Se trata de un mito bien acreditado, ya Aristoteles creia que el hombre de talento podia reconocerse por su extravagante locura.
Esta idea de que el creador es una especie distinta al común de los humanos y que tenia conexión directa con la divinidad a través
de su daimon, ha sobrevivido hasta hace recietemente poco, es decir hasta que los psiquiatras hemos podido observar si en
los creadores prevalece la condición de la locura, la hipótesis se ha sometido al escrutinio de la ciencia y no ha resistido las evidencias.
La supuesta melancolía de Schumann, el trastorno bipolar de Sócrates o de Van Gogh, la esquizofrenia de Holderlin, al alcoholismo de Allan Poe,
la sífilis de Goya, etc, ¿son condición para el talento o son más bien una remora?.
Este Weltschmerz que se expresa de muchas formas, no solamente es una forma crítica que acompaña a la modernidad, creo que es una de sus expresiones más necesarias y reveladoras”, escribió Bartra en El duelo de los ángeles, su imprescindible ensayo sobre la dispar relación con la melancolía en tres paradigmas del pensamiento de Occidente: Kant, Weber, Benjamin. A la filosofía, a la antropología, a las ciencias, les toca entenderse con ese universo oscuro, el reino sin límites entre el genio y la locura; mientras tanto, el arte lo expresa, lo abraza, se desmorona con él y dibuja sus ángeles, sus sombras, su dolor, su
desesperación, su fascinación. Tal como lo percibió el genio de Goya: el sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Pero la razón trabaja a medias cuando se empeña en ignorar los monstruos.
Berlín, mayo 2006
La verdad es que no existen respuestas unívocas, ni tampoco determinismo alguno, la locura puede llegar a producir un genio o quizás,
el genio frente a tanta realidad malsana, llegue a la locura.
GENIO Y LOCURA
POR RAQUEL BUZNEGO (PSICOLOGA)
Observamos, en no pocas ocasiones, que el lenguaje cotidiano, confunde genio y superdotado; sin embargo ambas personas se sitúan en polos radicalmente opuestos.
La tarjeta de identidad del genio consiste en su talento creativo, rompedor, innovador. En cambio en pruebas de inteligencia obtiene un CI entre 110 y 130. El superdotado se caracteriza por un elevado rendimiento intelectual, en las pruebas psicométricas un sujeto es considerado como tal cuando su rendimiento supera un CI de 130-135.
La distinción entre genio y superdotado no sólo se refiere al distinto grado de rendimiento obtenido en las escalas psicométricas sino al tipo de inteligencia. En el superdotado prevalece la inteligencia fluida, especializada en los procesos de aprendizaje, registro de información y aporte de soluciones rápidas a problemas. En el genio prevalece la inteligencia cristalizada que le permite novedosas asociaciones conceptuales vividas o inventadas. Las ideas racionales se enriquecen con intuiciones, fantasías y elaboraciones inconscientes.
Los genios y los superdotados suelen transitar por vías diferentes. Puede ocurrir que se asocie una inteligencia superdotada con un talento creativo, sin embargo esta asociación es muy poco frecuente. En las aulas, el genio, puede ser considerado como un estudiante de baja calidad, un sujeto extraño que muestra desinterés por la enseñanza reglada.
Suele caracterizarse la personalidad del genio por un sometimiento a oscilaciones periódicas ya que su vitalidad presenta una frecuente inestabilidad que se manifiesta como un movimiento pendular que le lleva de la inacción a la exuberancia creativa.
Con frecuencia su producción se vincula a ciertos momentos del día y del año. La productividad circadiana suele ser más intensa en las mañanas y en las noches. La mayor productividad circanual se produce en primavera y verano.
Debido a estas diferencias el superdotado es socialmente considerado como el triunfador nato, mientras el genio es, o puede ser, objeto de recelo, desconfianza, incomprensión y, en no pocas ocasiones, tildado de loco.
Un genio que merece consideración especial es el idiota sabio o, más propiamente dicho, el genio subnormal. Este sujeto suele poseer una memoria portentosa acompañada de aportaciones creativas inimaginables dado su bajo CI (entre 70 y 75 ). La mayor parte de la producción de estos genios se da en el campo de la música, la escultura y el cálculo matemático.
Se desconoce la fuente de esta creatividad pero probablemente se deba a mecanismos que se ponen en funcionamiento debido al aislamiento social y/o sensorial, forzando a la mente a habilitar vías especiales.
Entre la genialidad también caben distinciones, a grandes rasgos podemos hablar de genialidad científica y genialidad artística.
El genio científico se caracteriza por los siguientes rasgos: descubridor de paradigmas, creatividad como producto del esfuerzo y la tenacidad, personalidad más equilibrada, desarrollo de la creatividad en la edad adulta y actitud escasamente narcisista.
En cuanto a las características del genio artístico cabe distinguir: creador de mundos y formas, pensamiento dominado por la fantasía, personalidad alterada, desarrollo de la creatividad en la infancia y fuerte componente narcisista.
Existe una tercera figura en discordia, radicalmente diferente a las anteriores, pero frecuentemente confundido con ellos: el Sabio.
El sabio tiene gran facilidad para el aprendizaje de conocimientos, producto de la agudeza de observación y/o percepción, una gran asimilación de la experiencia, mentalidad abierta, consideración de todas las opciones posibles y capacidad de resolución de problemas.
La sabiduría se va acumulando con el paso de los años, es un modo especial de cognición, una especie de metaconocimiento producto de una personalidad paciente, madura y generalmente altruista.
El genio deslumbra por sus creaciones, el sabio por su brillante equipamiento, producto de una personalidad paciente, madura y generalmente altruista. Es maestro del aprendizaje convencional.
Genio, sabio, superdotado, tres figuras brillantes, excepcionales, seductoras.
Radicalmente diferentes, pero igualmente atractivas.?
Aristóteles - Problema XXX
Newton lastimosamente abandona el campo de la ciencia, por un tiempo, y se dedica a cuestiones teológicas, donde en 1693 cae en una profunda melancolía, se referían a "la locura de Newton"
"Si desarrolláramos una raza de Isaac Newton, esto no seria progreso, pues el precio que tuvo que pagar Newton por ser un intelecto supremo, fue que era incapaz de amistad, amor, paternidad y muchas otras cosas deseables. Como hombre fue un fracaso, como monstruo un soberbio".
Aldous Huxley
Aquí estoy yo, Leopoldo María Panero
hijo de padre borracho
y hermano de un suicida
perseguido por los pájaros y los recuerdos
que me acechan cada mañana
escondidos en matorrales
gritando porque termine la memoria
y el recuerdo se vuelva azul, y gima
rezando a la nada por temor.
“En la cárcel se rompe la odiosa dicotomía entre lo público y lo privado, se rompe con la odiosa estructuración social del aislamiento. Por ello es el único lugar donde es posible la amistad. Una amistad que dura lo que dura el tiempo de prisión (...) La cárcel es el útero materno. Y fuera de él, el Yo se fortalece y empieza, por tanto, la guerra más inútil y más sangrienta. La guerra por ser Yo, para lo que haría falta que el Otro no existiera. Esto es lo que origina el intercambio de humillaciones que, más que un intercambio mercantil, es lo que estructura la sociedad actual.”
“El sufrimiento es la vida entera. Creo que todos somos máquinas de sufrir, joder. Pero algunos no aceptan el sufrimiento por miedo a sufrir ellos también. El sufrimiento es algo prohibido. Porque la injusticia mayor es estar loco. Y, en definitiva, ser o no ser loco es tener o no tener amigos.”
Son palabras de Leopoldo María Panero, uno de los poetas vivos españoles con más prestigio universal. Son palabras del Loco de Mondragón, interno en sanatorios psiquiátricos desde su juventud.
¿Hasta qué punto la poesía y la sensibilidad hacia el horror de Panero son fruto de la enfermedad de su mente, cuando nos hace vibrar así a los que nos creemos cuerdos? ¿Hasta qué punto la esquizofrenia que sufre no es una virtud para tomar distancia sobre la aceptación de la realidad convenida?
Y, la pregunta más terrible, si es compatible la genialidad y la locura ¿no tendrá una que ver con la otra?
Algo así debió pensar Roger Waters cuando escribió Shine on You crazy Diamond para su admirado amigo y cofundador de Pink Floyd, Syd Barret, que también acabó encerrado de por vida en un psiquiátrico:
Recuerda cuando eras joven, cuando brillabas como el sol. ¡Brilla ahora, loco diamante! Hoy hay algo en tus ojos, como agujeros negros en el cielo. Quedaste atrapado en el fuego cruzado de la infancia y el estrellato, templado en la brisa del acero. Vamos, objeto de las risas ajenas. Vamos, extraño, leyenda, mártir ¡brilla ahora!
Alcanzaste el secreto demasiado pronto y lloraste por la luna ¡Brilla ahora, loco diamante! Asustado por las sombras de la noche, indefenso ante la luz del día ¡Brilla ahora, loco diamante! Dejaste de ser bien recibido, con precisión aleatoria, y cabalgaste sobre la brisa del acero. Vamos, loco delirante. Vamos, loco visionario. Vamos, pintor, músico, prisionero ¡Brilla!
sanguinyol
Visitant
El genio y la locura
« el: 12 de Mar de 2008, 01:33:17 »
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Introducción del libro El Genio y la Locura por Philippe Brenot
"Entonces, doctor, ¿según usted todos los novelistas, hombres y mujeres, son unos
neuróticos?" pregunta André Maurois en Tierra de promisión. "Para ser más exactos –
responde-, todos serían unos neuróticos si no fueran novelistas... La neurosis hace al
artista y el arte cura la neurosis."
