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"The last stage is reached when, in the highest tension and concentration, beholding in silence and utter forgetfulness of all things, it [the soul] is able as it were to lose itself. Then it may see God, the fountain of life, the source of being, the origin of all good, the root of the soul. In that moment it enjoys the highest indescribable bliss; it is as it were swallowed up of divinity, bathed in the light of eternity." --Plotinus
THEURGY NOW & THEN
by Iona Miller, (c)2018
"We shall no longer hang on to the tails of public opinion or to a nonexistent authority on matters utterly unknown and strange. We shall gradually become experts ourselves in the mastery of the knowledge of the Future." –Wilhelm Reich
"This is the Hall of Wisdom. No one can reveal it, no one can hide it. Like a flower, it must grow and bloom in thy soul. If thou wouldst plant the seed of this flower in thy soul--learn to discern the real from the false. Listen only to the Voice that is soundless... Look only on that which is invisible, and remember that in thee thyself, is the Temple and the gate to it, and the mystery, and the initiation." --P. D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot
"'These palaces are not built in space, then. They are the only space available. They project their own space when they arise. There is no repressed negativity around them that seeks to enter. Nothing exists, then, but what the imagination, which has brought forth the palace, has constituted.' (Paul Veyne (1988), pp. 121-2)
"... palaces of the imagination... are not mere fictions but... aspects of all human endeavour, our reality itself. Beyond these palaces (in which gods may dwell) lies …nothing. To conceive essences from this nonspace is simply to expand the palaces and further push back the horizons of the unknown, ‘that untraveled world whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move’, as Tennyson’s Ulysses put it." --Gregory M. Nixon, "Myth and Mind: The Origin of Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred" (322-323)
PREFACE: Why Magic & Theurgy?
"Magic is a way of living. If one has done one's best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place." -Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
"The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive." -Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
"The last stage is reached when, in the highest tension and concentration, beholding in silence and utter forgetfulness of all things, it [the soul] is able as it were to lose itself. Then it may see God, the fountain of life, the source of being, the origin of all good, the root of the soul. In that moment it enjoys the highest indescribable bliss; it is as it were swallowed up of divinity, bathed in the light of eternity."–Plotinus
"This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called ‘apparition,’ the whole so-called ‘world of spirit,’ death, all these things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely eliminated from life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied." —Rainer Maria Rilke (from the Duino Elegies)
"Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature." --Marsilio Ficino
"How about it, then? Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come." -Seneca
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"Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature." --Marsilio Ficino
"How about it, then? Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come." -Seneca
Today, we define our own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Naturally, we tend to combine innovation with tradition for a more adaptable, fluid, and dynamic view, incorporating current perspectives. This includes the psyche, body, relationships and the total environment, with which we share a common destiny.
Whether activated or dormant, the vital principle still living in our substance and essence, re-enchants the world. There is more to life than just matter. The unconscious modifies the conscious.
The invisible force of animation is an immense force of nature -- metaphysical, biological, and phenomenological resonance. Unknown factors contribute to the way we interact with the world. What do magic and theurgy have to offer in the 21st century?
The unconscious is a virtual mixing operator, co-creating natural magic and ceremonial invocation. The theurgic process has poetic strategies for releasing potential knowledge from the unconscious. Words, metaphor, and images carry mythical and archetypal resemblances within them.
We can engage, investigate, and discover them in the interiors of our own psyches. The seer enters a trance state which quiets the conscious mind for the influx of divine energy and divine light (luminous visions, formless luminous apparitions). It includes states of Theophoría (bearing a God), Enthousiasmós (having a God within, entheos), Epípnoia (inspired by a God).
Invoking Archetypes & Evoking Images
Theurgy reveals such unknown factors as a way of establishing greater self-knowledge. The aspirant performs a poetic fantasy in which the soul is deepened by the affective capability of word and metaphor bridging phenomenal and noumenal realities through the mythic connection. To "invoke" is to "call in", while to "evoke" is to "call forth." It 'tunes'' us like a specific resonant frequency.
Words share in archetypal activity drawing us inwards, connecting the known and the unknown, mundane and sublime, through soul-making. Theurgy provides a medium of communication with a God or Daimôn that purifiesthe theurgist's soul. It serves as a medium by which the individual soul may participate in the divine image.
Invocation is a symbolic and imagistic journey. A unitary reality leads to an epiphany which links consciousness and unconsciousness. The trans-rational mythic imagination borders the unconscious. It provides a route for us an archetypal encounter, echoing the seeds of expanded consciousness.
If we fully experience the archetype and are apprehended by it, we get a glimpse into the imaginal reality which transcends ordinary perception. The mage enters the image sympathetically. Intuition emerges as gnosis, knowledge without previous learning.
We call such awesome emotional intensity a numinous experience. We are aroused by the power, presence, or realization of a divinity -- an uncanny, mighty spirit, a tremendous mystery. True imagination embodies the divine wisdom of the soul through percepts, affect, and concepts. Psyche or soul is our image making capacity.
Hillman's psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Word, metaphor, and epiphany can lead to a theurgic expansion of soul.
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Space, "to go so far and so deep, [we] must go beyond the sentimental resonances with which we receive... a work of art." We become sensitized to the resonances "dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world.
While the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence. ..."reverberations bring a change of being." The poetic act grips us entirely leaving a phenomenological mark of exuberance and awakening new depth in us. Universal mind pours itself into the profundities of the soul.
Bachalard says reverberation, "has a simple phenomenological nature in the domain of poetic imagination. For it involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image. By its novelty, a poetic image sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism. The poetic image places us at the origin of the speaking being."
Raw poetic power arises resonantly within us as experience and deep memory. "But the image has touches the depths before it stirs the surface. ...it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being."
Ensouled Life
Only when the soul enters the material cosmos is there need to honor its generative power, to make a relationship with the interpenetrating divine through that particular worldview.
Our concern is process, meaningful connected patterns over time not just outcome, worldwork as well as individual arc. Emergence is a process by which order appears “spontaneously” within a system. We increase our ability to create, express, collaborate and enliven our life.
Over time processes lead to the appearance of emergent features, such as knowledge and transformation. When many elements are allowed to mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact, activating latent phenomena -- the taking in of Source, the Many into One, breath of life, breath of compassion, breath of union.
"Nevertheless, we will become inflated many times over the course of any system of spiritual development. Its equal-and-opposite counterpart is depression, again a literal description because the energy one normally has available is depressed, pushed down into the unconscious. The cycle of inflation and depression is inevitable if one opens a channel to the unconscious; the key is to recognize as soon as possible that we are becoming either inflated or depressed. Once we do, often the recognition itself is sufficient to center us once more. If not, it is effective to ground ourselves in the normal activities of life, especially those involving physical effort, or those which involve detail, which require our full attention." (Robin Robertson, The Shadow's Gift)
Does such entanglement provide the basis of universal consciousness? When the mind lets go of its rational order and enters into unstructured chaos it emerges later with a new structure. If beliefs arise, they include a 'belief in the inherent importance of all parts of ourselves and all viewpoints in the world around us'. Somatic and cognitive fluency meet in a flow state of dynamic processing expressing as pleasurable interest.
Magic facilitates an ego which can not only penetrate, but also diffuse its awareness.
The seer views the transcendent self and is seen by it. Over time the seer identifies with the Self, and I-Thou polarity dissolves.
From the holistic perspective you embrace higher values, realize your inherent divinity, and enlarge your potentials. The boundary between the seer and the seen collapses into cosmic consciousness. The seer becomes a Sage.
This flexible ego can form a more harmonious relationship with subconscious processes. It does not abort the transformation in the middle of the process through wrong value judgements and interference.
Archetypal psychology is poetic vision. The totality of the psyche has its own aims, which are not necessarily those of the individual ego. Psychic activity is paradoxical in nature. It looks both forward and backwards.
Theurgy is the 'edge-work' of philosophy, a process metaphysics approach to matter and ontology which emphasizes “flow” rather than permanence and can be traced ultimately. Process metaphysics is a natural approach to complex systems.
Complex systems theory assigns nature the tendency to self organize—to construct complex structures and processes. It makes emergence a genuine metaphysical possibility. The parts collectively form the stable base among which the system processes occur.
In theurgy, an embodied philosophy, the greatest teacher is direct and unmediated experience of the image-making capacity of the soul. Unconscious psyche and matter are one. The theurgist intentionally gives the voice of the unconscious form that actively engages the ego so personality can be transformed by it. We have to face our darkness to find our light.
Theurgy is a fluency framework. Archetypal thinking helps us conceptualize an approach to subjective metaphysics without foregoing critical thinking -- participatory enaction anchoring a number of spiritual meanings and the open-ended questions of the personal myth. Metaphysical action becomes more important than metaphysical assumptions or theories.
Perceptual insight during elaboration, also referred to “aha!” moments. Naturally-arising light, the indivisible emptiness-luminosity, when the naked mind, free of everything, dwells in the uncreated state, revealed in the transparency of the spiritual epiphany.
The light in nature is the divine in the world. Myth, the interplay of cosmic principles, and memory are the basis of our relationships. The root of existence is matter and spirit --the deep nature of reality and experience, veiling and revealing its divinity.
Traditions of 'Light' continue to inform our conceptions of reality. What we call reality and consciousness depends on our level of observation and mystical penetration. The quality of vision we have expresses penetrating ideas exploring the complexity or “depths” of any given phenomenon and reconceptualizes polarities. The most common error is conflating Consciousness and Awareness. Consciousness is a product of widespread communication, while awareness is a focal capacity. Do our attentional habits create our experience? What reality are we in?
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
"The way to see the Gods is to know the world. Practical knowledge, common sense, therefore cannot be divided from metaphysical knowledge....metaphysics becomes the praxis of an essentially lived life in which being, substances, method, order, and other traditional topics of metaphysics become qualities of soul." (Adam Elenbaas, 2006, Why Use Only 7 Planets?)
The Approach
There is is growing interest in practical theurgy grounded explicitly in Neoplatonic texts. What draws us in may be an aesthetic interest at the beginning, or an affinity for a different world related to deepening engagement. The process unfolds in natural but unexpected ways.
Reciprocal interaction manifests between the aspirant and the divine through natural and acausal effects. The aspirant instantiates the potential of the psychic field. Thus, our character is forged in the alchemical mix of ordinary life and the 'big dream' of psychic being, rooted in our-present Source. Effective dreams have the power to change us.
Rational viewpoints are complimented by emotional experiences and intuition, deeper vision, and a timeless feeling of shared compassion for all living beings. The theory is one of emergent phenomena and consciousness. We can naturally aspire to wisdom, holiness, and humanity. They don't have to interfere with one another, be surprising, peculiar, or sensational -- there is no onslaught of compulsive weirdness.
In a materialist culture, while guarding against our collective and idiosyncratic delusions, how can we confront the problems of living an ethical life in a society plagued by dissension, vice, and corruption? We tend to forge our own approach to ethics and well-being, even if consulting wisdom traditions and modern research, rather than forcing a singular point of view, diversity rather than pathology.
The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics or morals (personal accountability) should help us cooperate with one another. But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival.
Meta-ethics examines our notions about what constitutes ethics or morality relative to the position of others. Related issues are lifestyle choices, decisions, respect, impartiality, responsibility, identity, duty, principles, empathy, compassion, and conscience or consciousness.
The flattening of affect or emotional neutrality is the enemy – the aspect that conditions poor choices and ethical erosion as the acceleration or speed of cognition increases in our mindnumbing modern lives and we become dulled to the field of perception (Damasio 2004). Its been called information overload and future shock. Ethics is Aesthetic.
It means living deliberately, with global intentionality, which is an artform in itself – living with awareness and acting from that center. It is an aesthetic choice for ‘artful living’, living life in an artful manner in harmony with flow and creativity. We choose enriching experiences over consumerism is generative and creative. Magic expresses the fluid interpenetration of the ordinary and imaginal or soul realms.
Theurgy is a theophanic metaphysics, a mythopoetically informed, practice. Awakening dormant intuition, we cultivate an aptitude for revelation and communication of the divine. An imaginal theophany is hierophantic, relying on a certain ability and level of perception and consciousness, with eyes that "see through" events into their pattern. Epistemologically, the divine is "that" which is beyond the imaginal and out of which the appearance comes (epiphany).
Our philosophical ethics are tied to our aesthetic sense and metaphysics, to our worldview – especially for artists and scientists. The mechanistic view is one of greed-creating scarcity, a sense of there not being enough of whatever resources to go around (Fuller). The worldview provides the ground for our beliefs, ideas and lifestyle choices about what is right and what is wrong. This paradigm is tied to our health.
Whether we seek transformation, to honor the gods, or a poetic flight of ideas connected by the unconscious, we are making soul and deepening character. If we "see through" the gods, rather than transcending, they mirror the spectacle of our naturally fractured lives with awe and compassion. We sense the right moment, find the right words, use the natural magic of special places, have the natural magic, rather than rational attitude, and become a field of wisdom.
'Opening the eye of the soul' alludes to enlightenment, and means to obtain knowledge through introspection and visionary sight to view the higher forms of existence, the source of life. Perhaps our answers are in the riddles of life, the gaps or the lacuna in the world's theological beliefs, not a singular belief. Michael York uses the term “deific pluralism” rather than “polytheism.”
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggestes the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, that draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Carl Jung noted, "...that "the One" should meditate, and that the world should be produced by the spirit in its creative role, is a conception which goes directly back to the philosophy about the Nous in antiquity." (Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Pages 59-60.
Archaic influences remain within us -- the preliterate culture of poetry, song, and myth; unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual. They express locality of focus and ethical concern. Each time our vision scans over the inner landscape we experience new impressions, flowing from one experience to the next.
Awareness is self-arising waves of potential from which different potential outcomes of reality and perceived outcomes emerge. We don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.
Memories accrue from experiences and that ambience, character or atmosphere accumulates to effect the soul. Our attention to details (ambience), memory recall, and information provide insight about situations that are outside of normal understanding about time and space.
Jung spoke of the two-million year old human within us, the ancestral soul – the primal soul. The instinctive self, rooted in nature, speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago as complementary facets of a deeper reality emerging in amplified symbols.
The first achievement of the transformation of instinctual energy by our primal ancestors is magic. Psychization transforms an instinctual or sensory perception, rather than energy, into an experience. Magic is just part of the human experience. But notions of attainment remain elusively ahead of us. If, as Jung says, all we can know is the god-image, what does it mean to be the image of God?
In this vast night, be the magic power
at your senses' intersection,
the meaning of their strange encounter.
And if the earthly has forgotten
you, say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
R.M. Rilke, The sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX
As Liber Novus says, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." Non-Ordinary states of consciousness can heal suffering. They can be accessed in a number of ways, including our subject, theurgy, which has the potential to unlock a new level of insight and self-awareness. What most people believe can be attributed to the gods, that is, the archetypes of the collective unconscious, whether we perceive them consciously or not.
It is also true for tending our psychic wounds and embracing personal and collective shadow. As Anaïs Nin reminds, 'We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.'
We cannot take an ego-driven approach to growth and development. That is like pulling on a seedling sprout until we uproot it. It cannot be forced to completion, even to feed a hunger for meaning and experience, but must take its course.
Meaning is inherent in life processes down to the sub-quantal level. Life is filled with soma-significance expressed in the felt-sense of ambiance, gestures, words, non-ordinary states of consciousness, aesthetics, and more. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures, utterance, and action.
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Today, we define our own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Naturally, we tend to combine innovation with tradition for a more adaptable, fluid, and dynamic view, incorporating current perspectives.
In a materialist culture, while guarding against our delusions, how can we confront the problems of living an ethical life in a society plagued by dissension, vice, and corruption? We tend to forge our own approach to well-being, even if consulting wisdom traditions and modern research, rather than forcing a singular point of view. Perhaps our answers are in the riddles of life, the gaps, not a singular belief.
Archaic influences remain within us -- the preliterate culture of poetry, song, and myth; unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual. Each time our vision scans over the inner landscape we experience new impressions, flowing from one experience to the next. Awareness is self-arising waves of potential from which different potential outcomes of reality and perceived outcomes emerge.
Jung spoke of the two-million year old human within us, the ancestral soul – the primal soul. The instinctive self, rooted in nature, speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago as complementary facets of a deeper reality emerging in amplified symbols.
The first achievement of the transformation of instinctual energy by our primal ancestors is magic. Psychization transforms an instinctual or sensory perception, rather than energy, into an experience. Magic is just part of the human experience. But notions of attainment remain elusively ahead of us. If, as Jung says, all we can know is the god-image, what does it mean to be the image of God?
In this vast night, be the magic power
at your senses' intersection,
the meaning of their strange encounter.
And if the earthly has forgotten
you, say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
R.M. Rilke, The sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX
As Liber Novus says, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." Non-Ordinary states of consciousness can heal suffering. They can be accessed in a number of ways, including our subject, theurgy, which has the potential to unlock a new level of insight and self-awareness. What most people believe can be attributed to the gods, that is, the archetypes of the collective unconscious, whether we perceive them consciously or not.
It is also true for tending our psychic wounds and embracing personal and collective shadow. As Anaïs Nin reminds, 'We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.'
We cannot take an ego-driven approach to growth and development. That is like pulling on a seedling sprout until we uproot it. It cannot be forced to completion, even to feed a hunger for meaning and experience, but must take its course.
Cicero spoke of philosophy as critical to healing the mind (Tusculan Disputations). One power we have is the power of self-observation. But it usually is not very well developed, especially around the unconscious, which is the core of our lives, the totality of the life processes within us -- an individual concrete and creative response to the mystery of the world.
In Revisioning Psychology, Hillman describes Ficino's spiritual 'height psychology,' rather than a depth psychology:
"When "body" is disparaged in Ficino in order to affirm soul, it can be psychologized to mean the empirical, literal, physical perspective, particularly the perspective of practical action which had less significance in Ficino's scheme of things than did Venus and the voluptuousness [sic]. ... The opposition is less between soul and fleshly sensual joy - for voluptuousness in Ficino was a model for spiritual delight - than between interiority and outwardness, or what we have called the metaphorical and the literal perspectives."
Early philosophical views failed to notice the central importance of metaphor in understanding our reality. Recent works, such as Metaphors We Live By have closed that gap, revising the central assumptions of meaning in the Western philosophical tradition. The 'inner journey' is a primary metaphor:
"The psyche is not an object, a thing; it is a process. Motion is its essence. Just as the outer landscape flows by when we travel, so before the inward eye images succeed one another in a constant motion picture. It is these which we tune in on when we shut our eyes to outer things and step into our chariots for a voyage within." (Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey)
Metaphor is a pervasive field of imagery intimately linked to self-narrative and internal descriptions of what our experience 'is like.' Everyday language is full of tacit metaphors that shape the way we think, act, characterize and interpret our experience -- alternative accounts beyond objective truth. It is fundamental to our conceptual system and frameworks , including worldview.
Lakoff’s (1988) definition of metaphor is a schema, “a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground.” His central thesis is that metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which new information may be accommodated, forming a cognitive map. (Metaphors We Live By)
Reality is in-formed by soul's metaphorical weave of mythical narrative. Soul (anima) is an active intelligence that forms or plots our fates. Being-in-Anima (esse in anima) is to be ensouled.
Soma Sophia, the Body of Wisdom is inherent dwelling within the body of Anima Mundi. Psyche is immersed in imagination, metaphor, poetry and myth, including scientific and spiritual technologies. Fantasy deliteralizes the illusory concreteness of matter. Images and fantasy are the carriers of meaning. Soul transforms events into experiences.
Implicit theories of the unconscious always take a central role in the metaphysics of spirit and framing the horizon of significance we give to the term 'magic,' encouraging participation and engagement. Every idea belief and concept is metaphorical.
When we 'see through' the Greek mythos from ancient times it shines through the “here / now” presence of our everyday lives. In the gap of image as metaphor, magic becomes the "as if" space between two senses of the same term or figure, where the literal and the metaphorical reverberate against each other.
In Real Magic, Dean Radin refers to magic as a natural aspect of reality that each of us is actually able to tap into. “The essence of magic boils down to the application of two ordinary mental skills: attention and intention. The strength of the magical outcome is modulated by four factors: belief, imagination, emotion, and clarity. That’s basically it,” he writes.
Jung describes the raw material of consciousness: “Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the source of life.”
In many ways, such psychological categories are logical extensions of philosophical themes, not just looking at things but dwelling on them. In the depth psychological frame, the unconscious remains the well at the dawn of life, which we can still revisit via time-honored methods, engaging the psyche in new and different ways. Jung noted, "Our consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths."
Mysticism can refer to visionary experiences, non-visionary via negativa experiences, or gnosis, direct spiritual insight into hidden aspects of the cosmos, or transcendence. But, the primordial images are the true force that shapes and channels instinct, occult or hidden forces active in the natural world.
Aspirants seek direct spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of themselves and the cosmos. James Hillman says, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform.
Recognizing and engaging the sacred means calling attention to a vital and important dimension of reality being threatened by onesided rationalization, secularization, and the mechanization of the world.
The Illuminative Vortex
The subject of the unconscious was in the domain of philosophy. The notion of the unconscious abyss and the essential self-revealing nature of pre-reflective non-differentiated being was fundamental to the natural-mystical philosophy of Neoplatonism.
Planetary Technoetics: Our 21st century aesthetic frame is essentially technoetic, described by artist Roy Ascott as a convergent mix of the emergent fields of art, technology and consciousness research. He further suggests that planetary technoetics is a sort of 'species' consciousness and gains "new insights from older cultural traditions previously banished from materialist discourse."
