Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

Royal Academy Schools, 1-2 October 2010

Researching a series of unexplained incidents at this historic building, artist Blue Firth uncovered a first-hand account of apparent poltergeist activity in the artists’ studios.

While patrolling the 18th century corridors one night in 2008, Red Collar guard Nathan Phillips experienced something that prevented him from finishing his shift: “When I got back to where the skeletons are kept, the doors all slammed shut — like boom, boom, boom one after another. I tried to make out what it could be and checked all the doors again. I got to the same point in the same sequence and the bangs happened all over again. I didn’t finish my patrol that night.”

To make sense of what happened to Nathan, Blue has collaborated with parapsychologist Dr David Luke and writer Mark Pilkington. As preparatory research they undertook investigative training sessions with the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP).

Bringing together their knowledge and experience of the paranormal and arts fields, the trio have devised an event that merges Blue’s art practice with David and Mark’s expertise in making sense of the unexplained. The end result is a unique participatory experiment in which the audience are both observers and the observed, the haunters and the haunted.

Participants will be asked to complete psychological and physiological assessments before and after entering the site of the haunting, which will be monitored for any unusual occurrences. The vigil will take place under carefully controlled conditions and in total darkness.

Combining authentic investigative procedures with subtle performative aspects, Vigil examines and subverts the roles of audience expectation, spectatorship and belief.

Spaces for both nights are extremely limited so we advise reserving your position soon.

Visit the Royal Academy web site to buy tickets.

Erik Davis just posted a glowing review of a new book on ayahuasca: Singing to the Plants by Steve Beyer. While Erik makes the book sound like a must-read, it’s just out and for now is only in pricey hardcover. However, I’ve just been browsing Beyer’s blog, and I’ve quickly become impressed enough to be here pushing you his way.

Since discovering James Hillman’s work, I’ve had a very strong notion that, despite his total avoidance of psychedelics and “altered states”, his approach to psychology has a great deal to offer the modern psychedelic community. The non-Western influences on psychedelic culture have been diverse and profound, with Oriental notions of “enlightenment”, “gurus”, etc. perhaps outweighing the imports from shamanic societies. I’ve no wish to brush these influences aside with a snort of post-colonial disgust—they’re far from unproblematic, but they’re an integral part of our attempts to absorb the impact of these dimensions being unleashed on our barren religious landscape.

But Hillman presents a perspective firmly rooted in the Greek soil that much of our culture is also rooted in, giving it a particular resonance for Westerners (though of course he draws from the sidelines of our history, the Neoplatonists and Romantics). And his core opposition to “developmental psychology”, and the utilitarian narrowness of the quest for a “cure” or linear “growth”, exposes the vanities in our expectations of meditation, psychedelics and magic as much as it critiques modern psychotherapies. Psychedelic culture usually has problems at the other end of the scale from being fixated on a “goal”, too—sometimes it wanders too much. It strikes me that the discipline and diligence in Hillman’s approach to “following the image” is a valuable adjunct to the boundary-corrosion of hallucinogens, a useful position mediating between focus and drift.

Reading Beyer’s account of DMT researcher Rick Strassman’s story, his final paragraph seemed thoroughly Hillmanian to me. Discussing the fact that Strassman was disillusioned that not many of his research subjects seemed to “really change” after their initial rushes of revelation, Beyer remarks:

But is long-term personal change what DMT is even about? With his own preexisting biases, both Buddhist and countercultural, Strassman thought that spiritual transformation was the endpoint of the hallucinogenic experience; he was personally surprised and disoriented by the frequently reported contact with other-dimensional beings. Perhaps the hospital setting was less important than Strassman’s own unmet expectations. Perhaps DMT—like ayahuasca itself—is not a psychotherapist but a teacher, leading where it intends—not to some sort of enlightenment, not to self-improvement, not to community volunteer work; but into the dark and luminous realm of the spirits.

Then, sure enough, Hillman pops up. Beyer’s recent post on the collective unconscious is a brilliant critical summary of the history behind and the issues involved with Jung’s famous notion, which concludes using Hillman’s typically astute assessment of the “archetype” concept.

It’s great to see Hillman embraced within an intelligently psychedelic context. Perhaps not surprising that it’s around ayahuasca. The complex of traditions around this brew are saturated with animism, a perspective that, while Hillman largely avoids terminology that will associate his ideas with indigenous cultures, also saturates his work.

My other highlight so far from the blog is the great little summary of Pierre Clastres‘ work, with some interesting additional notes on the role that sorcery might play in the context of Clastres’ vision of primitive society dispersing itself to avoid the coagulation of the State.

Informed, eloquent and clearly possessing a great depth of experience: this is who we need writing about the boundaries between consciousness and nature.

(Transcript here.)

When he first posted about it, someone piped up with concerns about Merrick’s tone.

The third question regards the (to me) overly aggressive attitude you took whilst you were talking about the Liberal Democrats. I was wondering how you thought it would come across to the general population of the UK? I compare this to the amiable way that Nick Clegg spoke after you.

Our culture’s gone through many cycles of upheaval, greater and lesser anger against the State and the failings of our elected representatives (and the lack of real alternative offered by their rivals). Direct action seeped into mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, mainly through environmental activism such as anti-road and anti-GM protests.

As the scientific evidence of the seriousness of our ecological blundering mounted, and the blundering continued apace, many assumed that the (supposedly) incoherent, “angry” approach to political action had failed. Corporations and the bland public reality they’ve created dominate, so the only game left is to work from within, they said. It’s the “smart” way forward; ranting from the sidelines simply engenders conflict and stand-offs, and doesn’t win over the public at large. People like “nice”, so that’s what we need to give them if we want to win them over.

