The Serpent's Wisdom

Marshall McLuhan considers the story of King Cadmus and the dragon's teeth to be an essential metaphor in the examination of Western history. King Cadmus, who was said to bring the Phoenecian alphabet to Greece, planted dragon's teeth like seeds, and up sprouted an army, ready for battle.

It may be impossible to overstate the effect of alphabetic literacy on humankind. Since it warps our perceptions before they hit the conscious mind, we are numbed to it; we cannot tell where letter and number stop and raw reality begin, because our brain is designed to look for shortcuts. The conscious censor makes us unaware of the seams in our text-inspired reality-narrative. (The brain also numbs to redundant sense data -- a process called "adaptation" -- so it is no surprise that since we are immersed in literate culture we become numb to the evidence of literacy's affects inside us and outside us.)

Once writing was developed, our brains latched on to it. We can recognize power and potential when we see it, and the abililty to trap words (thoughts, concepts, the universe itself) in writing conveys immense power. This power is reflected in the forms of the alphabets themselves -- the Hebrew letters designed to resemble flames, the Tibetan alphabet inspired by the cracks in the human skull.

It is reflected also in the apotheosis of the alphabet, which we see explicitly in the Hindu and Jewish traditions. The Hindu alphabet is called "devanagari," the "writing of the city of the gods." In the Jewish tradition the divinity of alphabet was captured much more vividly, with the innovation of an invisible God whose name exists only in written form -- it was (and still is) blasphemy to translate God's name to spoken form, or to destroy a medium bearing the written name of God. Letters are used as an oracle in many traditions (for example, the tradition of casting runes). Esoteric traditions find magical significance in the ways letters and numbers combine, or in the interplay of consonant and vowel, and often assign metaphorical or transcendent meaning to each letter, dividing up the cosmos in an explicit way, to match the implicit ways language, alphabet, and number chew up our experience of the world.

A creation myth from Jewish Haggadah included in The Other Bible describes the creation of the universe through the expression of the Torah in written form, an interesting contrast with the Genesis story itself which describes God creating through speech. The intent may have been to establish a mythical primacy of alphabet over speech.

Esoteric traditions seem to be ambivalent about the use of writing. While the written/unspoken God was called the chief demon (archon) in the Gnostic tradition, along with rejection of the written code of law and the imperial edifice it makes possible, there is also extensive use of writing. I think this may be because they found they could harness the power of writing for their own use as a tool in psychological self-exploration. In Gnostic esoterica (as in certain Hellenistic, Egyptian, and Jewish esoterica) initiates are able to assert power over angels, demons, and forces of nature by using their signs or knowing their names. With that power thus granted, the initiate is able to access parts of the mind or the collective unconscious usually closed to conscious awareness.

Ah, yeah, I love what reading McLuhan does to my mind.

I can't read him as an academic, he made too many statements that in themselves just aren't rigorous enough. However, as a prophet, his writings were of immense value. He took the implications of monism to their outer limits, and had a special talent for drawing attention to our state of interbeing with one another, with culture, and with our artifacts as extensions of ourselves.

In particular I like his invoking of the Narcissus myth to explicate the conscious censor: our media as a pool of water reflecting back our image at us, which fascinates us so much that it becomes all we can see. This works much better than Plato's Cave.

He would be particularly edified to know that the internet has come to be arranged just like a brain.

1. I decided to skip chapter four of Bohm's book. It is heavily mathematical -- which doesn't scare me (math is one of three things I will actually claim that I am good at) but the amount of time and energy it would take to digest it was not worth the payback in terms of how much I was getting from it that is relevant to my current interests. I can always come back to it and I am developing a queue of things I want to read.

I'm detecting in Bohm's thought a kind of neo-Pythagoreanism that reminds me of Bucky Fuller. He asserts, for example, that what appears to us to be randomness is simply order of indeterminate degree. Quantum uncertainty is not true uncertainty, but demonstrates the workings of hidden variables which we have not recognized or understood. Following this to its logical conclusion, reality is made of nested sets of structures that go "all the way down" (and "all the way up"). This flies in the face of conventional interpretations of quantum theory which hold that uncertainty is a inherent part of quantum reality.

On the whole, I am sympathetic to this kind of thinking. I go one step further and say that there is a kind of order or pattern that exemplifies all that exists -- this is implied by my idea of the cosmeme. The cosmeme, in turn, is proposed based on the idea that nature is frugal and parsimonious -- and will therefore utilize a good idea to the fullest extent possible.

I'm tempted to read Fuller again, but, my gosh, that requires such an investment of time and energy...

2. Along another line of thought, thinking about memetics has made me want to read Marshall McLuhan again. His theory of media as extensions of human senses kept popping into my mind. I'm going to try to track down a copy of Understanding Media and put that on the reading queue.

3. On the fiction front, I'm reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, which alobar recommended. Bear's prose style is a little lurid for my taste, but I'm enjoying the book and I like the direction it goes in. Bear's way of incorporating unorthodox science into his story is not unlike Greg Egan's.