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Demonstrative: Toward a Mytho-Poetics of Monstrosity

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(Excerpt from my new novel-in-progress, All’s Fair on All Fours. Told in the voice of Newt, with indebtedness to Stephen Asma’s On Monsters)

Let this be a warning.

It began ages ago in the un-navigable coils of time, before the written word and the linear logics of history, when ourstory was told in the mutable oral style around the campfires fending off the horrible night and all the beasts that hunted our feeble species. When, in the land known of old as Scythia, between the Black Sea and the Eurasian steppes, between the Causasus Mountains where Prometheus was bound and the Carpathian range where Vlad Tepes drank blood, there once wandered Neolithic tribes of Proto-Indo-Europeans, the first men to step from the Stone to the Bronze.

But then something unimaginable went wrong. One season around the region of what is now the city of Odessa in the Ukraine, the Black Sea rose up in a great deluge covering the land, killing all life back to desert wastelands. And from those chaotic depths rose something else, something unthinkable from which the nomads fled, fleeing through the centuries down the Fertile Crescent, along the Arab Sea to the Indus River Valley; west around the Mediterranean to the Celtic, to the Dead Sea and Red Sea and the Nile; east over the Caspian Sea toward the Yellow River; and north up the Volga to the Baltic and Barents ice. And wherever the proto-men fled, they brought with them stories of the flood and warnings of what the flood had cast up to confound human eyes and hearts and strangle them in the night with its coils.

For the sea gave birth to monsters – the oncoming storm god, with a dragon’s head and limbs whipping like coils of intestines across a hundred leagues, called Typhon by the Greeks, Set by the Egyptians, Apu by the Sumerians, Vritra by the Aryans, Humbaba by the Babylonians, Jormungand by the Norse, Leviathan by the Israelites. Or it was his consort, the maiden with the dragon’s tail, the first goddess and she-viper who held the tablets of destiny in her scaly womb, called Enchidne, Chrybdis, Api, Tiamat, Lilitu, Cthulhu. Or perhaps there was only one: a great conjoined hermaphroditic serpentine writhing – the unnamable ouroboros, the chthonic dweller surrounding the secret parts of Earth – the mother of horrors who gave birth to Cerberus, the Hydra, the Chimerae, the Sphynx, the Nemean Lion, Fenrir, the Needlehogg, Kraken, trolls, sirens, djinnis and afrits, asuras, Rakshasa, nagas, giants, basilisks, gorgons, cenocephali and other animal-headed hybrids, cyclopi, hyppogriffs, wyrms, Pazuzu, rocs, the wyverns, Grendel, and all manner of slitherers, crawlers, colossals, hybrids, possessors, and parasites – in short, every monster to haunt the nightmares of men in every age and every land in which humanity sought safe purchase.

And wherever the proto-men fled and conquered and settled to farm the land, they told their stories, demonizing the local wildlife and inhabitants with the names of the Storm and Dragon to justify the rise of their ruling warrior classes, the rise of their city states and patrilineal religions, the stories shifting now from awe and worship of the Goddess to sheer hatred and terror – with new heroes and new humanized gods to beat back and tame the matrilineal chaos of the pre-historic world, to carve up the body of the horrifying abyss and construct from her bones and blood the order of civilization. In their rage all the monsters were slain, and the heroes raised a glass in Valhalla. They thought they were so brave.

And yet the dragon maid lived on, in the desert wastes and steppes above the Black Sea, occasionally devouring livestock and babies. When Heracles rounded Geryon’s cattle across the steppes, she cast the hero into a drugged sleep and stole the herd, offering to return them only for his seed, from which she gave birth to fierce Scyth and the Scythian people who worshipped the original seven gods – but her most of all – in their cannabis-fueled cannibal sacrifices. In 320 BCE, Alexander the Conqueror chased the Persian king Darius across the Caucasus range only to be set upon by the Scythian steppe-riders, who he beat back, only to discover a land teeming with monstrosities – not just the cannibal nomads and the Amazons – the true Black Sea Amazons who bested Theseus – but also the Arimaspeans – giant one-eyed men who fought against the hyppogriffs – winged horses with sharp beaks and claws, the original nightmares carved upon the earliest Scythian tombs and pottery – so that Alexander, who had boasted of killing many a monster on his conquests, cried out, ‘In this region everything is horrible, more than can be believed!’ And he erected a towering gate so that no other man might enter by mistake – or the monsters escape until the ends of time.

But one day a fox digging beneath the walls found a way out, and, amazed, the monsters followed. Soon travelers spotted them and marked their maps, ‘here be dragons,’ bringing tales back from the ends of the earth of beings beyond the outward bound of knowledge and civilization, narratives embellished only the way men can embellish them, exaggerating what they saw and projecting bravado and audacity to cover their vulnerability and thwartedness in the face of the unknown. Historians studied bones that could only have belonged to the griffs and one-eyed men – or creatures no less horrific, what we now call mastodons and protoceratops as if that makes them less monstrous – while the first scientists debated over children born with tails, with two heads or none, disbelieving only the outlandish literary conventions of the odes in which monsters were sung, but abandoning themselves to the improbable yet empirical fact that the natural world contained things more terrifying than were imaginable in their philosophies.

And the question each man asked was what do these monsters mean? Monstrum, from the Latin monere: to warn. Each uncertain creature was a portent of natural or political ruin, was, literally, demonstrative of the limits of human knowledge and power, their liminal and hybridic forms shattering the fragile categories of the nascent scientia through which the scholar-heroes still tried, desperately, to order the chaotic world that had been cast up from the abyss. They thought they were so brave; Alexander’s tutor Aristotle claiming that monsters have no purpose, are accidents of flawed matter, mistakes of perception and memory – mere myths to be expunged by the light of reason – while monstrous desires assailed men from the inside, greed and warfare bringing the Socratic ideals of justice and social harmony to their knees. That primordial terror had laid her raging brood inside men’s hearts where no logic could pursue.

