/tag/gods

57 quotes tagged 'gods'

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

393

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the 'good old days'; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary. The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened. The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations. These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men. Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole. By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d'état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious - or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies - is, however, only a passing phenomenon. Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace. But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

338

This progressive assimilation of unconscious contents gradually builds up the personality, thus creating an enlarged psychic system which forms the basis of man's inner spiritual history as this makes itself increasingly independent of the collective history going on all around him. This process, initiated in the first instance by philosophy, has today reached what is chronologically its latest stage in psychology, still of course only in its infancy. Hand in hand with this there goes a 'psychization' of the world. Gods, demons, heaven and hell are, as psychic forces, withdrawn from the objective world and incorporated in the human sphere, which thereupon undergoes a very considerable expansion. When we give the name of 'sexuality' to what was once experienced as a chthonic divinity, or speaking of 'hallucination' instead of revelation, and when the gods of heaven and the underworld are recognized as dominants of man's unconscious, it means that an immense tract of external world has dropped into the human psyche. Introjection and psychization are on the other side of the process by which a world of physical objects becomes visible, and this world can no longer be modified by projections to the degree that it could before.

327

The more complex a content is, the less it can be grasped and measured by consciousness, whose structure is so one-sided that it can attain to clarity only over a limited area. In this respect consciousness is built analogously to the eye. There is one spot where vision is sharpest, and larger areas can be perceived clearly only by continuous eye-movements. In the same way, consciousness can only keep a small segment sharply in focus; consequently it has to break up a large content into partial aspects, experiencing them piecemeal, one after he other, and then learn to get a synoptic view of the whole terrain by comparison and abstraction.\n\n 'An advanced consciousness will therefore split the bivalent content into a dialectic of contrary qualities. Before being so split, the content is not merely good and bad at once; it is beyond good and evil, attracting and repelling, and therefore irritating to consciousness. But if there is a division into good and evil, consciousness can then take up an attitude.\n\n 'Rationalization, abstraction, and de-emotionalization are all expressions of the 'devouring' tendency of ego consciousness to assimilate the symbols piecemeal. As the symbol is broken down into conscious contents, it loses its compulsive effect, its compelling significance, and becomes poorer in libido. Thus the 'gods of Greece' are no longer for us, as they were for the Greeks, living forces and symbols of the unconscious requiring a ritualistic approach; they have been broken down into cultural contents, conscious principles, historical data, religious associations, and so on. They exist as contents of consciousness and no longer - or only in special cases - as symbols of the unconscious.

174

In this [the hero's] conflict the 'inner voice,' the command of the transpersonal father or father archetype who wants the world to change, collides with the personal father who speaks for the old law. We know this conflict best from the Bible story of Jehovah's command to Abraham: 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee' (Genesis 12:1), which the midrash interprets as meaning that Abraham is to destroy the gods of his father. The message of Jesus is only an extension of the same conflict and it repeats itself in every revolution. Whether the new picture of God and the world conflicts with an old picture, or with the personal father, is unimportant, for the father always represents the old order and hence also the old picture current in his cultural canon.

126

The meaning of ritual, irrespective of the useful effects which primitive man expects from it, lies precisely in strengthening the conscious system. The magical forms by means of which archaic man comes to terms with his surroundings are, all other considerations apart, anthropocentric systems of world domination. In his rituals he makes himself the responsible center of the cosmos; on him depends the rising of the sun, the fertility of crops, and all the doings of the gods.

The individual's view of the world changes with every stage of his development, and the variation of archetypes and symbols, gods and myths, is the expression, but also the instrument, of this change.

Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation

Author: Robin Robertson

Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

433

The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier certainty. The very idea of a universal stability, an eternal firmness of principle out there that can be sought for through the world as might an Arthurian knight for the Grail, is, in the morphology of history, a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods in the first two millennia after the decline of the bicameral mind. What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.

427

What happens in this modern dissolution of ecclesiastical authorization reminds us a little of what happened long ago after the breakdown of the bicameral mind itself. Everywhere in the contemporary world there are substitutes, other methods of authorization. Some are revivals of ancient ones: the popularity of possession religions in South America, where the church had once been so strong; extreme religious absolutism ego-based on “the Spirit,” which is really the ascension of Paul over Jesus; an alarming rise in the serious acceptance of astrology, that direct heritage from the period of the breakdown of the bicameral mind in the Near East; or the more minor divination of the I Ching, also a direct heritage from the period just after the breakdown in China. There are also the huge commercial and sometimes psychological successes of various meditation procedures, sensitivity training groups, mind control, and group encounter practices. Other persuasions often seem like escapes from a new boredom of unbelief, but are also characterized by this search for authorization: faiths in various pseudosciences, as in Scien-tology, or in unidentified flying objects bringing authority from other parts of our universe, or that gods were at one time actually such visitors; or the stubborn muddled fascination with extrasensory perception as a supposed demonstration of a spiritual surround of our lives whence some authorization might come; or the use of psychotropic drugs as ways of contacting profounder realities, as they were for most of the American native Indian civilizations in the breakdown of their bicameral mind. Just as we saw in III.2 that the collapse of the institutionalized oracles resulted in smaller cults of induced possession, so the waning of institutional religions is resulting in these T H E A U G U R I E S O F S C I E N C E 441 smaller, more private religions of every description.

424

This drama, this immense scenario in which humanity has been performing on this planet over the last 4000 years, is clear when we take the large view of the central intellectual tendency of world history. In the second millennium B.C., we stopped hearing the voices of gods. In the first millennium B.C., those of us who still heard the voices, our oracles and prophets, they too died away 1. In the first millennium A.D., it is their sayings and hearings preserved in sacred texts through which we obeyed our lost divinities. And in the second millennium A.D., these writings lose their authority. The Scientific Revolution turns us away from the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in Nature. What we have been through in these last four millennia is the slow inexorable profaning of our species. And in the last part of the second millennium A.D., that process is apparently becoming complete. It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest and greatest endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authorization, in our reading of the language of God in Nature, we should read there so clearly that we have been so mistaken.\r\n\r\n\r\n1: I discuss this more fully in my paper with William Woodward, “In the Shadow of the Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1974, 10: 3-15, 144-159.

404

The reasons that hallucinations take the -particular form they do lie partly in the physical nature of the world, but mostly in education and a familiarity with gods and religious history. But I do mean to suggest (1) that there are in the brain aptic structures for the very existence of such hallucinations, 20 Schreber, pp. 226, 332. 21 Ibid., p. 269. 22 J. Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952), p. 18. 417 S C H I Z O P H R E N I A (2) that these structures develop in civilized societies such that they determine the general religious quality and authority of such hallucinated voices, and perhaps organize them into hierarchies, (3) that the paradigms behind these aptic structures were evolved into the brain by natural and human selection during the early civilizing of mankind, and (4) are released from their normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia and particularized into experience.

401

It is the very central and unique place of these auditory hallucinations in the syndrome of many schizophrenics which it is important to consider. Why are they present? And why is “hearing voices” universal throughout all cultures, unless there is some usually suppressed structure of the brain which is activated in the stress of this illness? And why do these hallucinations of schizophrenics so often have a dramatic authority, particularly religious? I find that the only notion which provides even a working hypothesis about this matter is that of the bicameral mind, that the neurological structure responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind.

335

Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons. The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a demon j he just talks like one. Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-ings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite of his or her usual self. 'He' may name himself a god, demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often 'the fox'), may demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if these are withheld. 'He' commonly describes his natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets.12 And 'he' often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet. As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with observers, such as a promise that 'he' will leave the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the 'demon' as the sometimes similar cove-nants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by the command of an authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god.

332

By the end of the third century, Christianity had suddenly flooded the pagan world with its own claims to authorization and began to dissolve into itself many of the then existing pagan practices. The idea of possession was one of those. But it was absorbed in a transcendental way. At almost the same time that Iamblichus was teaching the induction of gods into statues, or young illiterate katochoi to 'participate' in divinity and have 'a common energy' with a god, Athanasius, the competitive Bishop of Alexandria, began claiming the same thing for the illiterate 9 It is safe to suggest that many feats of present-day stage magicians have their origin in duplicating these 'proofs' of divine intervention. Jesus. The Christian Messiah had heretofore been regarded as like Yahweh, a demigod perhaps, half human, half divine, reflecting his supposed parentage. But Athanasius persuaded Constantine, his Council of Nicaea, and most of Christianity thereafter, that Jesus participated in Yahweh, was the same substance, the Bicameral Word made Flesh. I think we can say then that the growing church, in danger of shattering into sects, exaggerated the subjective phenomenon of possession into an objective theological dogma. It did so to assert an even greater claim to an absolute authorization. For Athanasian Christians the actual gods had indeed returned to earth and would return again.

307

While the universal characteristics of the new consciousness, such as self-reference, mind-space, and narratization, can develop swiftly on the heels of new language construction, the larger contours of civilization, the huge landscape of culture against which this happens, can only change with geological slowness. The matter and technic of earlier ages of civilizations survive into the new eras uneroded, dragging with them the older outworn forms in which the new mentality must live. But living also in these forms is a fervent search for what I shall call archaic authorization. After the collapse of the bicameral mind, the world is still in a sense governed by gods, by statements and laws and prescriptions carved on stelae or written on papyrus or remembered by old men, and dating back to bicameral times. But the dissonance is there. Why are the gods no longer heard and seen? The Psalms cry out for answers. And more assurances are needed than the relics of history or the paid insistences of priests. Something palpable, something direct, something immediate! Some sensible assurance that we are not alone, that the gods are just silent, not dead, that behind all this hesitant subjective groping about for signs of certainty, there is a certainty to be had.

