Moments of Comfort

 

Screenshot

The Serpent

Magic is also the only immaterial thing of which the debris still survive from civilisations which have entirely ceased to function—witness the cases of Egypt, of Chaldea, even of Druidism; and no doubt African "fetishism" has a similar origin. Sorcery could be said to be made of the vestiges of dead civilisations. Is this why the serpent, in the most recent times, has hardly kept anything but its malefic significance, and why the dragon, ancient Chinese symbol of the Word, awakens only "diabolical" ideas in the minds of modern Westerners?

 — René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science

Saint George and the Dragon

Paulo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, 1470

In the well-known version from Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend, 1260s), the narrative episode of Saint George and the Dragon took place somewhere he called "Silene" in what in medieval times was referred to as "Libya" (basically anywhere in North Africa, west of the Nile). Silene was being plagued by a venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond, poisoning the countryside. To prevent it from affecting the city itself, the people offered it two sheep daily, then a man and a sheep, and finally their children and youths, chosen by lottery. One time the lot fell on the king's daughter. The king offered all his gold and silver to have his daughter spared, but the people refused. The daughter was sent out to the lake, dressed as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George arrived at the spot. The princess tried to send him away, but he vowed to remain. The dragon emerged from the pond while they were conversing. Saint George made the Sign of the Cross and charged it on horseback, seriously wounding it with his lance. He then called to the princess to throw him her girdle (zona), and he put it around the dragon's neck. Wherever she walked, the dragon followed the girl like a "meek beast" on a leash.

The princess and Saint George led the dragon back to the city of Silene, where it terrified the population. Saint George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to become Christians and be baptized. Fifteen thousand men including the king of Silene converted to Christianity. George then killed the dragon, beheading it with his sword, and the body was carted out of the city on four ox-carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George on the site where the dragon died and a spring flowed from its altar with water that cured all disease. Only the Latin version involves the saint striking the dragon with the spear, before killing it with the sword.

—Wikipedia

 René Guénon interprets the slaying of the dragon this way:

Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is represented by some object the approach to which is guarded by the dragon; and this conquest essentially implies the reintegration into the centre of the human state, that is, into the point where communication is established with the higher states of the being. (Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science)

The water in the lake guarded by the dragon would then be the water of life. The victory over the dragon would have initiatory meaning.

There seems to be also a residue in this legend of some hierogamic ritual (the princess dressed as bride) that has been reinterpreted in the Christian context as union with a loathsome beast.

 

Getting High

Shamanic ecstasy can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the "fall" ; in other words, it reproduces a primordial "situation" accessible to the rest of mankind only through death (since ascents to heaven by means of rites—compare the case of the Vedic Indian sacrificer—are symbolic, not concrete like the shaman's). Although the ideology of shamanic ascent is perfectly consistent and forms an integral part of the mythical conception we have just reviewed ("Center of the World," break in communications, degeneration of humanity, etc.), we have come upon numerous cases of aberrant shamanic practices; we refer especially to rudimentary and mechanical means of obtaining trance (narcotics, dancing to the point of 'exhaustion, "possession," etc.). The question arises if, aside from the "historical" explanations that could be offered for these aberrant techniques (deterioration as the result of external cultural influences, hybridization, etc.), they cannot also be interpreted on another plane. We may ask, for example, if the aberrant aspect of the shamanic trance is not due to the fact that the shaman seek to experience in concreto a symbolism and mythology that, by their very nature, are not susceptible of being "realized" on the "concrete" plane; if, in short, the desire to obtain, at any cost and by any means, an ascent in concreto, a mystical and at the same time real journey to heaven, did not result in the aberrant trances that we have seen; if, finally, these types of behavior are not the inevitable consequence of an intense desire to "live," that is, "experience" on the plane of the body, what in the present condition of humanity is no longer accessible except on the plane of "spirit."

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

No sooner

does man begin to speak than he is exiled into abstraction. This is the Fall, the ejection from a retrospectively conjured-up paradise of undifferentiated being. In other words, the origin of culture is subsequently experienced as a loss. There is within culture always a desire to undo it and the oppositions that define it and regain the blissful plenitude that consciousness intuits as prior to consciousness. This is why the religious impulse is universal.