He describes a "fully differentiated interactive art process," outlining a five-fold path of connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence. (Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness, 2004) We agree such tuning is the natural basis of a global interaction between organisms and of collective consciousness.
Ascott says such artists, "are prepared to look into any discipline, scientific or spiritual, any view of the world, however eccentric or esoteric, any culture, immediate or distant in space or time, any technology, ancient or modern, to find ideas and processes that allow for the navigation of mind and its open-ended exploration." (Cybernetic, Technoetic, Syncretic: The Prospect for Art, 2008)
'Technoetics is a convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical or spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moistmedia.' (Roy Ascott 2008)
Its significance "in its power to provide for the release of the self, release from the self, the fictive “unified self” of Western philosophy. It lies in our ability to be many selves, telematically in many places at the same time, our self-creation leading to many personas and serial identities."
For this essay, the technology is Hermetics and theurgy. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone or vortex. The massa confusa of the vortex of pure information becomes gradually discernible. Emergence, or spiritual rebirth, a humbling not inflationary experience, is its telos.
Aesthetic Arrest: Clarity is artistic discovery of the universal. There is enchantment in the quality of wholeness. There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception.
That flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment.
These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward in the Quest. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment that captivates our rapt attention.
Aesthetic arrest blows apart the illusory differences between the sacred and the profane. We are inspired in the a-ha moment, utterly dissolved in the momentary ego-death of its solutio that tears asunder illusory nature. This aesthetic experience is an act of surrender that is an epiphany. It makes us gasp for air and sparks a cascade of pleasure.
We become a part of the truth we seek at the paradox of participation. The alchemist lives at this paradox. The greening of the wasteland restores artistic expression. Voegelin calls each participant in therapeutic process and practice a simultaneous part and whole of a reality of consciousness like a marriage, polity, or cosmos. Alchemy speaks of the Royal Marriage, or paradoxical cosmic conjunction (coniunctio) of opposites.
We are directly connected to beauty and wholeness. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being. As artists we are mythmakers, dreaming the alchemical dream onward. Myth is transparent to transcendent process in the Now-Here. In sublimatio we reach escape velocity.
In aesthetic arrest, the phenomenal field disappears as we come to our own Zero Point. Any artistic expression produced by this personal experience is likely to lead others to their own point of synchronization that creates an altered state.
Soul is made by narrating events in terms of myth, the metaphoric and symbolic dimensions of our experience. Poetics brings the archetypal into participation with the mundane by tending the currents of life.
Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.
Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
The abyss of the transcendent imagination is the archaic 'ground without a ground,' the positive significance of the negative, pre-perception. The root image of the abyss includes the zero-point, primeval waters, chaos, source of all existence, source of life and life’s return to this source, as well as the paradoxical death instinct.
It is also a 'window to eternity,' the Self-field or Plenum (Jung), transcendent ultimacy. It exemplifies conscious communion or participation in a timeless reality. This radically transformative pleromatic experience of unitary reality is there from our inception.
Reconnecting with the unconscious is reconnecting with the mythic world, our instincts and intuition. We cannot repress our imagery without repressing our instincts. We don't search for symbols; instead, we are directly impacted by experience and how we metabolize it. Tacit knowledge means we know more than we can tell. The intuitive is difficult to explicate but it is possible—and valuable—to clarify.
Erich Fromm suggested eight basic needs: Relatedness, Transcendence, Rootedness, Sense of Identity, Frame of Orientation, Excitation and Stimulation, Unity, and Effectiveness (The Sane Society and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness).
In many ways, such psychological categories are logical extensions of philosophical themes, not just looking at things but dwelling on them. In the depth psychological frame, the unconscious remains the well at the dawn of life, which we can still revisit via time-honored methods, engaging the psyche in new and different ways. Jung noted, "Our consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths."
Mysticism can refer to visionary experiences, non-visionary via negativa experiences, or gnosis, direct spiritual insight into hidden aspects of the cosmos, or transcendence. But, the primordial images are the true force that shapes and channels instinct, occult or hidden forces active in the natural world.
Aspirants seek direct spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of themselves and the cosmos. James Hillman says, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform.
"Thus, the Stoics do not only say "I don't know whether my action will succeed." Rather, they also say: "Since I don't know in advance what the results of my actions will be, and what Destiny has in store for me, I have to make such-and-such a decision in accordance with probability and a rational estimate, without any absolute certainty that I am making the right choice or doing the right thing." (Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel)
"Now our image of the goal changes: not Enlightened Man, who sees the seer, but Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not world. For it is impossible to reflectively know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names. We are always behind our reflections—too late, after the event, or we are in the midst, where we see through a glass darkly." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis (p. 92).
"Metaphysical gnosis is non-dualistic spiritual insight. . .comparable to that found in the Corpus Hermeticum between “lower” and “higher” gnosis, “lower” referring to philosophic learning, “higher” to direct insight into the Nous." "Cosmological gnosis illuminates the hidden patterns of nature as expressing spiritual or magical truths; it corresponds, more or less, to the via positiva of Dionysius the Areopagite. Metaphysical gnosis, on the other hand, represents direct insight into the transcendent; it corresponds, more or less, to the via negativa of Dionsyius the Areopagite." (Versluis)
Esoteric thought and ancient Egyptian mystical currents had a great impact on Renaissance culture, Neoplatonism, and the practice of pagan and Christian theurgy. Plotinus synthesized the ethics of the Stoics and Plato's metaphysics of the gods. Plato (ca. 429–347BCE), comprehends inspiration as a kind of unreason or ecstasy, inspired by an inner necessity, and creative impulse.
One scholarly model of "esotericism" concerns a perennialist, hidden, inner tradition. A second perspective describes world-views which seek to embrace an "enchanted" world-view in the face of increasing de-enchantment. Hanegraaff views Western esotericism as "rejected knowledge" by the scientific establishment and orthodox religious authorities.
Western esoterism is not a single inquiry; 'inner traditions', magical aesthetics, and movements proliferate. Initiatory societies professing esoteric knowledge such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry developed in the 17th century; the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century led to the development of new forms of esoteric thought. New trends emerged in the 19th century that became known as occultism.
https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/9244372/Esotericism_Theorized_Major_T.PDF
http://www.forbiddenhistories.com/basic-readings/
https://books.google.com/books?id=1X2bEHOk8L4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=1X2bEHOk8L4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
To Believe or Not Believe Is Not the Question
Recognizing and engaging the sacred means calling attention to a vital, important, mythic dimension of reality being threatened by one-sided rationalization, secularization, and the mechanization of the world. The gods catalyze our personalities in the soul-field or imaginal dimension of our lives.
The older we get with maturity on the path, the more we seek what resonates with us, an evolving aesthetic, and our own references, rather than an effect or reaction. Even the Gods display vulnerability in their divinity and, like ourselves, carry scars that can't be seen. They are vulnerable, powerful, and definitively otherworldly. It is not myth we need to question but our own spiritual life that informs us throughout our lifetime in the remarkable fabric of our existence. How can we believe more in ourselves and the core, Self?
It is a philosophical awareness of the nature of image running through the Great Work and the mutual trajectory of our soul guides. Like imagery, the most meaningful and fully informed beliefs, opinions, and ideas arise from the unconscious and in no way are intentional. They are uncontrived, rather than trying to be relevant or even interesting.
Echoing the tension between superstition and reason, we can ask ourselves, after Paul Veyne, "Did the Greeks believe in their mythology?" They may have embraced the historical nugget of even imaginal characters and the core or heart of the myth, but not the literal details of the poetic narrations that emphasize the glory of the Greek spirit.
The original kernel became overgrown with an overburden of false legends over time. All legends were embraced as completely authentic. Their own ways of believing and being skeptical differ from our own; nor were their histories compiled like ours. They authenticated historical truth by consensus over the ages. History was a way of creating belief. They simply copied their predecessors, none of whom witnessed the events.
Historical tradition purports to be the memories of ancestors passed down to their descendants. Tradition is the presumed truth and history is born of it. History arises from inquiry, not controversy, so it is riddled with errors and gives rise to false beliefs of commission and omission. With undifferentiated fiction and reality, 'Truth' takes on a fictive aspect that includes the naivete of the believer. Myth is information and the poet is inclined to tell the truth or lie informed by the Muses.
They acted like myth and history shared the same realm of belief, a world beyond the horizon of collective memory. Are religion and history more fictive than art, history, or physics? The difference between fiction and reality is only the subjectivity of a believer. Veyne concludes truth is created not found. (Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination)
Veyne reminds us that, "myth and logos are not not opposites, like truth and error," so the Greeks accepted myth as a subject of serious reflection over two millennia. The contradictions and historical reasoning are reconciled in a metaphorical approach to the 'supernatural.' Sallustius gave us the notion that myth is what is always happening, but never occurred.
He admonishes us, "Those who wish to hear about the Gods should have been well guided from childhood, and not habituated to foolish beliefs." He also said, "One may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden." "The essences of the Gods never came into existence (for that which always is never comes into existence; and that exists for ever which possesses primary force and by nature suffers nothing): neither do they consist of bodies; for even in bodies the powers are incorporeal." (On the Gods and the Cosmos)
Cosmological Gnosis
Magic and its maps of meaning have to be restated in the language of its time. The ontological discourse of reality is no longer occupied solely by religious doctrine and appeals to supernatural forces. We have to confront our own ontological assumptions. Those drawn to the lure of magic and philosophy can use to either clarify or further mystify themselves through a variety of means and for myriad personal reasons.
We have to remain open to understanding since no single interpretation can be definitive. There are aspects only a practicing theurgist would recognize and understand. We can make the experiment and look for ourselves. Immersive experiences stimulate our senses—they draw us in, transport us to another place, and keep us in the moment.
The imaginal dimension of psyche and immersive experience is naturally esoteric, full of unspeakable things and unknowable truth. We call such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them God. We have repressed the contents of the unconscious while forgetting and disregarding the magic and mystery there. That rejection or marginalization in no way diminishes its usefulness.
The esoteric worldview reflects an autonomous relationship between psyche and cosmos. Esotericism was rejected and suppressed by science in the Enlightenment and by Protestant Christianity in the Reformation. That rejection or marginalization in no way diminishes its usefulness. This rejected knowledge and initiatory technology was pushed into the unconscious and a few secret societies.
Theurgy is, at root, the transfiguration of the commonplace. It is more than merely an 'alternative' spirituality, magic, astrology, alchemy, theosophy, quantum mysticism, or holistic healing. It's a sacred commitment to an inner depth dimension.
The “esotericism” of today's rational/skeptical, romantic imagination, or new age idealism is not the “esotericism” of the social and historical past. Often it's the reverse of what we might imagine taking it out of context -- a creative reconstruction. Each theoretical viewpoint creates its own imaginal construct of practical magic. At the moment you do it, it brings some sort of relief, and that is the essential thing.
Dr. David Shaver says, "Reality, then, is not some kind of “objective” fact or knowledge out there in the universe, waiting to be discovered, but, rather, is an organizing principle existing between the mind and this unknown (and unknowable) matter existing in the universe. Reality, then, is an alignment or synchronization of nature and mind."
Belief systems are technologies of symbolism. Theurgic Platonist and Hermetic writing are symbolic modes of expression, innate gnosis, and ritual practices. They share a common purpose: to make the soul immortal and divine. These mysteries speak about the same process, as do Jungian and Transpersonal psychologies.
Jung amalgamated his theories from his Red Book experiences, ancient mystery religions, gnosticism, alchemy,astrology, Mesmerism, and Spiritualism. "The unconscious is the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy, and of all expressions of life that are based on psychological premises." -C. W. Jung, CW 11
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
In the Neoplatonic cosmology, Radiant Light, The One, Nous or divine wisdom emanates archetypal Forms and Ideas, as well as the World Soul which animates the world, an ecology of souls. It mediates reality between matter and spirit. Theurgy promises a symbolic return to Paradise. It induces symbolic ego death and rebirth though soul consciousness, promoting expanded consciousness. The desire for life and death are paradoxically yoked.
Soul mediates and reconciles ordinary consciousness (life instinct) and unconsciousness (death instinct). Soul consciousness is the undifferentiated life/death instinct, identical to the function of intuition, the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct.
Theurgy is the culmination of philosophical thinking. Philosophy is a prelude to a more transcendent existence beyond reason. Such anomalous experiences have conscious, subconscious and unconscious dimensions.
We may be aware, or only partially aware that it is happening, without knowing how it comes about or why it happens as it does. Is it precise or vague; happen slowly or quickly; is it open or hidden; explainable or unexplainable, expansive or contractive; partial or total; predictable or unpredictable; regressive or progressive?
Predictive coding of perception sheds new light on the concentration and visualization practices central to much of modern occultism and active esoteric philosophy movements. Predictive coding, which informs belief, choice, and reasoning, states that the brain continually generates models of the world. Optimizing predictions minimizes sensory prediction error. It also means expectations matter.
Our perceptions work by detecting matches and mismatches. If there is dissonance, it adjusts our internal structure by arousal and action to match the schema and external reality. Unconscious distortions arise that conform with our mythic structures or the mythology changes to conform with our experience.
As Gustav Kafka notes: “It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls.”
In The Red Book Jung reveals: "This meeting is magical and eludes comprehension. Magical understanding is what one calls noncomprehension. Everything that works magically is incomprehensible, and the incomprehensible often works magically. One calls incomprehensible workings magical. The magical always surrounds me, always involves me. lt opens spaces that have no doors and leads out into the open where there is no exit. The magical is good and evil and neither good nor evil. Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures and provokes; and I am always its first victim."
Glisten Up: Esoteric Imagination
"Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit." ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Para 229.
We don't know the true nature of reality, but we continue to yearn for the fullness of existence and a nature that is independent of our conceptions of it, even an extra-cultural reality that is part of the natural world.
"Once upon a time there was a flower, a stone, a crystal, a king and a queen, a castle, a lover and his beloved, and that was a long time ago, in an island in the ocean five thousand years ago.... This is love, the mystical flower of the soul. This is the center, the self... no one understands what I mean. Only a poet could say that..." --C.G.Jung, the Hermetic Circle (by m. (Serrano) P. 60
Esoterics and the esoteric imagination are rooted in the natural fusion of philosophy and religion. Esoteric practices provide techniques of cultivating mental imagery. Imagination is central to esoteric practices which produce powerfully subjective experiences. Special knowledge is often sought through intimate experiences with mediators. Practices focus on sensing, visualizing, and feeling the divine directly.
In Ch 13.1 of Corpus Hermetica, Hermes tells Tat that the experience of rebirth cannot be taught in an ordinary manner and he reveals his divine status, essentially identical with the secret magical light of primordial awareness, the first and last matter, worshiped by means of silence alone:
"I have nothing to say but this: seeing within me a formless vision that came from the mercy of god, I went out of myself into an immortal body, and now I am not what I was before. I have been born in Nous. This thing cannot be taught, nor can it be seen by the physical body .... Now you see me with your eyes, my child, but by gazing with bodily sight you do not see what I am. I am not seen with such eyes, my child.3" (Shaw)
Henri Corbin said, "The often-abused word 'esoterism' refers to the inevitable need to express the reintegration of the human being into symbols." Likewise, the word 'occult' is misunderstood, when it merely means 'hidden' and implies the lure of secrecy. It is hidden because it is experiential by necessity. It reinstates our humanity.
It includes ecstatic experience in the Neoplatonic tradition and quest for wisdom. Gregory Shaw describes how Iamblichus "unified the teachings of Plato and Aristotle within a Pythagorean framework and integrated this philosophic synthesis with the oldest forms of traditional worship." https://www.princeton.edu/~hellenic/Hermeneutica/ShawPaper.pdf
Shaw contextualizes modern interpretations. The unitive not conceptual state was what the aspirant was always after. "...when the initiate’s particular and mortal perspective is replaced by the universal perspective of a god."
"Our initial mistake is to read Platonism as dualism, which leads us to assume that Platonists want to escape from the material realm to enter the noetic world of immaterial Forms (as if these were separable to begin with!). This, Trouillard argued, is a misreading of Plato based on a literalizing of his mythical language regarding the Forms; 24 it is certainly a misreading of theurgic Platonism. It is precisely this kind of dualism that Iamblichus criticizes in Porphyry who had suggested that gods are distant from the world and cannot be engaged in material rites, a position that Iamblichus lamented." (Shaw)
Shaw also describes dualistic and unitive views as stages in the process: "Fowden’s careful reading of the Hermetica shows that the monism and dualism regarding the cosmos are not contradictory themes but reflect different degrees of spiritual awakening in aspirants.30
According to Fowden, in the earlier stages of hermetic paideia (for the notion of initiation and learning are combined) the initiate embraces his body, the world, and even his sexuality as expressions of the divine.31 But in the more advanced degrees of initiation —outlined in CH 13 and NH 6.6—the initiate leaves his body and materiality behind. For Fowden the monism evident in some hermetic texts —affirming the powers of the divine in the world—is superseded by the dualism of escaping from the cosmos in the attainment of gnôsis.32 Copenhaver summarizes Fowden’s interpretation as follows:
"Scholars have taken pains to analyze and schematize parts of the Corpus as monist or dualist, optimist or pessimist, but Fowden proposes to see such variations as sequential rather than contradictory. Thus, a positive view of the cosmos as good and worth understanding would suit an earlier stage of the initiate’s labors and, hence, a treatise focusing on a time when the body’s needs were still great while a negative treatment of the world as evil and unworthy of thought might befit a farther station in the spirits journey... closer to the culmination of gnôsis , which entailed liberation from the body.33"
Esotericism is full of psychologically rich sources from visions and trances to ritual, initiation, hidden correspondences and esoteric hermeneutic techniques. Thematic issues include the textual-interpretive, practical and conceptual dimensions of Western esotericism. Late Antiquity emphasized ecstatic experience, reflected in aspects of the ‘Platonic underworld’ of Hermetism, Gnosticism, Magic and Theurgy.
The Platonic framework includes: Platonic mania; ritual and contemplative inductions of ecstatic experience; ancient terminologies for altered states of consciousness; Neoplatonic epiphanies; philosophical vision and ecstatic vision; the fate and legacy of the ‘shamanism’ concept in classical studies; initiatic and oracular experience in Platonism; and modern psychological perspectives on ancient ecstatic experience.
In Ficino’s Florence, mania was central to the praxis of the Platonic world view in Natural Magic. There are strong similiarities between narratives of “soul flight” in ancient Mediterranean cultures, spanning diverging theological/philosophical traditions over at least a millennium of history.
Modern revivals and experimentation continue. In that we find our relationship to our fate and renewal as well as every phenomenon relating to the human universe, growth, love, creativity, and its dark side - death. To find that both limits us and determines and reveals us.
Plato suggested to perceive desire, is to bring the soul into that state where it is close to its greatest light, to its becoming, to its true destiny. Individuation mirrors the soul's journey. The soul travels along the journey as it “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Eldo Stellucci reminds us that, "The INVISIBLE is the "connecting network" and in which we experience our authentic existence if, as Heraclitus says, "the hidden plot is stronger than the manifested one" (fr.55 / A 20), adding that "the true constitution of each what is it used to hide "(fr 123 / A92). So it will be the surprising and numinous encounter with the invisible to make the "VISIBLE" significant of that ulteriority of meaning that really nourishes our psychological life. The invisible opens the visible to the Mystery that lives there. But what is this "invisible"? What is this network that connects? How do we experience it and where do we meet it? What happens really and psychologically on the border between the visible and the invisible?"
Dramatic Mirror
Psyche mirrors Cosmos. Events can be grouped by meaning as well as cause. Nature is our mirror. Reflection is just one way that visible light may interact with matter and the main way the universe gets created. Light reflects off of the field of matter (Higgs field).
Psyche is both a mirror of the subjective ego and a reflection of the whole psyche, a combination of the intentional and phenomenal. Dreams mirror and reflect psyche, whether we are seeker, aspirant, mystic, or mage.
Images mirror another mirror, (perception), a filter through which and a mirror in which we see ourselves. We can't privilege the conceptual over the imaginal. Images are not signs, representations, symbols or allegories but direct experience of "the individuation of images," avoiding the reduction to mere concepts of these images that 'arise' of themselves, independent of ego.
Image is not what we see but how we see. The image is a consequence of an imaginative look connected to a poetic usage, to an image of fantasy.. We see ourselves made visible in metaphors. Biogenesis mirrors the cosmic process of creation. Images organize themselves into fantasies through archetypal pattern. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face with Cosmos.
Still, Hillman says, "Reflective insights may arise like the lotus from the still lake of meditation, while creative insights come at the raw and tender edge of confrontation at the borderlines where we are most sensitive and exposed - and curiously most alone. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology - a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal - 'Know thyself'' will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not 'Know thyself' through reflection, but 'Reveal thyself', which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving."
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? Interiority and exteriority are basic components in philosophy. Reflection is a metaphor for the continuum of the subject-object in the mirror-of-the-mind and the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority.
Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman). Psychology is the discipline of interiority. Identity includes both psychological interiority and physical expression.
The mirror would reflect all of the souls and powers in the universe and when the souls of shamans went to the world of souls it would show them the way. What we can extract from it is a mirror of our own soul and its treasures. We learn to see ourselves 'depersonalized in the mirror of the human spirit.'
