Our Fundamental Mode of Being

The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram.

In The Spell of the Sensuous (1997) ecologist and philosopher David Abram examines how our minds have become severed from sensory experience, and – consequently – our bodies disconnected from the natural world.

The blame for our current ecological plight he allocates predominantly to alphabetic writing, which destroyed the link between meaning and its basis in our physical participation in the processes and qualities of the natural world.

When linguistic signs become based on arbitrary vocal sounds (in contrast to pictographic symbols), then: “the larger, more-than-human life-world is no longer a part of the semiotic, no longer a necessary part of the system” (1997: 101). Consequently,

our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs […] Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses […] become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary. (1997: 267)

Specifically, it was the ancient Greeks who led us into this sorry state. “Socrates forced his interlocutors to separate themselves, for the first time, from their own words” (1997: 109). Myths and stories formerly provided a union with nature, which Plato’s writings undermined and destroyed. In an oral culture, a term such as “Justice” always has a context: it is expressed in stories as a specific occurrence, as an event that actually took place. Yet “Socrates attempts to induce a reflection upon the quality as it exists in itself” (1997: 111), and so we arrive – via Plato – at the sense of Justice as a thing-in-itself, an abstract entity with an existence somehow independent from the physical world. There is now scope for belief in a realm of ideas separate from nature, and Abram’s complaint is that we have become increasingly lost in this Platonic invention.

Abram’s book has been influential. His evocation of the role of sensation and perception in human cognition is powerful and compelling. He offers a philosophical foundation for shamanistic and ecological magicks. Yet I am troubled by his demonisation of Platonism, and his privileging of the body and nature above soul and intellect.

If, as Abram suggests, the invention of phonetic writing sealed us within a world of human signs, excluding the other in the body, in non-human species and the natural environment, then our conception of soul or spirit is a harmful, autistic delusion.

However, surely by coincidence, the very next book I read after Abram’s makes a similar but opposite argument. In The Primitive Edge of Experience (2004), psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden writes of a basic mode of human experiencing that he names “the autistic-contiguous position”:

Sequences, symmetries, periodicity, skin-to-skin “molding” are all examples of contiguities that are the ingredients out of which the beginnings of rudimentary self-experience arise. (2004: 32)

The elements of this level of experience, which first appears in early infancy, are perceptual sensations of bodily contact, hardness or softness, being rocked, rhythms of appearances and disappearances, all of which: “have nothing to do with the representation of one’s affective states, either idiographically or fully symbolically. The sensory experience is the infant” (2004: 35).

The Primitive Edge of Experience, by Thomas Ogden
The Primitive Edge of Experience, by Thomas Ogden.

Yet whereas Ogden concurs with Abram that the use of language or symbolisation detracts from experience at this autistic-contiguous level, in Ogden it lacks the Edenic quality evoked by Abram’s writing. For Ogden, the autistic-contiguous is “preparatory for the creation of symbols” (2004: 59), and to dwell exclusively within it presents a dilemma of becoming “entrapped in sensory experience” (2004: 78). For Abram, the sensory is primary and language is an autistic detraction. For Ogden, sensation attracts the label of “autism”, yet without any sense of pathology, because this type of non-reflective experience provides an essential “bounded sensory ‘floor’ […] of experience” (2004: 45), “the beginnings of qualities of who one is” (2004: 54).

For Abram, the turning in upon human signs results in alienation from the body. But for Ogden, the turning in upon sensory experience results in a basic sense of self on top of which further maturational developments may accrue. Both writers are exploring similar territory, but from opposing points of view. Placing these authors beside one another, perhaps we start to see how this “autism”, the reflexive turning in upon oneself, is perhaps not by definition detrimental. And perhaps neither is sensation or symbolisation necessarily malign or benign. Increasingly, it may seem that we are labouring beneath a false opposition between the body and spirit.

