imported_saoirse
08-11-2005, 03:39 PM
Friends - haven't checked in here for a while - I hope you are all well. Thought thjs might be of interest to some of you. stay strong.
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495qs/theswordinthemouth/id5.html
Conspiracy Theory and Symbolic Self-Immunity
1. Confusio Mortis
"The Old Christian way taught that until man faced the fact of his evil nature, he would forever be a prisoner of illusion and of those magicians who would enslave his energies – ostensibly in pursuit of utopia – but actually to the furtherance of the inner executive power ideology of a secret elite." From the Preface to the 1995 edition to Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffmann II
Michael Hoffmann walks a strange and lonely path that most people would rather not know about. At a glancing angle to what is called revisionist history on one hand and conspiracy theory on the other, he pursues a rugged zigzag of his own, unmasking more sinister illusions. His way is guaranteed not to win many friends in the circles that pass for intellectual culture today.
Yet, the time is coming when the psycho-spiritual research of Hoffmann’s histories will begin to be felt as a need, if only to provide a sharp alternative to official accounts of the age. Or should I say, official acts of forgetfulness? For one of the issues at contention is what kind of history will be written of this era – if, that is, there are people who will live in this world after we have gone, and if so, if such people will possess the requisite mental acuity to seek a deeper understanding of life by studying history. Neither of these assumptions is a sure thing. Michael Hoffmann raises the alarm about what is being done to the human mind in modern "advanced" societies – about what people are allowing themselves to become in societies where it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain accountability in business, politics, government, and the arts.
One has only to read the chapter in John Lukacs’ magisterial tome, Historical Consciousness, about "the difficulties of history in democratic ages," to realize that the postwar conditions that Lukacs was writing about have multiplied exponentially since that book was first published in 1968. Far too much in print, and much of what is in print of poor quality – letters supposedly written by "leaders" but signed by machines – bureaucratic position papers all. And then, how to trace the phone call, or now, the digital memo? – when something of importance may have occurred? If the decomposition of democracy into bureaucracy makes the work of the historian more difficult, the decomposition of bureaucracies into "shadow governments" will make it impossible. The historian will become utterly reduced to being a mere chronicler of the Father of Lies. From committee to committee, individuality sinks into the indistinguishable mass, and no one can be held to anything. People in high office say one thing and do another, pit groups against each other, allow the country to be flooded with immigrants in order to weaken the population, pass laws undermining morality, tradition, families, and religion in order for the people to become weak and demoralized, and engage in unrelenting assault on the economy and attempts to control it. The getting of money is shameless, votes no longer count for anything, and leaders or would-be leaders who attempt to bring fresh air and accountability to the system mysteriously disappear, over the years, in assassination after assassination. Somehow groups or religious organizations that show resistance are mocked, like the Catholic Church, or annihilated in a rain of hellfire courtesy the Federal Government, like the poor cultists in Waco. Public services continue to decline, the concept of "public good" or the "public things" – for God’s sake, the republic! -- disappears into the toilet-bowl of autism that the American Dream has become. In the meantime be assured the CEO’s and masters of finance are doing well, seeming to care not a whit while their country disappears into the black hole of debt. The leader of the Free World flashes the sign of Satan to the cheering crowds and the nation marches to the tune of the Israeli National Anthem.
And these things keep happening, and they keep happening again and again while the so-called "free press" . . . but I need not linger long on the despicableness of the sycophantic and lying press. For it only gets worse. In the sinking of all professionalism and standards of procedure all that is left is the Pageant of the Rulers. Tyranny, as Ortega y Gasset observed, though he put it in better words than mine, begins with the collapse of all standards.(1)
As I say – with facts like these, some people may begin to interest themselves in work like Michael Hoffmann’s. The reptile in man has awakened, and a few people even on this continent are starting to notice, along with the unfortunate sudden disappearance of what used to be called "civilization." But how does a people, a nation, misplace civilization – lose it, throw it aside, fail to cultivate it? Speaking of the sheer proliferation of "information" peddled by conspiracy buffs, Hoffmann remarks that "The cultivation of powers of discrimination and discernment are seldom the focus of the information-mongers. Yet if we acknowledge a war against the mind’s capacity for independent thinking, then the acquisition of wisdom and not data is what we ought to recognize as paramount… Indeed, when ‘expansion of the mind’ is substituted for the traditional vocation of cultivation of the mind, we find ourselves not on a ‘superhighway’… but in [a] cul-de-sac…"
Civilization is an art of cultivation, and those nations that do not cultivate it will, by some inexorable process of spirit, or despiritualization, lose both civilization and perhaps their own being and national existence. It is this "loss of being" with which Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare is concerned.
This "loss of being" manifests in many and often apparently contradictory ways. It may mean a fascination with sex, violence, Satanism, etc., or, contrariwise, an obsession to "expose" them. But both "fascination" and "exposure" alike belong to the "videodrome," the "sinister flattery" of the "occult imperium" that continually flatters modern man with the message that he is the most advanced, the most intelligent, the most progressive, the most free, on the planet. With all of these things accomplished, why bother with the humble precautionary work of preserving the fences, the limits, the standards and structures, of civilization? Why, we can just watch the latest videodrome horrors on MTV, keep the kids entertained with videogames, and go charging off to the mall in our SUV’s on the endless trails of asphalt so conveniently laid down as far as the eye can see, everywhere. Nor need we be so concerned with the "quality" of our leaders and elected representatives – for after all, the American system, being "best in the world," can just as easily be run by drones. It's the ultimate "quality control"-- government by machine!
Flattery, indeed, is the seemingly unprogrammed invitation to "Do your own thing," which Hoffmann links with the "thelemic current" of the Counter-church of the "Masonic cryptocracy." It is possible that we will begin to lose sympathizers here, as we head into the deeper waters of conspiracy theory. But I beg my readers to suspend disbelief – which some famed literary critic has suggested is needful to the reading of poetry. I will not be spending a great deal of time with the occult links to Freemasonry which Hoffmann has detailed in this book – Highway 66 in the USA laid out by Freemasons, the 33º parallel connected with the Trinity Site in New Mexico where the atomic explosion occurred, and with the Dallas location of the Kennedy assassination. It is not that matters of the "magico-scientific toponomy" are not of interest, but they are not my main interest. It is the theory of conspiracy that interests me more than the details – or perhaps it is just that I would rather mention different details. For example, I am more interested in the symbolism of oil – "black gold" – as a strong contributing cause to the civilizational complacency that he discusses. I think it is no accident that these deposits of energy were laid down in the "Saurian Ages," and that now, as we approach the end of the hydrocarbon era, and the oil resources are diminishing, man is becoming a type of human saurian.
Conspiracy theory takes account of both the literal and the symbolical dimensions of any given event. The inability of the modern mind to pay sufficient attention to both of these dimensions is the factor that enables "mind control" – the hypnotic spell of the ‘spectacular, electronic videodrome’ that continues to crank out its spellbinding horrors. People can be manipulated and made subject to ‘subliminal suggestion’ to the extent that they are not fully awake, alert, self-attuned and aware of these interpenetrating symbolic currents flowing through historical events today. Modern man’s uneducated imagination and lack of awareness of the symbolic dimensions of the events and phenomena within his purview, is the "weak link" in his society and selfhood. The link burst asunder in the early 20th century, first with an invasion of the arts, which began manifesting more and more egotistical if not diabolical themes. The poison has seeped to further recesses of interiority today. These tendencies have been noted for years by conservative and even "liberal" commentators – though few have thought through the correlations in history.
Thus, in fact, conspiracy theory is in essence the attempt to alert people to the symbolic dimensions of history. Which is to say – to alert people to history. But conspiracy theory is a dangerous arena – an unregulated market full of hidden agendas and deceptive practices. That modern man should need such a tool for his awakening is in itself a telling commentary on the inadequacies of modern education. An educated imagination does not need conspiracy theory. But then, an educated imagination is not putty in the hands of symbolic manipulators.
