this article in portuguese HERE
Nelson Job
(translated by Pedro Ribeiro)
(translated by Pedro Ribeiro)
The fact that there
is nothing but a spiritual world
deprives us
of hope and gives us certainty.
Kafka[1]
There is a deep
resonance between magic, philosophy, science and art, with a special emphasis
on the confluences of Hermeticism, philosophy of difference and modern Physics.
Hermeticism is a magical way of knowledge inspired by Ancient Egypt, which
migrates via Alexandria, during the Middle Ages, to all Europe. This shows how
esoteric knowledge is important for Western knowledge. There are proven
Hermetic influences on Kepler’s science (CONNOR, 2005), who worked as an
astrologer for Roman-German Emperor Rudolph II, and Newton (DOBBS, 1994). On
the second case, the theory of gravity itself was inspired by alchemy. Newton even
translated to English the most important alchemical text: “The Emerald Table”
(DOBBS, 2002). In broad terms, different from a rationalist view of the History
of Science, classical science is not born “in opposition” to magic, but exactly
the contrary: classic science is born from
magic. In his brilliant book Esoterism
and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, Historian Wouter
Hanegraaff (2012) says in his conclusion that, given the present studies, it
would be absurd to exclude, for instance, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della
Mirandola – two great mystical philosophers – from the History of Philosophy, as
well as exclude astrology (which influenced astronomy) and alchemy from the
History of Science.
We will use the passage
from alchemy to chemistry as a monad of
the relations between esotericism, philosophy and science. Alchemy began with
the archaic magical-ritualistic techniques of healers, miners and blacksmiths, being constituted as a body of knowledge in China, India
and Mesopotamia circa 600 B.C. (VARGAS, 2009). In Egypt, alchemical knowledge
arrived a little later, with the philosophy of Plotinus. The first known Egyptian
alchemist is Zosimos, from 300 A.D., author of the first distinctly alchemical texts.
Zosimos probably was an apprentice of Mary the Jewess, who named the famous
bain-marie method, indicating that alchemy was important for Judaism, since
there were many Jewish alchemists, possibly the first to believe in the
transmutation of metals. There are speculations that Moses was also an
alchemist (PATAI, 2009).
Alchemy was used by Swiss analyst Carl Jung (1991) as a
symbol of the workings of the unconscious. His book Psychology and Alchemy includes his famous use of alchemy in the
interpretation of the dreams – considered alchemical by Jung – of physician Wolfgang
Pauli, Nobel Prize winner for Quantum Mechanics. They became friends, and from
this friendship was born one of Jung’s most important concepts, synchronicity (PAULI & JUNG, 2001). However,
Hanegraaff (2012) points that Jung’s interpretation reduces alchemy to a mere
psychological symbolism. It is important to stress that alchemy was a
laboratory practice, an inspiration for the scientific lab of the present. Alchemy
is also the main source of information of Renaissance physician Paracelsus
(BALL, 2009), a university teacher, researcher, author of many relevant medical
treatises, whose work influenced the advent of homeopathy centuries later.
To mention Paracelsus as a noteworthy medical author can
seem odd to skeptical readers. However, a closer study of his work shows that
Paracelsus possessed a scientific mind, as
well as a magical one (BALL, 2009). Later studies, such as the History of Science by George Sarton, created
the illusion that, among other prejudiced and biased affirmations, science is cumulative, progressive and marked by
skepticism, while magic would be irrational (HANEGRAAFF, 2012). This invention of
a certain “folkloric”, that is, immutable magic, ignores the continuous sophistication observed during the
passage of many centuries, in mystic authors like Plotinus, the anonymous
Medieval authors who used the pseudonym of Hermes Trismegistus – organized in
the Corpus Hermeticum – and Isaac Newton, who added concepts,
practices and other details along the history of magic. In the reading of these
and many other mystic authors can be perceive a progression and an unfolding of
concepts of magic that still abide nowadays, in works like Psicomagia, by movie director and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky
(2009), and Liber Null and Psychonaut,
by Peter J. Carroll (2016), this later being one of the creators of the
so-called Chaos Magick, one of
the rare examples of a consistent articulation of Quantum Mechanics
interpretations with magic. It is commonplace to say that the considerations about oxygen made by Lavoisier – after
the death of Paracelsus – would
generate an “anti-Paracelsian” medicine, at the same time they inaugurated
chemistry. Nothing in the opus of Paracelsus indicates that he would reject
oxygen, much to the contrary: he seemed enthusiastic about new discoveries
(BALL, 2009).
