Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science

"One who grasps [written Hebrew’s] … structure deeply and by the roots, and knows how to keep that [structure] fitted to the fields of knowledge will have a pattern and a rule for the complete discovery of anything that can be known."
–Pico della Mirandola (Copenhaver, Number 41)

Scholars have often seen the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as the most prominent harbinger of modern culture, especially in his Oration’s espousal of the ‘dignity of man’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 163). Frances Yates suggests that Pico reformulated the position of European man as a Magus, who by acting upon the world through magic and the Cabala could control his destiny with science (Yates 116). While this concept of a new relationship between human will and the world may have aided the Scientific Revolution, through its focus on analysis and technological operations, Renaissance magic and occultism were often viewed as illegitimate by orthodox religion, philosophy, and the growing scientific approach to reality (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 262, 280). Pico’s active interest in magic has led scholars such as Lynn Thorndike to dismiss his influence on science altogether (Copenhaver, Number 26). However, Recent studies by Brian P. Copenhaver may show that Pico della Mirandola’s focus on language and hermeneutic interpretation in the Cabala helped broaden the fields of textual analysis, mathematics, and the precision of scientific languages.

Like most Renaissance philosophers, Pico was interested in history, physics, mathematics, and other ‘natural philosophies’ that formed the basis for the Scientific Revolution, but his research did not exclude the more Humanist concerns of poetry, art, grammar, and ethics that were seen as culturally useful knowledge (Copenhaver and Schmitt 24, 28 and Copenhaver, Number 30). Such diverse learning was a prevalent tool in Renaissance philosophy, and Pico saw this eclecticism as an aspect of man’s freedom, with which he tried to construct a broader sense of truth from diverse texts without adhering to any particular philosophy (Copenhaver and Schmitt 59, 167-8). In 1486, Pico wrote the Oration to introduce his 900 Conclusions (Copenhaver and Schmitt 165-6), which were intended to be a total synthesis of all current knowledge (Yates 94), and empower man to transcend his ontological and moral positions in the world (Copenhaver and Schmitt 166-7). Though the recovery of ancient texts and the study of classical manuscripts was a prime concern of Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33), Pico embraced systems of thought rejected by other Humanists and little known to most European Christians (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171). In his Conclusions, Pico attempted to harmonize Plato and Aristotle with the translations of semi-philosophic religious manuscripts called the Hermetic Corpus, as well as Pythagorean, Orphic, Chaldeaen, and Cabalistic texts that formed the basis of Renaissance ‘natural magic’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 16, 168).

In 1462, Marsilio Ficino translated the Hermetic Corpus for Cosimo Medici, and his On Arranging One’s Life According to the Heavens served as the most influential text on magic theory for several centuries, giving educated Europeans a philosophical basis for their beliefs in magic, astrology, and the occult (Copenhaver and Schmitt 146-7, 159-60). Philosophical and pious Renaissance Magi replaced medieval notions of disreputable and necromantic wizards (Yates 107), and for Ficino, the aim of their natural magic was to put “natural materials in relationship with natural causes” (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 281). The decline of magic as a legitimate concern of natural philosophy was one of the most important features of the Scientific Revolution, but empirical occultism remained a significant source of natural and historical information for Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 290, 280). This magical world-view also expressed the same impulse of “turning towards and operating on the world” essential to the development of the mechanical and mathematical sciences (Copenhaver, Number 263).

After meeting Ficino in the 1480s, Pico hoped to combine Ficino’s natural magic with his own unified theories, in order to overcome philosophical sectarian discord (Copenhaver and Schmitt 174). However, Pico recommended magic much more openly than did his colleague, in the form of a practical Cabala that could tap the higher powers of the cosmos through the invocation of angels and the names of God (Yates 84). Having studied languages in several different universities, Pico learned of Cabala from Elia Del Medigo while in Padua, and later from the Sicilian rabbi Flavius Mithridates, who translated several thousand pages of Cabalistic texts for the young philosopher (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). Cabala is a Jewish mystical tradition, supposedly handed down from Moses as a source of ancient wisdom, and developed in 13th Century Spain in the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, or “Book of Creation” (Yates 92). For Pico, Cabalism was comparable to the Hermetic Corpus of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (Yates 84-5). At the core of Cabalistic doctrine are the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Sephiroth, or ‘enumerations,’ the ten names most common to God that were used to create the world (Yates 92). In the Hebrew account of creation, as told in Genesis, God spoke the world into existence. Thus, the Cabalists saw the Hebrew words and letters as containing the creative language of God, and they developed interpretative techniques to understand the nature of the world from the text of the Scriptures (Yates 85, 92).