Indeed, as Hoffmann stresses, the ‘uncovering’ of a heinous crime marked with occult signifiers may be as much a part of the covert agenda as the commission of the crime itself. The manipulation and enslavement of the mind arises, Hoffmann believes, out of a prideful, Renaissance-era magic and science, which aims to substitute for natural creation a man-made, machine utopia. Such pride and hubris disdain the natural world and traditional forms of humane civilization and the acceptance of limits for the sake of power, conquest, and glory. Anything handed down and inherited is to be rejected; man is to be all in all. Hoffmann traces these notions to a debased Kabbalistic magic and Freemasonry. Perhaps we need not quarrel. Whatever the source, it is the ancient heresy of Lucifer: "Ye shall be as gods!"
Hoffmann speaks as a true conservative when he defends the Old Church, whose hierarchy and dogma, he says, were out in the open – unlike the Thelemic Counter-Church, where rigidity, hierarchy, and authority are covert. True conservatives used to say such things, but in recent years they seem to have all magically vanished. There are no "conservatives" in public any more. If they are in public they are not conservatives, because the "public" we now have is utterly contaminated beyond all hope of conservatism. Such true conservatives as exist write on the Internet, where they put forward views that are essentially antiwar and progressivist.
In the "public" of the United States today it is impossible to account for, or comprehend the meaning of, the number of people killed in the Middle East, the real size of the public and private debt, the real agenda behind the projected theft of Social Security funds, the number of cars on the roads, the amount of oil consumed, the numbers of soldiers killed and maimed, the number of ill-educated children, the number of years we have until the climate goes into some kind of super-collapse (not many), the number of illegal immigrants flooding the country from the South, the number of corporate scandals and theft of funds in government operations, the number of incidents of war profiteering and the amounts involved, the number of people who have lost jobs due to "outsourcing," or the number of threats issued daily from the White House against some other country. The figures simply mushroom into meaningless millions. Sometimes you hear people commenting on the passivity of the American public with respect to its own national self-interest, not to mention self-respect, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s headlines continue to blaze the news of the latest Eagles’ game as if there were nothing else of importance going on in the world. As Jim Kunstler has often written, the "consensus trance" seems to have completely befogged the populace.
If anything, the events in our time have disproved the Darwinian theory of survival and the self-preservation instinct, as well as the free market theory of Adam Smith that supposedly inspired capitalism. The free market is in shambles because of manipulated finance and endless fiat money (not to mention the inflow of money due to the sale of illegal drugs), the Enlightenment is gone because the assumptions of rationality no longer hold, and even evolutionary science is in a precarious position with respect to the multicultural barbarians who disdain any allegiance to Nature. In point of fact, there seems to be nothing to believe in, nothing whatsoever except "getting one’s own," and even there, it has become painfully difficult for many to achieve the stable loving relationships that make life worth living. Not to mention stable employment, neighborhoods, or schools.
Can knowledge of symbolism bring a new understanding of our benighted condition? Is humanity in this phase of history undergoing global occult initiation and if so, what can those who possess genuine knowledge of the occult do to exercise a beneficial influence? "Your soul deserves the place to which it came/If having entered Hell, you feel no flame," wrote Adam Mickiewicz, a motto used by Russell Kirk for his book, Lord of the Hollow Dark. It was the evil initiate’s aim in that book to cast his followers into the "Timeless Moment," where, in the bowels of a Scottish castle, they would gyrate in a drugged trance forever and ever—"Everything there is vacant of spirit…"
So it is to oppose this "vacancy of spirit" that we consider the symbol-comprehending faculty in man.
2. Expressive Dynamic
For the most part we are so accustomed to the way things are in the world that we have stopped looking – or if we look, we do not see.
For instance, rarely do we hear anyone express appreciation for the human or animal form. Nature lovers, horse people, and specialists of one species or another will share their delights of botany, horses, or ants, but usually such appreciative communications are reserved for glossy general-interest magazines, the Parade supplement to the Sunday papers, or nature programs suitable for children. The adults, the big important people, the scientists with their massive grants from government, are more prone to be heard declaiming about the faults and defects of some representative of the natural order, which they mean to fix with their genetic interferences, cloning techniques or hybridization technologies. This is big business for advanced intellects, and people who can be heard complaining about the dangers of such a head-on assault against the natural order, and of the human arrogance and folly it implies, are not considered worthy of the privilege of residing in the modern empire. A humble regard for the limits imposed by Nature has never perhaps characterized humankind, although the damage inflicted by this attitude was, in past times, limited compared with what is looming before us today. It seems to be too much to expect that great minds should acknowledge this potential for the exponential increase of human mischief occasioned by the advance of technical knowledge. Unfortunately, another behavior of which history affords few examples is that of powerful people voluntarily restraining themselves.
But I digress. I wish for a moment to point to the human form and body as a marvel in its own right – no, not in its own right. Most certainly not "in its own right" but as testified to have been created "in the image of God." I am not about to embark on the Creationist arguments, for I wish mainly to point out that the statement regarding man’s creation "in the image of God" should immediately alert us to the fact that we are dealing with a concept of the transcendent unity of mankind. This is a symbolic idea, not an "empirical" concept.(2) For the idea does not refer to any real or measurable entity in the world. In the sense of empiricism there are only particular men and women, in various tribes, races and divisions of "mankind." Thus the concept "mankind" is actually a gigantic conceptual leap into universality.
The Creationist-Darwinian views mirror each other in a hybrid of abstraction and unreality. The Creationists assume that God put together the human entity which has more or less continued to exist throughout the ages in its original divinely-ordained form.(3) The Darwinians assume that somewhere through the great rolling of the ages of time among the tribes of great apes a little sector got going with a different program, and evolution continued with results as noted today. If either of these warring camps had turned their attention to the conceptual faculty in man (this for the Creationists) or the evolution of consciousness (this for Darwinians) real progress might have been made. As it is, the spell of these conflicting ideologies has continued for well over a hundred years – only they are not simply ideologies but idolatries -- about which more in due course.
That there has been a development of human consciousness over time seems to me indubitable. One has only to consider one’s own development from infancy to adulthood to imagine that something like this may be applied to mankind’s development as a whole And of course, in the symbolism of the human form there is an enormous difference between any member of the species "mankind" and any other animal species, but in terms of the lowest threshold of measurable genetic differences between the branch of "human" as contrasted with our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, the differences are minute.
But again I digress. My purpose here is to draw attention to the interpenetration of symbolical and literal in the formation of the "phenomena" that science investigates.. I believe much of our profound intellectual and moral confusion is due to a failure to clarify the mode of investigation proper to each. "Symbolic mankind" needs to be investigated like any other symbol: that is, to be approached in the spirit of seeing what it yields, what it represents. The domain of this investigation is that of pure thinking, where close attention to the operation of thinking within the person who is doing it may be expected to yield insight into the incarnational processes of spirit and matter – of ‘thought’ and ‘thing.’ When what properly should be a symbolic concept of mankind is made to fit into the sort of purely external and extrinsic phenomena such as science typically investigates, the spiritual concept turns into a "phenomenon." And to the extent that we fail to pay heed to the "phenomenalization" of our concepts, they turn into "idols." They have no "within" because we forget our own role in constructing them. Thus Barfield: "When the ‘things’ of the physical world have become idols, then indeed the literal interpretation excludes the symbolical and vice versa. But where everything is a representation, at least half-consciously experienced as such, there is as yet no such contradiction. For a representation experienced as such is neither literal nor symbolical; or, alternatively, it is both at the same time… Before the Scientific Revolution, on the other hand, it was the concept of the ‘merely literal’ that was difficult."(4)
We have to break through the idol-matter in idol-space and idol-time to see in the evolution of consciousness a simultaneous evolution of ‘things’ – that is, not only the human bodily form but the world of Nature as well. The evolution of consciousness correlates with the evolution of phenomena. And again, we know this concretely and personally in our own lives – despite Descartes’ invocation of the "Timeless Moment" in his famous words, cogito, ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am."