The sacred is the presence within culture of what is alien to it, but at the same time constitutes the center around which culture forms. It is the gateway to paradise but also, at the same time, the gateway to hell, because it intimates within the human world the proximity of the nonhuman, of something, as Otto put it, at once awesome and awful.

Rainbow Bridge

 

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1438-47, photo: Steven Zucker

It is always by way of the rainbow that mythical heroes reach the sky.

Though indirectly, these myths refer to a time when communication between heaven and earth was possible; in consequence of a certain event or a ritual fault, the communication was broken off; but heroes and medicine men are nevertheless able to reestablish it. This myth of a paradisal period brutally abolished by the "fall" of man will engage our attention more than once . . . 

Shamans and magicians ... simply restore—temporarily and for themselves alone—this "bridge" between sky and earth, which was once accessible to all mortals.

The myth of the rainbow as road of the gods and bridge between sky and earth is also found in Japanese tradition, and doubtless existed in the religious conceptions of Mesopotamia. Further, the seven colors of the rainbow have been assimilated to the seven heavens, a symbolism found not only in India and Mesopotamia but also in Judaism. In the Bamiyan frescoes the Buddha is represented seated on a rainbow of seven bands; that is, he transcends the cosmos, just as in the myth of his Nativity he transcends the seven heavens by taking seven strides toward the north and reaching the Center of the World, the culminating peak of the universe. The throne of the Supreme Being is surrounded by a rainbow, and the same symbolism persists into the Christian art of the Renaissance. The Babylonian ziggurat was sometimes represented with seven colors, symbolizing the seven celestial regions; he who climbed its storeys attained the summit of the cosmic world. Similar ideas are found in India and . . . in Australian mythology. The Supreme God of the Kamilaroi, the Wiradjuri, and the Euahlayi dwells in the upper sky, seated on a crystal throne; Bundjil, the Supreme God of the Kulin, remains above the clouds. Mythical heroes and medicine men ascend to these celestial beings by using, among other things, the rainbow.

It will be remembered that the ribbons employed in Buryat initiations are called "rainbows"; in general, they symbolize the shaman's journey to the sky. Shamanic drums are decorated with drawings of the rainbow represented as a bridge to the sky. Indeed, in the Turkic languages the word for rainbow also means bridge. Among the Yurak-Samoyed the shamanic drum is called "bow"; the shaman's magic projects him to the sky like an arrow. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the Turks and the Uigur regarded the drum as a "celestial bridge" (rainbow) over which the shaman made his ascent. 

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

Almost all erotic poetry

can be interpreted as expressing a longing for mystical union. The most notable example is the biblical Song of Songs. Why not a Lana Del Rey song?

This is what happens

 when social media reduces discourse to an exchange of memes and one liners.

America’s economy isn’t working for many people who grew tired of being gaslit about how great the economy was, so there is a nihilistic sense that we should just burn it all down. Understandably, people who have been fucked over or sidelined want revenge against those who did well in the economy under the previous system. Despite this mentality among a large segment of Trump supporters, Trump primarily respects people who are winners under capitalism and has contempt for the less well off people who support him.

Liberalism and populism are the crest and trough of an oscillation that is tearing apart an arrangement that has come to the end of its life and can neither go forward or backward.  The is how the modern project comes undone. We could talk of a crisis of capitalism but that would be to reduce what Guenon called the crisis of the modern world to a purely economic/political crisis. Neither side in this exchange of barbed inanities has the language or breadth of vision to grasp the metaphysical import of the situation. They trade blows in a gladiatorial arena soon to be buried under the rubble of an extinct civilization.

The First Shaman

Certain legends explain the present decadence of shamans by the pride of the "first shaman," who is believed to have entered into competition with God. According to the Buryat version, the first shaman, Khara-Gyrgän, having declared that his power was boundless, God put him to the test. God took a girl's soul and shut it up in a bottle. To make sure that it would not escape, God put his finger into the neck of the bottle. The shaman flew through the sky, sitting on his drum, discovered the girl's soul and to set it free, changed into a spider and stung God in the face. God instantly pulled out his finger and the girl's soul escaped. Furious, God curtailed Khara-Gyrgän's power, and after that the magical abilities of shamans markedly diminished.

— Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

I notice there is a huge interest in associating shamanism with psychedelics. 

Sledgehammer

The metallurgist, like the blacksmith and, before him, the potter, is a "master of fire." It is by means of fire that he brings about the passage of the material from one state to another. As for the metallurgist, he accelerates the "growth" of ores, he makes them "ripe" in a miraculously short time. Smelting proves to be the means of "acting faster" but also of acting to make a different thing from what already existed in nature. This is why, in archaic societies, smelters and smiths are held to be masters of fire, along with shamans, medicine men, and magicians. But the ambivalent character of metal—laden with powers at once sacred and demonic—is transferred to metallurgists and smiths: they are highly esteemed but are also feared, segregated, or even scorned.

In many mythologies the divine smiths forge the weapons of the gods, thus insuring them victory over dragons or other monstrous beings. In the Canaanite myth, Koshar-wa-Hasis (literally, "Adroit-and-Clever") forges for Baal the two clubs with which he will kill Yam, lord of the seas and underground waters. In the Egyptian version of the myth, Ptah (the potter god) forges the weapons that enable Horus to conquer Seth. Similarly, the divine smith Tvashtr makes Indra's weapons for his battle with Vritra; Hephaestus forges the thunderbolt that will enable Zeus to triumph over Typhon. But the cooperation between the divine smith and the gods is not confined to his help in the final combat for sovereignty over the world. The smith is also the architect and artisan of the gods, supervises the construction of Baal's palace, and equips the sanctuaries of the other divinities. In addition, this godsmith has connections with music and song, just as in a number of societies the smiths and braziers are also musicians, poets, healers, and magicians. It seems, then, that on different levels of culture (an indication of great antiquity) there is an intimate connection between the art of the smith, occult techniques (shamanism, magic, healing, etc.), and the arts of song, of the dance, and of poetry.

 —Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas

 

Numerous sources are lamenting

the end of "deep" reading.

What exactly is being published today that requires "deep reading"?

The Masculine Triad

As men begat both sons and daughters, and as the former were much more desired than the latter, it was natural that a reason for this should be sought so that, if possible, the sex of the offspring could be controlled. As the phallus was the great object of veneration, it was, no doubt, carefully scrutinized and closely examined in all its peculiarities; but no marked difference of size, form, or condition was found that would account for the difference of begetting sons in one case, and daughters in another. It was observed, however, that men who had diminutive testicles, as a rule, lacked in virility, and that those who had none naturally—or who had lost them—were unable to become fathers. This was a revelation that the tests performed an important part in generation; and hence led to closer observation of their peculiarities. A marked and uniform difference was easily discovered. The right test is the more prominent, and hangs at a lower level than its smaller and less pronounced fellow on the left. The dimmest traditions of the remotest past, therefore, brings us the theory that the larger right testicle has the honor of giving the world its men; while the lesser one on the left has the minor distinction of being responsible for the weaker sex—a belief which is quite general at the present time in nearly every civilization.

How soon after the recognition of the phallus as creator—or as the instrument and representative of the Creator—that honor was divided with the less conspicuous, but equally necessary testicle appendages we have no means of definitely determining; certain it is, however, that the generative supremacy at first accorded to the phallus was in time divided with the tests—thus recognizing cooperation in the masuline organs of generation. The phallus was called Asher, which signifies to be "straight," "upright," "the erect one," "happiness," "unus cui membrum erectum est, vel fascinum ipsum"—"the erect virile member, charmed in the act of its proper function." Anu, probably from On, meaning "strength," "power"—especially "virile power," the male idea of creator, was the name given the right testicle, which, as the assistant in the generation of male children, was held next in rank to the phallus itself. This will readily explain why Jacob calls his son Benjamin—"son of my right side;" while the mother called him Benoni—" son of Anu," "son of my On." Hoa, or Hea,—while of obscure origin, and of doubtful meaning, is clearly feminine—and was the name applied to the third in rank—the left testicle.