Abram himself recognises a flaw in his privileging of the sensory and those indigenous means of apprehending the world that are deeply rooted in it. “If our primordial experience is inherently animistic,” he wonders, “how can we ever account for the loss of such animateness from the world around us?” (1997: 90). The argument that x is our primary mode of being, but that x has been forgotten, contains a glaring contradiction that the forgetting of x is evidently more primary than x itself. In that case, perhaps the ecological crisis is not a consequence of the invention of writing so much as the forgetting of nature because our (even more) primary mode of being is, perhaps, forgetfulness. Indeed, for Ogden, the autistic-contiguous is a “position” (2004: 11), a kind of stance or attitude that may be lost, or into which we may fall at any time, if more sophisticated levels of being are placed under stress. Our fundamental mode of being is maybe neither sensory nor cognitive, neither bodily nor spiritual. Perhaps our fundamental mode of being consists in not having a fundamental mode of being.

Enlightenment traditions present themselves as the antidote to habitual forgetfulness. Techniques for realising the absence of a fundamental self rely on cultivating a turning inwards, a kind of intentional autism that contrasts with the reactive type that both Abram and Ogden evoke. Within enlightenment traditions, it does not appear to matter what the objects of that turning inwards might be, whether sensations, thoughts or meritorious actions. The intention is to realise how whatever fills experience is not fundamentally what we are, because it is not invulnerable to forgetting.

Applying this to magickal practice, my view is that magick is wherever we find it. There are body magicks and shamanistic nature magicks. But there are also word and number magicks, and magicks of abstract contemplation. They are not of equal value, but neither is one of them necessarily of greater value than all the rest.

References

Abram, D. (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage.

Ogden, T.H. (2004) The Primitive Edge of Experience. London: Karnac.

Hygienic Everyday Magic

Bureau d'Hygiène
Photo by chantrybee, CC-BY

Recently, I read up on hygienic macros in functional programming languages. (Unless you are into very geeky details of computer science, you do not have to follow that link.) Thought processes diverged and branched out and recombined, and I present you with the resulting definition of Hygienic Magic:

Hygienic Magic is magic whose working is guaranteed not to cause the accidental capture of mental identifications.

To further parody the Wikipedia article I linked: The general problem of accidental capture is well known within the magical community. Magicians will use banishing rituals and dedicated temple spaces to define the location and duration of a ritual, and to remove any residual, unwanted identifications, for example after invoking an entity.

In other words, most formal, ceremonial magical acts are hygienic.

Every intentional act is a Magical Act.

So what about the everyday intentional, magical acts where we do not set up a temple and banish thoroughly before and after? Should we be worried about contracting astral diseases off door handles? Should we expect demons behind every street corner ready to possess us? Will we ourselves become vehicles of contagion?

No. But there is a class of intentional acts which carry a high possibility of capturing mental identifications: reading or otherwise accessing or interacting with information. To a degree, the new identifications are desired and expected: by reading a book on Chaos Magic, I want to identify with being someone who knows more about the subject.

What if the book carries other, less overt information suitable for identification? By reading a text by Julius Evola for example, I will also be exposed to his latent fascism and appreciation of the nazi “order” of the SS. Will this turn me into a reactionary genocidal black brother? Not immediately, I am sure. And maybe not in the long term either, depending on my other identifications and preferences. I already know that the author had ideological affiliations which I reject, so I will be alert and my magical act of intentionally reading Evola will likely be a hygienic one.

How about reading Peter Carroll’s blog, an influential writer who is very competent in magic but whose political leanings were not previously on my mental radar? Are the identitarian overtones which I encounter there worthy of my consideration because I am so used to having my preconceived notions about reality challenged by this magician, or are they just more of the murky banality of the dark enlightenment? Or did Peter Carroll himself neglect hygiene by picking up this stray right-wing identification? And of course, questions like these should arise in me not only when accessing texts by magical writers, but when interacting with any information in general.

Protective Sigil (ineffectual without personal transformation)

Unfortunately, I know of no simple banishing ritual that will wipe away all traces of accidentally captured identifications. It is tempting to believe that wearing a suitable sigil or chanting a certain mantra will give me the magical equivalent of a condom protecting me from the exchange of fluids and energies during intellectual intercourse, but I am convinced that nothing short of a personal transformation into being more watchful and critical – and hygienic – in the everyday magical act of consuming information is necessary.