There’s rarely a day goes by now that doesn’t show this attitude to be a load of shit. Of course, any intelligent person recognizes the value of tactics. However, I question the automatic association of anger with incoherence. I think this is a legacy of a culture—and I’m especially talking about my own country here, England—that seems constitutionally uncomfortable with strong human emotions. We lose coherence when angry because we’re entering alien territory, natural emotional landscapes that we’ve been alienated from.

Hatred, as Primal Scream said, will eat you whole, and has to be let go of. But all too often, in therapy, politics, and society in general, we confuse these twisted emotional brambles with the healthy shoots of anger. Our lack of emotional literacy leaves us prey to those who want us to “let go”, when actually they’re talking about repressing.

Merrick got quite a few boos at Glastonbury. The commenter on his blog took this as an indication that, if even such a left-leaning audience as Glastonbury Festival booed, the public at large would react badly to the anger expressed at the Lib Dem’s failure to offer a real alternative. Therefore, we should tone down our anger, and be more “amiable”, like Clegg. Better still, we could “let go” of our anger…

If you’re not angry—at least sometimes—at 99% of politicians today, you’re blind or numb, or both. And if you think the way forward is to publically make our emotions conform to the flattened landscape that is preferred by politics and corporations, where most of us are forced to live much of the time, you’re wrong. This public landscape, where spontaneous emotion is distrusted, and emotion and intelligence are forced apart, is the medium through which our catastrophic disconnection from nature and each other is expressed.

Anger isn’t a “solution”, and focused on to the exclusion of joy, sadness, compassion, and the rest of the spectrum (a reasonable working definition of “hate”), it can become as much of a distortion of humanity as its repression. But it’s precisely the amiable fuzziness, the tactical avoidance of anything uncomfortable or unseemly, of people like Clegg that has us continuing our trajectory towards ecological collapse.

The apocalypse is enabled with a whimper, not a bang.

Asklepius visits a dreamer. Epidauros, Greece.

by Gyrus

The realm of dreams is perhaps the most ubiquitous, fertile, and alluring place that we look to for inspiration. Whether we’re craving new creative ideas or insight into ourselves, our night-time excursions to this mercurial land of multiple meanings, shifting landscapes and beguiling mysteries seem to dangle endless fresh possibilities before us. What if we were able to discover techniques that allowed us to easily reach out and grab these possibilities? What if tools were available that could haul this submerged inspiration out onto our all-too-dry land, ripe and ready to refresh our vision?

This kind of hope is the fuel for most of the prolific literature on “using” dreams, some of which is hugely important and powerful. In particular, lucid dreaming (a state in which you become aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming) can exponentially increase the access you have to the dream state’s treasures.

However, just as individual dreams are never of simple significance, and only yield their true nature through multiple perspectives, our general interaction with dreams is hampered if we maintain a singular overall attitude towards them. Here I wish to dwell on an approach to dreams that—for obvious if not always good reasons—is rarely voiced. It has more to do with attending to dreams than using dreams. It is tricky (certainly not to be captured in a short essay like this), and vexes the results-hungry ego.

It is most forcefully expressed in The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman, a brilliant and provocative psychologist whose work has endeavoured to revive the classical Greek sense of “soul” (psyche). Not the personal atom of spiritual being that our Christian heritage has left us with, but a liminal, polytheistic, metaphor-loving aspect of our being, which we dwell within as much as it dwells within us, and which resists all attempts to pin it down for service to pragmatism. Hillman calls soul “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.” (Re-Visioning Psychology)

This perspective, Hillman argues, is expressed most accurately in dreams. Freud famously claimed that dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious”. Hillman shares Freud’s high estimation of dreams, but differs subtly and crucially in his approach to them. Freud may have talked of a road to the unconscious, but his avowed project was for traffic to move the other way—and to be disarmed of its irrational power en route by the process of interpretation. Freud wanted to move the contents of the unconscious into the realms of the rational ego, on the ego’s own terms. His landmark work The Interpretation of Dreams contains much respect for the dream, and is essential reading; but in the end his allegiance was to the rational project. “Where id was, there shall ego be.” Where exactly this process might stop isn’t made clear. However, a quick contemplation of handing over the control of bodily functions such as the heartbeat and cell repair to the ego should give you a good biological example of the limits of consciousness, which can trigger a sense of how vital unconscious processes might be for the psyche, too.

Hillman sees dreams less as a road to the unconscious than as the unconscious itself, “the psyche speaking to itself in its own language”. He resists the urge to interpret, to translate the psyche’s language into the ego’s language, with a characteristic lack of compromise:

[T]his dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—[...] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.

How to do this? Hillman’s key framework is psychotherapy. Although he is often harshly critical of the practice (one of his books is called We’ve Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse), it is his long-standing, embittered but loyal ally. He envisions it as an alchemical process, the classic 50-minute session acting as an enclosing container for the psyche, an alembic stretching through the weeks to hold and slowly refine the soul’s processes. Importantly, the finitude, that often annoying awareness that the clock’s ticking away, constellates death.

Hillman takes the dreamworld as the underworld—Hades. Not the literal underground into which the bodies of the dead slowly dissolve, the dark and earthy realm of fertile, composted death that the earth goddesses rule over; rather, Hades is the spectral realm of metaphorical death. Death as psychological depth. Not death as a literal biological event, but the death of the ego’s rational solid grasp of “hard facts”—the death of simple, singular vision.

It is not bodies that dissolve here, but mental constructs. Hillman takes interpretation as a colonial act of the dayworld ego, but analysis (from the Greek for “breaking up” or “loosening up”) he sees—despite our association of it with the rational intellect—as the natural movement of the psyche in Hades. In therapy, the constituent elements of the psyche, which are expediently joined together for effective action in the world of the reality principle, are separated out, revealing the multivalent (Hillman would say polytheistic) nature of the psyche. Dreams directly show us the manifold substructures that govern us; therapy, in teasing them apart, hopes to give each aspect of the psyche enough definition and confidence to make healthier pacts and accords with other aspects than were previously possible in the cramped and often hastily arranged space of the “personality”. The falsely unified persona of everyday life dies to the truth of the masque of death, the parade of numinous shadow figures that constitute the psyche’s depths.

