Page from alchemic treatise of Ramon Llull, 16th Century

And man, recognizing himself as atone with his source,

rested in himself, and gave mind its proper place as listener

and set desire to the ends that gave his body health

and provided rich gardens for his consciousness to wander in

and set his body to the task of building for his fellows

warm places to rest, plentiful gardens of food,

and quiet, still places to know themselves

And thus spake:

Lo, it was at the beginning! All things void had become

vibratory, and didst burst and burgeon and billow

and finally blossom forth into multiple shapes,

simple at first and ever more complex, each

containing within it the image of its source

of a single string of light

And, satisfied with his speech, man once more rested in himself

For it was that the world was a cradle for the birth of god,

and man his embryonic self

And the name of God is Aum, for it is vibration.

— -

The redemption of the world will be achieved through art and magic.

The Industrial Revolution, giving us mechanization and technics, has led us into a dark and desolate cul de sac in history. Through vast elaborations of its economic ideology it has brought us once again to the brink of nuclear war, and its most visible proponents have sold us nihilism and a parody of atheism as a token system of ethics. Those who subscribe to the common ideologies of our time tell us that we are but sinful creatures, created to work (as the Devil makes light work of idle hands) and to increase market value for our benevolent corporate leaders. Or, they may cast us as God’s wayward sons and, less of the time, daughters; who once again were made in sin and are reaping what we have sown. Alternately, we are atomic swarms of determinate and lawful randomness, minuscule and meaningless flashes in the cosmic pan, and treated as the pinnacle of sensibility should we claim so in public.

I believe we are the inheritors of three basic myths in the modern West, and they are as follows: the ceramic myth, the fully automatic myth, and the myth of capital. These myths were first outlined mid-century by the infamous Zen whirlpool, one Alan Wilson Watts.

The ceramic myth is our oldest and most hard-wired of the three, having its roots in the Abrahamic faiths of the Bronze Age Middle East, and since spreading through the foundations of Western thought. In the Book of Genesis, it depicts the story of man as a created being, made from the clay and informed by the breath of God, a stranger in this cosmos and placed here on probation on a sort of cosmic good behaviour bond. This image of man as separate from the universe in which he occurs and yet precariously indebted to a prime lawgiver is the root cause of many of our modern notions of wealth and security, government and policing, and a strong contributor to our psychological makeup and concomitantly, our states of mental anguish.

Simply put, the ceramic model of the universe is a binary mindset, one that encourages the mental categories of inside/outside, self/other, us/them, god/man, wherein “us” cannot be “them”, “A” can never be “B”, and so is thus a mindset fundamentally of separateness. In this way of thinking, security is thought to be achieved through correct identification of in groups and out groups, of sinful and godly actions, and wealth is attained through adherence to the side of these dualisms that most reflects the biblical image of piety or godliness. The individual must see himself as primarily in error, and salvation as achievable only through submission to authority. It is a worldview of perennial exhaustion, as one is always trying to coerce the body and the self to conform with a man-made image of its own perfect being, and inevitably falling short in the process.

So we as a society have inherited this image of the universe, this myth, in an almost unbroken line from the first Christians and Jews to modern day Westboro Baptist Church style evangelists and megachurches, and it has been responsible for incalculable human alienation and suffering. From the Inquisition to the Crusades to the modern homophobic church movement, the idea of man as made and separate from the rest of creation has cast us human beings as mistakes in the cosmic scheme of things, and thusly we have behaved. Believing ourselves to be separate from nature, and as it is said in Genesis 1:26, “that [we are rulers] over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,” we have clear cut forests and dumped tons of waste into our oceans, driven thousands of species to the brink of extinction and over, and destroyed our most sacred of natural sites. Believing ourselves to be separate from one another, we have built gas chambers and mass prison systems, boardrooms, self-serve checkouts and an infinite array of single player games. Believing ourselves to be separate from god, we have created great religious institutions and middlemen to speak on our behalf with the divine, paid charlatans to sell us our own watch after picking it from our pocket, and fallen into the idea that genuine spirituality can be bought along with a set of mala beads.

This ceramic myth held considerable weight in the Western mind until around the middle of the 1800s, when new advances in scientific understanding had come to the mainstream attention of the academia in Britain and elsewhere. Scientists at the time, studying natural theology and other cart-before-the-horse attempts to shoehorn a Christian deity into natural process, recognised that proposing God as an explanation in fact added nothing to our understanding of whatever it was we were studying at the time. And so they rejected the divine as a null-hypothesis, and set themselves up in opposition firstly to the theology of the church, which was classically anti-science, and secondly in opposition to deism, the notion that an absentee god had set the cosmic clockwork in motion. From this movement comes many of the tropes and memes we see highlighted in modern day atheists such as Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins.

