How everything is connected

Simon Weil, Hermeticist?

Toa Te Ching by Lap-Tzu (translated by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo)

In the Beginning: There is no God but God (monotheism)

The Process of Decreation: God takes pieces of Himself¹ and makes them Other (panentheism)

In the End: Everything is God (pantheism) / There is no God (atheism) / There is nothing but God (Eat, Pray, Love)

From The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism by Alexander Room

We must follow the example of God and decreate ourselves.

In the Beginning: I am God (solipsism)²

The Process of Decreation: Recognising that there is something other than me that is also God (love of neigbour)

In the End: I am everything (schizophrenia) / There is no I (ego death) / There is nothing but Eye (Emerson).

Illustration by Christopher Pearse Cranch.

There is a permanent boundary between the self and God.

Prayer consists of paying attention to what is on the other side of the boundary, without desiring evidence that there is anything on the other side (loving the void).

The boundary has to be maintained, because direct contact with God would obliterate the self.

The Swan, Hilma af Klimt

Buckle up, buckeroos, because we will now read the Bible with Simone Weil (she’s not problematic, she’s problématique)³ and when Weil turns her attention to the Old Testament, on she makes Prof. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sound like Karen the Sunday school teacher.⁴

Our reading today is from the Book of Genesis. Genesis Nine, verses Eighteen to Twenty-Seven, to be exact (KJV):

¹⁸ And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

¹⁹ These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

²⁰ And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

²¹ And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

²² And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

²³ And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

²⁴ And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

²⁵ And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

²⁶ And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

²⁷ God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

From The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Room

According to Weil’s exegesis⁵, this passage contains the whole history of the Mediterranean civilization. Japhet begot the Indo-Europeans. Shem begot the Semites (Hebrews, Arabs, Assyrians and others). Ham begot the Phoenicians, the Philistines, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Egyptians (i.e. “the whole of the Mediterranean Civilisation until right before the start of recorded time”).⁶

However, to get to the truth, Weil believes, we need to “subtract that which the Hebrews have added out of hatred”. ⁷ Weil finds it suspect that Ham is found at fault and a curse is invoked on his son Canaan, since that is the name of the land whose native inhabitants the Hebrews had decided to genocide:⁸

He who wants to drown his dog accuses it of being rabid. He who has drowned it, even more.

The villains in Weil’s queer reading are therefore Japhet and Shem, who sought to cover the naked truth that they were too ashamed to face. The nakedness of Noah is the nakedness of Adam and Eve before the fall. We try to cover ourselves, but one day we will be judged dead and naked. Saintliness lies in shamelessness:

Only a few perfect beings are dead and naked here below, while they are still alive. Like St Francis of Assisi, who always kept his thoughts on the nakedness and poverty of the crucified Christ, and St John of the Cross, who desired nothing in the world other than humility of spirit. But if they could bear being naked, it is because they were drunk on wine; drunk on the wine that flows everyday on the altar. This wine is the only remedy for the shame that gripped Adam and Eve.

Noah’s planting of a vineyard links him to King Melchizedek of Salem, to Dionysus⁹ and to Christ (who first turned water into wine and then wine into the blood of God)¹⁰ — bypassing the priests of Israel to whom wine was forbidden. Christ’s spiritual ancestry cannot be traced through Shem, and only indirectly through Japhet. The True Light first shone in Egypt (the Greeks used the same word for the ark of Deucalion, the Greek Noah, son of Prometheus, and the coffin containing the body of Osiris):

The Egyptians knew that man can see God only in the sacrificed Lamb. About twenty thousand years ago, if we are to believe Herodotus, a human being, but holy and perhaps divine called Heracles (who is maybe identical to Nemrod, the grandchild of Ham) wanted to see God face to face and so beseeched Him. God did not want to, but He couldn’t resist the prayer, so He killed and skinned a ram, took his face for a mask, put on its fleece, and revealed Himself in this manner.

The Ghent Altarpiece: Adoration of the Lamb (detail) by Hubert van Eyck

What else did the Egyptians know?

Death turned every man, rich or poor, into a God for all eternity, a justified Osiris, if he could say to Osiris: “Lord of truth, I bring you truth. I have destroyed evil for you.” For that, he needed to be able to say: “I never put my name forward for honours. I never asked anyone to do extra work for me. I never had any slave be punished by his master. I did not let anyone die. I did not make anyone afraid. I did not make anybody cry. I did not make my voice haughty. I did not turn a deaf ear to words of justice and truth

This gnosis was passed onto the Greeks via the Phoenicians. Ezekiel compares Tyr (the Phoenician city in what is now Lebanon) to the cherub guarding the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and Egypt to the Tree of Life itself.