304

We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past. We have our houses of gods which record our births, define us, marry us, and bury us, receive our confessions and intercede with the gods to forgive us our trespasses. Our laws are based upon values which without their divine pendancy would be empty and unenforce-able. Our national mottoes and hymns of state are usually divine invocations. Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now silent deities taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.

302

Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind. Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action. But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? — Psalm 42

301

Groups of bicameral men certainly persisted until the downfall of the Judean monarchy, but whether in association with other tribes or with any organization to their hallucinated voices in the form of gods, we don't know. They are often referred to as the 'sons of nabiim,' indicating that there was probably a strong genetic basis for this type of remaining bicamerality. It is, I think, the same genetic basis that remains with us as part of the etiology of schizophrenia.

277

Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do.

249

temporal development of the preconscious hypostases can be roughly divided into four phases: Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms referred to simple external observations. Phase I I : Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations. Phase I I I : Subjective: W h e n these terms refer to processes that we would call mental; they have moved from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur. Phase I V : Synthetic: W h e n the various hypostases unite into one conscious self capable of introspection. The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four separate phases is to call your attention to the important psychological differences of transition between these phases. The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the beginning of the breakdown period. It comes from the absence or the inappropriateness of gods and their hallucinated directions. The buildup of stress for want of adequate divine decisions increases the psychological concomitants of such stress until they are labeled with terms that previously applied to only external perception. The transition from Phase II to Phase III is a much more 2 Professor A. D. H. Adkins has made this drawing-together of the various mind-words into one the theme of his book From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). I N T E L L E C T U A L C O N S C I O U S N E S S O F G R E E C E 261 complicated matter. And much more interesting. It is due to the paraphrand generator of metaphor described in 1.2. In that chapter, I outlined the four-part process of metaphor, how we begin with a less-known term called a metaphrand which is to be described, and then describe it by applying to it a better-known metaphier which is similar to it in some way. Usually there are simple associations of the metaphier which I have called paraphiers, which then project back as associates of the original metaphrand, these new associates being called paraphrands. Such paraphrands are generative in a sense that they are new in their association with the metaphrand. And this is how we are able to generate the kind of 'space' which we introspect upon and which is the necessary substrate of consciousness. This is really quite simple as we shall see shortly. And, finally, the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also. I suggest that as the subjective Phase III meanings of thumos, phrenes, et al. become established, their original anatomical bases in different internal sensations wither away, leaving them to become confused and to join together on the basis of their shared metaphiers, e.g., as 'containers' or 'persons.' But this synthetic unity of consciousness may also have been helped by what can be called the laicization of attention and its consequent recognition of individual differences in the seventh century B.C., a process which resulted in a new concept of self.

233

Extispicy, as divining from the exta of sacrificed animals is called, becomes the most important type of induced analog augury during the first millennium B.C. The idea of sacrifice itself, of course, originated in the feeding of the hallucinogenic idols as we saw in II.2. With the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the idols lost their hallucinogenic properties and became mere statues, but the feeding ceremonies now addressed to absent gods remained in the various ceremonies as sacrifices. It is thus not surprising that animals rather than oil, wax, smoke, etc., became the more important media of communication with the gods. Extispicy differs from other methods in that the metaphrand is explicitly not the speech or actions of gods, but their writing. The baru first addressed the gods Shamash and Adad with requests that they 'write' their message upon the entrails of the animal,22 or occasionally whispered this request into its ears before it was killed. He then investigated in traditional sequence the animal's organs — windpipe, lungs, liver, gall bladder, how the coils of the intestines were arranged — looking for deviations from the normal state, shape, and coloring. Any atrophy, hypertrophy, displacement, special markings, or other abnormalities, particularly of the liver, was a divine message metaphorically related to divine action. The corpus of texts dealing with extispicy outnum-bers all other kinds of augury texts and deserves much more careful study. From its earliest and very cursory mention in the second millennium, to the extensive collections of the Seleucid period around 250 B.C., the history and local development of extispicy as a means of exopsychic thought is an area where the tablets are simply awaiting the ordering of proper research. Of particular interest is that in the late period the markings and 22 See J. Nougayrol 'Presages medicaux de Tharuspicine babylonierine,' Semittca, 1956, 6, 5-14. 244 The Witness of History discolorations are described in an arcane technical terminology similar to what occurred among medieval alchemists.23 Parts of the exta of the sacrificed animal are referred to as 'door of the palace,' 'path,' 'yoke,' and 'embankment' and symbolize these locations and objects, creating a metaphor world from which to read out what to do.

231

the throwing of lots, like consciousness itself, has metaphor as its basis. In the language of I.2, the unexpressed commands of the gods compose the metaphrand which is to be lexically widened, and the metaphier is the pair or assembly of lots, be they sticks, beans, or stones. The paraphiers are the distinguishing marks or words on the lots which then project back into the metaphrand as the command of the particular god invoked. What is important here is to understand provoked divination such as sortilege as involving the same kind of generative processes that develop consciousness, but in an exopsychic nonsubjective manner.

230

Sortilege or the casting of lots differs from omens in that it is active and designed to provoke the gods' answers to specific questions in novel situations. It consisted of throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans upon the ground, or picking one out of a group held in a bowl, or tossing such markers in the lap of a tunic until one fell out. Sometimes it was to answer yes or no, at other 16 See J. J. Finkelstein, uMesopotamian historiography,' Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1963, pp. 461-472. 17 See A. Leo Oppenheim, 'Mantic dreams in the Ancient Near East,' in G. E. von Grunbaum and Roger Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 341-350. 2 4 0 The Witness of History times to choose one out of a group of men, plots, or alternatives. But this simplicity — even triviality to us — should not blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as well as appreciating its remarkable historical importance. We are so used to the huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all of them vestiges of this ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically. It is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. Therefore, the discovery (how odd to think of it as a discovery!) of deciding an issue by throwing sticks or beans on the ground was an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind. For, because there was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined.

227

The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs. Since omens are really a particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture per se. Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times. But they had little importance. Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever. While the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second millennium B.C. that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable. By the first millennium B.C., huge collections of them are made. In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial omens dealing with everyday life: If a town is set on a hill, it will not be good for the dweller within that town. If black ants are seen on the foundations which have been laid, that house will get built; the owner of that house will live to grow old. If a horse enters a man's house, and bites either an ass or a man, the owner of the house will die and his household will be scattered. If a fox runs into the public square, that town will be devastated. If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard and kills it, he will prevail over his adversary. And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous age would have been under the guidance of gods. They can be construed as a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what consciousness does in a more complex way.

217

The same dominant theme of lost gods cries out to us from the tablets known as The Babylonian Theodicy.2 This dialogue be-2 A fascinating problem is why the reference to gods at this time becomes plural even when it takes a singular verb. This occurs in contexts which in previous literature would have meant it was the personal god. This occurs in both the Ludlul, A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 227 tween a sufferer and his advising friend is of an obviously later date, perhaps 900 B.C., but wails with the same pleas. Why have the gods left us? And since they control everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us? The poem also shimmers with a new sense of an individual or what we would call an analog self denoting a new consciousness. It ends with the cry which has echoed through all later history: May the gods who have thrown me off give help, May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy. From here to the psalms of the Old Testament is no great journey. There is no trace whatever of such concerns in any literature previous to the texts I am describing here. The consequences of the disappearance of auditory hallucinations from human mentality are profound and widespread, and occur on many different levels. One thing is the confusion of authority itself. What is authority? Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure. They turn to omens and divination, which we shall take up shortly. And as I have mentioned earlier, cruelty and oppression become the ways in which a ruler imposes his rule upon his subjects in the absence of auditory hallucinations. Even the king’s own authority in the absence of gods becomes questionable. Rebellion in the modern sense becomes possible.

216

My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. T h e good angel who walked beside me has departed. This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The speaker is one Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan (as we are told in the third tablet), a feudal lord possibly under Tukulti. He goes on to describe how, with the departure of his gods, his king becomes irreconciliably angry at him, how his feudal position of ruling a 226 The Witness of History city is taken away, how he thus becomes a social outcast. The second tablet describes how, in this godless state, he is the target of all disease and misfortune. Why have the gods left him? And he catalogs the prostrations, the prayers, and the sacrifices which have not brought them back. Priests and omen-readers are consulted, but still My god has not come to the rescue in taking me by the hand, Nor has my goddess shown pity on me by going at my side. In the third tablet, he realizes that it is the almighty Marduk who is behind all that is happening to him. In dreams, the angels of Marduk appear to him in bicameral fashion, and speak messages of consolation and promises of prosperity from Marduk himself. At this assurance, Shubshi is then delivered from his toils and illnesses and goes to the temple of Marduk to give thanks to the great god who 'made the wind bear away my offenses.' The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time. Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god. These aspects of present-day religion find an explanation in the theory of the bicameral mind and its breakdown during this period. The world had long known rules and dues. They were divinely ordained and humanly obeyed. But the idea of right and wrong, the idea of a good man and of redemption from sin and divine forgiveness only begin in this uneasy questioning of why the hallucinated guidances can no longer be heard.

248

Let us examine more closely what would have happened at the beginning of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. In I.4, we found that the physiological cuing of an hallucinated voice, whether in a bicameral man or in a contemporary schizophrenic, is the stress of some decision or conflict. Now, as the voices of gods become more inadequate and suppressed during this social chaos, we may suppose that the amount of that stress necessary to occasion an hallucinated voice would be raised. It is quite likely, then, that as the bicameral organization of mind began to diminish, the decision-stress in novel situations would be much greater than previously, and both the degree and duration of that stress would have to become progressively more intense before the hallucination of a god would occur. And such increased stress would be accompanied by a variety of physiological concomitants, vascular changes resulting in burning sensations, abrupt changes in breathing, a pounding or fluttering heart, etc., responses which in the Iliad are called thumos, phrenes and kradie respectively. And this is what these words mean, not mind or anything like it. As the gods are heard progressively less and less, these internal response-stimuli of progressively greater stress are associated more and more with men's subsequent actions, whatever they may be, even coming to take on the godlike function of seeming to initiate action themselves.

