This Picture Reveals Your True Nature

by Amanda on June 30, 2013, no comments

Marcello Venusti, Ecce Homo, 16th century

“What you say about Jesus says more about you than it does about Jesus.” — Richard Smoley

The other day I was introduced to this couple and we were bonding about the affect of music on courtship. As they were explaining how they met, I asked them their astrological signs. I could sense an inner eye roll from the guy, a lawyer, even though he was too polite to do it to my face, which isn’t always the case. I doubt my new friend knew very much about astrology, but it appeared that he knew enough to consider it totally ridiculous. This was far from the first time I’ve experienced the anti-occult eye roll treatment and it didn’t really bother me, but it did get me to start thinking about people’s preconceptions about the Mysteries, and many other delights of the spirit world.

We humans are categorizing creatures, which is essential to our survival, but which can also make us blind to that which doesn’t fit neatly into our world view. Most of us have experienced walking by a familiar thing, like a tree or a house in our neighborhood, and realizing that we’ve never noticed it before. As soon as we saw it we slipped it into a category, “tree”, and then dismissed it. When that happens to me I always end up wondering what else I am missing out on. Probably a lot.

Part of the importance of an education in the arts, both the esoteric and the fine arts, is that it can help us to look more closely, it can help us to see all the things around us hidden in plain sight. When we practice looking closely (and then looking closely again, and then again) at a text, or a painting, or person, we can begin to see beyond the categories we normally ascribe to that object. We start to see its suchness, its uniqueness in all the world. We begin think about its history and context. By looking closely, whole new worlds, both interior and exterior, begin to open up.

But even artists and others involved in intellectual culture frequently dismiss the occult and people who are interested in it. Fascination with the occult is identified as being so much New Age psychobabble. It’s a general human tendency to dismiss things we don’t understand, or to think we understand all too well things of which we are totally ignorant. For example, current scholars of anthropology acknowledge that, in early studies on “shamanism” or “witchcraft”, when Europeans studied people from indigenous cultures, the Western scholars frequently misunderstood the ceremonies they were witnessing. (Pels and Meyer, 2003, p. 8). More than learning about a foreign culture, these early anthropologists were often just reifying their own identities as “rational, scientific thinkers,” by identifying the practices of the indigenous communities as non-rational and superstitious. In reality, the anthropologists probably had no more idea what was going on in these communities than I would if I went to a physics conference (I’m interested in physics but by no means an expert, I’d surely be lost). However, if I went to a physics conference, most people would rightly consider me annoying if I rolled my eyes at all the things I didn’t understand and implied that the physicists were idiots for believing in it, or even talking about it. But that just demonstrates how we privilege scientific knowledge over almost any other form of knowing in contemporary culture.

People also seem to feel very comfortable making wild assumptions about art (really this whole post is about how people love to make wild unfounded assumptions in general – and I can be as guilty as the next person). Take Duchamp’s Fountain for example. For several years I taught art history, in addition to a bunch of other subjects, at a trade college. Like most of art’s uninitiated, upon first seeing Fountain my student’s would often be either outraged, disgusted, or just totally dismissive. “How is this art?? This is trash. Anyone could do this. Why should this sh** be treated as if it’s good art?” Eye rolls abounded. It’s perfectly reasonable that they would have this reaction; it’s part of the intention of the work. But by the end of the course, students would often have had a change of heart, some would even claim Dada as their favorite art historical movement. Anyone who knows anything about Western art in modernity, even if they don’t like or appreciate Dada, can surely see that there is a lot more going on in Fountain than initially meets the eye. But if the art student doesn’t stick around to learn more, or doesn’t stop to think on their own, then they will walk around saying that Duchamp was a fraud and Dada was a bunch of bullsh**. (Yes! Dada doesn’t mean anything! Bravo!). I remember saying similar things about Akira Kurisawa’s Dreams when I first saw it at thirteen. I thought it was boring and left the theater (I still cringe about that, I guess at that time I wanted a flashier, faster-paced otherworld). Most artist’s and intellectuals would recognize these assumptions as a form of ignorance, understandable ignorance, but ignorance none the less. And yet artists and intellectuals often feel perfectly comfortable talking about things they don’t understand as if they were experts. We’ve all done this, I think. Whenever I think of times I’ve bad-mouthed things or people I didn’t understand I cringe. Consequently you can sometimes find me cringing in line at the super market or while stuck in traffic.

The point is, it’s human nature to categorize and make assumptions. None of us is without sin in this regard. But it’s a dangerous practice and personally I think it’s worth it to shine the light of awareness on our behaviors in effort to overcome them. The principle that allows people to scoff at astrology, or Marcel Duchamp, or the idea of an atom or evolution, is the same principle allows the so-called authorities to invade countries we know nothing about and expect positive outcomes. GuvCorp goes into ecosystems, nations, uteruses, without considering the opinions of the people and beings who live there. This is outrageous, unloving, ultimately destructive behavior. And the cure for this kind of illness/ignorance, is to listen more, pay attention more, and to adopt a position of humility, curiosity, and compassion.