The evolution of art mirrors our liberation from time, space and personality. Artists work in imagistic space with no beginning, middle, or end -- what comes through the permeable consciousness, including trains of images. “The Gnostic artist is also a magician for he materializes thought forms in all that he does. These materializations are not always conscious, hence he is also a type of medium.” (Michael Bertiaux, Voudon-Gnostic Workbook)
Rainer Maria Rilke depended on an inspirational wind or angel sweeping through the poet. In a 1921 letter, he wrote, "I believe that as soon as an artist has found the living center of his activity, nothing is so important for him as to remain in it and never go further away from it (for it is also the center of his personality, his world) than up to the inside wall of what he is quietly and steadily giving forth; his place is never, not even for an instant, alongside the observer and judge."
“It is the psyche of the artist that is the product, it sprung from your own well, it’s your own water”, says Sweden’s great painter Karin Mamma Andersson. “The moment you dig into something, it becomes a sort of self-image.”
Jung believed individuation can lead us out of the hall of mirrors and return us to our Self, calling of the soul back into the heart of being. Self is both a mirror of the subjective ego and a reflection of the whole psyche. Grounded intuition of a centered sphere of soul opens a microcosm that mirrors the Cosmic macrocosm: "As Above, So Below.”
The night sky is the soul's mirror, showing light in the darkness, the luminous darkness that steers the course of individuation. We belong to a world—and a self—that is ever in a state of becoming. The night sky is the soul’s mirror, a reminder that light is embedded even in the deepest darkening, a “seed plot of a world to come.” (Costello)
For centuries, "black mirrors" used in a practice called “scrying," (“to perceive”) were employed to assist the conscious mind to perceive and appropriate Unconscious contents. Elizabethan magician John Dee used an Aztec obsidian magical mirror. Michel Nostradamus in the 16th century used black mirrors for divination.
One technique is to allow archetypal images to arise into awareness from the depths of the Unconscious. Using candles, pierced stones, black mirrors and the like in extraverted ways have no objective value; they’re simply one means to the same end. Televisions and computers are modern 'black mirrors.'
Jung held a mirror up to processes inside us. Jung mirrored the realization of the macrocosm within the microcosm. This movement has the effect of creating a mirror of consciousness. The place of the soul is the wellspring of mythological guidance.
The individual self is identified as soul in each system, and it is placed in what both Jung and Plato call the “third,” a level of being located in-between the divine Self or One, and the ego complex or sense based self. The Self radiates through archetypal awareness.
"Practicing the work of individuation in Jung or philosophy in Plato, which are similar paths, we can unite the opposites in the lower self. "The capacity to mirror divine life is an experience that is also a form of knowledge. Such knowledge is mystical rather than rational."
"Individuation and philosophy provide a path for realized being and real knowledge through the soul's capacity to mirror the divine. Jung 1970a, 336 referred to the experience of the absolute as 'objective facts', transmitted through psychic events." (Weldon, Platonic Jung)
The Great Work through philosophy or individuation involves a unity of the psyche. That creates an inner state where the individual soul is simultaneously aware of the ego or sensory world below and the divine One or Self above. Plato describes it as the realization of the macrocosm within the microcosm and Jung mirrors this idea of wholeness.
Philosophy arose from the image of the mirror of nature, adjusted and repackaged as worldviews and existential situations changed. The Renaissance humanists used the metaphors of the soul as 'mirror image.' The ancient Etruscan word for soul, hinthial, also meant an image reflected in a mirror.
Soul rests in the divine image with which we are utterly akin. It embodies us and makes us One and inseparable. A mirror can represent the divine Sun., symbol of the Self. The Soul is like a mirror which reflects the vast interiority of the Divine Infinity, Soul brightly reflecting God’s image in our Inner mirror.
Instead of watching with biological eyes, we visit this Inner mirror through spiritual contemplation. Human nature mirrored in the cosmos is a theater designed by and for the soul. Plato uses the metaphor mirror analogy, the cosmic soul reflected in the heavens, in Book X of Plato’s Republic (596c–e).
Ficino in Platonic Theology, Book III, Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities, the life of those mortals and the nexus of both. And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest, by means of his reasons, he has built in the sky, beyond the stars, the astral figures and parts of figures, such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties."
The visible body of the universe mirrors as closely as possible the form of the invisible Cosmic Soul, mirrored in our psychic body. The zodiacal light rises from the horizon, envelops planets along the ecliptic, and intersects the Milky Way, revealing Plato‘s visible god, the celestial X that mirrors the World Soul.
Logical and mystical tendencies co-mingle within us. Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. Going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective--is problematic; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts.
We desire a more meaningful relationship with self, others, and cosmos -- a world suspended between thought and poetry. Beyond our roles and dramas is the place where only energy, frequency, and vibration matter...that space where we remember who we really are. Soul contains our history, mystery, and our future. We are only immortal to the extent that consciousness is immortal.
Hillman suggests, "With the return of the soul [to the world], the literal can lose its dominion.The imaginal has become real, for many it is the real. [...] It remains an alternative [to the crisis of our western consciousness], that is, the way of the South, encouraging images [...] and developing "temples and statues" for "portions and phases" and pathologization of the soul: the elaboration of "recepticles acconci" for the psyche in the psyche Then we can put the tumult of our fantasies into the broadest deposit of myths, and by giving them the myth as a center we can take them off the streets, where they merely tumble following the impulses of the moment.I speak of an uninterrupted attention to the imagination, from first story told to a child up to the last conversations of old age.We talk about the recovery of the lost psychic space to contain and the lost mirrors to reflect."
"Our field needs to build rich and fantasy psychologies again such as classical mythology, the arts of memory and alchemy; like the psychology of Jung, like Neoplatonism, which gave order and culture to the madness of the Renaissance and the Romantics. Because what happens to our culture is what happens to - OUR - culture, our fantasies and individual images, they are moralized and repressed by us, or diagnosed and imprisoned, or exploited and betrayed, or drugged and derided. The soul of our civilization depends on the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture requires a culture of imagination." (Re-Visioning Psychology)
The quest for the transpersonal and hyperrational spiritual essence is more than what impels us to the moral life; it is unity, light, and completion. If religion provides magic for the masses, magic is a 'religion' of individuation and self-transformation.
Psyche or soul, the subjective center, merges with the primordial universe in an idealized gnostic apotheosis. Mystics tell us the divine is formless. For Plato, the virtues paled in comparison with the highest capacity of the soul, which is the mystical beholding of the eternal.
"We must begin by overcoming our virtuousness, with the justifiable fear of falling into vice on the other side. This danger certainly exists, for the greatest virtuousness is always compensated inwardly by a strong tendency to vice, and how many vicious characters treasure inside themselves sugary virtues and a moral megalomania." C. G. Jung.
"The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing." Jung. Vol. 18.
Archetypal psychology emphasizes the unconscious defined as imagination with an emphasis on images and soul, preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology, and insistence on treating the dream only in its own terms.
As a technology, magic is not tethered to its real or imaginal history in by-gone eras, but is recreated by each individual for their own path. We've used couriers, telegraph, and telephones to communicate, and now we have contemporary versions of even more efficient devices and ways to use them.
We now have the capacity to use cutting edge as well as ancient technology for altering consciousness. New mythologies are linked to new media. Highly adaptive, magic readily reinvents its technologies in accordance with progress. There are other methods, from yoga and Sufi dancing to drugs and meditation.
Our rituals have always taken place in the realm of the imagination. We aren't bound by medieval or even Renaissance means of connecting with an experiencing psyche, nor is our magical practice, though it may reference the history of such notions. We might describe it as a coherent resonance locking with the circuitry of the universe, but in an organic, not mechanical way. Magic makes a great metaphor for exploring the human condition.
Magic is a valuable tool for examining and reflecting the experience of living in the simultaneously glorious and terrible present -- more big data analytics than situational analysis. But 'magical thinking' or the appropriation of magic for serving personality deficits means 'standing too close to the mirror' to see them.
Do we abandon traditional practice when we use apps to hone in on magical timing, or use online sigil generators? Will we have to choose between nature and the new technology? In Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley explains: “Magick is the Science of understanding one’s self and one’s own situation. It is the art of applying this knowledge in action.”
Authenticity, living out of and clarifying our essence, requires we cultivate a capacity for nuance and duality and master the art of living with opposing truths. The true philosophical art isolates them as they form and re-form in the flowing stream of deeper reality. We contemplate them to assimilate them as they pass.
Our long personal pilgrimage begins with the formulation of our own philosophy, a deliberate and habitual orientation toward wisdom -- a more spiritual, self-contained magic.
A cultured person has some kind of original philosophy, the practice of individuality and self-knowledge, a reflective and considered tapestry of understanding focused on the mystery of life. We live by it secretly and profoundly for many long years as means of protecting it from disintegrating elements.
Gnosis makes us an authenticated user. Our user value-added creations are generated in the content-creating imaginal landscape. We don't need to 'literalize' the magical aspects, even while employing them. Self-arising transformation or individuation works on us whether we dogmatically 'believe' and practice it or not. Real magic transcends the technology of regular rules. What we find is often surprising and subtle, too aglow with silent radiance to fit into our intellectual templates of understanding.
What is truly magical concerns the ultimate comprehensibility of the process. We don't necessarily understand exactly what's going on to make psyche do what it does, but it's a matter of convenience. Magic is the art of self-culture through deeper awareness and heightened livliness. Culture becomes wisdom when it is diffused into the fiber and root of life informing our character, compassion, and ethics.
The ultimate explanation of the "magical" effect would be mundane physics -- a field of superimposed probability waves. The uncertainty principle implies the existence of an undiscovered means of transferring information nonlocally between the aspirant's consciousness and the entangled quantum realm.
We know as much as we need to know to make the technology work and don't care so much beyond that. We could learn what's really going on, probably, at least according to psychology and neurology. But we have to consider unforeseen consequences, the effects of our actions beyond our conscious intent. User as content generator and diffuser gives us an important role in the information process.
In the case of something truly magic, though, we don't have that confidence. Something that runs on truly supernatural principles, not bound by ordinary mathematical laws of physics, would ultimately be ineffable. There might be a few comprehensible layers, but deep down, the ultimate operating principle remains fundamentally unknowable.
That sets even the most advanced technology apart from magic. For something to be technology, it needs to be based in rules that are fundamentally knowable, given enough time and effort. Magic is not. No level of super-science goes so far beyond human understanding to truly be indistinguishable from magic. Yet we can experience it subjectively when we venture past the limits of the possible a little way into the impossible.
Magic is simply a system we treat like magic, a key distinction to get the desired effect without the nonsense of idiosyncratic thinking or overblown ego -- using the operating principles from the user's perspective. As in media, it is a case of "user as content", with the unconscious as content creator...Self as content author. The magical quest itself remains a journey of self-knowledge and transcendence. Aspirants will continue to find their sense of sacred meaning in their own way.
Synchromorphic Transformation
William Blake said, “Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.” As Eldo Stellucci puts it, "When a-causality enters our life and confronts us with orders of coherence implied righteous by meaning, it is probable that we are preparing to cross new psycho-conscious morphogenetic fields that will further transform our existence."
Self-referential symbols and symbolic intersubjectivity in liminal space enable certain styles of consciousness, supersensory images of the sacred. Theurgy is at once a teaching tool and a spiritual connection. It is one way of closing the gap between ‘symbolic’ representation and symbolic interaction. The resolution of paradox requires a change in perspective. "We don't really heal anything; we simply let it go," said Jung.
Consciousness itself is miraculous. Gurdjieff regarded a miracle as the “manifestation of the laws of one cosmos in another cosmos" of nested hierarchies and scale invariant patterns. Unity in multiplicity is the greatest paradox and miracle of all. Cultivating subtle attention is cultivating spirituality. Our consciousness becomes more complex internally over time.
Crossing that threshold means stepping beyond sociocultural conditioning into the enchanted world of nonordinary awareness. What is miraculous is our ability to move from one state of being to another, from sleep to awakening, from numbly repeating what we think we know to seeing something new and marvelous that was hiding in plain sight.
The whole being can even fuse in ecstatic communion with divinity. This suggests that Consciousness initiates a form of top-down evolution on the Darwinian genetic being. It is the mental and physical context of the universe at all scales.
In The Red Book Jung notes, "The image of God casts a shadow, which is as big as he is. The upper sense is big and small, it is as large as the space of the firmament and tiny as the cell of a living body."
Hillman summarized his counterpoint objections to Oriental transcendence and idealism in Revisioning Psychology:
“If divinity is in our freedom from hindrances and not in our inhibitions, complaints, and grotesqueries, then Oriental transcendence will hardly look to pathology for what might be entering us through it, asking what door is opened into soul through our wounds. Instead it urges: rise above psychological hassles and tangles, be wise – not snared, court bliss – not affliction.”
“My characterization of the Oriental denial of pathologizing is Western, reflecting the way it is used by Westerners. For what we do with Oriental transcendent methods derives as much from the Western psyche as it does from the Eastern spirit. In the East this spirit is rooted in the thick yellow loam of richly pathologized imagery – demons, monsters, grotesque Goddesses, tortures, and obscenities. It rises within a pathologized world of want and despair, chained by obligations, agonized. But once uprooted and imported to the West it arrives debrided of its imaginal ground, dirt-free and smelling of sandal-wood, another upward vision that offers a way to bypass our Western psychopathologies. The archetypal content of Eastern doctrines as experienced through the archetypal structures of the Western psyche becomes a major and systematic denial of pathologizing."
"If I have disparaged the transcendental approaches of humanistic and Oriental psychology, it is because they disparage the actual soul. By turning away from its pathologizings they turn away from its full richness. By going upward towards spiritual betterment they leave its afflictions, giving them less validity and less reality than spiritual goals. In the name of the higher spirit, the soul is betrayed.” (p. 67)
Forewarned, we have to recognize from the framework of theurgy, consciousness is different from that of psychology, quantum science, and neurology and is used differently. An experimental consciousness is concerned with participation, direct experience, and the paradigm-changing dialogue between experience and interpretation. Interpretation is built into perception.
Encounter, in or out of ritual space, is experiential discovery that helps us realize the mythic and sacred are the cosmos -- the unseen within as well as the spacious spectacle of the whole sky without. We might conjecture that the constellations and wandering stars were like sigils to ward off the Nothing.
Schopenhauer remarked that mankind clings, "to the thought of Magic in all places and at all times, notwithstanding frequent failure; and we come to the conclusion, that this thought must, to say the least, be deeply rooted in human nature, if not in things in general, and cannot be a mere arbitrary creation of the fancy."
We may become aware of a need and desire for ritual -- "a gnostic impulse" for insight beyond radical dualism that awakens us from a long ontological sleep. Some aspirants act this desire out in ceremonies and invocations, (theurgy), in personal or popular culture revivals drawing on Neoplatonic and other roots.
In Theurgy, spiritual yearning is not concretized but remains metaphorical though enacted. Magical intelligence includes transcendental technologies -- technologies of the self through which we construct our own identities -- a relationship between games of truth and how we construct our self-image.
We perform transformational operations that effect our bodies, souls, thoughts, behavior, and beliefs -- our cultural programs. So, magic gets labelled subversive and transgressive. We may find ourselves introduced to an objective ontological phenomenon underlying our experiences, unmediated by cultural frameworks.
Not for self-appropriation, magical technologies allow nature to do the work, like the wind that fills a sail. Theurgy is like using a magical sail to get nature's cooperation. The Greek word techne implies an extension and optimization of life's potential through repeatable processes.
Jung remarked that, "The magical word is one that lets "a primordial word resound behind it"'; magical action releases primordial action." (Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63). And, "Do not forget that the original meaning of all letters and numbers was a magical one!" (Letters Vol. 1, Pg. 528-529)
And in The Red Book: "The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner. The magical way is not arbitrary, since that would be understandable, but it arises from incomprehensible grounds. ...The magical way arises by itself If one opens up chaos, magic also arises."
Ascent to heaven is an archetypal motif of exceptional metaphysical importance in philosophy and religion. At these “holy moments” we can experience unity akin to a both a Neoplatonic and Jungian ideal.
Prof. Greg Nixon (2010) suggests: "Such a system is not primarily representational at all, but is instead driven by autopoietic (self-creative) processes so never presented (concretely perceived) ideas, images, or beings can be called forth thus extending reality into abstract palaces of the imagination. Once such an abstract image is communicated and conceived, it is becomes part of the reality of non-representational human experience. If it is experienced, its reality cannot be doubted (cf . Eliade, 1963; Frankfort & Frankfort, 1949), and humanity enters the realm of the sacred."
Our consciousness spontaneously arises from the space of awareness. We each have a conscious and unconscious worldview, a system of interconnected beliefs. Can we be certain of any beliefs as 'truth'? Plotinus warned, "The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone." There is no consensus on theories of truth.
Though strongly held and well-justified, some of our presumed philosophical/conceptual "facts" will naturally turn out to be mistaken. A cosmology is a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul’s need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things, by connecting the end to the beginning.
The world's meaning is immeasurably immense as polyphonic psyche. The mystical ascent to the sky is central to the Egyptian, Platonic, and Hermetic traditions. Spiritual flight, ascent to the noetic realm through transcendence, is common in Neoplatonic literature.
The descent and ascent is one of manifestation and reintegration. The desire to seek greater knowledge leads to unification of consciousness. That desire is sacred because it arises from the domain of myth and caring for the soul by exploring the personal and collective unconscious. Myth allows us to see many things at once by collapsing complex processes into understandable, simplified forms.
McLuhan uses terms such as “integral awareness",, “organic interrelation”, “organic whole”, and “organic unity” to show how use of myth helps us explain and understand our reality. McLuhan says, "For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period." A mind overloaded by facts reverts to myth to understand the world.
"Myth is contraction or implosion of any process..." "myth...capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight." "Our inner experience, increasingly at variance with these mechanical patterns, is electric, inclusive, and mythic in mode. The mythic or iconic mode of awareness substitutes the multi-faceted for point-of-view."
He continues in Understanding Media, "...myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture." "Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure", in our case Plato, Hermes Trismegestus, and the Neoplatonics. (Understanding Media)
"The Word and image, like male and female, are opposites complementary. Every time a culture elevates the word written at the expense of the image, the patriarchy dominates. When the importance of the image replaces the written word, female values and egalitarianism thrive."
(Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess.The conflict between word and image, p.15)
For Jung, it is the symbolic process that must be made conscious. It is not the concept but the symbol that opens us to the mythic dimension and symbolic conscience.
Hillman found desire something to work with and make Holy through attention and discipline that iterates over time. A trajectory forms when the result of applying a given function is fed again into the function as input, and this process is repeated.
Jung understood our god-images are mirrors of our own unconscious desires. This is our renewed image of the sacred and holding it in tension between heaven and earth. Yet it is our most ancient notion of encounter with the numinous.
We repress the contents of the unconscious, disregarding the magic and mystery there, at our own peril. Sacred ritual re-invokes our ability as carriers of divine presence. Sacred rites, places, and objects use metaphor to make a connection between humanity and divinity. In the Renaissance, magic was another term for Hermeticism.
Desire is holy, as depth psychology, the romantics, and the Neoplatonists insisted, because it touches and moves the soul. Desire creates a reciprocity between human and divine through a palpable and lived relationship with the sacred psyche. It is invaluable, even just to redeem us from existential crisis through practice and service.
We need to separate our constructions from a illusory interpretation of the facts of reality, as available to experience. How can we integrate different theories relating to the basis of reality? No shortage of comparisons and correlations between spiritual notions, metaphysical ideas, and scientific theories has been made.
Phenomenology indicates a way to research where we can be open to the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through our own direct involvement and understanding. Understanding arises directly from our personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure and immersion.
We meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced a way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which we see the phenomenon in a radically fresh and fuller way.
Sacramental Function
"Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act." --James Hillman, Healing Fiction
This inner journey to the level of archetypes and principles is the quest to know the nature of reality, the infinite, absolute mystery at the core of ourselves and the universe. It leads to philosophy, art, and science. Without beauty, the soul shrivels and dies. It is our inner self, the spark of light and love that resides at the core of our being.
It also leads to magic in the classical sense, but that was made taboo and transgressive. Nevertheless, it is a recurring theme of myths and tales -- the titanic energies of those forces that are beyond us. Desire leads us through our images and dreams like Ariadne's thread.
If magic starts in desire, it still needs direction in a greater frame of timeless time. Sacred psychology is an ongoing operation with the soul's images. It means joining a greater life; dying to our current selves and being reborn in our eternal selves.
But the human condition suffers estrangement and alienation from nature and our own nature. So, how can we become a partner in symbiosis with nature -- as the human beings we would like to be in an optimal trajectory with our destiny? Marion Woodman says, “Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we owe to Soul."
It has been sought in universals, transcendental idealism, radical dualism, empirical materialism, existential nihilism, and deconstructionism. Relativistic perception is the opposite sense or position. Paradoxical tension between spiritual transcendence and soulful immanence is breathing life into the textures of our experience.
The notion of paradox comes from a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, dualistic paradox. Self-referential paradox feeds back and annihilates itself. Such bivalence (binary logic: this or that; true or false; black or white) can be superseded by multivalent consciousness which perceives in terms of degrees. Multivalence more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of consciousness.
As in the case of fractal generation, solutions are not found in terms of this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relationships. Fuzzy philosophy is based on acceptance of degrees of truth, the "grayness" of most propositions (truth values), the fractional solutions of fuzzy logic. Human consciousness is a self-referential system which embodies this principle of a connection between logic and chaos, in holistic ("whole brain") awareness.
