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‘.

Look no further. Bid for a custom-made Pat Robertson voodoo doll:

(Thanks to Gypsy Lantern for this. Check out his post on Haiti for the background to Robertson’s lurid nonsense, as well as thoughtful reflections on the role of Haiti’s religious traditions in the reporting of the earthquake, and a round-up of other good places to send donations.)

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.

Consciousness Change: A Challenge for the 21st Century

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 21st-24th March 2008
• Venue: Congress Centre, Basel, Switzerland

The LSD symposium two years ago, commemorating Albert Hofmann‘s 100th birthday, was, it seems, successful enough to generate some healthy momentum. Catching a relatively quiet, but extremely significant wave of resurgence in scientific psychedelic research, this forum capitalized well on the attention garnered by the father of LSD’s centenary, bringing people from around the world to discuss psychedelics of all descriptions in the location of the notorious first ever acid trip.

Over 1500 people filled the Congress Centre in the peacefully stimulating city of Basel over Easter weekend. With official endorsements from Swiss International Air Lines and Basel Kantonalbank, this sort of event is a slight culture shock for the British or Americans. We may not have embraced psychedelics in the way the enthusiasts of the early ’60s might have envisioned, but their hopes are alive and well.

At the forefront of said wave of research are MAPS and The Beckley Foundation. I caught MAPS‘ Rick Doblin on the first afternoon, introducing Swiss psychotherapists who have been conducting trials investigating the therapeutic potentials of MDMA and LSD.

MDMA is now being studied in several places for its beneficial role in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Its famed ability to enable contemplation of deeply negative memories without their imprinted, paralyzing associations, makes it a good candidate for success in this field. Peter Oehen (of the Swiss Association for Psycholytic Therapy) made some interesting observations on his experience with MDMA therapy, such as the arc of experience he has repeatedly seen in sessions: first, relaxation; then, the appearance of physical symptoms; then, as these somatic knots are worked with and through, the welling up of conceptual and emotional insights. Evidently MDMA resonates strongly with the work of people like Wilhelm Reich, in which trauma is seen to be bound up in the body.

Juraj Styk then introduced some general principles from psychedelic therapy, plainly building on the solid foundations of Stanislav Grof‘s work. (Grof was a ubiquitous presence at the forum, but I know his work so well I missed his presentations in favour of less familiar grounds. Anyone not aware of his work, however, is strongly urged to get to know his pioneering research.)

Also, at one of the “Rising Researchers” panels, I caught Sameet Kumar reporting on new research in Florida into how psilocybin may help terminal cancer patients reconcile themselves (and thus their loved ones) with their approaching demise. In commenting a couple of years ago on a recent book by Stan Grof, who made good headway with this kind of psychedelic research with Walter Pahnke in the early ’70s, I remarked:

There are very good cases to be made for psychedelic therapy in any number of situations. But, as Grof notes, the idea that it’s still difficult to license it for terminal patients who are deemed beyond medical help, is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows clearly that our culture’s problem with the issue has little to do with the idea that psychedelics might mess people’s lives up in some way, and much more to do with an unwillingness to do what [Grof and Pahnke's subjects] want to do: face death consciously.

The fact that this sort of research is proceeding again—along with all the other sanctioned psychedelic experiments now underway—is exciting, heartening news. Indeed, being so soaked in the broad, speculative end of psychedelic culture myself, I found these presentations much more thrilling and inspiring than many of the rallying cries for psychedelics to “save the world”. Not to dismiss such rhetoric entirely; it’s just a different, more tangible buzz for me to hear of individuals in genuine need having distress alleviated. This is the agenda of MAPS in action; more power to them.

The Beckley Foundation, headed by longtime advocate of consciousness research Amanda Fielding, was present at the forum as the proud sponsors of the first study in over thirty years of LSD use in humans. Our understanding of the brain has surged forwards since the last legitimate scientific LSD research took place, and this study hopes to use modern neuroimaging techniques to gain a high-res understanding of the interactions between this still-fascinating substance and human neurochemistry.

At the forum, Fielding presented her theory on the link between human consciousness and blood supply to the brain. Essentially, she thinks evolution has left us with an insufficient supply, leaving us susceptible to various mental disorders, and that through the ages healthy societies have been those who have found ways of compensating for this. It’s one of those perspectives that can persuade the open mind to an extent, but its very simplicity makes one wary of reductionism. Certainly, it’s another option in our increasing range of ways to understand consciousness, and deserves more research.

Jeremy Narby

The Saturday saw a splendid line-up of ideas, research, passion and art. Jeremy Narby delivered an erudite and stimulating talk on his ongoing quest to find spaces where science and shamanism can agree to disagree on points where they clash, to leave room for the tantalizing overlaps. Following his experiment of taking Western molecular biologists through ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon to see if they could gain accurate biochemical information from their visions (detailed in the excellent Shamans Through Time), he took on a more passive role in facilitating a cultural-scientific exchange between an American tuberculosis researcher and a Peruvian shaman. The shaman discovered, through his ayahuasca visions, a plant with great success in treating tuberculosis. Exactly where these tentative cross-pollinating missions are heading is uncertain; that they are happening at all, though, is hugely encouraging.

