Very smart and very interesting Mary Jane. I really appreciate the exchange and agree that the dichotomy I'm proposing may well be too narrow. Nice post.
Thanks, this is great! Occultist comics writer Alan Moore (one of the distant models for Simon Magnus) has a good anecdote from one of his magical workings that stresses the importance of the "ironic" in spirituality and echoes Murdoch on pride. (The context of his anecdote is a public correspondence in the '90s—including much discussion of William Blake, Kabbalah, etc.—with a self-published Canadian cartoonist later famed as a men's rights type misogynist pundit, but that's another story...) One reason I prefer literature as my esoteric tradition is because its creators seem likelier to understand the following than many prophets, preachers, gurus, etc., whether monotheist, secular, or spiritual:
"In Tiphareth [the sphere of Kabbalah where Moore locates Blake] the virtue is "Dedication to the Great Work," which would take too long to explain, and the vice is "pride."
"My probably imperfect understanding of what is meant by pride in this context came during a magical exploration of the sixth sphere, undertaken as usual with one of my similarly minded associates, in this instance a musician. At one point during the event, I got carried away with a self-serving monologue on how special and wonderful creative people were, completely opiated by my own marvellousness. At this point, my glazed and trancing companion spoke for the first time in twenty minutes, making a single, gnomic utterance: "A gold pig."
"As soon as he'd said it he looked puzzled, told me that the phrase had just popped into his head, and advised me to ignore it as meaningless, which of course I was unable to do. It struck me, at the time, as a perfect image of the pride of artists: a gold pig. Flashy, brilliant. and valuable, but also vaguely squalid, absurd. and tasteless. It seemed to me that creators should not confuse themselves with whatever light comes through them. At best, they can take comfort in the clarity and lucidity of the window that their work lets the light into the world by. They can try not to block the light with their own shadow, they can try to widen their window or aperture, and they can take satisfaction in their success at this. But they are not the light."
If we're sticking with Kabbalah, from the Ein Sof. Since the Ein Sof has no attributes, though, it's not a satisfying answer to the linear linguistic rational mind...
(Thinking more on my comment, I didn't mean to imply writers—of all people!—were humbler than prophets etc., but that the humility of irony is built into literature as it's not into other discourses.)
Very smart and very interesting Mary Jane. I really appreciate the exchange and agree that the dichotomy I'm proposing may well be too narrow. Nice post.
Thanks, this is great! Occultist comics writer Alan Moore (one of the distant models for Simon Magnus) has a good anecdote from one of his magical workings that stresses the importance of the "ironic" in spirituality and echoes Murdoch on pride. (The context of his anecdote is a public correspondence in the '90s—including much discussion of William Blake, Kabbalah, etc.—with a self-published Canadian cartoonist later famed as a men's rights type misogynist pundit, but that's another story...) One reason I prefer literature as my esoteric tradition is because its creators seem likelier to understand the following than many prophets, preachers, gurus, etc., whether monotheist, secular, or spiritual:
"In Tiphareth [the sphere of Kabbalah where Moore locates Blake] the virtue is "Dedication to the Great Work," which would take too long to explain, and the vice is "pride."
"My probably imperfect understanding of what is meant by pride in this context came during a magical exploration of the sixth sphere, undertaken as usual with one of my similarly minded associates, in this instance a musician. At one point during the event, I got carried away with a self-serving monologue on how special and wonderful creative people were, completely opiated by my own marvellousness. At this point, my glazed and trancing companion spoke for the first time in twenty minutes, making a single, gnomic utterance: "A gold pig."
"As soon as he'd said it he looked puzzled, told me that the phrase had just popped into his head, and advised me to ignore it as meaningless, which of course I was unable to do. It struck me, at the time, as a perfect image of the pride of artists: a gold pig. Flashy, brilliant. and valuable, but also vaguely squalid, absurd. and tasteless. It seemed to me that creators should not confuse themselves with whatever light comes through them. At best, they can take comfort in the clarity and lucidity of the window that their work lets the light into the world by. They can try not to block the light with their own shadow, they can try to widen their window or aperture, and they can take satisfaction in their success at this. But they are not the light."
https://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2015/09/correspondence-from-hell-part-2.html
Brilliant anecdote! But where does the light come from?
If we're sticking with Kabbalah, from the Ein Sof. Since the Ein Sof has no attributes, though, it's not a satisfying answer to the linear linguistic rational mind...
(Thinking more on my comment, I didn't mean to imply writers—of all people!—were humbler than prophets etc., but that the humility of irony is built into literature as it's not into other discourses.)