Re: CAS's influence on Witchcraft
Posted by:
Gavin Callaghan (IP Logged)
Date: 5 February, 2006 07:53PM
"Howard and I, under such circumstances, always talk metaphysics and the beginnings and end of the universe…." ---George Kirk, bookseller, (CANNON, "Lovecraft Remembered", 234)
Right after reading your message, I went home and coincidentally read the following passage in a translation of Rudolph Steiner, "Many a one will experience, when sitting silent in his room, his heart sad and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn, that the door will open…." (SEDDON, "Rudolph Steiner, Western Esoteric Masters Series", 93)
Afterward, Steiner goes on to discuss something which he calls "the abyss". But of course this word can mean anything to anyone.
What YOU say about "the abyss" reminds me of Rimbaud's prose poem "Childhood", which ends with the cryptic line: "But why should the appearance of an aperture gleam white in the corner of the vault?", which I take to mean: why should reality open?, --open the way the portal in "Donnie Darko" opens, simply by Donnie stabbing a knife into a looking glass. (What strange and difficult lives we Paranormal Investigators lead; multiple abysses flooding up beneath our floorboards, ruining the property values of our homes, blowing drafts through the attic wallboards; while portals to other universes frost with cold the interior of our dormer windows.)
I've never had a waking experience such as you describe, though I think many of us wish something of the sort WOULD happen. For myself, during my own periods of mental crises in the past, I was more apt to aimlessly watch Greek-language television programs over and over, than to witness a splintering of creation, --although I have, like most everyone else, come face to face with the "abyss" in my sleep. There's a medical term for this phenomenon, which I forget, --the sudden sensation of falling into blackness, which jolts one awake with a start, just a few moments after falling asleep, --the whole phenomenon being an error in the activation of our dreams, caused, no doubt, by the inadvertent running of our consciousness "program" after sleep.
Certainly, there is nothing mysterious about dreams themselves. Dreams are screen-savers, and nothing more. Naturally, this is to be expected, given the fact that the brain is simply an audio-visual device, very much like a television screen or computer monitor. It logically follows, then, that we would expect the brain to operate just like any other audio-visual system, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of dreams, whose nightly function is directly analogous to those screen-savers which prevent the burning out of the pixels of computer monitor which would otherwise occur during long periods of inactivity and disuse. Surely everyone has noticed the numerous similarities between dreams and screensavers: the colorful but nonsensical imagery, the repetitive actions, the looping narratives, the random and yet somehow predictable sequences, the bizarre symbolism, --not to mention the similar processes by which both dreams and screen-savers are automatically activated after a set period of mental or binary disuse, ---as well as their mutual ability to immediately vanish from view upon activation or re-awakening, dreams leaving no more trace upon the active mind upon waking than do the colorful characters of a screensaver, which somehow somehow vanish upon the application of stimuli to reveal the suddenly staid perameters of a computer spreadsheet.
As to "the abyss", --it is of course difficult to speak about, without more clarification in our definitions. By "the abyss" do we mean simply the abyss of space, i.e. "existence", --or do we mean, in fact, the antithesis of that, i.e. "non-existence"? (The fact that we are so easily able to confuse existence with non-existence in this matter, --a "case of mistaken identity", as it were--, --as if the two could be confused as easily as suspects in a police line-up, like partners in the perpetration of the same crime--, should at once give us pause. ) This idea that non-existence and existence are opposites, however, at least in Western culture, is still taken for a proven fact by most people. Ian Curtis, in the Joy Division song "Heart and Soul", speaks darkly of "An abyss that laughs at creation…", but which is more horrible, the abyss or the laugh? Or IS the abyss the laugh itself?
Visualizing such an abyss, however, in terms of such a dichotomy between existence vs. non-existence, presents problems. If space, i.e. "existence", consists mostly of empty space, then what can non-existence be like? Can non-existence even be said to exist as such, or is that a contradiction? This then naturally leads us to the question of "existence" itself; for how can we define non-existence, unless we can define its opposite?