This cogito is the "Creationist" moment in modern history – its originating act. Yet several commentators have pointed out that Descartes failed to describe the long developmental sequence that precedes the sudden appearance of the "cogito." We are not born as thinkers. We have to develop to it, slowly and painfully if at all. And the course of that development coincides with our ‘objectification’ of the world. Self-awareness and object-awareness are dynamically correlated. And though we may somehow place this thinking faculty in a category apart from the developmental sequence behind and within it, we also know, intuitively, concretely and personally, that our "form" and our "mind" can never be other than integral. I am the same person that I was in my infancy, only "more so."
Despite the many fashionable denials of human integrality or integrity that reign today -–for to such a denial is the tendency of idolatrous thinking – there is no getting around the immediate sense that this integrality is what it "means," in fact, to be "human." Descartes seized upon the "objective" side of this integrality, despite the interiority of the cogito. And the "object" side of this equation has been the preoccupation of Western philosophy ever since.
The entrance of symbolic awareness through conspiracy theories and the events to which they refer obliges us to become reacquainted with the interiority – but not in a subjective so much as a symbolic sense.(5) To begin with, we might remind ourselves that to see a human being before us is to know that the physical appearance is in some integral fashion related to the vitalizing thought – or, where thinking is absent or poorly developed, at least to the "disposition" or animated leaning – and that both form and disposition comprise, roughly, what we mean by the term "character" or "personality."
All of this, of course, is just sheer elementary common sense. But it is astonishing the degree to which such elementary notions have virtually passed out of our culture today. People – especially the ones you see on television – often have the bearing of livid masks. Newscasters, especially for some reason the female ones, seem to act like bones and nerves pulled along by wires, and the countenance appear to be fixated in a permanent grimace. No doubt this flatness of modernized humanity has given rise to a welter of urban folklores of roboticized humans on the one hand, or monsters of perversity on the other. The former is bland, the latter is vile. The area occupied by normal human beings possessing blood, the repertory of vital organs, viscera, muscles, smells and smiles seems to be shrinking day by day. But this is because our "viscera" no longer "speak" to us. Their symbolic dimensions have collapsed into the literal physicality which characterizes all of our "objects." Thus even our own viscera have become "idols." [See also note 5 below]
The re-forging of the participatory consciousness and will of man must take place in the smithy of symbolism. It is knowledge of the representational nature of all the phenomena that needs to be recovered because it is only in that way that we can recover the awareness of our own participatiion in them and with that, the sense of our own place in nature and society.
In the sense that we may contrast a "livid mask" to a face, we may note that the latter is both a physical appearance and a symbol: rather, it is a case of "matter" [flesh] being raised to individualized expressiveness. "Expressiveness" has to do with symbolism, with the "throwing together" of inner tendency with outer form. Everything we do or fail to do is expressive. If I were to write this piece with no capitals, punctuation, paragraph breaks and with misspellings and poor grammar, I would be expressing either my stupidity or my pride. My "expressiveness" would amount to a revelation of either laziness or contempt. If the latter, I would be expressing contempt for the reader by implying that I was beyond such petty considerations as grammar. Likewise, a landscape is expressive – and one has only to drive through most of the landscapes of modernity in what euphemistically used to be called "the countryside" to behold how modern humanity expresses its contempt for the earth and possibly, its own self-contempt. The vomitoria of suburbanization stretches for miles, with shopping malls and detritus of the automobile age interspersed with housing developments constructed in fake English styles. Only the degraded and impotent subjects of an Empire of Idolatry could throw up such a hideous memorialization of itself. And these subjects are not only "dispossessed" in the political sense, that is, lacking the political power to shape their environments. The building patterns are the result of modernity’s idolization of matter – that is, the incapacity of modern phenomena to speak the language of symbolism.
But it is not just the face that is symbolic of the human, but the entire form: the upright posture, the two legs and arms, bilaterality, symmetry, the intricacy of the organs, the incredible complexity of the nerves and senses. It is amazing that we spend so little time pondering what is natural and given, and that we fail to recall how we are "placed" in the world. For good or for ill, the head rests upon all else. But whether this head is to be symbolic of mind or whether it is to be suffocated within its own "skullcap" – this is the question of our time.
Only a degraded humanity could embrace a vision that says the "genes" determine the whole show or that human beings "descended" from apes. It is not, I hasten to add, that such views do not possess a kind of truthfulness and accuracy. Who knows? Perhaps they are even 100% accurate. But whether they are accurate or not is beside the point. My point is that such views symbolize something. And what they symbolize is the transformation of the concept "mankind" from a "participated" to a "nonparticipated" concept. Such views attest to a process of "excarnation" or disengagement on the part of those who espouse them.
In short, a great abdication is occurring. The intellectuals and the scientists are seceding from humanity – no doubt following the great example set by our business and government elites. The owners of the giant corporations have discovered that it is much more cost-effective to cheat and outsource, and the owners of government have discovered the wonderful ideology of "privatization," which allows them to cancel the social contract and annihilate the concept of the public from government. In the new tribalism of intellectual power, knowledge is irresponsibility.
"Participation" in the sense in which I am using it here means being aware of something otherwise than though mere sensory perception. When I see ‘face,’ I don’t just see a blob of physical matter but an expressive countenance. Knowing a face as a face is knowing another human being through immediate empathy, although this empathy may not be conscious and in fact I may not even like the person whose face I see. Owen Barfield uses the term figuration to describe the process by which mere sensations are constructed by the percipient mind into recognizable objects. Figuration is something little children do all the time, and much of the charm of poetry consists in the poet’s ability to get us to re-engage in it. If the poet is skillful, this figuration which the poem invites us to perform helps to break the hold of idol-matter upon our minds by ‘rescuing’ the particulars in perception.
Indeed, the particulars of perception are ‘slain’ in the generalized concepts. I have often thought that the Biblical story of Cain and Abel was a type of allegory of this mental process. ‘Abel’ is the particular, unique and individual element that gets subsumed in the generalizing conceptual faculty. ‘Cain’ is the one who possesses the faculty of conceiving in a general way – and he is forever the slayer of his brother. The achievement of symbolic and conceptual faculty by man is not a cost-free event.
Be that as it may, the concept "mankind" becomes an idol when the so-called "agent of change" is conceived to lie in some mystical realm of genetics or ‘evolutionary process’ apart from the ones doing the living, being, and developing. For as a "phenomenon" mankind has no "within-ness." The phenomenal-literal view only moves the scene of action from the agent, man, to some other and more distant scene, while implicitly giving license to those who would tamper with human genetics. For it assumes that the genetic evolution, by having somehow gotten to the point at which many of its mechanics have been figured out, only needs the conscious direction of experts to work out the kinks. This point of view shows ignorance and contempt for our distant ancestors by denying the role that will, consciousness and understanding must have played in their own course of development, and it increases the arrogance and hubris of modern scientists by assuming that their mechanical knowledge can improve the species. Thus where past or pre-history is concerned modern science recites the script of the crude ignoramus while for modern times it rehearses for the part of God.
But the degeneration of the idea of an evolving mankind into an idol for which even the term ‘evolution’ itself can have no real significance (because all the ‘evolving’ presumably occurred before we emerged into our glorious present selves) has even uglier implications. The symbolic unity and universality of the idea of mankind, to which all human persons belong and in which all persons participate by virtue of their humanity, is an idea that we lose at our peril. For this idea has been only able to maintain itself precariously within a human race whose overwhelming tendency is and has always been to tribalize. Paradoxically, the symbolical forebears of the human race – Adam and Eve – was the inspiration of that most tribal of all peoples, the Hebrews, and it was only granted a renewed lease on life through the universalistic influence of Christianity.
