It’s funny how the things you read can relate to each other. Here’s some passages from the fantastic occult/historical novel The Fiery Angel by the Russian Decadent/Symbolist Valery Bruisov that really seem to speak to the musings about god I gave vent to in the first part of this essay:
Never have I agreed that true religion demands outward manifestations. If the Lord God had given into the possession of mankind the earth, where only by stuggle and trial can we fulfil our duty, and where only passionate feelings can bring true joy – then in His Justice, He cannot demand that we renounce toil, struggle and passion.
And are you not as guilty in giving in to my temptation as I in yielding to yours? Or rather, is not God the guilty one, in that he created human beings a prey to weakness, and did not endow them with the strength to combat sin?
And here’s a quote from Erik Davis’s TechGnosis that I should have used when first discussing Gnosticism which captures its appeal:
The Gnostic sought the pure signal that overrides the noise and corrosive babel of the world – an ineffable rush tinged with the Platonic exaltation of mind, a first- person encounter with the Logos etched into the heart of the divine self within.
And another that illustrates what I see as the necessarily terrestrial quality of spirituality and which no doubt also illuminates (so to speak) Stella’s comment about part one:
Once the Buddha opened his deep-space dharma eye, he did not climb mountaintops to gaze longingly into the heavens; he touched the earth in the shadow of a tree. The drama of phenomenal existence, with its quasars, frogs, and fibre-optic cables is impossible to separate from transcendent reality.
Which brings me to Paganism, the spiritual discipline I believe Davis has the most sympathy for, however hard he tries to remain neutral:
In constructing a premodern religion in a postmodern world, Pagans have thus learned to maneuver quite cannily between techno-scientific categories and imaginative practice. And they have done so in part by replacing the religious question of belief with the hands-on exploration of embodied experience and altered states of consciousness.
With its dramatic language of gesture, symbol, and scent, ritual bypasses the intellect and stimulates psychological and perceptual aspects of the self that register on a more subliminal level; by cutting a pentagram into the air or dancing a wild spiral dance, the self submits to the designs of human and cosmic powers on a more visceral plane than philosophical conceptions or sermons allow.
And I have to say I sort of bend the Pagan way myself – after all it’s the way that’s literally in my blood. There are problems with Paganism too, of course. Though devotees don’t really want to admit it, the fact of the matter is that nobody really knows exactly what many of the original Pagans did or believed. Even the ones we know the most about, the followers of the Greek and Roman religions, still have many crucial secrets from us, such as the workings of the Oracle of Delphi or the mysterious initiation at Eleusis. Despite modern claims to the contrary, we have no real idea of what "witches" really did or even if they actually existed. Details about the Druids are similarly murky – it’s especially difficult to unravel the practices of people who didn’t build temples, make statues or write sacred books. If nothing else the Christians proved good exterminators – they managed to break the chain of Paganism that had been forged for thousands of years.
I also say that, maybe because it’s so rooted in the earth, Paganism can seem quite banal at times, or even silly, a lot of nonsense words spoken by people in ridiculous clothes, often to accomplish mundane, non-spiritual things such as finding lost objects or enticing hot dates.
But the fact that Paganism has no overwhelming tradition can be liberating. As in alchemy, the spiritual quest becomes experimental and creative, the practitioner aware of the practices of others and embracing the elements that call to him and rejecting those that feel foreign.
But, like Schopenhauer, I believe that the only truly transcendent experiences are aesthetic. Another great magus, Rimbaud, coined the phrase, The Alchemy of the Word, and to me the creation of art and the pursuit of the spiritual quest are insoluble, both being in a way the byproduct of the other, the way that, for an alchemist, the creation of gold and the perfection of the soul were essentially the same endeavor.
And, yes, America, you can rest easy knowing that part three of this scintillating essay is forthcoming!
A Leak In The Safe 