Obviously here isn’t the place for outlining the actual techniques and craft of therapy. But how might this approach be applied in our lives, to serve our creativity, to enrich and inspire us? I’m returning to this question—”What to do?”—partly because the form of this type of essay gravitates in this direction, but also deliberately, to foreground this movement. And then, to undermine it. Specific practices are copiously documented in any number of dreamwork books or websites. But here, I’m trying to follow Hillman by initiating our approach to the dream with an attitude that, firstly, pays homage to the dream. Rather than be lead by the dayworld urge to get something practical, literal and utilitarian underway, perhaps we can try starting with the dreamworld, and cultivate a love for it that refuses expectations.

The most crucial element in approaching dreams is attention. We must attend to dreams closely; sustained attention brings sustenance. Keeping a dream journal is an essential discipline, but perhaps not a discipline to be “pushed”, like jogging. The muscular effort of exercise, as an attitude, is a great way to repel the images of the dreamworld; they appreciate less strained and direct effort. Indeed, an attitude of service rather than discipline is more appropriate. “Therapy” is derived from the Greek for “to wait on, attend”; the priests or attendants at the ancient Greek dream incubation temples, where the healing god Asklepius worked his wonders, were called therapeutes. This Greek root in turn stems from the root dher, which means “to support”. Psychotherapy, then, is to wait on, or attend to the soul. Both the therapist and the patient (who must be patient) are, in their dialogue, actually waiting for the impersonal soul to reveal itself through their interaction.

Paying attention to dreams can be fuelled by doing certain things, doing dreamwork. But the real trick is to slowly, with patience and persistence, cultivate a caring love for dreams, alert to their textures, movements and details for their own sake. I don’t see this as some kind of flat phenomenology, which cautiously sticks purely to the surface impressions given by dreams. The very nature of the impressions created by dreams, if examined closely enough, elicits a dynamic process of associative thought. As discussed previously, avoiding interpretation does not preclude analysis; dreams welcome a caring dissolution of any apparent coherence into multiple perspectives and trajectories. Indeed, as “a dream”, phenomenologically speaking, may just be our waking mind’s memory of a dream, perhaps this process of carefully mulling over the dream, not wrenching its secrets out on the rack of rationality but letting its structure unfold its ever-deeper recesses, is the basis for returning to “the dream itself”—whatever that may be.

We must bear in mind that when patients at Asklepian temples were cured, the visit that the god paid to them during their slumber wasn’t made in order to give them something to do, something in the waking world to obtain or pursue in order to be cured. The dream itself was the cure. What we do with the dream in waking life (if anything) should be a careful extension of the principles of the dream itself; any slip into the habits of translation or principally pragmatic exploitation could banish the mysterious power of our brush with this imaginal underworld. In attending to dreams, we need to cultivate the waking life traditions that share close affinity with dream logic—art, ritual, some psychotherapies. Only in these activities can we find containment that is sensitive and strong enough to accept the powers that dreams bestow.

Over many years, a prolonged devotion to these peculiar dips into the psyche’s native land does indeed transform your life, creating subtle and inexpressible currents of mental, emotional and spiritual nourishment. A certain stability—still mutable, but more coherent within the context of the dream—may arise in particular dream landscapes or characters that populate that world; the dream grows more assured and trusting in your presence. Patterns can span months, years or decades, and mature into a form of personal mythology; the dream is pleased with your patience, and rewards you with a more sophisticated knowledge of your depths. Terrifying encounters can open to reveal an indestructible concern for our well-being, and images or situations that seem intensely personal can give way to a much wider sense of the world beyond us.

We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.

— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld

Photo by Caroline Forbes

An Interview with Patrick Harpur

by Gyrus

Gyrus: The threefold division of ‘body, soul & spirit’, as opposed to the dualistic mind/body model so common in our culture, seems central to your work. Could you sketch it briefly, and discuss how you feel “soul” has come to be distorted, misunderstood, or lost?

Patrick: You’ve started with the hardest possible question! I’ve just jotted down 14 ways in which the word ‘soul’ can be used, and there are many more. It’s impossible to define. But this flaw is also its strength. Like ‘God’, it’s a portmanteau word, ‘empty’ in itself, yet taking on meaning in different contexts and in relation to other things.

Soul in relation to body likes to personify itself as Jung’s anima, for instance, or as the personal daimon whom Plato describes in his myth of the geezer called Er who returns from the dead at the end of The Republic. It’s different from soul in relation to spirit, which is where I prefer to use the word as the Neoplatonists used it. For them, soul was a whole realm intermediate between the spiritual or intelligible world (nous) and our own familiar sensory, material world. It was Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, wherein dwell the daimons who link us, as Socrates remarked, to the gods.

However, this all-pervading collective realm was paradoxical: it could also manifest individually, as individual souls—in other words, as us. Since the chief faculty of soul is not reason but imagination, it likes to imagine itself in many different ways, cutting its cloth to suit the times. Thus it re-imagines itself now as Imagination itself—a powerful autonomous realm beloved of the Romantics whence all the myths come—now as Jung’s collective unconscious. It supplies the root metaphor for such modern re-inventions as the earth-spirit Gaia and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field.