The idea of a mankind universally tainted by the originalism of sin could not really survive the rise of the nation-state, although the Enlightenment theories of moral universalism extended its lease for a couple of hundred years. But the universalism expressed in the Kantian moral law does not have the symbolic resonance to cope with the new tribalism arising from the intellectual classes today. No doubt the multiculturalists and devoted apostles of tolerance and diversity would be offended to hear me say that they have brought out all the heavy artillery for the wrong war. The new tribalism is not really about race. Rather, race is but a diversionary tactic. It is true that diversionary tactics can take a few real casualties. But the real war is elsewhere. The real war has to do with the symbolical nature of man. Those who understand this belong to a pharisaic cult - conscious or otherwise - which knows how to wield symbolism. Those who do not grasp the symbolism principle will not be participating in this new phase of human evolution. Symbolism will be "done unto them" - that is, the incessant visioning of degraded forms of human living. The persons resulting from such propagandistic immersion will be merely literal – rather than human – beings. They will literally be ‘lost’ to any real attributions of humanity. The new ‘tribalism’ is thus the production of subhuman beings to serve the machine order of the neo-tribalistic elites.
3. Symbolic Participation
With the rise of the nation-state, the older medieval idea of ‘participation’ gave way to a more narrowly conceived notion involving citizenship. When we hear the word ‘participation’ today, we commonly only think of ‘political participation.’ But it is imperative for us to recover the symbolizing dimensions of the concept of participation. It is not only that political participation in advanced, complex technological and bureaucratic societies has been rendered almost meaningless. It is more pointedly the fact that without a sense for the larger dimensions of participation – that is to say, without a clear concept of human destiny – itself a "symbolic" and spiritual notion -- human beings will be unable to oppose the saturnine entropy that threatens the existence of civilized man as well as the natural order.
Modern advanced societies are poised dangerously on the cusp of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which underlies the manifestations of all life. The degradation of all forms of energy is relentless – the finitude of the oil resources being only the most obvious example. But everything from climate, food, and fertility to forms of social organization, arts, and concepts of public good, are affected by modern man’s impoverished capacity of participation. And the hour is late. There is no guarantee that an education in participation will arrest the entropic slide into spiritual suffocation for society as a whole. But ultimately participation will be necessary to save the appearances from chaos and inanity – as Barfield puts it, "In the long run we shall not be able to save souls without saving the appearances, and it is an error fraught with the most terrible consequences to imagine that we shall."
* * *
In the early 15th century Italy there occurred an interesting exchange of letters between two persons, an exchange which illuminates the changing of an era. At that time in Florence, there was a great debate in progress between the humanists, who believed that students should be exposed to the classical authors, and members of the Church, who held that the pagan authors were best studied by students after they had first received a sufficient grounding in the faith. One of the persons troubled by the progress of classical studies was a monk living at San Miniato near Florence. He wrote to Coluccio Salutati [1330-1406] one of these humanists, who was credited with the revived Carolingian script. Salutati’s reply to this monk, on January 25, 1405, is considered to be one of the important documents of early humanism.
Salutati in this letter devotes close attention to the question of metaphorical or figurative language. He wrote:
"Do you not see that sacred literature, the whole body of Holy Scripture, is rightly considered, nothing else in its method of expression than poetry? For, when we are speaking of God or of incorporeal beings, nothing is literally true, but beneath that surface of fiction there is nothing that is not true."
Salutati comments, for instance, on the passage in Scripture where it says, "The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," remarking that "How can a corporeal act be reported of the spirit of God which is an incorporeal thing?"
Here in a nutshell we see the decline of the ancient ‘participation.’ In that old participatory consciousness, it was no more to be wondered at that one would speak of the spirit of God moving the face of the waters than it is for us to note the spirit of joy or sorrow on a human face. The interpenetration of spirit and matter which is the mystery of all incarnation is here felt to reside not only in Christ, the Divine Exemplar, or in human persons generally, but in the world at large as well. The consciousness of man had not yet polarized into an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer,’ as with us. Another example, often cited to illustrate this earlier unity between ‘thoughts’ and ‘things,’ is the translation of the word pneuma in the New Testament. Sometimes it is translated as ‘Spirit,’ at other times it is translated as ‘wind,’ and at still other times ‘breath.’ The important point is that the power of pneuma manifests within human beings as in Nature and indeed encompasses the supersensible world of ‘Spirit.’ These dimensions of meaning have shrunk in modern times – as with our ‘pneumatic drill’ or the disease of congested breath, pneumonia.
According to Owen Barfield, whose important book, Saving the Appearances, should be the foundational text for basic education in participation and more generally for anyone who wishes to understand human thought prior to the Scientific Revolution, in a participated world the phenomena "carry the sort of multiple significance which we today find only in symbols." Evidently by the time of Coluccio Salutati this participated world was already considered old-fashioned.
The appearance on the scene of conspiracy theories is an indication that the field of symbolic awareness is pressing upon us. The factual claims of conspiracy theories should be investigated with the tools used to investigate any factual claims of the physical world. But to dismiss the claims made by conspiracy theorists because, well, they have been put forward by people who subscribe to conspiracy theories – such a dismissal can only be indicative of the apprehensions of elite neo-tribalists that the symbolic con game might be unmasked. Whether the neo-tribalists are "literally" members of a "conspiracy" is not the point. The point is that apparently it serves the interests of the neo-tribalists to keep the masses of the people in a state of dull literalism punctuated by symbolic threadless "thrills" that lead nowhere.
For let it be said that the thesis of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare is that the subliminal manipulation of the public is being carried out through assassinations of important public figures, crimes and "exposes" of crimes, violent and pornographic movies, media events and video games by means of unidentified persons or groups who are either consciously working for the diabolic aims of Freemasonry and a debased Kabbalah, or unconsciously serving such persons or groups. These groups shifted into high gear with the assassination of John F. Kennedy – an event "explained" to the American people by the "lone nut" theory of the Warren Commission – a theory successively trotted out for the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, and no doubt others. The blogger who goes by name of "Xymphora" had the best summary of the "occult program." Commenting on the election of Nov. 2, 2004, he wrote:
"The 2004 election is the culmination of forty years of American conspiracy starting with the murder of JFK, with the failure to investigate each conspiracy leading directly to the next one. When Earl Warren decided he had to lie to the American people about who was really responsible for the death of JFK, he set in motion a series of head-in-the-sand bad decisions that continue up to today.The consistent lack of courage in facing its demons has left the United States in a bit of a pickle, as it now faces an almost inconceivably bleak future of theocratic leadership, disastrous economic policies, and a never-ending series of wars." [Sunday, Jan. 23, 2005]
I believe this summation of the situation in contemporary America is powerful in its brevity. There can be nothing to add to it. For the decision of the neo-tribalist elites not to investigate "conspiracy theories" speaks for itself. May the ruin of America be on their souls and conscience. For another word for the manipulation of symbolism and events by people in positions of public trust for selfish ends and covert goals is – treason.
Notes:
1. His words – "Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal may be made," from The Revolt of the Masses.
2. Ortega y Gasset – once again – says that a concept is something that often cannot be expressed in words. He gives the example of the concept of riding a bicycle – in such a case one is reduced to making pantomime gestures. A symbol represents something. In the case of "symbolic mankind" the concept represents unity, indivisibility, universality.
3. I realize that contemporary "Intelligent Design" theories are far more nuanced than the superficial statement I have made here. I think these recent variants of the Creationist arguments are hopeful signs. Nevertheless, I think the propounders of these theories would also benefit from the study of symbolism and participation that I am attempting to lay out in this paper.
4. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, New York, 1965; p. 75.
5. Cf. Barfield: "… the unaccountable rapidity with which a literal-minded generation developed a sympathetic response to the psycho-analytical gnosis of dream-imagery, and accepted the … fantastic idea of an immaterial realm of ‘the unconscious,’ is another sign… that the development of man’s consciousness is an evolutionary as well as a dialectical process… yet here again… the historian of the future will observe the fatally blighting influence of the conventional idolatry… Representation, as a principle, is accepted [by Freud] as a matter of course…[But] from the perception that physical functions and organs are themselves representations he is, however, cut off by all the assumptions of idolatry." Saving the Appearances, pp.133-34. This is what I mean by the distinction ‘subjective’ vs. ‘symbolical’ awareness. Psychoanalysis is "subjectivist." Symbolical awareness embraces not only the personal and subjective, but the historical and trans-personal dimensions.