And so Alexander’s empire crumbled, Darius’s empire crumbled, Caesar’s empire crumbled, Cyrus’s empire crumbled, Constantine’s empire crumbled; reason fled screaming from the black night of ignorance and superstition and the world was cast into the Dark Ages where myths and monsters struggled with God for the souls of men.

The stories shifted now from the meaning of monsters to their necessity in the divine plan: if the Creator was all powerful and good then why did he create foul evils to plague the nightmares of men? Monstrous deformations could be the result of working with flawed matter, but if He created matter, then God must have wanted monsters. In the Bible, great beasts like Leviathan and Behemoth came to represent God’s frightening strength and unknowable sublimity, while also standing as the threatening force from outside His Kingdom, Satan’s army, a threat for men to overcome in their crusades of righteousness – Saint George slaying the dragon just as the Crusaders chased the infidel nations of Gog and Magog back through Alexander’s Gates. Monsters like the pagan giants of old and the Nephalim – the malformed children of women raped by angels – symbolized hubris and the Fall, their corruption a cautionary tale, their category-crossing hybridity a warning against the impure – whole books were written on how to avoid the connection between sin and heredity, filth and evil: monsters and foreigners were the barbaric result of unholy pagan sexual orgies, only fit to be slain in total warfare, their earth salted, for ‘if ye commit abominable acts than ye shall birth abominations.’

The battlefield became the soul; the triumph was belonging to the human fold. Like a ghost in the machine or ship’s captain navigating through the monstrous straits of Charybdis and Scylla, the soul was an active force, the agency or reason necessary to steer ourselves toward immortal life in the hereafter. If, like the dog-headed Saint Christopher, a creature displayed rationality and choice, then despite their appearance they were a human being, with the same potential as the rest of us for redemption, immortality, and legal and moral culpability. If, like the last great pagan monster slayer Beowulf, they acted from thoughtless pride and rage, then despite their human faces men would become monsters themselves, their souls stared into by the abyss, only fit to fall and die. In the Christian charity paradigm, monsters were no longer evil but merely misunderstood, needing not the sword but a hug (not that the Crusaders practiced what Christ preached).

The warnings waned, the portents waned, morality waned; the soul fled screaming as the cold light of reason vanquished the horrible night of the Middle Ages. God was no longer king, but science, laying its hierarchical grid over the still-teeming chaos of nature while rejecting the supernatural explanations. Monsters became mechanized – no longer the result of God’s glory or wrath; they were now born to man due to inconsistent or corrupt seed, injured or narrowed wombs, heredity or accidental illness, or overactive imaginations manifesting in the flesh. There were no longer real monsters but merely confusions, illusions, and the occasional freak of nature. Tales of ghosts and demons that once frightened audiences into paroxysms of uncritical belief now only produced the stale laughter of entertainment, the suspension of wonder.

And yet men still wondered at what monsters could portend. The 18th Century anatomist John Hunter, on whom Victor Frankenstein was based, cut up and reassembled malformed babies to discover that monsters vary according to their own developmental laws. Due to cell division during mitosis, for instance, there could only be two-, rather than three-headed mutations. This new science was called teratology by Isidore Saint-Hilaire, from the Greek word for monster and marvels, teratos; and was the starting point for Darwin’s work on evolution – though even Empedocles, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers – the earliest proto-scientists – in 450 BCE, wondered, could monsters be the branching point of new species? Studying cases of lycanthropy and tail-hybridity before his finches on the Galapagos led to Darwin’s discovery of man’s descent from animals and the adaptive processes of natural selection. Chuck eventually concluded that embryological mutants could not reproduce, stating: ‘What has been in the blood will remain in the blood.’ Lethal in most cases, monsters were not the cause of, but vestigial proof demonstrating species evolution. Monsters warned of us.

The stories shifted once again. With growing scientific ‘proof’ that cryptozoological anomalies never truly walked the earth, and that deformation showed only our connection to the chains of nature – we were of the created not the Creator – atheists heralded monsters as another proof against God’s existence. The battleground shifted and the real monsters continued to lurk in the hearts and minds and perceptions of men, just where the dragon laid them – wherever the primeval fear of the hostile unknown produced horrere – the bristling of the short hairs. Psychology was born to fight the horror – joining the ancient ranks of art and literature and other productions of the human imagination: Freud’s uncanny dissonance when the familiar becomes strange or the strange familiar, Lovecraft’s cosmic dread of what waits ravenously outside all knowledge to drive us mad, Heidegger’s nervous angst at the indefinite uncontrollable threats that thrust us into existential quandaries, Kant’s sublime inadequacy of the imagination in the face of sheer awesome or awful magnitude, Todorov’s fantastic hesitation and attempt to explain inexplicable events in any rational way except the supernatural, Jung’s active collective archetypal imagination.

In the dark night of the instinctual subconscious reality could still become a sinister primeval world of ill-will and death, lit only by glimmers of knowledge and safety and love. We had to be ready at any moment to defend ourselves from what beasts our brains still told us were about to pounce from the horrible night right in our own living rooms.

There had always been and still were ananke, necessary and more powerful forces than us in the world – the weather, seasons, parents, the influence of planets and politics – and monsters still retained their force as symbols of our powerless frustration at what we couldn’t control, at Fate. Slaying them was an attempt to reclaim our infantile longing for dominance over the universe. We thought we were so brave, projecting the unconquerable fears in our hearts onto everything around us, from stray animals to neighbors to entire nations. Myth was and continued to be the magical means of resolving these internal contradictions – narratives that have power to collectively change the way we think and act. The new myths of mass media continued to relieve our instinctual tensions and teach us how to interact with the world and other people. And yet people increasingly suspended their wonder and flat out disbelieved in the reality of the gods and supernatural forces – monster stories became mere entertainments. We no longer warmed to the warnings.