To apprehend the importance and consistence of alchemy,
we can quote the conclusion of Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb’s study (2009), where
she says “the process that happened was dynamic, alchemy did not fall by itself
– due to its many contradictions – but by the contradictions that its context
caused in the new system of thought”. What this excerpt makes clear is that
there is a change of mentalities with Illuminism and the French Revolution. The
famous episode of German chemist Friedrich Kekulé’s dream – where dreaming with
the Ourobouros, the alchemical figure of the snake eating its own tail, provided
him the insight for the disposition of the atom in the benzene molecule– is an
excellent representation of the passage from alchemy to chemistry. Kekulé would
become one of the pioneers of organic chemistry, whose separation between the
inorganic and the organic marks the loss of importance of a magical animism in
the increasingly scientific imaginary of Europe and the rest of the world. This
episode is part of a long process of dualism and separatism that happened to
thinking. It is necessary to provide a summary of this process.
“The decisive moment of human development
is continually at hand.”
Kafka
History has some
passionate debates about if there ever was a “matriarchy”. At any rate, if we
depart from a historically identifiable advent of patriarchy, the use of cold
weapons, we can establish a great initial separatism process: the social
division between masters and slaves. In Ancient Egypt, at the beginning of the
dynasties of the Pharaohs (middle of the Ancient Empire [circa 2680 B.C.
– 2190 B.C.]), the entire society was shaped by the concept of Ma’at,
an immanent goddess of justice and truth (NUNES CARREIRA, 1994). To this must
be added a society where philosophy, religion and politics were immanent,
principally in relation to the figure of the pharaoh. The goddess Ma’at was present
in the cosmos; she was the cosmos. During
the New Empire (circa
1550 B.C. – 1070 B.C.), there is a process of transcendentalization of Ma’at, which culminates with the decadence
of the Empire and a growing individualism in Egypt. During this historical
process, Ma’at ceases to be an immanent goddess to submit to a single God,
becoming a State myth, a “sentiment” of justice. This individualism will become
increasingly sophisticated in a separation between subject and object, where
there is a migration of the immanent ethics of Ma’at to the “love thy neighbor”
of Judaic-Christian morals.
The
dimension of a “neighbor” or “other” is only elicited in a cosmovision where
subject and object are separate, even if “love your neighbor as thyself” is an invitation to an
immanent vision: me and the other are one. However, the passage from the
initial Christianity to another, after many Councils, to an increasingly
transcendent Christianity, altered its original message: from I am the other, to “being concerned” with
the other, that is, ethical information degenerated in a moral rule. The
precept “love thy neighbor like thyself”, in its “immanent version”, resonates
with the maxim from the Hindu Upanishads,
“Tat twam asi”, which in the Advaita
Vedanta interpretation would be something like “Thou art That”, an eminently
non-dual way of knowledge, very similar to Spinozism, which will be mentioned
below (OM & JOB, 2017).
A new
step on this separation will happen in Greece. Asia and Egypt had commercial
exchanges with Greece via Persia (MCEVILLEY, 2002). One
consequence of this, among others, is that all the Shamanism present in Pythagoras
and his famous theorem was already present in geometric form in the pyramids of
Egypt. Greek rationalism inherits the final phase of Egyptian thought, once an undifferentiated
blend of knowledges that culminates in a Greece whose philosophy is born by separating
itself from myths and rites. There is a rationalist
political act when a certain History inaugurates Greek thought. For
instance, the existence of a philosophy immanent to religion, as in Egypt, was
abandoned. Such political act is indeed relevant to understand what happens in
the present in relation to medicine and the concept of health.