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495qs/theswordinthemouth/id5.html
Conspiracy Theory and Symbolic Self-Immunity
1. Confusio Mortis
"The Old Christian way taught that until man faced the fact of his evil nature, he would forever be a prisoner of illusion and of those magicians who would enslave his energies – ostensibly in pursuit of utopia – but actually to the furtherance of the inner executive power ideology of a secret elite." From the Preface to the 1995 edition to Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffmann II
Michael Hoffmann walks a strange and lonely path that most people would rather not know about. At a glancing angle to what is called revisionist history on one hand and conspiracy theory on the other, he pursues a rugged zigzag of his own, unmasking more sinister illusions. His way is guaranteed not to win many friends in the circles that pass for intellectual culture today.
Yet, the time is coming when the psycho-spiritual research of Hoffmann’s histories will begin to be felt as a need, if only to provide a sharp alternative to official accounts of the age. Or should I say, official acts of forgetfulness? For one of the issues at contention is what kind of history will be written of this era – if, that is, there are people who will live in this world after we have gone, and if so, if such people will possess the requisite mental acuity to seek a deeper understanding of life by studying history. Neither of these assumptions is a sure thing. Michael Hoffmann raises the alarm about what is being done to the human mind in modern "advanced" societies – about what people are allowing themselves to become in societies where it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain accountability in business, politics, government, and the arts.
One has only to read the chapter in John Lukacs’ magisterial tome, Historical Consciousness, about "the difficulties of history in democratic ages," to realize that the postwar conditions that Lukacs was writing about have multiplied exponentially since that book was first published in 1968. Far too much in print, and much of what is in print of poor quality – letters supposedly written by "leaders" but signed by machines – bureaucratic position papers all. And then, how to trace the phone call, or now, the digital memo? – when something of importance may have occurred? If the decomposition of democracy into bureaucracy makes the work of the historian more difficult, the decomposition of bureaucracies into "shadow governments" will make it impossible. The historian will become utterly reduced to being a mere chronicler of the Father of Lies. From committee to committee, individuality sinks into the indistinguishable mass, and no one can be held to anything. People in high office say one thing and do another, pit groups against each other, allow the country to be flooded with immigrants in order to weaken the population, pass laws undermining morality, tradition, families, and religion in order for the people to become weak and demoralized, and engage in unrelenting assault on the economy and attempts to control it. The getting of money is shameless, votes no longer count for anything, and leaders or would-be leaders who attempt to bring fresh air and accountability to the system mysteriously disappear, over the years, in assassination after assassination. Somehow groups or religious organizations that show resistance are mocked, like the Catholic Church, or annihilated in a rain of hellfire courtesy the Federal Government, like the poor cultists in Waco. Public services continue to decline, the concept of "public good" or the "public things" – for God’s sake, the republic! -- disappears into the toilet-bowl of autism that the American Dream has become. In the meantime be assured the CEO’s and masters of finance are doing well, seeming to care not a whit while their country disappears into the black hole of debt. The leader of the Free World flashes the sign of Satan to the cheering crowds and the nation marches to the tune of the Israeli National Anthem.
And these things keep happening, and they keep happening again and again while the so-called "free press" . . . but I need not linger long on the despicableness of the sycophantic and lying press. For it only gets worse. In the sinking of all professionalism and standards of procedure all that is left is the Pageant of the Rulers. Tyranny, as Ortega y Gasset observed, though he put it in better words than mine, begins with the collapse of all standards.(1)
As I say – with facts like these, some people may begin to interest themselves in work like Michael Hoffmann’s. The reptile in man has awakened, and a few people even on this continent are starting to notice, along with the unfortunate sudden disappearance of what used to be called "civilization." But how does a people, a nation, misplace civilization – lose it, throw it aside, fail to cultivate it? Speaking of the sheer proliferation of "information" peddled by conspiracy buffs, Hoffmann remarks that "The cultivation of powers of discrimination and discernment are seldom the focus of the information-mongers. Yet if we acknowledge a war against the mind’s capacity for independent thinking, then the acquisition of wisdom and not data is what we ought to recognize as paramount… Indeed, when ‘expansion of the mind’ is substituted for the traditional vocation of cultivation of the mind, we find ourselves not on a ‘superhighway’… but in [a] cul-de-sac…"
Civilization is an art of cultivation, and those nations that do not cultivate it will, by some inexorable process of spirit, or despiritualization, lose both civilization and perhaps their own being and national existence. It is this "loss of being" with which Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare is concerned.
This "loss of being" manifests in many and often apparently contradictory ways. It may mean a fascination with sex, violence, Satanism, etc., or, contrariwise, an obsession to "expose" them. But both "fascination" and "exposure" alike belong to the "videodrome," the "sinister flattery" of the "occult imperium" that continually flatters modern man with the message that he is the most advanced, the most intelligent, the most progressive, the most free, on the planet. With all of these things accomplished, why bother with the humble precautionary work of preserving the fences, the limits, the standards and structures, of civilization? Why, we can just watch the latest videodrome horrors on MTV, keep the kids entertained with videogames, and go charging off to the mall in our SUV’s on the endless trails of asphalt so conveniently laid down as far as the eye can see, everywhere. Nor need we be so concerned with the "quality" of our leaders and elected representatives – for after all, the American system, being "best in the world," can just as easily be run by drones. It's the ultimate "quality control"-- government by machine!
Flattery, indeed, is the seemingly unprogrammed invitation to "Do your own thing," which Hoffmann links with the "thelemic current" of the Counter-church of the "Masonic cryptocracy." It is possible that we will begin to lose sympathizers here, as we head into the deeper waters of conspiracy theory. But I beg my readers to suspend disbelief – which some famed literary critic has suggested is needful to the reading of poetry. I will not be spending a great deal of time with the occult links to Freemasonry which Hoffmann has detailed in this book – Highway 66 in the USA laid out by Freemasons, the 33º parallel connected with the Trinity Site in New Mexico where the atomic explosion occurred, and with the Dallas location of the Kennedy assassination. It is not that matters of the "magico-scientific toponomy" are not of interest, but they are not my main interest. It is the theory of conspiracy that interests me more than the details – or perhaps it is just that I would rather mention different details. For example, I am more interested in the symbolism of oil – "black gold" – as a strong contributing cause to the civilizational complacency that he discusses. I think it is no accident that these deposits of energy were laid down in the "Saurian Ages," and that now, as we approach the end of the hydrocarbon era, and the oil resources are diminishing, man is becoming a type of human saurian.
Conspiracy theory takes account of both the literal and the symbolical dimensions of any given event. The inability of the modern mind to pay sufficient attention to both of these dimensions is the factor that enables "mind control" – the hypnotic spell of the ‘spectacular, electronic videodrome’ that continues to crank out its spellbinding horrors. People can be manipulated and made subject to ‘subliminal suggestion’ to the extent that they are not fully awake, alert, self-attuned and aware of these interpenetrating symbolic currents flowing through historical events today. Modern man’s uneducated imagination and lack of awareness of the symbolic dimensions of the events and phenomena within his purview, is the "weak link" in his society and selfhood. The link burst asunder in the early 20th century, first with an invasion of the arts, which began manifesting more and more egotistical if not diabolical themes. The poison has seeped to further recesses of interiority today. These tendencies have been noted for years by conservative and even "liberal" commentators – though few have thought through the correlations in history.
Thus, in fact, conspiracy theory is in essence the attempt to alert people to the symbolic dimensions of history. Which is to say – to alert people to history. But conspiracy theory is a dangerous arena – an unregulated market full of hidden agendas and deceptive practices. That modern man should need such a tool for his awakening is in itself a telling commentary on the inadequacies of modern education. An educated imagination does not need conspiracy theory. But then, an educated imagination is not putty in the hands of symbolic manipulators.