And so the danger of the dragon lived on, repressed in our chests and ignored in our stories until some could not bare or bury it anymore and broke out into rage and appalling, inhuman crime.

We became the monsters; able to bite off strangers’ faces and rip their chests open with our bare hands, able to march billions into ovens and gas chambers, anyone who chose to abnegate their human responsibility through lashing out or calculated planning, without or with rational motives for violence or vengeance, rage and cold hatred contending like powerful viruses in the blood. The psychopathological logic – the repressed rage, the acting out of taboo fantasies, the desire to annihilate or instill total order, the us vs. them white vs. black human vs. inhuman carving of the world into enmity, the will to seek too great power that cannot be controlled, the choice of the easy path of ends over means. Psychopathological symptoms – deceitfulness, egocentricity, grandiosity, impulsivity, manipulation, lack of conscience, and, most important, lack of empathy – for monsters cannot feel what others feel, or else how could they do such monstrous things? The causes – replication of childhood abuse, genetic heritage, repressed trauma, changes in brain biology, high-stress urban environments, the pace and general madness of the modern world. But most of all, as the ancient Stoics were aware of, the abnegation of responsibility and just not owning up to what is in your power to control – your actions, reactions, perceptions, and projections toward all the unknowns that leap out at you from the dark forests of life.

The legal definition of murder proper entails the malice to take away another’s life without provocation, which requires a malignant heart. Monstrous crimes are not construed from situation and circumstance but from inherent character flaws and the chronic decision to do harm again and again and again. Monsters are an act of choice.

And so that old Scythian horror lives on, in the malignant heart where our fears of the unknown crouch terrified, waiting for one and all of us to lash at out at her – in which case we lash out at ourselves and each other, the perfect weapon. And it is here with a fence around the malignant heart that the proto-men established the charter of civilization – long before all law codes – when they fled from the flooded cannibal wastes above the Black Sea screaming of monsters and that we’d better learn to farm than fish. And she roars and writhes her draconian coils through the night each time men rape or murder; lynch their neighbors over skin-color or sexual choices; habitually lie, cheat, and steal; torture in physical or psychological form; demonize or dehumanize the other; commit war and genocide and the capitalization of vital services; create unnecessary clashes of civilization over ideological grudges; vampirically horde or like zombies endlessly consume; technologically fetishize our experiences and mutilate the earth we live on; shift the blame from ourselves or relativize the moral center away from goodwill toward all men for our own sake; and, like the titanic corpses of old, cry out, we are too big to fall, ho, ho, ho!

No! Let this be a warning that Alexander’s Gates were not erected to keep the monster zone outside the known world but to keep us in. For in all the stories through which we map what is inhuman in ourselves onto the hideous forms we use to hide our own atrocities and potentials for such, the greatest fear is that we never wanted to heed the portents and warning signs in the coils of her intestinal limbs – that while we parade our monsters through the streets, collect them like trading cards, give them puppy dog eyes and starring roles, we can pretend that we don’t have a choice in how we act, or that by choosing irresponsibly we can be led to the promise of ever greater rewards, however perilous to attain. But though we may not always like it, we always have a right choice.

And writhing coils of wrong ones.

For be warned as well that there are still those who willingly worship the old horror, through new and more hideous forms of ritual than munching on the odd flesh-brisquette, horrors so abstracted from the flesh that they no longer feel as flesh feels and no longer want what flesh wants, and would make monsters of us all, exposing and expressing the dragon’s curse in our blood – where it lurks in our very DNA – so that they might escape their own responsibilities and atrocious crimes, saying, look around, there are no monsters here because we’re all monsters, humans are just horrible is all, even the best of us. Now give us a hug and a couple bucks while we slip our coils around your throat!

Doesn’t it just make your blood run cold?

Spiritual Warfare, Symbolic Resistance

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I am a staunch advocate of the idea that the stories we tell and beliefs we hold can cause real effects in the real world; that in short our mythologies can be both powerful and dangerous. Recently I’ve been pondering the concept of spiritual warfare – not holy wars and jihads, but that many of the conflicts fought for nominally political, cultural, or economic reasons have at base a spiritual motive and or deploy symbolic tactics – and that the history of global struggle is in essence illegible without considering war and resistance to war from this angle.

Consider the continual conflict in the Middle East. The stated reasons that the US went to war in Iraq – because of 9/11 or to find Weapons of Mass Destruction or free the people – proved in reality to be patently false. It was just as likely a war for oil and land rights, or so Bush Jr could settle his father’s feud with Saddam. But we live in counter-factual times, and there could equally be spiritual causes at stake. Bush did supposedly head his Iraq War briefings with quotes from the Bible. But even deeper, the struggles between the various political powers in that part of the world may go back to the split of the Monotheisms, and the mythic claim that those who hold the Temple Mount and surrounding environs will be granted power to herald in whichever apocalyptic future that religion longs for. Whether true or not, it is a belief many have fought and died over, most without knowing it.

Now this all may seem absurd to those who do not take beliefs seriously, who laugh that gods and invisible forces no longer hold any sway in our modern materialistic world. However, many within positions of political and rhetorical power, even in “free-thinking” countries like the United States, base their strategies on their beliefs – no matter how dogmatic, literal, or absurd – and some of these have in fact begun to call again for a renewal of old school spiritual warfare.