Of particular interest to Pico’s studies on the Cabala were the 13th century commentaries on Maimonides by Abraham Abulafia. This Spanish mystic developed a technique of combining Hebrew letters in endless permutations, called a ‘revolving alphabet,’ which became a primary source for Pico’s textual analysis (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171-2, and Yates 93). At the suggestion of his translator, Flavius, Pico innovated the Cabala by linguistically deriving the name of Jesus from the names of God, as an encoded Christian secret in the Scriptures (Copenhaver and Schmitt 172). He went so far in his Conclusions as to claim that magic and Cabala could give the most scientific certainty about Christ’s divinity, a statement that the Christian Church found heretical, which prompted their refusal to let Pico print his work (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169, 166). But even in his formal Apology to the Church, published in 1489, Pico still defended his magical use of Cabala, by dividing it into a theoretical or contemplative branch and a practical branch that magically operated on the names of God (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169). Pico called this later Cabala the “practical part of natural knowledge,” classified it as a science that could “make practical the whole of formal metaphysics and of lower theology,” and claimed that no magical operation worked without its use (Copenhaver, Number 34-6, Yates 95, and 91).

According to Copenhaver, the importance of these Cabalistic studies, and Pico’s ultimate insistence on their operative use, relies on the last thesis of his Conclusions: “Just as the true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, in the same way Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the Law” (Copenhaver, Number 25). Pico was fascinated with the idea that the Universe was a vast and original book that could be interpreted through the magical languages of shape and number (Copenhaver, Number 29-30), in much the same way that the Scriptures could be interpreted through the Hebrew Language. Hermeneutics, the Cabalist method of textual interpretation, had taught Pico that nothing in the Torah lacks meaning, even individual letters contained secrets that could be penetrated through specific techniques (Copenhaver, Number 52, and Copenhaver and Schmitt 172), such as linguistic abbreviation or transposition, called notarikon and temurah (Yates 93). The most complex technique that Pico used in his practical Cabala was gematria, a system in which numerical values are assigned to each Hebrew letter. Through the intricate linguistic arithmetic of gematria, calculations between numbers and words could reveal “the entire organization of the world in terms of word-numbers” (Yates 93 and Copenhaver, Number 41), a revelation that was bound to appeal to Pico’s explicit goal of synthesizing all knowledge.

By recommending such linguistic signs as magically operative over natural substances, Pico had to make a distinction between the shape or figure of letters and their linguistic messages, in order to avoid the charge that his magic communicated with demons (Yates 88-9, and Copenhaver, Number 61, 39). As such, Pico built on medieval theories of signification and supposition, as well as on Thomas Aquinas’s semiotic theories in which Scriptural parts of speech mean something by themselves, outside of their semantic content. Pico suggested that there is a difference between God’s original use of language, which signifies the creation of the world, and the priest or Magi’s repetitious and onomatopoeic language, that does not actually signify anything (Copenhaver, Number 39-40). In his Conclusions, Pico states that any speech is powerful if informed by the speech of God, but Hebrew letters were meaningful in themselves as “characters and figures,” like those used to mark amulets in astrology or alchemy, because their shape revealed the shape of God to medieval Cabalists (Copenhaver, Number 33-4, 37). Characters and figures were in the safe realm of natural action because they shared the powers attributed by Pythagorean philosophers to mathematical entities, and this conjunction between shape, number, and word in Cabalism further articulated a magical arithmetic for Pico (Copenhaver, Number 37, 60, and 34). This mathematical use of language, along with Pico’s focuses on the precision of significant speech and hermeneutic analysis of texts, were themes taken up and expanded by later natural philosophers, such as Giambattisto Vico and Galileo Galilei.

Hermeneutics, as a theory of interpreting linguistic and non-linguistic expressions that might have deeper, non-literal meanings, descended from Greek philosophy through Renaissance Biblical studies, and eventually came to include the study of all classical texts. Vico, in his Scienza Nuova of 1725, argued that thinking is always rooted in a specific cultural context, and that textual interpretation, from poetry to technical vocabularies, must involve historical and cultural studies as well as self-understanding (Ramberg and Gjesdal). These ideas have become essential to modern hermeneutical analysis, and may have resulted from Renaissance Humanists like Pico, who modernized the study of classical manuscripts by improving knowledge of ancient languages and specific cultural-historical settings (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33). Furthermore, as a tool for revealing layers of symbolic meaning, hermeneutics shares with scientific languages the attempt to provide a foundation for meaning through a critical attitude and precise terminology (Rasmussen 22-3). Drawing on his Cabalistic studies in which the phonetics of language were more corporeal than the semantic contents, Pico criticized rhetoric as a superficial obfuscation of truth, and stressed that philosophical language must be a tool of clarity, accuracy, and seriousness (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). In this light, Pico’s Cabalist conclusions may have revealed “new tools for understanding nature as God’s creation,” which scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Eugenio Garin believed had methodological, ethical, and epistemological consequences for the development of science (Copenhaver, Number 26-7).