Indeed, as Hoffmann stresses, the ‘uncovering’ of a heinous crime marked with occult signifiers may be as much a part of the covert agenda as the commission of the crime itself. The manipulation and enslavement of the mind arises, Hoffmann believes, out of a prideful, Renaissance-era magic and science, which aims to substitute for natural creation a man-made, machine utopia. Such pride and hubris disdain the natural world and traditional forms of humane civilization and the acceptance of limits for the sake of power, conquest, and glory. Anything handed down and inherited is to be rejected; man is to be all in all. Hoffmann traces these notions to a debased Kabbalistic magic and Freemasonry. Perhaps we need not quarrel. Whatever the source, it is the ancient heresy of Lucifer: "Ye shall be as gods!"
Hoffmann speaks as a true conservative when he defends the Old Church, whose hierarchy and dogma, he says, were out in the open – unlike the Thelemic Counter-Church, where rigidity, hierarchy, and authority are covert. True conservatives used to say such things, but in recent years they seem to have all magically vanished. There are no "conservatives" in public any more. If they are in public they are not conservatives, because the "public" we now have is utterly contaminated beyond all hope of conservatism. Such true conservatives as exist write on the Internet, where they put forward views that are essentially antiwar and progressivist.
In the "public" of the United States today it is impossible to account for, or comprehend the meaning of, the number of people killed in the Middle East, the real size of the public and private debt, the real agenda behind the projected theft of Social Security funds, the number of cars on the roads, the amount of oil consumed, the numbers of soldiers killed and maimed, the number of ill-educated children, the number of years we have until the climate goes into some kind of super-collapse (not many), the number of illegal immigrants flooding the country from the South, the number of corporate scandals and theft of funds in government operations, the number of incidents of war profiteering and the amounts involved, the number of people who have lost jobs due to "outsourcing," or the number of threats issued daily from the White House against some other country. The figures simply mushroom into meaningless millions. Sometimes you hear people commenting on the passivity of the American public with respect to its own national self-interest, not to mention self-respect, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s headlines continue to blaze the news of the latest Eagles’ game as if there were nothing else of importance going on in the world. As Jim Kunstler has often written, the "consensus trance" seems to have completely befogged the populace.
If anything, the events in our time have disproved the Darwinian theory of survival and the self-preservation instinct, as well as the free market theory of Adam Smith that supposedly inspired capitalism. The free market is in shambles because of manipulated finance and endless fiat money (not to mention the inflow of money due to the sale of illegal drugs), the Enlightenment is gone because the assumptions of rationality no longer hold, and even evolutionary science is in a precarious position with respect to the multicultural barbarians who disdain any allegiance to Nature. In point of fact, there seems to be nothing to believe in, nothing whatsoever except "getting one’s own," and even there, it has become painfully difficult for many to achieve the stable loving relationships that make life worth living. Not to mention stable employment, neighborhoods, or schools.
Can knowledge of symbolism bring a new understanding of our benighted condition? Is humanity in this phase of history undergoing global occult initiation and if so, what can those who possess genuine knowledge of the occult do to exercise a beneficial influence? "Your soul deserves the place to which it came/If having entered Hell, you feel no flame," wrote Adam Mickiewicz, a motto used by Russell Kirk for his book, Lord of the Hollow Dark. It was the evil initiate’s aim in that book to cast his followers into the "Timeless Moment," where, in the bowels of a Scottish castle, they would gyrate in a drugged trance forever and ever—"Everything there is vacant of spirit…"
So it is to oppose this "vacancy of spirit" that we consider the symbol-comprehending faculty in man.
2. Expressive Dynamic
For the most part we are so accustomed to the way things are in the world that we have stopped looking – or if we look, we do not see.
For instance, rarely do we hear anyone express appreciation for the human or animal form. Nature lovers, horse people, and specialists of one species or another will share their delights of botany, horses, or ants, but usually such appreciative communications are reserved for glossy general-interest magazines, the Parade supplement to the Sunday papers, or nature programs suitable for children. The adults, the big important people, the scientists with their massive grants from government, are more prone to be heard declaiming about the faults and defects of some representative of the natural order, which they mean to fix with their genetic interferences, cloning techniques or hybridization technologies. This is big business for advanced intellects, and people who can be heard complaining about the dangers of such a head-on assault against the natural order, and of the human arrogance and folly it implies, are not considered worthy of the privilege of residing in the modern empire. A humble regard for the limits imposed by Nature has never perhaps characterized humankind, although the damage inflicted by this attitude was, in past times, limited compared with what is looming before us today. It seems to be too much to expect that great minds should acknowledge this potential for the exponential increase of human mischief occasioned by the advance of technical knowledge. Unfortunately, another behavior of which history affords few examples is that of powerful people voluntarily restraining themselves.
But I digress. I wish for a moment to point to the human form and body as a marvel in its own right – no, not in its own right. Most certainly not "in its own right" but as testified to have been created "in the image of God." I am not about to embark on the Creationist arguments, for I wish mainly to point out that the statement regarding man’s creation "in the image of God" should immediately alert us to the fact that we are dealing with a concept of the transcendent unity of mankind. This is a symbolic idea, not an "empirical" concept.(2) For the idea does not refer to any real or measurable entity in the world. In the sense of empiricism there are only particular men and women, in various tribes, races and divisions of "mankind." Thus the concept "mankind" is actually a gigantic conceptual leap into universality.
The Creationist-Darwinian views mirror each other in a hybrid of abstraction and unreality. The Creationists assume that God put together the human entity which has more or less continued to exist throughout the ages in its original divinely-ordained form.(3) The Darwinians assume that somewhere through the great rolling of the ages of time among the tribes of great apes a little sector got going with a different program, and evolution continued with results as noted today. If either of these warring camps had turned their attention to the conceptual faculty in man (this for the Creationists) or the evolution of consciousness (this for Darwinians) real progress might have been made. As it is, the spell of these conflicting ideologies has continued for well over a hundred years – only they are not simply ideologies but idolatries -- about which more in due course.
That there has been a development of human consciousness over time seems to me indubitable. One has only to consider one’s own development from infancy to adulthood to imagine that something like this may be applied to mankind’s development as a whole And of course, in the symbolism of the human form there is an enormous difference between any member of the species "mankind" and any other animal species, but in terms of the lowest threshold of measurable genetic differences between the branch of "human" as contrasted with our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, the differences are minute.
But again I digress. My purpose here is to draw attention to the interpenetration of symbolical and literal in the formation of the "phenomena" that science investigates.. I believe much of our profound intellectual and moral confusion is due to a failure to clarify the mode of investigation proper to each. "Symbolic mankind" needs to be investigated like any other symbol: that is, to be approached in the spirit of seeing what it yields, what it represents. The domain of this investigation is that of pure thinking, where close attention to the operation of thinking within the person who is doing it may be expected to yield insight into the incarnational processes of spirit and matter – of ‘thought’ and ‘thing.’ When what properly should be a symbolic concept of mankind is made to fit into the sort of purely external and extrinsic phenomena such as science typically investigates, the spiritual concept turns into a "phenomenon." And to the extent that we fail to pay heed to the "phenomenalization" of our concepts, they turn into "idols." They have no "within" because we forget our own role in constructing them. Thus Barfield: "When the ‘things’ of the physical world have become idols, then indeed the literal interpretation excludes the symbolical and vice versa. But where everything is a representation, at least half-consciously experienced as such, there is as yet no such contradiction. For a representation experienced as such is neither literal nor symbolical; or, alternatively, it is both at the same time… Before the Scientific Revolution, on the other hand, it was the concept of the ‘merely literal’ that was difficult."(4)
We have to break through the idol-matter in idol-space and idol-time to see in the evolution of consciousness a simultaneous evolution of ‘things’ – that is, not only the human bodily form but the world of Nature as well. The evolution of consciousness correlates with the evolution of phenomena. And again, we know this concretely and personally in our own lives – despite Descartes’ invocation of the "Timeless Moment" in his famous words, cogito, ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am."