El gran misterio del genio y la locura aparece como un prejuicio que Maurois resume
mediante esta elegante fórmula de la neurosis que hace el artista. No se debe olvidar que
Tierra de promisión es una novela moralista que publicó en 1943, entre una larga serie
de biografías de hombres ilustres: la de Shelley (1923), Disraeli (1927), Byron (1931),
Marcel Proust (1949), George Sand (1952), Victor Hugo (1955) y Balzac(1965). Esta
mirada de historiador y biógrafo parece conducirlo a la evidencia de la originalidad del
proceder artístico.
La cuestión del genio y la locura es antigua; ya Aristóteles la plantea en un texto
célebre, el Problema XXX, al que recientemente se le ha añadido el subtítulo El hombre
genial y la melancolía. Se pregunta en esencia por qué los hombres excepcionales son
con tanta frecuencia melancólicos. Por melancolía, Aristóteles no sólo entendía esa
tristeza soñadora vinculada a la imagen del artista que reaparecerá en el Renacimiento o
en la época del romanticismo, sino también esa noción antigua de la mezcla de los
humores que marca la naturaleza de la personalidad. Más tarde Diderot, recuperando la
idea de Aristóteles, formulará ese lugar común –el genio cercano a la locura- que los
primeros psiquiátras someterán a discusión en el siglo XIX. Esta "diferencia" de los
seres fuera de lo común es una idea ampliamente extendida, según la cual el creador, el
genio, es un inadaptado, un excéntrico, una persona inestable, obsesionada por su obra
y, en caso extremo, rayana en la locura.
Al mismo tiempo se plantean otros interrogantes -¿qué es el genio? ¿qué es la locura?-
que hacen que esta reflexión resulte particularmente delicada. ¿Qué imagen tenemos del
genio? ¿La del héroe puro al que se rinde culto? ¿La del don divino de las aptitudes
innatas? ¿Y de la locura? ¿Qué tipo de locura? ¿El delirio, la depresión? ¿Cómo nos
representamos nuestra propia locura?
Ahora bien, cuando la visión de la cultura se acerca a la de la medicina, desconfiemos
de esa manía de los médicos de ver enfermos por doquier. Recientemente he podido
conocer estudios médicos muy serios sobre la patología de los grandes hombres, que
harían sonreír si redujéramos la imagen que tenemos de ellos a esos albures de la salud
muy naturales en cada uno de nosotros. Me refiero a la nefrítis de Mozart, al reuma de
Cristóbal Colón, al "accidente" de Ravel, a la ceguera de John Milton, a los vértigos de
Lutero, a la dermatosis de Oscar Wilde, al párkinson de Hitler, al asma de Séneca, a la
anorexia de Kafka, al alzheimer de Swift, a la dislexia de Dickens...Todas estas
supuestas afecciones –en algunos casos probadas- tienen un fundamento, pero en
definitiva no explican ni la vida ni la obra. Las mismas críticas deben aplicarse a los
afectos y al ámbito mental; en ningún caso la obra puede reducirse a una patología. El
arte o el genio proceden de múltiples componentes que siempre conservarán una parte
de misterio.
Sin embargo, esta vieja idea del parentesco entre genio y locura encuentra en la
actualidad argumentos de respuesta en una nueva concepción psiquiátrica de los
trastornos del humor, que ilumina el misterio de la creatividad y enriquece la lectura
psicoanalítica del movimiento creativo. La obra parece nacer de una sabia mezcla de la
dificultad del ser y un factor energético constitucional, el mismo que ha animado a
todos los creadores de universos, a todos los aventureros de lo imposible, poetas,
magos, profetas, pintores, inventores, músicos, políticos... Rimbaud, Schumann,
Goethe, Van Gogh, Mozart, Hemingway, Balzac, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Miguel Angel,
Rousseau, Simenon, Picasso...
Así, biografías, autobiografías y patobiografías nos proporcionan testimonios directos,
análisis y opiniones psiquiátricas que corroboran la intuición de Aristóteles. La
exaltación creadora es íntima de la melancolía, hermana de la depresión e hija de la
manía, pero también pariente cercana de la locura cuando la obra ya no consigue
contener todos los afectos. Entonces esa lectura sin concesiones de los destinos fuera de
lo común nos lleva a conclusiones sorprendentes: el humor genial parece distribuirse de
un modo muy desigual entre las artes del lenguaje (poesía, literatura) y las artes no
verbales ( plásticas y musicales).
Las primeras se encuentran a escasa distancia de los trastornos mentales, la depresión es
uno de sus mecanismos. El escritor nace a partir de sí mismo y adopta un seudónimo.
La escritura es un crimen para aspirar a la existencia.
Las segundas tienen pocos vínculos con la locura, la depresión no es muy frecuente en
ellas y resulta sorprendente constatar que prácticamente ningún pintor ni músico utilizan
seudónimo. ¿Acaso la literatura es como una fruta prohibida? ¿Acaso la vista y el oído
protegen de la locura?
Al margen de las críticas que puede provocar –y que provocará- semejante análisis de
los seres excepcionales, la coherencia de los hechos es suficientemente explícita para
suscitar la reflexión y aceptar la evidencia de un factor propio del genio, que yo he
llamado "factor humano" y de una función social que calificaré de "función chamánica"
pues la originalidad del proceder creador presenta innumerables puntos en común con
ese papel provocador y catalizador de la sociedad que el chamán desempeña en aquellas
tribus nómadas del mundo antiguo que todavía hoy subsisten como un testimonio del
origen, como un resto fósil de los cazadores-recolectores de los que nosotros somos los
últimos herederos.
El genio domina los siglos y trasciende la humanidad. Es una herencia de nuestra
historia y continúa siendo uno de los grandes interrogantes de nuestro espíritu.
HISTORIA DE UNA IDEA
"¡Cuán parecidos son el genio y la locura! –afirma con seguridad Diderot-. Aquellos a
los que el cielo ha bendecido o maldecido están más o menos sujetos a estos síntomas,
los padecen con más o menos frecuencia, de manera más o menos violenta. Se les
encierra o encadena, o bien se les erigen estatuas." Esta vieja idea de la proximidad, o
del parentesco entre el genio y la locura nos llega en forma de sentencia convertida en
lugar común por la pluma del enciclopedista. Sin embargo, no es más que una larga
sucesión de préstamos de la idea original de Aristóteles, que encuentra cierta validez a
lo largo de los siglos y de la experiencia repetida . ¿Qué es el genio? ¿Qué es la locura?
¿Y en qué están íntimamente unidos?
Se trata de un mito bien acreditado, ya Aristoteles creia que el hombre de talento podia reconocerse por su extravagante locura. Esta idea de que el creador es una especie distinta al común de los humanos y que tenia conexión directa con la divinidad a través de su daimon, ha sobrevivido hasta hace recietemente poco, es decir hasta que los psiquiatras hemos podido observar si en los creadores prevalece la condición de la locura, la hipótesis se ha sometido al escrutinio de la ciencia y no ha resistido las evidencias. La supuesta melancolía de Schumann, el trastorno bipolar de Sócrates o de Van Gogh, la esquizofrenia de Holderlin, al alcoholismo de Allan Poe, la sífilis de Goya, etc, ¿son condición para el talento o son más bien una remora?.
Este Weltschmerz que se expresa de muchas formas, no solamente es una forma crítica que acompaña a la modernidad, creo que es una de sus expresiones más necesarias y reveladoras”, escribió Bartra en El duelo de los ángeles, su imprescindible ensayo sobre la dispar relación con la melancolía en tres paradigmas del pensamiento de Occidente: Kant, Weber, Benjamin. A la filosofía, a la antropología, a las ciencias, les toca entenderse con ese universo oscuro, el reino sin límites entre el genio y la locura; mientras tanto, el arte lo expresa, lo abraza, se desmorona con él y dibuja sus ángeles, sus sombras, su dolor, su
desesperación, su fascinación. Tal como lo percibió el genio de Goya: el sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Pero la razón trabaja a medias cuando se empeña en ignorar los monstruos.
Berlín, mayo 2006
La verdad es que no existen respuestas unívocas, ni tampoco determinismo alguno, la locura puede llegar a producir un genio o quizás, el genio frente a tanta realidad malsana, llegue a la locura.
GENIO Y LOCURA
POR RAQUEL BUZNEGO (PSICOLOGA)
Observamos, en no pocas ocasiones, que el lenguaje cotidiano, confunde genio y superdotado; sin embargo ambas personas se sitúan en polos radicalmente opuestos.
La tarjeta de identidad del genio consiste en su talento creativo, rompedor, innovador. En cambio en pruebas de inteligencia obtiene un CI entre 110 y 130. El superdotado se caracteriza por un elevado rendimiento intelectual, en las pruebas psicométricas un sujeto es considerado como tal cuando su rendimiento supera un CI de 130-135.