In the last years of his life, Pico della Mirandola wrote a refutation of predictive astrology, Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, an attempt to defend human freedom from astral determinism that became his largest project (Copenhaver and Schmitt 176). Downplaying the magical aspects of astrology that interested Ficino and other natural philosophers, Pico argued that the Cabalistic deciphering of shapes in the Torah could teach astrologers how to more accurately read signs in the stars (Copenhaver, Number 61). Not only did this project defend the human importance of finding meaning in nature, but distinguished mathematical-physical causality from astrological causality, and suggested that phenomena could only be understood through experience; themes that may have foreshadowed the works of Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Newton (Copenhaver, Number 25-7).

Galileo also made the claim that the Universe was a book that could be read in a language of characters through mathematics, which may have inspired Descartes’ coordinate geometry, that was also viewed by its critics as a form of magic using shapes as explanation (Copenhaver, Number 29). Though Galileo’s hermeneutics of reading shape into the stars detached Scripture from nature to form a mathematical science, this development from natural philosophy may not have been possible without Pico’s correlation of nature to text in his work with the Cabala (Copenhaver, Number 61-2). By focusing on textual interpretation, the relationship between form, number, and language, and the need for accurate linguistic signification, Pico was able to transform the mystical system of the Cabala into an operative magic, which became a tool for Renaissance natural philosophers to begin exploring their world in a scientific manner.

Bibliography

Copenhaver, B. “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel.” Natural Particulars: Nature and Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. Eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999

--- “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science.” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Copenhaver, B. and Schmitt, C. “Renaissance Philosophy.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992

Rasmussen, D. “Symbol and Interpretation.” The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974

Yates, F. “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964

Ramberg, B. and Gjesdal, K. “Hermeneutics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online. 9 Nov. 2005. Available http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/

that magic touch

"Are you a theosophical kabbalist or an ecstatic kabbalist?"
the mad scientist asked, the hair sprouting from his ears in swirling puffs
and brain sprouting from his hair in an illusion of three dimensions
and hand thrusting up through his pants made of pants (with no zippers)
like a hydraic dildo ready to fingerfuck the world
till it is bent backwards over his need to be amused;
"because I suspect you of a theosophical bent,
and if you prove to be ecstatic we can have a much more interesting conversation."

I laughed at the arbitrariness of this dichotomy and didn't dance
to any of the songs I had danced to before.
The rain was falling like burnt leaves
around the edges of the sweat-soaked party and the mad scientist
was falling into that old trick of getting people
to question their assumptions.
And their assumptions' assumptions.
Ad nauseum.
It's one of his more amusing games and unlike the music,
different each time it is played.

Personally I suspected he didn't believe a word of it,
and was secretly a magico-theurgical kabbalist in disguise;
only masquerading as a mad scientist to put us on
like a puppet show in which he was both manipulator
and lead dummy.

Do you want to break the world to pieces and feign understanding,
or break yourself and fall into the world like a dying god?
Or is there some other path hitherto unaccounted for?
It is like asking "Do you prefer anatomy lessons or tantra?"
when there is a whole range of erotic experiences
that have nothing to do with the insertion of body parts
into other body parts, or with parts at all,
partners and partings,
as if feeling could be reduced to some mechanistic universe
of touch/ no touch.
Try breathing in a thunderstorm,
duality becomes just another
incoherent vibration of molecules.

Recontextualize the sound of text,
meaningless symbols become other meaningless symbols
and the record of the world makes the same
faint skritching noise when you drag unamplified nails across it,
even if there is an appreciable tactile difference.
It's all braille to me anyway, my fingers are already blinded
by the full array of textures they encounter.
I couldn't use them to knit a scarf they cry out
at the sight of the softest yarn,
much less plunge them into the world
and reknit the bodies of time and space to fit
my bedraggled and threadbare desires.
They twist so much on their own
that my twisting just gets in the way
and tangles the whole tapestry in on itself
till the drunken details kiss and break into fractal dances
across the rain-soaked floor and word-soaked moonlight.

If observation wasn't the married cousin of subjectivity,
or the willing slave of relativity,
I would put down my pen and disappear completely
behind the edges of the world's hands,
and watch amused this net of nonsense
draw tight around it's own discordant skin
till it squeezes out little fingers of meaning
like incandescent worms in the rain.

shifting soul states

[salvaged from Key23]

A question that keeps coming up in my magical practice is how we represent different states on an energetic level. Not just basic physical, mental, and emotional states, but all the subtleties in between that make up the vast range of human experience. What are these states, how can we access them, and what are they good for?

The ancient Chinese system of the I Ching maps out a host of states through the binary interplay of heaven (yang) and earth (yin), from which arise the rest of the hexagrams. But these states are not static positions, they represent process, the movements of one state changing into the next. Likewise I imagine that our internal states are not static but are in a continual flux, feeding back on each other and adapting to wherever our attention lies. And also like the I Ching, though these states can be expressed through a smaller set of basic states (yin/ yang, the four elements, the eight gua) they are only the more recognizable positions in the grand transition of states within us and the world. And yet if we are going to map them out in any usable way breaking them down to a few simple positions will make it easier, since these can be located in the subtle energy centers of the body. Functioning somewhere in the range between black holes and point attractors these “rings of power” assert some sort of pull on the greater flow that we can notice and then exercise into use.