Parmenides
inaugurates this divided Greece stimulating what became an apology of permanence, to which Western Philosophy
becomes, in a mode of speaking, addicted. Platonism magnifies separatism with
its exaltation of the World of Ideas in detriment to the sensible, inferior
world of the Simulacrum. Scholasticism expands this rift by building a world
separate from God. Descartes distinguishes body and mind as different Natures
(DELEUZE, 2006). During this same Cartesian 17th century, there is a
radical change in the ontology of language, in an unfolding of the medieval
debate between Nominalism and Realism. If, up to this point, in the “Western”
imaginary, the word was immanent to the thing, in the middle of the 17th
Century the word is dissociated from the thing, only representing it, this
aspect being important to discredit witchcraft (CLARK, 2006). Kant, in his
turn, made the Thing-in-Itself inaccessible
to the mind, which finally will slip into Positivism, i.e., science is unable
to reach reality, and can only deal with phenomena (PINGUELLI ROSA, 2005). Modern
man feel inexorably isolated from the comos; a “humanity” destitute from its
cosmic scope is invented.
“How is it possible to rejoice in the world except by
fleeing to it?”
Kafka
Now we can understand better the processes that happened:
the passage from astrology to astronomy and from alchemy to chemistry
culminated in an act, that is, the exclusion
of immanence from the philosophy of that way of knowledge. Astrology
promoted the immanence between our lives (micro) and celestial orbits of the
stars (macro). Alchemy promoted immanence between life (coagulated in a certain
body, “micro”) and the elements (that are in the world and are the world,
“macro”). With the removal of philosophy, which since the Egyptians was immanent
to all activities, astronomy became a mere description of celestial movements,
with nothing to add to our lives, and chemistry became a combination of the
elements, without any immanent meaning to life, except for the description of
those chemical processes in the world. Philosophy degenerates in mere opinion,
since Kant forbad it from dealing in fact
with things. When this humanity detached from the cosmos is invented, an
immense solitude ravaged the spirits in Europe. It was inevitable that soon after
would appear a Freud to manage solitude, reinforcing it with an individual
psychic apparatus.
But during the 17th Century there already
appeared a solution for all this separatism. It is, of course, the philosophy
of Baruch Spinoza (2008). Spinozism is the heir of a long tradition of “damned”,
which began during a forgotten Egyptian immanence, whose Greek heir is
Heraclitus and its impermanent becoming; its late followers, the Stoics, the
Hermetic sorcerers and alchemists, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza’s preceptor, Franciscus van den Enden (JOB, 2013).
With Spinoza, there is indeed a pure immanence: a univocity
between God, Nature and substance, a mind immanent in the world and an ontology
marked by an Ethics: if from bad
encounters a diminution of potency is obtained, generating sadness and
servitude, good encounters lead to an increase in potency, joy, freedom and
bliss, i.e., an apprehension of immanence by man’s mode of expression.
In this way, Spinoza solves various problems: creator (Natura Naturans) and creature (Natura Naturata) are immanent: man stops
being separated from the cosmos. Philosophy deals directly with things, and
emerges from them. It is an entire philosophical search from the first (imagination)
to the third kind of knowledge (intuition), necessarily passing through the
second (reflection), problematizing inadequate ideas towards adequate ideas
and, on its turn, to bliss, where we perceive ourselves as immanent to God. Witchcraft
maybe could arrive at immanence only by the demonic way, but all too often the
denial of Christian morality only generated an immature “everything is
permitted”. This stance would be more intensely mediatized with the magician Aleister
Crowley (2017, p. 33), whose following motto was misunderstood, because it was
reproduced only in part. The famous Law of Thelema, present in the Book of Law, written in 1904 by Crowley[2], is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Love is the law, love under will. There is no other law but Do what thou wilt.”
Crowley’s law may have similarities with the bliss in
Spinoza’s Ethics, written centuries
before. However, if the philosopher cultivates an impeccable ontological rigor,
Crowley’s text is confusing. In Spinoza, passions must be governed by good
encounters, putting man as “lord of his passions”, what is different from an
individual moral, unfolding an Ethics that
would never be only from the order of the “individual”.
Spinozism, as predicted Spinoza himself, was considered a
heresy by the Church, putting the lens polisher in excellent historical company.
After him, the thinkers of immanence would be (in a fashion) Leibniz, Hume,
Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, to mention the more obvious examples. However,
to advance in our argument, we must now discuss melancholy.
“The spirit only becomes free at the point where it
ceases to be invoked as a support.”