Dale Pendell – photo by Mark Pilkington

Dale Pendell was a great discovery for me. Just that morning I had remarked to a friend how discussion of magic and the occult was lacking from proceedings. Pendell more than made up for this with his trip through the “mythopoetic roots of psychedelic practice in the Western Tradition”. With Milton’s Eve as the first curandera, and Plato’s ambivalent pharmakon as a guiding principle for the “poison path” of plant medicine, Pendell rooted the mythology and philosophy of psychedelics right into west Eurasian soil. Through Faust, he pinpointed the West’s quintessential magical operation as that of conjuration, giving form to spirits. Commercial incorporation, he emphasized, is plainly a most dangerous form of magic, giving legal reality to an abstraction whose prime motive is gain and profit. The spirit is conjured, with no circle of containment; “hungry ghosts” empowered and turned loose on the world. ‘Nuff said.

(You can download an MP3 (65MB) of Pendell’s post-talk discussion from the Sunday, and read the transcript. See also my review of his book of walking and talking with legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown.)

Kathleen Harrison

Kathleen Harrison has been known to me for a while as the former wife of Terence McKenna. Her presentation on her long-term fieldwork with indigenous Mazatec people in Mexico neither substituted for, nor paled in comparison with McKenna’s unique presence. Harrison was perhaps the most outspoken and coherent voice for animism (or, as she phrased it, “inter-species drama”). The Mazatecs, famed via María Sabina for their use of psilocybin mushrooms, and as the lone guardians of the odd psychedelic Salvia divinorum, are evidently a treasure trove for ethnobotanists, and it’s fantastic that such a sensitive and dedicated researcher as Harrison is working with them.

In discussing how careful Mazatec shamans are when sourcing their plant medicines—wanting to know that no one saw them being picked, and so on, purely for animistic reasons of respect for the plants’ spirits—Harrison mentioned a little rite of observance for urban psychonauts. She said that every psychedelic session she has that involves substances that have placed people at risk to get them to her, she offers thanks to them, and remembers all those whose freedom has been taken from them. (Applause greeted this, echoing the earlier support showed for the call from Kajuyali Tsamani—a Kogi shaman from Columbia—to boycott all cocaine use, on account of the inordinate suffering it causes in the regions where it’s produced.)

Harrison’s talk was bursting with tips for pragmatic, conscious engagement with plants, ancestors, the whole realm of spirits. It was very edifying to hear someone so obviously versed in the extremes of visionary information downloads, that while responses to questions asked of ancestors inevitably come with persistence, they are “never quite verbal”. She feels these answers arise at the subtle levels of instinct and spontaneous impulse. A cautionary note against the showy verbiage of many methods of “contacting the dead”, and a reminder that animism is really a perpetual refining process, learning through direct experience how to hear the quieter voices around and within us.

She ended with a statement of belief in the value of research into consciousness, religion and healing that was all the more pointed and rousing for her acknowledgement that its worth lies in the ongoing importance of such work in any situation—not just the possibility of it effecting some large-scale world-saving miracle. Kat Harrison reminded us all why we were there.

A showing of Jan Kounen’s excellent documentary, The Other World, on ayahuasca use among the Shipibo-Conibo Indian of the Peruvian Amazon, rounded off a thoroughly engrossing day.

I sadly missed the bulk of Sunday’s presentations in a haze of tiredness and networking. Monday saw some juicy para-forum extras: seminars and workshops with illustrious folk such as Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner, and Alex & Allyson Grey beckoned. I opted for the coach trip to the HR Giger museum.

We got a brief but energetic tour around the current exhibition of visionary art there from Claudia Müller-Ebeling, including wine and cheese. (The museum is in Gruyères, the home of my favourite cheese; eating it right there while viewing psychedelic art was a genuine treat!) Naturally Giger’s own work was wondrous to behold, especially in a setting where every detail is crafted in his style, right down to biomechanical patterns on the paving outside and spinal column handrails on the steps.

The short trip ended magnificently with a swift beer in the Giger Bar, just opposite. Arched spines vaulted the roof, skeletal alien chairs supported the locals chatting against the bar, and incongruous smoky jazz drifted around. More than a few comparisons to the Star Wars cantina were bandied around to describe the atmosphere. Do pop in if you pass through Switzerland.

In all, a resounding success. We felt the lack of more diverse after-hours social events—these being apparently limited to the customary trance and techno gatherings. But the balance between the tangible encouragements of hard science and more mercurial expressions of the psychedelic world worked well. Most importantly, it was easy to see a proliferation of new connections between individuals sparkling around the place. There’s an important cultural flame to be tended and maintained here, and Basel in 2008 saw it flare up with healthy enthusiasm.

Photo by Mark Pilkington

A discussion with Dale Pendell

[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]

Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, “Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?” “Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?” So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.