La distinción entre genio y superdotado no sólo se refiere al distinto grado de rendimiento obtenido en las escalas psicométricas sino al tipo de inteligencia. En el superdotado prevalece la inteligencia fluida, especializada en los procesos de aprendizaje, registro de información y aporte de soluciones rápidas a problemas. En el genio prevalece la inteligencia cristalizada que le permite novedosas asociaciones conceptuales vividas o inventadas. Las ideas racionales se enriquecen con intuiciones, fantasías y elaboraciones inconscientes.
Los genios y los superdotados suelen transitar por vías diferentes. Puede ocurrir que se asocie una inteligencia superdotada con un talento creativo, sin embargo esta asociación es muy poco frecuente. En las aulas, el genio, puede ser considerado como un estudiante de baja calidad, un sujeto extraño que muestra desinterés por la enseñanza reglada.
Suele caracterizarse la personalidad del genio por un sometimiento a oscilaciones periódicas ya que su vitalidad presenta una frecuente inestabilidad que se manifiesta como un movimiento pendular que le lleva de la inacción a la exuberancia creativa.
Con frecuencia su producción se vincula a ciertos momentos del día y del año. La productividad circadiana suele ser más intensa en las mañanas y en las noches. La mayor productividad circanual se produce en primavera y verano.
Debido a estas diferencias el superdotado es socialmente considerado como el triunfador nato, mientras el genio es, o puede ser, objeto de recelo, desconfianza, incomprensión y, en no pocas ocasiones, tildado de loco.
Un genio que merece consideración especial es el idiota sabio o, más propiamente dicho, el genio subnormal. Este sujeto suele poseer una memoria portentosa acompañada de aportaciones creativas inimaginables dado su bajo CI (entre 70 y 75 ). La mayor parte de la producción de estos genios se da en el campo de la música, la escultura y el cálculo matemático.
Se desconoce la fuente de esta creatividad pero probablemente se deba a mecanismos que se ponen en funcionamiento debido al aislamiento social y/o sensorial, forzando a la mente a habilitar vías especiales.
Entre la genialidad también caben distinciones, a grandes rasgos podemos hablar de genialidad científica y genialidad artística.
El genio científico se caracteriza por los siguientes rasgos: descubridor de paradigmas, creatividad como producto del esfuerzo y la tenacidad, personalidad más equilibrada, desarrollo de la creatividad en la edad adulta y actitud escasamente narcisista.
En cuanto a las características del genio artístico cabe distinguir: creador de mundos y formas, pensamiento dominado por la fantasía, personalidad alterada, desarrollo de la creatividad en la infancia y fuerte componente narcisista.
Existe una tercera figura en discordia, radicalmente diferente a las anteriores, pero frecuentemente confundido con ellos: el Sabio.
El sabio tiene gran facilidad para el aprendizaje de conocimientos, producto de la agudeza de observación y/o percepción, una gran asimilación de la experiencia, mentalidad abierta, consideración de todas las opciones posibles y capacidad de resolución de problemas.
La sabiduría se va acumulando con el paso de los años, es un modo especial de cognición, una especie de metaconocimiento producto de una personalidad paciente, madura y generalmente altruista.
El genio deslumbra por sus creaciones, el sabio por su brillante equipamiento, producto de una personalidad paciente, madura y generalmente altruista. Es maestro del aprendizaje convencional.
Genio, sabio, superdotado, tres figuras brillantes, excepcionales, seductoras.
Radicalmente diferentes, pero igualmente atractivas.?
"Si desarrolláramos una raza de Isaac Newton, esto no seria progreso, pues el precio que tuvo que pagar Newton por ser un intelecto supremo, fue que era incapaz de amistad, amor, paternidad y muchas otras cosas deseables. Como hombre fue un fracaso, como monstruo un soberbio".
Aldous Huxley
Un acontecimiento que influyó negativamente fue la locura de Newton.
Una época en la que debido a la muerte de su madre Newton cayó en una depresión que le hizo llegar a
desinteresarse por la ciencia.
La cuestión del genio y la locura es antigua; ya Aristóteles la plantea en un texto
célebre, el Problema XXX, al que recientemente se le ha añadido el subtítulo El hombre
genial y la melancolía. Se pregunta en esencia por qué los hombres excepcionales son
con tanta frecuencia melancólicos. Por melancolía, Aristóteles no sólo entendía esa
tristeza soñadora vinculada a la imagen del artista que reaparecerá en el Renacimiento o
en la época del romanticismo, sino también esa noción antigua de la mezcla de los
humores que marca la naturaleza de la personalidad. Más tarde Diderot, recuperando la
idea de Aristóteles, formulará ese lugar común –el genio cercano a la locura- que los
primeros psiquiátras someterán a discusión en el siglo XIX. Esta "diferencia" de los
seres fuera de lo común es una idea ampliamente extendida, según la cual el creador, el
genio, es un inadaptado, un excéntrico, una persona inestable, obsesionada por su obra
y, en caso extremo, rayana en la locura.
Newton lastimosamente abandona el campo de la ciencia, por un tiempo, y se dedica a cuestiones teológicas, donde en 1693 cae en una profunda melancolía, se referían a "la locura de Newton"
En 1699 fue nombrado Guardián de la Casa de la Moneda. Desde 1703 hasta su muertefue presidente de la Royal Society. Fue nombrado también caballero , por la Reina Ana.
Murió en 1727, y su cuerpo estuvo presente en la cámara de Jerusalén.
A pesar de toda su inteligencia, Newton no era un ser perfecto, era irritable, y muy reservado, de pocas palabras pero con grandes avances. En 1671 intento publicar sus Opticas, pero se horrorizo al pensar en la controversia que podría causar so documento.
"No se lo que puedo parecer al mundo, pero para mi mismo, solo he sido como un niño, jugando a la orilla del mar, y divirtiéndome al hallar de vez en cuando un guijarro mas suave o una concha mas hermosa que de costumbre, mientras que el gran océano de la verdad permanecía sin descubrir ante mi"
"Si desarrolláramos una raza de Isaac Newton, esto no seria progreso, pues el precio que tuvo que pagar Newton por ser un intelecto supremo, fue que era incapaz de amistad, amor, paternidad y muchas otras cosas deseables. Como hombre fue un fracaso, como monstruo un soberbio".
Aldous Huxley
La frontera entre genialidad y locura
"El genio no es un enfermo mental, pero, en caso de serlo, sabe aprovechar sus brotes para crear cosas fantásticas"
MÓNICA L. FERRADO - Barcelona - 27/04/2007
Vota Resultado 7 votos
Demócrito se quitó la vista para poder pensar con mayor lucidez y crear la teoría sobre la estructura del átomo. Fue tachado de loco. En el cerebro de Albert Einstein había anomalías estructurales en el lóbulo izquierdo que podrían estar relacionadas con la genialidad del creador de la teoría de la relatividad. El poeta Antonin Artaud, que sufría trastorno bipolar, dirigió el laboratorio de experimentación de los surrealistas, empeñados en desentrañar y aprovechar al máximo los mecanismos del cerebro y de la locura -Dalí y su método paranoico-crítico es uno de sus exponentes-. Son bien conocidos los trastornos mentales del genial pintor Vicent Van Gogh, del matemático John Nash -que inspiró la película Una mente maravillosa- y del compositor Robert Schumann.
La noticia en otros webs
webs en español
en otros idiomas
Son muchos los ejemplos de genios cuyo cerebro muestra características diferentes al resto de los mortales, y que incluso han tocado la locura. Así pues, ¿dónde está la frontera entre genialidad y enfermedad? A esta pregunta intentaron dar respuesta Francisco Mora, catedrático de Fisiología Humana de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, y Vicenç Altaió, escritor, traficante de ideas y director del KRTU, organismo dependiente de la Administración catalana para promover la creación artística, como ponentes del debate ¿Genialidad o enfermedad, dónde está la frontera?, que el martes organizaron el Aula EL PAÍS y la Dirección de Promoción de la Cultura Científica del Instituto de Cultura de Barcelona dentro de las actividades del programa Barcelona Ciencia 2007.
Ni todos los genios están locos, ni todos los locos son genios, coincidieron los dos ponentes. Según Mora, "el genio es una persona con extraordinarias capacidades, focalizadas en alguna materia, y con capacidad para alumbrar ideas abstractas nuevas y expresarlas, es decir, de crear". Mora puntualizó que existen personas con buenas ideas, aunque no serían considerados como genios: "el genioide es el que puede concebir ideas, pero no puede expresarlas. El talento lo tiene el que puede acabar creando".
En cuanto al mito sobre la relación entre genialidad y enfermedad mental, Mora dejó claro: "el genio no es un enfermo, hay de todo, aunque es cierto que en el caso de existir enfermedad, sabe aprovechar sus brotes de locura para crear cosas fantásticas". Esta tesis viene apoyada por estudios que han permitido ver que "las facultades creadoras ya existen antes de manifestarse la enfermedad".
Vicenç Altaió incidió también en que otro tipo de enfermedades físicas también pueden dar otra percepción del mundo y puso un ejemplo. "Proust, debido a la alergia que tuvo de niño [síndrome de EPOC], nunca más pudo llevar una vida normal. Se dice que su genialidad se debe a su necesidad de recrear algo que él nunca más podría sentir". Incluso algunas extravagancias, como la de Demócrito a la hora de cegarse, pueden tener su explicación: "Hay que cerrar los ojos para ver el átomo en abstracto".