It's been sought in philosophy and religion to connect back to self and God. For the theurgist, 'it is a sacrilege not to preserve the immortality of the soul, raising it to the level of the holy and uniting it to the divine.' (Damascius, Phil.Hist .19 Athanassiadi)
In Hymns to an Unknown God, Sam Keen said, “My life is the text in which I must find the revelation of the sacred.” This alternative approach requires our ongoing personal engagement with religious and mythological traditions, and the sacred dimension of each individual’s life story from a metaphorical, archetypal, and imaginal perspective.
Through pluralism, psyche has escaped the absolute domination of the sacred function of myth by traditional religions, working with the spiritual dimension of personal mythology (Krippner).
A phenomenological approach to magic is an "as if" reality with which we participate -- a creative, mythopoetic approach. We open to the religious dimension of myth in terms of personal mythological consciousness -- beliefs and experiences that order, shape, and direct our lives. We don't perceive the world through ideas but through events we
live through.
Ritual enables a psychic shift within the participant toward a specific way of thinking and conceptualizing which produces a 'sacred' state of mind. As we enact a ritual our psyche moves deeper into the fantasy of the metaphorical enactment, causing an increasing identification with the symbolic meaning.
At some deeper level we have an implicit desire to make deep meaning of both inner and outer life. These metaphors are the bridge by which we come to 'understand' the divine. The divine takes on a form familiar to human experience, yet dependent on human experience in order for it to be real. We may feel the sacred animal joy, the instinct of poetic and aesthetic participation when we engage in the process.
Theurgy is both psychosomatic (physical influences of emotional factors) and psychosemantic; the meaning of the word or 'utterance' is largely the result of imagination, “imaginational heart.” Neoclassical practice is the desire for the self to reveal itself as a pantheon of gods and goddesses that mirror the cosmos.
Theurgic speech of the birds and solar knowledge echoes the tongues of the gods and their songs, chanting out the universe by the secret Name of everything, back to the ineffable Silence. The rites themselves also 'speak,' manifesting noetic realities of the archetypal realm, transporting and transmuting the theurgist with the divine.
“This feeling for the infinite...can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be...ultimately limited–we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” (C. G. Jung)
"Just remember that I am, and that I support the entire cosmos with only a fragment of my being. Behold, Arjuna, a million divine forms, with an infinite variety of color and shape. Behold the gods of the natural world, and many more wonders never revealed before. Behold the entire cosmos turning within my body, and the other things you desire to see." (Bhagavad Gita)
"With a drop of my energy I enter the earth and support all creatures. Through the moon, the vessel of life-giving fluid, I nourish all plants. I enter breathing creatures and dwell within as the life-giving breath. My true being is unborn and changeless. I am the Lord who dwells in every creature." (Bhagavad Gita)
The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or
consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the
fundamental basis of all that is.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Neoplatonism, Hermetic, and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
Logical Lies, Psychological Symbols, & Aesthetic Metaphors
Older strata of the unconscious remain active within us despite modern explanations and contextx. Belief urges actions. We act our beliefs. The stronger we believe, the more action takes over, the more motivated we become.
Philosophy is done within the context of a worldview. The dilemma of the personal cannot be solved personally. We need to deal with collective events more mythically, as they rework our lives. Theurgy engages with rites of alchemical transformation, mystical union with the noetic Sun, revelation of the divine face, salvation as return to the divine.
But psychology cannot provide metaphysical beliefs. Jung's crucial move was distinguishing between God and the god-image. The metaphysical influences on the Western Tradition include Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, alchemy, and astrology.
Depth psychology avoids metaphysical positing with a stance of non-deciding but opening, a Presencing. We don't have to believe literally to engage in aesthetic practices that foster and refine psychic life everyday. Depth and resilience to the mystery of existential suffering that tries our souls has been called the 'dark sacred' in the spiritual frame of reference.
Jung suggests in the Red Book, that 'the magical way arises by itself. If one opens up chaos, magic also arises.' "One can teach the way that leads to chaos, but one cannot teach magic. One can only remain silent about this, which seems to be the best apprenticeship. This view is confusing, but this is what magic is like."
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into a bifurcation or unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. The deepest effects result in a new self image Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The physical universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner life. The reality of universals is deconstructed by not presuming them. How can we experience and confirm the particulars of the universal Idea or Form, which has the opposite characteristic to the particular?
The new 'realism' is indeterminate -- how things are presents itself to consciousness in some kind of immediacy. The ancient philosophers sought it in magic. Metaphysical realism views the ways things are as always outrunning our ability to represent them. Pure potentiality, the condition of possibility of an event, does not take place if it has no place to be.
Natural philosophy returns in the “new” concept of mind, life and matter emerging from the nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime. Space is no longer secondary to matter. Absolute space of the vacuum is the primary reality.
The things we know as matter (mass, with properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. Our “essential nature” must be here, now. And in the emerging concept there is no "absolute matter," only an absolute matter-generating energy field.
The philosophy of cognitive science deals with the traditional issues of cognition and transcendence. Phenomenology and philosophy provide constitutive explanations that describe the structural conditions of possibility of phenomena. Science can provide ground for revising philosophical theories about them. Both phenomenology and transcendental philosophy answer to naturalistic epistemological constraints. (Wheeler)
Though most don't practice this archaic structure, magic has always been part of the human story from the rituals of ancient shamans. Shamanic magic is the root of religion, medicine, philosophy, art, and science. All magic is ultimately shamanic, but not all aspirants are shamans.
Some are theurgists actively participating in the transpersonal and numinous, the spiritual Mysteries of the soul, divine Self-Revelation, and living resurrection, a return to wholeness. The mystery of resurrection is the creative power of visionary imagination.
Theurgy has roots in Egyptian initiation rites, Orphism, Neoplatonism, and Kabbalah. It contains the concept of spiritual evolution, and ultimately unification with God or the Godhead at its core -- the virtual substrate.
The existence of unconscious mental processes presents us with an acute philosophical challenge. The true nature of mind reminds us us that perfection is an illusion, and that we are simply ‘reality’ experiencing or exploring itself.
In Jung the concept of the ‘archetype’ is inseparable from the concept of the ‘collective
unconscious.' ’In From Cliché to Archetype, McLuhan conceptualizes the activated archetype as a ‘cliché ’This is an equivalent term for what he had termed the ‘medium’ or ‘technology’, but specifically refers to the function of a technology in use. Symbolism is the art and technique of breaking literal connections. Technology is an extension of our own bodies.
Even 'utterance' -- metaphysical power words -- is an extension of ourselves. For example, the spells, or "utterances", of the pyramid texts are primarily concerned with protecting the pharaoh's remains, reanimating his body after death, facilitating ascent to the heavens, the image of the afterlife during the Old Kingdom. McLuhan calls ‘acoustic space’, the ‘sense-ratio’, ‘media-environment’, ‘archetype’ or ground.
All experience is correlated to an ‘archetype’ extant in the unconscious. A cliché becomes an archetype through resonance, repetition, and retrieval by consciousness. The unconscious form activates when we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype. Magic is retrieved when it enacts ritual and invokes specific archetypes. We unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress.
We can relate theurgic practice to McLuhan's description of art. The tool is a work of art. Every technology is created in the first place as a work of art, while every work of art, in its repeated use, becomes a technology (CA).
McLuhan says that ‘The function of art in a tribal society is not to orient the population to novelty but to merge it with the cosmos.... The primitive role of art [is that] of serving as consolidator and as liaison with the hidden cosmic powers ...’ (CA, 177)
Image, Gesture, & Words
Around 1964,McLuhan began using Jung’s term ‘collective unconscious’ to describe the effects of technologies: "All technologies are collective unconscious." ‘Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness."... (Counterblast 30-31)
Deities or archetypes may have evolved to smooth interpersonal relations by including an understanding of human types, along with rules for helping the different types relate with one another. If the deities are just reflections of ancient evolutionary pressures, with a dash of neuroanatomy thrown in, we still have same pressures today so the ancient archetypes still "work", irregardless of any objective existence of gods and goddesses.
But McLuhan required no transcendental reference, no Platonic life of forms in an abstract realm. The life of the forms is always here, now and we participate in their creation. What we call the unconscious is Nature and media reflecting ourselves back to ourselves. His method was 'probing' the (unconscious) environment, and, McLuhan tells us, it has utility across all fields of the arts and sciences.
There is no archetypal realm beyond the relations we have with the metamorphosing cosmos. We use them to express and interpret our experiences -- what appears grounded in the spontaneous action of the psyche, expressed through image, gesture, and word, which transcend the ego.
Jung's archetypal concept is of a psychic content and mythological processes that may be ‘projected’ upon objects in the environment. Jung claims archetypal projection is the way in which individuals ‘assimilate[s] all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events’.
The state of pure awareness is that silent space between thoughts. That gap, inner stillness, connects us to the field of pure potentiality of the void, universal and persistently present truth. In non-duality we are our experience, just experiencing it with awareness. Theurgy is a pro-active choice toward choosing something we wish to experience.
Transcendental Magic
The theurgist is symbolically sacrificed on the altar of wholeness. The aspirant essentially becomes an 'altar' of worship, through ceremony, speech, gesture, and concentration. Right-brain spiritual and religious imagination creates a specific 'atmosphere' and an exaltation of consciousness that activates the 'temples' in the cranium with alternate states of consciousness.
Modern magic emphasizes the Great Work of spiritual evolution -- Self-transformation or transmutation. Reuniting the soul with the divine was believed to result in communication with one's personal angel or higher self. The unconscious has many voices because the notion of moving along a single plane of narrative awareness is totally alien to the nature of language and the unconscious.
"Hermeticism is the science of nature hidden in the hieroglyphics and symbols of the ancient world. It is the search for the principle of life, along with the dream (for those who have not yet achieved it) of accomplishing the great work, that is the reproduction by man of the divine, natural fire which creates and recreates beings." (Eliphas Levi)
Theurgy is artistic engagement with technology. Individual mind engages the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The illusion of content siphons off all attention, mechanical repetition and reoccurance, and from the forms and effects.
This magnum opus is analogous to Jung's individuation process, where psychic transformation follows an archetypal and universal process. It unfolds through integration of our conscious and unconscious aspects.
What was initially fragmented and broken, is restored and synthesized. A whole and unique individual emerges; an individual who fully accepts, and is one with, him or herself, is fully authentic and embraces their destiny. It is a movement toward consciously collaborating in the realization of one’s unique destiny.
The sacredness of the Opus, or Great Work, is the central idea. It is a holistic perspective. One must be self-oriented, rather than ego-oriented. The adept is also diligent, patient and virtuous. We must have that integrative potential within for self-realization -- for becoming whole or 'holy.'
Magic requires an inward seeking, just like the process of individuation. It is a solitary task for no one may follow where you go. But there may be guides who will help inspire your faith and dedication to the task. Others have been to the territory you will explore, but none will accompany you.
The Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World acts as the soul-guide to the highest region. We experience an imaginal Reality -- the world ensouled as living divinity, consciousness in its material unconsciousness. The putrefying contents of our psychophysical existence are elevated through insight and revisioning to the very means of our rebirth, and the unblocked, clear perception of our existential Reality.*****
Divine Loving Presence
In On the Mysteries, Iamblichus successfully argued that union with the Gods could not be achieved by mere philosophical speculation, but only by moving beyond concepts to a non-dual union with the divine through sacred rites and theurgy.
In a sense, the Soul is already "there". But consciousness from the lower bodies, and lower planes must be withdrawn upwards before It is reunited with its True Self, or Soul.
In On the Gods and the World, Neoplatonist philosopher Sallustius noted: "Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods - subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden.”
Magic is woven into the cosmology of Greek mythology, cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. Neoplatonists distinguished between divine or High Magic and low magic for personal gain. Some theurgic rites involved a form of self initiation.
The theurgist does not coerce the Gods; the Gods themselves who elevate the theurgist by giving light. The Hidden Stele describes adoration to a "spirit who enters into me, convulses me, and leaves me kindly according to the will of God."
The aspirant senses an intense feeling of upward movement, as if being literally pulled by a magnetic force, the attraction of the radiant field of spiritual love. That pull attracts like a magnet, escorting the emanated soul back to the Source, absorbing the soul into the Absolute.
Ritual is the medium of the art of ceremonial magic, creating a channel for the unconscious potential of the Unmanifest -- a bridge between aspirant and deity for the sake of union without ulterior motive. It is a creative outlet for pathos and the mythologizing tendencies of the psyche. It allows a life lived in close connection to psyche, interrelated with the mysteries of life, death, and transformation.
Theurgy is not reviving a dead faith but building relationship with living essence. Everything is and remains metaphorical. Mythic animation of archetypal figures and revivification of myth though the archetypes remain literally unattainable. Epistemological metaphors are 'how we know what we know.' When an archetype activates, it is primarily through a number of psychological mechanisms that influence behavior.
Theurgy intentionally activates that archetypal process. Theurgists aspires toward a longer or shorter experience of insight into true identity and what is hidden in the depths and the highest spheres of heaven. We learn to “think with the heart,” to seize and embrace spiritual values and bring them down to earth. Shakespeare suggested, “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.”
Heightened State
Both art and ceremonial magic are means of manipulating symbols, words or images, to facilitate changes in consciousness and readjust our relationship with the cosmos. Art draws forth the potential of the unmanifest. An aesthetic response to beingness opens us up to our unconscious and intuition. Understanding and aesthetic response lead to the formulation of wisdom and true knowledge -- the Radiance of Here and Now.
In the western mystery tradition, magic (wisdom) is a ‘living’ or evolving philosophical system and paradigm that morphs with developments in science, thought, and culture. It helps us actualize our philosophical perspective, personal ethics, and self-realization.
John Keats reminds us, 'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?' He also noted, "There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself."
Keats's view of the "world as a vale of soul-making" -- a heartful world of meaning, touchstones and transformations -- is echoed in Archetypal Psychology and its Neoplatonic roots. It is a creative response to life's vitality and events -- the idea of working with the things that happen to us.
James Hillman realized, “The Spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.” Spirit views soul as vague and inferior but Hillman imagines them balancing one another.
Magic hints at the idea that the universe is in sympathy with everything else. That all things, by the mere fact of belonging to the same system, are one. It reconnects us to the experience of wonder, with the unconscious, the wisdom of the body, and the forms of natural images -- the Self. It honors the anima and the animal, while respecting the polyphony and mysteries of theophany. We delight in the paradoxical, enigmatic, ambiguous, and contradictory.
Theurgy describes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of evoking the action or invoking the presence of one or more gods. Every gesture of the hand, every placement of the foot, every sound, every movement is the language of wisdom. Our ordinary sense of time and space dissolves.
Jung says, "The ego has to acknowledge many gods before it attains the center where no god helps it any longer against another god." (Letters Vol. II, Pgs. 257-264). "The archetype is, so to speak, an “eternal” presence, and it is only a question of whether it is perceived by the conscious mind or not." (CW 12, Para 329).
It especially concerns the goal of merging with the divine and perfecting oneself as a deathless (immortal) body of light. In this perfection of the human body-mind, our microcosmic soul merges with the World Soul, enabling our participation in wisdom. As Jung suggests, "The Self might equally be called the God Within."
"By heightened unconscious performance we mean that peculiar automatic process whose results are not available for the conscious psychic activity of the individual...In this field we meet with a not unjustifiable skepticism on the part of the scientific pundits...occultism has claimed a special right to this field" (Jung, Psychiatric Studies, Vol 1, 80).
Bodies of Light
Theurgy is ceremonial Magic, ranging from shamanism to the mysticism of the Neoplatonists, in which divine consciousness and powers enter the human soul. Theurgy is the worship of the Gods as a philosophical way of life, rather than formal religion.
The practice unites the opposites. It builds a subtle, immaterial body of light as a vehicle for soul travel. "The body of light is a spiritual term for the non-physical body associated with enlightenment, known by many names in different spiritual traditions:
Christianity: “the resurrection body” and “the glorified body”,
Taoism: “the diamond body,” “the immortals” and “the cloudwalkers.”
Tibetan Buddhism: “the light body” or “rainbow body”,
Vajrayana: “the diamond body”,
Kriya Yoga: “the body of bliss”,
Vedanta: “the superconductive body.”
In some mystery schools, it is called “the solar body.”
Rosicrucian: “the diamond body of the temple of God.”
Ancient Egypt: “the luminous body or being” (akh).
Old Persia: “the indwelling divine potential” (fravashi or frav)."
Hermeticism: “the immortal body” (soma athanaton).
Judism: the Merkabah, Cube of Space or Throne Chariot of Qabalah; The Diamond Body.
Sufism: “the most sacred body ” (wujud al-aqdas), “supracelestial body ” (jism asli haqiqi).
Tantrism: “the vajra body,” “the adamantine body,” and “the divine body.”
Gnosticism and Neoplatonism: luminous “the radiant body” of the Uncreated self.
Alchemy: the Emerald Tablet calls it “the Glory of the Whole Universe” and “the golden body.” Philosopher's Stone, The alchemist Paracelsus called it “the astral body.”
Communication is through interaction and true participation between gods and aspirants in ritual. A great attraction to the gods exists which arises freely from the soul. This same great power, Eros, reciprocally descends from the gods. We can experience gods in our daily life, but theurgy is the formal means for worship, communicate with, and experience the Gods.
"Soul becomes psyche through love and it is Eros that engenders the psyche [...] The creative is a result of love. It is marked by imagination and beauty and by the connection with tradition as a living force and with nature as a living body. This perception of instinct will insist on the importance of love: nothing can be created without love and love reveals the origin and principle of all living things, as in Orphic cosmogony." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis)
"In individuation we ground ourselves in the part of the feminine, Eros, that is relational and feeling, that comes from the heart. And, we learn that our inner relationships are the foundation for our outer ones, as well as our relationship to life and the Divine. It is how we accept ourselves, find the courage to sacrifice our self-images again and again in order to relate to our complexes and find the promise of an enlarged life that actually frees us from our past and self-defeating habits." (Bud Harris, Becoming Whole: A Jungian Guide to Individuation)
Theurgy means "God-working" -- magic used for personal growth, spiritual evolution, and becoming closer to the Divine. It includes a range of esoteric subjects including natural magic, Qabalah, angelic hierarchies, planetary seals, angelic sigils, magical correspondences, and theurgy.
Theurgy and Magic
"Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic." ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Theurgy and magic are the poential for the participant to work with natural laws. These laws are under the dominion of the Gods. Since theurgy is communication with the gods, union with the power of nature is possible. The world thinks and feels and imagines. Alive with its own desires, its own memories, it lives with experiences, regrets, and longings that interfuse with our own.
Theurgy has nothing to do with mundane superstition, practices which are called in ancient Greek goetia, sorcery, or black magic. Goetia should be viewed as trickery.
Theurgy is genuine high magic, entirely selfless and performed only as necessary. Such magic is great because its source is the Deathless Gods. Trivial false magic fails because the Gods cannot be compelled to act for the self-serving designs of the mundane.
Genuine theurgy is not magic since we cannot force the Gods to appear through prayers and incantations. iIf that were so, then beings which appeared could not possibly be Gods, but could only be deception. Theurgy is worship and, by means of our love, we invite the Gods to come. Theurgy occurs in a field of mutual freedom enjoyed between Gods and mortals.
In tradition, the rituals are too sacred to display publicly, being the formal means we use to communicate with the gods, an intimate and private act. We do not put our rituals on display. They are not meant for the eyes of the casual onlooker who has no understanding of what they see.
Theurgy is for sincere and well-meaning individuals who desire it with pure heart, who respect what it is and ho are willing to take the time and energy to learn the foundation of knowledge which makes their meaning comprehensible.
Thæourgós - (theurgus; Gr. θεουργός, ΘΕΟΥΡΓΟΣ. Noun.) individual who conducts ritual, a priest or priestess. The word means divine worker, and ritual (thæouryía) is the divine work of the worship of the Gods. The cosmic Thæourgós is the Dimiourgós. - Cf. Iæréfs.
Thæouryía - (Theurgy; Gr. θεουργία, ΘΕΟΥΡΓΙΑ. Noun. divine work) ritual, the worship of the Gods.
Thærapeia - (therapeia; Gr. θεραπεία, ΘΕΡΑΠΕΙΑ. Noun.) service to the Gods, worship, ritual.
Theurgy (from the Greek theos: God, and ergon: work), is the highest, the most pure
and also the most wise aspect of Magic. We begin with the latter, keep only the essence and most refined purity, is to consummate the former.
According to Charles Barlet, “Ceremonial Magic is an operation by which Man seeks
to constrain – by means of the very play of Natural Forces – the Invisible Powers of
various Orders to act in accordance with what he requires of them. To this end, he seizes
them, surprises them, that is to say through projection (by means of analogical “correspondences” which comprise the Unity of Creation); these Powers over which he is
not master, but to which he can open extraordinary pathways, to the very heart of Nature.