The enlightened practitioner doesn’t follow the occult in order to use spells or astrology to “magically” solve all their problems. As I see it, a commitment to magic is an act of rebellion, it’s an act of defiance against cynical lack of imagination and slavish faith in an ugly, petty, un-magical worldview. Allegiance to the Mystery is not just about considering the position of Mercury before you buy a major appliance; it’s a practice, moment by moment, of subverting destructive ignorance and devoting yourself to liberation, to rekindling the imagination of the world, in the name of Love, and celebration of the Mystery.

Medium As Performer

by admin on June 21, 2013, no comments

Florence Cook manifesting the spirit Katie King, circa 1870

“‘Modern Spiritualism’ had, after all, started in the United States when the Fox sisters discovered in March 1848 that the spirit of a murdered man communicated with them through raps and taps (Wallace [1874] 1896:152-53). The movement spread quickly and reached England in the early 1850s in the shape of two female American mediums and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Britten 1883:129, 137; Owen 1989:19). In the United States the movement was allied with radical — individualistic, abolitionist, and feminist — critiques of society. Ann Braude has shown how, through the trance speaking medium — the definition of which depended on ‘female’ receptivity to possessing spirits — female opinion leaders could emerge who had previously been barred from speaking in public (Braude 1989).”

— From Pels, Peter “Spirits of Modernity.” Magic and Modernity. Ed. Peter Pels, Ed. Birgit Meyer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2003. 251. Print.

Performer As Medium

by admin on June 21, 2013, no comments

Joan Jonas, Twilight, 1975

“The performer sees herself as a medium the spirit passes through.”

— Joan Jonas, 1982, “Closing Statement”. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Kristine Stiles, Ed. Peter Selz. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 894. Print.

Totems Cure Queasyness

by Amanda on June 21, 2013, no comments

Louise Bourgeois, Spiral Woman , 2003

For Freud, totems and taboos both were outward expressions of the same psychological tendency. Totem is heads and taboo is tails. Or rather, the totem grows from the muck of the taboo, like a lotus. Totems, for him, were created by tribal societies in order to resolve conflicts that arose from ambiguity – something people are notoriously loathe to tolerate. Characteristically, Freud relates this ambiguity to the incest taboo. In order to prevent incest, genetically related people would be of the same totem and were prohibited from intermarrying. The totem both united the clan, and prevented its members from engaging in conjugal union.

Freud’s anthropological analysis seems spurious to me. But nevertheless, as with so much of his thinking, ALL thinking, it might be true in a poetic rather than literal sense. The creation of the totem is a way of resolving, through physical manipulation of matter, a queasy problem of consciousness. A queasy relationship we, the acting agent, the desiring agent, the repulsed agent, have to something in our lives.

In the spirit world, there is no distinction between subject and object. There, in that infinite realm encompassing everything, particularly our paltry subjectivity, everything is a sign, a multifluus symbol. Everything has resonance. In the material world, that is also true. But we forget. I forget. I get taken in by the story of daily life. Calling Sallie Mae. Frustrated over road block. Disgusted by news program.

A totem can be our guiding spirit. The totem we have created calls us back. Calls us back to ambiguity. To the larger story. The story of the materials that create it. Where did those feathers come from, where did that bird come from, where did that worm come from, where did that dirt come from? The story is in everything. Spirit is in everything. The totem reminds us. And ambiguity is the porthole.

Magic Manifesto 1

by Amanda on June 5, 2013, no comments

The Unicorn is Found. Tapestry. 16th Century. Anonymous.

Magic is everywhere. Magic sparkles from cleaning products in television advertisements. Sarah Silverman argues that “Jesus is Magic.” Esoteric shops in every city offer magic stones, crystals, wands and herbs promising to help achieve a variety of desired effects. Even Donald Rumsfeld uses magic (as our comrades at The Center for Tactical Magic can attest), with his use of symbols to invoke various powers of authority. So if magic is used in all these contexts, if magic is a trick, a practice, a ploy, a wish, what is it in essence?

For us, magic is a connection to something larger, more fun, and more interesting than the bloodless drudgery of corporate America and consumer culture. Magic is a way of looking at the world that points to all the beautiful and mysterious aspects of life that we don’t understand and that we forget to appreciate.

The word magic in English comes from the Greek mageia, where it was used to refer to foreigners from the east, spell casting priests from Babylon.* From the very beginning of its contemporary roots, magic was used to refer to the weird and unsettling practices of outsiders. But that isn’t just true for our xenophobic Grecian forbearers.

Everyone knows about the various Inquisitions, where The Church rounded up witches and other heretical folks in order to punish them in the meanest ways possible. The practices of the “witches” were magic, in other words, their practices weren’t sanctioned by the proper authorities and thus needed to be named and destroyed. What’s fascinating is that Catholics themselves have often been labeled heretical pagans by other more aesthetically austere Christian branches. Clearly then, magic is often a pejorative term for the practice of being or doing whatever it is that the hegemony isn’t, or doesn’t want you to do.

Whatever psychic territories the dominant authorities (whether it is the classical Greek citizen, the Roman Catholic Church, or the orthodoxies of science today) label as outside, foreign, ridiculous, spurious, or weird, magic is sure to be found lingering there. Which is enough of a reason for us to love it.

Magic is complicated, interesting, and ambiguous – all things that we are supremely comfortable with here at The Mystery Project. So if you like the weirder outlying territories too, welcome. You have met your people.

Yours In Love,

Amanda
* Davies, Owen. (2012). Magic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.