213

In summary, I have sketched out several factors at work in the great transilience from the bicameral mind to consciousness: (1) the weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing; (2) the inherent fragility of hallucinatory control; (3) the unwork-ableness of gods in the chaos of historical upheaval; (4) the positing of internal cause in the observation of difference in others; (5) the acquisition of narratization from epics; (6) the survival value of deceit; and (7) a modicum of natural selection.

220

I wish to be very clear that consciousness is chiefly a cultural introduction, learned on the basis of language and taught to others, rather than any biological necessity. But that it had and still has a survival value suggests that the change to consciousness may have been assisted by a certain amount of natural selection. It is impossible to calculate what percentage of the civilized world died in these terrible centuries toward the end of the second millennium B.C. I suspect it was enormous. And death would come soonest to those who impulsively lived by their unconscious habits or who could not resist the commandments of their gods to smite whatever strangers interfered with them. It is thus possible that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations. And again we may appeal to the principle of Baldwinian evolution as we did in our discussion of language. Consciousness must be learned by each new generation, and those biologically most able to learn it would be those most likely to survive. There is even Biblical evidence, as we shall see in a future chapter, that children obdurately bicameral were simply killed.

209

The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog space of consciousness. After the breakdown of authority and of the gods, we can scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy that would feature human behavior during the disorder we have described. We should remember that in the bicameral age men belonging to the same city-god were more or less of similar opinion and action. But in the forced violent intermingling of peoples from different nations, different gods, the observation that strangers, even though looking like oneself, spoke differently, had opposite opinions, and behaved differently might lead to the supposition of something inside of them that was different. Indeed, this latter opinion has come down to us in the traditions of philosophy, namely, that thoughts, opinions, and delusions are subjective phenomena inside a person because there is no room for them in the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ world. It is thus a possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers, as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior. In other words, the tradition in philosophy that phrases the problem as the logic of inferring other minds from one’s own has it the wrong way around. We may first unconsciously (sic) suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our own by generalization.

196

The Causes of Consciousness AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.” This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance. But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high ; most of us need to be over our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for genetical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person. During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination. It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to 94 The Mind of Man cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers.11 Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not.12 It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as they are often called, do not occur.13

It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around. And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgment are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding. Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallunications are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be oever our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of a breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for gentical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.\n\n During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary becuase of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination.\n\n It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers*. Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not*. It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as there are often called, do not occur*.'\n\n *W.L. Sawrey and J.D. Weisz, 'An experimental method of producing gastic ulcers,' Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1956, 49:269-270.\n **J.V. Brady, R.W. Porter, D.G. Conrad, and J.W. Mason, 'Avoidance behavior and the development of gastro-duodenal ulcers,' Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1958, I:69-72.\n **J.M. Weiss, 'Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease,' Scientific American, 1972, 226:106.\n\n\n

It is not that the vague general ideas of a psychological causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around. And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgment are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

Greek gods cannot create anything out of nothing, unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis. In the relationship between the god and the hero in their dialectic, there are the same courtesies, emotions, persuasions as might occur between two people. The Greek god never steps forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be. He simply leads, advises, and orders. Nor does the god occasion humility or even love, and little gratitude. Indeed, I suggest that the god-hero relationship was - by being its progenitor - similar to the referent of the ego-superego relationship of Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead. The strongest emotion which the hero feels toward a god is amazement or wonder, the kind of emotion that we feel when the solution of a particularly difficult problem suddenly pops into our heads, or in the cry of eureka! from Archimedes in his bath.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

265

this is the burden of the “primal scene”: not that it awakens unbearable sexual desires in the child or aggressive hate and jealousy toward the father, but rather that it thoroughly confuses him about the nature of man. Romm observed on her patient: His distrust of everyone he attributed mostly to the disappointment consequent to his discovery of the sexual relationship between his parents. The mother, who was supposed to be an angel, turned out to be human and carnal.26 This is perfect: how can you trust people who represent the priority of the cultural code of morality, the “angelic” transcendence of the decay of the body, and yet who cast it all aside in their most intimate relations? The parents are the gods who set the standards for one’s highest victory; and the more unambiguously they themselves embody it, the more secure is the child’s budding identity.

244

I think if we push the analysis to its ultimate point we have to say that each earthly father accuses us of our impotence if we become truly creative personalities; they remind us that we are born of men and not gods. No living person can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world.

212

When we say neurosis represents the truth of life we again mean that life is an overwhelming problem for an animal free of instinct. The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would: by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness both to the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action. We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction—in a real sense, man’s natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it “partialization” and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it. What we call the well-adjusted man has just this capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action.2 I have used the term “fetishization,” which is exactly the same idea: the “normal” man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren’t built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses.

199

This is the reason for so much bitterness, shortness of temper and recrimination in our daily family lives. We get back a reflection from our loved objects that is less than the grandeur and perfection that we need to nourish ourselves. We feel diminished by their human shortcomings. Our interiors feel empty or anguished, our lives valueless, when we see the inevitable pettinesses of the world expressed through the human beings in it. For this reason, too, we often attack loved ones and try to bring them down to size. We see that our gods have clay feet, and so we must hack away at them in order to save ourselves, to deflate the unreal over-investment that we have made in them in order to secure our own apotheosis. In this sense, the deflation of the over-invested partner, parent, or friend is a creative act that is necessary to correct the lie that we have been living, to reaffirm our own inner freedom of growth that transcends the particular object and is not bound to it. But not everybody can do this because many of us need the lie in order to live. We may have no other God and we may prefer to deflate ourselves in order to keep the relationship, even though we glimpse the impossibility of it and the slavishness to which it reduces us.22 This is one direct explanation—as we shall see—of the phenomenon of depression.

167

Here was a group of young men and women who had identified with Charles Manson and who lived in masochistic submission to him. They gave him their total devotion and looked upon him as a human god of some kind. In fact he filled the description of Freud’s “primal father”: he was authoritarian, very demanding of his followers, and a great believer in discipline. His eyes were intense, and for those who came under his spell there is no doubt that he projected a hypnotic aura. He was a very self-assured figure. He even had his own “truth,” his megalomanic vision for taking over the world. To his followers his vision seemed like a heroic mission in which they were privileged to participate. He had convinced them that only by following out his plan could they be saved. The “family” was very close, sexual inhibitions were nonexistent, and members had free access to each other. They even used sex freely for the purpose of attracting outsiders into the family. It seems obvious from all this that Manson combined the “fascinating effect of the narcissistic personality” with the “infectiousness of the unconflicted personality.” Everyone could freely drop his repressions under Manson’s example and command, not only in sex but in murder. The members of the “family” didn’t seem to show any remorse, guilt, or shame for their crimes. People were astonished by this ostensible “lack of human feeling.” But from the dynamics that we have been surveying, we are faced with the even more astonishing conclusion that homicidal communities like the Manson “family” are not really devoid of basic humanness. What makes them so terrible is that they exaggerate the dispositions present in us all. Why should they feel guilt or remorse? The leader takes responsibility for the destructive act, and those who destroy on his command are no longer murderers, but “holy heroes.” They crave to serve in the powerful aura that he projects and to carry out the illusion that he provides them, an illusion that allows them to heroically transform the world. Under his hypnotic spell and with the full force of their own urges for heroic self-expansion, they need have no fear; they can kill with equanimity. In fact they seemed to feel that they were doing their victims “a favor,” which seems to mean that they sanctified them by including them in their own “holy mission.” As we have learned from the anthropological literature, the victim who is sacrificed becomes a holy offering to the gods, to nature, or to fate. The community gets more life by means of the victim’s death, and so the victim has the privilege of serving the world in the highest possible way by means of his own sacrificial death. One direct way, then, of understanding homicidal communities like the Manson family is to view them as magical transformations, wherein passive and empty people, torn with conflicts and guilt, earn their cheap heroism, really feeling that they can control fate and influence life and death. “Cheap” because not in their command, not with their own daring, and not in the grip of their own fears: everything is done with the leader’s image stamped on their psyche.

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

175

But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast to the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a 'Thou' (to use Martin Buber's term), but a thing, an 'It.' I have chosen a few characteristic passages that we shall all -- I am sure -- readily recognize, and which, rehearsed in the present context, may help us to realize that we have been bred to one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time. First, then, as follows: \n\n>When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you utterly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth [Deuteronomy 7:1-6]. \n\n>When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded [Deuteronomy 20:10-18]. \n\n> And when the Lord your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage [Deuteronomy 6:10-12]. \n\nAnd when, in reading, we move on from Deuteronomy to the greatest war book of all, of Joshua, there is -- most famous of all -- the legend of the fall of Jericho. The trumpets blew, the walls fell down. 'And then,' as we read, 'they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword. . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord' (Joshua 6:21, 24). The next city was Ai. 'And Israel smote them, until there was left none that survived or escaped. . . And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all of the people of Ai' (Joshua 8:22, 25). 'And so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and the lowland and the slopes, and their kings. He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded' (Joshua 10:40). \n\nAnd that, the very same Lord God so frequently cited by our doves of peace today as having taught, 'Thou shall not kill!

