets were at dinner together, and Keats proposed a toast:

Confusion to the memory of Newton!

To Wordsworth's questioning of the reason for this toast, Keats replied that Newton "destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." [The Romantic Imagination, Maurice Bowra.] It is easy to share Keats's concern. For reductive scientism a prism is really a prison of perception. It attempts to provide for humanity a final word on things, an authoritative explanation that can only be challenged by officially recognized experts.

Individual, singular visions and revelations are only accepted as potentially entertaining fancies -- nothing to be taken seriously unless one, like Pound and very nearly Blake, plans for an extended and enforced stay at the local bughouse. Private apocalypses are only tolerated if one is quiet about them, or if they are presented as harmless "fiction." This is the true extent of "freedom of speech."  

Hermetic anarchists, though, perhaps now know more about Newton than did the romantic poets. Newton was really one of the last of the alchemists, his own allegiance to dogmatic materialism is only a projection onto him by later adherents of the new faith. And, contra Keats, the prism far from necessarily limiting our understanding of perception also demonstrates the ubiquity of the rainbow. Where there is light there is mystery. Keats's sentiment is sincere, but he need not have been concerned. Imagination is not that fragile.

Guerrillas gonna Guerrilla

The task of current poets and anarchists of the imagination appears to be more arduous than in the Romantic era. Nearly everything has become simulacra -- preformed, programmed, plastic, each a fully disposable and interchangeable unit in a uniform series with no original and no real difference.

How could it be possible for vision to penetrate into the eternal within a global system of usury where the real has been reduced to that which can be cheaply reproduced, priced and sold in non-localized, abstract markets? Even within this automotive, automated hell, though, the poets have not yet become extinct. There are cracks, glitches, blindspots in the panopticon, and enlightened madmen like PKD are always there to discover the divine in the detritus of the death culture.



The vision is particular, singular, individual but it always opens up a vista of the whole. Both the neo-nats and the skeptoids offer only further fragmentation. The categories are defined slightly differently but we remain boxed in, fenced off. The other is othered.

Instead, the penetrating vision is fluid, polymorphic, eclectic. It remains polytheistic and pagan, unmediated and promiscuous, indefinite and contradictory. It is non-dualist but not dogmatically so. There is polarity in nature, in thought -- Crowley's 2=0. We affirm Nietzsche's rejection of Platonism -- there is immense value in the earth, in the flesh -- but there is a wide gap between the mundane view and that of eternity. This is reflected in Blake's "double vision," in Nagarjuna's "two truths." There is a kind of coitus of perception entwining the particular and the eternal, the renewal of the Golden Age within the present world.

And all agents of mediation have been eliminated from this vision. They are no longer there to take their cut, to add distance and alienation. And perhaps this is what is manifesting. The absolute panopticon can only exist as a nearly perfect mirror of the collective imagination set absolutely free. Total control may be only a hairsbreadth away from total liberation, just as the State's most effective strategy against a guerrilla insurgency is to go guerrilla itself.

It is not the internet that is liberating humanity, it is the collective imagination that is surfacing and manifesting as the architecture of the world soul.

The net is not the world; it is the imagination of the world. -- The H.D. Book (1961) 

Already the parasitic middlemen are falling away, becoming irrelevant. In the music industry, in the film industry, the transformation is occurring in any place where information is abundant and can be given away without loss -- in education, in media, in medicine, even in design and manufacturing. And the trajectory here is extremely clear. The final gatekeepers who bar the doors to eternity are about to be swept aside, bypassed, ignored. The state and the big banks are the final middlemen to fall.

Direct democracy is now fully possible and is becoming a reality in places like Iceland and the central squares and parks of cities across Europe and America. Bitcoin ushers in a new era of P2P banking -- not the solution but a start, a Napster of peer financing. Even Bitcoin is already obsolete, needlessly centralized, too easy to manipulate. It is now but one of numerous cyptocurrencies. A few like Freicoin are modeled after one of Pound's heroes', the German anarchist Silvio Gesell's, ideas of an alternative currency based on demurrage. Gesell's conviction was that a currency, like any other commodity, should lose value over time, thus discouraging hoarding.

Pound's central concern about currency, of "the problem of issue. Who issues it? How?," is about to be addressed on a mass scale. And, beyond the purposeful summoning of oblivion which may also come, there seems to be no way of stopping this process. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri spell this out beautifully in Multitude:

The deployments of marines and military bases scattered around the globe are not insignificant. And yet this picture, like an Escher drawing, is completely unstable and with a shift of perspective can quickly be inverted. The strength of unilateral deployments is suddenly re­vealed
as weakness; the center it raises up is revealed as a point of maximum vulnerability to all forms of attack. In order to maintain it­self Empire must create a network form of power that does not isolate a center of control and excludes no outside lands or productive forces. As Empire forms, in other words, geopolitics ceases to function. Soon unilateralist and multilateralist strategies will both prove equally in­effective. The multitude will have to rise to the challenge and develop a new framework for the democratic constitution of the world.

As Blake and PKD taught, though, the Empire is not only externalized in bases and forces. Both it and the Temple are also within, but the way forward is the same. The commons will be expanded into all fields. All the representatives of time and space, and ultimately these Archons themselves, will melt away as the illusions they have always been. All authority will become drowned by the issue of the udder of eternity. Tits up!

The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its linear His-story as All, but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises. -- Against His-story, Against Leviathan!