Reclaiming Mysticism Pt. 1: The Empire Never Ended

This notion of a mysticism of transcendence and of physical existence as a “descent” from something “higher” doesn’t begin with the Hermetic Qabalah, of course, which, despite my high esteem for it as a body of doctrine, is actually a reasonably recent development. Instead this notion has its origins in Antiquity, with the first occurrence (of which I am aware) being Plato’s “Phaedrus”. But it permeates Western mysticism, with many working definitions of the Great Work including a narrative of a unification (or reunification, to be more precise) of the microcosmic mystic with the macrocosmic “godhead”.

The general thrust of my mysticism has thus tended to be focused on a return to the unity of the Divine, a “going home” or “reversion”, as it is sometimes called in the Neoplatonic literature. This was strongly fueled by lifelong and persistent feelings of homesickness for a place I have never been, a sort of forlorn feeling of cosmic loneliness that has haunted me as long as I can remember. Because these feelings lined up with the teachings I received from trusted sources, I have believed in and pursued this transcendental model of mysticism for most of my life. To be clear, I don’t blame my beloved teachers Kurt, Francine, and Tony, or the writers of the various books I have read, for perpetuating this teaching. It was the model they inherited, as well, and we all have to contend with a broken, suppressed, and sometimes fraudulent history in this business.

But ironically, as I leave one grade to move into another, as my Great Work comes to another of its great climaxes, I find myself not only rejecting the mystical model of transcendence as inconsistent with the insights and visions I’ve experienced over the course of my magickal and mystical career, but also rejecting that model because I have become suspicious. I feel like this whole idea of what magick and mysticism is about is not just faulty, but manipulative and exploitative. It seems like it is meant to funnel something that is wild, powerful, and fundamentally non-dualistic into a safe, predictable, and—above all—orderly channel. A channel that specifically removes mages and mystics from any meaningful place in our larger communities and disempowers us from causing meaningful social and political change.

In this series, I wish to explore this suspicion and what I believe we—by whom I mean modern mages and mystics living in the early 21st century—should do in our current situation.

In “On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic”, Friedrich Nietzsche (1887) made an interesting and—for his late 19th Century readers—startling argument. He argued that ethics as they existed in 19th century Germany did not arise, as most moral philosophers have argued, either as divine command via revealed holy text or as a reasoned expansion on innate ethical intuitions, but as an insidious manipulation. He argued that what has been put forth—specifically by Christianity—as moral goodness, by which he means ethical values such as mercy and especially altruism, is actually a manipulation by the “weak” to seize power from the “strong” using emotional manipulations. He tells a story more than a history, and makes all sorts of appeals to things he thinks will sound good to his readers, such as “nobility”, while simultaneously playing on the interconfessional strife between Protestants and Catholics that was common in Germany before WWII by developing a notion of a “warrior caste” being deviously supplanted by a “priestly caste”. He is able to do a lot of work with such appeals to emotion and a sort of “appeal to masculinity” that at, some points, sounds more like a manosphere podcast than a philosophical argument, but in the end it all comes down to this: we’ve been duped and what we’ve been taught to value is actually here to enslave us.

Well, not us, exactly. The noble. The strong. The “blond beast” that has been adopted by so many racists as their own image (though that may have been a later addition by his sister, I am not familiar with the current scholarship on that issue). The kind of people with whom Nietzsche invites us to identify with by agreeing with his argument.

Please understand that I am not criticizing Nietzsche for making appeals to emotion…I make rhetorical appeals to emotion in my work all the time. Chapter 14 of the rough draft of “Towards A Philosophy Of Magick” is full of appeals to emotion, as I’m sure some of you are aware. Blameworthy attitudes and behaviors cause problems and sometimes the only way we can sense how those problems show up in the world is with our emotions. As many victims of abuse and injustice can attest, sometimes something feels bad long before we can logically articulate why exactly it is bad, and I don’t think we should wait until logic or moral philosophy catches up to reality for us to stop bad things from happening. Obviously emotion alone is not a trustworthy guide for our attitudes and behaviors, and we have to especially be conscious of power dynamics before we assume that our discomfort should be centered in a given situation, but I believe that our emotions do, in fact, give us some form of knowledge.

