The Persistent Occult

“To provide a fixed point as a fulcrum for human activity is to solve the problem of Archimedes, by realizing the use of his famous lever. This it is which was accomplished by the great initiators who have electrified the world, and they could not have done so except by means of the Great and Incommunicable Secret. However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the remains and evidences of its previous life. So also Moses saw to it that all those who had known Egypt and her mysteries should end their life in the desert; at Ephesus St. Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory.”

— Eliphas Levi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic

From La historia de la alquimia y los comienzos de la química

Occult means ‘hidden’. And so occultists pursue the understanding of that which we cannot see. The strands of thinking that split and intertwine are head-spinning in number and complexity, but they are all united in this central study. Tarot, astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, ritual magic, kabbalah, and so on — these are only some of the disciplines handling the mysteries within the tradition of Western esotericism. While these all have doppelgangers walking well worn paths across the world’s cultures, what we are concerned with here is its contingent in the West, i.e. European and/or Abrahamic in origin. [1]

The occult rises from its context both in collaboration and contention with its major spiritual and historical forces. In any single tradition of the occult, you will find influences from one or more of the following (this list is far from exhaustive): pagan religions, idealized Egyptian rites, Judaism, Catholicism, Norse religious practice, classical Greek philosophy, current continental philosophy, Arabic culture, the Inquisition, guild ritual, fairy tales, theoretical physics, advanced pharmacology. The practices of the occult are, nevertheless, maligned by many of the institutions it borrows from. Religious, political, and scientific bodies have long struggled against this strange behavior of occult practice. Their leading minds spill considerable ink denouncing it.

But despite these forces that seek its destruction, we cannot rid our society of occultism. We have tried to silence its followers — imprison them, torture them, burn them, shame them, debate them, laugh at them. It continues. It has always continued. By repressing it, it flourishes. By smothering whatever tendrils rise to the surface, we only perpetuate it.

The occult proves difficult to defeat, and perhaps that is because it cannot be defeated. To go a step further, perhaps it survives because it is attacked.

Illustration of Hermes Trismegistus

What We Do Not See

If the occult is the pursuit of what is hidden, we find its practice is often hidden as well. Grimoires are routinely written in cyphers and with intentional blind alleys built into them to repel dabblers. Its organizations shroud their behavior behind closed doors. Witches gather in secret under moonlight. Sorcerers hideaway their spellmaking in secluded studies. The temple is not open to the public; the texts are not handed out for public view.

This secrecy prevents detection while also seducing the curious into bonds of omerta before the keys are handed over, and even these keys lead only to the garden’s gate. Occult organizations do not thrive on mass appeal nor mass enrollment because the legacy itself is an education in sub rosa maneuvers and the careful management of shared secrets.

Thus, outright repression only ensures that the culture inside occultism is maintained. Today, where sacred texts are shared in PDF form and rituals are uploaded on YouTube and tarot decks are sold at Barnes & Noble, the threat to the occult is greatest as the deep appeal is weakest — but even here we see that these open forms will never allow entry to what is actually sought in the occult. These are surface phenomena connected to the occult, certainly, but what it creates is only a new layer. These are new blind alleys to trap the curious diletante while the committed seekers find other ways around.

Woodcut showing punishments for witches from Tengler's ''Laienspiegel'', Mainz (1508)

The Place for Those Hidden From View

Any study of occult history in the West will bring a cast of characters that look much different from the acceptable culture. Leaders in the field have uninterrupted representation of women, immigrants, people of color. That is not to say it is immune to racism and sexism (occultists helped lay the groundwork of Nazism, after all) but that a spiritual tradition hidden from view ends up absorbing those seekers who are not allowed in the legitimate institutions.

As long as the institutions in power create walls, which they must to define their own existence, they will wall people out, which they must to define the group they derive loyalty from. And so, the occult exists as a permanent shadow, made up of counter-institutions pursuing the secret forces. In any time, there are forces allowed and forces forbidden. The occult promises access to that which is forbidden, and will — to differing degrees — be a refuge for those locked out of the acceptable forms of power.

As Silvia Federici describes in Caliban and the Witch, the burning of witches functioned for female spiritual power what the enclosures functioned for social property. Modern capitalism required many such projects of enclosure to create the grounds of private property — apparently the rule of market forces is so “natural” it requires endless tending and state intervention to even get off the ground. This is but one example of how the occult works as an umbrella term for the spiritual realms of those disqualified from the official institutions.

Frontispiece from The Hermetic Triumph (1604)

Circling Back

These are insights. There is no firm link between them. Like the many strands of occult practice and philosophy, no observations are systematically helpful across the board. But these insights are important insofar as any ongoing interest in the occult is important, because one is served in their practice by understanding the hidden dimensions of what they do — the occult of the occult, if you will.