Why was Weil, the author of The Need for Roots, so intent on severing the link between Jesus and the Jews? Writing in the age of Hitler, she accused Jews and Aryans alike of trying to find roots in blood and soil rather than in the Ground of Being:

All those who have a part — big or small, direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious, but authentic — in the wine of Noah and Melchizedek, in the blood of Christ, all those are brothers of Egypt and Tyr, the adoptive sons of Ham. But today the sons of Japhet and Shem make a lot more noise. The one powerful, the other persecuted, separated by an atrocious hatred, they are brothers who resemble each other in many ways. They resemble each other by refusing nakedness, by requiring a garment made from skin and especially from collective warmth, protecting from the light the evil that each carries within him. This garment makes God inoffensive, it makes it possible to affirm or deny Him with indifference, to invoke him Him under false or true names; it makes it it possible to call Him by His Name without fearing that the soul will be transformed by the supernatural power of this Name.

In loving her enemy, Weil internalised a horror at the evil that her enemy was unwilling to face within himself. There is cost to such selfless love. Loving is a creative act. And every creative act requires energy that can only be generated through a simultaneous process of decreation: directed outwards, this causes destruction; directed inwards, unselfing. And the self can get exhausted.

The sororicidal orgy occasioned by Lauren Oyler’s No judgement proved the irony in the title. We can’t help but judge, that is how we feel our way through the world. But how do we judge? How do we decide whether something is good or bad? Good or evil? Master or slave, we consider how the subject of our judgement measures up against an ideal.

Since we can’t help but judge and these judgements require ideals, it follows that ideals exist by necessity. There doesn’t have to be anything spooky or highfalutin about Idealism (at least in sense that Murdoch can be described as an Idealist).

Ideals may exist only in our minds, but that doesn’t mean that we can consciously shape them. Ideals are formed unconsciously by what we pay attention to.¹¹ How do we know where to direct our attention? By recognising the Sovereignty of Go(o)d.

In commemoration of the short-lived Hegelian E-girl Council and in the spirit of co-operation with our immaterial brethren, I asked ChatGPT 3.5 to explain how Murdoch differs from Hegel. I think it did a pretty reasonable job:

Unlike Hegel’s dialectical system, which synchronises contradictions, Murdoch presents the Good as an ideal that always remains beyond reach but exerts a magnetic pull on our moral consciousness. Moral progress, for her, is not a historical or collective achievement but an individual struggle towards greater attentiveness.

But does ChatGPT 3.5 really understand Hegel? Do any of us?¹² Blake Smith’s elucidation of the thought of Judith Butler’s erstwhile teacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, suggests that an anti-totalitarian reading of Hegel is possible:¹³

[W]e are invited to contemplate the unbridgeable distance between our ideas and the world, and our unending but never wholly successful attempts to reduce that distance, in an attitude of ironic tolerance

Intrigued, I googled “post-hegelianism” and found this sentiment echoed in an abstract of the concluding chapter of Terry Pinkard’s Hegel's Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, delightfully titled Hegel as a Post-Hegelian:

Philosophy shows both how we are committed to certain things, such as modern rights and morality, and how these bring certain tensions with them. The only reconciliation philosophy offers is a reconciliation to the necessity of these commitments and their tensions, not a reconciliation of the tensions themselves. It is also hopeless to think that any state can overcome any of these tensions. The modern agent must therefore become an “amphibian” who lives within all those tensions. To be a successful amphibian also means to exercise something like Aristotle's conceptions of the virtues. Wholeness can be partially achieved in art and religion, and philosophy can achieve a theoretical but not practical wholeness. Hegel is thus not a philosopher of totality, and his dialectical approach is, in an important sense, open‐ended.

With the advent of neoliberalism, the avatar of Western esotericism shifted from the guru to the shaman: from teacher to healer. Esotericism used the involve instruction in spiritual exercises such as the techniques and rituals of secret societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Nowadays it boils down to visiting a sangoma or a therapist to feel your feelings until there is nothing left to feel.

The need for integration is a key tenet of those “working with plant medicine” and other forms of neoshamanism. Jung’s dictum Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate (derived form Freud’s Where id was, there ego shall be) has somehow got vulgarised into a promise of psychic wholeness through healing one’s (intergenerational) trauma.¹⁴

But if we take the medical metaphor seriously, are we not forced to admit that not all wounds can be healed, that what doesn’t kill me doesn't always make me stronger, that we lose parts of ourselves that we can never get back, that life is ultimately a process of disintegration?