But existence itself does not lend itself toward a clear definition. As beings who are ourselves nourished within the womb of existence, (or, at least we think we are), it is unthinkable to us that existence should not exist. Indeed, perhaps our familiarity, --our familial tie, so to speak, with existence--, blinds us to the fact of how alien existence it is, how unnatural, --so that, in fact, it might be more "natural" for nothing to exist at all. Non-existence is unthinkable to us, but only because we ourselves think, and because space itself, because of its breadth and dimensions, provides an arena for thought.
Imre Madach, the Hungarian poet, treats of something relating to this idea in his Miltonic play, "The Tragedy of Man" (1860), a sort of Hungarian adaption of "Paradise Lost", in which Satan is depicted as the embodiment of that very same "abyss" which God overcame in order to bring about his "creation". Madach writes:
"LUCIFER (pointing to the Angelic Choir): 'That wretched legion gives Thee praise enough. And rightly, too--- to praise Thee is its duty! Thy Light conceived those Shadows there. But I have been since the beginning here on high!'
THE LORD: 'O, arrogant! Hadst thou not sprung from matter, where would thy kingdom be, and where thy power?'
LUCIFER: And I could answer with that very question.
THE LORD: From the beginning I had planned what is, and in Me lived, and hath been fulfilled.
LUCIFER: Yet didst Thou see no gap in that fulfillment, that barred the way against what was to be, and, ne'ertheless, Thou couldn't not but create? The name that barrier bore was Lucifer, the Spirit that eternally denies." (22-23)
Here, in other words, Satan is identified with "the abyss", that almost neurosynaptic "gap" between existence and non-existence, which God had to overcome before he could make "creation". But no one can equal, not even Clark Ashton Smith or Lovecraft, the language William Blake uses in "The First Book of Urizen" to describe the creation of existence, an act which Blake assumes, contra Lovecraft, to be inextricable from the creation of mankind and mind, and the supposed "problems" which spring therefrom:
"Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!
Self-clos'd, all repelling: what Demon
Hath form'd this abominable void
This soul shuddering vaccuum--Some said
'It is Urizen,' But unknown, abstracted
Brooding secret, the dark power hid.
Times on times he divided, & measured
Space by space in his nine fold darkness
Unseen, unknown! Changes appeard
In his desolate mountains rifted furious
By the black winds of perturbation
For he strove in battles dire
In unseen conflictions with shapes
Bred from his forsaken wilderness,
Of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element
Combustion, blast, vapour and cloud.
Dark revolving in silent activity:
Unseen in tormenting passions;
An activity unknown and horrible;
A self-contemplating shadow,
In enormous labours occupied….
(…)
[Urizen is speaking]: I have sought for a joy without pain,
For a solid without fluctuation…
…First I fought with the fire; consum'd
Inwards, into a deep world within:
A void immense, wild dark & deep,
Where nothing was, Nature's wide womb
And self balanc'd stretched o'er the void
I alone, even I! The winds merciless
Bound; but condensing, in torrents
They fall & fall; strong I repell'd
The vast waves, & arose on waters
A wide world of sold obstruction." (Erdman, 69-71)
Interestingly, the common assumption which seems to be underlying all of these Western investigations of existence is that reality is a "problem" which needs to be solved, a difficulty, a mystery, which again suggests the idea of the "unnaturalness" of existence, against which, I suppose, is opposed the idea of a natural state of "non-existence", if such a thing could be described as a "state". As Alan Watts said, if an eye is functioning, you do not see it; you do not see your eye, or smell your nose. Only when you have a mote in your eye, are you aware of the eye, and so too, in a way, is self-awareness a "problem" of the mind, ---this problem thus being projected by mankind upon existence, in order to create a "problem", where in fact there is none.
But this raises the fundamental question, regarding existence, and that is: is reality "real"? Eastern religions would say not, but this then begs the question as to the meaning of the word "real", which is, of course, colored by the fact of our own realness, or presumption of realness.