I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends—he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.

So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.

[Question about what specific traditions or techniques of magical practice DP uses.]

Very eclectic. But I certainly look to general magical theory, magical dynamics and magical laws. So I would look to… I mean I read Crowley, and Lévi… I mean, it was harder to find stuff, back in the sixties. From the poetic tradition, like the charming song tradition of the Inuits, where charms are like spells. They had different kinds of songs; one group of songs you sing just for the joy of seeing the sun rise, or fresh snow on the ground or something. And then there’s the songs of derision that you sing to make fun of somebody. And they would share all these songs. But one class of songs they wouldn’t share at the “songfest”, and those were charming songs. Charming songs were meant to change, like change the weather, renew luck.

So I kind of combine those any way I can. I kind of feel my way into it, sensing, trying to feel or see, sense the presence someplace.

I have a favourite story. An anthropologist was talking to his Native American informant at the edge of a field, and he said, “So, I suppose you think that all of these rocks out there in the field are alive?” And his informant goes, “No… But some of them are!” The art is in the “some of them”, and figuring out which ones.

Working with charms, and remembering that if you use magic, you are vulnerable to it… It’s very delicate work. Like María Sabina said, relations with the mushrooms are muy delicado—very delicate.

[Mention of DP's characterization, in his talk, of tobacco as a "diplomat".]

Tobacco is good. It brings up certain questions. That is, we’re all kind of rational, educated. What difference could it really make to the world to leave a tobacco offering at the base of a plant? What difference could it make to say grace before a meal? How is that really going to change the world in any way? In fact, maybe you can just skip the whole meal, and just swallow a pill or something, and get on with what’s really important.

There is perhaps some step of faith here. That doing something beautiful, something proper, that seems to put the world in balance, is a worthwhile thing to do, and makes a change in the universe.

I have a poem on this subject. In poetry and literary criticism, they have something called the “pathetic fallacy”. Pathetic fallacy is when you say, “The sky was weeping.” Giving human emotions to inanimate things. I think they haven’t gone far enough. So I’m for what I call the cosmic fallacy. This is called ‘Last Specimen’, it’s about plant collecting, pressing [????] specimens.

In the bank of a gravely wash
A mile from the road in Saline Valley
I found the desert paintbrush.
Not a rare plant
Just one I didn’t have in my collection.
The brilliant scarlet-tipped bracks of the inflorescence
Were still enfolded.
Kneeling down, I gently pulled them open
To inspect the corolla
And then saw, still a child.
It’s not that anyone else would come by here
But that you live to blossom
Alone, here, beneath an empty sky
Does mean that somewhere a soldier won’t die
Or that on a dried planet somewhere in Cygnus
It will rain.
And I return with an empty press.

And all the people who have lived close to the earth for a long time seem to respect these rites and rituals. They feel a sense of gratitude. God, even Nietzsche said, “A sense of gratitude is seemly.” Our existence here rests on many lives who have gone before us, generations of people. And not only people; all sorts of beings that have lived, and suffered, and died, and micro-organisms creating even the air that we breathe, and the topsoil, and all of it. So every day of our lives is a gift of countless generations that have provided it, for our benefit. So a sense of gratitude is right, and it is good to give something back. It’s good to take a moment to place an offering, or a word or something. Ultimately I don’t think we can prove this. But I say, the other side can’t prove their way either. It comes down to a wager. And I put my wager on a green square, and to do these things, to find a way to move in beauty ourselves, does change the world. It’s the only way we can change the world.

So, that’s a long way of saying that that’s the ultimate basis of my magic. [laughs]

[A question about Zen, psychedelics, koans and healing.]

I’ll come back to that. I have one more thought on magic, another kind of magic that I dabble in. And that’s charms to change things. I call it demon work. Principles of working with demons, getting to know them. It all revolves around this business of diplomacy. So, give them a place to go. You can make a little shrine for your demons, and it’s good if you can name them. I have one called “She’ll Be Hurt” that’s stopped me from doing all kinds of things that had nothing to do with “she” or “her”[?]. Then I learned she had a big sister called “She’ll Be Angry”. [laughter]

In that way I invoke a being I call “The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva”. The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva sits with his middle finger up, and he looks like an ape. I made a clay model of him, he’s got big nails sticking out of his head, and I have this shrine with this incense for him. Anybody who has a worse inner critic than I have has either quit writing, committed suicide-or both! So when I get the voices saying, “You’re not good enough to do that”, I get to where I can recognize it, and go “Aha!” I go over to the Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva, put a stick of incense in, and get on about my business.

I even made a scourge at one point, very wicked-looking. Magic has to with changing reality, so you do physical manipulations. So I made a scourge, a cat o’ nine tails with these leather thongs and twisted, very wicked-looking pieces of wire on them, and wrote all kinds of stuff on it (in blood actually), like, “Bring it to the surface”; or “You’re doing it to yourself anyway”. And when I would get a critic attack, all these voices saying, “You’re kind of fucked up” or “You can’t do it”… “Aha!” I would go get the scourge. And go, “Right! I get it! Thank you!” [mimes hitting himself over the back]

I look on all those operations as magical operations. It’s a wonderful field to be creative in. All good art is magic. All the best art is magic. So you can use aesthetic criteria to help find your way.