The first sacred creative trinity, as recognized by the Assyrians, was, therefore, Asher, Anu, and Hoa—three distinct entities (principles or persons), each perfect in itself, each necessary to the other, working in harmony as one, towards one end—a veritable three in one—and one made up of three. In this—as in all subsequent trinities—and in fact, as in all polytheistic cults—the different organs, principles, or persons were of relative rank. One was the superior—even supreme—among the others. Their names, when spoken of or written together, were arranged in the order of their rank, beginning with the one considered as the Lord of the others—Lord of Lords. When they were spoken of as a whole, sometimes this trinity—again, like subsequent trinities—bore a name distinct from the three members, but frequently the collective unity was referred to under the name of the one recognized as highest in rank.

In comparatively later times the Jews knew and recognized this masculine triad, giving the testicles joint honor with the phallus; for their law made them sacred, so that even a profane touch was punished with death, and a man who had lost the one, or who was wounded in the other, "could not enter the congregation of the Lord." That is, a man whose creative triad was imperfect was an abomination. Even a descendant of Aaron could not be initiated as a priest if he was sexually imperfect. This rule was not confined to the benighted and licentious past, for, even in the present age of superior intelligence, one who is sexually mutilated, and, therefore, "not a man," cannot be consecrated as a priest, or promoted to a bishopric, much less, exalted to the Papal throne until an examination, both interrogative and occular—which is a part of every ceremony of ordination or promotion in the Catholic hierarchy— proves him—"a man—perfect in all his members."

—R. A. Campbell, Phallic Worship, 1887

Lares

Compared to Rome's major deities, Lares had limited scope and potency, but archaeological and literary evidence attests to their central role in Roman identity and religious life. By analogy, a homeward-bound Roman could be described as returning ad Larem (to the Lar). Despite official bans on non-Christian cults from the late fourth century AD onwards, unofficial cults to Lares persisted until at least the early fifth century AD.

Lifeforce

is verything.

Mesmerized by Chris Robinson in this video. I can't watch it enough. Recorded more than 30 years ago, and I only stumbled on it recently.

The gods reveal themselves

to poets and mystics, rarely, if ever, to philosophers. The hierophany may well be nothing more than a little disturbance in the ordinary, a glitch in the Matrix as it were. For Cavafy, the sight of a beautiful youth is enough.

One of Their Gods

When one of them moved through the marketplace of Selefkia
just as it was getting dark—
moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome,
with the joy of being immortal in his eyes,
with his black and perfumed hair—
the people going by would gaze at him,
and one would ask the other if he knew him,
if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger.
But some who looked more carefully
would understand and step aside;
and as he disappeared under the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
going toward the quarter that lives
only at night, with orgies and debauchery,
with every kind of intoxication and desire,
they would wonder which of Them it could be,
and for what suspicious pleasure
he had come down into the streets of Selefkia
from the August Celestial Mansions. 

C. P. Cavafy

Whether God "exists"

or not is a triviality.

What matters is what kind of life and what kind of culture issue from faith and from faithlessness. Modernity supplies the answer. Without God as center, life and culture degenerate. Neurosis and madness proliferate. Freud did not sufficiently appreciate what he himself observed, that religion protects against neurosis. Like all moderns, he could not abide "illusions" and this blinded him to the fact that "fictions" and "illusions" are the stuff out of which culture is spun and are needed to protect human beings from the sterilizing effect of consciousness. 

Consciousness has to produce something that protects against its own death-dealing radiation. That is what produced religion.

Everything that needs saying has been said.

At this point, blogging or writing ought to be no more than the compiling of a commonplace. G.K. Chesterton is a particularly rich source.

We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

If this was true in 1908, how much truer is it after 1968 and the intellectual ravages of deconstruction?

What is there poetical about being in revolt?

You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It's mere vomiting.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

In art, love of the law translates into two complimentary forms of piety: the piety of craft married to the piety of subject matter.

The piety of craft: because fundamental to craft is reverence for tradition. The modern devaluation of craft is a profanation.

Sacred time is circular. It is an incessant return to origins. Therefore, sacred art finds invention in the  retelling of the same stories, in the reverential recreation of the same forms. The modern striving for novelty is a profanation.

Praising the beautiful

is sufficient castigation of the ugly. 

Why so much energy

and invention in '60s music and so little in '60s art?

From the '60s onwards the nominal arts become of strictly academic interest.The contrast between the energy of the counterculture and the enervation of '60s institutionally sponsored art is striking. Just at the moment when things were heating up on streets, campuses, and music venues, things were cooling down in galleries.