We are not Gods, Murdoch’s Socrates tells Plato. Everything doesn’t connect. There can be no marriage between Heaven and Hell: the divorce is final, the differences irreconcilable.

And yet…

1. Or Themselves, for the zoomer-brained.

2. You can expect to be be stuck in this stage for approximately 99.7% of the lifetimes you’ll take to reach Enlightenment.

3. Kim Petras joke for my long-suffering gen z bf.

4. Since I have already alluded to my past as a crystal girlie, I might as well cop to following Peterson back in his Genesis era (you can blame the meth-induced brain damage if you’d like).

Why did I fall for Daddy Peterson? Obvious Freudian explanation is obvious, but I think it’s because he was the rare “public intellectual” with a serious interest in Jung. I was a bright kid who had been exceptionally poorly educated by the vestigial institutions of Afrikaner Calvinism amid vibes of the apocalypse (quite literally: a teacher who was regularly privy to visions straight out of the Book of Revelations informed us during a high school assembly that the reason that the country escaped a full-scale civil war after the fall of Apartheid was that God heeded the prayers of South Africans and directed the evil spirits northwards, inadvertently resulting in the Rwandan genocide). Having firmly rejected these bronze age beliefs, but feeling burned out by my autodidactic forays into existentialism (many such cases), I was ripe to be seduced by Grand Theories of Everything — especially when delivered by a charismatic speaker (which is why YouTube was the perfect medium for Peterson).

The most insightful critique of Peterson at his best was offered by Tanner Greer back in 2018:

Peterson’s “careful comparative analysis” of world mythology and religious imagery is built almost entirely on the writings of Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade. There are a few other writers thrown in, but those two get the lion’s share of his citations.  This is entirely inadequate. If you are hoping to build a universal moral system through analysis of the great faith traditions and surviving myths of ancient civilization, you need to delve deeper than two idiosyncratic mid-20th century scholars. Peterson’s direct engagement with mythological and religious primary source material is limited to the Near East: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, and the Abrahamic offshoots. His discussion of Greek, Norse, Indian and Far Eastern religion (with quotations from an outdated Dao De Jing  translation excepted) are all mediated through Eliade. His take on Christianity relies too much on Nietzsche, and even his discussion of the Mesopotamia mostly derives from scholarship and translations from the 1960s.

The scholarship might have been fifty years out of date, but it was new to me — as it was to a lot of people, judging by Peterson’s meteoric rise. However, Greer’s prophecy of Peterson being defeated by superior learning appears terribly naïve in retrospect:

[…] inevitably we will be graced with a devastating invective of some left-leaning historian of religion or folklore who will not only be eager to demolish Peterson, but will know more about comparative religion than he does. When that day comes, the thinness of Peterson’s bibliography will come to haunt him. I can only hope that this reckoning does not destroy the Peterson project entirely. 

The Peterson project was not destroyed. Peterson himself was almost destroyed by the Swarm, but lived to become the Batman villain it also wanted him to be. Who will have the last laugh? Peterson seems to have assembled his own League of Doom (forgive me if I’m mixing up comic book lore) and we now have close to half the US population actively cheering for the weird party.

Lectures available from Peterson Academy.

Was the Intellectual Dark Web the equivalent of A Course in Miracles for disaffected young men in the Internet era?

[Speaking of psyops, Scott Alexander links to an insinuation about the mysterious founder of bitcoin. There also appears to be attempts to lure fash-curious Americans to repopulate Central Europe. I do not know whether the Fantasy Right was purposefully created (either directly or as a reaction to the Fanatasy Left) to make actual politics impossible or whether it just happened that way. As I keep saying, the problem is not only with the number of manipulative agents around, but also with the number of people desperate to be manipulated.]

John Pistelli has long teased a Sontag/Paglia play: may I suggest adding Peterson in a farcical adaptation of Sartre’s No Exit? Huis Clos Deux: C’est toujours les autres.

5. All direct quotes are my translations from Attente de Dieu. I have not fact-checked Weil’s key to all mythologies, because that would be beside the point. But I would be interested to find out how her theories compare to those of other perennialists.

6. Weil differs from other scholars who consider the Phoenicians to be a Semitic people. Also, unlike those who used the Curse of Ham to justify the transatlantic slave trade, Weil does not include Sub-Saharan Africans under the descendants of Ham.

7. It would be a mistake to accept Weil’s equation of Judaism with tribalism and Christianity with universalism, as each of these traditions contain plenty of both. Her niece, Sylvie Weil, writes in an introduction to Awaiting God:

Simone Weil, a Jew who became a Christian mystic, was certain that the Gospels owned nothing to Judaism. Yet her own obsession with charity may well have come from the traditions passed down by her Jewish ancestors, and her concepts of compassion, and love of one’s neighbour, had much in common with those of the rabbis of the Talmud, for whom charity, tzedakah, was the most important of all commandments.