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let me recount now a really marvelous Hindu legend to this point, from the infinitely rich mythology of the god Shiva and his glorious world-goddess Parvati. The occasion was of a time when there came before this great divinity an audacious demon who had just overthrown the ruling gods of the world and now came to confront the highest of all with a non-negotiable demand, namely, that the god should hand over his goddess to the demon. Well, what Shiva did in reply was simply to open that mystic third eye in the middle of his forehead, and paff! a lightning bolt hit the earth, and there was suddenly there a second demon, even larger than the first. He was a great lean thing with a lionlike head, hair waving to the quarters of the world, and his nature was sheer hunger. He had been brought into being to eat up the first, and was clearly fit to do so. The first thought: 'So what do I do now?' and with a very fortunate decision threw himself upon Shiva's mercy. Now it is a well-known theological rule that when you throw yourself on a god's mercy the god cannot refuse to protect you; and so Shiva had now to guard and protect the first demon from the second. Which left the second, however, without meat to quell his hunger and in anguish he asked Shiva, 'Whom, then, do I eat?' to which the god replied, 'Well, let's see: why not eat yourself?' And with that, no sooner said than begun. Commencing with his feet, teeth chopping away, that grim phenomenon came right on up the line, through his own belly, on up through his chest and neck, until all that remained was a face. And the god, thereupon, was enchanted. For here at last was a perfect image of the monstrous thing that is life, which lives on itself. And to that sunlike mask, which was now all that was left of that lionlike vision of hunger, Shiva said, exulting, 'I shall call you 'Face of Glory,' Kirttimukha, and you shall shine above the doors to all my temples. No one who refuses to honor and worship you will come ever to knowledge of me.'10 The obvious lesson of all of which is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think -- and their name is legion -- that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think -- as do many -- 'Let me first correct society, then get around to myself' are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God's peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

...let me conclude with the fragment of a Hindu myth that to me seems to have captured in a particularly apt image the whole sense of such a movement as we today are all facing at this critical juncture of our general human history. It tells of a time at the very start of the history of the universe when the gods and their chief enemies, the anti-gods, were engaged in one of their eternal wars. They decided this time to conclude a truce and in cooperation to churn the Milky Ocean -- the Universal Sea -- for its butter of immortality. They took for their churning-spindle the Cosmic Mountain (the Vedic counterpart of Dante's Mountain of Purgatory), and for a twirling-cord they wrapped the Cosmic Serpent around it. Then, with the gods all pulling at the head end and the anti-gods at the tail, they caused that Cosmic Mountain to whirl. And they had been churning thus for a thousand years when a great black cloud of absolutely poisonous smoke came up out of the waters, and the churning had to stop. They had broken through to an unprecedented source of power, and what they were experiencing first were its negative, lethal effects. If the work were to continue, some one of them was going to have to swallow and absorb that poisonous cloud, and, as all knew, there was but one who would be capable of such an act; namely, the archetypal god of yoga, Shiva, a frightening daemonic figure. He just took that entire poison cloud into his begging bowl and at one gulp drank it down, holding it by yoga at the level of his throat, where it turned the whole throat blue; and he has been known as Blue Throat, Nilakantha, ever since. Then, when that wonderful deed had been accomplished, all the other gods and the anti-gods returned to their common labor. And they churned and they churned and they went right on tirelessly churning, until lo! a number of wonderful benefits began coming up out of the Cosmic Sea: the moon, the sun, an elephant with eight trunks came up, a glorious steed, certain medicines, and yes, at last! a great radiant vessel filled with the ambrosial butter. This old Indian myth I offer as a parable for our world today, as an exhortation to press on with the work, beyond fear.

The Fourth Way

Author: P.D. Ouspensky

Publisher: Vintage (1971)

216

If we take the Ray of Creation, we must remember that the worlds are connected with one another and affect one another in accordance with the Law of Three. In other words, the first three worlds, taken together, produce the phenomenon which influences the following worlds, and so on. In the first three worlds the Absolute is the conductor of the active force. World 3 the conductor of the passive force, and World 6 the conductor of the neutralizing force. In other words, the Absolute is Carbon, World 3 is Oxygen and World 6 is Nitrogen. If we place the three forces in sequence, according to the order in which they unite, we will get the order 1, 2, 3; but the matters serving as conductors of these forces will, according to their density, stand in the order: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. So when the triad begins to form, they stand in the order 1, 3, 2. When matters stand in this order, phenomena are produced. But for subsequent creation, for the formation of the next triad, nitrogen must, as it were, return once more to the third place, to the order 1, 2, 3, and in this way become carbon of the next triad, for the second triad comes from the neutralizing force of the first triad becoming active. This change of place of matters in the triad is a kind of cosmic dance which produces action. Let us now try to see how forces emerging from the Absolute in order to manifest themselves in World 3 must first pass through World 6. An analogy shows us quite plainly the necessity of this direction of force. As I said, man's will can influence a fragment of tissue in certain parts of his body. But a tissue is composed of cells. In order to affect the tissue man's will must first influence the cells composing the given fragment of tissue. The tissue is a different world from cells, but at the same time tissues do not exist apart from cells for they are composed of cells. World 3 is a separate world from World 6, and at the same time it is composed of Worlds 6, that is of worlds similar to our Milky Way. So in order to influence a part of World 3 (All Worlds) the Absolute must first influence a certain number of Worlds (All Suns) of which World 3 is composed. Thus, in the passage of forces. Worlds 1, 3, 6 stand, at first, in the order 1, 3, 6, then in the order 1, 6, 3, and then, for a further passage of forces, they must again resume the order 1, 3, 6. In the next triad the Milky Way is carbon, the sun oxygen and the planets nitrogen. Since nitrogen stands between carbon and oxygen, the force coming from the Milky Way, that is, from the stars, must first pass through the planets in order to reach the sun. This may look strange at the first glance, but if we visualize the structure of the solar system, we shall see quite clearly that it cannot be otherwise. No analogies are needed here. Imagine the sun surrounded by planets moving round it; in the distance, some group of stars from which influences go forth towards the sun. But the sun does not stand in one place; we know that it moves; the planets, rotating round it, move with it in space, forming, each of them by its motion, a spiral round the central rod of the sun, so that this central rod is entirely enclosed in the spirals of planets and no influence can reach it without first passing through the world of planets, that is, penetrating through the rings of the spirals. Further, planets becoming carbon of the third triad must find corresponding oxygen and nitrogen. In our Ray of Creation, oxygen is earth. But there is no nitrogen in the astronomical Ray of Creation. Therefore the planets cannot pass their influence direct to earth, and in order to make the passage of forces possible between the planets and the earth, a special contrivance was created which represents the sensitive organ of the earth—organic life on earth. Organic life on earth is nitrogen of the third triad. Forces coming from the planets fall first on organic life, which receives them and passes them on to the earth. If we remember the extremely complicated organization of the ends of sensitive nerves in our own organism, for instance the ends of the nerves of taste and smell, we shall not think it strange that man is defined as a sensitive nerve-end of the earth. Of course, a meadow covered with grass diners in many ways from man—it receives only some planetary influences, and very few of these. Man receives much more complex influences. But people differ greatly from one another in this respect. The majority of men are important only in the mass, and only the mass receives one or another influence. Others are capable of receiving influences individually— influences which masses cannot receive, for they are sensitive only to coarse influences. Organic life on earth, playing the role of nitrogen of the third triad, is by this very fact carbon of the fourth triad in the Ray. In other words, it conducts the active force which meets with corresponding oxygen and nitrogen. Earth is oxygen and moon is nitrogen through which the influences of organic life pass to earth. Now, if we take the Ray of Creation divided into four triads and bear in mind that the sum total of each triad is a definite hydrogen, we shall get four hydrogens or four definite densities of matter. These four hydrogens can be taken as corresponding to the four fundamental points of the universe. The first corresponds to the Absolute, the second to the sun, the third to the earth and the fourth to the moon. I said that the Ray of Creation can be taken as an octave. After re, represented by the moon, the octave has its do, which is also the Absolute. So there are, as it were, two Absolutes: one begins the Ray, the other ends it. One Absolute is All, the other is Nothing. But there can be no two Absolutes, for, by its very nature, the Absolute is one. Therefore All includes Nothing and Nothing includes All. Our dualistically constructed mind cannot take in the identity of opposites. We divide everything, even the Absolute. In reality, what we call the antithesis of opposites exists only in our conception, in our subjective perception of the world. But, even when we understand this, we are unable to express this understanding in words; our language has no words which can include simultaneously thesis and antithesis. Our mind cannot grasp them as one idea, just as it cannot grasp the images of some Hindu gods, combining complete opposites in themselves. Now we shall examine the passage of radiations between the four fundamental points of the cosmic octave. We take radiations between each two points in the form of an octave and thus obtain three octaves; Absolute—Sun; Sun—Earth; Earth—Moon. It should be noted that, although there are six intervals, only three of them require to be filled from without. The intervals between do and si are filled by the Will of the Absolute, by the influence of the sun's mass on the radiations passing through it, and by the influence of the mass of the earth on the radiations passing through it. All the hydrogens in this Table represent matters with which we have to do in studying man. It has been scaled down twice in order to include only the hydrogens that have relation to man, both to his outer life and the inner life of his organism.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