But, in another sense, soul and spirit can be thought of as symbols of the two main perspectives through which we view the world—the two perspectives which create the world we see. We experience them as a tension within ourselves between the spiritual longing for Oneness, unity, purity, light, transcendence etc. and the imaginative need to recognise Manyness, multiplicity, labyrinthine entanglement, darkness, immanence etc. It’s because, historically—ever since the Enlightenment—Western culture has emphasised the preeminence of ‘masculine’ upward-striving Apollonian reason and science that I have tried to emphasise the neglected ‘soul’ perspective which is dark, moon-struck, downward-spiralling and Hermetic or Dionysian—the Affirmative way of the artist, as the medieval mystics might have put it, instead of their own Negative way, which disdains and seeks to overcome the images and myths which soul, willy-nilly, besieges us with and which we find so hard to free ourselves from in spiritual disciplines. The great ascents of the spirit into rareified mountain realms where the One dwells in blinding light can be read as a disastrous neglect, even repression, of the Nekiya—the underworld journey of the soul whose course is tortuous and mazy, moving towards darkness and death. That’s why, as far as any sort of gnosis goes, I prefer the soul’s way, death and resurrection, the painful initiatory dismembering of the shaman, to the rather unsexed and anodyne rebirth system of ‘spiritual’ paths.

I prefer, as Jung says, wholeness to perfection. That’s the short and incoherent answer to your question.

Gyrus: I was quite surprised when I learned that James Hillman had travelled quite widely, in Asia and Africa—his work is so consciously rooted in, and confined to, the Western tradition. You’re steeped in the same tradition, from Greek antiquity, through the Neoplatonists, to the Romantics and depth psychology; but you also freely draw inferences from anthropology, from animist traditional cultures. Have your own experiences while travelling led to this influence?

Patrick: Actually I’ve barely travelled at all—my daimon has always kept me tied to my desk, insisting that I travel metaphorically through the realm of imagination rather than literally… So, no—my influences are all from books. But I did hitch-hike round Africa with a mate in my gap year, when I was seventeen—when everyone else was travelling to India—and it did leave a deep impression on me. I constantly wondered what was going on in the minds of the Biafran refugees, or the Cameroonian villagers or the Masai or the Bushmen or the Ethiopians and so on.

I’m still trying to find the perfect work of anthropology, as it were—the book which gets inside the mind of wholly different culture from my own; which imaginatively empathises with its tribe rather than applying ‘scientific’ principles. I mean, how can you trust an anthropologist who can’t study witchcraft properly because he doesn’t believe in its possibility? I want anthropology to be like the works of Carlos Casteneda or that essay of Benjamin Whorf’s on the language of the Navajo or Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.

Gyrus: How does the perception of deep problems in the “comparative” approach to religion and myth, exemplified by J.G. Frazer and Mircea Eliade, impact your thinking? What remaining value do you see in wide cross-cultural surveys of things like folklore and shamanism, the alleged dangers and past mistakes of this approach notwithstanding?

Patrick: That’s very pertinent and difficult to answer. I laugh at the idea of this approach being ‘dangerous’—it’s often what academics often call ideas which contradict their own. Who’s in danger? What’s more dangerous is the modern presupposition that all cultures are isolated and opaque to each other, and so studies are confined to details and minutiae, without any attempt to draw wider inferences about how different cultures can be compared, and whether or not they share a common humanity.

But if you believe that humanity is informed by a common imagination whose autonomous products, the myths, are, as Ted Hughes says, ‘as alike as the lines on the palm of the hand’, you see that no myth is truly alien to us, no matter how outlandish it appears at first sight. And if no myth is alien, no culture is. And if the contents of the myths seem strange, then Lévi-Strauss’s structural approach has been very useful in showing how the mythopoeic imagination obeys certain archetypal rules—rules of symmetry and inversion, for example—which illuminate myths by showing how one story, which looks wholly different from its neighbour, is in fact a transformed version of that neighbouring tale. This is how I hit upon the notion that the tall tales of modern science concerning black holes and dark matter and the abyss of space etc. are in fact only literalised versions of those Gnostic myths which were suppressed by orthodox Christianity 1500-odd years ago.

So, while I sometimes despair of ever understanding a single thing about another culture, I also rejoice in how much of that culture is in fact available to me through our common imaginative substrate. Incidentally, it was my elaboration of what I call ‘daimonic reality’—a version of Jung’s ‘psychic reality’—which proved the most useful tool in understanding that relationship with the world which ‘tribal’ peoples seem universally to have, and which we Westerners used to have: a reality which lies between the literal and metaphorical, which has one foot in the Otherworld, which obeys Blake’s ‘double vision’ (something shared by all artists), which is participatory rather than objective, and so on. I’d call myself an animist if that weren’t already a rather insulting term for one who has a clear vision of how everything that is, is ensouled and participates in that great World-Soul whose images constitute the flagstones of reality which underlie this poor phenomenal world of ours. And this is how ‘tribal’ people see the world: they’re natural Neoplatonists.

And of course Eliade et al. may be wrong in certain details; but the impulse is, surely, invigorating and engaging in a way that most mythography and anthropology isn’t—we suffer loss of meaning, even a loss of soul as benighted primitives say, when we lack an overarching world-view, a sense of a bigger picture from which no culture is excluded, don’t we? (Frazer was, by the way, very different from Eliade—he literalised one ‘solar hero’ myth and sought to explain most other myths by recourse to it. In this he was more like a Darwinist than a comparative mythographer).

While I appreciate the agonising of post-colonial, post-imperial, post-modern critics, I just can’t interest myself in it. It’s a fault, I know. But my deepest impulses are religious, I think. I’m a Christian, for instance; but I don’t like other Christians much. That’s why I was so happy to find my own people among the Christian Neoplatonists (who are also pagan!) such as the alchemists, the Renaissance magi, the Romantic poets. A religion or religious perspective, at once Christian and pagan, such as they held, seems just what’s needed in our times of Christian and Scientistic fundamentalism. I’d like to propagandise it more; but unfortunately it can’t of its nature be subjected to the tools of propaganda because it’s subtle, humorous, tricky etc, and has to be just seen, like a joke or a dream, to be grasped. It’s the opposite of fundamentalism because it sees the root metaphors or myths behind every belief, including itself!