[A question about precautions necessary in "unbinding magic".]

I’m not sure it’s a problem with unbinding. Unbinding is not really… You’re not asking for something for yourself. It’s like releasing a bird. I think the dangerous magic is when you’re trying to get something for yourself; that’s a binding magic. Or trying to hurt somebody else. Any of those things, the vibration, the colour of it is so different, you can feel it right away. The best unbinding magic is invisible, there’s nothing there that anything can catch on; you can draw teasel through it. That’s the goal, and we come as close to it as we can. We usually end up with something that things still catch on, cling to; but that’s the ideal.

[Questioner remarks that in unbinding there is sometimes resistance, that things seem to prefer to stay bound.]

[sighs] Yeah. [long pause] The ocean is salty because of Kwan Yin‘s tears, when she realized she could not really save any beings. That’s what I heard. Any being at all.

[A return to the question of koans and healing, advice on koan practice.]

Sure, I’ll be bad. Go right into koan practice. Why not accept several hundred obstructions right away? [laughs] They help you get unobstructed! Koans are quite wonderful, there’s a lot of misconceptions about koan practice. Like, some people think, they don’t really have answers, you just have to do something spontaneous, or they have strange ideas about the answers. But there’s hundreds of them, and many of them are quite specific. Some actually have particular presentations. Maybe you’ll come up with a variation or something, and your teacher will say, [uncommitted, slightly dismissive tone] “Yeah, that gets the point.” Then he’ll say, “But the traditional answer is so-and-so.” And you always go, “Ah yes, that hits it right on the head.”

They’re kind of like brain candy. Very seductive. They’re meant to absorb your whole power of thought and mind, attention. Doesn’t that sound like fun? [laughs]

Not all Zen schools use them. The Soto schools don’t really use them, but in Rinzai Zen and some of [????], there’s a transmission.

[Questioner asks about koans and tripping.]

Like, my intention for that trip is to solve a koan? I don’t know of any rules. If you’re working with a teacher, he gives you a koan. You go back to your cushion… “OK, OK, sound of one hand, what’s that?” You go back to the teacher, and you present your answer. And he’ll probably go, “Hmmm, back to the cushion. Sit with this some more.”

Some of the great teachers worked on the first koan for years. One was about to kill himself, he worked on it for seven years. All of his friends had already solved it, you know, they were all whipped off to be Buddhists someplace. He was about to jump off a balcony or something… when he got it. He went on to be the great Mumon.

It becomes so all-encompassing. It should be, good practice; to where it’s all you think about, all the time, it’s what you’re thinking about. That’s good, that’s the way it should be.

So, tripping at such a time… I don’t know. It wasn’t my way. Maybe some people have gotten answers that way. Salvia divinorum has the best shot, I think. But the best is just going back and focusing on it, on your cushion. But one never knows, and there’s no rules on this-so, whatever works. It’s probably wise to try the way that people have been doing it for a long time.

Laura Pendell: Or it’s like the story you told about Gary [Snyder]. He came up with the perfect answer…

DP: Yeah, he came up with the perfect answer, that’s what it usually seems… Marijuana seems to do that, too. You get “perfect answers”—but it’s not the point of the koan.

Go work on this some more. [sly laugh]

[Question about the use of psychoactives in Buddhist history.]

Tea. They made an early alliance. In fact, tea is even said to be Bodhidharma’s eyelids. He fell asleep, and he was so upset that he ripped his eyelids off so he wouldn’t fall asleep again. He threw them behind him and they grew into the first tea plants.

[Someone thanks DP for his books introducing them to the pleasures of tea.]

The interesting thing is that all the major religions have abandoned whatever use of entheogenic substances that they once had. Sometimes I’ll think about why… Going back and reading early accounts of psychedelic administration, even Oscar Janiger, who collected hundreds and hundreds of accounts, made a point of giving LSD to people for the first time without them knowing anything about it, without them knowing what to expect, because he was collecting information. Almost everybody felt positive about it. About a third of them had bad trips… I don’t know, it’s very time-consuming, it goes all over the place. So we find lots of traces of entheogenic substances at the origins of religion, and in tribal religions, shamanic religions. All of the cosmopolitan schools have abandoned them, except for the saddhus. Who else?

[A woman in the group talks about finding motivation, about having interest in psychology and writing and helping the world, but feeling lost and directionless. She starts crying halfway through, telling DP she feels she trusts him. She has to support her family but nothing seems to have sense, the world doesn't need her help.]