To this end he uses Pentacles, special Substances, rigorous conditions of Time and Place,
which he must observe under pain of the gravest of perils. For, if the path sought is even
a little lost, the audacious one will be exposed to the force of these “Powers” before which he is but a speck of dust..” (Barlet: l’Initiation, January 1897 edition).
https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/03/03/more-reflections-on-james-hillmans-archetypal-psychology/
http://www.hellenicgods.org/theurgy---thaeouryia---theourgia
http://www.markfoster.net/rn/texts/practicalkabbalah-part2.pdf
Chaldean Oracles
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ow0VAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=chaldean+oracles,+google+books&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr2KiO4ePbAhXDt1kKHboOD3kQ6AEILDAA#v=onepage&q=chaldean%20oracles%2C%20google%20books&f=false
Gregory M. Nixon, "Myth and Mind: The Origin of Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred" (322-323): https://www.academia.edu/295004/_Myth_and_Mind_The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Discovery_of_the_Sacred_
THEURGY NOW & THEN
by Iona Miller, (c)2018
"We shall no longer hang on to the tails of public opinion or to a nonexistent authority on matters utterly unknown and strange. We shall gradually become experts ourselves in the mastery of the knowledge of the Future." –Wilhelm Reich
"This is the Hall of Wisdom. No one can reveal it, no one can hide it. Like a flower, it must grow and bloom in thy soul. If thou wouldst plant the seed of this flower in thy soul--learn to discern the real from the false. Listen only to the Voice that is soundless... Look only on that which is invisible, and remember that in thee thyself, is the Temple and the gate to it, and the mystery, and the initiation." --P. D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot
"'These palaces are not built in space, then. They are the only space available. They project their own space when they arise. There is no repressed negativity around them that seeks to enter. Nothing exists, then, but what the imagination, which has brought forth the palace, has constituted.' (Paul Veyne (1988), pp. 121-2)
"... palaces of the imagination... are not mere fictions but... aspects of all human endeavour, our reality itself. Beyond these palaces (in which gods may dwell) lies …nothing. To conceive essences from this nonspace is simply to expand the palaces and further push back the horizons of the unknown, ‘that untraveled world whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move’, as Tennyson’s Ulysses put it." --Gregory M. Nixon, "Myth and Mind: The Origin of Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred" (322-323)
PREFACE: Why Magic & Theurgy?
"Magic is a way of living. If one has done one's best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place." -Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
"The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive." -Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
"The last stage is reached when, in the highest tension and concentration, beholding in silence and utter forgetfulness of all things, it [the soul] is able as it were to lose itself. Then it may see God, the fountain of life, the source of being, the origin of all good, the root of the soul. In that moment it enjoys the highest indescribable bliss; it is as it were swallowed up of divinity, bathed in the light of eternity."–Plotinus
"This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called ‘apparition,’ the whole so-called ‘world of spirit,’ death, all these things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely eliminated from life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied." —Rainer Maria Rilke (from the Duino Elegies)
"Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature." --Marsilio Ficino
"How about it, then? Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come." -Seneca
*****
"Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature." --Marsilio Ficino
"How about it, then? Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come." -Seneca
Today, we define our own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Naturally, we tend to combine innovation with tradition for a more adaptable, fluid, and dynamic view, incorporating current perspectives. This includes the psyche, body, relationships and the total environment, with which we share a common destiny.
Whether activated or dormant, the vital principle still living in our substance and essence, re-enchants the world. There is more to life than just matter. The unconscious modifies the conscious.
The invisible force of animation is an immense force of nature -- metaphysical, biological, and phenomenological resonance. Unknown factors contribute to the way we interact with the world. What do magic and theurgy have to offer in the 21st century?
The unconscious is a virtual mixing operator, co-creating natural magic and ceremonial invocation. The theurgic process has poetic strategies for releasing potential knowledge from the unconscious. Words, metaphor, and images carry mythical and archetypal resemblances within them.
We can engage, investigate, and discover them in the interiors of our own psyches. The seer enters a trance state which quiets the conscious mind for the influx of divine energy and divine light (luminous visions, formless luminous apparitions). It includes states of Theophoría (bearing a God), Enthousiasmós (having a God within, entheos), Epípnoia (inspired by a God).
Invoking Archetypes & Evoking Images
Theurgy reveals such unknown factors as a way of establishing greater self-knowledge. The aspirant performs a poetic fantasy in which the soul is deepened by the affective capability of word and metaphor bridging phenomenal and noumenal realities through the mythic connection. To "invoke" is to "call in", while to "evoke" is to "call forth." It 'tunes'' us like a specific resonant frequency.
Words share in archetypal activity drawing us inwards, connecting the known and the unknown, mundane and sublime, through soul-making. Theurgy provides a medium of communication with a God or Daimôn that purifiesthe theurgist's soul. It serves as a medium by which the individual soul may participate in the divine image.
Invocation is a symbolic and imagistic journey. A unitary reality leads to an epiphany which links consciousness and unconsciousness. The trans-rational mythic imagination borders the unconscious. It provides a route for us an archetypal encounter, echoing the seeds of expanded consciousness.
If we fully experience the archetype and are apprehended by it, we get a glimpse into the imaginal reality which transcends ordinary perception. The mage enters the image sympathetically. Intuition emerges as gnosis, knowledge without previous learning.
We call such awesome emotional intensity a numinous experience. We are aroused by the power, presence, or realization of a divinity -- an uncanny, mighty spirit, a tremendous mystery. True imagination embodies the divine wisdom of the soul through percepts, affect, and concepts. Psyche or soul is our image making capacity.
Hillman's psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Word, metaphor, and epiphany can lead to a theurgic expansion of soul.
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Space, "to go so far and so deep, [we] must go beyond the sentimental resonances with which we receive... a work of art." We become sensitized to the resonances "dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world.
While the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence. ..."reverberations bring a change of being." The poetic act grips us entirely leaving a phenomenological mark of exuberance and awakening new depth in us. Universal mind pours itself into the profundities of the soul.
Bachalard says reverberation, "has a simple phenomenological nature in the domain of poetic imagination. For it involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image. By its novelty, a poetic image sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism. The poetic image places us at the origin of the speaking being."
Raw poetic power arises resonantly within us as experience and deep memory. "But the image has touches the depths before it stirs the surface. ...it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being."
Ensouled Life
Only when the soul enters the material cosmos is there need to honor its generative power, to make a relationship with the interpenetrating divine through that particular worldview.
Our concern is process, meaningful connected patterns over time not just outcome, worldwork as well as individual arc. Emergence is a process by which order appears “spontaneously” within a system. We increase our ability to create, express, collaborate and enliven our life.
Over time processes lead to the appearance of emergent features, such as knowledge and transformation. When many elements are allowed to mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact, activating latent phenomena -- the taking in of Source, the Many into One, breath of life, breath of compassion, breath of union.
"Nevertheless, we will become inflated many times over the course of any system of spiritual development. Its equal-and-opposite counterpart is depression, again a literal description because the energy one normally has available is depressed, pushed down into the unconscious. The cycle of inflation and depression is inevitable if one opens a channel to the unconscious; the key is to recognize as soon as possible that we are becoming either inflated or depressed. Once we do, often the recognition itself is sufficient to center us once more. If not, it is effective to ground ourselves in the normal activities of life, especially those involving physical effort, or those which involve detail, which require our full attention." (Robin Robertson, The Shadow's Gift)
Does such entanglement provide the basis of universal consciousness? When the mind lets go of its rational order and enters into unstructured chaos it emerges later with a new structure. If beliefs arise, they include a 'belief in the inherent importance of all parts of ourselves and all viewpoints in the world around us'. Somatic and cognitive fluency meet in a flow state of dynamic processing expressing as pleasurable interest.
Magic facilitates an ego which can not only penetrate, but also diffuse its awareness.
The seer views the transcendent self and is seen by it. Over time the seer identifies with the Self, and I-Thou polarity dissolves.
From the holistic perspective you embrace higher values, realize your inherent divinity, and enlarge your potentials. The boundary between the seer and the seen collapses into cosmic consciousness. The seer becomes a Sage.
This flexible ego can form a more harmonious relationship with subconscious processes. It does not abort the transformation in the middle of the process through wrong value judgements and interference.
Archetypal psychology is poetic vision. The totality of the psyche has its own aims, which are not necessarily those of the individual ego. Psychic activity is paradoxical in nature. It looks both forward and backwards.
Theurgy is the 'edge-work' of philosophy, a process metaphysics approach to matter and ontology which emphasizes “flow” rather than permanence and can be traced ultimately. Process metaphysics is a natural approach to complex systems.
Complex systems theory assigns nature the tendency to self organize—to construct complex structures and processes. It makes emergence a genuine metaphysical possibility. The parts collectively form the stable base among which the system processes occur.
In theurgy, an embodied philosophy, the greatest teacher is direct and unmediated experience of the image-making capacity of the soul. Unconscious psyche and matter are one. The theurgist intentionally gives the voice of the unconscious form that actively engages the ego so personality can be transformed by it. We have to face our darkness to find our light.
Theurgy is a fluency framework. Archetypal thinking helps us conceptualize an approach to subjective metaphysics without foregoing critical thinking -- participatory enaction anchoring a number of spiritual meanings and the open-ended questions of the personal myth. Metaphysical action becomes more important than metaphysical assumptions or theories.
Perceptual insight during elaboration, also referred to “aha!” moments. Naturally-arising light, the indivisible emptiness-luminosity, when the naked mind, free of everything, dwells in the uncreated state, revealed in the transparency of the spiritual epiphany.
The light in nature is the divine in the world. Myth, the interplay of cosmic principles, and memory are the basis of our relationships. The root of existence is matter and spirit --the deep nature of reality and experience, veiling and revealing its divinity.
Traditions of 'Light' continue to inform our conceptions of reality. What we call reality and consciousness depends on our level of observation and mystical penetration. The quality of vision we have expresses penetrating ideas exploring the complexity or “depths” of any given phenomenon and reconceptualizes polarities. The most common error is conflating Consciousness and Awareness. Consciousness is a product of widespread communication, while awareness is a focal capacity. Do our attentional habits create our experience? What reality are we in?
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
"The way to see the Gods is to know the world. Practical knowledge, common sense, therefore cannot be divided from metaphysical knowledge....metaphysics becomes the praxis of an essentially lived life in which being, substances, method, order, and other traditional topics of metaphysics become qualities of soul." (Adam Elenbaas, 2006, Why Use Only 7 Planets?)
The Approach
There is is growing interest in practical theurgy grounded explicitly in Neoplatonic texts. What draws us in may be an aesthetic interest at the beginning, or an affinity for a different world related to deepening engagement. The process unfolds in natural but unexpected ways.
Reciprocal interaction manifests between the aspirant and the divine through natural and acausal effects. The aspirant instantiates the potential of the psychic field. Thus, our character is forged in the alchemical mix of ordinary life and the 'big dream' of psychic being, rooted in our-present Source. Effective dreams have the power to change us.
Rational viewpoints are complimented by emotional experiences and intuition, deeper vision, and a timeless feeling of shared compassion for all living beings. The theory is one of emergent phenomena and consciousness. We can naturally aspire to wisdom, holiness, and humanity. They don't have to interfere with one another, be surprising, peculiar, or sensational -- there is no onslaught of compulsive weirdness.
In a materialist culture, while guarding against our collective and idiosyncratic delusions, how can we confront the problems of living an ethical life in a society plagued by dissension, vice, and corruption? We tend to forge our own approach to ethics and well-being, even if consulting wisdom traditions and modern research, rather than forcing a singular point of view, diversity rather than pathology.
The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics or morals (personal accountability) should help us cooperate with one another. But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival.
Meta-ethics examines our notions about what constitutes ethics or morality relative to the position of others. Related issues are lifestyle choices, decisions, respect, impartiality, responsibility, identity, duty, principles, empathy, compassion, and conscience or consciousness.
The flattening of affect or emotional neutrality is the enemy – the aspect that conditions poor choices and ethical erosion as the acceleration or speed of cognition increases in our mindnumbing modern lives and we become dulled to the field of perception (Damasio 2004). Its been called information overload and future shock. Ethics is Aesthetic.
It means living deliberately, with global intentionality, which is an artform in itself – living with awareness and acting from that center. It is an aesthetic choice for ‘artful living’, living life in an artful manner in harmony with flow and creativity. We choose enriching experiences over consumerism is generative and creative. Magic expresses the fluid interpenetration of the ordinary and imaginal or soul realms.
Theurgy is a theophanic metaphysics, a mythopoetically informed, practice. Awakening dormant intuition, we cultivate an aptitude for revelation and communication of the divine. An imaginal theophany is hierophantic, relying on a certain ability and level of perception and consciousness, with eyes that "see through" events into their pattern. Epistemologically, the divine is "that" which is beyond the imaginal and out of which the appearance comes (epiphany).
Our philosophical ethics are tied to our aesthetic sense and metaphysics, to our worldview – especially for artists and scientists. The mechanistic view is one of greed-creating scarcity, a sense of there not being enough of whatever resources to go around (Fuller). The worldview provides the ground for our beliefs, ideas and lifestyle choices about what is right and what is wrong. This paradigm is tied to our health.
Whether we seek transformation, to honor the gods, or a poetic flight of ideas connected by the unconscious, we are making soul and deepening character. If we "see through" the gods, rather than transcending, they mirror the spectacle of our naturally fractured lives with awe and compassion. We sense the right moment, find the right words, use the natural magic of special places, have the natural magic, rather than rational attitude, and become a field of wisdom.
'Opening the eye of the soul' alludes to enlightenment, and means to obtain knowledge through introspection and visionary sight to view the higher forms of existence, the source of life. Perhaps our answers are in the riddles of life, the gaps or the lacuna in the world's theological beliefs, not a singular belief. Michael York uses the term “deific pluralism” rather than “polytheism.”
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggestes the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, that draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Carl Jung noted, "...that "the One" should meditate, and that the world should be produced by the spirit in its creative role, is a conception which goes directly back to the philosophy about the Nous in antiquity." (Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Pages 59-60.
Archaic influences remain within us -- the preliterate culture of poetry, song, and myth; unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual. They express locality of focus and ethical concern. Each time our vision scans over the inner landscape we experience new impressions, flowing from one experience to the next.
Awareness is self-arising waves of potential from which different potential outcomes of reality and perceived outcomes emerge. We don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.
Memories accrue from experiences and that ambience, character or atmosphere accumulates to effect the soul. Our attention to details (ambience), memory recall, and information provide insight about situations that are outside of normal understanding about time and space.
Jung spoke of the two-million year old human within us, the ancestral soul – the primal soul. The instinctive self, rooted in nature, speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago as complementary facets of a deeper reality emerging in amplified symbols.
The first achievement of the transformation of instinctual energy by our primal ancestors is magic. Psychization transforms an instinctual or sensory perception, rather than energy, into an experience. Magic is just part of the human experience. But notions of attainment remain elusively ahead of us. If, as Jung says, all we can know is the god-image, what does it mean to be the image of God?
In this vast night, be the magic power
at your senses' intersection,
the meaning of their strange encounter.
And if the earthly has forgotten
you, say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
R.M. Rilke, The sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX
As Liber Novus says, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." Non-Ordinary states of consciousness can heal suffering. They can be accessed in a number of ways, including our subject, theurgy, which has the potential to unlock a new level of insight and self-awareness. What most people believe can be attributed to the gods, that is, the archetypes of the collective unconscious, whether we perceive them consciously or not.
It is also true for tending our psychic wounds and embracing personal and collective shadow. As Anaïs Nin reminds, 'We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.'
We cannot take an ego-driven approach to growth and development. That is like pulling on a seedling sprout until we uproot it. It cannot be forced to completion, even to feed a hunger for meaning and experience, but must take its course.
Meaning is inherent in life processes down to the sub-quantal level. Life is filled with soma-significance expressed in the felt-sense of ambiance, gestures, words, non-ordinary states of consciousness, aesthetics, and more. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures, utterance, and action.
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Today, we define our own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Naturally, we tend to combine innovation with tradition for a more adaptable, fluid, and dynamic view, incorporating current perspectives.
In a materialist culture, while guarding against our delusions, how can we confront the problems of living an ethical life in a society plagued by dissension, vice, and corruption? We tend to forge our own approach to well-being, even if consulting wisdom traditions and modern research, rather than forcing a singular point of view. Perhaps our answers are in the riddles of life, the gaps, not a singular belief.
Archaic influences remain within us -- the preliterate culture of poetry, song, and myth; unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual. Each time our vision scans over the inner landscape we experience new impressions, flowing from one experience to the next. Awareness is self-arising waves of potential from which different potential outcomes of reality and perceived outcomes emerge.
Jung spoke of the two-million year old human within us, the ancestral soul – the primal soul. The instinctive self, rooted in nature, speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago as complementary facets of a deeper reality emerging in amplified symbols.
The first achievement of the transformation of instinctual energy by our primal ancestors is magic. Psychization transforms an instinctual or sensory perception, rather than energy, into an experience. Magic is just part of the human experience. But notions of attainment remain elusively ahead of us. If, as Jung says, all we can know is the god-image, what does it mean to be the image of God?
In this vast night, be the magic power
at your senses' intersection,
the meaning of their strange encounter.
And if the earthly has forgotten
you, say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
R.M. Rilke, The sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX
As Liber Novus says, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." Non-Ordinary states of consciousness can heal suffering. They can be accessed in a number of ways, including our subject, theurgy, which has the potential to unlock a new level of insight and self-awareness. What most people believe can be attributed to the gods, that is, the archetypes of the collective unconscious, whether we perceive them consciously or not.
It is also true for tending our psychic wounds and embracing personal and collective shadow. As Anaïs Nin reminds, 'We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.'
We cannot take an ego-driven approach to growth and development. That is like pulling on a seedling sprout until we uproot it. It cannot be forced to completion, even to feed a hunger for meaning and experience, but must take its course.
Cicero spoke of philosophy as critical to healing the mind (Tusculan Disputations). One power we have is the power of self-observation. But it usually is not very well developed, especially around the unconscious, which is the core of our lives, the totality of the life processes within us -- an individual concrete and creative response to the mystery of the world.
In Revisioning Psychology, Hillman describes Ficino's spiritual 'height psychology,' rather than a depth psychology:
"When "body" is disparaged in Ficino in order to affirm soul, it can be psychologized to mean the empirical, literal, physical perspective, particularly the perspective of practical action which had less significance in Ficino's scheme of things than did Venus and the voluptuousness [sic]. ... The opposition is less between soul and fleshly sensual joy - for voluptuousness in Ficino was a model for spiritual delight - than between interiority and outwardness, or what we have called the metaphorical and the literal perspectives."
Early philosophical views failed to notice the central importance of metaphor in understanding our reality. Recent works, such as Metaphors We Live By have closed that gap, revising the central assumptions of meaning in the Western philosophical tradition. The 'inner journey' is a primary metaphor:
"The psyche is not an object, a thing; it is a process. Motion is its essence. Just as the outer landscape flows by when we travel, so before the inward eye images succeed one another in a constant motion picture. It is these which we tune in on when we shut our eyes to outer things and step into our chariots for a voyage within." (Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey)
Metaphor is a pervasive field of imagery intimately linked to self-narrative and internal descriptions of what our experience 'is like.' Everyday language is full of tacit metaphors that shape the way we think, act, characterize and interpret our experience -- alternative accounts beyond objective truth. It is fundamental to our conceptual system and frameworks , including worldview.
Lakoff’s (1988) definition of metaphor is a schema, “a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground.” His central thesis is that metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which new information may be accommodated, forming a cognitive map. (Metaphors We Live By)
Reality is in-formed by soul's metaphorical weave of mythical narrative. Soul (anima) is an active intelligence that forms or plots our fates. Being-in-Anima (esse in anima) is to be ensouled.
Soma Sophia, the Body of Wisdom is inherent dwelling within the body of Anima Mundi. Psyche is immersed in imagination, metaphor, poetry and myth, including scientific and spiritual technologies. Fantasy deliteralizes the illusory concreteness of matter. Images and fantasy are the carriers of meaning. Soul transforms events into experiences.
Implicit theories of the unconscious always take a central role in the metaphysics of spirit and framing the horizon of significance we give to the term 'magic,' encouraging participation and engagement. Every idea belief and concept is metaphorical.
When we 'see through' the Greek mythos from ancient times it shines through the “here / now” presence of our everyday lives. In the gap of image as metaphor, magic becomes the "as if" space between two senses of the same term or figure, where the literal and the metaphorical reverberate against each other.
In Real Magic, Dean Radin refers to magic as a natural aspect of reality that each of us is actually able to tap into. “The essence of magic boils down to the application of two ordinary mental skills: attention and intention. The strength of the magical outcome is modulated by four factors: belief, imagination, emotion, and clarity. That’s basically it,” he writes.
Jung describes the raw material of consciousness: “Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the source of life.”
In many ways, such psychological categories are logical extensions of philosophical themes, not just looking at things but dwelling on them. In the depth psychological frame, the unconscious remains the well at the dawn of life, which we can still revisit via time-honored methods, engaging the psyche in new and different ways. Jung noted, "Our consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths."
Mysticism can refer to visionary experiences, non-visionary via negativa experiences, or gnosis, direct spiritual insight into hidden aspects of the cosmos, or transcendence. But, the primordial images are the true force that shapes and channels instinct, occult or hidden forces active in the natural world.
Aspirants seek direct spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of themselves and the cosmos. James Hillman says, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform.
Recognizing and engaging the sacred means calling attention to a vital and important dimension of reality being threatened by onesided rationalization, secularization, and the mechanization of the world.
The Illuminative Vortex
The subject of the unconscious was in the domain of philosophy. The notion of the unconscious abyss and the essential self-revealing nature of pre-reflective non-differentiated being was fundamental to the natural-mystical philosophy of Neoplatonism.
Planetary Technoetics: Our 21st century aesthetic frame is essentially technoetic, described by artist Roy Ascott as a convergent mix of the emergent fields of art, technology and consciousness research. He further suggests that planetary technoetics is a sort of 'species' consciousness and gains "new insights from older cultural traditions previously banished from materialist discourse."
He describes a "fully differentiated interactive art process," outlining a five-fold path of connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence. (Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness, 2004) We agree such tuning is the natural basis of a global interaction between organisms and of collective consciousness.