791

APPENDIX LAMED: THE TACTICS OF MAGICK \r\n \r\n>The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in The Hunting of the Snark: 'What I tell you three times is true.' \r\n>—NORBERT WEINER, Cybernetics \r\n \r\nThe most important idea in the Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage is the simple-looking formula 'Invoke often.' \r\n\r\nThe most successful form of treatment for so-called mental disorders, the Behavior Therapy of Pavlov, Skinner, Wolpe, et al., could well be summarized in two similar words: 'Reinforce often.' ('Reinforcement,' for all practical purposes, means the same as the layman's term 'reward.' The essence of Behavior Therapy is rewarding desired behavior; the behavior 'as if by magic' begins to occur more and more often as the rewards continue.) Advertising, as everybody knows, is based on the axiom 'Repeat often.' Those who think they are 'materialists' and think that 'materialism' requires them to deny all facts which do not square with their definition of 'matter' are loath to admit the well-documented and extensive list of individuals who have been cured of serious maladies by that very vulgar and absurd form of magick known as Christian Science. Nonetheless, the reader who wants to understand this classic work of immortal literature will have to analyze its deepest meanings, guided by an awareness that there is no essential difference between magick, Behavior Therapy, advertising, and Christian Science. All of them can be condensed into Abra-Melin's simple 'Invoke often.' Reality, as Simon Moon says, is thermoplastic, not thermosetting. It is not quite Silly-Putty, as Mr. Paul Krassner once claimed, but is much closer to Silly-Putty than we generally realize. \r\n\r\nIf you are told often enough that 'Budweiser is the king of beers,' Budweiser will eventually taste somewhat better— perhaps a great deal better— than it tasted before this magick spell was cast. If a behavior therapist in the pay of the communists rewards you every time you repeat a communist slogan, you will repeat it more often, and begin to slide imperceptibly toward the same kind of belief that Christian Scientists have for their mantras. And if a Christian Scientist tells himself every day that his ulcer is going away, the ulcer will disappear more rapidly than it would have had he not subjected himself to this homemade advertising campaign. Finally, if a magician invokes the Great God Pan often enough, the Great God Pan will appear just as certainly as heterosexual behavior appears in homosexuals who are being handled (or manhandled) by Behavior Therapy. The opposite and reciprocal of 'Invoke often' is 'Banish often.' The magician wishing for a manifestation of Pan will not only invoke Pan directly and verbally, create Panlike conditions in his temple, reinforce Pan associations in every gesture and every article of furniture, use the colors and perfumes associated with Pan, etc.; he will also banish other gods verbally, banish them by removing their associated furnitures and colors and perfumes, and banish them in every other way. The Behavior Therapist calls this 'negative reinforcement,' and in treating a patient who is afraid of elevators he will not only reinforce (reward) every instance in which the patient rides an elevator without terror, but will also negatively reinforce (punish) each indication of terror shown by the patient. The Christian Scientist, of course, uses a mantra or spell which both reinforces health and negatively reinforces (banishes) illness.* Similarly, a commercial not only motivates the listener toward the sponsor's product but discourages interest in all 'false gods'- by subsuming them under the rubric of the despised and contemptible Brand X. * The basic Christian Science mantra, known as 'The Scientific Statement of Being,' no less, is as follows: 'There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is all in all, Spirit is immortal truth: matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material, he is spiritual.' The fact that these statements are, in terms of the scientific criteria, 'meaningless,' 'non-operational,' and 'footless' is actually totally irrelevant. They work. Try them and see. As Aleister Crowley, no friend of Mrs. Eddy's, wrote, 'Enough of Because! May he be damned for a dog!' Hypnotism, debate, and countless other games have the same mechanism: Invoke often and Banish often. \r\n\r\nThe reader who seeks a deeper understanding of this argument can obtain it by putting these principles to the test. If you are afraid that you might, in this Christian environment, fall into taking the Christian Science mantra too seriously, try instead the following simple experiment. For forty days and forty nights, begin each day by invoking and praising the world in itself as an expression of the Egyptian deities. Recite at dawn: I bless Ra, the fierce sun burning bright, I bless Isis-Luna in the night, I bless the air, the Horus-hawk, I bless the earth on which I walk. Repeat at moonrise. Continue for the full forty days and forty nights. We say without any reservations that, at a minimum, you will feel happier and more at home in this part of the galaxy (and will also understand better Uncle John Feather's attitude toward our planet); at maximum, you may find rewards beyond your expectations, and will be converted to using this mantra for the rest of your life. (If the results are exceptionally good, you just might start believing in ancient Egyptian gods.) \r\n\r\nA selection of magick techniques which will offend the reason of no materialist can be found in Laura Archera Huxley's You Are Not the Target (a powerful mantra, the title!), in Gestalt Therapy, by Peris, Heferline, and Goodman, and in Mind Games, by Masters and Houston. All this, of course, is programming your own trip by manipulating appropriate clusters of word, sound, image, and emotional (prajna) energy. The aspect of magick which puzzles, perplexes, and provokes the modern mentality is that in which the operator programs somebody else's trip, acting at a distance. It is incredible and insulting, to this type of person, if one asserts that our Mr. Nkrumah Fubar could program a headache for the President of the United States. He might grant that such manipulating of energy is possible if the President was told about Mr. Fubar's spells, but he will not accept that it works just as well when the subject has no conscious knowledge of the curse. The magical theory that 5 = 6 has no conviction for such a skeptic, and magicians have not yet proposed a better theory. The materialist then asserts that all cases where magic did appear to work under this handicap are illusions, delusions, hallucinations, 'coincidences,'* misapprehensions, 'luck,' accident, or downright hoax. * Look up the etymology of that word some time and see if it means anything. He does not seem to realize that asserting this is equivalent to asserting that reality is, after all, thermoplastic— for he is admitting that many people live in a different reality than his own. Rather than leave him to grapple as best he can with this self-contradiction, we suggest that he consult Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by Ostrander and Schroder—especially Chapter 11, 'From Animals to Cybernetics: The Search for a Theory of Psi.' He might realize that when 'matter' is fully understood, there is nothing a materialist need reject in magick action at a distance, which has been well explored by scientists committed to the rigid Marxist form of dialectical materialism. \r\n\r\nThose who have kept alive the ancient traditions of magick, such as the Ordo Templi Orientalis, will realize that the essential secret is sexual (as Saul tries to explain in the Sixth Trip) and that more light can be found in the writings of Wilhelm Reich, M. D., than in the current Soviet research. But Dr. Reich was jailed as a quack by the U.S. Government, and we would not ask our readers to consider the possibility that the U.S. Government could ever be Wrong about anything. Any psychoanalyst will guess at once the most probable symbolic meanings of the Rose and the Cross; but no psychologist engaged in psi research has applied this key to the deciphering of traditional magic texts. The earliest reference to freemasonry in English occurs in Andersen's 'Muses Threnody,' 1638: \r\n\r\n>For we be brethren of the Rosey Cross \r\n>We have the Mason Word and second sight \r\n\r\nbut no parapsychologist has followed up the obvious clue contained in this conjunction of the vaginal rose, the phallic cross, the word of invocation, and the phenomenon of thought projection. That the taboos against sexuality are still latent in our culture explains part of this blindness; fear of opening the door to the most insidious and subtle forms of paranoia is another part. (If the magick can work at a distance, the repressed thought goes, which of its is safe?) A close and objective study of the anti-LSD hysteria in America will shed further light on the mechanisms of avoidance here discussed. Of course, there are further offenses and affronts to the rationalist in the deeper study of magick. We all know, for instance, that words are only arbitrary conventions with no intrinsic connection to the things they symbolize, yet magick involves the use of words in a manner that seems to imply that some such connection, or even identity, actually exists. The reader might analyze some powerful bits of language not generally considered magical, and he will find something of the key. For instance, the 2 + 3 pattern in 'Hail Eris'/'All hail Discordia' is not unlike the 2 + 3 in 'Holy Mary, Mother of God,' or that in the 'L.S./M.F.T.' which once sold many cartons of cigarettes to our parents; and the 2 + 3 in Crowley's 'Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!' is a relative of these. Thus, when a magician says that you must shout 'Abrahadabra,' and no other word, at the most intensely emotional moment in an invocation, he exaggerates; you may substitute other words; but you will abort the result if you depart too far from the five-beat pattern of 'Abrahadabra.' A glance at the end of Appendix Beth will save the reader from misunderstanding the true tenor of these remarks. \r\n\r\nBut this brings us to the magical theory of reality. Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji (Aleister Crowley again, under another pen-name) writes in Yoga for Yahoos: \r\n\r\n>Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, color, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese . . . What then are these qualities of which we are so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and seen, of subject and object... \r\n\r\nThere is nothing here with which a modern physicist could quarrel; and this is the magical theory of the universe. The magician assumes that sensed reality - the panorama of impressions monitored by the senses and collated by the brain— is radically different from so-called objective reality.¹ About the latter 'reality' we can only form speculations or theories which, if we are very careful and subtle, will not contradict either logic or the reports of the senses. This lack of contradiction is rare; some conflicts between theory and logic, or between theory and sense-data, are not discovered for centuries (for example, the wandering of Mercury away from the Newtonian calculation of its orbit). And even when achieved, lack of contradiction is proof only that the theory is not totally false. It is never, in any case, proof that the theory is totally true— for an indefinite number of such theories can be constructed from the known data at any time. For instance, the geometries of Euclid, of Gauss and Reimann, of Lobachevski, and of Fuller all work well enough on the surface of the earth, and it not yet clear whether the Gauss-Reimann or the Fuller system works better in interstellar space. \r\n\r\nIf we have this much freedom in choosing our theories about 'objective reality,' we have even more liberty in deciphering the 'given' or transactional sensed reality. The ordinary person senses as he or she has been taught to sense —that is, as they have been programmed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation— which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis, as shown above— he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.^{2\r\n\r\nThis} book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes— that is, part of Operation Mindfuck— has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months (or perhaps years). When that understanding is achieved, the real import of this appendix (and of the equation 5 = 6) will be clearer. Officials at Harvard thought Dr. Timothy Leary was joking when he warned that students should not be allowed to indiscriminately remove dangerous, habit-forming books from the library unless each student proves a definite need for each volume. (For instance, you have lost track of Joe Malik's mysterious dogs by now.) It is strange that one can make the clearest possible statements and yet be understood by many to have said the opposite. \r\n\r\nThe Rite of Shiva, as performed by Joe Malik during the SSS Black Mass, contains the central secret of all magick, very explicitly, yet most people can reread that section a dozen, or a hundred times, and never understand what the secret is. For instance, Miss Portinari was a typical Catholic girl in every way— except for an unusual tendency to take Catholicism seriously— until she began menstruating and performing spiritual meditations every day.