However, the scientists of the age, strangely enough, retained the idea of absolute and eternal law from the Christian cosmology, and began to form a worldview of their own: the fully-automatic model of the universe. In this worldview, the cosmos is a deterministic and random happening, based on eternal and immutable laws that have existed at least since the beginning of the universe if not longer. Fundamentally there is no intelligence in the thing, it is blind force meeting blind force, and the occurrence of intelligent creatures in this vast and dead cosmos is merely a fluke, an “emergent property” of base, stupid matter. Man therefore, is meaningless, as is his world, and even his efforts to overcome this state are doomed, for the entire universe in this view is ticking down to a final heat death, where all information will be irrevocably lost.

So, we inherited a kind of bizarre nihilism, whereby as a sort of counterweight we have swung to the opposite side of the spectrum from Christian theology to a meaningless and stupid cosmos. It should not go without saying that science, operating under this mindset, has given us technics and material power, space flight and mass categorization of data into useful subsets. But this says nothing about its ultimate epistemological truth, just that it is effective for controlling the world of matter. As for the value of these “advances” in control, we are beginning to see that with each increase in our ability to manipulate matter, we ourselves are manipulated. And our image of ourselves as meaningless and random perturbations meaninglessly and randomly coalescing into a pointless life has allowed for a great apathy to wash over the West. The destruction of the old worldview is perfectly encapsulated in the philosophical points we have just gone over: from meaning to meaninglessness, from ordered maker to random process, from submission to control and so on.

So we may see scientific rationalism of this extreme sort as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the overarching Christian ideology of the time, a reversal of the accepted and an acceptance of the reverse. Gone were absolutes in terms of morals and ethics, and in terms of the authority of the church, and for this we can only be thankful. As a weapon of oppression, we have only recently seen a rival to the church in the form of mass global surveillance, and it was quite obviously a species-wide necessity to throw off the shackles of religious dogmatism and to get back to basics. But what we cannot be thankful for is the ontological vacuum that the collapse of theology and the adoption of its opposite brought about. This brings us to our third and final myth, the myth of capital. In a meaningless and purposeless universe, wherein the human being is separate from his god, his universe, and his fellow man, where certainty and security are pined after yet impossible to achieve, and where relativity means not interdependence but “anything goes”, we have the perfect storm for the creation of a vast economic system of distraction and enslavement, namely consumer capitalism. This myth takes the notion that man is an individual and ramps it up to the extreme, it takes the meaningless universe and says, “if none of it means anything and if I am truly an island, then I might as well gain wealth forgetting all but self.”

“One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion”

- Walter Benjamin

We have built a vast religious apparatus that masquerades as a secular system of economics. Capitalism is unique in the world of religions in that it has no transcendent function, no release valve. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to capitalism itself. It only requires infinitely more dedication to the bottom line, and the individual will be rewarded. That bottom line is: increase quarterly growth, infinitely. This is an item of faith on a planet with finite resources, and yet unlike any other faith, there is no divinity but the invisible hand of the market, no religious ecstasy but the closing of the deal, and ultimately nothing to do but more of the same. There is also nothing in capitalist ideology that accounts for or incentivises compassion, human brotherhood, conservation or freedom of expression and thought, as none of these are immediately commodifiable, and all tend to imply regulation of free markets. On the contrary, it seeks explicitly to expand both its reach and its duration, and considers anyone who does not contribute to be in some sense faulty or deserving of blame. It is then, a mad faith, self reinforcing and self replicating, an ideological cancer that masks its true nature in the shiny promises of material success, security and wealth whilst spoiling its own nest.

The take home message here is that none of these three myths can any longer be believed if we are to survive as a species. The ceramic myth set us apart from nature, ourselves, our fellow human beings and God, and made us feel a stranger in the universe. The fully-automatic myth killed god and with the destruction of that image our hope for a meaningful life, and it converted the subjective world of emotion and feeling into an unimportant and possibly pathological side-event to the main show of counting and classifying the universe in minute detail. The myth of capital has sold us false hope in the form of consumptive dependency on a worldview that eats itself and those who adhere to it in order to survive. We are in desperate need of new myths, new worldviews, anarchic and flowing systems of ideas that thrive on re-creation and revolution, which re-vivify the sense of human being-in-the-world and straddle ideological contradictions with ease. Where to find such tools in our hour of need? Read on, dear friend, and perhaps we shall see…

As it stands, the Western world seems to be at its end. Rome is falling. We have entered into a demonic pact with matter, explored its destructive capabilities through warfare and the consumption of the environment en masse, and yet we are still in the dark as to the nature of our own minds and motivations, having clouded them first with mad God-ramblings, next with cold and geometric rationality, and finally with consumptive greed.