Gyrus: Is there not a hint, at least, of the unifying ‘spiritual’ urge in looking for a “common humanity”—with current academia, perhaps ironically, serving ‘soul’ in its desire to retain distinctions, to emphasize particular characteristics of specific cultures, to champion multiplicity?

Patrick: Yes. And yes.

Gyrus: In your work you make very lucid, revealing comparisons between tribal initiatory structures and spontaneous modern experiences such as UFO abductions. Could you discuss these associations and what fascinates you about them?

Patrick: Yeah, the Attack of the Little Grey Men. Wasn’t that interesting folklore? With all the requisite memorates and fabulates, as those annoying folklorists with their quasi-scientific jargon call them…

Like anyone fascinated by UFOlore, I racked my brains to come up with some sort of reason why 80% of all Americans (it seemed at the time) were being snatched into circular uniformly-lit ‘spaceships’ and subjected to bestial probings by those truly frightening little greys with their now-iconic all-black eyes (the cover of Whitley Streiber’s book [Communion] still gives me the willies).

One of the theories I liked was that they were the demonic spirits of the millions of aborted foetuses getting their revenge! But it just seemed to me that what these abductions most resembled was the painful initiation of shamans by daimons, and, indeed, the imitative initiation of pubescent boys who are abducted at dead of night by masked elders posing as daimons, and subjected to scarring and circumcision etc. before being given secret knowledge. I was also struck by a remark of Jung’s—that the unconscious shows to us the face that we show to it. And I wondered if the ‘greys’ were probing us in a heartless empirical way in some parody of the way we investigate Nature.

Anyway, there is no ‘explanation’ for the widespread abduction epidemic—it is not a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to be entered—but I gave it my best shot vis-a-vis finding anthropological and Jungian parallels. While I liked the late John Mack, the Harvard Professor who researched abductions, I didn’t like the way his latest book seemed to ‘work’ with abductees, hypnotising them etc., until the ‘greys’ became sort of relatively benign harbingers of, yes, you guessed it, the imminent ecological crisis—thus effectively repressing the idea that unless we find news ways of initiating ourselves into the Otherworld, we run the risk of being forcibly initiated, against our will, by daimons who have become apparently demonic by virture of our neglect of them.

Gyrus: What is your fantasy for more conscious initiatory rituals in our society—or do you think society is now too unwieldy to manage like this, and true initiations will now continue to be emergent phenomena?

Patrick: I wouldn’t be surprised if the need for initiation has become urgent. It seems to be, after all, a universal requisite—there’s no society which doesn’t or which didn’t at one time attach the highest importance to initiation. So, now that we’ve abandoned formal rites, we must expect to pay the price: a catastrophic severance of relations with the Otherworld, for example, and a lack of certainty about identity and adulthood among youth.

Luckily youth has its own means of self-initiation—drugs, piercings, raves, Mediterranean ‘holidays’ etc.—but these can all of course be merely destructive if they are not performed in a sacred context, the ritual pain succeeded by revelations of the tribal secrets and myths. I think children probably long for initiation if reality TV is any guide: whenever they’re subjected to real hardship in a meaningful context—Brat Camp etc.!—they respond gratefully.

I can’t think what religion is doing, adopting secular liberal caring values where everything must be comfortable and all suffering is medicalised. The whole point of religion is not to provide a cure for suffering but, as Simone Weil says, a supernatural use for it. Only suffering can provide the deep energy required for self-transformation. (Luckily, once again, there’s often enough suffering to go round in the course of everyday life—illness, bereavment, unhappiness in love, whatever—but it’s usually treated when it could instead be pressed into the service of initiation.)

But I’m beginning to rant now. It’s just that i’m furious at the deprivation of meaning, enchantment and transformation that young people suffer at the hands of our culture.

Gyrus: What were your most significant initiations into your relationship to daimonic reality?

Patrick: Well, you know, I was brought up believing in Spiritualism because my grandmother was a first-class medium and my mother a believer, who, wherever she lived, always managed to dig up a local medium / healer to talk to the dead or cure us kids of our childish malaises.

Meanwhile I was very aware of my Dad’s psychic powers, which he played down, even denied, having made of himself a hard-headed business man. But he saw the fairies twice as a young man in his native Ireland—all the more surprising because he was Anglo-Irish, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, who was not supposed to see or believe in the Sidhe.

So I grew up with the supernatural and, instead of forgetting or rubbishing it all once I was exposed to education, I always tried to fit it in—ultimately this meant writing my own book. I was lucky at Cambridge to be supervised by the great Shakespeare and Yeats scholar, Tom Henn, who was another Anglo-Irishman. He, too, believed in the supernatural—he experienced Panic while fishing a stream in Galway, and heard the banshee keening on a train to Birmingham (his brother died at that moment)—and he showed me rare books from the Order of the Golden Dawn, and generally encouraged me to use my beliefs, as Yeats had, to make sense of the world.

However, my real initiation didn’t come until I immersed myself in alchemy for my book, Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. I thought I could crack alchemy in three months, but, three years later, I lifted my half-crazed, tear-stained face up off the nth Latin manuscript in the British Library and realised I’d never ‘crack’ it. For every book about alchemy perforce becomes a book of alchemy, and I had felt the hand of Mercurius move my hand and what I wrote didn’t come from me—I felt the centre of my volition shift and I was no longer myself. This, I suppose, is the central prerequisite of initiation: the awful uprooting as the Muse, or personal daimon, or self, ruthlessly seizes you and usurps the ego. From then on, I had a new topsy-turvy and Hermetic perspective on things, out of which I wrote Daimonic Reality and The Philosophers’ Secret Fire.

Gyrus: To apply Jung to his own lineage, what do you see as the Shadow side of the tradition of alchemy and Neoplatonism that you subscribe to? How do you relate to it?