Earlier I chanced upon an article (from Al Jazeera) suggesting that an “American Taliban” is growing in power in the American religious right, threatening to destroy non-Christian religious artifacts and replace secular Democracy with a global theocratic state, an ideology branded Dominionism, as if good old Manifest Destiny hadn’t been dominion enough. This movement draws on a concept called “strategic level spiritual warfare,” which developed out of the Evangelical and charismatic Revival movements of the 1970s and ’80s, specifically the New Apostalic Reformation, and is drawn from Ephesians 6:12:”For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” As the NAR’s intellectual founder C Peter Wagner of the International Spiritual Warfare Network described the different levels of spiritual warfare:

Ground level spiritual warfare is casting out demons from individuals. Occult level spiritual warfare is a confrontation with demons operating through witchcraft and esoteric philosophies (examples are Freemasonry and Tibetan Buddhism). Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare is the highest level, dealing with confrontation of territorial principalities that control entire communities, ethnic groups, religions, and nations.

Much of the media on strategic spiritual warfare that Google offers up online treats this confrontation with territorial principalities on a literal level – the casting out of demons or smashing of religious images from key places of power in physical communities – while the rest try to disprove that the Bible says, let alone demands, anything of the sort.

But this form of spiritual warfare is already being and has always been fought, not just in physical locations but across the collective media landscape inside which much of the world exists these days – through the confrontation of beleifs and ideologies that seek to discredit and displace other belief systems, in effect shattering cultural and social identities and cohesion. We live in a mediated age, and these wars are fought in the realm of symbols where they seep into everything we think and do.

At the same time though, the conflict in the Middle East has its own roots in symbolic warfare. Far before Jesus and his message of neighborly love was a mote in God’s eye, a small nomadic tribe clinging to a small pastoral deity fought a vicious symbolic war throughout the inhospitable land they called Canaan. Not only did they abolish the idols by which their neighboring tribes paid worship to their own gods, but they demonized those deities and everything they stood for (fertility rites to Astarte, for instance, were cast as sin-drenched homo-erotic orgies), a tactic that effectively demonized the cultures themselves before those tribes were obliterated, even down to the ground they stood on. Though whatever “factual” reasons behind this total warfare are lost to time, the winners claimed their God and their beliefs as the only God and beliefs, mythologizing their victories in the Book called Joshua. Centuries later the old Canaanite gods had all but vanished, reduced, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, to mere henchmen of Satan.

This form of strategic spiritual warfare goes back even further in history though. When the original Aryan tribes invaded the Ganges river valley, they placed their warrior-god Indra on the front lines, and in their myths he slays and enslaves hundreds of demons, the Vedic word for which, “Dasa,” was also the name used by the invaders to describe the dark skin of the local inhabitants, whose enslaved decedents would eventually become Hindus (we’ll hear what happened to them later).

The birth of Science in Hellenic Greece might also be considered a form of spiritual warfare, or a battle fought for the Dominionists’ side. Distraught with the capricious and monarchic whims of the gods of Olympus, the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander reviled Zeus’s court and developed a new singular god of infinite logic called the Apeiron, to better help explain why the world is the way it is. Eventually though, when the Jewish world was Hellenized this omni-god was conflated with the vengeful shepherd Yahweh, and once Christian evangelism and Roman Imperialism were thrown in the mix there was no stopping Him from trying to take over the world – through strategically demonizing the gods and beliefs of every single other culture, converting those who would be converted and slaying the rest. Even into this century this conception of God has been pivotal to the scientific method (which is a whole other story, but read Newton’s thoughts on God if you doubt His necessity to Science).

Even in the modern world, even when no “religion” is invoked, the techniques of spiritual warfare have been deployed to disastrous results. One only has to look at the near-success of Hitler during World War II, who utilized a mythology both re-valorizing the old Aryan warrior-kings and demonizing any cultural group he opposed in order to perpetrate one of the most atrocious acts known to mankind.

While not nearly as horrifying from a meta-historical vantage point, both sides in the atrocity known as 9/11 made use of such symbolic means. Even while the towers were falling, conservative politicians demonized the Arab world and their cultural values, while Bush spewed a rhetorical myth called Freedom – a nebulous concept at best, but a rallying cry around which he built support for the invasion of Iraq. Al-Qaeda, for their part, knew exactly how to spiritually attack the United States. Though the US still considers itself a Christian nation – or an atheist one depending on the day – the true god here is now the marketplace: money and finance (though perhaps that is only the old Canaanite god Mammon reborn through our belief in the total efficacy of cold cash). While there is no national temple to God, the World Trade Center was a veritable church to capitalism – and on a direct symbolic level, the destruction of the towers dealt a deathblow to faith in the economic order. Whether or not one could prove a direct or even subliminal causality, it should come as no surprise that within the decade of the towers falling, the US economy has essentially collapsed. Kill a god or faith in a god, and the world built on its back has nowhere left to stand.

* * *

Of course, the question I have to ask when faced with these facts (and or fantasies) is that, if strategic level spiritual warfare is so insidious and effective, where are the movements and tactics of symbolic resistance to Dominionism and other forms of spiritual warfare?

As suggested above, one of the problems may be that many of the free-thinkers in the Western World – those who see what’s going on and might question and respond to the dogmatic zealotry of governmental and religious institutions – most of these do not take belief seriously. Or if they do, it is only to lambast it, unquestionably herding each other after Marx’s axiom that religion is the opiate of the masses, without once considering that the power in belief can have positive effects and does not need to be tied to a church. Intellectuals, sadly, are a faithless and bitter lot, and yet the New Atheist Movement uses the same kind of strategic spiritual tactics to cast out God. Their failure however is that they are yet to offer a compelling enough counter-narrative on which people can stake their actions. Science may tell us what the world looks like (Anaximander’s god of logic was essentially a disembodied eye), but it is woefully silent as to how we might get by in the world and maybe make it a better place. At best New Atheism leads to a momentary laugh – like the atheist the other week who claimed he was a Pastafarian and thus won the right to wear a pasta strainer on his head in his license photo, for all the good that does the world.