³ One morning, during her meditation period, she visualized the Sacred Heart of Jesus with unusual clarity; immediately another image, distinctly shocking to her, came to mind with equal vividness. She recounted this experience to her confessor the next Saturday, and he warned her, gravely, that meditation was not healthy for a young girl, unless she intended to take the oath of seclusion and enter a convent. She had no intention of doing that, but rebelliously (and guiltily) continued her meditations anyway. The disturbing second image persisted whenever she thought of the Sacred Heart; she began to suspect that this was sent by the Devil to distract her from meditation. \r\n\r\nOne weekend, when she was home from convent school on vacation, her parents decided she was the right age to be introduced to Roman society. (Actually, they, like most well-off Italian families, had already chosen which daughter would be given to the church— and it wasn't her. Hence, this early introduction to la dolce vita.) One of the outstanding ornaments of Rome at that time was the 'eccentric international businessman' Mr. Hagbard Celine, and he was at the party to which Miss Portinari was taken that evening. It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening rapt-ly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying—he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately. \r\n' 'Son, son,' Hagbbard recited, ' 'with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?' Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable. \r\n'And the boy replied,' Hagbard went on, ' 'I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.' ' There was a shocked silence. \r\n'The case is quite typical,' Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. 'Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas.' \r\n'I don't see ...' a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. 'Oh,' he said, 'was the boy an American?' \r\nMiss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass. A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke. \r\n'The moon has a fat jaw tonight,' he said in Italian. 'Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth.' \r\n'Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?' she asked coolly. 'That sounds as if it might be American verse.' \r\nHe laughed— a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. 'Quite so,' he said. 'I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America's major poet of this century. How old are you?' he asked suddenly. \r\n'Almost sixteen,' she said fumbling the words. \r\n'Almost fifteen,' he corrected ungallantly. \r\n'If it's any affair of yours—' \r\n'It might be,' he replied easily. 'I need a girl your age for something I have in mind.' \r\n'I can imagine. Something foul.' He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. \r\n'Child,' he said, 'are you religious?' \r\n'I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned,' she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant. \r\n'At this point in history,' he said simply, 'it's the only thing that isn't old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind— you must be a Virgo.' \r\n'I am,' she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but very gently. He would know enough to do that.) 'But that is superstition, not religion.' \r\n'I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science.' He smiled. 'I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?' His persistence was maddening. \r\n'I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant,' she replied— immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism. \r\n'What symbol means the most to you?' he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap. \r\n'The cross,' she said quickly. She didn't want him to know the truth. \r\n'No.' He again corrected her ungallantly. 'The Sacred Heart.' \r\nThen she knew he was of Satan's party. \r\n'I must go,' she said. \r\n'Meditate further on the Sacred Heart,' he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist's (a cornball gimmick, he was thinking privately, but it might work). 'Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism — and the essential of all other religion.' \r\n'I think you are mad,' she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste. But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared—leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents— and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.⁴ \r\n\r\nThe importance of symbols— images— as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga— we reiterate—are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy. Thus, rationalists, who are all puritans, have never considered the fact that disbelief in magick is found only in puritanical societies. The reason for this is simple: Puritans are incapable of guessing what magick is essentially all about. It can even be surely ventured that only those who have experienced true love, in the classic Albigensian or troubadour sense of that expression, are equipped to understand even the most clear-cut exposition of the mysteries.⁵ \r\n\r\nThe eye in the triangle; for instance, is not primarily a symbol of the Christian Trinity, as the gullible assume— except insofar as the Christian Trinity is itself a visual (or verbal) elaboration on a much older meaning. Nor is this symbol representative of the Eye of Osiris or even of the Eye of Horus, as some have ventured; it is venerated, for instance, among the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam, who never heard of Osiris or Horus. The eye's meaning can be found quite simply by meditating on Tarot Trump XV, the Devil, which corresponds, on the Tree of Life, to the Hebrew letter ayin, the eye. The reader who realizes that 'The Devil' is only a late rendering of the Great God Pan has already solved the mystery of the eye, and the triangle has its usual meaning. The two together are the union of Yod, the father, with He, the Mother, as in Yod-He-Vau-He, the holy unspeakable name of God. Vau, the Holy Ghost, is the result of their union, and final He is the divine ecstasy which follows. One might even venture that one who contemplates this key to the identities of Pan, the Devil, the Great Father, and the Great Mother will eventually come to a new, more complete understanding of the Christian Trinity itself, and especially of its most mysterious member, Vau, the elusive Holy Ghost. \r\n\r\nThe pentagram comes in two forms but always represents the fullest extension of the human psyche— the male human psyche in particular. The pentagram with one horn exalted is, quite naturally, associated with the right-hand path; and the two-horned pentagram with the left-hand path. (The Knights Templar, very appropriately, inscribed the head of Baphomet, the goat-headed deity who was their equivalent of Pan or the Devil, within the left-handed pentagram in such wise that each 'horn' contained one of Baphomet's horns.) It is to be observed that the traditionally sinister⁷ left-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point upward, whereas the right-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point downward; this nicely illustrates the Law of Opposites.⁸ The pentagon in the Sacred Chao is tilted from the perpendicular so that it cannot be said to have any points directly upward or directly downward—or perhaps can be said to have 1 ½ points up and 1 ½ points down⁹ — thereby illustrating the Reconciliation of Opposites. All that can be said against the method of the left-hand pentagram, without prejudice, is that this form of the sacrament is always destructive of the Holy Spirit, in a certain sense. It should be remembered that the right-hand pentagram method is also destructive in most cases, especially by those practitioners so roundly condemned in Chapter 14 of Joyce's Ulysses— and this group is certainly the majority these days. In view of the ecological crisis, it might even be wise to encourage the left-hand method and discourage the right-hand method at this time, to balance the Sacred Numbers. \r\n\r\nVery few readers of the Golden Bough have pierced Sir Prof. Dr. Frazer's veil of euphemism and surmised the exact method used by Isis in restoring life to Osiris, although this is shown quite clearly in extant Egyptian frescoes. Those who are acquainted with this simple technique of resurrecting the dead (which is at least partially successful in all cases and totally successful in most) will have no trouble in skrying the esoteric connotations of the Sacred Chao— or of the Taoist yin-yang or the astrological sign of cancer. The method almost completely reverses that of the pentagrams, right or left, and it can even be said that in a certain sense it was not Osiris himself but his brother, Set, symbolically understood, who was the object of Isis's magical workings. In every case, without exception, a magical or mystical symbol always refers to one of the very few¹⁰ variations of the same, very special variety of human sacrifice: the 'one eye opening' or the 'one hand clapping'; and this sacrifice cannot be partial— it must culminate in death if it is to be efficacious. The literal-mindedness of the Saures, in the novel, caused them to become a menace to life on earth; the reader should bear this in mind. The sacrifice is not simple. It is a species of cowardice, epidemic in Anglo-Saxon nations for more than three centuries, which causes most who seek success in this field to stop short before the death of the victim. Anything less than death—that is, complete oblivion—simply will not work.¹¹ (One will find more clarity on this crucial point in the poetry of John Donne than in most treatises alleging to explain the secrets of magick.) \r\n\r\nThe symbolism of the swastika is quite adequately explained in Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is chiefly emblematic of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.¹² The Roman Catholic symbolism of the Sacred Heart is strikingly overt, especially to readers of Frazer and Payne-Knight. In essence, it is the same notion conveyed by the cartoonist's conventional rendering of Cupid shooting his arrow into a red pulsating heart. This is the basic meaning of the Dying God and the Resurrection. The identification of Christ with the pelican who stabs its own heart with its beak (to feed its young) is an analogous rendering of the same motif. We repeat that it was only because the Saure family so misread these simple symbols that they became cruel and sadistic. In essence, then, the basic symbols, of magic, mythology, and religion—whether Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, 'right-hand' or 'left-hand'—are so simple that only the pernicious habit of looking for alleged 'profundities' and 'mysteries' prevents people from automatically understanding them almost without thinking. The meaning of the hexagram— the female equivalent of the male pentagram— was explicated by Freud himself, but most students, convinced that the answer could not be so elementary and down-to-earth, continue to look into the clouds. \r\n\r\n¹ See the anthology Perception, edited by Robert Blake, Ph.D., and especially the chapter by psychologist Carl Rogers, which demonstrates that people's perceptions change while they are in psychotherapy. As William Blake noted, 'The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.' \r\n² Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously; see the paragraph about the cheese. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it. \r\n³ These two signs of growth often appear at the same time, being DNA-triggered openings of the fourth neural circuit. \r\n⁴ They were quite good friends, though, and he did fuck her occasionally. \r\n⁵ This book has stated it as clearly as possible in a number of places, but some readers are still wondering what we are holding back. \r\n⁶ This being has more in common with the ordinary nocturnal visitor, sometimes called a 'ghost,' than is immediately evident to the uninitiated. Cf. the well-documented association of poltergeist disturbances with adolescents. \r\n⁷ This association, attributing diabolism to the left-hand path, is oversimplified, prejudiced, and superstitious. In general, it can be said that the left-hand pentagram is suitable for both invocations and evocations, whereas the right-hand pentagram is suitable only for evocations, and mat is the only important difference. (It is assumed that the reader understands the pentagram as an exclusively male symbol.) \r\n⁸ Cf. the Tarot trumps II and III—the Magus, holding one arm upward and one downward, and the High Priestess, sitting between the pillars of Day and Night. (The Priestess is also associated with the Hebrew letter gimmel, the camel, and part of the meaning of this symbolism is contained in the shapes of the camel's back and the Hebrew letter.) \r\n⁹ This makes it quite useless for summoning werewolves. The Sacred Chao, however, is intended to teach a philosophical lesson, not to attract individuals with dubious pastimes. \r\n¹⁰ Fewer than seventy, according to a classical enumeration. \r\n¹¹ The magician must always identify fully with the victim, and share every agonized contortion to the utmost. Any attitude of standing aside and watching, as in a theatrical performance, or any intellectualization during the moments when the sword is doing its brutal but necessary work, or any squeamishness or guilt or revulsion, creates the two-mindedness against which Hagbard so vehemently warns in Never Whistle While You're Pissing. In a sense, only the mind dies. \r\n¹² See Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life.\r\n