Según Francisco Mora, existe una base genética del genio, aunque se ha investigado poco. Del mismo modo, el ambiente es fundamental: "En la selva, aislados, un Mozart o un Einstein hubiesen sido como chimpancés. Hay que tener en cuenta que el 75% de nuestro cerebro se hace con el ambiente". La creatividad está asociada también con el conflicto emocional. "La insatisfacción es lo que empuja al genio a crear, y eso tiene un fundamento neurológico", explicó Mora. Vicenç Altaió observó que en catalán hay dos palabras diferentes para la locura, foll y boig, "algo muy acertado, porque foll afectaría a la psicopatología del alma, y boig sería el enfermo mental". A juicio de Altaió, el interés por el cerebro desde el punto de vista creativo se debe a que cada época lleva su prótesis corporal: "El siglo XX-XXI está en el cerebro, igual que el romanticismo estuvo en el corazón".
ON MOZART sinfonia 41, JUPITER , la mas grande
465
Woody Allen once said that Mozart's Symphony 41 proved the existence of God. Certainly, a symphony of such grandness and scale had, until the summer of 1788, never before been seen in the musical universe. Its implications for the direction of music in the future, and its influence on future composers is immeasurable. What makes Mozart's Jupiter symphony worthy to share the name of the most powerful god of the Roman world?
The answer to this question comes in the Molto Allegro, and more specifically in its coda, (8:09-8:36). In the coda, Mozart takes the five musical themes or melodies that had been developed throughout the final movement, and does something that no one has ever achieved to the extent that he did, not even the illustrious Beethoven.
What Mozart does is take these five themes and combines them to create a fugato in five-part counterpoint. That is, he takes the five melodies and simultaneously plays them in a variety of combinations and permutations. Imagine five separate melodies, all with their own notes, being played simultaneously, but each constantly changing. It's impossible for the human ear to focus on the enormous amount of notes that this simultaneous playing and constant changing entails. The effect is that the music seems to encompass an infinite amount of sound. With lesser two or three-part fugues, it is occasionally possible to sense everything that is going on. Once you get to four voices, it's nearly impossible to detect all of the nuances of the melodies. With five, well, only God could completely grasp its profundity.
This is Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra performing the Molto Allegro of Mozart's Symphony 41 in C Major.
A far greater introduction to this piece than I provide can be found at NPR's website, if you follow this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
In the audio clip, you will get the chance to hear the five melodies that Mozart used in the coda individually.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's last symphony, the Jupiter Symphony (No. 41), was written along with two other, full-length symphonies in the summer of 1788 -- in just six weeks. Mozart had recently been idolized all over Europe for operas such as Don Giovanni and for his spectacular performances of his own piano concertos.
Statue of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Salzburg, Jan. 26
Getty Images
But, by most accounts, Mozart was near the bottom when he wrote it: broke and in debt. His audiences had become interested in other composers. Austria was at war with Turkey. And his newborn daughter had just died.
Still, Mozart was determined to do something revolutionary. That comes in the final movement of the Jupiter Symphony with the composer's use of counterpoint, or weaving together two or more different melodies. Mozart uses five different melodies simultaneously in the Jupiter, making it a challenge for any orchestra that takes it on.
Some have said the Jupiter sums up what had happened in symphonic music up to that point, and that it foreshadows the work of Beethoven. But more than that, it's exuberant and introspective, charming and complicated -- a lot like life itself.
If I Could Have Met Mozart...
Answers to the question: "If you could have met Mozart, what would you ask him or say to him?"
"Oh God, there'd be so many things to talk about. I'd want to talk about him about his beliefs, about religion and whether he felt comfortable writing for the church, because I feel it's very significant that his two greatest church compositions are both left unfinished: the great C Minor Mass and the Requiem. Was it simply pressure of work, or constraints of time or health that prevented him from completing both of these pieces? Or did he, in a way, come across some huge great roadblock which made it hard for him to set to music those difficult words in the credo, in the "I Believe" section of the mass. [The words are] about the resurrection of the dead and the life in the world to come and the holy Catholic Church, which he doesn't set to music in C Minor Mass."
-- Conductor John Eliot Gardiner
Aside from asking him how he ever found time to sleep, I suspect I'd be star-struck in the first moment. But then, as a conductor, I would to ask him questions about performance practice: his tempos, his articulations, dynamic ranges, tone production, ensemble sizes and musical gestures. As a 21st-century citizen, I'd want to know what he thinks about the music of today, in all its myriad expressions. But perhaps the most important question, which would answer all the others, would be simply to ask him to play for us.
-- Conductor Elizabeth Schulze
I would first of all say thank you, for all the fantastic music. Then, I'd play him a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, to get his reaction. Then I'd play him Wagner's Die Walkeure; then I'd play him Verdi's Falstaff. Then Schoenberg's five pieces for orchestra. I'd love to know what direction his mind would want to go, musically.
-- NPR Producer Tom Huizenga
La soledad del genioLos biógrafos de Mozart establecieron muy
pronto una relación lógica entre la desgracia en
la que Mozart cayó al final de su vida, y su
celebridad de niño prodigio. No sólo se admiró
al joven Mozart y a su hermana como fenómenos
que los músicos ponían a prueba, que analizaban
los filósofos y que mimaban las princesas de una
parte de Europa. Su propia existencia aparecía
como una emanación de la gracia divina, acorde
con la noción, aun muy arraigada en esa época,
de lo milagroso. El espíritu del gran público
estaba particularmente dispuesto a exaltar la
imagen del niño prodigio. Los últimos años del
músico, el divorcio creciente entre las conven¬
ciones del lenguaje musical de su tiempo y el estilo
que le era propio no podían contrarrestar esta
visión limitada. En la medida en que eligió, en
la mitad de su vida, su libertad de expresión per¬
sonal, la soledad de Mozart fue cada vez mayor.
Lo que la posteridad considera un salto cualitativo
sólo suscitó, entre sus contemporáneos, extrañeza
e incomprensión.
Las óperas y la música de cámara, sobre todo,
provocaron hostilidad. Haydn, que hacía evolu¬
cionar la música galante hacia el cuarteto de
cuerda clásico, aparece como un conciliador: sabe
hacer plausible el nuevo género para los conoce¬
dores y los aficionados. Mozart, tan próximo a
Haydn en la escritura del cuarteto de cuerda, debe
afrontar vivas críticas. Así, en 1782, en el Musi¬
kalischen Kunstmagasin, el influyente compositor
berlinés Johann Friedrich Reichardt reprocha
abiertamente a la música instrumental de Mozart
el hecho de ser "altamente antinatural", puesto
que "primero es jubilosa, pero de repente triste
y, con la misma brusquedad, alegre nuevamente".
Según Nissen (uno de los primeros biógrafos
del músico), Anton Hoffmeister, editor y com¬
positor amigo de Mozart, remitió a éste los hono¬
rarios de los cuartetos para piano y cuerda (K. 478
y K. 493), que se vendían mal, rogándole encare¬
cidamente que no compusiera los otros cuartetos
previstos en el contrato, con la siguiente recomen¬
dación: "Escribe siguiendo el género popular, si
no yo no puedo pagar ni imprimir nada para ti."
A esta incomprensión es posible oponer el
juicio célebre dirigido en' febrero de 1785 por
Joseph Haydn a Leopold Mozart (precisamente
después de haber oído el último y más audaz de
los cuartetos que Mozart le había dedicado, las
"Disonancias", K. 465): "Se lo digo ante Dios,
como hombre honrado, su hijo es el más gran
compositor que conozco personalmente o de
nombre: tiene buen gusto y, además, la más aca¬
bada ciencia de la composición." Entre las exi¬
gencias de su arte y lo que esperaba el público,
el genio de Mozart no encuentra, en su tiempo,
lugar alguno. Un destino que, en cierto modo,
comparte con Goethe. ¿Por qué? Porque su genio,
igualmente inmenso, representa un intento
análogo de acceder a la historicidad, pero minán¬
dola al mismo tiempo desde el interior. Conflicto
que desemboca en un renunciamiento, teórico y
práctico; el escritor decide no publicar el Segundo
Fausto, sin embargo concluido. Se niega, en vida,
a entregar a sus contemporáneos su preocupación
central.
¿Fausto y Don Juan, dos viajeros hacia el
infierno y, por ende, dos hermanos espirituales?
¿Y Mozart y Goethe? ¿Contemporáneos más allá
de su época, ayer y hoy? Allí reside tal vez el
secreto de su profunda actualidad. No se debería
a esa naturaleza humana superior, trascendente,
que se ha atribuido tantas veces a uno y otro, sino
que obedecería, mucho más, a la energía con la
que ambos inauguran la época moderna
Madrid no hacía más que reflejar la situación
general en Europa. Si la muerte del autor de
Las bodas de Fígaro lo arroja a la fosa común
de los ignorados, en 1809 las exequias de Haydn
convocan a toda la vida oficial vienesa, incluida
la guardia de honor del ejército de ocupación
napoleónico.
La grandeza de Mozart resplandece eternamente. Si una
determinada generación dejase de prestarle atención, ¿qué
importaría? Las leyes de la belleza son siempre las mismas y
una moda pasajera sólo podría empañarlas poco tiempo. ¿Ha
alcanzado nuestra época el alto nivel necesario para apreciar
a Mozart? ¿Tenemos hoy en día la sutileza y la sana
ingenuidad que se requieren para comprender
verdaderamente a Mozart?
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
compositor noruego
artículo sobre Mozart und seme Bedeutung fur die musikalische Gegenwart, publicado
el 21 de enero de 1906 en la Neue Freie Press en Viena
¿Para qué sirven los físicos?