On the other hand, there may be just as many free-thinking individuals who are spiritually inclined. But here the situation seems even more dire, as many cling to Gandhi’s words that you must change yourself before you can change the world. I’m all for soul-searching (or retrieval or building), but not as its own end, much the way the goal of Nirvana fell out of favor in Mahayana Buddhism. For the most part this attitude seems to reduce to a whole lot of navel-gazing, ego-stroking, escape from action, sub-cultish exclusivity, and an excuse to do lots of drugs in the middle of the Black Rock Desert. One might lay this at the misguided footsteps of Western Shamanic seekers like Carlos Castaneda: though there was a real Don Juan who taught a real message of spiritual warriorhood based in responsibility for yourself and the world, the Castanedas and McKennas popularized this as one jolly quest for some potent shrooms – as foolish an aim as King Arthur’s Grail Knights, chasing delusion after delusion into their graves rather than face up to the horror of the Crusades.

These are not the true spiritual warriors and revolutionaries, these are not the Bodhisattvas who choose to turn away from bliss in order to save all beings. Where are those who learned from the past that mythologies are not cast in stone but can and must be rewritten for each new age? I think of Abby Hoffman, who during the Vietnam War got enough Yippies and Hippies to hold hands in an attempt to exorcise the demon living under the Pentagon. This was a strategic spiritual tactic, though once again a little too literal (or not, as some might dare believe that when the plane struck that dread polygon the demon was released – a deity of war and hatred and self-righteous vengeance that was once named Moloch and is certainly alive in the world today).

History provides other examples of symbolic resistance and mythic revaluation. When we last saw the pre-Hindu natives of India they were enslaved by the Aryan warlords. Eventually though their gods won out over the Vedic gods, who were in turn adopted into the Hindu and then Buddhist pantheons where they were allowed to redeem themselves. Centuries later, Indra the warrior-king re-emerged in Huayan Buddhism as a patron of Universal Interconnection. Positive, yes, but it was a long, unplanned for process, and too late to help those once slain by Indra’s lightning bolts.

But this indicates a point I’ve been making for years – that what the world needs is myths for the future, stories we can believe in and shape our lives around that are not rooted in conflict and bloodshed, new belief systems not dogmatically chained to rituals and institutions thousands of years out of date. There is great need for a global narrative more compelling than that of Dominion. Though one wonders what that would look like; universal love should have done the trick for as many centuries as people have chanted that tune.

At the very least these ideas must be put on the table, so that cultures may begin weaving them into their imaginative and political processes. There are perhaps a few contemporary stories epic enough to aspire to the power of mythology already attempting to do just that – Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, King’s Dark Tower, Martin’s Game of Thrones, the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica. Each of these present a world or worlds not unlike our own – that is, torn by warfare and the daily struggles of survival. But beyond all the rational “real-world” reasons there are symbolic tactics deployed, spiritual realities at stake; gods are cast down and raised high and their civilizations follow. One wonders what myths a William Blake could weave across our contemporary media landscape.

Of course, I’m a storyteller – myths are the means I would choose to formulate a strategic spiritual resistance. And even then there are problems: stories today are for the most treated as mere entertainments – we willingly suspend our disbelief in fantasy worlds, but do not chose to believe in them strong enough to cause effects in the world. Myths are also slow; they take generations to command enough belief to change cultures. The days are gone when a man has a vision on the road to Damascus and within his lifetime has enough followers who truly believe that they are able to resist a whole empire. Even worse, the compelling aspect of most narratives is in fact the conflict – not between ideas or forces, but between real human beings. Is it possible to craft a myth worth believing in without including a battle to be won or enemies to be overthrown? Would Christianity ever have gotten off the ground if Jesus hadn’t died on the cross (or if the evangelists hadn’t covered up the fact that the only crime punished by crucifixion was political rebellion)? I don’t know, but hopefully those who feel this need like I do can take these thoughts and observations and run with them for all they’re worth.

The Psychology of Art and Magic

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Another key concern of mine at the Absent Narrative is a relationship between the creative and mystical arts, in particular the way in which writing can act as a form of magic (it’s no coincidence that magic and letters both spell things). I’ve been examining this idea for years, often in relation to Grant Morrison’s concept of the hypersigil, but for the most part it is easy to make these kind of surface comparisons that don’t necessarily further one’s actual practices.

Looking at the issue from the angle of effects, it is clear that both art and magic aim at causing effects in the world. Crowley for instance defined magick precisely as the ability to cause effects in accord with one’s intentions. And while many mystical practices do not aim at (and sometimes forbid) the intention toward external effects, there is certainly the goal of causing effects in one’s internal state. As for writing and the other creative arts, Oscar Wilde once said that good art should be useless, while 20th century literary critics felt examining the effects of creative works to be anathema to true scholarship. In reality however, art does cause people to feel or act differently, an understanding that has led to acts of highly effective creation, whether artistic genius or the mind-control of contemporary advertising/marketing. The only truly successful art in my eyes is art that changes you and your world.

But what of the actual processes that go into either artistic or mystical creation/ performance? How similar are these crafts? I am currently taking a class on psycholinguistics, and for my term paper am researching the psychological processes that go into successful creative narrative prose production, in other words, what our brains do when we invent and tell stories. While that paper will end up a lot more focused on experimental scientific research, the main processes that have come up in my preliminary research bear some strikingly similar features to my recent examinations of mystical practices (whether Daoist or Jungian, &c.), suggesting that psychologically, art and magic may be very interrelated processes in the brain.

The first aspect to consider for acts of creation is why do it. Why write that tweet or novel, why cast that spell or commune with which spirit? Why create at all? Psychologically this question is one of motivation, and more particularly motivation toward conflict resolution. In magical terms this is a question of intent. Artists and magicians – and really most people who are attentive to the complexities of the world around them and their need to address these complexities – are often struck by situations that they do not understand, or that present conflicts and challenges unable to be resolved through external and direct means. Even in wholly internal mystical traditions there is the conflict of not yet being unified with whatever force or intelligence your tradition is aimed at. If this need for resolution is great enough, the creative person will dwell on the problem (often at night, in lieu of sleeping, for hours on end), until they recognize it can be approached through sidereal means: one’s art.