The best thing that came out of modernism was so-called primitivism, but by the 1960s, primitivism in art was in abeyance. When it resurfaced in the '80s as Neo-expressionism, things weren't the same, probably because Neo-expressionism was the expressionism of artists who had learned about it in art school. Plus,  primitivism needed an ironic cover in order to be smuggled into institutional settings, so it came across as a simulacrum.

Fast forward to today and both art and music are equally boring.

 

I think of the counterculture

as something consumerism unintentionally produced. 

And then nullified.

The machinery of consumerism exists to incite dissatisfaction. Specifically, it is designed to create just enough dissatisfaction to make you crave the new thing but not so much that you become disillusioned with consumption altogether. 

In the '60s you had a generation that had grown up conditioned by this artificially induced appetite for something more, and I would say it was conditioned to the point where the appetite could not be satisfied by what consumerism had to offer. I would even say that at some point, consumerism produced a craving for the transcendent that threatened a complete generational rupture with the consumer economy. Hence the youthful indulgence in sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and esoteric non-Western spiritual practices. Young people were craving ecstatic experiences that exceeded, for a moment, what consumerism could bring to market.

Those moments of ecstasy and abandon were the beatific highlights of the counterculture.

But then the inevitable corruption set in, hastened by the internalization of that same consumerist conditioning that had incited a rebellion against consumerism. These '60s kids just couldn't kick the need for instant gratification. 

Glimpses of the transcendent are easy to come by. Music, drugs, sex offer glimpses. But to abide in the transcendent requires sacrifice, discipline, humility, and persistence, and the individuals capable of this were few. So it did not take very long for consumerism to reclaim the erstwhile rebels of the '60s.

Seeking the mystical death of the ego, many succumbed to actual self-destruction. The rest became consumers of "alternative" lifestyles dependent on alternative modes of consumption, which a consumer society was all too happy to accommodate, whether in the form of peasant blouses, beads, bell-bottoms or in the form of illicit but easily obtainable drugs.

The drugs were shortcuts to an altered state of consciousness that might have become mystical and genuinely life-changing had it been achieved with the proper techniques and proper attitude, that is, through prayer, self-discipline, and surrender to God's will. But the children of Madison Avenue did not have it in them to endure the hardships that spiritual purgation requires.

So instead of becoming ascetic mystics they became spoiled and whiny boomers.

But, yes, before the rot set in there were moments of great beauty in the '60s and most of them are to be found in the music.

Wisdom (Sophia)

lives in myth not philosophy.

If there ever was an alternative to modernity,

it could only have been a return to what preceded it. 

Instead, the postmodern attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment was formulated as a leap toward some vague transhumanism—which is really an attempt to reinvent religion as antireligion, alongside the attempt to reinvent art as antiart, the old impulse to worship the more-than-human turned into a desire to idolize the less-than-human.

Because moderns are cut off

from both the spiritual faculty of apprehending the sacred and the ascetic techniques that enabled union or identification with it, they take pleasure instead in blasphemy. What is in vogue today, in lieu of worship, is the inversion of worship: vapid rebellion, deconstruction, demystification, demythification, critique. 

Unbeknownst to themselves, the blasphemers are the last remnant of the faithful.

The problem with

any materialist philosophy is that humans are not matter. There is something in them that extends beyond the material realm. What makes humans human is a sense of the sacred.

Marxism is remarkably obtuse to what is in plain view throughout history: the overwhelming influence of religious ideas on human conduct. It won’t do to dismiss religion as “ideology” because that implies that Marxism has privileged access to a truth beyond or above ideology, which would itself be a religious claim. Like all modern isms, Marxism is a self-contradicting irreligious religion.

One of G.K. Chesterton's profound insights

was that in the modern world, Christian orthodoxy has not been supplanted by reason, as the naïve advocates of enlightenment had hoped, but by diffuse forms of credulousness. In the Father Brown stories, the priest stands out for being the worldly one, dogged in his insistence on rational explanations for mysterious occurrences that others too hastily attribute to supernatural causes.

Skepticism could only injure faith not supplant it, and from that injury issued the half-baked paganism that defines modern "spirituality."