The Babysitter

My two sisters and I are standing on one side of the yellow table in our childhood house, where the family gathers for meals. There are cups and a teapot on the table. The babysitter is opposite, a young grown-up woman who is looking at us fixedly, while I am staring back at her in defiance. We three siblings begin to sing, a ditty from a fairy-tale. The three verses are appropriate and fill the space over the table, between us and the babysitter, with their threefold repetition and the progression of their theme.

I wake up.

“Who is the babysitter from the dream, dear oracle?”

CLOUDS, THUNDER, SPROUTING. ONE WEAVES WARP AND WEFT.

Three women, Surrealist Graffiti in Zagreb. Photographer: Goran Zec
Three women, Surrealist Graffiti in Zagreb.  Goran Zec Creative Commons Attribution-Share alike

The Norns? The tree is there in the form of a wooden table, water for watering it in the form of, presumably, tea in the teapot. The three ladies are there. But what is the babysitter doing on the other side of the table?

WAITING, the oracle remarks. FOOD AND DRINK.

Ahh! I had expressed interest in contacting an ancestor some time ago. Then other events demanded my attention, and that work was assigned lower priority. But if all three of the sisters of fate and destiny show up in a dream, then it is time to turn my attention back to the matter.

Food and drink. An offering is left in the kitchen over night.

RELAX, the oracle advises. WITH MUSIC. If only I could remember that little song from the dream now!

I am halfway through a psychology article about the personality structure of a person who had gaps in her psyche. The gaps were regularly spaced, with slices of actual psychological entity alternating with empty ones. The subject of this study was a powerful woman, and her actions and decisions matched up perfectly with the missing portions of her psyche. I am particularly interested in understanding her motivations because she influences the lives of all people I know. Her office is not political or economic, but nevertheless invested with a lot of power. As I begin to grasp the full scale of this entire state of affairs, my understanding becomes less certain, some aspects fade from my awareness and the dream falls apart as I gain waking consciousness.

Superposition of two wave systems
Superposition of two wave systems

There is no need to consult the oracle. This was a dream experience of Sophia, the gnostic aeon who is, according to various myths, either Mother Wisdom or else responsible for foolishly bringing forth the misbegotten creator of our universe. Her mind might well be an interference pattern of wisdom and ignorance.

So when I wanted to contact an ancestor, I did not really think it would turn out to be the wise mother of ignorance, whose foolish asexual act of creation landed us all in the circumstances we now find ourselves in.

Someone less far down the line would have been totally satisfactory.

Monkeyspawed

“The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) is a supernatural tale of suspense written by W.W. Jacobs. And monkeyspawed is a slang-term I’ve heard, used by magickians to describe a particular way in which magick can rebound.

For instance, Boffo and I monkeyspawed ourselves handsomely in a recent working. I had been suffering from recurrent headaches and devised a ritual to balance my ajna chakra. Boffo was assisting, so I broadened the intention to include him. “It is our will,” we declared at the beginning of the ritual, “to balance our ajna chakras”.

It was a couple of weeks, and required the acumen of a third party, before we arrived at an explanation of the puzzling outcome of the working, because, the next day, I had my usual headache (although not quite as bad as usual) and Boffo had one as well. So we had indeed “balanced” our ajna chakras, in the sense that Boffo’s ajna chakra had been rendered as equally fucked-up as mine.

Skeletal figure on the cover of the 7th Pan Book of Horror.
The book in which, as a kid, I first read Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”.

