Magic: Divine, Human, and Satanic (10.11.11)

We're just wrapping up with the Priestess before moving on to arcanum #3, the Empress. UF concludes the chapter by noting that scientistic materialism can only be "true" if we exclude all of the other planes that make the horizontal plane of natural facts possible, and isolate the realm of quantitative facts from the rest of reality.

At the polar opposite of this is the Hermetic-philosophical sense, or the "sense of synthesis," which is capable of a vision of the whole: "The scientific sense... summarizes the facts of experience on a single plane, in the horizontal. Hermeticism is not a science and will never be one. It can certainly make use of sciences and their results, but by doing so it does not become a science."

Or, one could say that profane science is the study of the relative, which is change itself. But Hermeticism is essentially the science of the changeless, which is to say, metaphysics. Metaphysics is the science of the permanent, of those things that cannot not be, for example, the Absolute, and by extension, the Infinite. Or, of Beyond-Being, and its child, Being.

Again, science can verify truth on a single plane, while the gnostic sense investigates the depth of said truth. Thus, any philosophy of naturalism can only be absolutely true to the extent that one fails to ponder its depth and significance. The moment you engage in the latter, you have disproved it, for you have revealed a vertical depth of truth and being for which naturalism can never account. You have left materialism behind. For to listen in expectant silence in the vertical space is to be "instructed by God." Coongratulations. It's your psychic bar mitzvah! So say goodbye to your spiritual childhood and leave mater behind.

Now, on to the Empress. As a brief aside, I think one of the reasons this book didn't resonate with me at first, is that it starts out a bit slow, at least relative to what follows. My recollection is that the book really starts to catch fire after card four or five, but we shall see. This chapter in particular had some bland spots for me.

UF points out that the Empress symbolizes the realm of sacred or divine magic, which is embodied in the formula that the subtle rules the dense, and all it implies. I suppose that when I first read the book, I was slightly put off by this whole idea of "magic," being that it's such a loaded word. But UF has a very specific meaning in mind. First, he notes that the only legitimate magic is that which is "authorized from above." And the only legitimate aim of magic is liberation in order to ascend. And the only legitimate formula is the combination of the two wills: divine and human.

Thus, real magic results from our alignment with the divine will in order to ascend toward greater freedom. A new power is born through the unity of divine and human wills. Elsewhere he quotes Peladin, who spoke of the application of the strengthened human will to accelerate the evolution of the living forces of Nature. This is accomplished through the science of love.

And remember from the previous card, that love is the essence of unity, or the free unification of twoness in oneness, even while preserving the twoness. "Sacred magic is the power of love, born of the union in love of divine will and human will." Freedom, love, magic, will, ascent, evolution, multiplicity, oneness... all of these things are interrelated in surprising ways. "This is the aim of sacred magic; it is nothing other than to give the freedom to see, hear, to walk, to live, to follow an ideal and to be truly oneself -- i.e., to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to walk to the lame, life to the dead, good news or ideals to the poor, and free will to those who are possessed by evil spirits."

I won't bore you with some of the letters Bob receives testifying to the reality of this magic. People who couldn't "see" God now can; or people who couldn't hear, now do; or people who couldn't walk the walk, now dance the sacred coondance. But not one of these people attributes it to Bob. Well, maybe one person, but he was rather scary. The point is, they all "get it" -- that the magic results from aligning oneself (↑) with (↓), not by being a clone of Bob, God forbid, or I'll have to contact the authorities.

I usually have to reframe these ideas in terms of my own experience and understanding in order to appreciate where UF is coming from. I'm sure he wouldn't mind, for that is again how one moves down the spectrum from spiritual touch, to hearing, to synthesis and comprehension, then to projection and vision. No one else can give you the comprehension. It has to be your own, so it will naturally be inflected through the particulars of your own personality. Even Jesus -- who was a mode of the universal -- was nevertheless a human personality. True, he was "everyone," but he was nevertheless someone. This is what distinguishes him from merely mythological figures that are purely archetypal and therefore conventional.

UF then goes into a very important passage on what gets in the way, which is none other than the mind parasites of which Bob speaks in his book. If the object of sacred magic is liberation in order to ascend, then anything that intrudes upon or prevents that process is more or less parasitic.