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Two universes flowing in opposite directions. Two together form a third entity which is synergetically more than the sum of its two parts. Thus two always leads to three. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a duality and a trinity. A pentagon. Sheer energy, no matter involved. From the pentagon depend five more pentagons, like the petals of a flower. A white rose. Five petals and a center: six. Two times three. The flower interlocks with another flower just like it, forming a polyhedron made of pentagons. Each such polyhedron could have common surfaces with other polyhedrons, forming infinite latticework based on the pentagonal unit. They would be immortal. Self-sustaining. Not computers. Beyond computers. Gods. All space for their habitation. Infinitely complex.

In Chicago, Simon Moon was listening to the birds begin to sing and waiting for the first cinnamon rays of dawn, as Mary Lou Servix slept beside him; his mind was active, thinking about pyramids and rain-gods and sexual yoga and fifth-dimensional geometries, but thinking mostly about the Ingolstadt Rock Festival and wondering if it would all happen as Hagbard Celine had predicted. (Two blocks north in space and over forty years back in time, Simon's mother heard pistol shots as she left Wobbly Hall-Simon was a second-generation anarchist-and followed the crowd to gather in front of the Biograph Theatre where a man lay bleeding to death in the alley. \r\n\r\nAnd the next morning-July 23, 1934-Billie Freschette, in her cell at Cook County Jail, got the news from a matron. In this White Man's Country, I am the lowliest of the lowly, subjugated because I am not white, and subjugated again because I am not male. I am the embodiment of all that is rejected and scorned-the female, the colored, the tribe, the earth-all that has no place in this world of white male technology. I am the tree that is cut down to make room for the factory that poisons the air. I am the river filled with sewage. I am the Body that the Mind despises. I am the lowliest of the lowly, the mud beneath your feet. And yet of all the world John Dillinger picked me to be his bride. He plunged within me, into the very depths of me. I was his bride, not as your Wise Men and Churches and Governments know marriage, but we were truly wed. As the tree is wed to the earth, the mountain to the sky, the sun to the moon. I held his head to my breast, and tousled his hair as if it were sweet as fresh grass, and I called him 'Johnnie.' He was more than a man. He was mad but not mad, not as a man may go mad when he leaves his tribe and lives among hostile strangers and is mistreated and scorned. He was not mad as all other white men are mad because they have never known a tribe. He was mad as a god might be mad. And now they tell me he is dead. 'Well,' the matron asked finally, 'aren't you going to say anything? Aren't you Indians human?' She had a real evil shine in her eye, like the eye of the rattlesnake. She wants to see me cry. She stands there and waits, watching me through the bars. 'Don't you have any feelings at all? Are you some kind of animal?' I say nothing. I keep my face immobile. No white shall ever see the tears of a Menominee. At the Biograph Theatre, Molly Moon turns away in disgust as souvenir hunters dip their handkerchiefs in the blood. \r\n\r\nI turn away from the matron and look up, out the barred window, to the stars, and the spaces between them seem bigger than ever. Bigger and emptier. Inside me there is a space like that now, big and empty, and it will never be filled again. When the tree is torn out by its roots, the earth must feel that way. The earth must scream silently, as I screamed silently.) But she understood the sacramental meaning of the handkerchiefs dipped in blood; as Simon understands it. Simon, in fact, had what can only be called a funky education. I mean, man, when your parents are both anarchists the Chicago public school system is going to do your head absolutely no good at all. Feature me in a 1956 classroom with Eisenhower's Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon's Captain Ahab glare on the other, and in between, standing in front of the inevitable American rag, Miss Doris Day or her older sister telling the class to take home a leaflet explaining to their parents why it's important for them to vote. 'My parents don't vote,' I say. 'Well, this leaflet will explain to them why they should,' she tells me with the real authentic Doris Day sunshine and Kansas cornball smile. It's early in the term and she hasn't heard about me from the last-semester teacher. 'I really don't think so,' I say politely. 'They don't think it makes any difference whether Eisenhower or Stevenson is in the White House. They say the orders will still come from Wall Street.' It's like a thundercloud. All the sunshine goes away. They never prepared her for this in the school where they turn out all these Doris Day replicas. The wisdom of the Fathers is being questioned. She opens her mouth and closes it and opens and closes it and finally takes such a deep breath that every boy in the room (we're all on the cusp of puberty) gets a hard-on from watching her breasts heave up and slide down again. I mean, they're all praying (except me, I'm an atheist, of course) that they won't get called on to stand up; if it wouldn't attract attention, they'd be clubbing their dicks down with their geography books. 'That's the wonderful thing about this country,' she finally gets out, 'even people with opinions like that can say what they want without going to jail.' \r\n\r\n'You must be nuts,' I say. 'My dad's been in and out of jail so many times they should put in a special revolving door just for him: My mom, too. You oughta go out with subversive leaflets in this town and see what happens.' Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It's no better at home. Mom's an anarcho-pacifist, Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn't fight back. Dad's a Wobbly and wants to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half hour, they yell at each other for two. Bakunin said this and Kropotkin said that and Gandhi said the other and Martin Luther King is the savior of America and Martin Luther King is a bloody fool selling his people an opium Utopia and all that jive. Go down to Wobbly Hall or Solidarity Bookstore and you'll still hear the same debate, doubled, redoubled, in spades, and vulnerable. So naturally I start hanging out on Wall Street and smoking dope and pretty soon I'm the youngest living member of what they called the Beat Generation. Which does not improve my relations with school authorities, but at least it's a relief from all that patriotism and anarchism. By the time I'm seventeen and they shot Kennedy and the country starts coming apart at the seams, we're not beatniks anymore, we're hippies, and the thing to do is go to Mississippi. Did you ever go to Mississippi? You know what Dr. Johnson said about Scotland-'The best thing you can say for it is that God created it for some purpose, but the same is true of Hell.' Blot Mississippi; it's not part of this story anyway. The next stop was Antioch in dear old Yellow Springs where I majored in mathematics for reasons you will soon guess. The pot there grows wild in acres and acres of beautiful nature preserve kept up by the college. You can go out there at night, pick your own grass for the week from the female of the hemp species and sleep under the stars with a female of your own species, then wake up in the morning with birds and rabbits and the whole lost Thomas Wolfe America scene, a stone, a leaf, and unfound door and all of it, then make it to class really feeling good and ready for an education. Once I woke up with a spider running across my face, and I thought, 'So a spider is running across my face,' and brushed him off gently, 'it's his world, too.' In the city, I would have killed him. What I mean is Antioch is a stone groove but that life is no preparation for coming back to Chicago and Chemical Warfare. Not that I ever got maced before '68, but I could read the signs; don't let anybody tell you it's pollution, brothers and sisters. It's Chemical Warfare. They'll kill us all to make a buck. I got stoned one night and went home to see what it would be like relating to Mom and Dad in that condition. It was the same but different. Tolstoy coming out of her mouth, Bakunin out of his. And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Goddard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked. 'You're both wrong,' I said. 'Freedom won't come through Love, and it won't come through Force. It will come through the Imagination.' I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got contact-high and heard them, too. Their mouths dropped open and I felt like William Blake telling Tom Paine where it was really at. A Knight of Magic waving my wand and dispersing the shadows of Maya. Dad was the first to recover. 'Imagination,' he said, his big red face crinkling in that grin that always drove the cops crazy when they were arresting him. 'That's what comes of sending good working-class boys to rich people's colleges. Words and books get all mixed up with reality in their heads. When you were in that jail in Mississippi you imagined yourself through the walls, didn't you? How many times an hour did you imagine yourself through the walls? I can guess. The first time I was arrested, during the GE strike of thirty-three, I walked through those walls a million times. But every time I opened my eyes, the walls and the bars were still there. What got me out finally? What got you out of Biloxi finally? Organization. If you want big words to talk to intellectuals with, that's a fine big word, son, just as many syllables as imagination, and it has a lot more realism in it.' That's what I remember best about him, that one speech, and the strange clear blue of his eyes. He died that year, and I found out that there was more to the Imagination than I had known, for he didn't die at all. He's still around, in the back of my skull somewhere, arguing with me, and that's the truth. It's also the truth that he's dead, really dead, and part of me was buried with him. It's uncool to love your father these days, so I didn't even know that I loved him until they closed the coffin and I heard myself sobbing, and it comes back again, that same emptiness, whenever I hear 'Joe Hill': 'The copper bosses lulled you, Joe.' 'I never died,' said he. Both lines are true, and mourning never ends. They didn't shoot Dad the clean way, like Joe Hill, but they ground him down, year after year, burning out his Wob fires (and he was Aries, a real fire sign) with their cops, their courts, their jails, and their taxes, their corporations, their cages for the spirit and cemeteries for the soul, their plastic liberalism and murderous Marxism, and even as I say that I have to pay a debt to Lenin for he gave me the words to express how I felt when Dad was gone. 'Revolutionaries,' he said, 'are dead men on furlough.' \r\n\r\nThe Democratic Convention of '68 was coming and I knew that my own furlough might be much shorter than Dad's because I was ready to fight them in the streets. All spring Mom was busy at the Women for Peace center and I was busy conspiring with surrealists and Yippies. Then I met Mao Tsu-hsi. It was April 30, Walpurgasnacht (pause for thunder on the soundtrack), and I was rapping with some of the crowd at the Friendly Stranger. H.P. Lovecraft (the rock group, not the writer) was conducting services in the back room, pounding away at the door to Acid Land in the gallant effort, new and striking that year, to break in on waves of sound without any chemical skeleton key at all and I am in no position to evaluate their success objectively since I was, as is often the case with me, 99 and 44/100ths percent stoned out of my gourd before they began operations. I kept catching this uniquely pensive Oriental face at the next table, but my own gang, including the weird faggot-priest we nicknamed Padre Pederastia, had most of my attention. I was laying it on them heavy. It was my Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade period. 'The head-trip anarchists are as constipated as the Marxists,' I was giving forth; you recognize the style by now. 'Who speaks for the thalamus, the glands, the cells of the organism? Who sees the organism? We cover it with clothes to hide its apehood. We won't have liberated ourselves from servitude until people throw all their clothes in the closet in spring and don't take them out again winter. We won't be human beings, the way apes are apes and dogs are dogs, until we fuck where and when we want to, like any other mammal. Fucking in the streets isn't just a tactic to blow minds; it's recapturing our own bodies. Anything less and we're still robots possessing the wisdom of the straight line but not the understanding of the organic curve.' And so on. And so forth. I think I found a few good arguments for rape and murder while I was at it. \r\n\r\n'The next step beyond anarchy,' somebody said cynically. 'Real chaos.' \r\n\r\n'Why not?' I demanded. 'Who works at a straight job here?' None of them did, of course; I deal dope myself. 'Will you work at a straight job for something that calls itself an anarchist syndicate? Will you run an engine lathe eight unfucking hours a day because the syndicate tells you the people need what the lathe produces? If you will, the people just becomes a new tyrant.' \r\n\r\n'To hell with machines,' Kevin McCool, the poet, said enthusiastically. 'Back to the caves!' He was as stoned as me. The Oriental face leaned over: she was wearing a strange headband with a golden apple inside a pentagon. Her black eyes somehow reminded me of my father's blue eyes. 'What you want is an organization of the imagination?' she asked politely. I flipped. It was too much, hearing those words just then. 'A man at the Vedanta Society told me that John Dillinger walked through the walls when he made his escape from Crown Point Jail,' Miss Mao went on in a level tone. 'Do you think that is possible?' You know how dark coffee houses are. The Friendly Stranger was murkier than most. I had to get out. Blake talked to the Archangel Gabriel every morning at breakfast, but I wasn't that heavy yet. 'Hey, where you going, Simon?' somebody called. Miss Mao didn't say anything, and I didn't look back at that polite and pensive face-it would have been much easier if she looked sinister and inscrutable. But when I hit Lincoln and started toward Fullerton, I heard steps behind me. I turned and Padre Pederastia touched my arm gently. 'I asked her to come and listen to you,' he said. 'She was to give a signal if she thought you were ready. The signal was more dramatic than I expected, it seems. A conversation out of your past that had some heavy emotional meaning to you?' \r\n\r\n'She's a medium?' I asked numbly. \r\n\r\n'You can name it that.' I looked at him in the light from the Biograph marquee and I remembered Mom's story about the people dipping their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood and I heard the old hymn start in my head ARE YOU WASHED are you washed ARE you WASHED in the BLOOD of the Lamb and I remembered how we all thought he hung out with us freaks in the hope of leading us back to the church holy Roman Catholic and apostolic as Dad called it when he was drunk and bitter. It was obvious that whatever the Padre was recruiting for had little to do with that particular theological trade union. 'What is this?' I asked. 'And who is that woman?' \r\n\r\n'She's the daughter of Fu Manchu,' he said. Suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed like a rooster crowing. Just as suddenly, he stopped and looked at me. Just looked at me. 'Somehow,' I said slowly, 'I've qualified for a small demonstration of whatever you and she are selling. But I don't qualify for any more until I make the right move?' He gave the faintest hint of a nod and went on watching me. Well, I was young and ignorant of everything outside ten million books I'd gobbled and guilty-unsure about my imaginative flights away from my father's realism and of course stoned of course but I finally understood why he was watching me that way, it was (this part of it) pure Zen, there was nothing I could do consciously or by volition that would satisfy him and I had to do exactly that which I could not not do, namely be Simon Moon. Which led to deciding then and there without any time to mull it over and rationalize it just what the hell being Simon Moon or, more precisely SimonMooning, consisted of, and it seemed to be a matter of wandering through room after room of my brain looking for the owner and not finding him anywhere, sweat broke out on my forehead, it was becoming desperate because I was running out of rooms and the Padre was still watching me. 'Nobody home,' I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good enough. \r\n\r\n'That's odd,' he said. 'Who's conducting the search?' And I walked through the walls and into the Fire. Which was the beginning of the larger and funkier part of my (Simon's) education, and where we cannot, as yet, follow him. He sleeps now, a teacher rather than a learner, while Mary Lou Servix awakes beside him and tries to decide whether it was just the pot or if something really spooky happened last night.