I don’t know much about the Kaballah, but I also would’t be surprised to discover syncronicityies with Weil’s wilder speculations.

8. People give Yuval Noah Harari a lot of shit for his grand theories of everything, but Sapiens deserves credit for driving home the Landian point that humanity’s every step out of the cave has been a bloody one: the eradication of at least five other species of the homo genus, the brutal domestication of farm animals, the extinction of large fauna across the Americas and successive waves of conquest and enslavement across the globe.

9. The Netflix series KAOS starring Jeffery Goldblum as Zeus, Janet McTeer as Hera and Nabhaan Rizwan as Dionysus, got off to a promising start, but my interest quickly tapered off as the focus shifted from the delightfully wicked gods to the tediously righteous humans. Although the Catholic and Islamic aesthetics of the temples to Hera invite us to consider the rebellion against the gods as a paean to humanism, a Straussian reading implies that we are the gods who are about to be replaced by our more politically correct creations.

The pairing of Sam Kriss’s retrospective on Girls with John Pistelli’s review of Honor Levy’s My First Book and Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel suggests that Lena Dunham was the voice of the last fully human generation. Which makes her destruction by the Swarm, if not justified, then at least poetically apt. Dunham’s attempts at exorcising shame through exposure were no match for the digital furies. Our Nietzsche-wielding overlords have designed a perpetual resentment machine which we are now all plugged into by default. You can opt out, of course, its just a digital nudge, no-one is forcing you to stew in resentment. All you need to do is lay down the axe that you have to grind. Just don’t expect your enemies to do the same.

10. I alluded to this connection between Dionysus and Christ in response to the hysterical reaction to the Olympic opening ceremony.

11. Talking about attention, everyone’s favourite psychoanalyst Adam Phillips provides insight into why, although we all know the Internet, as Sam J eloquently put it, “thrums with human shame”, we still find it so difficult to extricate ourselves:

This explains why, although I’m sometimes still a bit embarrassed to be gay, I’m not ashamed of it. Wondering if I would have been happier straight is like wondering if I would have been happier as a dolphin. But writing on Substack has caused me to feel an exquisite degree of shame, because a writer is something that I feel that I could be, or could have been. And therein lies the rub.

Shame is Pride’s cloak says the Proverb of Hell. We may perhaps add: Pride is Shame in drag.

12. By the way, I think those engaged in the rather tedious debates about AI art should consider the distinction that Murdoch draws between fantasy and imagination. Like any mediocre artist, AI has plenty of the former but none of the latter (for now at least). A fantasy is nothing but a copy of someone else’s imagination.

13. Smith sees the possibility of a queer liberalism in Gadamer’s suggestion that we are all perverts:

The real world as it exists in opposition to the ‘truth’ of the law is thus perverted. Things do not occur in it in a way that would correspond to the ideas of an abstract mathematician or a moralist. Indeed, the live reality of it consists precisely in its perversion.

I really like this less damning spin on the doctrine of original sin! May it inject some libido into liberalism and protect us from the Integralists and from the intersectional feminist state.

14. As long as you don’t expect it to cure all your spiritual ailments, practices like yoga and “forest bathing” (ie going for a walk outside) are indeed beneficial to body and soul. Even astrology and tarot have their uses. What is more pernicious are the neopuritanical beliefs that have emerged despite (or because of) this anything-goes approach to the transcendent.

I appreciate Dan William’s point that there is no "woke mind virus" and that the pathogen metaphor precludes a constructive engagement with ideas we disagree with, but what are we to make of a statement of faith (and implicit call to martyrdom) such as There is no Queer liberation without Palestinian liberation which I’ve seen plastered all over London? In a conversation with Daniel Oppenheimer recorded in the before times, Naomi Kanakia expressed her bafflement that trans people in the US were willing to risk a Trump presidency and the loss of hard-won legal rights to “protest” Biden’s failure to protect Palestinian lives. Now the vibes have shifted: Kamala is sufficiently queer-coded — since she is brat and Charli is a queer icon even if she’s straight: as evidenced by the colabs with literal queers like billie eilish (“Charli likes boys but she know’s I’d hit it” she says on the remix of Guess) and Troye Sivan — so the girlies, gays and theys can rest assured that once Mother is elected all will be well. None of this makes any sense, of course, but that doesn’t matter: we have exited the era of sense and entered the era of sensibility. Plan accordingly.