Maybe try some of this magic stuff? Leaving a little flower offering, or tobacco offering at four cardinal points, or by your door every day. It doesn’t take much, some of the old ones said, to push the world over into the right direction. It just needs a little help, from you. There’s nothing you have to write[?]. Just leave a little offering; something that makes the world a little more beautiful. If we can get out without making the world worse, we have succeeded. That’s all we need to do, is find a way not to make things worse. That’s good enough.

Add a little bit of beauty someplace. You will see. It is OK to be in this state; it’s a very good place. A very good place. It’s very open, you’re kind of stretching out this open moment. Spiritual teachers have a word for that, they call it acedia. It’s like the “dark night of the soul”, it’s this point of not recognizing your own way, your own worth, just where you are in the spiritual process. But it’s a very pregnant and rich point. So, stretching that out is… painful. But it’s very good. Something very good, something very good is going to happen to you. Lay out a nice offering; invite the good spirits in: “Here’s some flowers for you. Here’s some hazelnuts.” I don’t know.

[An American woman says, "You think the world doesn't need your help? I live in a country that needs a lot of help."]

[A question about the relationship of the psychoactive effects of the poppy to Zen practice.]

Wow. That’s a very esoteric question! I’ll have to think about it to make a connection; I’m sure there’s a way to do it… What I think of with the hallucinogenic effects of poppies is Greek healing, and the temple of Apuleius, where with a drink from the poppy, sick people would go in to have dreams-and the dream would reveal to them why they were sick.

If you approach it right-you know, you have to walk through the door the right way, you don’t want to offend the gods. Again, it’s a matter of ritual propriety. Confucius made a big deal of ritual propriety—what’s the Chinese word, li? I think so. It’s one of the foundations of his whole system, you can almost feel that it’s a carry-over from the older animistic traditions. Ritual propriety. Keeping everything clean with the spirits—that’s what you want to do. That’s the basic magical law.

María Sabina with the leaves, and Eve in Paradise Lost, that’s ritual propriety. With the Salvia leaves, it becomes almost palpable. If you have stems with some parts that are left over, you wouldn’t just throw them out anywhere, that would be shocking, you know? The great Japanese flower masters would dig graves, dig a little hole in a special place to put the old flowers in. You don’t just put them anywhere. And this matter of ritual propriety is much neglected by our culture. There’s no sense of presence… In the animistic world there are spirits that live in streams and trees and rocks and places, little nooks, this little nook has its spirit. People who’ve lived close to the earth for a long time all seem to have some sense of the presences around, and recognition that they do not want to offend that presence. It would be a desecration. Our culture kind of moved all that, had it taken out of the environment and boxed up in the Kirche, in the church, where it’s clear, that’s a sacred space and you wouldn’t think of throwing trash on the ground in the church. That’s pretty clear. We have it all boxed into this special place, but it’s in all of Earth’s places around us. This matter of presences is again one of the fundamental principles of all shamanic magic. You can kind of build the whole system up pretty much from that. Recognizing that there’s presences, you don’t want to offend them, you want to keep them in balance, and trying to find propriety.

If you don’t always know, you need to come up with some means of divination. Divination is another neglected art, it’s a kind of hazy area. It’s still a big part of our world, but we pretend that it’s… We flip a coin at sporting events-who goes first? That was to get the will of the gods. What do the gods have to say about this? Now we call it “chance”.

When you talk about using tobacco, how do you use it? Offering, or smoking?

You don’t have to smoke it. Tobacco offerings are very traditional; tobacco moved around the world very quickly after Columbus.

[A question about the tobacco industry and chemical additives.]

Well, you can’t look to me for purity. [laughter] I do grow tobacco, and it’s very good to grow one’s own magical plants. Kat [Harrison] made the point in her talk [on her fieldwork with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico] that with sacred medicines, any shaman wants to know who’s touched them, where they came from, their history. And making magical objects, the materials, and the history of the materials is all very important. You don’t want to get boorish on this, but the more you can refine that, the further you can trace that out, the more powerful the magic is gonna be, and it’ll probably be better art, also.

[Question about tobacco as an offering.]

Yeah, and you can use it as a purifier. Smoke some, burn some on charcoal and you can clean things. It’s very famously used as a cleaner. You can clean bad vibes off something with tobacco.

Something else I’ve found is good for cleaning bad vibes I learned from the Chinese, which is firecrackers. Wanna get the bad spirits out? That’ll work. Whole strings of them, let ‘em off all at once!

There’s a great wealth of lore, ways different peoples dealt with things for a long time. Much of it is neglected, but we can still find these very useful things.

And if magical thinking goes against your grain because you’re educated, and you don’t want to be superstitious, look at it as art, use aesthetic principles. Look at it as art and theatre, and you can do the same thing that way.

[Question about magical propriety and sacred space in dense urban environments.]

It is more challenging, yeah, but you can use all the same principles. I’m kind of “seat of the pants”, so I started hanging yarrow in the door. Something like that. In the sixties we all made these gods’ eyes. I still have one—shows how bad I am. I’m sure there are lots of people who do stuff like that. Over huge parts of the world people have all these charms and amulets as protection against the Evil Eye. So yeah, start with charms and amulets. I like yarrow, that’s good.