30/05/2006 Fco. José Gutiérrez Martínez
Haciendo gala de su fino sentido del humor, Francisco J. Martínez explica en este texto en qué consiste su labor como físico en la consultoría. Con introducción de J. A. Carrión.
Hace dos años tuve la satisfacción y el honor de haber sido invitado a la de las Bodas de Plata de la promoción 1974-79 de físicos de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Universidad de Zaragoza de la que fui profesor. Ha sido esta una promoción singular en la que la mayor parte de los entonces estudiantes ocupan hoy altos cargos en muy diversos destinos. Precisamente, el primer acto de la celebración de su aniversario consistió en una reunión en la Sala de Grados de la Facultad en la que cada uno dispuso de cinco minutos para contar su vida profesional.
Una de las intervenciones, la de Francisco José Gutiérrez Martínez, merece ser conocida ya que define con precisión, seriedad y extraordinario sentido del humor, qué es y para qué sirve un físico, sin necesidad de hacer comentarios posteriores. Por ello, con su consentimiento, la transcribo literalmente.
¿Quién es D. Francisco José Gutiérrez Martínez? Es Director General TEA CEGOS DEPLOYMENT, el resto será él quien os lo diga...
J. A. Carrión.
Buenos días a todos.
Cuando hace un mes aproximadamente Jesús González Gago me comprometió sin derecho a réplica, a que preparara una explicación sobre mi trabajo, con la premisa de no sobrepasar bajo ningún pretexto los cinco minutos de exposición, no pensé que el encargo pudiera ser tan complejo como finalmente me ha resultado, pues de entrada, he tenido que preparar mi intervención para leerla, porque de no ser así, seguro que sobrepasaría largamente el poco tiempo estipulado.
Intentaré pues ceñirme estrictamente al guión.
Mi primer oficio, cuando finalmente conseguí salir vivo de los 14 meses de mili en Melilla (sin duda los más desagradables y baldíos de toda mí vida), fue el de consultor, aunque en aquel entonces, en la multinacional francesa a la que pertenecía, a mi oficio se le conocía como: experto nuclear, nivel III en ensayos no destructivos. En la actualidad sigo siendo consultor y, con singular constancia en este oficio que nunca he interrumpido, creo haber recorrido paulatinamente a lo largo de estos 25 años todos los peldaños de una evolución profesional bastante coherente.
Tras pertenecer a varias compañías y desempeñar distintas responsabilidades funcionales, en la actualidad, probablemente como último tramo de esa escalera profesional a la que me he referido, aunque sigo siendo consultor, ejerzo de director general de una firma que yo mismo fundé hace ya algunos años.
A partir de esta breve introducción, permitidme que hable de mi madre.
• Aún hoy… mi madre sigue estando preocupada porque no entiende bien como me gano la vida.
• Aún hoy… mi madre sigue sin tener nada claro cuál es mi profesión.
• Aún hoy… mi madre sigue sorprendiéndome frecuentemente con una profunda reflexión:
- Pero tu hijo mío, ¿realmente en qué trabajas? Ricardo es médico, Joaquín es arquitecto o Jesús es farmacéutico, y está bien claro como se ganan la vida… pero contigo, no soy capaz de explicarlo. Cuando me preguntan en qué trabaja “tu chico”, no se muy bien que contestarles porque yo misma tampoco lo entiendo. ¿Cómo te pueden contratar bancos, hospitales o fábricas para que les aconsejes lo que tienen que hacer? ¿Qué puede saber un físico de esas cosas?
No lo entiendo, la verdad, me comenta mi madre al menos cada navidad sin mostrar demasiada esperanza en que mis explicaciones de siempre, logren desvanecer sus dudas de siempre.
Hoy, este sábado de junio, mi madre está de suerte, porque aprovechando nuestra celebración y este comprometido encargo de explicar en no más de cinco minutos mi profesión, le haré llegar una fotocopia de estos folios y dispondrá así de algunos argumentos más para poder contestar, cuando en los cafés con sus amigas… casi todas viudas y agraciadas con hijos dentistas o abogados (y en consecuencia de oficio definido y conocido), le sigan preguntando: Por cierto Josefina, ¿en qué me dijiste que trabaja el chico?
Como ya os había adelantado antes de acordarme de mi madre, soy y siempre he sido, consultor. Mi especialidad en este oficio de aconsejar a organizaciones, empresas y directivos sobre lo que deberían hacer, es el desarrollo e implantación de modelos de gestión soportados por metodología TQM.
Como este foro es de total confianza, (y como además mi madre va a tener una fotocopia de estos papeles), me permito declarar abiertamente y sin muestra alguna de pudor, que dentro de esta especialidad soy experto en “el diseño de estrategias competitivas focalizadas en el cliente”. Seguramente, ahora buena parte de vosotros estéis ya comenzando a comprender muy bien a mi madre.
Especialista en el desarrollo e implantación de modelos de gestión soportados por metodología TQM, experto en el diseño de estrategias competitivas focalizadas en el cliente
(Hay que ver lo que impresiona cuando lo ves escrito). Seguramente, ahora buena parte de vosotros no sólo ya estéis comenzando a comprender muy bien a mi madre si no que incluso también empezáis a entender las dudas de sus amigas, y en estos momentos ya os estéis preguntando:
¿Cómo es posible que alguien se pueda ganar la vida con un oficio, como este que os acabo de anunciar?
Siento mucho no disponer de tiempo suficiente como para resolveros, aquí y ahora, esta duda, la verdad es que ya no dispongo de tiempo ni tan siquiera para intentar justificaros que mi oficio no es ilegal; ahora, ya solo tengo un minuto para concluir esta breve intervención respondiendo a otra cuestión, que estimo más importante y que además estoy seguro que la mayoría de vosotros (al igual que mi madre desde hace 25 años), también os estaréis planteando ahora:
¿Qué hace un físico en una profesión como esta?
Os daré mi opinión, lentamente fraguada y repetidamente contrastada a lo largo de los años.
• Ser físico te capacita para ser un excelente profesional en cualquier campo al que la vocación o la casualidad te derive.
• Ser físico te proporciona una excepcional preparación universitaria para poder abordar cualquier proyecto laboral independientemente de la especialidad de la que se trate.
• Ser físico te cualifica para aspirar a cualquier posición ejecutiva dentro de cualquier organización y en cualquier sector productivo.
Cuando un crío de 20 años es capaz de comprender la importancia de las variables complejas expresadas mediante el alfabeto griego… y no se entrega a la bebida para olvidar…
Cuando un chaval de 20 años es capaz de asumir la importancia del cálculo de la probabilidad que tiene un electrón de encontrarse en un determinado espacio y momento… y no tiene que recurrir a las anfetaminas para recuperarse…
Cuando un muchacho de 20 años es capaz de entender la importancia de la ecuación de Schrödinger con sus bonitas laplacianas al cuadrado… y no termina integrado en una secta psicodélica para superarlo...
…es indudable que ese joven de 20 años está preparado para superar los más ambiciosos retos laborales.
En suma, opino que cuando en plena juventud (casi en la adolescencia vista desde hoy):
• Se es capaz de intuir la criticidad de la fuerza de Coriolis para que el mundo siga dando vueltas…
• Se es capaz de apreciar la relevancia de los conceptos de entropía y entalpía, o de la interacción de la luz y la materia…
• Se es capaz de comprender que sin el estudio de las aberraciones cromáticas o sin el desarrollo de la física cuántica, la humanidad no habría llegado hasta aquí…
Y además, se es capaz de todo eso sin claras manifestaciones de enfermedad psicológica alguna (“sin enfermar”, que dicen en mi pueblo)…
Ese joven os garantizo que está excepcionalmente preparado para desempeñar cualquier trabajo.
Todos nosotros, que durante aquellos años tuvimos la fortuna de convivir, sin desmayar, sin abandonar (y sin enfermar), con Einstein, Planck, Schrödinger o Pauli, estábamos preparados para el éxito profesional tan bien como los mejores… pero ¡ojo! con una gran ventaja sobre todos ellos: que nosotros además lo podíamos demostrar en cualquier profesión.
A lo largo de estos 25 años he contratado a psicólogos, ingenieros o biólogos, he trabajado con mba’s de Boston, químicos de Sarria, ingenieros de Icai o economistas de Deusto, y lo que puedo confesaros desde mi experiencia… es que cada día que pasa sigo confirmándome más en la opinión de que ser físico es un verdadero lujazo, de que los físicos somos gente muy preparada, gente capaz, y es por ello por lo que cada día me siento más orgulloso de haber compartido con vosotros estas aulas (aunque alguno ahora me recordará en voz baja que yo de asistir a las aulas más bien poco).
Antes de concluir en exactamente 5 minutos, quiero aprovechar esta excepcional ocasión para agradecer públicamente a mi madre la mucha paciencia que tuvo entonces conmigo y con mi escaso ritmo de papeletas anuales, lo que me permitió la gran suerte de ser hoy vuestro colega.
También quiero agradeceros a todos vosotros, después de 25 años, vuestra ayuda de aquel entones, y vuestra compañía de hoy.
Muchas gracias y felicidades.
Fco. José Gutiérrez Martínez
Home Legal case Menu W. J. Sidis Biography The Tribes and the States
Where Are They Now?