It’s true, I was originally trained in the analytic tradition, where the epistemology is usually empiricism and the metaphysics is usually materialism, and it’s true that analytic philosophy is known for its rigid adherence to classical two-value deductive logic and its devaluing of emotion. Thus, by the standards of analytic philosophy, an “Appeal To Emotion” is an informal logical fallacy. But how else do I explain my marriage, my odd preference for one person’s company over that of all others and my commitment to share my life with them, if not by an appeal to emotion? How else do I explain my willingness to spend so much time and effort writing poetry, for which I gain little more than the joy of creating a paltry attempt at beauty? How else do I explain my pursuit of the Great Work itself, a pursuit that has motivated the majority of my major life choices? These are some of the most important choices of my life, and there was nothing else I could have possibly based them upon except my own emotions. The only answer to whether or not I should spend my life with my spouse can only come from my feelings of love and my emotional attitude of commitment. Likewise, only my inspiration and love of beauty can inform my choice to write poetry.

Thus it seems to me that emotion is actually a pretty good justification for some things. Emotions may not be a good source of warrant (reason to believe the truth of a proposition) about a claim like “the cat is on the mat” or “snow is white”, but those aren’t the only kinds of claims for which I must account in my philosophy. Sometimes the claim is “I love this cat” or “snow is beautiful”, and in those cases I need those appeals to emotion, I need to know how I actually feel, to know what is true.

Yes, it’s true that my emotions—and my introspections in general—are not public facts empirically available to others in the world. But I don’t think it’s possible to orient myself in the world in all the ways that I must by reason and empirical evidence alone. I often need my actual desire, love, or even rage to answer the question of “what should I do?” in any given moment. In Thelemic language, sometimes I need “pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result” (Liber AL 1:44) to know what to do and it is an error to fall into the “pit called Because” (Liber AL 2:27). In fact, as someone who was in my fair share of fights when I was young, I can tell you that sometimes trying to think about what you’re doing while you are doing it is the best way to get hurt.

In any case, as anyone who has read my philosophical work can attest, I have ranged far and wide since my school days and I see no need to limit myself to the norms of analytic philosophy. I am no longer a student trying to please my professors (pace, Dr. Brown and Dr. Hacking, and rest in peace), and for many years now I have been primarily a sort of “pagan existentialist” (compare with Christian Existentialism…one of my primary influences is Søren Kierkegaard). My logic is paraconsistent, my epistemology is phenomenalist, my metaphysics is idealist, my moral philosophy is virtue ethics, and I don’t feel guilty about any of it.

So, using a lot of emotional appeals, Nietzsche tells us a story, a story which I mostly disagree with because it is both radically ahistorical and it requires us to believe that the ethical systems of dozens of distinct cultural lineages over a period of thousands of years all stem from a mean-spirited conspiracy by the resentful “weak” to steal the rightful power of the “strong” by convincing them to give it up without a fight. This story also invites us to believe that the world of 19th century Germany was gripped in an ethics of altruism that hamstrung the “strong”, preventing them from dominating the “weak” as Nietzsche believed they should, which is frankly ridiculous. Germany in the 19th century was radically anti-labor, radically sexist, radically antisemitic (and racist in general), and was gripped by one war and upheaval after another as the “strong” stumbled their murderous way across history, unhampered by any sort of altruism or mercy. The “strong” trampled the “weak” as they chose, mostly without any consequences or accountability, and priests and pastors alike defended this as “natural” and “God’s will”. Nietzsche mistook the professed ethics of his culture, the loudly espoused ethics of the church and the classroom, for the actual ethics of the world in which he lived. This is an understandable error for a sickly philosopher living as a recluse…he saw the world primarily through books, newspapers, and the accounts of his family, and thus he saw not the world but the narrative the world likes to tell itself about itself.

But such a fundamental misunderstanding is a luxury that I cannot afford.