Kafka
The shift in the imaginary relative to melancholy is
relevant to our question. Melancholy, up to before Modern Age, was, in general
terms, a sort of preparation for enthusiasm
(from the Greek enthousiasmos), something
like “divine inspiration”, “being possessed by God” etc. It was a sort of
method for priest of various lineages that involved, during a preparatory time,
isolation, reflection, sexual and food abstinence, to achieve revelation and
suchlike. From the Cartesian century onwards, melancholy acquired increasingly
pathological contours (CHAUÍ, 2000).
Allied to the
pathologization of melancholy, there is an entire context of “disenchantment of
the world”, generated by the Inquisition, by Illuminism, by the Scientific
Revolution and all the separatism we mentioned before. If we can, to a certain
point, take part in the Weberian choir and name this process “disenchantment of
the world”, we must be careful: what is understood by “secularization”, such as
the loss of religious influence in the social sphere, is relative. According to
Hanegraaff (1999), there was, along with the New Age Movement, a shift in the institutionalization of
religions to private spiritualities, with their individual symbolisms. There
is an abundance of contemporary examples: Paulo Coelho, The Celestine Prophecy, The
Secret, The Power of Now, etc. In
other words, many people no longer follow an institutionalized religion, but
feel part of a diffuse group of spiritualists around the planet.
Hanegraaff (2012) also
says that New Age spiritualists live in a scientifized reality; however, their
belief system creates a separate reality, where the spiritual can manifest. We
understand that, given a history of the “West” so marked by transcendental
ideas, many spiritualists locate the spiritual in any transcendence available. Our
operation is Spinozian, consequently immanent, and involves finding God – and
the demons of the witches – in this very
world.
The disenchantment of
the world will generate a cosmovision exceedingly concrete. The invisibles tend
to be abolished from the constructed notion of reality. For instance, Newtonian
physics rationalizes the invisible with the concept of gravity. It must be said
that Newton was not a Newtonian, in
the sense his imaginary interacted harmoniously with science, theology,
philosophy and alchemy, and was not even a “mechanist”. It is only Descartes who
can, in fact, be considered mechanist, since his mechanics necessarily involved
the local relation of parts. On the other hand, Newton, with the force of
gravity, postulated an action at a distance or non-local. Newton only published
his scientific texts during his life, the smaller part of his complete works
(DOBBS, 1994). The irony in this is that this “edition” of Newton’s works, precisely
the “last of the magicians” – to use the famous discourse of Keynes (2002) –, was
a considerable vector for the process of Illuminist rationalization of the
disenchantment of the world. Quantum mechanics would generate later a new
version of the presence of the invisibles – even more subtle and transformative
– for the scientific field. Half a century after its appearance, it is
aggregated by the New Age movement as a scientific justification for spirituality,
even if occasionally with little or no consistency (HANEGRAAFF, 2013).
The second half of the
20th Century witnessed the so-called “pharmacological revolution”, where
psychiatry no longer treated only “madness”, prescribing drugs for any kind of
psychic discomfort: alcoholism, adult and infantile neurosis etc. (GRANATO,
2018). From 1990 onwards, a new boom would occur due to the arrival of new
antidepressants such as Prozac.
It is at this point
that we intend to promote our resonances: the consequence of the “abolition of
the invisibles” in Illuminism and the constitution of a world increasingly
concrete is that the individuals who perceive those invisible are considered
insane (schizophrenic hearing voices, seeing dragons, etc.). And with the
pathologization of melancholy, the need to be happy at any cost – since it is
an imperative of capitalist productivity – creates in the imaginary the need
for antidepressants.
Once again it is
necessary to link disenchantment to capitalist logic: Silvia Federeci (2017) shows
how the process of Inquisition, with its inherent feminicide, assured the ascension
of capitalism in the work relations. The disempowerment of the feminine,
intuition, and the invisibles refer us to the disenchantment of the world. Naturally,
in the scientific process there is creativity, intuition, and with it, necessarily
there is a certain feminine. However, it is inevitable that this feminine is
weakened and tamed. The “tamed feminine” gains its diagnostic evidence in the
turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, with the advent of PMS: the “witch”
has its social permission to emerge only on the days before menstruation...