Saussure's contribution to the modern profanation

of the world is the denaturalization of language. He turns the Symbol into a sign and the sign into a convention. The idea of convention appeals to moderns because it redesignates everything once thought to be sacred as a "construct" amenable to being reassembled into something more democratic and equitable.

We need to be reminded that ancient traditions held words to be sacred in origin. As René Guénon explains in "Word and Symbol" 

The philosopher Berkeley was not wrong, therefore, when he said that the world is 'the language that the infinite Spirit speaks to finite spirits'; but he was wrong to believe that this language is only a collection of arbitrary signs, for in reality there is nothing arbitrary even in human language, every signification at the origin necessarily having its basis in some natural conformity or harmony between the sign and the signified. It is because Adam had received from God the knowledge of the nature of all living beings that he was able to give them their names (Genesis II: 19, 20); and all the ancient traditions are in agreement that the true name of a being is one with its nature or its very essence.

The truly significant event of the modern era

is the desacralization of life and art. “Modernity” and “Postmodernity” are merely markers of the stages of that fateful event. 

With the disappearance in the West of the last vestige of the sacred, the triumph of materialism ushers a great inversion. The worship of the more than human is replaced by the worship of the less than human. Everything formerly sacrilegious, dishonorable, ignoble, ugly, monstrous becomes an object of cult veneration. 

As René Guénon observes in his essay, “On the Meaning of Carnivals,” (below) the “feast of fools” that was formerly a purgative ritual of strictly limited duration becomes in our era an everyday spectacle.

On the Meaning of Carnivals

In connection with a certain ‘theory of festivals’ formulated by a sociologist, we have pointed out that this theory has, among other deficiencies, the weakness of wanting to reduce all festivals to a single type, that of what may be called ‘carnival’ festivals, an expression which seems to us clear enough to be understood by everyone, as in fact carnival represents what is still left of festival today in the West; and we said at that time that this kind of festival raises questions which can call for a more thorough examination. In fact, the impression that emerges from them is always and above all else that of disorder, in the most complete sense of this word. How then does it happen that they are to be found, not only in our time, but also and even with a more ample development, in traditional civilisations with which they seem at first sight incompatible? If they pertained specifically to our own times, they could be considered simply as one of the numerous manifestations of the general disequilibrium.

We may as well give here some definite examples, and we will mention first certain truly strange festivals which were celebrated in the Middle Ages: the ‘feast of the ass’ where this animal, whose distinctly satanic symbolism is well known in all traditions, was even brought into the very choir of the church where it occupied the place of honour and received the most extraordinary tokens of veneration; also, the ‘feast of fools’, wherein the lower clergy gave themselves up to the worst improprieties, parodying both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the liturgy itself. How is it possible to explain that in such a period things whose most evident characteristic is incontestably that of parody and even of sacrilege were not only tolerated but even given an as it were official sanction?

We will also mention the Roman Saturnalia from which, moreover, the modern carnival seems to have been directly derived, though in fact it is no longer anything but a very diminished vestige: during these festivals, the slaves ordered the masters about, and the masters served the slaves. One then had the image of a truly ‘upside down’ world, wherein everything was done in reverse of the normal order. Although it is commonly claimed that these festivals were a reminder of the ‘golden age’, this interpretation is clearly false: for there is no question here of any kind of ‘equality’ that could strictly be regarded as representing, insofar as is possible in present conditions, the primordial indifferentiation of social functions. It is a question of the reversal of hierarchies, which is something completely different; and such a reversal constitutes, generally speaking, one of the plainest characteristics of satanism. We must therefore see here something that relates much rather to the sinister aspect of Saturn, an aspect which certainly does not pertain to him as god of the ‘golden age’ but, on the contrary, insofar as he is now no more than the fallen god of a bygone and finished period.