This cogito is the "Creationist" moment in modern history – its originating act. Yet several commentators have pointed out that Descartes failed to describe the long developmental sequence that precedes the sudden appearance of the "cogito." We are not born as thinkers. We have to develop to it, slowly and painfully if at all. And the course of that development coincides with our ‘objectification’ of the world. Self-awareness and object-awareness are dynamically correlated. And though we may somehow place this thinking faculty in a category apart from the developmental sequence behind and within it, we also know, intuitively, concretely and personally, that our "form" and our "mind" can never be other than integral. I am the same person that I was in my infancy, only "more so."
Despite the many fashionable denials of human integrality or integrity that reign today -–for to such a denial is the tendency of idolatrous thinking – there is no getting around the immediate sense that this integrality is what it "means," in fact, to be "human." Descartes seized upon the "objective" side of this integrality, despite the interiority of the cogito. And the "object" side of this equation has been the preoccupation of Western philosophy ever since.
The entrance of symbolic awareness through conspiracy theories and the events to which they refer obliges us to become reacquainted with the interiority – but not in a subjective so much as a symbolic sense.(5) To begin with, we might remind ourselves that to see a human being before us is to know that the physical appearance is in some integral fashion related to the vitalizing thought – or, where thinking is absent or poorly developed, at least to the "disposition" or animated leaning – and that both form and disposition comprise, roughly, what we mean by the term "character" or "personality."
All of this, of course, is just sheer elementary common sense. But it is astonishing the degree to which such elementary notions have virtually passed out of our culture today. People – especially the ones you see on television – often have the bearing of livid masks. Newscasters, especially for some reason the female ones, seem to act like bones and nerves pulled along by wires, and the countenance appear to be fixated in a permanent grimace. No doubt this flatness of modernized humanity has given rise to a welter of urban folklores of roboticized humans on the one hand, or monsters of perversity on the other. The former is bland, the latter is vile. The area occupied by normal human beings possessing blood, the repertory of vital organs, viscera, muscles, smells and smiles seems to be shrinking day by day. But this is because our "viscera" no longer "speak" to us. Their symbolic dimensions have collapsed into the literal physicality which characterizes all of our "objects." Thus even our own viscera have become "idols." [See also note 5 below]
The re-forging of the participatory consciousness and will of man must take place in the smithy of symbolism. It is knowledge of the representational nature of all the phenomena that needs to be recovered because it is only in that way that we can recover the awareness of our own participatiion in them and with that, the sense of our own place in nature and society.
In the sense that we may contrast a "livid mask" to a face, we may note that the latter is both a physical appearance and a symbol: rather, it is a case of "matter" [flesh] being raised to individualized expressiveness. "Expressiveness" has to do with symbolism, with the "throwing together" of inner tendency with outer form. Everything we do or fail to do is expressive. If I were to write this piece with no capitals, punctuation, paragraph breaks and with misspellings and poor grammar, I would be expressing either my stupidity or my pride. My "expressiveness" would amount to a revelation of either laziness or contempt. If the latter, I would be expressing contempt for the reader by implying that I was beyond such petty considerations as grammar. Likewise, a landscape is expressive – and one has only to drive through most of the landscapes of modernity in what euphemistically used to be called "the countryside" to behold how modern humanity expresses its contempt for the earth and possibly, its own self-contempt. The vomitoria of suburbanization stretches for miles, with shopping malls and detritus of the automobile age interspersed with housing developments constructed in fake English styles. Only the degraded and impotent subjects of an Empire of Idolatry could throw up such a hideous memorialization of itself. And these subjects are not only "dispossessed" in the political sense, that is, lacking the political power to shape their environments. The building patterns are the result of modernity’s idolization of matter – that is, the incapacity of modern phenomena to speak the language of symbolism.
But it is not just the face that is symbolic of the human, but the entire form: the upright posture, the two legs and arms, bilaterality, symmetry, the intricacy of the organs, the incredible complexity of the nerves and senses. It is amazing that we spend so little time pondering what is natural and given, and that we fail to recall how we are "placed" in the world. For good or for ill, the head rests upon all else. But whether this head is to be symbolic of mind or whether it is to be suffocated within its own "skullcap" – this is the question of our time.
Only a degraded humanity could embrace a vision that says the "genes" determine the whole show or that human beings "descended" from apes. It is not, I hasten to add, that such views do not possess a kind of truthfulness and accuracy. Who knows? Perhaps they are even 100% accurate. But whether they are accurate or not is beside the point. My point is that such views symbolize something. And what they symbolize is the transformation of the concept "mankind" from a "participated" to a "nonparticipated" concept. Such views attest to a process of "excarnation" or disengagement on the part of those who espouse them.
In short, a great abdication is occurring. The intellectuals and the scientists are seceding from humanity – no doubt following the great example set by our business and government elites. The owners of the giant corporations have discovered that it is much more cost-effective to cheat and outsource, and the owners of government have discovered the wonderful ideology of "privatization," which allows them to cancel the social contract and annihilate the concept of the public from government. In the new tribalism of intellectual power, knowledge is irresponsibility.
"Participation" in the sense in which I am using it here means being aware of something otherwise than though mere sensory perception. When I see ‘face,’ I don’t just see a blob of physical matter but an expressive countenance. Knowing a face as a face is knowing another human being through immediate empathy, although this empathy may not be conscious and in fact I may not even like the person whose face I see. Owen Barfield uses the term figuration to describe the process by which mere sensations are constructed by the percipient mind into recognizable objects. Figuration is something little children do all the time, and much of the charm of poetry consists in the poet’s ability to get us to re-engage in it. If the poet is skillful, this figuration which the poem invites us to perform helps to break the hold of idol-matter upon our minds by ‘rescuing’ the particulars in perception.
Indeed, the particulars of perception are ‘slain’ in the generalized concepts. I have often thought that the Biblical story of Cain and Abel was a type of allegory of this mental process. ‘Abel’ is the particular, unique and individual element that gets subsumed in the generalizing conceptual faculty. ‘Cain’ is the one who possesses the faculty of conceiving in a general way – and he is forever the slayer of his brother. The achievement of symbolic and conceptual faculty by man is not a cost-free event.
Be that as it may, the concept "mankind" becomes an idol when the so-called "agent of change" is conceived to lie in some mystical realm of genetics or ‘evolutionary process’ apart from the ones doing the living, being, and developing. For as a "phenomenon" mankind has no "within-ness." The phenomenal-literal view only moves the scene of action from the agent, man, to some other and more distant scene, while implicitly giving license to those who would tamper with human genetics. For it assumes that the genetic evolution, by having somehow gotten to the point at which many of its mechanics have been figured out, only needs the conscious direction of experts to work out the kinks. This point of view shows ignorance and contempt for our distant ancestors by denying the role that will, consciousness and understanding must have played in their own course of development, and it increases the arrogance and hubris of modern scientists by assuming that their mechanical knowledge can improve the species. Thus where past or pre-history is concerned modern science recites the script of the crude ignoramus while for modern times it rehearses for the part of God.
But the degeneration of the idea of an evolving mankind into an idol for which even the term ‘evolution’ itself can have no real significance (because all the ‘evolving’ presumably occurred before we emerged into our glorious present selves) has even uglier implications. The symbolic unity and universality of the idea of mankind, to which all human persons belong and in which all persons participate by virtue of their humanity, is an idea that we lose at our peril. For this idea has been only able to maintain itself precariously within a human race whose overwhelming tendency is and has always been to tribalize. Paradoxically, the symbolical forebears of the human race – Adam and Eve – was the inspiration of that most tribal of all peoples, the Hebrews, and it was only granted a renewed lease on life through the universalistic influence of Christianity.