The paw in Jacobs’ tale is a dried-up talisman with the power to grant three wishes, but it has left a trail of unhappiness. Its magick, we are informed, comes from a holy fakir who placed a spell upon it because: “He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow”. The hero of the tale, Mr. White, wishes for some cash to pay off his mortgage, only to receive the sum he requested as compensation for his son’s death in an industrial accident. Distraught with grief, Mrs. White persuades her husband to wish for the return of their son, and later that night knocking is heard at their door. Mr. White identified their son’s body, saw how badly mutilated he was by the accident, and can’t prevent himself from thinking how being buried for the past ten days might not have improved matters. And so White deploys the remaining wish, just as his wife flings open the door and – to Mr. White’s relief – discovers no one is there: “A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery…”

However, the lesson of “The Monkey’s Paw” cannot be simply that magick is evil or inevitably produces harm, because the fakir who made the spell is described as “a very holy man”, and his magick (unlike White’s) is successful in realising its purpose. Yet the demonstration of the fakir’s teaching is made at the expense of others who fail to see in advance that by using the paw and asserting their own desire, they are in fact subjecting themselves to someone else’s will.

Is it not odd that a morality tale highlighting the inadequacy of individual will should hinge so crucially upon language? “Getting monkeyspawed” usually implies a magickal intention that is verbally incomplete or ambiguously worded, as in the example of Boffo and I screwing ourselves over with the word “balance”. Wiccans habitually append the expression “an it harm none” onto their magickal intentions, and it might be supposed that if Mr. White had taken this simple measure it would have protected him from much distress, or at least have posed a greater challenge to the fakir’s intentions. Yet the Wiccans, sweet as they may be, are really only hedging the issue, because identifying what we don’t want to happen (i.e. harm) has always been easier than ascertaining and taking responsibility for our true desire.

And is it not equally odd how the notions of imposing will and of faults in linguistic expression match so closely the two definitions of magick bequeathed to us by Crowley? Namely: (1) ‘the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’ (1913: 124); but also (2) his less-quoted definition of magick as ‘a disease of language’ (1913: 185). What is this strange link in magick between the vulnerability of will and the inadequacy of language?

“Disease of language” is an expression taken by Crowley from Max Müller’s ideas on the formation of myths. Müller asserted that myths were a linguistic corruption caused when abstract concepts become personified (1866: 12). Crowley describes – for instance – how Thoth was originally just a guy who invented writing (1913: 185), not the terrible ibis-headed deity that sprang into being after writing itself was personified. Yet the advantage of personification is the creation of a linguistic hook to assist further thought. Magick, like myth, Crowley suggests, is a linguistic process for bringing the abstract into manifestation through personification.

Man with the head of an ibis writing in a book.
Thoth. Supernatural being, or just a regular guy who happened to invent writing?

From this perspective, magick as ‘Change in conformity with Will’ is complementary, for when we will this too is a process of personification: we experience an impulse and then we own it and experience it as “ours”. Will is the personification of desire, because each time we say “It is my will…”, this is an identification with experience. Suddenly, a desire belongs to someone; it becomes what that someone wants. The act of willing brings into existence an entity every bit as mythological as Thoth: the I. For if the disease of language is personification, then every “I”, “me” and “mine” is a symptom.

Given that magick consists in personification of or identification with desire, this creates the possibility of intentions that fulfil a desire which turns out not to be “ours”. In the case of Boffo and I, we both experienced headaches when we actually wanted to be free from them. A desire was fulfilled, but the identification with that desire was not. We got what we did not want because we identified a desire rather than identifying with it. We fell victim to language in its literal mode rather than the diseased form in which magick resides. Our language wasn’t diseased enough to prevent what happened from fitting the intention. If our language had been diseased enough there would have been only what we wanted in the intention (because it would have been “ours”), and so what actually happened wouldn’t have appeared to fit, and would have passed without notice.

In “The Monkey’s Paw”, presumably Mr. White is identified with the desires he expresses in his three wishes. However, we have seen already that there is another desire in play, the desire of the fakir, which is namely that others shall realise their wants are ineffectual and that they are subject purely to fate. Anything Mr. White wishes for is therefore foiled from the outset. He cannot use language magically to personify his desire, because he himself is a personification within the diseased language of the fakir, a personification of the typical person who is incapable of realising his desire.