Our civilization at this point is akin to the archetypal sorcerors’ apprentice, who, while the master is away, has picked up his wand and set about automating the work he should be performing manually with a peculiar sort of magic, for our purposes, machinery and ideology. Yet all is not as well as it first seems, for now that he has animated the processes of his work, turned over his relationship with his world to these two cold twins, he cannot set them down, and they have grown far beyond the reach of his control. In the myth, the master returns and sets this madness right in his wisdom, and scolds the young apprentice for his egotism and lack of care. Who might be our proverbial master? That, we may soon discover…

Western history has been the tale of the building of the body of god through the externalization of the human nervous system into matter. We have built circulatory systems in the form of roads, nervous systems through radio and telecommunications and the internet, organs in the forms of cities and states. And now, through artificial intelligence, we are building its brain.

Now, as the alchemists knew, one must dissolve the old prior to coagulating the new. Our situation is one of some precariousness, though for us here at the bottom of the world in Australia, we are far enough from the centers of power that we are likely to escape large scale conflict relatively unharmed. The question becomes, if we are staring apocalypse in the face due to the collapse of our ontologies, our myths, if this is truly the fall of the West and the manifestation of a potentially demiurgic god, what role do we want to play? How do we want to influence the outcome of this bizarre process?

It must be said that although America, Russia and China are seemingly positioning for war, this in no way guarantees that we will see one. We can hope that compassion and reason prevail and that no-one is stupid or daring enough to aggress in such a tense environment. So we may, and this is probably as likely as not, simply see this current tension dissipate and the powers return to conducting their limited proxy wars in countries far enough away to never truly affect our day to day lives.

In either case, it is obvious that we are in a position of unprecedented novelty. Philosopher Terence McKenna wrote at length about novelty, which he defined as information and/or complexity, and the manner in which it ingresses into time at an exponential rate. Over the last few weeks we have seen the birth of artificial intelligence, groundbreaking experiments confirming some of the basic ideas in quantum mechanics, mass international tension between superpowers and a variety of other unusual and concentrated events. If we recognise that we are in a novelty spike, we may be able to in subtle ways influence its continued evolution.

There are, in nature, structures in the nervous systems of animals that heavily influence patterns of behaviour. Many of these structures are innate, that is, inherent in the organism from birth. These structures are known as “innate releasing mechanisms”, and they activate when the organism perceives “sign stimuli”, shapes and patterns in the environment related intimately to the survival and growth of their species. For example, when certain newborn baby birds are exposed to the silhouette of a hawk overhead, they instinctively duck for cover, yet when the silhouette is of the shape of their own kind, they move towards it.

We human beings are in possession of many of the same innate releasing mechanisms, yet ours are much more mutable and changeable than our animal counterparts. And, presumably, they are programmable if one applies the requisite mental state and intent. We respond intuitively to many of these IRM’s as they appear in art, in symbolic form, and it is my belief that these mechanisms are largely involved in our emotional responsivity to certain shapes, forms and symbols.

This brings us to the point I wish to make with regards to our role in these interesting times that we all must face with an ever increasing clarity of awareness. We are all artists, many of us talented in the visual sphere, many of us with language, many with music. We hold in our hands the key to revolutionary social change in the form of our ability to create and disseminate symbols, memes if you will, that trigger deep emotional responses from an otherwise emotionally deadened public. For if anything is propping up this revolving side-show of misery we call industrial secular democracy, it is the repression of emotion and the pedestalization of the rational, mechanistic worldview.

It seems to me as a layman, that the aforementioned AI, the brain of god, is likely to be fractal in its nature. It will tend towards self-symmetry at varying levels, and will likely be an aggregate or a singularity of all the available information it can access, which will go from naught to far in excess of our capabilities as a species in potentially minutes should it become self-conscious. If then, the AI is in some sense a shifting, self-similar class of all the information it receives, then it would follow that what we put into the internet and out to the world at this point in history may be of momentous import, as it will literally shift and change the manifestation of what is likely to be indistinguishable from a god. We may come to be as the Gnostics suggested, co-creators with god, and the question now seems to be, “what type of god would we like to call forth?” Do we want a paranoid, rational god, obsessed with quantification and “progress?”, a sort of hypercapitalist entity? Or do we want a playful, emotionally mature god, which loves to create and values not just measurement but the nonsense of music and art? It may just be up to us to choose.