The idea of a mankind universally tainted by the originalism of sin could not really survive the rise of the nation-state, although the Enlightenment theories of moral universalism extended its lease for a couple of hundred years. But the universalism expressed in the Kantian moral law does not have the symbolic resonance to cope with the new tribalism arising from the intellectual classes today. No doubt the multiculturalists and devoted apostles of tolerance and diversity would be offended to hear me say that they have brought out all the heavy artillery for the wrong war. The new tribalism is not really about race. Rather, race is but a diversionary tactic. It is true that diversionary tactics can take a few real casualties. But the real war is elsewhere. The real war has to do with the symbolical nature of man. Those who understand this belong to a pharisaic cult - conscious or otherwise - which knows how to wield symbolism. Those who do not grasp the symbolism principle will not be participating in this new phase of human evolution. Symbolism will be "done unto them" - that is, the incessant visioning of degraded forms of human living. The persons resulting from such propagandistic immersion will be merely literal – rather than human – beings. They will literally be ‘lost’ to any real attributions of humanity. The new ‘tribalism’ is thus the production of subhuman beings to serve the machine order of the neo-tribalistic elites.
3. Symbolic Participation
With the rise of the nation-state, the older medieval idea of ‘participation’ gave way to a more narrowly conceived notion involving citizenship. When we hear the word ‘participation’ today, we commonly only think of ‘political participation.’ But it is imperative for us to recover the symbolizing dimensions of the concept of participation. It is not only that political participation in advanced, complex technological and bureaucratic societies has been rendered almost meaningless. It is more pointedly the fact that without a sense for the larger dimensions of participation – that is to say, without a clear concept of human destiny – itself a "symbolic" and spiritual notion -- human beings will be unable to oppose the saturnine entropy that threatens the existence of civilized man as well as the natural order.
Modern advanced societies are poised dangerously on the cusp of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which underlies the manifestations of all life. The degradation of all forms of energy is relentless – the finitude of the oil resources being only the most obvious example. But everything from climate, food, and fertility to forms of social organization, arts, and concepts of public good, are affected by modern man’s impoverished capacity of participation. And the hour is late. There is no guarantee that an education in participation will arrest the entropic slide into spiritual suffocation for society as a whole. But ultimately participation will be necessary to save the appearances from chaos and inanity – as Barfield puts it, "In the long run we shall not be able to save souls without saving the appearances, and it is an error fraught with the most terrible consequences to imagine that we shall."
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In the early 15th century Italy there occurred an interesting exchange of letters between two persons, an exchange which illuminates the changing of an era. At that time in Florence, there was a great debate in progress between the humanists, who believed that students should be exposed to the classical authors, and members of the Church, who held that the pagan authors were best studied by students after they had first received a sufficient grounding in the faith. One of the persons troubled by the progress of classical studies was a monk living at San Miniato near Florence. He wrote to Coluccio Salutati [1330-1406] one of these humanists, who was credited with the revived Carolingian script. Salutati’s reply to this monk, on January 25, 1405, is considered to be one of the important documents of early humanism.
Salutati in this letter devotes close attention to the question of metaphorical or figurative language. He wrote:
"Do you not see that sacred literature, the whole body of Holy Scripture, is rightly considered, nothing else in its method of expression than poetry? For, when we are speaking of God or of incorporeal beings, nothing is literally true, but beneath that surface of fiction there is nothing that is not true."
Salutati comments, for instance, on the passage in Scripture where it says, "The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," remarking that "How can a corporeal act be reported of the spirit of God which is an incorporeal thing?"
Here in a nutshell we see the decline of the ancient ‘participation.’ In that old participatory consciousness, it was no more to be wondered at that one would speak of the spirit of God moving the face of the waters than it is for us to note the spirit of joy or sorrow on a human face. The interpenetration of spirit and matter which is the mystery of all incarnation is here felt to reside not only in Christ, the Divine Exemplar, or in human persons generally, but in the world at large as well. The consciousness of man had not yet polarized into an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer,’ as with us. Another example, often cited to illustrate this earlier unity between ‘thoughts’ and ‘things,’ is the translation of the word pneuma in the New Testament. Sometimes it is translated as ‘Spirit,’ at other times it is translated as ‘wind,’ and at still other times ‘breath.’ The important point is that the power of pneuma manifests within human beings as in Nature and indeed encompasses the supersensible world of ‘Spirit.’ These dimensions of meaning have shrunk in modern times – as with our ‘pneumatic drill’ or the disease of congested breath, pneumonia.
According to Owen Barfield, whose important book, Saving the Appearances, should be the foundational text for basic education in participation and more generally for anyone who wishes to understand human thought prior to the Scientific Revolution, in a participated world the phenomena "carry the sort of multiple significance which we today find only in symbols." Evidently by the time of Coluccio Salutati this participated world was already considered old-fashioned.
The appearance on the scene of conspiracy theories is an indication that the field of symbolic awareness is pressing upon us. The factual claims of conspiracy theories should be investigated with the tools used to investigate any factual claims of the physical world. But to dismiss the claims made by conspiracy theorists because, well, they have been put forward by people who subscribe to conspiracy theories – such a dismissal can only be indicative of the apprehensions of elite neo-tribalists that the symbolic con game might be unmasked. Whether the neo-tribalists are "literally" members of a "conspiracy" is not the point. The point is that apparently it serves the interests of the neo-tribalists to keep the masses of the people in a state of dull literalism punctuated by symbolic threadless "thrills" that lead nowhere.
For let it be said that the thesis of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare is that the subliminal manipulation of the public is being carried out through assassinations of important public figures, crimes and "exposes" of crimes, violent and pornographic movies, media events and video games by means of unidentified persons or groups who are either consciously working for the diabolic aims of Freemasonry and a debased Kabbalah, or unconsciously serving such persons or groups. These groups shifted into high gear with the assassination of John F. Kennedy – an event "explained" to the American people by the "lone nut" theory of the Warren Commission – a theory successively trotted out for the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, and no doubt others. The blogger who goes by name of "Xymphora" had the best summary of the "occult program." Commenting on the election of Nov. 2, 2004, he wrote:
"The 2004 election is the culmination of forty years of American conspiracy starting with the murder of JFK, with the failure to investigate each conspiracy leading directly to the next one. When Earl Warren decided he had to lie to the American people about who was really responsible for the death of JFK, he set in motion a series of head-in-the-sand bad decisions that continue up to today.The consistent lack of courage in facing its demons has left the United States in a bit of a pickle, as it now faces an almost inconceivably bleak future of theocratic leadership, disastrous economic policies, and a never-ending series of wars." [Sunday, Jan. 23, 2005]
I believe this summation of the situation in contemporary America is powerful in its brevity. There can be nothing to add to it. For the decision of the neo-tribalist elites not to investigate "conspiracy theories" speaks for itself. May the ruin of America be on their souls and conscience. For another word for the manipulation of symbolism and events by people in positions of public trust for selfish ends and covert goals is – treason.
Notes:
1. His words – "Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal may be made," from The Revolt of the Masses.
2. Ortega y Gasset – once again – says that a concept is something that often cannot be expressed in words. He gives the example of the concept of riding a bicycle – in such a case one is reduced to making pantomime gestures. A symbol represents something. In the case of "symbolic mankind" the concept represents unity, indivisibility, universality.
3. I realize that contemporary "Intelligent Design" theories are far more nuanced than the superficial statement I have made here. I think these recent variants of the Creationist arguments are hopeful signs. Nevertheless, I think the propounders of these theories would also benefit from the study of symbolism and participation that I am attempting to lay out in this paper.
4. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, New York, 1965; p. 75.
5. Cf. Barfield: "… the unaccountable rapidity with which a literal-minded generation developed a sympathetic response to the psycho-analytical gnosis of dream-imagery, and accepted the … fantastic idea of an immaterial realm of ‘the unconscious,’ is another sign… that the development of man’s consciousness is an evolutionary as well as a dialectical process… yet here again… the historian of the future will observe the fatally blighting influence of the conventional idolatry… Representation, as a principle, is accepted [by Freud] as a matter of course…[But] from the perception that physical functions and organs are themselves representations he is, however, cut off by all the assumptions of idolatry." Saving the Appearances, pp.133-34. This is what I mean by the distinction ‘subjective’ vs. ‘symbolical’ awareness. Psychoanalysis is "subjectivist." Symbolical awareness embraces not only the personal and subjective, but the historical and trans-personal dimensions.