Many cultures and mystical traditions have attempted to map out these layers of being that somehow lay between our physical forms and the godhead within each of us, like a shield of veils or onion peels. And all have come up with their own number of primary states, locations in the body, and methods of use; none of which are wrong, but like all maps were drawn up from the limited information of any subjective experience and subject to revision as other maps come into comparison. The six latifah of the Sufi, the seven chakras of Hindi yoga, the eight trigrams of the I Ching, the ten sephiroth of qabalah, Leary and R. A. Wilson’s eight circuits or dimensions of consciousness. All these systems represent previous attempts at creating a formalized version of this map, but none of them accurately express the territory and can only offer signposts for us to follow in our own explorations of our internal states.

A few years ago I decided to start paying more attention to my internal states from the physiological level up, in order to reach some sort of metaprogrammatic control over myself and my worlds. Assuming of course that handy magical axiom that our worlds do indeed become what we choose to pay attention to. One of the first things I noticed is that everything changes us, the food we eat, the conversations we have, the cultures we live in, even the weather and the movements of the stars. We are so inextricably tied to our environments that it is hard to tell just where we end and the rest of the world begins, much less where each internal state stands in relation to the rest in their constant shifting. To this end I started using yoga and the magical idea of gnosis to create controlled situations where I could be open to awareness of the states unhampered by external influences that would only tangle the processes further. Of course gnosis, like eating or talking, changes our internal states, is in fact intended to do so, altering our perceptions of reality until we can look past it to its more subtle workings. Yoga, entheogens, meditation, sleep and sensory deprivation, sex and ecstatic dancing, there are many techniques towards this end. But while granting us more control for exploration also distance us from learning to utilize the states of the soul on an everyday level. I have found myself in some extreme and powerful places while under the influence of psychotropics, but is it possible to put myself back in those states in full consciousness? I would argue yes, it is in fact precisely what I am attempting to learn to do in one way or another. We’re talking ultimate god-mode here people, the psybernetics of the soul. Now if someone could find the perfect ratio between power and responsibility…

After a few particularly enlightening peak experiences which utterly pushed the boundaries of what I thought was possible I decided to start working with my subtle energy centers while in the state in which the world is perceived as vibrations or wavefronts of energy. I had already done much work in learning to recognize where my chakras are located, and from there it was a matter of determining their vibratory frequencies. Of course like the various maps of the layers themselves several conflicting ideas exist as to just where they each fluctuate, as in the petal arrangements of the chakras or Gurdjieff’s vibration numbers. Being a musician, I decided to use tonal harmonics to vibrate the centers manually, experimenting with mapping each one to a note in the diatonic scale starting the physical center on low C. After several months I had succeeded in being able to move my consciousness from one state to the next by intoning its note, even subsonically, while in deep meditation (and even noticed later that I am now able to sing any given note by placing my awareness on the appropriate energy center and humming). An interesting thing in using vibrations to access the layers is that it points to them being harmonics of each other, or deeper level interpretations of the same vibratory signals. Just as in music where playing one note also resounds with overtones, so to do the lower frequency states resonate with hints of the higher states, like fractals or holograms. The physical layer contains the frequencies of the emotions, identities, sociality, all the way up to the godhead, becoming much subtler unless vibrated directly, but still allowing us to recognize the sublimity of existence while in a baser state.

The other thing peculiar to using a diatonic scale is that its octave form suggests eight distinct layers (or seven layers and the higher octave of the first layer) as if the notes of RAW’s 8-dimension model were hung on the I Ching gua. I’ve always considered eight a sensible number, so that’s what I’m basing my recent maps off of. It’s in no way arbitrary, but it fits my experiences. Or perhaps they fit it, I am trying to shape my reality after all. Though at this point I am much more interested in trying to learn what we can do and how to reliably control it before putting any untrained skills to the test. So for those of you with more time on your hands (or who know how to stop it), here are some ideas for potential uses of each soul-state.

1- physiological – regulating and fulfilling bio-survival needs, physical coordination, general health
2- emotive - regulate and fulfill emotional responses (impulses), balance movements (center of gravity), awareness of reactions to external stimuli (tensions, and their release).
3- conceptual – ease of interpreting (boundaries defined), determine drive to goal states (direction/ intention), relational identity and map making
4- social – balance body community (host of selves), greater external connectivity and compassion, networking and true love
5- resonant – awareness of neurosomatic feedback / vibrational waves, heightened input/ output cycles and communication, breathing and subtle physiological control
6- psychic – awareness and manipulation of energy (electricity, auras, spirits), subtle receptivity, heightened creativity/ visualization, metaprograming, telepathy, telekinesis, and other forms of “mind control”
7- matric – morphogenetic cellular/ DNA control (healing, prevent aging), access akashic records (learning any skill, idea, etc), archetypal role playing/ storytelling
8- quantum – dissolution of self (being atoms of universe), connection to all as one, fractal consciousness, samadhi