The only wish of Mr. White’s that is fulfilled is the wish to send back his son to the grave. As a personification, Mr. White’s desire to cease desiring is the only one that can be met, which is associated in the tale with wishing dead the one that he loves.

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a morality tale, a genre that relies on personification to transmit its message. At this level, the fakir is presumably a personification also – but of what? A number of possibilities suggest themselves. Maybe he represents the Divine, as the ultimate source of all experience. On a more psychological level, maybe he is the unconscious. Or maybe he is language itself. In any case, he represents a force that alienates us from our desire. What the story seems to demonstrate is not that magick is necessarily evil, but that its efficacy – and ours – is undermined when we are barred from the process of expressing and exploring our own desire. When we cannot use diseased language to personify desire, we are trapped in a nightmarish world where what is said is literally what is, with no space for change.

The horror of “The Monkey’s Paw” is how we cease to be people and become personifications when our capacity to wish is taken away. Magick fails not when we wish for too much, but when we are prevented from engaging with our true desires.

References

Crowley, A. (1913 [2000]) Magick: Liber ABA Book Four. Weiser: York Beach, ME.

Jacobs, W.W. (1902 [1906]) “The Monkey’s Paw”. In: The Lady of the Barge. Sixth edition. London & New York: Harper & Brothers.

Müller, M. (1866) Lectures on the Science of Language. Fifth edition. London: Longmans & Green.

A Guide to Cat Magick

The narcissists and psychopaths of the world are firmly in charge, England is broken and Nazis have been given the green light to crawl out from under wet, stinking rocks everywhere. It’s difficult not to feel that everything’s going to shit.

These are clearly difficult times, and difficult times, ladies and gentlemen, need serious measures.

We need to be agile; light on our feet; able to squeeze through small gaps, leap obstacles and find shelter in dark hiding places; we need white hot reactions coupled with an unrivalled ability to relax. In short, we need to Get Cat.

To which cat deity should we turn in these times? Bast? Shashthi? Ceridwen? Hecate? Freyja? All beautiful and powerful goddesses, and deserving of our veneration.

But no, these singular times need a deity of particular strengths: possessing not just the cat qualities above, but ideally also a magic bag from which he can conjure solutions to the problems which beset us. But where might we encounter such a being?

Ladies and gentlemen, we offer you The Felix the Cat Working.

Things you will need

  • a picture of Felix for your altar, ideally in his earlier, more feral incarnation, but in the end just pick one that appeals
  • Felix’s anthem
  • cream
  • saucer

How to do it

Put the picture of Felix on your altar. Gather in front of it. Have cream and saucer to hand.

Say the Statement of Intent: “It is our will to be able to greet life’s difficulties with the agility and resourcefulness of Felix the Cat.”

Evoke Felix in this fashion: “Great Felix, be with us here today to gift us your agility and resourcefulness as we face life’s difficulties. We offer you a libation in tribute.”

Pour cream into the saucer as you say the above. Set the rest of the cream aside. Raise the saucer above your head and place on the altar in front of the picture of Felix.

Time for Gnosis. Get Cat, in whatever fashion you choose.  Getting down on all fours, clawing the carpet and stretching in a langorous fashion should get you rolling. The rest, as they say, is up to you. Think Cat until the thoughts disappear and simply Be Cat. That’s the moment.

Stand up/get down from the top of the wardrobe/get out of the litter tray/stop showing your bumhole to your companions. Regather in front of the altar.

Thank Felix in this fashion: “Great Felix, thank you for your presence with us today. As you depart to your habitations, let there be forever peace between us. In your honour we sing your anthem.”

Sing the anthem: “Felix the Cat, The wonderful wonderful cat, Whenever he gets in a fix, He reaches into his bag of tricks! Felix the Cat, The wonderful wonderful cat, You’ll laugh so much your sides will ache, Your heart will go pitter pat, Watching Felix the wonderful cat!”

Drink the remaining cream. Go on, do it. Drink the cream. Don’t start whining, you shouldn’t have bought a litre. Drink the cream.

Banish with laughter

or dancing

or Catgroove.