The Symposium

Author: Plato

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)

Following the birth of Aphrodite, the other gods were having a feast, including Resource, the son of Invention. When they'd had dinner, Poverty came to beg, as people do at feasts, and so she was by the gate. Resource was drunk with nectar (this was before wine was discovered), went into the garden of Zeus, and fell into drunken sleep. Poverty formed the plan of relieving her lack of resources by having a child by resource; she slept with him and became pregnant with love.\n\n 'Because he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love's situation is like this. First of all, he's always poor; far from being sensitive and beautiful, as is commonly supposed, he's tough, with hardened skin, without shoes or home. He always sleeps rough, on the ground, with no bed, lying in doorways and by roads in the open air; sharing his mother's nature, he always lives in a state of need. On the other hand, taking after his father, he schemes to get hold of beautiful and good things. He's brave, impetuous and intense; a formidable hunter, always weaving tricks; he desires knowledge and is resourceful in getting it; a lifelong lover of wisdom; clever at using magic, drugs, and sophistry.\n\n 'By nature he is neither immortal nor mortal. Sometimes on a single day he shoots into life, when he's successful, and then dies, and then (taking after his father) comes back to life again. The resources he obtains keep on draining away, so that Love is neither wholly without resources nor rich. He is also in between wisdom and ignorance. The position is this. None of the gods loves wisdom or has the desire to become wise - because they already are; nor does anyone else who is already wise love wisdom. Nor do the ignorant love wisdom or have the desire to become wise. The problem with the ignorant person is precisely that, despite not being good or intelligent, he regards himself as satisfactory. If someone doesn't thing he's in need of something, he can't desire what he doesn't think he needs.

Pop Magic

Author: Grant Morrison

Publisher: The Disinformation Company (2008)

Meditations

Author: Marcus Aurelius

Publisher: Penguin Great Ideas (2005)

To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming - in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the Ruler within you - means a loss of opportunity for some other task. See then that the flow of your thoughts is kept free from idle or random fancies, particularly those of an inquisitive or uncharitable nature. \r\n\r\nA man should habituate himself to such a way of thinking that if suddenly asked, 'What is in your mind at this minute?' he could respond frankly and without hesitation; thus proving that all his thoughts were simple and kindly, as becomes a social being with no taste for the pleasures of sensual imaginings, jealousies, envies, suspicions, or any other sentiments that he would blush to acknowledge in himself. \r\n\r\nSuch a man, determined here and now to aspire to the heights, is indeed a priest and minister of the gods; for he is making full use of that indwelling power which can keep a man unsullied by pleasures, proof against pain, untouched by insult, and impervious to evil. He is a competitor in the greatest of all contests, the struggle against passion's mastery; he is imbued through and through with uprightness, welcoming whole-heartedly whatever falls to his lot and rarely asking himself what others may be saying or doing or thinking except when the public interest requires it. \r\n\r\nHe confines his operations to his own concerns, having his attention fixed on his own particular thread of the universal web; seeing to it that his actions are honourable, and convinced that what befalls him must be for the best - for his own directing fate is itself under a higher direction. \r\n\r\nHe does not forget the brotherhood of all rational beings, nor that a concern for every man is proper to humanity; and he knows that it is not the world's opinions he should follow, but only those of men whose lives confessedly accord with Nature. As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad, and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes, has no value for him.

118-119

The gods either have power or they have not. If they have not, why pray to them? If they have, then instead of praying to be granted or spared such-and-such a thing, why not rather pray to be delivered from dreading it, or lusting for it, or grieving over it? Clearly, if they can help a man at all, they can help him in this way. You will say, perhaps, 'But all that is something they have put in my own power.' Then surely it were better to use your power and be a free man, than to hanker like a slave and a beggar for something that is not in your power. Besides who told you the gods never lend their aid even towards things that do lie in our own power? Begin praying this way and you will see. Where another man prays 'Grant that I may possess this woman,' let your own prayer be, 'Grant that I may not lust to possess her.' Where he prays, 'Grant me to be rid of such-and-such a one,' you pray, 'Take from me my desire to be rid of him.' Where he begs, 'Spare me the loss of my precious child,' beg rather to be delivered from the terror of losing him. In short, give your petitions a turn in this direction and see what comes.

Remind yourself constantly of all the physicians, now dead, who used to knit their brows over their ailing patients; of all the astrologers who so solemnly predicted their clients' doom; the philosophers who expatiated so endlessly on death or immortality; the great commanders who slew their thousands; the despots who wielded powers of life and death with such terrible arrogance, as if themselves were gods who could never die; the whole cities which have perished completely, Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others without number. After that, recall one by one each of your own acquaintances; how one buried another, only to be laid low himself and buried in turn by a third, and all in so brief a space of time. Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes. Spend, therefore, these fleeting moments on earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.

Enough of this miserable way of life, these everlasting grumbles, these monkey antics! Why must you agitate yourself so? Nothing unprecedented is happening; so what is it that disturbs you? The form of it? Take a good look at it. The matter of it? Look well at that, too. Beyond form and matter, there is nothing more. Even at this late hour, set yourself to become a simpler and better man in the sight of the gods. For the mastering of that lesson, three years are as good as a hundred.

The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)