(no subject)

I recently finished reading Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, which I enjoyed greatly and which I found to be very illuminating. I do wish there was some way to cogently summarize his argument, but there is no "sound bite" summary. It is a complex (but IMO convincing) argument involving several parts of the mind and cultural mechanisms which interact in complex ways. In his estimation, we are rather "stuck" with religion because it is not a system for answering the big questions -- this is a recent add-on -- but is a way of reacting to experiences in every day life. Certain things about the way our minds work -- emotions and inference systems -- make it slightly more likely that religious memes will persist.

Okay, I'm stopping there. I'd told myself I'd resist the temptation to try to summarize the book's argument and I meant it. Any further than that and I'll just be botching it.

Now I'm re-reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and I'm certain to have some things to say about that.

the palace floor glitters like water

During one of my qabalistic pathworkings several years ago, I found myself in the Devil's labyrinth. The maze was arranged inside the walls of a cube. Each person in the maze was lost in his or her own individual trip. Looking up I could see the devil on a throne watching over all. After I ascended to his throne, he allowed me to sit.

From this perspective, I could see that the devil sat on a throne facing the way out of the maze.

Perhaps this was so that he could watch for people who might be getting close to the exit. Or maybe he was the devil simply virtue of the fact that he knew the way out but does not divulge this.

But isn't it interesting that both Christ and Lucifer are compared to the morning star in scripture? Or that the Hebrew words for Messiah and serpent have the same gematria?

a new heresy every day

A lot of the occultists I know think of themselves as bold innovators, taking unchanging and ancient esoteric traditions and creating a personal variation on a theme.

The only real problem with this image is that esotericism is nothing but innovation. If you dig into the history of esoterica, you see that there has been constant evolution. Virtually everyone who's written anything in this field has left some personal mark on it.

What causes this impression of "unchanging ancient tradition" is the written word. To see a text and know it was written 1500 years ago gives a sense of long-term unchanging solidness. Esoteric orders, seeking to appear rooted and authoritative, do their part to encourage this impression.

The written record itself, though, belies this idea of unchanging esoteric tradition. The Gnostic library includes almost a dozen variations on the theme of Genesis alone; and as Irenaeus wrote, the Gnostic sects saw and encouraged ongoing innovation (although his way of putting it was that the Gnostics created a new heresy every day). The history of alchemical writing, too, shows this trend as well. Anyone who thinks that kabbalah has come to us from millenia of unchanging tradition should have a peek at Gershom Scholem's Kabbalah, which is dedicated to kabbalah's evolution over the centuries.

Even within a magician's own record there can be considerable evolution. See for example the record of Dee and Kelly, which goes on and on and on, stuff building on top of other stuff. My own record shows the same -- which is one of the reasons I took a long break from esoteric work; I didn't feel as though I was really making any progress, though I now believe that the real power of esoteric innovation is not in the content one receives, but in the effects of the method itself on the unconscious parts of the brain.

Innovation can include the revival of ancient traditions with no clear line of esoteric succession to the present, also called reconstructionism. The written and anthropological record includes many gaps which have to be filled in, and there are many aspects of modern society which cannot be matched one-for-one with assumptions underlying the old traditons, and this is where innovation plays a role.

So esoteric innovators are not doing anything special. In fact I daresay that if you aren't innovating, you aren't doing it right.