Ascott says such artists, "are prepared to look into any discipline, scientific or spiritual, any view of the world, however eccentric or esoteric, any culture, immediate or distant in space or time, any technology, ancient or modern, to find ideas and processes that allow for the navigation of mind and its open-ended exploration." (Cybernetic, Technoetic, Syncretic: The Prospect for Art, 2008)
'Technoetics is a convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical or spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moistmedia.' (Roy Ascott 2008)
Its significance "in its power to provide for the release of the self, release from the self, the fictive “unified self” of Western philosophy. It lies in our ability to be many selves, telematically in many places at the same time, our self-creation leading to many personas and serial identities."
For this essay, the technology is Hermetics and theurgy. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone or vortex. The massa confusa of the vortex of pure information becomes gradually discernible. Emergence, or spiritual rebirth, a humbling not inflationary experience, is its telos.
Aesthetic Arrest: Clarity is artistic discovery of the universal. There is enchantment in the quality of wholeness. There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception.
That flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment.
These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward in the Quest. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment that captivates our rapt attention.
Aesthetic arrest blows apart the illusory differences between the sacred and the profane. We are inspired in the a-ha moment, utterly dissolved in the momentary ego-death of its solutio that tears asunder illusory nature. This aesthetic experience is an act of surrender that is an epiphany. It makes us gasp for air and sparks a cascade of pleasure.
We become a part of the truth we seek at the paradox of participation. The alchemist lives at this paradox. The greening of the wasteland restores artistic expression. Voegelin calls each participant in therapeutic process and practice a simultaneous part and whole of a reality of consciousness like a marriage, polity, or cosmos. Alchemy speaks of the Royal Marriage, or paradoxical cosmic conjunction (coniunctio) of opposites.
We are directly connected to beauty and wholeness. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being. As artists we are mythmakers, dreaming the alchemical dream onward. Myth is transparent to transcendent process in the Now-Here. In sublimatio we reach escape velocity.
In aesthetic arrest, the phenomenal field disappears as we come to our own Zero Point. Any artistic expression produced by this personal experience is likely to lead others to their own point of synchronization that creates an altered state.
Soul is made by narrating events in terms of myth, the metaphoric and symbolic dimensions of our experience. Poetics brings the archetypal into participation with the mundane by tending the currents of life.
Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.
Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
The abyss of the transcendent imagination is the archaic 'ground without a ground,' the positive significance of the negative, pre-perception. The root image of the abyss includes the zero-point, primeval waters, chaos, source of all existence, source of life and life’s return to this source, as well as the paradoxical death instinct.
It is also a 'window to eternity,' the Self-field or Plenum (Jung), transcendent ultimacy. It exemplifies conscious communion or participation in a timeless reality. This radically transformative pleromatic experience of unitary reality is there from our inception.
Reconnecting with the unconscious is reconnecting with the mythic world, our instincts and intuition. We cannot repress our imagery without repressing our instincts. We don't search for symbols; instead, we are directly impacted by experience and how we metabolize it. Tacit knowledge means we know more than we can tell. The intuitive is difficult to explicate but it is possible—and valuable—to clarify.
Erich Fromm suggested eight basic needs: Relatedness, Transcendence, Rootedness, Sense of Identity, Frame of Orientation, Excitation and Stimulation, Unity, and Effectiveness (The Sane Society and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness).
In many ways, such psychological categories are logical extensions of philosophical themes, not just looking at things but dwelling on them. In the depth psychological frame, the unconscious remains the well at the dawn of life, which we can still revisit via time-honored methods, engaging the psyche in new and different ways. Jung noted, "Our consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths."
Mysticism can refer to visionary experiences, non-visionary via negativa experiences, or gnosis, direct spiritual insight into hidden aspects of the cosmos, or transcendence. But, the primordial images are the true force that shapes and channels instinct, occult or hidden forces active in the natural world.
Aspirants seek direct spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of themselves and the cosmos. James Hillman says, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform.
"Thus, the Stoics do not only say "I don't know whether my action will succeed." Rather, they also say: "Since I don't know in advance what the results of my actions will be, and what Destiny has in store for me, I have to make such-and-such a decision in accordance with probability and a rational estimate, without any absolute certainty that I am making the right choice or doing the right thing." (Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel)
"Now our image of the goal changes: not Enlightened Man, who sees the seer, but Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not world. For it is impossible to reflectively know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names. We are always behind our reflections—too late, after the event, or we are in the midst, where we see through a glass darkly." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis (p. 92).
"Metaphysical gnosis is non-dualistic spiritual insight. . .comparable to that found in the Corpus Hermeticum between “lower” and “higher” gnosis, “lower” referring to philosophic learning, “higher” to direct insight into the Nous." "Cosmological gnosis illuminates the hidden patterns of nature as expressing spiritual or magical truths; it corresponds, more or less, to the via positiva of Dionysius the Areopagite. Metaphysical gnosis, on the other hand, represents direct insight into the transcendent; it corresponds, more or less, to the via negativa of Dionsyius the Areopagite." (Versluis)
Esoteric thought and ancient Egyptian mystical currents had a great impact on Renaissance culture, Neoplatonism, and the practice of pagan and Christian theurgy. Plotinus synthesized the ethics of the Stoics and Plato's metaphysics of the gods. Plato (ca. 429–347BCE), comprehends inspiration as a kind of unreason or ecstasy, inspired by an inner necessity, and creative impulse.
One scholarly model of "esotericism" concerns a perennialist, hidden, inner tradition. A second perspective describes world-views which seek to embrace an "enchanted" world-view in the face of increasing de-enchantment. Hanegraaff views Western esotericism as "rejected knowledge" by the scientific establishment and orthodox religious authorities.
Western esoterism is not a single inquiry; 'inner traditions', magical aesthetics, and movements proliferate. Initiatory societies professing esoteric knowledge such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry developed in the 17th century; the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century led to the development of new forms of esoteric thought. New trends emerged in the 19th century that became known as occultism.
https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/9244372/Esotericism_Theorized_Major_T.PDF
http://www.forbiddenhistories.com/basic-readings/
https://books.google.com/books?id=1X2bEHOk8L4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=1X2bEHOk8L4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
To Believe or Not Believe Is Not the Question
Recognizing and engaging the sacred means calling attention to a vital, important, mythic dimension of reality being threatened by one-sided rationalization, secularization, and the mechanization of the world. The gods catalyze our personalities in the soul-field or imaginal dimension of our lives.
The older we get with maturity on the path, the more we seek what resonates with us, an evolving aesthetic, and our own references, rather than an effect or reaction. Even the Gods display vulnerability in their divinity and, like ourselves, carry scars that can't be seen. They are vulnerable, powerful, and definitively otherworldly. It is not myth we need to question but our own spiritual life that informs us throughout our lifetime in the remarkable fabric of our existence. How can we believe more in ourselves and the core, Self?
It is a philosophical awareness of the nature of image running through the Great Work and the mutual trajectory of our soul guides. Like imagery, the most meaningful and fully informed beliefs, opinions, and ideas arise from the unconscious and in no way are intentional. They are uncontrived, rather than trying to be relevant or even interesting.
Echoing the tension between superstition and reason, we can ask ourselves, after Paul Veyne, "Did the Greeks believe in their mythology?" They may have embraced the historical nugget of even imaginal characters and the core or heart of the myth, but not the literal details of the poetic narrations that emphasize the glory of the Greek spirit.
The original kernel became overgrown with an overburden of false legends over time. All legends were embraced as completely authentic. Their own ways of believing and being skeptical differ from our own; nor were their histories compiled like ours. They authenticated historical truth by consensus over the ages. History was a way of creating belief. They simply copied their predecessors, none of whom witnessed the events.
Historical tradition purports to be the memories of ancestors passed down to their descendants. Tradition is the presumed truth and history is born of it. History arises from inquiry, not controversy, so it is riddled with errors and gives rise to false beliefs of commission and omission. With undifferentiated fiction and reality, 'Truth' takes on a fictive aspect that includes the naivete of the believer. Myth is information and the poet is inclined to tell the truth or lie informed by the Muses.
They acted like myth and history shared the same realm of belief, a world beyond the horizon of collective memory. Are religion and history more fictive than art, history, or physics? The difference between fiction and reality is only the subjectivity of a believer. Veyne concludes truth is created not found. (Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination)
Veyne reminds us that, "myth and logos are not not opposites, like truth and error," so the Greeks accepted myth as a subject of serious reflection over two millennia. The contradictions and historical reasoning are reconciled in a metaphorical approach to the 'supernatural.' Sallustius gave us the notion that myth is what is always happening, but never occurred.
He admonishes us, "Those who wish to hear about the Gods should have been well guided from childhood, and not habituated to foolish beliefs." He also said, "One may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden." "The essences of the Gods never came into existence (for that which always is never comes into existence; and that exists for ever which possesses primary force and by nature suffers nothing): neither do they consist of bodies; for even in bodies the powers are incorporeal." (On the Gods and the Cosmos)
Cosmological Gnosis
Magic and its maps of meaning have to be restated in the language of its time. The ontological discourse of reality is no longer occupied solely by religious doctrine and appeals to supernatural forces. We have to confront our own ontological assumptions. Those drawn to the lure of magic and philosophy can use to either clarify or further mystify themselves through a variety of means and for myriad personal reasons.
We have to remain open to understanding since no single interpretation can be definitive. There are aspects only a practicing theurgist would recognize and understand. We can make the experiment and look for ourselves. Immersive experiences stimulate our senses—they draw us in, transport us to another place, and keep us in the moment.
The imaginal dimension of psyche and immersive experience is naturally esoteric, full of unspeakable things and unknowable truth. We call such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them God. We have repressed the contents of the unconscious while forgetting and disregarding the magic and mystery there. That rejection or marginalization in no way diminishes its usefulness.
The esoteric worldview reflects an autonomous relationship between psyche and cosmos. Esotericism was rejected and suppressed by science in the Enlightenment and by Protestant Christianity in the Reformation. That rejection or marginalization in no way diminishes its usefulness. This rejected knowledge and initiatory technology was pushed into the unconscious and a few secret societies.
Theurgy is, at root, the transfiguration of the commonplace. It is more than merely an 'alternative' spirituality, magic, astrology, alchemy, theosophy, quantum mysticism, or holistic healing. It's a sacred commitment to an inner depth dimension.
The “esotericism” of today's rational/skeptical, romantic imagination, or new age idealism is not the “esotericism” of the social and historical past. Often it's the reverse of what we might imagine taking it out of context -- a creative reconstruction. Each theoretical viewpoint creates its own imaginal construct of practical magic. At the moment you do it, it brings some sort of relief, and that is the essential thing.
Dr. David Shaver says, "Reality, then, is not some kind of “objective” fact or knowledge out there in the universe, waiting to be discovered, but, rather, is an organizing principle existing between the mind and this unknown (and unknowable) matter existing in the universe. Reality, then, is an alignment or synchronization of nature and mind."
Belief systems are technologies of symbolism. Theurgic Platonist and Hermetic writing are symbolic modes of expression, innate gnosis, and ritual practices. They share a common purpose: to make the soul immortal and divine. These mysteries speak about the same process, as do Jungian and Transpersonal psychologies.
Jung amalgamated his theories from his Red Book experiences, ancient mystery religions, gnosticism, alchemy,astrology, Mesmerism, and Spiritualism. "The unconscious is the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy, and of all expressions of life that are based on psychological premises." -C. W. Jung, CW 11
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
In the Neoplatonic cosmology, Radiant Light, The One, Nous or divine wisdom emanates archetypal Forms and Ideas, as well as the World Soul which animates the world, an ecology of souls. It mediates reality between matter and spirit. Theurgy promises a symbolic return to Paradise. It induces symbolic ego death and rebirth though soul consciousness, promoting expanded consciousness. The desire for life and death are paradoxically yoked.
Soul mediates and reconciles ordinary consciousness (life instinct) and unconsciousness (death instinct). Soul consciousness is the undifferentiated life/death instinct, identical to the function of intuition, the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct.
Theurgy is the culmination of philosophical thinking. Philosophy is a prelude to a more transcendent existence beyond reason. Such anomalous experiences have conscious, subconscious and unconscious dimensions.
We may be aware, or only partially aware that it is happening, without knowing how it comes about or why it happens as it does. Is it precise or vague; happen slowly or quickly; is it open or hidden; explainable or unexplainable, expansive or contractive; partial or total; predictable or unpredictable; regressive or progressive?
Predictive coding of perception sheds new light on the concentration and visualization practices central to much of modern occultism and active esoteric philosophy movements. Predictive coding, which informs belief, choice, and reasoning, states that the brain continually generates models of the world. Optimizing predictions minimizes sensory prediction error. It also means expectations matter.
Our perceptions work by detecting matches and mismatches. If there is dissonance, it adjusts our internal structure by arousal and action to match the schema and external reality. Unconscious distortions arise that conform with our mythic structures or the mythology changes to conform with our experience.
As Gustav Kafka notes: “It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls.”
In The Red Book Jung reveals: "This meeting is magical and eludes comprehension. Magical understanding is what one calls noncomprehension. Everything that works magically is incomprehensible, and the incomprehensible often works magically. One calls incomprehensible workings magical. The magical always surrounds me, always involves me. lt opens spaces that have no doors and leads out into the open where there is no exit. The magical is good and evil and neither good nor evil. Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures and provokes; and I am always its first victim."
Glisten Up: Esoteric Imagination
"Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit." ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Para 229.
We don't know the true nature of reality, but we continue to yearn for the fullness of existence and a nature that is independent of our conceptions of it, even an extra-cultural reality that is part of the natural world.
"Once upon a time there was a flower, a stone, a crystal, a king and a queen, a castle, a lover and his beloved, and that was a long time ago, in an island in the ocean five thousand years ago.... This is love, the mystical flower of the soul. This is the center, the self... no one understands what I mean. Only a poet could say that..." --C.G.Jung, the Hermetic Circle (by m. (Serrano) P. 60
Esoterics and the esoteric imagination are rooted in the natural fusion of philosophy and religion. Esoteric practices provide techniques of cultivating mental imagery. Imagination is central to esoteric practices which produce powerfully subjective experiences. Special knowledge is often sought through intimate experiences with mediators. Practices focus on sensing, visualizing, and feeling the divine directly.
In Ch 13.1 of Corpus Hermetica, Hermes tells Tat that the experience of rebirth cannot be taught in an ordinary manner and he reveals his divine status, essentially identical with the secret magical light of primordial awareness, the first and last matter, worshiped by means of silence alone:
"I have nothing to say but this: seeing within me a formless vision that came from the mercy of god, I went out of myself into an immortal body, and now I am not what I was before. I have been born in Nous. This thing cannot be taught, nor can it be seen by the physical body .... Now you see me with your eyes, my child, but by gazing with bodily sight you do not see what I am. I am not seen with such eyes, my child.3" (Shaw)
Henri Corbin said, "The often-abused word 'esoterism' refers to the inevitable need to express the reintegration of the human being into symbols." Likewise, the word 'occult' is misunderstood, when it merely means 'hidden' and implies the lure of secrecy. It is hidden because it is experiential by necessity. It reinstates our humanity.
It includes ecstatic experience in the Neoplatonic tradition and quest for wisdom. Gregory Shaw describes how Iamblichus "unified the teachings of Plato and Aristotle within a Pythagorean framework and integrated this philosophic synthesis with the oldest forms of traditional worship." https://www.princeton.edu/~hellenic/Hermeneutica/ShawPaper.pdf
Shaw contextualizes modern interpretations. The unitive not conceptual state was what the aspirant was always after. "...when the initiate’s particular and mortal perspective is replaced by the universal perspective of a god."
"Our initial mistake is to read Platonism as dualism, which leads us to assume that Platonists want to escape from the material realm to enter the noetic world of immaterial Forms (as if these were separable to begin with!). This, Trouillard argued, is a misreading of Plato based on a literalizing of his mythical language regarding the Forms; 24 it is certainly a misreading of theurgic Platonism. It is precisely this kind of dualism that Iamblichus criticizes in Porphyry who had suggested that gods are distant from the world and cannot be engaged in material rites, a position that Iamblichus lamented." (Shaw)
Shaw also describes dualistic and unitive views as stages in the process: "Fowden’s careful reading of the Hermetica shows that the monism and dualism regarding the cosmos are not contradictory themes but reflect different degrees of spiritual awakening in aspirants.30
According to Fowden, in the earlier stages of hermetic paideia (for the notion of initiation and learning are combined) the initiate embraces his body, the world, and even his sexuality as expressions of the divine.31 But in the more advanced degrees of initiation —outlined in CH 13 and NH 6.6—the initiate leaves his body and materiality behind. For Fowden the monism evident in some hermetic texts —affirming the powers of the divine in the world—is superseded by the dualism of escaping from the cosmos in the attainment of gnôsis.32 Copenhaver summarizes Fowden’s interpretation as follows:
"Scholars have taken pains to analyze and schematize parts of the Corpus as monist or dualist, optimist or pessimist, but Fowden proposes to see such variations as sequential rather than contradictory. Thus, a positive view of the cosmos as good and worth understanding would suit an earlier stage of the initiate’s labors and, hence, a treatise focusing on a time when the body’s needs were still great while a negative treatment of the world as evil and unworthy of thought might befit a farther station in the spirits journey... closer to the culmination of gnôsis , which entailed liberation from the body.33"
Esotericism is full of psychologically rich sources from visions and trances to ritual, initiation, hidden correspondences and esoteric hermeneutic techniques. Thematic issues include the textual-interpretive, practical and conceptual dimensions of Western esotericism. Late Antiquity emphasized ecstatic experience, reflected in aspects of the ‘Platonic underworld’ of Hermetism, Gnosticism, Magic and Theurgy.
The Platonic framework includes: Platonic mania; ritual and contemplative inductions of ecstatic experience; ancient terminologies for altered states of consciousness; Neoplatonic epiphanies; philosophical vision and ecstatic vision; the fate and legacy of the ‘shamanism’ concept in classical studies; initiatic and oracular experience in Platonism; and modern psychological perspectives on ancient ecstatic experience.
In Ficino’s Florence, mania was central to the praxis of the Platonic world view in Natural Magic. There are strong similiarities between narratives of “soul flight” in ancient Mediterranean cultures, spanning diverging theological/philosophical traditions over at least a millennium of history.
Modern revivals and experimentation continue. In that we find our relationship to our fate and renewal as well as every phenomenon relating to the human universe, growth, love, creativity, and its dark side - death. To find that both limits us and determines and reveals us.
Plato suggested to perceive desire, is to bring the soul into that state where it is close to its greatest light, to its becoming, to its true destiny. Individuation mirrors the soul's journey. The soul travels along the journey as it “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Eldo Stellucci reminds us that, "The INVISIBLE is the "connecting network" and in which we experience our authentic existence if, as Heraclitus says, "the hidden plot is stronger than the manifested one" (fr.55 / A 20), adding that "the true constitution of each what is it used to hide "(fr 123 / A92). So it will be the surprising and numinous encounter with the invisible to make the "VISIBLE" significant of that ulteriority of meaning that really nourishes our psychological life. The invisible opens the visible to the Mystery that lives there. But what is this "invisible"? What is this network that connects? How do we experience it and where do we meet it? What happens really and psychologically on the border between the visible and the invisible?"
Dramatic Mirror
Psyche mirrors Cosmos. Events can be grouped by meaning as well as cause. Nature is our mirror. Reflection is just one way that visible light may interact with matter and the main way the universe gets created. Light reflects off of the field of matter (Higgs field).
Psyche is both a mirror of the subjective ego and a reflection of the whole psyche, a combination of the intentional and phenomenal. Dreams mirror and reflect psyche, whether we are seeker, aspirant, mystic, or mage.
Images mirror another mirror, (perception), a filter through which and a mirror in which we see ourselves. We can't privilege the conceptual over the imaginal. Images are not signs, representations, symbols or allegories but direct experience of "the individuation of images," avoiding the reduction to mere concepts of these images that 'arise' of themselves, independent of ego.
Image is not what we see but how we see. The image is a consequence of an imaginative look connected to a poetic usage, to an image of fantasy.. We see ourselves made visible in metaphors. Biogenesis mirrors the cosmic process of creation. Images organize themselves into fantasies through archetypal pattern. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face with Cosmos.
Still, Hillman says, "Reflective insights may arise like the lotus from the still lake of meditation, while creative insights come at the raw and tender edge of confrontation at the borderlines where we are most sensitive and exposed - and curiously most alone. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology - a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal - 'Know thyself'' will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not 'Know thyself' through reflection, but 'Reveal thyself', which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving."
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? Interiority and exteriority are basic components in philosophy. Reflection is a metaphor for the continuum of the subject-object in the mirror-of-the-mind and the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority.
Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman). Psychology is the discipline of interiority. Identity includes both psychological interiority and physical expression.
The mirror would reflect all of the souls and powers in the universe and when the souls of shamans went to the world of souls it would show them the way. What we can extract from it is a mirror of our own soul and its treasures. We learn to see ourselves 'depersonalized in the mirror of the human spirit.'