It can be seen by these examples that there is invariably a sinister and even satanic element in such festivals; and it should be noted in particular that this very element is precisely what pleases the mob and excites its gaiety. There is something here, in fact, that is very apt-and even more so than anything else to satisfy the tendencies of fallen man, insofar as these tendencies push him to develop the lowest possibilities of his nature. Now it is just in this that the real point of such festivals lies: it is a question of somehow ‘channeling’ these tendencies, and of thus making them as inoffensive as possible by giving them an opportunity to manifest themselves, but only during very brief periods and in very well defined circumstances, and by thus enclosing this manifestation within narrow limits which it is not allowed to overstep. Otherwise these same tendencies, for want of the minimum satisfaction required by the present condition of humanity, would be at risk of exploding, so to speak,and of spreading their effects everywhere, collectively as well as individually, causing thereby a disorder far more serious than that which is produced only during some few days specially reserved for this purpose, and which is all the less to be feared for being thus ‘regularised’. For on the one hand these days are placed outside the normal course of things, so as not to exert any appreciable influence upon it, while, on the other hand, the fact that there is nothing unforeseen in these festivals ‘normalises’ as it were the disorder itself and integrates it into the total order. Apart from this general explanation, which no one who is prepared to think about it can fail to understand, it will be as well to say something in particular about the ‘masquerades’ which play an important part in carnivals themselves, and in other more or less similar festivals; and what we have to say will confirm still further what we have just said. In fact, carnival masks are generally hideous and most often evoke animal or demonic forms so that they are like a figurative ‘materialisation’ of the inferior and even infernal tendencies, which are allowed to come to the surface on these occasions. Besides, each one will quite naturally choose from among these masks, without being fully aware of it, the one that best suits him, that is, the one which represents what is most in conformity with his own lower tendencies-so much so that one could say that the mask which is supposed to hide the true face of the individual, on the contrary reveals to the eyes of everyone that which he really carries within himself but which he is habitually obliged to dissimulate. It is well to note, for this throws further light on the masks, that we have here a kind of parody of the ‘reversal’ which, as we have explained elsewhere, takes place at a certain degree of initiatic development; a parody, we say, and a truly satanic counterfeit, for here the reversal is an exteriorization, not of the beings spirituality but, on the contrary, of its lowest possibilities.

To end this survey, we will add that if the festivals of this kind are more and more rare and if they even seem hardly able any longer to arouse the interest of the crowd, it is because, in a time such as our own, they have become truly pointless. In fact, how can there still be any question of ‘circumscribing’ disorder and of containing it within rigorously defined limits, when it has spread everywhere and is manifested constantly in all domains of human activity? Thus although, considering only externals and from a purely ‘aesthetic’ point of view, one might be tempted to welcome, on account of their inevitable garb of ugliness, the almost complete disappearance of these festivals, this disappearance can on the contrary be seen, by going to the roots of the matter, as an exceedingly unreassuring symptom, because it bears witness to the irruption of disorder into the whole course of existence and to its having become generalised to such a point that we could really be said to live in a sinister ‘perpetual carnival.’

The world, as symbolic enclosure

that separates form from formlessness, comes into being always and everywhere as divine creation. This is a mythical recognition of the structural necessity of the symbolic order remaining beyond rational comprehension or questioning. God is the navel of the symbolic order, the omphalos, the ineffable ground. The worship of the gods, then, is not evidence of credulity or of some sort of "alienation," but an affirmation of what enables culture to function as a refuge from chaos. Culture becomes a construct when it is falling apart. Only then can it become an object for analysis. 

The fools are not the devout but the sociologists.

Bacon did not ignore any means

to tum us away from Plato’s philosophy, the human preface to the Scriptures, and praised, expounded, and propagated that of Democritus, that is to say, atomic philosophy, a desperate attempt of materialism pushed to extremes, which, being aware that matter escapes it and explains nothing, plunges into the infinitely small, seeking, so to speak, matter without matter and being completely happy even amid absurdities so long as it does not find intelligence.

In conformity with this system of philosophy, Bacon urges men to seek the cause of natural phenomena in the configuration of constituent atoms or molecules, the most false and gross idea ever to have stained the human understanding. And this is why the eighteenth century, which has always loved and praised men only for the evil they bear, made Bacon its god, while nevertheless refusing to give him justice for his good and even excellent qualities. It is quite wrong to believe that he forwarded the progress of science, for all the real scientific innovators preceded him or were ignorant of him. Bacon was a barometer who announced good weather, and because he announced it people believed that he had made it.

Joseph de Maistre, The Saint Petersburg Dialogues