Of course, the names and numbers are all flexible, and the uses barely suggestive of all that we are capable of. Perhaps you know more.

riding quantum waves

Here's the aforementioned diagram of the human energy octave represented as a wavefront, based off an unfolded golden spiral confirming to fibbonaci's sequence (for aesthetic reasons only, I kind of doubt the harmonic ratio between the layers is really 011235813). Click on the picture for a larger and labeled version of the diagram. I picture it as a single wave spinning around itself, like if you took a conch shell and spun it on its tip like a top, so that the 3rd 5th and 7th centers extend out from the central axis to form the qabalah map. The center axis is the main tree and the left and right sides the body and mind trees respectively. And I couldn't keep myself from spicing up the drawing with a fractal series of golden spirals. If I had a really large sheet of graph paper this could show how multiple waves become connected (in the blank space above the quantum layer and extending out in each direction). Like always though, my ability to put these concepts into visual form falls far short of how I perceive them internally. But hasn't that always been the curse of the artist? Feedback greatly appreciated.

(a look at) the 8 layers of human consciousness

[scroll down...]

8. Spiritual-fractal energy - heaven	non-local quantum neuroatomic	cosmic metatypes	god/ ILU – avatar application	black C - aura
7. Mythic-ontic thought - wind	archetypal morphogenetic	akashic genotypes	shaman session	white b - crown
6. Psychic light - fire	imaginative neuroelectric	psionic memotypes	metaprogrammer presentation	violet a – pineal
5. Sensory-creative sound – mountain	communicative neurosomatic	hedonic processes	yogi transport	blue g - throat
4. Socio-political air – lake	connective self-organization	civilized protocols	domestic human network	green f – heart
3. Conceptual-experiential fire - water	directive timespace-binding	paleolithic semantics	exploring child symbol (identity)	yellow e – solar plexus
2. Emotional-sexual water - lightning	responsive movement	mammalian parameters	dualistic child sign (stigmergy)	orange d – gravity axis
1. Physical earth - earth	environmental bio-survival	invertebrate medium	infant signal (channel)	red c - coccyx

I've been working on this chart for weeks now, trying to draw up suitable graphics to represent the eight layers of human consciousness as a waveform, but decided just to post the chart as it was anyway, which might perhaps encourage me to finish my drawings post haste.

Anyway, these ideas are mostly out there, and I drew a lot from traditional chakra mappings (with an 8th total field chakra), the qabalah (can you find it?), the I Ching guas, Wilson's 8-dimensional take on Leary's circuits of consciousness, metachor's recent work on mapping the OSI model of computer network protocal stacks with the occult stacks, and of course my own lived experience of the different layers, which like always seems to contradict previous maps of this territory. I'm sure most of this will be out-dated before I even post it.

While helping me compile this work Metachor pointed out that several of the layers form dialectic pairs across the body-mind spectrum. Particularly the 3rd, 5th, and 7th layers which end up forming the side spheres of the qabalah when mapped out. I'll have that diagram done soon...

moving in, moving on

Okay, things have been rather busy here in the world of janus. Not only have I been furiously trying to write up my first article for Key23 on my samahdic experience this summer, but I am also working out the details to become an inhouse artist for Konton magazine and am soon to begin looking for a publisher for my upcoming magical children's novel, "In the Garden of the Stars".



Despite all of that (and my normal working life) I found some time to draw up a new conception of the Qabalah that I have been working on, inspired by some excellent ideas at Work of the Chariot.







This diagram isn't complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it does show the tree of life with da'ath as an actuallized sphere and malkuth as the earth-matrix as a lower reflection of the ain sof or above the spheres. There are some notes around the sides, but they aren't so important if they are illegible from the scanning. Some missing things are the letterings for the paths, which I wasn't sure how to work out since the paths now cross to da'ath from its surrounding spheres and do not lead to malkuth. Also I wanted to work in the chakras, but couldn't decide to stick with the original mappings or assign them to the seven central spheres (daath would make a good throat chakra, though the geburah/ chesed level also seems to represent breathing and communication. Tipharet could bot hbe the heart and power, and hod/netzack the emotions, except that both yesod and the second layer chakra are represented by the moon. otherwise the root chakra and the foundation of yesod relate well). Some important things to notice are that the seeven central spheres are framed on two interlocking circles, which symbolicaly has a lot of balance and power (as the veseca of two interlapping circles is a potent symbol of the interaction of multiple waves from events), and this diagram does not show the tree in relation to other trees around the central axis. But it does show the axis as being the ain sof or, the nothingness in the center of all things, which I mistakingly didn't represent before; kether is still in people as a localized connection to the non-local, but it is not the center of the wheel.