Patrick: Your question is a difficult one. It may be an incoherent one. I don’t know that I can answer it.

I want to say that alchemy and Hermetico-neoplatonism (if such a thing exists) is itself the turbulent mercurial underground stream which shadows the orderly canals of religion and reason, welling up in times of transition and crisis to form the flood of culture we have called the Renaissance or Romanticism. That’s to say, in itself, the ‘perennial philosophy’ I favour includes its own shadow, like the Nigredo of the alchemists. That’s part of its great attraction: it is concerned with wholeness and with realising the totality of the psyche; it holds the great dividing forces within psychic life—forces I’ve called ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ (tho’, pace Nietszche, Apollonian and Dionysian would do)—holds them in tension so that nothing is repressed and no shadow forms.

I think Jung said that Christ redeemed mankind but left out Nature, which groaneth and travaileth. Nature is therefore Christianity’s shadow. It was part of the alchemists’ (unconscious) purpose to complete the work of redemption by raising up Nature. But in a sense this is no more than poetry does—there’s something redemptive about all great poetry, isn’t there? Poetry, like alchemy, doesn’t merely copy Nature (as Plato feared), but (as Plotinus says) completes the work of the Creator by returning to the original archai or archetypes which the Demiurge looked into in order to make the world.

The whole point of a daimonic philosophy (to put it another way) is that it doesn’t subscribe to the brilliant Apollonic lighting effects of monotheism and, later, rationalism which are themselves intrinsically shadow-forming—soul is always neglected and forced into the darkness underground. Rather it operates in lunatic twilight, between the light and the dark, where it is half light and half shadow, and so the problem of ‘the shadow’ is not so much resolved as dissolved altogether…

Sorry, gone off the point a bit. Or have I?

Gyrus: I get the idea of this hidden tradition “containing its own shadow”. But surely there’s a shadow that’s missed by everything that can be called a “tradition”. With alchemy and Neoplatonism, I wonder if social concerns, engagement with communal politics and so on, the whole quotidian world of people and their mundane necessities—isn’t this neglected by most exponents of the tradition? Maybe Blake manages to transcend even that… But the modern occult / hermetic “scene” can be woefully insular. And I look at the arc of James Hillman’s work, and it seems his merging of the concepts of Anima Mundi with things like urban architecture and environmental concerns came quite late in his career, like the “real world” out there was the last bastion. Of course he had his Neoplatonic take on it—that we repress beauty, and our environment suffers from this…

Patrick: Yes, I take your point about there always having to be a shadow of some sort—in the case of the Neoplatonic tradition, the quotidian world etc. I don’t know, but I always thought that that was something those guys took in their stride. When you read Porphyry’s life of Plotinus, you don’t get the sense that he was in any way sealed off from the world or sitting, Hindu-like and silent, in a sacred grove, or living in an academic ivory tower etc. Rather the reverse—like most mytics worth their salt, he seems to have been embedded in life and as pragmatic as St Teresa, who achieved union with the Godhead only to burst out of the convent and found many more, her letters full of practicality and worldly advice.

I dare say periods of retreat were necessary for the Hermetic lads, during stages of their advancement—as it is for us all. But I think they attended to God’s immanence in the world, and hence to the world, just as much as to His transcendent aspect. They had both perspectives, and held that contradiction in tension by means of Blakean ‘double vision’.

On the other hand, I’m only guessing. But I’m probably, as so often, right.

As decades rather than years began to roll by, I sometimes thought that my lack of real comprehension of our financial systems—mortgages, inflation, interest and other such oddities—might be amiss. Surely I should have a good grasp of the basics of the society I lived in? Of course the basic mechanisms seemed clear enough when spelled out. But the “a-ha!” part of me just never got it. I could see how they worked, in a flat, literal sense; but some essential part of my understanding just glazed over and reached for a nice cosy book on occult philosophy.

When I read a quote by someone (Hazel Henderson, it turns out) saying, “Economics is a form of brain damage,” I realized I wasn’t just being intellectually lazy. (Physical laziness is much more my cup of tea.) I had always felt that to bring myself to truly grok our financial system, I would have to lead my neurons down pathways that would be inimical to their health. Naturally I knew that many fine minds had comprehended it all enough to critique it, and survived without descending into dribbling and hallucinating odd smells. But I realized more and more that I didn’t feel the risk was for me.

This morning, drifting in and out of sleep, I was fixated on the idea that the insanity of economics was being demonstrated with greater clarity than ever before by Gordon Brown. Forget the fact that Brown’s financial “steady hand” is a mere artifact of his dour appearance and recent economic events beyond his control (in 2004 he said: “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”). Ignore the bland salad of jargon that’s used to make it sound like he knows what he’s doing. He’s clearly one of the more retarded specimens. A global crisis caused by excessive borrowing and irresponsible financial institutions? No problem. Let’s borrow even more, and give this money to the institutions!

I know, a Nobel Prize winner weighed in and said that Brown had “defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.” From where I’m sat, it looks like everyone suddenly got freaked by an apparent confirmation of that sneaking suspicion that our entire system isn’t built to last. And their denial was mightily relieved to see someone else—Brown, whose battle with denial was lost long ago—lead the way out of the unappealing corner we’ve painted ourselves into. Not as many people as you’d hope have seen that Brown’s solution is to just slap paint on our eyes.

Well, doing a quick web search for “economics brain damage” to track my favourite quote down, it was a sobering surprise to find a recent item on a “neuroeconomics” study in the Wall Street Journal titled ‘Lessons From The Brain-Damaged Investor’:

The 15 brain-damaged participants that were the focus of the study had normal IQs, and the areas of their brains responsible for logic and cognitive reasoning were intact. But they had lesions in the region of the brain that controls emotions, which inhibited their ability to experience basic feelings such as fear or anxiety. The lesions were due to a range of causes, including stroke and disease, but they impaired the participants’ emotional functioning in a similar manner.