I don’t know what to do about sound. You’ll think of something. [laughs]

[audio:2007-11-06-metageum-pauldevereux.mp3]
(Download 99 MB MP3)

Bristol’s Festival of Ideas kicked off today with a short lecture by social philosopher Steve Fuller, which I popped along to. A flaky friend didn’t show, so you, my dear readers, get what would have been my post-lecture pub ramblings.

Before we get the first round in (mine’s a pint), let me say I’ve not yet read any of Steve Fuller’s fascinating-looking books. An hour or so of listening to the guy talk and respond to questions gives a good impression, but I’ve probably missed some of his subtleties.

Fuller seems to be doing what I’ve always thought should be done, and only recently, through this lecture, realised is being done: he applies the principles of sociology and anthropology to science itself. He studies our own science in the way we might curiously observe the beliefs of a foreign tribe. Obviously this ruffles his colleague’s feathers, especially when the relativism that this stance necessitates sees him standing in defence of “Intelligent Design” (in court, no less). ID, according to almost anyone who hates fundamentalist Christianity, is a contemporary ruse with which to smuggle Creationism into classrooms. Fuller is much more generous towards ID – too generous, many would say.

Given the ludicrously limited choice of neo-Darwinism and Creationism, I side with Dawkins & co. as the lesser of two evils. ID, Creationist links notwithstanding, tries to hold out the promise of a “third option”. I’m not sure it wholly fulfills this role, but it’s the most publicly visible concept that has the potential to complexify the standard face-off between scientists whose concepts of science’s bounds have become worryingly fuzzy, and monotheists whose rationality has suffered a similar fate.

Fuller’s great contribution here seems to be to use ID as a tool for critiquing the calcified strata of belief that often underpin the dazzling commitment to objectivity in science. He contends that belief in a designer actually initiated and fertilized much, if not most, of the origins to modern science.

OK, so Newtonian tradition (if not Newton himself) has God as some great rational designer of an artifact universe; but why should the beliefs that got science off the ground not be shed, like scaffolding, when they outlive their usefulness?

Indeed, says Fuller. He took the work of Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, who stood against ID in the court case where Fuller stood in defence of it, and who Fuller regards as the bee’s knees when it comes to the orthodox anti-ID evolutionary position. Tracing most of the arguments that Miller rallies back to the Journal of Molecular Biology, he decided to look at what is really being said about evolution by hard-nosed scientists. Not in their pop science titles where expressions implying a “designer” at work might be forgiven as convenient metaphors, but in their own technical periodicals, where their language is free to be as tediously bereft of such needless personifications as it wants to be.

Well, Fuller claims to have discovered that every step of the way, the concept of a “designer” at work is at least implied in the language of the discussions in this austere journal. This, he says, marks the Darwinists as disingenuous folk trying to have something both ways, with ID at least coming clean and trying to grapple with the issue as it can be conceptualized.

This is where he lost me. It’s an interesting take, perhaps, but it’s more than a little specious. He did, at least, come clean himself; he confessed that he personally can’t conceive of “design” without a “designer”. Suddenly I saw that he’s probably not as well qualified for the job he’s got as one might hope. How can someone so fundamentally trapped within a specific (if currently widespread) model of the world hope to offer useful meta-critiques of science itself?

Perhaps he addresses this in his books, but he made no mention this evening of Chinese thought. Alan Watts, in a lecture I was listening to a few nights ago, remarks that the Chinese ideogram for “nature” literally translates as “that which happens by itself”. Clearly, the Taoist appreciation of spontaneous order affirms that “design without a designer” is a humanly possible conception, even if it might be an effort to grasp from within a culture not used to the idea. Taoism, I feel, has a lot to offer the frustrating, explosive debate between science and religion in the arena of creation and evolution. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that John Gray‘s biting Darwinian attack on secular humanism, Straw Dogs, takes its title and opening quotation from Lao Tzu (“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs”).

What is more, post-Darwinian Western science is home to another legitimate current of conceptions of spontaneous order: Chaos theory. Are Darwinians really being dishonest? If science is able to coherently formulate theories of spontaneous order arising in matter, surely the fact that writers in the Journal of Molecular Biology aren’t able to avoid language that implies an active “designer” simply begs questions about the limitations of our language? Our verbs may all need subjects, but does every action need an actor? Are we perhaps projecting limitations of our language onto the world? Fuller, at least, seems to be.

In all, an engaging and important thinker. But he may be more effective after a long meditational retreat.

I must finish here with another take on “spontaneous order”. Last night I found Adam Curtis’ most recent documentary, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, on Google Video (you might have to click around for the 2nd and 3rd parts). Not as wholly gripping as The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self (also to be found on the net for free viewing), but essential if you’re interested in the arguments he built up in those works. At heart it is a critique of post-World War II laissez-faire social and economic policies, and has some good analysis of the failures of the theory that “spontaneous order” arises when the state apparatus is dismantled (a la Reagan & Thatcher, Blair & Clinton).