I will be drawing up some more diagrams (relatively) soon, showing this tree in relation to other trees, as I am beginning to get a clearer sense of how thy all fit together.



Also, here's another little poem I wrote a few days ago:



Do you hear angels

singing on the street corners,

in every laughing ray of sunlight

that breaks through the clouds,

and pours warmth all over the Earth

like a lover's breath?



When did I die?

Heaven is right now,

we are the only gods

to pray to.

Why ask for anything else

when it is already here?

Let go of your fear

and become the sky.



Feet float off of the ground

and worlds dance

on the tips of our fingers.

Every breath feels like the first,

and carries me back to you.

pictoral appendage

the net



So this drawing was supposed to accompany my last post (about da'ath and the tree of knowledge), but as is evidenced by the fact that it took me several days to draw it, it seems obvious that I'm much more willing to express myself verbally than graphicaly. Interestingly enough, when it comes to my own understanding of these concepts things are much more multisensory. A weave of words, lines, sounds, feelings, colors, tensions, etc. is conjured up by any thought, so expressing anything in just words or images falls far short of catching any intended meaning. And so of course, this picture is nothing like what I had intended it to be, but still manages to capture some of the nuances that have been bouncing around my head the past week. It also doesn't help that I'm not trying to represent any sort of "truth", but only shades of interpretation.



That being said, it should be obvious that the straight lines running towards the axis are supposed to represent the tree of life, or an ordered (linear) perspective of reality. I debated leaving a blank line between each of the trees around the circle, but once the pen's on the paper, that's that (and it amuses me to think of the trees as overlapping). The eye at the axis is kether, or non-local connection, or universal conscioussness (singularity). There would ideally be an infinite amount of tree of life lines connected here to show how everything is connected, but that would have been a bit messy. The radial lines are da'ath, the tree of knowledge, or the connections on which the various jewels (sephiroth) hang. They could also be seen as ripples emanating from the axis, like those caused by a stone dropped in water, and are thus also representative of the waves that are space-time and the primordial ocean of chaos on which an ordered perspective is placed to form the matrix/ net of reality.



The faint curving lines that look like lotus petals are an example of phyllotaxis, which is the method by which certain flower petals form along the golden spiral (taught to me by my good friend Alberto Almarza, one of the greatest living alchemical artists, but with absolutely no web presence of his work (yet)). I only penciled these lines in to see how they lined up with the paths of the tree of life, which they did remarkably well, except that they connect chokmah to geburah (15) and binah to chesed (17) through the abyss placement of da'ath and not to tipharet. Which would make sense if da'ath were actually a sphere and a higher harmonic of tipharet and not an infernal ghost in the machine.



The striated lines surrounding the spheres and the net itself indicate radiance, and are purely decorative. I also considered drawing an arrow to malkuth labled "you are here," but thought it wasn't all that necessary.





and here's a little something I wrote the other day while immersed in the wonderful illustrations of Roob's "Alchemy and Mysticism":



Drawn forth from the flood

all being resplendent

in a single shared cup.

Drink your fill

and dance on the waves.

The whole world falls

at your feet

ring after ring after ring.

Where is the kingdom

with a thousand centers

and none?



Drawn down from the stars

and traced in the dirt.

At crossed roads

and the shifting shore,

standing with one foot

in the the sea. The tides

stop for no man,

they wash up and you

are in,

they sway back and you

are naught.

Up and back, ceaseless

and serene at dawn

but so terrible

when they are gone.



So rise, plant both feet

in the air, the wind

waves as well; but across

no bounds

but your skin.

Strip it away and away.

What is left for the wind

to caress but your soul?

signal from noise: raising babel from the seas of the da'atha-sphere

Last night I was practicing my nightly asanas, letting myself dissolve into breathing, when a startling noise like the end of the world erupted through the ordered peace of the room, piercing my consciousness straight to the core. After a panicked moment when I felt all of reality had turned on its head I realized it was only the fire alarm, set off by the candles I was burning. My heart beating in my throat and sleep now an impossibility, I sat down and started reading Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" in order to calm down, but soon found myself drawn into his world of viral information and interconnected knowledge. There amidst ninja hackers and religious franchises I stumbled upon a chapter that detailed some things that have been creeping around my head, ideas of myth as tales of social organization and information processing. In particular, Stephenson talks about the Sumerian myths, interpreting the stories of Enkil fertilizing the river valleys as the creation of communication (as he is the water god, and Sumerian society wrote on clay from the river banks created from his heart-waters (sperm, as original information carrier). But then another sentence broke through, much closer to the research I have done, after Asherah, the Sumerian ophidian (snake) mother goddess is compared to Eve, "Eve, as I recall, is responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just a fruit- it's data."