It is necessary to
learn the context of the second half of the 20th to the present day:
the explosion of illegal drug use and the increase in the use of psychiatric
drugs are part of the same movement (GRANATO, 2018). This movement would be the
use of chemical products from various provenances to alter “mental states”. The
“disenchanted” tend to use legal drugs and the New Age “enchanted”, illegal
ones, even if the transit between both positions is immense, according to the
policy performed by the user on his social field.
This is our question: the
passage of alchemy to chemistry, a fractal to the passage of witchcraft to
science, with its taxonomization of knowledges and life, disconnected man from
cosmos, condemning him to an unhappy life. It is necessary to consume
everything, including all kinds of drugs, legal and illegal, to stand this
fragmented world and individual. This is exactly the historical moment of the “medicalization
of life”. So, what is to be done?
“You are the exercise, the task. No student far and
wide.”
Kafka
Foucault (2002) affirms
that the immanence between words and things survived in literature. We can
expand this idea and bring art to life. But it is Deleuze and Guattari (1997) who
will provide the great ontological step and promote a becoming-woman. The authors defend that every becoming is a minority
and passes necessarily through a becoming- woman, and add there is no “becoming-man”,
since “man” is the majority. In the same text, Deleuze and Guattari whisper
sometimes in our ears: “we sorcerers”, proposing an immanent demonic alliance, instead of a
familiar, transcendent alliance. This philosophy develops Henri Bergson’s concept
(2009) of virtual, the non-temporal
space that comprehend coexistent times and individual and cosmic consciousness,
all of them immanent. The philosopher goes as far as saying that when somebody
perceives the virtual of other individual it could be understood as a ghost or
spirit.
When we mentioned that Deleuze
and Guattari are affiliated to witchcraft (JOB, 2019), our strategies become
clearer we will regain the invisibles without denying science and the
technological world. If the pharmaceutical industry turned medicine in
something “diabolical”, now it is appropriate to allow prescriptions to become demonic, in the sense of Deleuze and
Guattari.
What the process of
Illuminism and disenchantment of the world achieved was a flattening of the
spectrum of reality, or, in other worlds, an “ontological reduction”. The
illusory idea of transcendence was installed as an ontology of obedience: a transcendent God, State, kings, parents,
chiefs, etc., are the avatars of this transcendence, preparing the subject
removed from the cosmos to obedience. This sad passion has the legal and
illegal chemical sedation we mentioned above as one of its developments.
The virtual, as a
reinsertion of the hidden forces in reality, allows us to access again this
wider ontological spectrum, building possibilities (JOB, 2013). But we must refine
our strategy.
Anarchist Sufi Hakim
Bey (2001) proposes a mystical and ontological
anarchy. With his Temporary
Autonomous Zone (TAZ), he says that revolution should not even be desired,
and proposes in its place the uprising.
The TAZ would be any provisional
libertarian space: a party, a picnic, a study reunion, as long as it is
hierarchy-free, promoting freedom. As we saw in this article, the docile body
obeys the institutions – with their transcendent aspirations – and is permeated
and ruled by these institutions, including the medical ones. A space of freedom
invites the body to dance, to decoagulate,
to use a Hermetic term, the “individual”, making them conscious of the flux to
which they belong, and their immanence.
Our
resistance happens in an immanent way, including between science and witchcraft.
Our medicine is life as a work of
art, the cultivation of freedom, a festive nomadism. To inhabit the cosmos from
the perspective of immanence, along with Nature and culture, allow us to
consider ourselves one with the cosmos, a cosmos which includes the sea,
plants, animals, automobiles, skyscrapers, pills, etc. The moment of the
Luddites is long past. Our concern is to use technology in an ethical way,
aware of the immanence between us and the cosmos and everything inside it. It
would be naive to deny any chemical medicine, but perhaps we could find another
approach, for instance, in psychiatry, where medication should be negotiated
between client and doctor.
Aware
of the virtual invisibles, conjurable in
the actual, as well as the possibility of transmitting these information live
by social networks via um smartphone, we comprehend that esoterism, philosophy
and science inhabit a continuum of
thought and intuition and the next steps of the cosmic dance must intensify the
confluence of the vibrational lines that compose this continuum.
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[1] All the epigraphs
opening the sections of this article are by Franz Kafka (2017), from the book “Zürau
Aphorisms”.