April Fool!
by Jared Manley (pseud. of James Thurber) 1
The New Yorker, Saturday, August 14, 1937, 22-26.
One snowy January evening in 1910 about a hundred professors and advanced students of mathematics from Harvard University gathered in a lecture hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to listen to a speaker by the name of William James Sidis. He had never addressed an audience before, and he was abashed and a little awkward at the start. His listeners had to attend closely, for he spoke in a small voice that did not carry well, and he punctuated his talk with nervous, shrill laughter. A thatch of fair hair fell far over his forehead and keen blue eyes peered out from what one of those present later described as a "pixie-like" face. The speaker wore black velvet knickers. He was eleven years old.
As the boy warmed to his subject, his shyness melted and there fell upon his listeners' ears the most remarkable words they had ever heard from the lips of a child. William James Sidis had chosen for the subject of his lecture "Four-Dimensional Bodies." Even in this selective group of erudite gentlemen, there were those who were unable to follow all the processes of the little boy's thought. To such laymen as were present, the fourth dimension, as it was demonstrated that night, must indeed have perfectly fitted its colloquial definition: "a speculative realm of incomprehensibly involved relationships." When it was all over, the distinguished Professor Daniel F. Comstock of Massachusetts Institute of Technology was moved to predict to reporters, who had listened in profound bewilderment, that young Sidis would grow up to be a great mathematician, a famous leader in the world of science.
William Sidis, who at the age of eleven made the front pages of newspapers all over the country, was a Harvard student at the time. To explain how he got there, we must look at his father, the late Boris Sidis. Born in Kiev in 1868, the elder Sidis had come to this country, learned English, and gone to Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1894. His specialty was that branch of psychotherapy which engages to alleviate the nervous diseases and maladjustments by mental suggestion. He wrote a book called "The Psychology of Suggestion," and he was greatly interested in experiments in transmitting suggestion by means of the hypnotic state. It was his belief that in its very first years the brain is many times more susceptible to impressions than in later life. When his son was born in 1898, he was born, so to speak, into a laboratory. Boris Sidis by the time was running a psychotherapeutic institute in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was an admirer and friend of the late William James, and he named his son after that great psychologist.
Boris Sidis began his experiments on his son when little William was two years old. It appears that he induced a kind of hypnoidal state by the use of alphabet blocks. The quick results he got delighted his scientific mind. The child learned to spell and to read in a few months. Within a year he could write both English and French on the typewriter. At five he had composed a treatise on anatomy and had arrived at a method of calculating the date on which any day of the week had fallen during the past ten thousand years. Boris Sidis published several papers in scientific journals describing his baby's achievements. At six, the little boy was sent to a Brookline public school, where he astounded his teachers and alarmed the other children by tearing through seven years of schooling in six months. When he was eight years old, William proposed a new table of logarithms, employing 12 instead of the usual 10 as the base. Boris Sidis published a book about his amazing son, called "Philistine and Genius," and got into Who's Who in America.
The wonder child was going on nine when his father tried to enroll him at Harvard. He could have passed the entrance examinations with ease, but the startled and embarrassed university authorities would not allow him to take them. He continued to perform his wonders at home, and began the study of Latin and Greek. He was not interested in toys or in any of the normal pleasures of small children. Dogs terrified him. "If I see a dog," William told somebody at this time, "I must run away. I must hide. I like the cat. I can't play out, for my mother would have to be there all the time?because of the possibility that I might see a dog." His chief recreation seems to have been going on streetcar rides with his parents. The elder Sidis explained transfers to him and interested him in the names of streets and places. Even before he was five, William had learned to recite all the hours and stations on a complex railroad timetable. He would occasionally recite timetables for guests as other children recite Mother Goose rhymes or sing little songs. Those who remember him in those years say that he had something of the intense manner of a neurotic adult.
In 1908, at the age of ten, William James Sidis was permitted to enroll at Tufts College, in Medford. He commuted daily from Brookline with his mother, who was as interested in his phenomenal mental development as his father was. They always went to and from the college on streetcars. The youngster attended Tufts for one year and finally, in 1909, when he was eleven, Harvard permitted him to enroll there as a special student. He matriculated as a regular freshman the following year, and thus became a member of the class of 1914. Cotton Mather, in 1674, had become a Harvard freshman at the age of twelve, and it is probably because of this distinguished precedent that William Sidis was allowed to matriculate at that same age. He was a source of wonder to his fellow students and to the faculty; some of the newspapers assigned reporters to cover "the Sidis case."
Just how William was prevailed upon to speak before the learned scholars in January of his first year at Harvard is lost to the record, but it is known that he took an eager interest in hearing others lecture and joined easily in group discussions of metaphysics. In his spare time he began to compose two grammars, one Latin, the other Greek. The pressure of his studies and his sudden fame began to tell upon him, however, and it wasn't long after his notable discourse that he had a general breakdown. His father was running a sanatorium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the time, and William was rushed off there. When finally he came back to Harvard, he was retiring and shy; he could not be persuaded to lecture again; he began to show a marked distrust of people, a fear of responsibility, and a general maladjustment to his abnormal life. He did not mingle much with students and he ran from newspapermen, but they cornered him, of course, on the day of his graduation as a Bachelor of Arts in 1914. He was sixteen years old. He wore long trousers then, and he faced the reporters who descended on the Yard with less of a feeling of embarrassment than he had as a knickered child. But definite phobias had developed in him. "I want to live the perfect life," William told the newspapermen. "The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds." For "crowds" it was not difficult to read "people." Among those who graduated with William James Sidis that day were Julius Spencer Morgan; Gilbert Seldes; and Vinton Freedley and Laurence Schwab, the musical-comedy producers. The reporters paid no attention to them.
At sixteen, William James Sidis was a large boy, and when he entered Harvard Law School, he was no longer the incongruous figure he had been. The newspapers had little interest in his comings and goings. He attended law school quietly for three years and was apparently a brilliant student, but his main interest was mathematics, and in 1918 he accepted a teaching position at a university in Texas. His fame preceded him, but even if it hadn't, the extreme youth of this mathematics instructor would have been enough to set him off as a curiosity. He found himself the centre of an interest that annoyed and dismayed him. He suddenly gave up his position and returned bitterly and quietly to Boston, where he lived obscurely for some months.
It was on May 1st, 1919, that young Sidis's name reached the front pages of the newspapers again. With about twenty other young persons, he took part in a Communistic demonstration in Roxbury and was hauled into the municipal court as one of the ringleaders of the group, as, indeed the very individual who had carried the horrific red flag in their parade. On the witness stand, Sidis proved to be more forthright and candid than tactful. He announced to a shocked court that there was for him no god but evolution; asked if he believed in what the American flag stands for, he said only to a certain extent. At one point he launched on an explanation of the Soviet form of government, for the instruction of the magistrate. His Marxist leaning had developed over a period of several years. When the United States entered the war, he had announced himself as a conscientious objector, and on several occasions had delivered himself of the opinion that the troubles of the world were caused by capitalism.
A policeman who had helped break up the parade of the radicals identified Sidis as the man who had carried the red flag. The officer said that he had asked Sidis why he was not carrying the American flag, and that Sidis had replied, "To hell with the American flag!" Returning to the stand, the famous prodigy hotly denied that he had ever spoken to the witness and that he had ever said to anyone, "To hell with the American flag!" He repeated that he was opposed to war and that he believed in a socialized form of government. After a pause, he announced that, as a matter of fact, he had carried an American flag, whereupon, to the amazement of the courtroom, he pulled a miniature American flag from his pocket. He was sentenced to eighteen months in jail for inciting to riot, and assault. He appealed, and while out on bail of $5,000 disappeared from the state in which he had startled erudite professors and shocked patriotic policemen. It marked the beginning of a new and curious mode of life for the young man.
For five years after that, William James Sidis seems to have achieved the "perfect life" he had spoken of on the day of his graduation, the life of seclusion. Apparently he drifted from city to city, working as a clerk, or in some other minor capacity, for a salary only large enough for him to subsist on. In 1924 he was dragged back into the news when a reporter found him working in an office in Wall Street, at twenty-three dollars a week. He was dismayed at being discovered. He said all he wanted was to make just enough to live on and to work at something that required a minimum of mental effort. The last few reporters who went down to his office to interview him didn't get to see him. He had quit his job and disappeared again.
Two years later, in 1926, Dorrance & Company, a Philadelphia publishing house which prints "vanity" books?that is, books published at the authors' expense?got out a volume called "Notes on the Collection of Transfers." It was written by one Frank Folupa. Frank Folupa, some pitilessly ingenious reporter discovered, was none other than William James Sidis. Again he was run down and interviewed. He announced that he had been for a long time a "peridromophile"?that is, a collector of streetcar transfers. He had coined the word himself. His book (now out of print) ran to three hundred pages and was a scholarly and laborious treatise on the origin, nature, and classification of nothing more nor less than the slips of paper streetcar conductors hand to passengers when they ask for transfers. Many a psychologist and analyst must have been interested to read in the papers that the genius of the precocious child who had astounded the academic world sixteen years before had flowered in this bizarre fashion. The book is worthy of examination. Sidis wrote a preface to the volume, which began this way: "This book is a description of what is, so far as the Author is aware, a new kind of hobby, but one which seems on the face of it to be as reasonable, as interesting, and as instructive as any other sort of collection fad. This is the collection of street car transfers and allied forms. The Author himself has already collected over 1600 such forms." The preface revealed, in another place, that the Author was not without a certain humor. "We may mention," it read, "the geographical and topographical interest, both in the exploration and in the analysis of the transfers themselves. There is also the interesting sidelights which such a collection throws on the politics in which transit companies are necessarily involved; though we hardly recommend that this political interest be carried far enough to induce the collector to take sides in any such disputes. And again: "One may derive much amusement out of transfers?It is said that a Harvard College student got on a street car and, wishing an extra ride, asked the conductor for a transfer. When asked 'Where to?' he said, 'Anywhere.' The conductor winked and said, 'All right. I'll give you a transfer to Waverly.' The student was afterwards laughed at when he told the story, and was informed that the asylum for the feeble-minded was located at Waverly." Sidis also included in his preface some verses he had written when he was fourteen years old. They begin:
From subway trains at Central,
a transfer get, and go
To Allston or Brighton or
to Somerville, you know;
On cars from Brighton transfer
to Cambridge Subway east
And get a train to Park Street,
or Kendall Square, at least.