In Hebrew, Da'ath is knowledge, and is the "hidden" 11th sphere of the Tree of Life, the abyss seperating the lower spheres from the supernal triad and not located in any one place on the tree of life as it is the space between the spheres. A quick jaunt through the Net revealed that Da'ath is linked to the Tree of Knowledge, that when Adam and Eve ate the malus malum (bad apple) from the Tree their universal consciousness was reduced to the limited ego perspective of duality (good vs evil, light vs dark, self vs other). By sampling a specific bit of data their perspectives became limited from the whole of knowing to a simple binary mentality. This is represented in the tree of life as a fall from the non-local connection of Kether to the singular being of malkuth, and as googlism so aptly put it, da'ath is the hole left behind when malkuth fell out of the garden of Eden. And so knowledge was reduced from the "appreciation for interconnected details" (wikipedia) of indra's net, in which all the hanging jewels (things, data, fruit, sephiroth) are reflection of all others, to a gaping abyss literally between oneself and the rest of the world. And so in one fell bite the order of the world is reduced to an incomprehensible chaos and a new order has to be formed (there are some interpretations of this myth that claim that God intended this in order to reorder his relationship to the world and be more intimately known in it).



Now, the idea of a choas that becomes ordered (or reordered) is rooted in many mythologies (the Sumerian again, with Enkil's slaying of Tiamat and reshaping the world from her body). Chaos is often represented by a serpent or ocean mother, who is the matrix, the prima materia from which all form arises. (see my article on the matrix for more information). According to information theory (and to paraphrase metachor), chaos is an increased state of entropy that allows messages to occur non-linearaly, in an ordered complexity that is essentially a measure of our inability to match signals we recieve from our experiences of the world with the frameworks we view it through, much like the choas I experienced before I realized the fire alarm was just that, and not a herald of armegedon. The form (signal) of fire alarm rose from the chaos of unprecedented noise. Or like this article, pasted together from the buzzing noise of opinions and subjective references that makes up our collective discourse.



Chaos is also considered as an abyss or void, and is akin to the space between things when the world is viewed as self and other. It is only by the distance between that one is able to interpret a relation to another object, and meaning (knowledge) is only the interpretation of that relation to one's self. In magical traditions, the adept has to across the abyss, or chapel perilous, in order to find understanding, a relationship to the jewel (data) hanging at the other side of the abyss. Picture yourself in a vast darkness with a thousand jewels hanging all around. You start walking to one, and as you move a colored trail is laid down in the dark to mark your path to whatever object you approach. You find a jewel, a book maybe, or a tree, and head towards another. At the same time others are moving through this abyss, making their own paths, so that soon there is a web of trails marked out between the jewels, establishing them in relation to each other. Not the infinitely reflecting web of indra's net, but a subjective web of referances ordering the objects, signals, in relation to the observer, much like the pheremone trails left by ants so others in their nest can find food (the idea of which is called stygmergy), but built from the chaos, the noise, itself (the medium is the message). So now we have replaced the complex chaos-matrix with a framework ordered to our own experiences, and constantly evolving as new knowledge is linked together. As knowledge expanded and the links were passed down from generation to generation, new technologies sprang up to represent this web of knowledge, culminating in what is now the internet, the datasphere or da'atha-sphere.



I propose that this da'atha-sphere is synonymous to the tree of knowledge, which runs perpindicular to the tree of life (line conscioussness vs. point conscioussness), and forms the web on which the spheres are hung in relation to each other. But it is also synonymous with the tower of babel (literally "gate to god) as an edifice to our push towards the godhead of interconnected conscioussness. In the myth, which also plays a large part in Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a tower is built with "the heavens in its roof," only to be abandoned when god causes its builders to speak in seperate tongues, so that they can not communicate where they all spoke the same language before and can not finish construction of the tower. No communion with the godhead, better luck next time. But next time is now, thanks to the translitartive powers of the internet, and a new tower is being built, this time spread out over the entire globe (knowledge stored serialy instead of hierarchichly). What does this mean? What strange and unexpected collective signal will emerge from the chaotic white noise of infinite bits of data swirling across the earth like a blizzard in some great infopocalyptic vision?



That remains to be seen. Any expectation of the singularity, like magical attention and quantum subjectivity, presupposes a result. What you look for you will find. If we look at this through the order of our established beliefs, we will only find them reflected back on us, though that might be what we are going for in the first place. If we want to see god in the collection of human knowledge, then we will see god.



Whether it is or not is an entriely different story.

myths, maps, and sealing wax

(reposted from old journals)



As I’ve said many times before, the world is and has always been a rather mythological place for me. That is, I’ve always seen life, and my place in it, more in terms of how my/ our interactions continually play out these high level stories then as being the interactions in themselves.