My favourite part was near the end, and reminded me of that wise adage, “Economics is a form of brain damage.”

In economics, the whole idea that the free market is an efficient system is coming under serious attack. Over the past five years, many of the Nobel Prizes for Economics have been awarded for studies that show that markets do not create stability or order; that what Adam Smith called “the Invisible Hand” is invisible because it isn’t actually there; and politicians do have a powerful role to play in controlling the markets.

And a new discpline, called Behavioural Economics, has been studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model says they do. They show that only two groups in society actually behave in a rational, self-interested way in all experimental situations: one is economists themselves; the other is psychopaths.

Curtis believes that simple models of reality (here, John Nash’s game theory and classical economics) have been taken too literally, and in the process of applying them to society, people have been subtly moulded to conform to the image of people required by the model. The economic theory that people are rational, self-interested agents who behave in a roughly mechanical way is held at least partly responsible for creating a world where people are cut off from their non-rational feelings and altruistic empathies.

This all resonates strongly with David Kidner’s contention in Nature & Psyche that industrialism’s minimal conception of the natural world has led, through the forceful application of industrialism, to the literal reduction and destruction of much of the natural world. A simple model is enacted, and the world, like the taller guests of Procrustes, is violently made to conform to the model.

My vote for Curtis’ next project would be a dramatic exposition of Kidner’s thesis. So far Curtis has delineated the crucial issues at stake in politics, business and society; with ecological awareness bearing down as the weightiest contemporary issue, it would be fantastic to see his documentary series extend to our relationship with the natural world.

Today I went to cast some offerings into the River Avon as part of some ritual work I’m doing. I eyed my umbrella on the way out, but it seemed like a bright, placid day, so I left it hanging there (rarely a good idea in a West Country winter). Down by the river, I watched from a footbridge as some people walked round the jetty I work on. Some little fish seemed to be jumping in the water; or at least, that’s what it looked like until I saw how prevalent the ripples were…

I held my palm out and felt no drops of rain. Could it really be raining just over there and not here? Indeed, a bank of light drizzle was moving towards me, at such a slow rate that it took about 30 seconds to traverse the 10 feet or so between me and the bank. Noticing that the people I’d seen had moved along, I walked down to my spot.

It started getting a little heavier as I sat there, so after I’d done my thing, I walked off before I started getting drenched. By the time I was walking along the road towards the Clifton suspension bridge, the rain was abating, and had stopped by the time I was walking up the Zig Zag path. A vast rainbow arced over Clifton, from the Observatory on the downs over to the city centre.

It’s happened before for me, this synchronicity between outdoor ritual work and the weather. I suspect it’s common. Sometimes it doesn’t need ritual, it’s just an unfolding interaction between the flow of consciousness and emotion and the elements. Nothing that could be charted to satisfy the scientific urge; even so, something that strikes the attentive mind and heart as stepping out of the private realm in a way that renders terms like “fancy” and “projection” naggingly redundant.

Weather magic, often in the form of the “rain dance”, is one of the more common forms of magic to have penetrated the popular Western imagination. Like love spells, it deals with a system so complex that modern science genuinely seems to have hit the limits of its predictive and manipulative power, leaving it shrouded in a cloak of irreducible mystery, and thus ripe for a magical approach.

But it’s something less specific I’m getting at here; none of my experiences of weather changes accompanying rituals have involved any intent to affect the weather. Rather, the weather seems to have played a role in reflecting the energy of the ritual itself, an affirmative dance between the two.

I once headed to the Badger Stone on Ilkley Moor to offer some blood (my own) to the river goddess Verbeia. My sense was that she was connected somehow to the moors as well as the river, and I decided to petition the goddess herself for help in uncovering the connection. As I approached the stone, rain started to fall. By the time I got there, it became sleety. As the ritual peaked, it started hailing, and the wind from behind me (from the south) became so strong that as I looked at the cup-mark on the stone where I’d dripped blood, hail was hitting the back of my head and creating an intense tunnel effect in my vision. I wound things down, and the hail softened. As I walked away from the stone, the rain stopped altogether.

(I later discovered that the weather was more tightly bound to this ad hoc rite than I suspected. In Scotland, similar cup-marked stones are sites where libations—usually milk—were frequently offered to gruagach, elemental spirits. One rock in Colonsay was called “the well of the south wind”, referring to the power it gave the chief of the MacPhees to summon this wind at will.)

In art, when an expression imputes attributes like feeling and intent to non-human phenomena, it is known as a “pathetic fallacy”. Coined by John Ruskin in an 1856 volume of his Modern Painters, this term has sat in a corner of my mind, ever since it found its way in there in some English lesson, as a withering condemnation of anthropomorphism in general, not just in art. (And no, I couldn’t resist anthropomorphising the term itself.) It’s been an education to look more deeply at it in order to write this.