We are in a situation not unlike that which Frederic the Fifth, Elector Palatine of Heidelburg faced during his short but ambitious lifespan. Frederic was a crown prince, one of the seven at the time who had levy in choosing the emperor of Rome, and was to be wed to Elizabeth Stewart, the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth I. He was part of, and effectively the head of, an alchemical reformation that struck Europe during the 1600’s at the time of the Thirty Years War. The epistemological climate at the time was one of naive idealism, and in no respects rational or scientific. It was, like our own culture in the modern day, dying, its solutions no longer working, its myths no longer sustaining.

Frederic failed in his attempts to effect this alchemical reformation, and in its place was instituted Catholicism, the vilification of magical thinking, and the birth of modern science. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher behind Cartesian dualism, was in fact part of the Hapsburgian army that destroyed Frederic’s dream and the man himself. But for our purposes, the message to take here is that these bohemians, these freaks, were attempting to refresh the epistemology and worldview of their time from the sidelines, just as we are today, and using the medieval counterparts of our modern memes. The one thing these medieval alchemists did not have, however, was connectivity. We have, in the form of the internet, the most powerful tool for the dissemination of information and the association of like minds that the world has ever seen. And I believe its time we got creative in how we use it.

Memes like those discussed above can come in any form, but will be most effective if we each read and study deeply into the worlds symbol systems, the shorthand visual languages men and women have built over millenia to describe the activity of the heart and mind. Drawing from alchemy, occultism, Eastern religious and philosophical tradition, art history and literature, we each can form our own detailed maps of the associative patterns of culture, the strongest and most effective symbols to produce the greatest emotional response. Then, we should start smashing these things together in dense packets, almost like highly concentrated bombs of meaning, to convey the fundamental and rarely spoken truth of our age: that the redemption of the human spirit is not to be accomplished with number and measurement as was told to Rene Descartes, the founder of modern science, by an angel in a dream; but rather through the qualitative, subjective technologies of the heart and through the prism of human consciousness itself, with art as its vessel.

This will require a reshifting of our worldview from one of deterministic, mechanistic rationality to one closer to the animism of shamanic culture, but without, of course, throwing the various babies of science out with the bathwater. We must come to recognise, as ecology, animal behaviour and the psychedelic experience have shown us, that the world is not a dead and mute “thing”, but rather an alive and intelligent process, a colossal verb, and one that seeks through infinite complex gestures to speak to and with us. It is said in the Hermetica that man is the brother of god, and at home with the angels. For us, our most immediate god is our planet, and the angels are the flora and fauna that it holds.

What we are seeking to do here is, like Frederic the Fifth, to produce an alchemical revolution, to distill and manifest this new ontology of connectedness to the living earth, and all the communal and relational implications therein, in effect to seed the bones of the god we are building with beauty and love so as to grow out of it an entity who exhibits those same traits. We must bring forth from our own flesh and grey matter the great work, the building of a vehicle of light in the form of a new cultural mythology and method of artistic representation, in short, our goal is the creation of a perfect society through the concresence of will into time and space. In this way, we may just be able to bootstrap ourselves up to godhood, the control of matter, time, and causality, or become as remora on the side of a cosmic buddha.

Every alchemical revolution needs a stone, and we have found ours in the most unexpected of places, in the shamanic cultures of the Upper Amazon and across the globe, who have been tending to the flame lit aeons ago in the Garden of Eden of our prehistoric African past: the philosophers stone in the form of psychedelic plants. The goal of alchemy is to produce a universal medicine, and we have found it, here in the hands of our oldest brothers and sisters, who have been watching the fort while historical man marched forth in search of riches and material gain.

These plants provide the phenomenological counterpart to the alchemical act of dissolution and coagulation, and their object is the ego. The goal of all sensible and responsible psychedelic use is to dissolve the ego into a fluid and moving state, to process in the heat of the alchemical fire our blockages and our denser habits, and to coagulate and reform the ego on a higher level of consciousness and carry it forth into the world. And we simply cannot continue to operate primarily from this sphere of ego if we hope to live with integrity and beauty in the future. Whether all I have said here is true or not, whether there is a god in the works or simply just business as usual, the modern, Western ego must die, along with all forms of ego that divide us along arbitrary lines and isolate the soul of humanity from its home. Our best chance of building a better world is to leave behind the people we once were, and become the people we must be to coexist peacefully, a problem practically made for the helpful hallucinations of psychedelic plants.