The study suggests the participants’ lack of emotional responsiveness actually gave them an advantage when they played a simple investment game. The emotionally impaired players were more willing to take gambles that had high payoffs because they lacked fear. Players with undamaged brain wiring, however, were more cautious and reactive during the game, and wound up with less money at the end.

Some neuroscientists believe good investors may be exceptionally skilled at suppressing emotional reactions. “It’s possible that people who are high-risk takers or good investors may have what you call a functional psychopathy,” says Antoine Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, and a co-author of the study. “They don’t react emotionally to things. Good investors can learn to control their emotions in certain ways to become like those people.”

Now, as an avid J.G. Ballard fan, I’m not instantly repelled by the idea of “creative pathology”. And the article balances out in the end with a note that the brain-damaged participants in the study often performed less well in the real world (highlighting the “pathology” inherent in the blinkered nature of many controlled scientific experiments). The authors also remark on the fact that our evolved emotional reactions, especially regarding fear, may be maladapted to the modern world, which has arisen much faster than biology can remould itself.

Still, anyone who doesn’t accept the modern world without question can’t help but wonder whether neuroeconomics may end up undermining the worldview it’s designed to serve. To what extent does the potential “advantage” of brain damage in economic activity point to the inadequacy of our neuropsychology? To what extent does it highlight the inhumanity of economics?

One needn’t be fixated on a static idea of humanity to object to economics; to what extent does economics block us from healthier, more desirable ways of being in the world that have yet to be realized?

In any case, we need more than lip service to the fact that crisis is opportunity—not just a dire situation in need of patching up.

Further reading

• ‘Money and the Crisis of Civilization’ by Charles Eisenstein
• ‘No Money Down’ by Douglas Rushkoff
• ‘Bring on the Recession’ by George Monbiot
• Hormones ‘may fuel market crises’ (BBC News)

You can call this healing, you can call it transformation—there are all sorts of names. But let’s stay with the word “love” because it is so amazing to realize that love is working toward clarification, becoming clarified like a broth, like a butter, because what happens is transparency. And when we try to “clear things up,” go over the past to see it better, or put ourselves through confessions—all that is part of love becoming clarified. We are working at transparency. Impossible dark spots of the interior person get lit up, the shadow, the ugliest man, all the shames and embarrassments regarding the concealed personal tied-up self—well, there they are. “Good morning! How are you! Nice to see you!” They’re aren’t gone away or healed or integrated. [...] There they are, but they have become transparent, for a moment at least, like rubies and emeralds. The leopard can’t change his spots, but the spots can be gems. I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that’s what remains—if anything has to remain—after a person’s dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It’s amazing how the very thing you couldn’t bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband—they die, and then the rubies show right in the shadow…

I’m very excited, and damnably lucky, to have been granted a press pass for this year’s World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland (21st to 24th March). I’ll be interviewing a number of the luminaries and “rising researchers” there, and using these interviews as the basis for an in-depth feature for Dreamflesh Journal (as well as posting the full interviews here).

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time Stanislav Grof, Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner. Hopefully I’ll get round to interviewing Jeremy Narby, after nearly doing so a couple of times. And if Christian Rätsch rustles up anything approaching his impression of himself turning into a panther on his first acid trip that he did at Bath in 2004, I’ll be more than content.

Of course, as with all conferences, the real gems will be found hidden away in unexpected encounters between scheduled events, buried deep in late-night conviviality, and crystallized out of nowhere by the cumulative force of the ideas surrounding you.

I know of the people behind the event, the Gaia Media Foundation, from back in the ’90s—they used to stock Towards 2012. It’s great that they’re still going, stronger than ever, and putting together such catalytic gatherings.

by Gyrus

Most of the writings in this book were written during a very strange, obsessive and fruitful time in my life. I was, as ever, experimenting with various ways of altering consciousness and interacting with the environment in magical ways. My own trip, the various complexes that I’d become aware of in my psyche, seemed to resonate uncannily with certain aspects of the prehistoric landscapes I was exploring—for the most part, Ilkley Moor and the Avebury monuments. As I dug deeper into their histories and associations, it sometimes felt like I was unearthing buried contents of my own mind.

There’s no certain outcome from getting into stuff like this. You can go off the rails a bit; you can publish some very dubious theories that say more about you than prehistory. My own approach was to keep my critical mind alert, but to embrace the fact that there’s a grey area between digging into your own unconscious and unearthing the realities of prehistoric life. How could it be otherwise, if we shake off the modern illusion of individual isolation, and accept that all our roots tangle together in the deep past?

There’s a long tradition of overlap between psychology and the study of the past. Carl Jung wanted to study archaeology, but his family couldn’t afford to send him to a university that taught the subject. So, he ended up doing medicine, which led him to psychiatry. The metaphor of archaeology remained with him, though. The crucial dream of 1909 that led to his theory of the collective unconscious involved him descending into the lowest level of the basement underneath a house, passing through a Roman level before encountering scattered bones. “This must be a prehistoric cave!” he exclaimed before waking up.

Oddly enough, my own plunge into the past was largely triggered by something above, in the sky. I had a nasty experience with chemicals at Glastonbury Festival—as you do—where I saw a vortex in the sky that threatened to drag me into it, to my death. The image of the vortex haunted me for years.

Looking back, with a playful eye for the movements of fate, I wonder… What led me after that experience to move to Leeds, a short bus ride from Ilkley Moor? And what led me to Ilkley Moor, where I was gobsmacked to find oodles of prehistoric rock art, the type of exotic and mysterious creations that part of me assumed were confined to caves in the Australian desert?