Now that the primary conflict (situation/concern, &c) has been established, how is it resolved? The obvious and eventual answer is through the application of the techniques of one’s craft. There is however a far more important and fascinating psychological stage that occurs prior to (or at least in tandem with) an art’s techné: the conflict is in some way entered into the imagination and there symbolically manipulated as if it were actually occurring. Now the challenge of discussing this process is that the imagination continues to remain a bugaboo to the sciences; it is like a black box or more accurately Schrodinger’s box, in that any logical attempt to access the contents and process of the imagination alters those contents and processes, especially in an experimental setting. However as an artist with a clear grasp of my own imagination it is possible to make some comments about what goes on in there.

According to current theories of psychological narrative production, humans create mental models or schemas to internally resolve conflicts. My recent research into Daoist physiological practices and Jungian psychology turns up a remarkably similar mechanism: the act of visualization or active imagination. Essentially an internal reality is constructed that corresponds with the conflict to be resolved, populated with settings, characters (archetypes/deities), and goal states which are manipulated in order to realistically play out the potential resolutions of the conflict. While this process of imagination can be conscious and direct, much of the work done here may also happen below the level of conscious thought, that is, once the internal reality has been constructed the conflict continues to work itself out there regardless of direct input, as in dreams.

The key thing though, which makes me regard narrative production and mystical-magical acts as highly similar processes, is that this symbolic manipulation is not abstract or conceptual – we do not manipulate the contents of our imaginations like so many chess pieces. Rather we actively participate in our imaginary worlds (even when that participation is subconscious). Theories of narrative production for instance indicate that authors both follow the actions of their main characters as well as become their main characters and perform their actions for them as if they as the characters were really acting in the external world. Mystical traditions suggest something similar, often called a pscyhodrama, and anyone who has done some amount of dreamwork will certainly testify that they are experientially there. To return to science, recent studies are leaning in favor of what is called embodied cognition: on a basic neuro-chemical level, the act of imagining an event triggers the same neural pathways as would be triggered by real sensory experience. One might say then that artists and magicians, through their visualization practices, are in a very real way forming new experiences of the resolution to conflicts without those situations ever “really” occurring (and if anything is truly magical, that is).

Finally once these imaginary resolutions are reached, that experience must be translated back into the external world. This requires the concretization of symbols into specific mediums through the techniques of those mediums. In narrative production, that medium is words; in magic-mysticism the medium can be, well, really anything, from movements, to sigils, to vocalizations, &c. But the important thing is that the specific techniques and media used will correspond in some clear way to the symbolic processes in the imagination. True art is not sloppy or haphazard, but draws a clear line from an external problem through the symbolic underside of the psyche and back out into a concrete form.

Of course, in reality the processes of artistic or magical creation may rarely be this logically ordered. Often the original intention, its imagining, and its technical statement will occur at the same time (as in spontaneous performative acts), or will operate in a spiral back and forth between these psychological processes (especially in larger or longer term works). But at least from my experience I can’t imagine any successful creative or magical work resulting without all three of these processes.

An Attitude of Critical Possibility

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The question of how we know that we know what we know is one of the foundational questions of western philosophy, but in the 21st century has been polemicized into a seemingly irreparable conflict between dogmatic scientific doubt and dogmatic religious faith, neither of which is willing to admit the validities of the other approach or the possibility of entirely new models for understanding human experience.

On the one hand, despite the fact that an objective perspective (ie: God) has been necessary to the scientific project up until the last fifty years or so, rational thought is most characterized by Descartes’ method of doubt. That is, we don’t consider things to exist unless we have empirical proof for them (though we ask, and maybe this or maybe that until we find the proof). However, the way this has panned out is that certain things are now considered impossible (and in fact absurd to consider) due to their continued inability to be verified. These things – call them supernatural or not – just seem to defy proof, or conflict with scientific kinds of proof, and therefor are scoffed at by many.

And yet there are endlessly documented accounts of real experiences of these things, and the desire for them in their representation, in all cultures through all times, even now. Due to their un-verifiability, these things have generally fell under the purview of faith, as instituted in religion. Despite the fact that many supernatural accounts may be attempts to subjectively explain reality, faith is most characterized by a belief in something despite (and even because of) the fact that it defies proof. Those who doubt consider this irrational, but just ask anyone who has deep beliefs: faith can give us just as real knowledge about the world, but a different kind of way of knowing. The problem is, faith too has panned out in a negative light. Certain beliefs have become so codified that they are believed in unquestioningly, despite every evidence otherwise, despite the fact that a lot of the specific knowledge they give applies best to socio-cultural situations thousands of years past.

Personally I’d find this whole dichotomy a laughable charade if it wasn’t infuriating, as it seems to be holding back the possibilities for human thought and experience. I am both a spiritual and logical person, and have thus been attempting to find a way for those two modes of knowing to exist without a contradiction between them. I was raised to have a great capacity for belief, but never felt satisfied with the beliefs I was raised in, and would probably have remained agnostic about it except for having had actual direct experiences of spiritual, supernatural, and otherwise irrational realities. I am often just as able to critically explain these experiences as take them for genuine encounters with the inexplicable. I can not deny their existence however, and even more, I want to believe in them, and in everything imaginable.