Well no, that's not quite correct. In fact, it's not correct at all. Earth is not to be confused with heaven. We are not meant to live non-friction lives, for it is precisely the obstacles that present the opportunity for growth and transcendence. But there are "legitimate" obstacles, tests and trials that work within the Cosmic Law, and illegitimate ones that may look satanic, but are actually mostly human. Or, you might say that they are a kind of black magic which results from the alignment of the human will with the forces of darkness. Does this really happen? Please. Grow up. You've already had your psychic bar mitzvah. Now start acting like it, schmendrick.

UF makes the critical point that the Adversary never deprives anyone of his freedom. That is not his style, but more importantly, it is not his role. He's not some sort of street thug or community organizer. No: "Temptation is [his] only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted."

But one can obviously squander one's freedom, to the point that one is essentially "possessed" by the demon that one has co-created with the Adversary. As UF describes it, "One engenders an elemental being and one subsequently becomes the slave of one's own creation." And here is the money quote, as it coonfirms Bob's ideas about demonic mind parasites, which

"have been discovered by contemporary psychiatrists and are recognized as real -- i.e., as 'parasitic psychic organisms' independent of the conscious human will and tending to subjugate it." As such, "One need not fear the devil, but rather the perverse tendencies in oneself! For those perverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us. Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind."

Let's pause here for a little red meat for the base. Liberalism is obviously about freedom. But the founders always understood this in the manner outlined above, as spiritual freedom, i.e., the freedom to ascend. For example, in the words of John Adams,

“Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.... We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.... We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.”

The Democrat party has long since abandoned the classical liberalism of America's founders for a leftism that is not just its political opposite, but its very negation. It is a collusion of man and his own lower forces in order to create hell on earth. Instead of a vertical freedom conferred by God and respected by the state, it promulgates a horizontal freedom granted by the state. But the state can create nothing. Just as it cannot create wealth but only take it away by force, it cannot grant real freedom, since that freedom is a priori and intrinsically spiritual. And by attacking and undermining religion itself, it results in the creation of a new kind of man-beast hybrid whose freedom is for his own sake. It is not even horizontal freedom, but merely the freedom to fall further into his own warped imagination, i.e., the Rule of the Mind Parasites.

Virtually all freedom-loving Americans have a sense of deep foreboding about what may come with the Rule of the Mind Parasites. But this is nothing new. UF quotes a passage by St. Paul, who spoke of how the entire Creation had been "groaning in travail," awaiting its hour of liberation, when it "will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God."

Isn't this inversion amazing, that the "irreligious" secular left -- precisely because they are irreligious -- are laboring under the fantasy that the world has been groaning in travail while awaiting the hour of... Obama? -- a shape-shifting cipher and compulsively lyin' Hawaiian who represents the quintessence of soothing hypnosis and oily seduction, the favorite methods of the Adversary? For he is the inverted image of the Empress.

To be continued....

*****

This post at Belmont Club has some implicit connections to mine. You figure them out:

"'It was a bold man who first et an oyster,' a wag once wrote. But many a timid man followed the bold. Once the first pedophile discovered holidays in Thailand or a perverted clergyman spread the word that children trusted men of the cloth it was only a matter of time before a kind of bubble blew up which created a whole new category of tourist industry and very nearly collapsed institutions which had lasted for millenia. When radical Islamists discovered that Western civilization made cars, airplanes, the Internet and biological science available to the common man it wasn’t long before mass terror attacks using these implements were under way. One day evil people make a business process or technological breakthrough and for a time, they have a boom which to us looks like a catastrophe. Imagine the excitement with which real scammers must have regarded Fan and Fred, or the derivative market, as you prefer. Seek and you shall find.

"It’s interesting to speculate about what bad guys may be looking for next. An amusing story is told about Kurt Godel, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. It seems that Godel applied for US citizenship and proceeded to his examination in company with Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern when it occurred to him to tell the judge about a logical loophole he had discovered in the US Constitution through which America could be turned into a tyranny.

"Einstein and Morgenstern coached Gödel for his U.S. citizenship exam, concerned that their friend’s unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his chances. When the Nazi regime was briefly mentioned, Gödel informed the presiding judge that he had discovered a way in which a dictatorship could be legally installed in the United States, through a logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. Neither the judge, nor Einstein or Morgenstern allowed Gödel to finish his line of thought and he was awarded citizenship.

"It’s amusing until one realizes how often we discover, at intervals of 50 or so years, how a cohort of people more or less simultaneously learn to game a system until it crashes. I really do wish the judge had let Godel finish, though the 5% of men in the world would have been listening to his words more intently than all the rest."