What starts to emerge from these insights is a general gestalt: that if a thing is hidden it will draw a certain seeker and serve a certain purpose. By providing an undercurrent of creative energy, it continually revitalizes the visible spectrum of spiritual life.

The Emerald Tablet (1606)

Notes

[1] We do not need to pretend here that the concept of the “West” is not deeply fraught. We only need to use it to designate that particular nexus of certain forces that are typically identified as the “West,” sparing ourselves the indignity of buying into the whiggish conception of Western Civilization.

The Wells of Horror

The pursuit of understanding the world always turns toward mysteries. But the pursuit of beauty acts as balm for this desire to know. In beauty, the mystery is not pursued in order to break it, it is pursued in order to behold it. Beauty, then, does not try to destroy the mystery to find the truth inside, rather it accepts the mystery itself as the truth. Do not try to solve the riddle, whisper its words and cherish the sounds.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

The Terrible Inheritance

Horror utilizes archetype and symbol more than perhaps any other genre. Its stories are ones of fear, and fear, above all other emotions, is precoded by the collective unconscious. We arrive on this earth with vivid fears. Fears of fanged creatures, of howling in the night, of mist, of spiders, of the dead, of darkness. 

We then continue to manufacture new fears out of the stuff of our lives: the traumas we experience and the traumas we witness. Our fears begin with an inheritance and always accrue with the product of our own hard work. But even these fears often maintain direct lines to more ancient predecessors. This is because the traumas that serve as the raw materials to our new fears are only traumas if they realize a fear already there.

And so provoking fear requires the recollection of an archetype already feared. The archetypes are productive inserts for storytelling, borrowed from our shared patterns of fear.

Plato’s world of ideal forms is a world without articles. You don’t come upon a dog, you come upon Dog. You don’t go to a theater, you go to Theater. There are no specifics, only symbols channeling power through a refraction shaped out of the bends and folds that make up the ideal form. These forms are made out of the same mental stuff, bent into their unique shapes — perhaps fear works like this, too.

Our nightmares are the closest guides to thinking this through. How we conjure up the strangest stories leading a path of anxiety to panic to complete and total fright. In the morning, we sometimes wake to find the events of a nightmare certainly strange, but our response is incongruous. A friend of mine recently recounted a recurring dream he had as a child. In the dream, he rises from his bed and goes to the window to see a deer and a dog looking in at him from beyond the glass, their black eyes gleaming. What an interesting response to this image, fear. And yet, the terror always accompanied the dream with each return. The fear itself tells us something of how to read the message of the dream. The stirring beasts beyond the room in the night. Beasts that also stir within us. That call us to some other nature outside of walls and beds and language. The image does not seem frightening to the waking mind, but the image connects the dreamer to the realm of fear, like a key to a forbidden room or a trap door to the undiscovered basement. The fear itself teaches the dreamer that an archetype of fear is speaking.

But a work of horror cannot bring emotion to inform the text. Rather, the text must draw out the emotion. And so, horror cannot add to fear before establishing it. Horror thus calls into being images of an archetype of fear, and can only augment or modify once the link is established.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

The Kingdom of Repressed Truth

Horror is an aesthetic pursuit. A work of storytelling. Being an aesthetic pursuit, horror operates around its own conception of beauty — here beauty simply means an aesthetic ordering that is appreciated, be it through paralyzing terror, erotic arousal, gentle gratitude, or any number of states of appreciation. [1] As we have discussed, horror creates this beauty by weaving archetypes of fear throughout the other elements of the text. 

Horror trades in the least touched truths, everything that is refused to be true and yet endures. When we sink our fears below the surface of our thoughts, some die, proving to be temporary phantoms of anxiety and paranoia, trifles that come and go. But not all of these fearful thoughts pass forever. Those that do not drown under the water of our unconscious float to the surface again and again, never leaving, never dying. Horror is made up of the things that survive the drowning.

And so any philosophy of horror must hold this position: take account of the unbearable truths, see what you blind yourself to. What unites all horror is that it attempts this one act, returning these dark truths to us.

Horror is the unsettling rise of known and unknown truths from the dungeons where we keep them. Horror is a philosophy, a metaphysics, a spiritual path that speaks to us about the things we struggle to forget. It is therefore a rigorous path, requiring intellectual courage and spiritual bravery. It is the handling of that which must not be handled. Horror reminds us of that which we collectively agree we do not wish to be reminded of.

This path is all encompassing, because the unrefused truths are not disqualified from it, it is the insistence that both refused and unrefused are held together. These truths are brought together in the vessels of their archetypes. The tension arising from that gathering is the magic of horror.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

Notes

[1] Not unlike Nehemas’ conception of beauty as a representation of a lack, only because a lack is also pursued.

Tarot and the Use of Art & Symbol

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