This seems at the crux of the seeming contradiction between doubt and faith. One can both have beliefs and be, not necessarily skeptical, but critical of them. They can be interrogated and made more accurate; faith and the objects of faith becoming ever more refined through new experience and applicability to life. Similarly, instead of doubting until proven existent, the rational side of the process can be more open to possibilities, can revel perhaps in the ways in which the unlikely could possibly be. Which is in fact how scientific discoveries are made and makes for much of the wonder in what we’ve empirically found out about Reality. These two functions – essentially to take apart and build up – seem part of the same larger process of consciousness, iconized in the two sides of the brain. No wonder the world seems so schizophrenic, when what would be the most holistic is an attitude of critical possibility in all things.

The Participatory Psychology of Reading

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As a counterpoint to my earlier post’s suggestion that authors can mythically enter into the stories they tell , I thought it necessary to point out that a similar thing happens during the act of reading a story, that in fact reading is, by the nature of the imagination, always participatory. This point is probably most clear in contrast to another contemporary medium for storytelling, that of film or television.

For most of my life I’ve been an avid, almost obsessive reader, and just as avidly refused to watch film. Watching the events of a story on screen was just not as engaging for me. Recently however I’ve found an appreciation for film as a narrative medium, particularly in that, as it is a popular or mass medium, the contents of its tales have much more probability of quickly entering into the cultural imagination and the realm of mythology. That an avid reader like myself can get sucked into film speaks to its success as a medium, but forces me to consider that there are still things that the written word can do that you can’t with film, such as entering into a character’s flow of conscious or casting abstract and philosophical ideas into a narrative (one can’t quite imagine Borges’s fiction ever working on film). Similarly I can’t quite imagine poetry working as well on the screen, where the mise-en-scene is to be taken more literally than figuratively (though some surrealist and abstract film-makers might disagree). But the real distinction for me between reading and watching stories is what happens in the mind of the reader.

I said above that I find reading to be a more engaging experience than watching film. Some might argue that reading is just as passive of an activity, but that’s not actually the case at all, in that instead of just receiving images when you read the brain has to actively translate the symbols of words into images. But there’s more going on than just this. According to a study I read last year, the act of imagining the contents of what we read triggers the same neural pathways (or whatnot) in the brain that are activated by real sensory data. That is, when you read right here that a man jumped over a building, your brain has the same physiological experience as if you actually saw with your own eyes a real man jumping over a real building (which is I suspect the psychological mechanism behind Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief). Film on the other hand, because it is already highly mediated through the screen (as frame for its unreality), and because you do not have to actively imagine the events occurring, does not seem to cause us to have the same kind of physiological experience, the experience of a sensual reality.

This participatory experience of reading is heightened when we consider the ability of the written word to encourage character identification. Certainly watchers of film say they identify with its characters, by which they seem to mean they find the characters sympathetic or compelling. With the written word however character identification means something different. Without an actor or other visual representation of a character to keep clear the boundaries of identity, when we read, people seem to generally associate the main narrator or protagonist with their self, the imagination relying on our own personal experiences, emotions, etc. to interpret and make real those aspects of an otherwise wholly linguistic character. This is especially the case with first person narrators, but even multiple narrator stories encourage us to identify with each one as if we were really them, or at the very least as if we are another silent character following along inside of the plot.

But either way we are there, or here, if you let me suggest that we are having this conversation over steaming cups of coffee in a well lit café. Note how readily your imagination lets you be right in that scene, filling in all the rest of the real sensory details from your imagination and expectations. When you next sit down to read a story, consider the extent to which you identify with and become its characters and to which you psychologically experience the sensory details, and you might realize that you are not just reading a story, you are living it.

The Skeptic's Lament and the Believer's Prayer

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Earlier I read an article from a skeptic who, distraught that 80% of Britons believe in Heaven, discussed the history of the concept of Heaven in order to disprove it, showing Heaven as at best a comforting bedtime story and at worst as cause for endless wars. While the same could be said of technology, the author didn’t bother getting their historical facts right, or even attempt to discuss the concept of an afterlife in other cultures, which are much older and varied and necessary to examine if you actually want to understand what’s going on in belief rather than merely disparage it. And that’s the thing, what struck me most about the article was how bitter it sounded, bitter and lonely and destructive, the skeptic’s lament.

From time to time I’ll read such skeptical arguments, and am always struck by this tone, as if, in not having the capacity or imagination to believe themselves, skeptics have grown cold-hearted and jealous, and anxious to ruin it for anyone who gets something positive out of their beliefs. Some skeptics even sound like they are deliberately not participating, like not eating Passover to prove the Exterminating Angel will not sweep them up. And it doesn’t, in their eyes, but that doesn’t mean it already hasn’t, if their attitudes are any indication. From my personal experience I have found that when I think and write from a place of skepticism and disbelief, I also very easily feel this way, at odds with myself and the world, with other people and grand old Reality in all its mystery and splendor. But when I choose to think and write from a place of belief or open-minded and imaginative curiosity, I find myself filled with light, as if carrying a secret smile or untrampeled joy, and more, the whole world is suffused with this feeling, leading me to better want to understand and appreciate others on their own terms. This positive attitude is real, and significant.

Granted, not all who have a capacity for belief feel this way. The dogmatic and zealous are often just as blindered as the skeptics, and their lament is a war song, desperately clinging to beliefs that have become habituated, loosing all of their original imaginative power. So certain have both camps grown in their points of view that they have forgotten that these are points of view, not immutable truth, and points of view not readily reconcilable, as if, in quantum terms, one wants to pin God in place while the other measure His velocity. The problem is that both sides want to stake their position on the grounds of literal truth, when that is like showing up to fight the Battle of Waterloo in Saigon. For though the contents of belief can be real and true, they are real and true in a different mode than that of science and history.