Even though a certain university’s “glossary of literary theory” bills it as “a term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects”, Ruskin himself is less simplistic. As an artistic device, he knows it makes no sense to decry it outright. However, both informed and slightly befuddled by his strong Victorian dualism between intellect and feeling, he distinguishes several classes of poet according to how they are able to negotiate this rather dubious exchange of feeling between the human and the environment:

So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower, apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it.

There’s a certain three-step resonance with one of those hard-to-source Oriental sayings: “Before I studied Zen, a mountain was just a mountain. After I began to study Zen, a mountain was no longer just a mountain. Then, when I completed my studies, the mountain became a mountain again.” The pathetic fallacy is only decried by Ruskin when it’s insincere or when it seems to be overwhelming the poet, i.e. when the emotion involved is either absent or fumbled.

The greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it.

Yet if Ruskin intended to coin a potentially positive, or at least neutral term, why “pathetic”, and why “fallacy”?

In Ruskin’s day, “pathetic” mostly held to its Greek origins in pathos, and meant “relating to the emotions”. The fact that pathos also seems to refer to suffering as well as feeling in general could probably inspire several psychohistorical studies. For now, it’s interesting to note the modern evolution of the word “pathetic“:

Meaning “arousing pity, pitiful” is first recorded 1737. Colloquial sense of “so miserable as to be ridiculous” is attested from 1937.

My Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990) lists it as a “British colloquialism” meaning “miserably inadequate”. It would be glib, but not entirely without grounds, to see here the cumulative influence of the notorious English contempt for strong emotions—nurtured by puritanical religion, science’s lust for impassive “objectivity”, and the Industrial Revolution’s demands on everyday life.

One suspects that despite his obvious intelligence, Ruskin was very much a man of his times, and of his country. While he chose “pathetic” as a technically correct term, his age’s growing distrust of emotional truth and dismissal of animism (outside the patrolled confines of art) found an outlet in his choice of this word, which was carrying more and more negative baggage in the popular mind.

So, why “fallacy”? Simply, Ruskin thought that any feelings, intentions, or other attributes reserved for humans can only be imputed by us to non-human phenomena. Even though the artistic use of this imputation may be praised as the work of genius, it is nevertheless false.

Ramsey Dukes, in S.S.O.T.B.M.E. and elsewhere, has written of the four “cultures”, or modes of apprehending the world: Art, Religion, Science and Magic. To simplify the work of a very subtle writer, he sees them as being discreet, to an extent. They’re not (or needn’t be) in competition with each other: they’re like apples and oranges (and pears and kumquats). However, he does see them as successive reigning principles in a cyclic process, at least in Western culture.

That we have recently been living through a scientific phase needs little debate, and it is clearly Ruskin’s place in the early part of this phase that leads him to use the word “fallacy”. Anthropomorphism is scientifically invalid; so much so, that we may as well drop the “scientifically” bit. Science is “common sense”, the triumphant arbiter of truth itself.

In talking of the classes of poet he feels he has discerned in examining the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin says:

I separate these classes, in order that their character may be clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of alterability. (emphasis in original)

To me this has clear resonance with Dukes’ concept of the magician as one who integrates in himself all four “cultures” (Art, Religion, Science & Magic) or elements (Earth, Air, Fire & Water—but do note that Dukes does not equate particular “cultures” with particular elements). The point is to be flexible.

This emphasis on “alterability”, for me, exists in a certain tension with Ruskin’s final conclusion, which largely amounts to distinguishing between the pathetic fallacy with and without the distancing use of “as if” or “like”—similar to what we’re taught as the difference between a simile and metaphor. For Ruskin, forgoing “as if” testifies to a weakness of character that is unable to resist being engulfed by the emotions that suffuse both the body and the perceived environment.

So much for “alterability”; the lines are clearly drawn, and giving in to the full force of emotions is a one-way trip for morbid romantics.

While science teachers may worry about animism creeping into their lessons, they may not fully appreciate that their fear is not of an alien intruder. Anthropology has taught us that the psyche of Homo sapiens is naturally animist, and fear of animism in modern science is fear of a weakening of the rational structure hastily erected on top of this sturdy baseline granted us by evolution. Only feebly integrated with its psychobiological foundations, it creaks in the wind and bolsters itself with paranoia.

Modern linguistics and philosophy also teaches us that some things that science has been fearful of are actually hard-wired into our foundations:

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

“Air” and “spirit” are synonymous in most ancient languages, so perhaps it is no surprise that the weather attends to, reflects and participates in our magico-spiritual acts. And in perceiving this as such, in accepting our direct experience of these phenomena, in recognising our rational apprehension of them as an abstracted superimposition—valid only in a limited sense—we connect with what it means to be human.

As we become conscious of the unseen depths that surround us, the inwardness or interiority that we have come to associate with the personal psyche begins to be encountered in the world at large; we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught up within the sensuous world. This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.

David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous

I wonder where climate change will leave our conception of ourselves and the world?

Thanks, Corpus Mmothra.