"We know," the Author concludes, "someone who was actually helped to take the right route by remembering a snatch from one of these verses." The book discusses all kinds of transfers: standard types, Ham type, Pope type, Smith type, Moran type, Franklin Rapid transfers, Stedman transfers. Of the last (to give you an idea), Mr. Sidis wrote, "Stedman transfers: This classification refers to a peculiar type turned out by a certain transfer printer in Rochester, N. Y. The peculiarities of the typical Stedman transfer are the tabular time limit occupying the entire right-hand end of the transfer (see Diagram in Section 47) and the row-and-column combination of receiving route (or other receiving conditions) with the half-day that we have already discussed in detail."
The year after his book came out (it apparently sold only to a few other peridromophiles), Sidis came back to New York City and once again got a job as a clerk with a business firm. To his skill and experience in general office work, the mathematical genius had now added, ironically, the ability to operate an adding machine with great speed and accuracy, and was fond of boasting of this accomplishment. He lived at 112 West 119th Street, where he made friends with Harry Freedman, the landlord, and his sister, a Mrs. Schlectien. Sidis is no longer with them and they will not tell you where he has gone, but they will forward any mail that comes for him. They are fond of the young man and appreciate his desire to avoid publicity. "He had a kind of chronic bitterness, like a lot of people you see living in furnished rooms," Mr. Freedman recently told a researcher into the curious history of William James Sidis. Sidis used to sit on an old sofa in Freedman's living room and talk to him and his sister. Sidis told them he hated Harvard and that anyone who sends his son to college is a fool?a boy can learn more in a public library. Frequently he talked about his passion for collecting transfers. "He can tell you how to reach any street in any city of the United States on a single streetcar fare," said Mr. Freedman in awe and admiration. It seems that Sidis corresponds with peridromophiles in a number of other cities, and keeps up on the streetcar and transfer situation in that way. Once the young man brought down from his room a manuscript he was working on and asked Mrs. Schlectien if he might read "a few chapters" to her. She said it turned out to be a book on the order of "Buck Rogers," all about adventures in a future world of wonderful inventions. She said it was swell.
William James Sidis lives today, at the age of thirty-nine, in a hall bedroom of Boston's shabby south end. For a picture of him and his activities, this record is indebted to a young woman who recently succeeded in interviewing him there. She found him in a small room papered with the design of huge, pinkish flowers, considerably discolored. There was a large, untidy bed and an enormous wardrobe trunk, standing half open. A map of the United States hung on one wall. On a table beside the door was a pack of streetcar transfers neatly held together with an elastic. On a dresser were two photographs, one (surprisingly enough) of Sidis as the boy genius, the other a sweet-faced girl with shell-rimmed glasses and an elaborate marcel wave. There was also a desk with a tiny, ancient typewriter, a World Almanac, a dictionary, a few reference books, and a library book which the young man's visitor at one point picked up. "Oh, gee," said Sidis, "that's just one of those crook stories." He directed her attention to the little typewriter. "You can pick it up with one finger," he said, and did so.
William Sidis at thirty-nine is a large, heavy man, with a prominent jaw, a thickish neck, and a reddish mustache. His light hair falls down over his brow as it did the night he lectured to the professors in Cambridge. His eyes have an expression which varies from the ingenious to the wary. When he is wary, he has a kind of incongruous dignity which breaks down suddenly into the gleeful abandon of a child on holiday. He seems to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself, but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occasionally a curious, gasping laugh. He seems to get a great and ironic enjoyment out of leading a life of wandering irresponsibility after a childhood of scrupulous regimentation. His visitor found in him a certain childlike charm.
Sidis is employed now, as usual, as a clerk in a business house. He said that he never stays in one office long because his employers of fellow-workers soon find out that he is the famous boy wonder, and he can't tolerate a position after that. "The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill," he said. "All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won't let me alone." It came out that one time he was offered a job with the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway Company. It seems that the officials fondly believed the young wizard would somehow be able to solve all their technical problems. When he showed up for work, he was presented with a pile of blueprints, charts, and papers filled with statistics. One of the officials found him an hour later weeping in the midst of it all. Sidis told the man he couldn't bear responsibility, or intricate thought, or computation?except on an adding machine. He took his hat and went away.
Sidis has a new interest which absorbs him at the moment more than streetcar transfers. This is the study of certain aspects of the history of the American Indian. He teaches a class of half a dozen interested students once every two weeks. They meet in his bedroom and arrange themselves on the bed and floor to listen to the one-time prodigy's intense but halting speech. Sidis is chiefly concerned with the Okamakammessett tribe, which he describes as having had a kind of proletarian federation. He has written some booklets on Okamakammessett lore and history, and if properly urged, will recite Okamakammessett poetry and even sing Okamakammessett songs. He admitted that his study of the Okamakammessetts in an outgrowth of his interest in Socialism. When the May Day demonstration of 1919 was brought up by the young woman, he looked at the portrait of the girl on his dresser and said, "She was in it. She was one of the rebel forces." He nodded his head vigorously, as if pleased with that phrase, "I was the flag-bearer," he went on. "And do you know what the flag was? Just a piece of red silk." He gave his curious laugh. "Red silk," he repeated. He made no reference to the picture of himself in the days of his great fame, but his interviewer later learned that on one occasion, when a pupil of his asked him point-blank about his infant precocity and insisted on a demonstration of his mathematical prowess, Sidis was restrained with difficulty from throwing him out of the room.
Sidis revealed to his interviewer that he has another work in progress: a treatise on floods. He showed her the first sentence: "California has acquired considerable renown on account of its alleged weather." It seems that he was in California some ten years ago during his wanderings. His visitor was emboldened, at last, to bring up the prediction, made by Professor Comstock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in 1910, that the little boy who lectured that year on the fourth dimension to a gathering of learned men would grow up to be a great mathematician, a famous leader in the world of science. "It's strange," said William James Sidis, with a grin, "but, you know, I was born on April Fools' Day."
?Jared L. Manley 1
_________
1 In The Years with Ross Thurber wrote: "It was one of the 'Where Are They Now?' series, for which I did the rewrite (Grossett & Dunlap, 1957, p. 210)." But Jared Manley was Thurber's pseudonym. "Bernstein writes: 'In early 1936 Thurber began to write (really rewrite, since some of The New Yorker's best reporters, like Eugene Kinkead, were doing the research) a number of short, retrospective profiles. Bernstein also reveals that Jared L. Manley was a name that Thurber cobbled together when writing his first piece about an old boxer based on the initials of the boxer John L. Sullivan and Manley based on "the manly art of self-defense".'"—Privacy, Information and Technology
2 Norbert Weiner, who was at the math club meeting wrote: "Young Sidis, who was then eleven, was obviously a brilliant and interesting child. His interest was primarily in mathematics. I well remember the day at the Harvard Mathematics Club in which G. C. Evans, now the retired head of the department of mathematics of the University of California and Sidis's life-long friend, sponsored the boy in a talk on the four-dimensional regular figures. The talk would have done credit to a first- or second-year graduate student of any age, although all the material it contained was known elsewhere and was available in the literature. The theme had been made familiar to me by E. Q. Adams, a companion of my Tufts days. I am convinced that Sidis had no access to existing sources, and that the talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very brilliant child (Ex-Prodigy, Simon & Schuster, p. 131 - 132)."
3 Minutes of the Harvard Math Club, Wed., Jan. 5, 1910
4 Cf. The Failure Myth by Dan Mahony: "Research shows that most child prodigies go on to lead productive lives. As did Sidis."
Typing by Bill Paton
LETTER XLV
Rica to Usbeck, at * * *
YESTERDAY morning, as I lay in bed, I heard a violent knocking at my door, which was suddenly opened, or driven in, by a man with whom I have some slight acquaintance, and who appeared to me to be quite beside himself.1
His dress was, to say the least, very homely; his wig, all askew, had not even been combed; he had not had time to mend his black waistcoat; and he had, for that day, omitted the wise precautions with which he was in the habit of concealing the dilapidation of his attire.
“Rise,” he said; “I shall want you all day. I have a thousand purchases to make, and it will be a great convenience to me to have you with me. First of all, we have to go to the Rue Saint Honoré to see a notary, who is commissioned to sell an estate worth five hundred thousand livres. On my way here, I stopped a moment in the Faubourg Saint Germain, where I hired a house at two thousand crowns; I hope to sign the contract today.”