In the world that I actually live within, the strong dominate the weak using barely concealed threats on the one hand and a steady stream of paltry rewards that ensure dependence on the other. The ultimatum is clear: accept the crappy deal being offered by the wealthy and powerful to work for them, buy their products, and let them be in charge, or suffer the consequences. The carrot or the stick. They are quite willing to let us have toys and diversions—bread and circuses—and those of us with a certain amount of privilege can even use words like “the liberal democratic world order” to describe what is happening if that makes us feel better, but in the end the wealthy and powerful wield both the carrot and the stick and they use them to steer the world around.

But mystics don’t care about the carrot or the stick. Many of us don’t care about how much we suffer or how we benefit at all. We are often too busy chasing what I call resonance to pay tribute, fight in wars, or court the powerful. We are building relationships with the Divine and doing our true wills (for those of you that believe in such a thing). That can be a hell of a motivation, the kind of motivation that can’t be convinced by threats and feels insulted by bribes. Mystics can be especially dangerous to established power structures because mystics tend to subvert ecclesiastic hierarchies and sidestep the normal pressures of politics and wealth. Mystics can live in caves and spend all their time praying and meditating but still end up being more influential than the people with all the money and the armies.

One paltry example among many: over a billion people in the world consider St. Anthony Of The Desert a saint, literally a sanctified human who connected directly with the Divine during his human lifetime, and people have believed this about this one humble mystic who lived in a cave, weaved prayer mats, and worked out his salvation with fear and trembling, for over 1600 years. In contrast, how many people can remember who was president of the United States a mere century ago without consulting Wikipedia? Who the richest person on Earth was? Millions of people venerate St. Anthony every day and pray for his intervention…people have to be threatened with bad grades to remember who Calvin Coolidge was for a week so they can regurgitate it once on a test and then forget it forever. And yes, I had to look it up.

Mystics have power. Wild, dangerous power. The kind of power that gets people imprisoned. Beheaded.

Crucified.

So I want to tell you a story. My story is a lot like Nietzsche’s…it’s only vaguely historical and it invites you to believe that a lot of distinct historical lines of culture and authority lined up in just the right way to create a certain modern situation. But I’m a mage and I believe in both spirits and egregores so, unlike Nietzsche, I actually have an causal explanation for why all of these distinct historical events and forces lined up just the way they did, and I can sum that explanation up in a single word. I can point out our oppressor.

I see you, spirit: Empire is your name.

In my story, the spirit of Empire starts out small. They are just a little wisp of a thing, born out of the simple desire of a small group of prosperous people, probably traders and chieftains, warriors and kings, to no longer have to worry about their neighbors competing with them. They didn’t just eye the property and resources of their neighbors with greed—that would have just made them another group of raiders—but with an eye to ongoing advantage without having to constantly fight for it. They wanted access to the resources of their neighbors without having to conquer them and then having to actually do the work of running their kingdom. They wanted control without risk or responsibility and wealth with as little effort and cost as possible. They wanted a tribute, a percentage, a subscription fee. They wanted a regular bribe to not pillage, rape, and destroy.

The dubious relationship between liege and vassal arises from this desire to control without having to fight, and our modern notion of taxation descends from the ancient notion of tribute extracted by kings. We modern folks in so-called democratic societies like to talk about the “social contract”, the “consent of the governed”, and how we all have to pay into the system for the system to work, but very few people want to talk about how no one gives us a real choice about whether we want to be a part of that system, or any system, at all. Most of us are born into citizenship somewhere, indoctrinated into believing it is a privilege, and then given bills to pay and told to go to work as soon as possible. Just try to withdraw your “consent of the governed” and you will find out exactly what the relationship between any government and their citizens is really about: the power of that government to commit violence and extract wealth with impunity.

They teach us all a history that makes it all seem natural and normal, but when we look at it from the Xeno Position, from the point of view of the Alien, the outsider, it all just seems like a ridiculous game where only one side knows they are playing. And that game has an origin: Empire.

Over the course of the early generations of wars and expansions, either the spirit of Empire was born as an egregore or an opportunistic spirit was able to attach itself to this chain of events and sets of people and objects in the world. We will probably never know which and it’s basically immaterial at this point.