The evolution of art mirrors our liberation from time, space and personality. Artists work in imagistic space with no beginning, middle, or end -- what comes through the permeable consciousness, including trains of images. “The Gnostic artist is also a magician for he materializes thought forms in all that he does. These materializations are not always conscious, hence he is also a type of medium.” (Michael Bertiaux, Voudon-Gnostic Workbook)
Rainer Maria Rilke depended on an inspirational wind or angel sweeping through the poet. In a 1921 letter, he wrote, "I believe that as soon as an artist has found the living center of his activity, nothing is so important for him as to remain in it and never go further away from it (for it is also the center of his personality, his world) than up to the inside wall of what he is quietly and steadily giving forth; his place is never, not even for an instant, alongside the observer and judge."
“It is the psyche of the artist that is the product, it sprung from your own well, it’s your own water”, says Sweden’s great painter Karin Mamma Andersson. “The moment you dig into something, it becomes a sort of self-image.”
Jung believed individuation can lead us out of the hall of mirrors and return us to our Self, calling of the soul back into the heart of being. Self is both a mirror of the subjective ego and a reflection of the whole psyche. Grounded intuition of a centered sphere of soul opens a microcosm that mirrors the Cosmic macrocosm: "As Above, So Below.”
The night sky is the soul's mirror, showing light in the darkness, the luminous darkness that steers the course of individuation. We belong to a world—and a self—that is ever in a state of becoming. The night sky is the soul’s mirror, a reminder that light is embedded even in the deepest darkening, a “seed plot of a world to come.” (Costello)
For centuries, "black mirrors" used in a practice called “scrying," (“to perceive”) were employed to assist the conscious mind to perceive and appropriate Unconscious contents. Elizabethan magician John Dee used an Aztec obsidian magical mirror. Michel Nostradamus in the 16th century used black mirrors for divination.
One technique is to allow archetypal images to arise into awareness from the depths of the Unconscious. Using candles, pierced stones, black mirrors and the like in extraverted ways have no objective value; they’re simply one means to the same end. Televisions and computers are modern 'black mirrors.'
Jung held a mirror up to processes inside us. Jung mirrored the realization of the macrocosm within the microcosm. This movement has the effect of creating a mirror of consciousness. The place of the soul is the wellspring of mythological guidance.
The individual self is identified as soul in each system, and it is placed in what both Jung and Plato call the “third,” a level of being located in-between the divine Self or One, and the ego complex or sense based self. The Self radiates through archetypal awareness.
"Practicing the work of individuation in Jung or philosophy in Plato, which are similar paths, we can unite the opposites in the lower self. "The capacity to mirror divine life is an experience that is also a form of knowledge. Such knowledge is mystical rather than rational."
"Individuation and philosophy provide a path for realized being and real knowledge through the soul's capacity to mirror the divine. Jung 1970a, 336 referred to the experience of the absolute as 'objective facts', transmitted through psychic events." (Weldon, Platonic Jung)
The Great Work through philosophy or individuation involves a unity of the psyche. That creates an inner state where the individual soul is simultaneously aware of the ego or sensory world below and the divine One or Self above. Plato describes it as the realization of the macrocosm within the microcosm and Jung mirrors this idea of wholeness.
Philosophy arose from the image of the mirror of nature, adjusted and repackaged as worldviews and existential situations changed. The Renaissance humanists used the metaphors of the soul as 'mirror image.' The ancient Etruscan word for soul, hinthial, also meant an image reflected in a mirror.
Soul rests in the divine image with which we are utterly akin. It embodies us and makes us One and inseparable. A mirror can represent the divine Sun., symbol of the Self. The Soul is like a mirror which reflects the vast interiority of the Divine Infinity, Soul brightly reflecting God’s image in our Inner mirror.
Instead of watching with biological eyes, we visit this Inner mirror through spiritual contemplation. Human nature mirrored in the cosmos is a theater designed by and for the soul. Plato uses the metaphor mirror analogy, the cosmic soul reflected in the heavens, in Book X of Plato’s Republic (596c–e).
Ficino in Platonic Theology, Book III, Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities, the life of those mortals and the nexus of both. And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest, by means of his reasons, he has built in the sky, beyond the stars, the astral figures and parts of figures, such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties."
The visible body of the universe mirrors as closely as possible the form of the invisible Cosmic Soul, mirrored in our psychic body. The zodiacal light rises from the horizon, envelops planets along the ecliptic, and intersects the Milky Way, revealing Plato‘s visible god, the celestial X that mirrors the World Soul.
Logical and mystical tendencies co-mingle within us. Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. Going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective--is problematic; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts.
We desire a more meaningful relationship with self, others, and cosmos -- a world suspended between thought and poetry. Beyond our roles and dramas is the place where only energy, frequency, and vibration matter...that space where we remember who we really are. Soul contains our history, mystery, and our future. We are only immortal to the extent that consciousness is immortal.
Hillman suggests, "With the return of the soul [to the world], the literal can lose its dominion.The imaginal has become real, for many it is the real. [...] It remains an alternative [to the crisis of our western consciousness], that is, the way of the South, encouraging images [...] and developing "temples and statues" for "portions and phases" and pathologization of the soul: the elaboration of "recepticles acconci" for the psyche in the psyche Then we can put the tumult of our fantasies into the broadest deposit of myths, and by giving them the myth as a center we can take them off the streets, where they merely tumble following the impulses of the moment.I speak of an uninterrupted attention to the imagination, from first story told to a child up to the last conversations of old age.We talk about the recovery of the lost psychic space to contain and the lost mirrors to reflect."
"Our field needs to build rich and fantasy psychologies again such as classical mythology, the arts of memory and alchemy; like the psychology of Jung, like Neoplatonism, which gave order and culture to the madness of the Renaissance and the Romantics. Because what happens to our culture is what happens to - OUR - culture, our fantasies and individual images, they are moralized and repressed by us, or diagnosed and imprisoned, or exploited and betrayed, or drugged and derided. The soul of our civilization depends on the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture requires a culture of imagination." (Re-Visioning Psychology)
The quest for the transpersonal and hyperrational spiritual essence is more than what impels us to the moral life; it is unity, light, and completion. If religion provides magic for the masses, magic is a 'religion' of individuation and self-transformation.
Psyche or soul, the subjective center, merges with the primordial universe in an idealized gnostic apotheosis. Mystics tell us the divine is formless. For Plato, the virtues paled in comparison with the highest capacity of the soul, which is the mystical beholding of the eternal.
"We must begin by overcoming our virtuousness, with the justifiable fear of falling into vice on the other side. This danger certainly exists, for the greatest virtuousness is always compensated inwardly by a strong tendency to vice, and how many vicious characters treasure inside themselves sugary virtues and a moral megalomania." C. G. Jung.
"The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing." Jung. Vol. 18.
Archetypal psychology emphasizes the unconscious defined as imagination with an emphasis on images and soul, preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology, and insistence on treating the dream only in its own terms.
As a technology, magic is not tethered to its real or imaginal history in by-gone eras, but is recreated by each individual for their own path. We've used couriers, telegraph, and telephones to communicate, and now we have contemporary versions of even more efficient devices and ways to use them.
We now have the capacity to use cutting edge as well as ancient technology for altering consciousness. New mythologies are linked to new media. Highly adaptive, magic readily reinvents its technologies in accordance with progress. There are other methods, from yoga and Sufi dancing to drugs and meditation.
Our rituals have always taken place in the realm of the imagination. We aren't bound by medieval or even Renaissance means of connecting with an experiencing psyche, nor is our magical practice, though it may reference the history of such notions. We might describe it as a coherent resonance locking with the circuitry of the universe, but in an organic, not mechanical way. Magic makes a great metaphor for exploring the human condition.
Magic is a valuable tool for examining and reflecting the experience of living in the simultaneously glorious and terrible present -- more big data analytics than situational analysis. But 'magical thinking' or the appropriation of magic for serving personality deficits means 'standing too close to the mirror' to see them.
Do we abandon traditional practice when we use apps to hone in on magical timing, or use online sigil generators? Will we have to choose between nature and the new technology? In Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley explains: “Magick is the Science of understanding one’s self and one’s own situation. It is the art of applying this knowledge in action.”
Authenticity, living out of and clarifying our essence, requires we cultivate a capacity for nuance and duality and master the art of living with opposing truths. The true philosophical art isolates them as they form and re-form in the flowing stream of deeper reality. We contemplate them to assimilate them as they pass.
Our long personal pilgrimage begins with the formulation of our own philosophy, a deliberate and habitual orientation toward wisdom -- a more spiritual, self-contained magic.
A cultured person has some kind of original philosophy, the practice of individuality and self-knowledge, a reflective and considered tapestry of understanding focused on the mystery of life. We live by it secretly and profoundly for many long years as means of protecting it from disintegrating elements.
Gnosis makes us an authenticated user. Our user value-added creations are generated in the content-creating imaginal landscape. We don't need to 'literalize' the magical aspects, even while employing them. Self-arising transformation or individuation works on us whether we dogmatically 'believe' and practice it or not. Real magic transcends the technology of regular rules. What we find is often surprising and subtle, too aglow with silent radiance to fit into our intellectual templates of understanding.
What is truly magical concerns the ultimate comprehensibility of the process. We don't necessarily understand exactly what's going on to make psyche do what it does, but it's a matter of convenience. Magic is the art of self-culture through deeper awareness and heightened livliness. Culture becomes wisdom when it is diffused into the fiber and root of life informing our character, compassion, and ethics.
The ultimate explanation of the "magical" effect would be mundane physics -- a field of superimposed probability waves. The uncertainty principle implies the existence of an undiscovered means of transferring information nonlocally between the aspirant's consciousness and the entangled quantum realm.
We know as much as we need to know to make the technology work and don't care so much beyond that. We could learn what's really going on, probably, at least according to psychology and neurology. But we have to consider unforeseen consequences, the effects of our actions beyond our conscious intent. User as content generator and diffuser gives us an important role in the information process.
In the case of something truly magic, though, we don't have that confidence. Something that runs on truly supernatural principles, not bound by ordinary mathematical laws of physics, would ultimately be ineffable. There might be a few comprehensible layers, but deep down, the ultimate operating principle remains fundamentally unknowable.
That sets even the most advanced technology apart from magic. For something to be technology, it needs to be based in rules that are fundamentally knowable, given enough time and effort. Magic is not. No level of super-science goes so far beyond human understanding to truly be indistinguishable from magic. Yet we can experience it subjectively when we venture past the limits of the possible a little way into the impossible.
Magic is simply a system we treat like magic, a key distinction to get the desired effect without the nonsense of idiosyncratic thinking or overblown ego -- using the operating principles from the user's perspective. As in media, it is a case of "user as content", with the unconscious as content creator...Self as content author. The magical quest itself remains a journey of self-knowledge and transcendence. Aspirants will continue to find their sense of sacred meaning in their own way.
Synchromorphic Transformation
William Blake said, “Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.” As Eldo Stellucci puts it, "When a-causality enters our life and confronts us with orders of coherence implied righteous by meaning, it is probable that we are preparing to cross new psycho-conscious morphogenetic fields that will further transform our existence."
Self-referential symbols and symbolic intersubjectivity in liminal space enable certain styles of consciousness, supersensory images of the sacred. Theurgy is at once a teaching tool and a spiritual connection. It is one way of closing the gap between ‘symbolic’ representation and symbolic interaction. The resolution of paradox requires a change in perspective. "We don't really heal anything; we simply let it go," said Jung.
Consciousness itself is miraculous. Gurdjieff regarded a miracle as the “manifestation of the laws of one cosmos in another cosmos" of nested hierarchies and scale invariant patterns. Unity in multiplicity is the greatest paradox and miracle of all. Cultivating subtle attention is cultivating spirituality. Our consciousness becomes more complex internally over time.
Crossing that threshold means stepping beyond sociocultural conditioning into the enchanted world of nonordinary awareness. What is miraculous is our ability to move from one state of being to another, from sleep to awakening, from numbly repeating what we think we know to seeing something new and marvelous that was hiding in plain sight.
The whole being can even fuse in ecstatic communion with divinity. This suggests that Consciousness initiates a form of top-down evolution on the Darwinian genetic being. It is the mental and physical context of the universe at all scales.
In The Red Book Jung notes, "The image of God casts a shadow, which is as big as he is. The upper sense is big and small, it is as large as the space of the firmament and tiny as the cell of a living body."
Hillman summarized his counterpoint objections to Oriental transcendence and idealism in Revisioning Psychology:
“If divinity is in our freedom from hindrances and not in our inhibitions, complaints, and grotesqueries, then Oriental transcendence will hardly look to pathology for what might be entering us through it, asking what door is opened into soul through our wounds. Instead it urges: rise above psychological hassles and tangles, be wise – not snared, court bliss – not affliction.”
“My characterization of the Oriental denial of pathologizing is Western, reflecting the way it is used by Westerners. For what we do with Oriental transcendent methods derives as much from the Western psyche as it does from the Eastern spirit. In the East this spirit is rooted in the thick yellow loam of richly pathologized imagery – demons, monsters, grotesque Goddesses, tortures, and obscenities. It rises within a pathologized world of want and despair, chained by obligations, agonized. But once uprooted and imported to the West it arrives debrided of its imaginal ground, dirt-free and smelling of sandal-wood, another upward vision that offers a way to bypass our Western psychopathologies. The archetypal content of Eastern doctrines as experienced through the archetypal structures of the Western psyche becomes a major and systematic denial of pathologizing."
"If I have disparaged the transcendental approaches of humanistic and Oriental psychology, it is because they disparage the actual soul. By turning away from its pathologizings they turn away from its full richness. By going upward towards spiritual betterment they leave its afflictions, giving them less validity and less reality than spiritual goals. In the name of the higher spirit, the soul is betrayed.” (p. 67)
Forewarned, we have to recognize from the framework of theurgy, consciousness is different from that of psychology, quantum science, and neurology and is used differently. An experimental consciousness is concerned with participation, direct experience, and the paradigm-changing dialogue between experience and interpretation. Interpretation is built into perception.
Encounter, in or out of ritual space, is experiential discovery that helps us realize the mythic and sacred are the cosmos -- the unseen within as well as the spacious spectacle of the whole sky without. We might conjecture that the constellations and wandering stars were like sigils to ward off the Nothing.
Schopenhauer remarked that mankind clings, "to the thought of Magic in all places and at all times, notwithstanding frequent failure; and we come to the conclusion, that this thought must, to say the least, be deeply rooted in human nature, if not in things in general, and cannot be a mere arbitrary creation of the fancy."
We may become aware of a need and desire for ritual -- "a gnostic impulse" for insight beyond radical dualism that awakens us from a long ontological sleep. Some aspirants act this desire out in ceremonies and invocations, (theurgy), in personal or popular culture revivals drawing on Neoplatonic and other roots.
In Theurgy, spiritual yearning is not concretized but remains metaphorical though enacted. Magical intelligence includes transcendental technologies -- technologies of the self through which we construct our own identities -- a relationship between games of truth and how we construct our self-image.
We perform transformational operations that effect our bodies, souls, thoughts, behavior, and beliefs -- our cultural programs. So, magic gets labelled subversive and transgressive. We may find ourselves introduced to an objective ontological phenomenon underlying our experiences, unmediated by cultural frameworks.
Not for self-appropriation, magical technologies allow nature to do the work, like the wind that fills a sail. Theurgy is like using a magical sail to get nature's cooperation. The Greek word techne implies an extension and optimization of life's potential through repeatable processes.
Jung remarked that, "The magical word is one that lets "a primordial word resound behind it"'; magical action releases primordial action." (Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63). And, "Do not forget that the original meaning of all letters and numbers was a magical one!" (Letters Vol. 1, Pg. 528-529)
And in The Red Book: "The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner. The magical way is not arbitrary, since that would be understandable, but it arises from incomprehensible grounds. ...The magical way arises by itself If one opens up chaos, magic also arises."
Ascent to heaven is an archetypal motif of exceptional metaphysical importance in philosophy and religion. At these “holy moments” we can experience unity akin to a both a Neoplatonic and Jungian ideal.
Prof. Greg Nixon (2010) suggests: "Such a system is not primarily representational at all, but is instead driven by autopoietic (self-creative) processes so never presented (concretely perceived) ideas, images, or beings can be called forth thus extending reality into abstract palaces of the imagination. Once such an abstract image is communicated and conceived, it is becomes part of the reality of non-representational human experience. If it is experienced, its reality cannot be doubted (cf . Eliade, 1963; Frankfort & Frankfort, 1949), and humanity enters the realm of the sacred."
Our consciousness spontaneously arises from the space of awareness. We each have a conscious and unconscious worldview, a system of interconnected beliefs. Can we be certain of any beliefs as 'truth'? Plotinus warned, "The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone." There is no consensus on theories of truth.
Though strongly held and well-justified, some of our presumed philosophical/conceptual "facts" will naturally turn out to be mistaken. A cosmology is a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul’s need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things, by connecting the end to the beginning.
The world's meaning is immeasurably immense as polyphonic psyche. The mystical ascent to the sky is central to the Egyptian, Platonic, and Hermetic traditions. Spiritual flight, ascent to the noetic realm through transcendence, is common in Neoplatonic literature.
The descent and ascent is one of manifestation and reintegration. The desire to seek greater knowledge leads to unification of consciousness. That desire is sacred because it arises from the domain of myth and caring for the soul by exploring the personal and collective unconscious. Myth allows us to see many things at once by collapsing complex processes into understandable, simplified forms.
McLuhan uses terms such as “integral awareness",, “organic interrelation”, “organic whole”, and “organic unity” to show how use of myth helps us explain and understand our reality. McLuhan says, "For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period." A mind overloaded by facts reverts to myth to understand the world.
"Myth is contraction or implosion of any process..." "myth...capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight." "Our inner experience, increasingly at variance with these mechanical patterns, is electric, inclusive, and mythic in mode. The mythic or iconic mode of awareness substitutes the multi-faceted for point-of-view."
He continues in Understanding Media, "...myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture." "Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure", in our case Plato, Hermes Trismegestus, and the Neoplatonics. (Understanding Media)
"The Word and image, like male and female, are opposites complementary. Every time a culture elevates the word written at the expense of the image, the patriarchy dominates. When the importance of the image replaces the written word, female values and egalitarianism thrive."
(Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess.The conflict between word and image, p.15)
For Jung, it is the symbolic process that must be made conscious. It is not the concept but the symbol that opens us to the mythic dimension and symbolic conscience.
Hillman found desire something to work with and make Holy through attention and discipline that iterates over time. A trajectory forms when the result of applying a given function is fed again into the function as input, and this process is repeated.
Jung understood our god-images are mirrors of our own unconscious desires. This is our renewed image of the sacred and holding it in tension between heaven and earth. Yet it is our most ancient notion of encounter with the numinous.
We repress the contents of the unconscious, disregarding the magic and mystery there, at our own peril. Sacred ritual re-invokes our ability as carriers of divine presence. Sacred rites, places, and objects use metaphor to make a connection between humanity and divinity. In the Renaissance, magic was another term for Hermeticism.
Desire is holy, as depth psychology, the romantics, and the Neoplatonists insisted, because it touches and moves the soul. Desire creates a reciprocity between human and divine through a palpable and lived relationship with the sacred psyche. It is invaluable, even just to redeem us from existential crisis through practice and service.
We need to separate our constructions from a illusory interpretation of the facts of reality, as available to experience. How can we integrate different theories relating to the basis of reality? No shortage of comparisons and correlations between spiritual notions, metaphysical ideas, and scientific theories has been made.
Phenomenology indicates a way to research where we can be open to the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through our own direct involvement and understanding. Understanding arises directly from our personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure and immersion.
We meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced a way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which we see the phenomenon in a radically fresh and fuller way.
Sacramental Function
"Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act." --James Hillman, Healing Fiction
This inner journey to the level of archetypes and principles is the quest to know the nature of reality, the infinite, absolute mystery at the core of ourselves and the universe. It leads to philosophy, art, and science. Without beauty, the soul shrivels and dies. It is our inner self, the spark of light and love that resides at the core of our being.
It also leads to magic in the classical sense, but that was made taboo and transgressive. Nevertheless, it is a recurring theme of myths and tales -- the titanic energies of those forces that are beyond us. Desire leads us through our images and dreams like Ariadne's thread.
If magic starts in desire, it still needs direction in a greater frame of timeless time. Sacred psychology is an ongoing operation with the soul's images. It means joining a greater life; dying to our current selves and being reborn in our eternal selves.
But the human condition suffers estrangement and alienation from nature and our own nature. So, how can we become a partner in symbiosis with nature -- as the human beings we would like to be in an optimal trajectory with our destiny? Marion Woodman says, “Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we owe to Soul."
It has been sought in universals, transcendental idealism, radical dualism, empirical materialism, existential nihilism, and deconstructionism. Relativistic perception is the opposite sense or position. Paradoxical tension between spiritual transcendence and soulful immanence is breathing life into the textures of our experience.
The notion of paradox comes from a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, dualistic paradox. Self-referential paradox feeds back and annihilates itself. Such bivalence (binary logic: this or that; true or false; black or white) can be superseded by multivalent consciousness which perceives in terms of degrees. Multivalence more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of consciousness.
As in the case of fractal generation, solutions are not found in terms of this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relationships. Fuzzy philosophy is based on acceptance of degrees of truth, the "grayness" of most propositions (truth values), the fractional solutions of fuzzy logic. Human consciousness is a self-referential system which embodies this principle of a connection between logic and chaos, in holistic ("whole brain") awareness.
It's been sought in philosophy and religion to connect back to self and God. For the theurgist, 'it is a sacrilege not to preserve the immortality of the soul, raising it to the level of the holy and uniting it to the divine.' (Damascius, Phil.Hist .19 Athanassiadi)
In Hymns to an Unknown God, Sam Keen said, “My life is the text in which I must find the revelation of the sacred.” This alternative approach requires our ongoing personal engagement with religious and mythological traditions, and the sacred dimension of each individual’s life story from a metaphorical, archetypal, and imaginal perspective.