Looking back at my childhood, this isn’t very surprising. I’ve always been fascinated by mythologies and their epic description of reality. If anything, that has been my own personal disconnect from the world and at times has kept me from being able to interact with the world "as it is." I think this approach was first fostered by being raised Christian, but not in being raised to believe that that view of the world was the correct or only view. As my Dad once said, he raised us that way to believe that there is something in the world to believe in, that we are part of something much bigger than this. With an active and critical imagination, it didn’t take me long to realize that this Christian story was only just another story. And being an avid reader as well I began pouring through the old stories of many different cultures and religions, the myths of Greece and Rome, the Norse, Assyrian, and Indian cultures. And beyond that I was attracted to other more fantastic stories that carried such mythic and epic perspectives, namely the Lord of the Rings, and movies like Tron (which paints a good picture for a late twentieth century take on these old myths) and Star Wars. Actually it didn’t really surprise me to discover that George Lucas had been good friends with Joseph Campbell, as Lucas’ epic deftly portrays a version of Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’. And as I’ve pointed out recently, that myth itself is nothing but a story for our own coming to terms with being individual humans in this wide and crazy world. And beyond these, my mythic approach was also highly informed by certain epic role-playing video games, namely the Ultima and Final Fantasy series. These last perhaps really set up my beliefs that I was indeed the hero of my own quest through the world or personal legend, and as the hero, was capable and responsible for trying to save or at least change the world in some meaningful and lasting way.



Myths of individual self-importance aside, all these stories also set up my belief that the world would "end" soon in some cataclysmic struggle between good and evil or magic and technology. Looking at this now, I could say that this almost worldwide myth of the apocalypse might just be a story for learning to accept our finitude as mortal beings, or for our personal struggles trying to yoke disjoint aspects of our personalities. What is right and wrong, and should we approach the world analytically, intuitively, or both? Not that the world still doesn’t appear that it might end soon, or at least that humanity might not be pushing it and ourselves to some vast breaking point; our myths and history (and discernable future) seem to point to some apocalyptic climax looming on the horizon. Of course, I still could be reading too much into this, but we’ll never know until it happens.



As they say as above, so below, our personal interactions serve as reflections of higher level cultural interactions and vice versa. If anything, that is how myth works, in finding correlations between our personal stories and that of the cosmos, creating maps for our journeys through the world in the spinning of stars and migrations of our ancestors. One could perhaps say then that our personal interactions are also being played out on collective levels, that each culture, and humanity as a whole, are going through their own hero’s journey of world-discovery and self-affirmation. Perhaps the Universe is going through this as well, as the myths of gods playing, and sciences of physical forces interacting all seem to point too.



In fact, I would argue that it is possibly this mapping between heavenly bodies and natural processes to our everyday experiences and interactions that has allowed us understand our place in the world (at least to a limited degree) and communicate this to each other. Over time we have created elaborate symbol systems that serve to represent ourselves as these higher levels of interaction, and become frameworks to relate to our own and other’s experiences; such as the Kabala’s mapping of the cosmos, or the I Ching’s mapping of organic change. Even our daily language itself has its roots in such symbolic forms of representation, if you look at the old runic alphabets in which each symbol is not only its letter but a communicable concept describing aspects and interactions that had been consistently noticed in the world. And today, even though each concept is not directly mapped from its individual symbols, these jumbles of letters still serve to spell out and represent actual things in the world. Of course, some languages, like Chinese, never forgot this representational quality of the characters used, in that each symbol still represents a concept in itself in the form of a stylized picture of it. Which leads me to say that art in itself can serve as another representative form for communicating our experiences, whether in visual forms, sonic feelings, etc… And in this sense, any action or interaction could be considered art in that it is interpretable of representative of both itself and higher level interactions of our experiences of the world. The act of going to work each day is reflective of our daily animal struggle of fending to survive, but it is also just going to work. The act of going to sleep is reflective of giving oneself up to death and of the fall of cultures and of the inevitable end of all things. But it is also just going to sleep.



Now, the question that is raised in my mind by all this, is if and when it is necessary to frame our experiences in terms of their higher level interpretations. It seems that we have to find some common ground in order to relate our experiences to each other, and myths can offer us a collective framework for our experiences. But if we are trying to communicate more day to day interactions, the mythic filter can possibly distract from or add too much meaning to what is relevant in each information exchange. If for example I want to suggest to someone a good place to eat, it is not necessary to tie in discussions of our struggles for bio-survival or the role that cave drawings once might have played in ancient cultures, but just to say such and such restaurant has tasty and affordable food. But if the discussion were to tend to topics of how we fit into the world, such higher level themes and stories might be necessary in order to paint a decent picture of our experiences of reality. It seems to come down to being aware of what information is practical in any given exchange, and excluding the levels of interpretation that are not. Just because my actions of informing you where to eat could be interpreted as acting out some archetypal role of teacher or guide, it is almost meaningless to point this out when you just want directions. Instead our interaction could suggest to you what you need to know, and just, that unless you aren’t too hungry that you could chat for a bit before you eat. And so, though the mythic interpretation of reality is a meaningful approach to our experiences , it is only really useful in dealing with high level interpretations of our experiences, and not in communicating the actual interactions we have on a more experiential level.