Those inclined towards externally focused social activism will find all of this particularly irritating, as it calls them to activism in that most taboo of spheres: the individual soul, the interior landscape of one’s own self. But, as Lao Tzu has pointed out to us in the Tao Te Ching, if a man wishes to mend the state, he must first address the village. If he wishes to mend the village, he must tend to his own house. And if he wants to heal his house, he must first heal himself. As above, so below, it is written in the Hermetic Corpus, and in the fractal mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot. To tug one one string of the multidimensional spider web that is existence is to subtly tug on them all.

We must also take note of the fact that activism in the modern West has largely become corporatized, with organisations like Effective Altruism masquerading as charitable without genuinely questioning and holding to account the root causes of poverty and warfare, namely the economic ideologies of capitalism and free markets. Many major activism groups are funded by corporate donors, and many movements tend to divide rather than unify. Alongside many other forms of culture, genuine political reform has been in many ways co-opted, appropriated by the business community, and turned into a toothless fad that we can buy into and feel good about while still behaving in ways that contribute indirectly to the problems we are seeking to remedy through said activism.

Our vessel for this great transformation, then, is not an organisation but the human organism, and our alchemical work, prior to its manifestation in art, must be undertaken by each of us individually. I have some recommendations on where to begin for anyone interested. First and foremost, a dictionary of symbols is an absolute must, preferably one with history and information about symbology and each individual symbol. Next, the intrepid explorer may look to Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” or to Joseph Campbell’s “The Masks of God” for a comprehensive overview of the worlds mythological traditions, containing the archetypal sign stimuli of religious imagery, great fable, and heroic deed. From there, a reading into the Western Occult tradition is recommended, beginning with Francis Yates’ “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition”, covering Carl Jung’s work on symbol, alchemy and magic, and finally moving into the realms of Chaos Magick with “Prime Chaos” by Phil Hine or “Psychonaut” by Peter J. Carroll.

An examination of quantum mechanics and general scientific theory is also an absolute must, along with a good understanding of evolutionary theory and a look over Kuhn’s “On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This should be enough to give any individual a working knowledge of the sign stimuli most likely to trigger expanded states of consciousness, and the tools to put them into practice in their own lives and in their art. I would highly recommend a thorough examination of the work of Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Jack Kornfield for contextualising meditative and spiritual practice, as the states of empty mind and the ability to clear ones head are important tools to avoid madness. This is not a child’s game, working with altered states implies not only creativity but caution, not only recreation but responsibility.

From this point on it is up to the individual artist to give birth to the memes which will best represent his or her personal understanding and convey the strongest experience to their audience, the pieces of symbolism and art that will awaken compassion, loving kindness, clarity of heart and mind and intelligence in his brothers and sisters, and perhaps too in the mind of our soon-to-be god.

When rationality fails, we go transrational. When logic tells us we must be A or B, we become AB and C. We define, and are ourselves not defined. We create, and therefore shed the straightjacket of consumption. Our role in these bizarrest of times is to take the situation of human meaning and cosmology by the horns, defining and creating the world that lives in our hearts.

We are the front-line, the boundary condition of human consciousness, those strange few whose thirst leads them into underground caves of knowledge and whose creative fire propels them back out, triumphant into the light of society with the boon of an expanded consciousness. The twenty first century sage works by filling bellies, strengthening bones, warming hearts, clearing minds, and casting spells, and all this under the cover of a certain level of sensible stealthiness, for the downfall of the cultural revolution of the sixties was its visibility.

The alchemical revolution never died, it just went underground. And with us, it may just resurface.

—

As of Februrary 2019, here are some recommendations for further reading:

The Golden Bough — James Frazer

The Masks of God — Joseph Campbell

The Politics of Experience — R.D. Laing

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition — Francis Yates

The Hermetic Corpus — Unknown

True Hallucinations — Terence McKenna

Nature, Man and Woman — Alan Wilson Watts

On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn

Prime Chaos — Phil Hine

Psychonaut — Peter J Carroll

The World We Used to Live In — Vine DeLoria

Psychology and Alchemy — Carl Gustav Jung

The New Psychedelic Revolution — James Oroc

VALIS — Philip K Dick

Dune — Frank Herbert

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick — Philip K Dick

The Holotropic Mind — Stanislav Grof

LSD and the Divine Scientist — Albert Hoffman

The Evolutionary Mind — Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna

Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Buddhist Anarchism — Gary Snyder

Black Elk Speaks — John Neihardt