I had already written most of my essay The Devil & The Goddess, which takes ancient snake goddesses as a central theme, when I discovered by chance that a Romano-Celtic snake goddess—Verbeia—was worshipped as an embodiment of the River Wharfe, which runs past the moors and through Ilkley. I delved deep into etymology, and found that both “Verbeia” and “Wharfe” had potential roots in words referring to turning, swirling, and vortices. I quickly made connections with the turning, swirling Swastika Stone carving on the moor, and the vortex-like concentric circles of the common cup-and-ring marks carved onto many of the moor’s stones. Endless details, myriad connections, all gave me the vertiginous sense that I had psychically meshed with the local landscape and its history. My own association of the vortex with death and altered states permeated my reading of the rock carvings. I railed against the narrow-mindedness of academia (without having actually read much academic research, of course), and proffered my own visionary interpretations in the small press.

Before long, I was reading Richard Bradley’s book on the predominantly cup-and-ring rock art of Atlantic Europe. This was around 1997. Almost a decade before, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson had caused a storm in archaeological circles with their paper, ‘The Signs of All Times’, which proposed that much Palaeolithic art was inspired by shamanic trance states. Drawing on their ideas about geometric shapes—grids, spirals, dots, and so on—representing the hallucinations from the early stages of trance, archaeologists like Bradley started to speculate about the Neolithic and Bronze Age cup-and-rings. Could they represent these early parts of the shamanic altered state? Lab tests had shown that vortex-like imagery was common as people were drawn into the deeper levels of trance. And entry into the Otherworld was frequently associated with death by shamanic cultures. Could the occurrence of spirals and cup-and-rings at the entrances to Irish passage graves be explained by this connection?

Well, of course it could. I’m all for keeping an open mind about prehistory, this vast period that we’ll never be certain about. But the logic and coherence of the “shamanic trance” theory of rock art, while it obviously can’t be applied anywhere and everywhere, means to me that it has to be placed in the foreground of our collection of possible models for the origins of this art.

Now, I’m really interested in how I managed to come to this conclusion independently, after a few years of messing around with strange drugs and staggering about West Yorkshire’s moors, when earnest academics had taken most of their careers of diligent study to get there. Does this mean that we can throw all our books away and get to the truth of the past by wrenching the lids off our minds? Sadly not. However, I’m not entirely convinced that it was blind luck that led me to this theory that academia has now validated. There really is something to be said for getting down to the basic structures of the psyche through experimentation, and using the data gathered from this first-hand experience to speculate about that period when these basic structures were being laid down—and, for the first time, expressed in material artifacts. It’ll never be an exact science, but it can function as an extremely valuable adjunct to scientific exploration. Some common-sense participation in the ways of magic, animism and altered states could, I believe, help ground abstract theories in the realities of the human body and the many qualities of the human mind that persist through changing historical circumstances. Anthropologists often go a bit native and live their subject’s life a little; why not archaeologists too?

If personal experience can contribute to the study of the past, what can the past contribute to our experience now? For me, history was always my worst subject at school. I’m still pretty patchy on all that stuff that happened between the Romans and the 20th century. My route into the past was Terence McKenna’s theories about the role of psychedelic mushrooms in the origins of human consciousness. Suddenly, someone was drawing compelling links between the direct experiences in my life that fascinated and inspired me, and the grander, often bewildering sweep of human history.

Recently, Andy Letcher’s book Shroom has taken this type of theory to task, heavily criticizing modern psychedelic culture for projecting its own agendas back onto the past. And many pagans, lead by Ronald Hutton, who was a big inspiration for Letcher, have for a while been taking apart the historical fantasies of Wiccans and others who believe themselves to be continuing a genuine lineage of magical practice. Why should we need validation for our current activities so much that we’re prepared to delude ourselves about history?

I do value the hard information and refreshing cynicism of Letcher and Hutton’s work—it’s priceless among subcultures that often succumb to insular illusions. But I think their views can be seen as the flip-side to the fantasies of historical validation that they try to demolish. To polarize things a bit: one side is so blindly in need of validation, that they are prepared to be certain about things that are up in the air; but the other side seems to carry itself with a kind of modern intellectual machismo that believes this need for validation from the past can be disposed of entirely. Science is the watchword, and despite the archaeological cliché that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, if hard proof isn’t forthcoming, we have to turn away. This seems to be as modern as Wiccan revivalism, and at least as damaging as they believe any uncritical reconstruction of past beliefs is.

We can’t just believe what we want about the past. But I feel we can’t just leave it be, or accept the “hard evidence” of orthodox archaeology as all that remains. The past is alive, and constantly expresses itself through the present, into the future. This isn’t determinism, it’s just the way things are. You can take a more complex angle if you want, and say that it’s our relationship to the past that is alive. The imagination is one of the most potent forces in human life, and it loves the past. Especially ancient times. It seems wise to engage consciously with this love, to nurture it and guard against its excesses, rather than decry it and hope it goes away.

Dreams, as Jung found, are particularly enthused about the past. Nothing is simple and straightforward in dreams; their metaphoric nature and tricksterish layering of meaning always defy any rational attempt to codify and delineate them. But they respond eagerly when you feed your head with images and stories of ancient things. The outward forms of prehistory, when they permeate your waking life, can seep into your dream world and help give shape to long-neglected patterns in your personal history.

Anyone’s deeper complexes can be as uncertain and hard to pin down as the forever lost—but deeply resonant—rituals of prehistoric tribes. Just as we can’t pin down such archaic events with archaeological certainty, the precise identification of our own ancient moments of significance may forever elude us.

But likewise, just as the lingering, intangible traces of these moments can profoundly shape our lives from behind the scenes, we will never be able to fully wipe away our subtle bonds to the deep past of the species. In both personal and collective psychohistory, our unceasing curiosity should be tempered by a light touch that respects the reality and the importance of the past’s essential unknowability. The lack of hope for solid conclusions needn’t be a cause of despair; it can animate our investigations with a playful delight, and a respect for irreducible mystery.