An afterlife, for instance, is like the gods neither provable or disprovable. Proof is just the wrong language. It is impossible for us to really know what happens after we die, for believers and disbelievers alike. But what we can know is that belief in the concept of life after death has a real effect in the world. Religion may have originated out of funerary rituals, and as such, the attendant feeling of belief is the imaginative human response to the unknown, inarticulable , and ultimate. Belief gives knowledge, not of what literally happens after death (we’ve all seen corpses) but of how humans who are still alive can relate to death. The literal truth is unimportant beside that these beliefs allow people to find acceptance and even joy in the face of our mortality, which is especially necessary in an age where science has “proven” that everything, the Earth and even perhaps the Universe itself, will someday end. The concept of Heaven as afterlife is not then just a comforting bedtime story, but a reason to continue getting out of bed and act in a positive manner in the world. And it is a foundation for true magic. Consider the efficacy of prayer, which can heal where medicines fail, even still today despite the general lack of belief in miracles.

Heaven, like all spiritual or holy truths, is a realm of significance, not the inhuman and objective relations of science, but the experiential relationships of humanity to life and each other. Things are only meaningful for us, who are alive and can imagine. And as the world turns, things can only be meaningful if we continue to imagine and believe anew, not lamenting as skeptics do after logical proof nor clinging like fanatics to meanings that ceased being really meaningful centuries past. We are in an age that needs new beliefs, new gods, new heavens. We need a new sense of the significances of life, that speak to our ever-changing relationships and struggles between myth and science, doubt and and burning imagination. Why for instance cling to or fight against a concept of Heaven only accessible to the dead, and the dead of only a small portion of humankind, when the acceptance and joy born of these beliefs is available now on Earth? If there is a Heaven, why not say that we are already living in it, for that opens up a new meaning to and for all life.

The Oppression of the Senses

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If you ask people how many senses they have they will generally tell you five; sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. It is commonly held that this is a natural and physiological division, but the fact that people also talk about a “sixth sense” suggests that this is far from the case. Certainly there are physical limits to our perception; we cannot perceive the far ranges of our sensory spectrums, the infrared of reptiles, the ultraviolet of bees, the high pitches of dogs and small children, the subsonic vibrations of bats and whales. But then again, there is the case of the blind boy who trained himself to the sense of echolocation, suggesting that our sensory limitations may be more mutable than we typically suspect.

William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, calls for a radicalization of perception. He suggests that, though our senses are the “chief inlets of soul in this age,” that soul, ie: Reality, is greater than the classical five senses can readily perceive. That we claim five senses only, Blake seems to hint and I’ll say outright, is a matter of habit and scientific rationalization. These particular senses are perhaps most empirically measurable, and thus have been historically categorized so that, as children, we are taught we only have these five senses and thus do not learn to develop the multitude of other perceptions available to us. I call this the Oppression of the Senses, which also connotes that in an empirical world, we do not believe in things that we cannot perceive, including our ability to perceive other sensations.

As a child I was diagnosed with what is called a Sensory Integration Dysfunction, what I like to call a dysaesthesia, in which not only are the various senses dis-integrated from each other but become uninterpretable to themselves. For instance, it is sometimes difficult for me to filter out voices through the small channel of the telephone as interpretable amidst the vast amount of other auditory data and white noise with which we are constantly bombarded. One thing that always struck me though about the occupational therapy I had to go through as a child in order to become a functional sensory being, is that the senses to be reintegrated were not just the classical five. They also included motor skills such as balance and movement, but the way these senses interrelated to the aesthetic senses, in short, a total spectrum of being a sensory body in a sensual world. Though people refer to a “sense of balance,” we don’t typically think that this is also a mode of perception. Just try dancing or juggling, or even better watch dancing and juggling while paying attention to what senses you use to perceive such actions, and you may begin to understand that our perceptions of the world are much wider and subtler than we are habituated into.

Conversely there is the condition of synaethesia, the artist’s boon, in which the separate sensory modes trigger each other, perceiving sound as color is a common example. Personally I suspect (though I’m not sure if science chooses to support this) that we are all born a little synaesthetic, and only learn through use and habituation to keep our senses apart, it is perhaps easier to handle the world discretely, the same way we eventually settle through use on left or right handedness. I for instance have noticed for at least a decade that I smell touch, and have also through artistic mediums and active imagination trained myself to other synaesthetic perceptions. To complicate this though, there is recently discovered the condition of time-space synaesthesia, in which time is perceived visually, the year for instance as a ring circling the body. Jokes about Time Lords aside, this begs the question, do humans have a natural sense perception of time? Anyone who’se been stuck in a boring job will tell you, yes, you can almost physically feel time slip by if you pay enough attention to it. But, it seems that through the centuries of reliance on watches and calendars, we may have left undeveloped what may otherwise have a strong sense of time, suggesting that, though technologies extend our senses, they also limit them and their potential evolution.

Beyond these extra motor and temporal senses, we might discuss the perceptions of face recognition, pattern recognition, gesture, emotion, intent, subtle energies, spirits, hunger, significance, really any condition which we can conceive we can potentially train our brains and bodies to perceive, and even appreciate. An expansion of perception might lead to an expansion of aesthetics and the arts. For instance, the classical senses each have an associated artistic mode, hearing – music, touch – textiles, sight – visual arts, taste – cooking, smell… well, perhaps we’ve been wary of creating an olfactory art. But what of dance and acrobatics, which, though perceived visually, do rely on our senses of movement and balance for their performance and interpretation, or writing, particularly the tension of narratives, which relies on our sense of patterns and significance, the perception of what we know we don’t yet know. Or what art comes from the temporal sense? Film still mainly relies on vision, and though both film and music rely on time there is no aesthetic of time perception as might radicalize and stretch the possibilities of the temporal arts.

I’m not here going to get into the deeper issue of our belief only in the perceptible, but there is still a great importance to an opening of the senses themselves. As Blake says, we currently view the world through the narrow chinks of our caverns, more so now than when he wrote, that is, our five senses are not enough to fully experience life. And because we don’t recognize the senses necessary to fully experience life, we can not yet know how to fully appreciate being alive.