Through pluralism, psyche has escaped the absolute domination of the sacred function of myth by traditional religions, working with the spiritual dimension of personal mythology (Krippner).
A phenomenological approach to magic is an "as if" reality with which we participate -- a creative, mythopoetic approach. We open to the religious dimension of myth in terms of personal mythological consciousness -- beliefs and experiences that order, shape, and direct our lives. We don't perceive the world through ideas but through events we
live through.
Ritual enables a psychic shift within the participant toward a specific way of thinking and conceptualizing which produces a 'sacred' state of mind. As we enact a ritual our psyche moves deeper into the fantasy of the metaphorical enactment, causing an increasing identification with the symbolic meaning.
At some deeper level we have an implicit desire to make deep meaning of both inner and outer life. These metaphors are the bridge by which we come to 'understand' the divine. The divine takes on a form familiar to human experience, yet dependent on human experience in order for it to be real. We may feel the sacred animal joy, the instinct of poetic and aesthetic participation when we engage in the process.
Theurgy is both psychosomatic (physical influences of emotional factors) and psychosemantic; the meaning of the word or 'utterance' is largely the result of imagination, “imaginational heart.” Neoclassical practice is the desire for the self to reveal itself as a pantheon of gods and goddesses that mirror the cosmos.
Theurgic speech of the birds and solar knowledge echoes the tongues of the gods and their songs, chanting out the universe by the secret Name of everything, back to the ineffable Silence. The rites themselves also 'speak,' manifesting noetic realities of the archetypal realm, transporting and transmuting the theurgist with the divine.
“This feeling for the infinite...can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be...ultimately limited–we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” (C. G. Jung)
"Just remember that I am, and that I support the entire cosmos with only a fragment of my being. Behold, Arjuna, a million divine forms, with an infinite variety of color and shape. Behold the gods of the natural world, and many more wonders never revealed before. Behold the entire cosmos turning within my body, and the other things you desire to see." (Bhagavad Gita)
"With a drop of my energy I enter the earth and support all creatures. Through the moon, the vessel of life-giving fluid, I nourish all plants. I enter breathing creatures and dwell within as the life-giving breath. My true being is unborn and changeless. I am the Lord who dwells in every creature." (Bhagavad Gita)
The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or
consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the
fundamental basis of all that is.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Neoplatonism, Hermetic, and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
Logical Lies, Psychological Symbols, & Aesthetic Metaphors
Older strata of the unconscious remain active within us despite modern explanations and contextx. Belief urges actions. We act our beliefs. The stronger we believe, the more action takes over, the more motivated we become.
Philosophy is done within the context of a worldview. The dilemma of the personal cannot be solved personally. We need to deal with collective events more mythically, as they rework our lives. Theurgy engages with rites of alchemical transformation, mystical union with the noetic Sun, revelation of the divine face, salvation as return to the divine.
But psychology cannot provide metaphysical beliefs. Jung's crucial move was distinguishing between God and the god-image. The metaphysical influences on the Western Tradition include Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, alchemy, and astrology.
Depth psychology avoids metaphysical positing with a stance of non-deciding but opening, a Presencing. We don't have to believe literally to engage in aesthetic practices that foster and refine psychic life everyday. Depth and resilience to the mystery of existential suffering that tries our souls has been called the 'dark sacred' in the spiritual frame of reference.
Jung suggests in the Red Book, that 'the magical way arises by itself. If one opens up chaos, magic also arises.' "One can teach the way that leads to chaos, but one cannot teach magic. One can only remain silent about this, which seems to be the best apprenticeship. This view is confusing, but this is what magic is like."
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into a bifurcation or unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. The deepest effects result in a new self image Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The physical universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner life. The reality of universals is deconstructed by not presuming them. How can we experience and confirm the particulars of the universal Idea or Form, which has the opposite characteristic to the particular?
The new 'realism' is indeterminate -- how things are presents itself to consciousness in some kind of immediacy. The ancient philosophers sought it in magic. Metaphysical realism views the ways things are as always outrunning our ability to represent them. Pure potentiality, the condition of possibility of an event, does not take place if it has no place to be.
Natural philosophy returns in the “new” concept of mind, life and matter emerging from the nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime. Space is no longer secondary to matter. Absolute space of the vacuum is the primary reality.
The things we know as matter (mass, with properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. Our “essential nature” must be here, now. And in the emerging concept there is no "absolute matter," only an absolute matter-generating energy field.
The philosophy of cognitive science deals with the traditional issues of cognition and transcendence. Phenomenology and philosophy provide constitutive explanations that describe the structural conditions of possibility of phenomena. Science can provide ground for revising philosophical theories about them. Both phenomenology and transcendental philosophy answer to naturalistic epistemological constraints. (Wheeler)
Though most don't practice this archaic structure, magic has always been part of the human story from the rituals of ancient shamans. Shamanic magic is the root of religion, medicine, philosophy, art, and science. All magic is ultimately shamanic, but not all aspirants are shamans.
Some are theurgists actively participating in the transpersonal and numinous, the spiritual Mysteries of the soul, divine Self-Revelation, and living resurrection, a return to wholeness. The mystery of resurrection is the creative power of visionary imagination.
Theurgy has roots in Egyptian initiation rites, Orphism, Neoplatonism, and Kabbalah. It contains the concept of spiritual evolution, and ultimately unification with God or the Godhead at its core -- the virtual substrate.
The existence of unconscious mental processes presents us with an acute philosophical challenge. The true nature of mind reminds us us that perfection is an illusion, and that we are simply ‘reality’ experiencing or exploring itself.
In Jung the concept of the ‘archetype’ is inseparable from the concept of the ‘collective
unconscious.' ’In From Cliché to Archetype, McLuhan conceptualizes the activated archetype as a ‘cliché ’This is an equivalent term for what he had termed the ‘medium’ or ‘technology’, but specifically refers to the function of a technology in use. Symbolism is the art and technique of breaking literal connections. Technology is an extension of our own bodies.
Even 'utterance' -- metaphysical power words -- is an extension of ourselves. For example, the spells, or "utterances", of the pyramid texts are primarily concerned with protecting the pharaoh's remains, reanimating his body after death, facilitating ascent to the heavens, the image of the afterlife during the Old Kingdom. McLuhan calls ‘acoustic space’, the ‘sense-ratio’, ‘media-environment’, ‘archetype’ or ground.
All experience is correlated to an ‘archetype’ extant in the unconscious. A cliché becomes an archetype through resonance, repetition, and retrieval by consciousness. The unconscious form activates when we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype. Magic is retrieved when it enacts ritual and invokes specific archetypes. We unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress.
We can relate theurgic practice to McLuhan's description of art. The tool is a work of art. Every technology is created in the first place as a work of art, while every work of art, in its repeated use, becomes a technology (CA).
McLuhan says that ‘The function of art in a tribal society is not to orient the population to novelty but to merge it with the cosmos.... The primitive role of art [is that] of serving as consolidator and as liaison with the hidden cosmic powers ...’ (CA, 177)
Image, Gesture, & Words
Around 1964,McLuhan began using Jung’s term ‘collective unconscious’ to describe the effects of technologies: "All technologies are collective unconscious." ‘Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness."... (Counterblast 30-31)
Deities or archetypes may have evolved to smooth interpersonal relations by including an understanding of human types, along with rules for helping the different types relate with one another. If the deities are just reflections of ancient evolutionary pressures, with a dash of neuroanatomy thrown in, we still have same pressures today so the ancient archetypes still "work", irregardless of any objective existence of gods and goddesses.
But McLuhan required no transcendental reference, no Platonic life of forms in an abstract realm. The life of the forms is always here, now and we participate in their creation. What we call the unconscious is Nature and media reflecting ourselves back to ourselves. His method was 'probing' the (unconscious) environment, and, McLuhan tells us, it has utility across all fields of the arts and sciences.
There is no archetypal realm beyond the relations we have with the metamorphosing cosmos. We use them to express and interpret our experiences -- what appears grounded in the spontaneous action of the psyche, expressed through image, gesture, and word, which transcend the ego.
Jung's archetypal concept is of a psychic content and mythological processes that may be ‘projected’ upon objects in the environment. Jung claims archetypal projection is the way in which individuals ‘assimilate[s] all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events’.
The state of pure awareness is that silent space between thoughts. That gap, inner stillness, connects us to the field of pure potentiality of the void, universal and persistently present truth. In non-duality we are our experience, just experiencing it with awareness. Theurgy is a pro-active choice toward choosing something we wish to experience.
Transcendental Magic
The theurgist is symbolically sacrificed on the altar of wholeness. The aspirant essentially becomes an 'altar' of worship, through ceremony, speech, gesture, and concentration. Right-brain spiritual and religious imagination creates a specific 'atmosphere' and an exaltation of consciousness that activates the 'temples' in the cranium with alternate states of consciousness.
Modern magic emphasizes the Great Work of spiritual evolution -- Self-transformation or transmutation. Reuniting the soul with the divine was believed to result in communication with one's personal angel or higher self. The unconscious has many voices because the notion of moving along a single plane of narrative awareness is totally alien to the nature of language and the unconscious.
"Hermeticism is the science of nature hidden in the hieroglyphics and symbols of the ancient world. It is the search for the principle of life, along with the dream (for those who have not yet achieved it) of accomplishing the great work, that is the reproduction by man of the divine, natural fire which creates and recreates beings." (Eliphas Levi)
Theurgy is artistic engagement with technology. Individual mind engages the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The illusion of content siphons off all attention, mechanical repetition and reoccurance, and from the forms and effects.
This magnum opus is analogous to Jung's individuation process, where psychic transformation follows an archetypal and universal process. It unfolds through integration of our conscious and unconscious aspects.
What was initially fragmented and broken, is restored and synthesized. A whole and unique individual emerges; an individual who fully accepts, and is one with, him or herself, is fully authentic and embraces their destiny. It is a movement toward consciously collaborating in the realization of one’s unique destiny.
The sacredness of the Opus, or Great Work, is the central idea. It is a holistic perspective. One must be self-oriented, rather than ego-oriented. The adept is also diligent, patient and virtuous. We must have that integrative potential within for self-realization -- for becoming whole or 'holy.'
Magic requires an inward seeking, just like the process of individuation. It is a solitary task for no one may follow where you go. But there may be guides who will help inspire your faith and dedication to the task. Others have been to the territory you will explore, but none will accompany you.
The Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World acts as the soul-guide to the highest region. We experience an imaginal Reality -- the world ensouled as living divinity, consciousness in its material unconsciousness. The putrefying contents of our psychophysical existence are elevated through insight and revisioning to the very means of our rebirth, and the unblocked, clear perception of our existential Reality.*****
Divine Loving Presence
In On the Mysteries, Iamblichus successfully argued that union with the Gods could not be achieved by mere philosophical speculation, but only by moving beyond concepts to a non-dual union with the divine through sacred rites and theurgy.
In a sense, the Soul is already "there". But consciousness from the lower bodies, and lower planes must be withdrawn upwards before It is reunited with its True Self, or Soul.
In On the Gods and the World, Neoplatonist philosopher Sallustius noted: "Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods - subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden.”
Magic is woven into the cosmology of Greek mythology, cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. Neoplatonists distinguished between divine or High Magic and low magic for personal gain. Some theurgic rites involved a form of self initiation.
The theurgist does not coerce the Gods; the Gods themselves who elevate the theurgist by giving light. The Hidden Stele describes adoration to a "spirit who enters into me, convulses me, and leaves me kindly according to the will of God."
The aspirant senses an intense feeling of upward movement, as if being literally pulled by a magnetic force, the attraction of the radiant field of spiritual love. That pull attracts like a magnet, escorting the emanated soul back to the Source, absorbing the soul into the Absolute.
Ritual is the medium of the art of ceremonial magic, creating a channel for the unconscious potential of the Unmanifest -- a bridge between aspirant and deity for the sake of union without ulterior motive. It is a creative outlet for pathos and the mythologizing tendencies of the psyche. It allows a life lived in close connection to psyche, interrelated with the mysteries of life, death, and transformation.
Theurgy is not reviving a dead faith but building relationship with living essence. Everything is and remains metaphorical. Mythic animation of archetypal figures and revivification of myth though the archetypes remain literally unattainable. Epistemological metaphors are 'how we know what we know.' When an archetype activates, it is primarily through a number of psychological mechanisms that influence behavior.
Theurgy intentionally activates that archetypal process. Theurgists aspires toward a longer or shorter experience of insight into true identity and what is hidden in the depths and the highest spheres of heaven. We learn to “think with the heart,” to seize and embrace spiritual values and bring them down to earth. Shakespeare suggested, “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.”
Heightened State
Both art and ceremonial magic are means of manipulating symbols, words or images, to facilitate changes in consciousness and readjust our relationship with the cosmos. Art draws forth the potential of the unmanifest. An aesthetic response to beingness opens us up to our unconscious and intuition. Understanding and aesthetic response lead to the formulation of wisdom and true knowledge -- the Radiance of Here and Now.
In the western mystery tradition, magic (wisdom) is a ‘living’ or evolving philosophical system and paradigm that morphs with developments in science, thought, and culture. It helps us actualize our philosophical perspective, personal ethics, and self-realization.
John Keats reminds us, 'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?' He also noted, "There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself."
Keats's view of the "world as a vale of soul-making" -- a heartful world of meaning, touchstones and transformations -- is echoed in Archetypal Psychology and its Neoplatonic roots. It is a creative response to life's vitality and events -- the idea of working with the things that happen to us.
James Hillman realized, “The Spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.” Spirit views soul as vague and inferior but Hillman imagines them balancing one another.
Magic hints at the idea that the universe is in sympathy with everything else. That all things, by the mere fact of belonging to the same system, are one. It reconnects us to the experience of wonder, with the unconscious, the wisdom of the body, and the forms of natural images -- the Self. It honors the anima and the animal, while respecting the polyphony and mysteries of theophany. We delight in the paradoxical, enigmatic, ambiguous, and contradictory.
Theurgy describes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of evoking the action or invoking the presence of one or more gods. Every gesture of the hand, every placement of the foot, every sound, every movement is the language of wisdom. Our ordinary sense of time and space dissolves.
Jung says, "The ego has to acknowledge many gods before it attains the center where no god helps it any longer against another god." (Letters Vol. II, Pgs. 257-264). "The archetype is, so to speak, an “eternal” presence, and it is only a question of whether it is perceived by the conscious mind or not." (CW 12, Para 329).
It especially concerns the goal of merging with the divine and perfecting oneself as a deathless (immortal) body of light. In this perfection of the human body-mind, our microcosmic soul merges with the World Soul, enabling our participation in wisdom. As Jung suggests, "The Self might equally be called the God Within."
"By heightened unconscious performance we mean that peculiar automatic process whose results are not available for the conscious psychic activity of the individual...In this field we meet with a not unjustifiable skepticism on the part of the scientific pundits...occultism has claimed a special right to this field" (Jung, Psychiatric Studies, Vol 1, 80).
Bodies of Light
Theurgy is ceremonial Magic, ranging from shamanism to the mysticism of the Neoplatonists, in which divine consciousness and powers enter the human soul. Theurgy is the worship of the Gods as a philosophical way of life, rather than formal religion.
The practice unites the opposites. It builds a subtle, immaterial body of light as a vehicle for soul travel. "The body of light is a spiritual term for the non-physical body associated with enlightenment, known by many names in different spiritual traditions:
Christianity: “the resurrection body” and “the glorified body”,
Taoism: “the diamond body,” “the immortals” and “the cloudwalkers.”
Tibetan Buddhism: “the light body” or “rainbow body”,
Vajrayana: “the diamond body”,
Kriya Yoga: “the body of bliss”,
Vedanta: “the superconductive body.”
In some mystery schools, it is called “the solar body.”
Rosicrucian: “the diamond body of the temple of God.”
Ancient Egypt: “the luminous body or being” (akh).
Old Persia: “the indwelling divine potential” (fravashi or frav)."
Hermeticism: “the immortal body” (soma athanaton).
Judism: the Merkabah, Cube of Space or Throne Chariot of Qabalah; The Diamond Body.
Sufism: “the most sacred body ” (wujud al-aqdas), “supracelestial body ” (jism asli haqiqi).
Tantrism: “the vajra body,” “the adamantine body,” and “the divine body.”
Gnosticism and Neoplatonism: luminous “the radiant body” of the Uncreated self.
Alchemy: the Emerald Tablet calls it “the Glory of the Whole Universe” and “the golden body.” Philosopher's Stone, The alchemist Paracelsus called it “the astral body.”
Communication is through interaction and true participation between gods and aspirants in ritual. A great attraction to the gods exists which arises freely from the soul. This same great power, Eros, reciprocally descends from the gods. We can experience gods in our daily life, but theurgy is the formal means for worship, communicate with, and experience the Gods.
"Soul becomes psyche through love and it is Eros that engenders the psyche [...] The creative is a result of love. It is marked by imagination and beauty and by the connection with tradition as a living force and with nature as a living body. This perception of instinct will insist on the importance of love: nothing can be created without love and love reveals the origin and principle of all living things, as in Orphic cosmogony." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis)
"In individuation we ground ourselves in the part of the feminine, Eros, that is relational and feeling, that comes from the heart. And, we learn that our inner relationships are the foundation for our outer ones, as well as our relationship to life and the Divine. It is how we accept ourselves, find the courage to sacrifice our self-images again and again in order to relate to our complexes and find the promise of an enlarged life that actually frees us from our past and self-defeating habits." (Bud Harris, Becoming Whole: A Jungian Guide to Individuation)
Theurgy means "God-working" -- magic used for personal growth, spiritual evolution, and becoming closer to the Divine. It includes a range of esoteric subjects including natural magic, Qabalah, angelic hierarchies, planetary seals, angelic sigils, magical correspondences, and theurgy.
Theurgy and Magic
"Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic." ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Theurgy and magic are the poential for the participant to work with natural laws. These laws are under the dominion of the Gods. Since theurgy is communication with the gods, union with the power of nature is possible. The world thinks and feels and imagines. Alive with its own desires, its own memories, it lives with experiences, regrets, and longings that interfuse with our own.
Theurgy has nothing to do with mundane superstition, practices which are called in ancient Greek goetia, sorcery, or black magic. Goetia should be viewed as trickery.
Theurgy is genuine high magic, entirely selfless and performed only as necessary. Such magic is great because its source is the Deathless Gods. Trivial false magic fails because the Gods cannot be compelled to act for the self-serving designs of the mundane.
Genuine theurgy is not magic since we cannot force the Gods to appear through prayers and incantations. iIf that were so, then beings which appeared could not possibly be Gods, but could only be deception. Theurgy is worship and, by means of our love, we invite the Gods to come. Theurgy occurs in a field of mutual freedom enjoyed between Gods and mortals.
In tradition, the rituals are too sacred to display publicly, being the formal means we use to communicate with the gods, an intimate and private act. We do not put our rituals on display. They are not meant for the eyes of the casual onlooker who has no understanding of what they see.
Theurgy is for sincere and well-meaning individuals who desire it with pure heart, who respect what it is and ho are willing to take the time and energy to learn the foundation of knowledge which makes their meaning comprehensible.
Thæourgós - (theurgus; Gr. θεουργός, ΘΕΟΥΡΓΟΣ. Noun.) individual who conducts ritual, a priest or priestess. The word means divine worker, and ritual (thæouryía) is the divine work of the worship of the Gods. The cosmic Thæourgós is the Dimiourgós. - Cf. Iæréfs.
Thæouryía - (Theurgy; Gr. θεουργία, ΘΕΟΥΡΓΙΑ. Noun. divine work) ritual, the worship of the Gods.
Thærapeia - (therapeia; Gr. θεραπεία, ΘΕΡΑΠΕΙΑ. Noun.) service to the Gods, worship, ritual.
Theurgy (from the Greek theos: God, and ergon: work), is the highest, the most pure
and also the most wise aspect of Magic. We begin with the latter, keep only the essence and most refined purity, is to consummate the former.
According to Charles Barlet, “Ceremonial Magic is an operation by which Man seeks
to constrain – by means of the very play of Natural Forces – the Invisible Powers of
various Orders to act in accordance with what he requires of them. To this end, he seizes
them, surprises them, that is to say through projection (by means of analogical “correspondences” which comprise the Unity of Creation); these Powers over which he is
not master, but to which he can open extraordinary pathways, to the very heart of Nature.
To this end he uses Pentacles, special Substances, rigorous conditions of Time and Place,
which he must observe under pain of the gravest of perils. For, if the path sought is even
a little lost, the audacious one will be exposed to the force of these “Powers” before which he is but a speck of dust..” (Barlet: l’Initiation, January 1897 edition).
https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/03/03/more-reflections-on-james-hillmans-archetypal-psychology/
http://www.hellenicgods.org/theurgy---thaeouryia---theourgia
http://www.markfoster.net/rn/texts/practicalkabbalah-part2.pdf
Chaldean Oracles
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ow0VAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=chaldean+oracles,+google+books&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr2KiO4ePbAhXDt1kKHboOD3kQ6AEILDAA#v=onepage&q=chaldean%20oracles%2C%20google%20books&f=false
Gregory M. Nixon, "Myth and Mind: The Origin of Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred" (322-323): https://www.academia.edu/295004/_Myth_and_Mind_The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Discovery_of_the_Sacred_