As soon as, or rather before, I was dressed, my gentleman hurried me downstairs. “Let us start,” said he, “by buying and setting up a coach.” As a matter of fact, we bought, not only a coach, but—and that in less than an hour—a hundred thousand francs’ worth of goods: all this was done with promptitude, because my gentleman haggled about nothing, kept no account, and paid no money. I reflected upon it all; and, when I examined this man, I found in him such an extraordinary mixture of indications of both wealth and poverty, that I knew not what to think. But at last I broke silence, and taking him aside, I said, “Sir, who is to pay for all this?” “Myself,” said he. “Come to my room, and I will show you immense treasures, and riches envied by the greatest kings—but not by you, because you will always share with me.” I followed him. We climbed up to his fifth storey, and by means of a ladder hoisted ourselves to a sixth, which was a closet open to all the winds, and contained nothing but two or three dozen earthenware basins filled with different liquors. “I rose very early,” he said, “and, as I have done every morning for the last twenty-five years, I paid a visit to my work. I saw that the great day had come, the day which would make me the richest man in the whole world. Do you see this ruddy liquor? It possesses at present all the qualities required by philosophers for the transmutation of metals. I have collected those grains which you see, and which are, as their colour shows, pure gold, although they are a little deficient in weight. This secret, which Nicholas Flamel discovered, but which Raymond Lully2 and a million others have sought in vain, has been revealed at last to me; and to-day I find myself a happy adept. May God grant that with the treasures which He has committed to me I may do nothing but for His glory!”
Transported with anger, I left the room, and descended, or rather threw myself down the stairs, and left this man of boundless wealth in his garret. Farewell, my dear Usbek, I will visit you to-morrow, and, if you wish, we can return to Paris together.
Paris, the last day of the moon of Rhegeb, 1713.
1 In this letter Montesquieu was probably thinking of a physician named Boudin, who imagined that he had rediscovered the secrets of the alchemists. Saint-Simon has an admirable description of this man.
2 Nicholas Flamel, a citizen of Paris (1330-1418), was regarded as an alchemist by those who envied his great fortune. Raymond Lully, a Spanish savant (1235-1315), was considered, rightly or wrongly, one of the most famous alchemists.
VOL. II.
LETTER 76
Usbek to his friend Ibben, at Smyrna
European law is dead against suicide. Those who kill themselves suffer, as it were, a second death: they are dragged with ignominy through the streets: their infamy is published, and their goods confiscated.
It seems to me, Ibben, that this law is very unjust. When I am loaded with grief, misery, and contumely, why should I be hindered from putting an end to my sufferings, and cruelly deprived of a remedy which is in my hands?
Why should I be forced to labour for a society to which I refuse to belong? Why in spite of myself, should I be held to an agreement made without my consent? Society is founded upon mutual advantage; but, when it becomes burdensome to me, what hinders me from leaving it? Life was given me as a blessing; when it ceases to be so I can give it up: the cause ceasing, the effect ought also to cease.
Will any prince require me to be his subject, if I reap none of the benefits of subjection? Can my fellow-citizens require our lots to be so unequal; theirs, usefulness—mine, despair? Will God, unlike other benefactors, condemn me to receive favours which are a burden to me?
I am obliged to obey the laws while I live under them; but, if I cease to live, can they still bind me?
“But,” some one may say, “you disturb the order of Providence. God has joined your soul to your body; in separating them, you oppose His designs and resist His will.”
What force is there in this argument? Do I disturb the order of Providence, when I alter the qualities of matter, and square a ball which the first laws of motion, that is to say the laws of creation and preservation, made round? Certainly not; I only exercise a right which has been given me; and, in that sense, I can disturb, as my fancy dictates, the whole order of Nature, without any one being able to say that I oppose Providence.
When my soul shall be separated from my body, will there be less order, less harmony, in the universe? Do you think that that new combination will be less perfect, and less dependent upon general laws; that the world would lose anything by it; that the works of God would be less great, or rather less immense?
Do you think that my body, become a blade of grass, a worm, a grass-green turf, will be changed into a work of nature less worthy of her; and that my soul, freed from all its earthly trammels, will become less sublime?
All these ideas, my dear Ibben, have their only source in our pride. We do not feel our littleness; and, however small we may be, we wish to count for something in the universe, to cut a figure there, and to be of some consequence in it. We imagine that the annihilation of such a perfect being would degrade all nature: and we cannot conceive that one man more or less in the world—what do I say?—that the whole world, that a hundred millions of worlds¹ like ours, can be more than one small frail atom, which God perceives only because His knowledge is all-embracing.
Paris, the 15th of the moon of Saphar, 1715.
¹ Cent millions de têtes in some editions. Terres seems preferable, however, as it is an anticlimax to proceed from all men to a hundred millions.
Forward
Richard Feynman
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Richard Phillip Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988)
Nacimiento 11 de mayo de 1918
Nueva York, Estados Unidos
Fallecimiento 15 de febrero de 1988
Los Ángeles, California, Estados Unidos
Residencia Estados Unidos
Nacionalidad estadounidense
Campo física teórica
Instituciones Universidad de Cornell, Instituto Tecnológico de California
Alma máter Universidad de Princeton
Supervisor doctoral John Archibald Wheeler
Estudiantes
destacados Al Hibbs
George Zweig
Mark Kislinger
Finn Ravndal
Thomas Curtright
Conocido por formular los principios de la electrodinámica cuántica y la nanotecnociencia
Sociedades Royal Society en 1965
Premios
destacados Premio Albert Einstein (Princeton) (1954),
Premio Lawrence (1962),
Premio Nobel de Física (1965),
Medalla Oersted a la Enseñanza (1972).
Cónyuge Arline Greenbaum (1942 - 1945)
Retrato de 1965.Richard Phillips Feynman (Nueva York, Estados Unidos, 11 de mayo de 1918 - Los Ángeles, California, Estados Unidos, 15 de febrero de 1988), físico estadounidense, considerado como uno de los más importantes de su país en el siglo XX. Su trabajo en electrodinámica cuántica le valió el Premio Nobel de Física en 1965, compartido con Julian Schwinger y Sin-Ichiro Tomonaga. En este trabajo desarrolló un método para estudiar las interacciones y propiedades de las partículas subatómicas utilizando los denominados diagramas de Feynman. En su juventud participó en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica en el proyecto Manhattan. Entre sus múltiples contribuciones a la física destacan también sus trabajos exploratorios sobre computación cuántica y los primeros desarrollos de nanotecnología.
Contenido [ocultar]
1 Biografía
1.1 Educación
1.2 El proyecto Manhattan
1.3 Principios de su carrera: Universidad Cornell
1.4 Los años en el Caltech
1.5 Vida Personal
1.6 Los últimos años de Feynman
2 Legado
3 Libros
4 Véase también
5 Enlaces externos
Biografía [editar]Feynman nació el 11 de mayo de 1918 en Nueva York; sus padres eran judíos, aunque no practicantes. El joven Feynman fue fuertemente influenciado por su padre (John Jesus Feynman), que le animaba a hacer preguntas que retaban al razonamiento tradicional; su madre le transmitió un profundo sentido del humor, que mantuvo durante toda su vida. De niño disfrutaba reparando radios pues tenía talento para la ingeniería. Experimentaba y redescubría temas matemáticos tales como la 'media derivada' (un operador matemático que, al ser aplicado dos veces, resulta en la derivada de una función) utilizando su propia notación, antes de entrar en la universidad. Su modo de pensar desconcertaba a veces a pensadores más convencionales; una de sus preguntas cuando estaba aprendiendo la anatomía de los felinos, durante un curso de biología universitario fue: "¿Tiene un mapa del gato?". Su manera de hablar era clara, aunque siempre con un marcado discurso informal.
Educación [editar]Richard Feynman recibió la licenciatura en el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts en 1939 y un doctorado por la Universidad de Princeton en 1942; su director de tesis fue John Archibald Wheeler. Después de que Feynman completase su tesis en mecánica cuántica, Wheeler se lo presentó a Albert Einstein, pero a éste no le convenció.
Mientras trabajaba en su tesis doctoral, Feynman se casó con Arline Greenbaum, a la que los médicos le habían diagnosticado tuberculosis, una enfermedad terminal en aquella época; dado que ambos fueron cuidadosos, Feynman nunca contrajo la enfermedad y vivió muchos años después de la muerte de su esposa.
El proyecto Manhattan [editar]En Princeton, el físico Robert R. Wilson instó a Feynman a participar en el Proyecto Manhattan, el proyecto del ejército de los Estados Unidos en Los Alamos para desarrollar la bomba atómica. Visitaba a su esposa en un sanatorio en Santa Fe los fines de semana, hasta su muerte en julio de 1945. Se volcó en su trabajo en el proyecto y estuvo presente en la prueba de la bomba en Trinity. Feynman pretendía ser la única persona que vio la explosión sin las gafas oscuras proporcionadas, mirando a través del parabrisas de un camión para protegerse de las dañinas frecuencias ultravioletas.
Como joven físico, su papel en el proyecto estaba relativamente alejado de la línea principal, consistiendo en la dirección del grupo de computación 'humana' de la división teórica, y después, con Nicholas Metropolis, instalando el sistema para usar máquinas de tarjetas perforadas de IBM para la computación. Feynman y su grupo realmente tuvieron éxito al solucionar una de las ecuaciones del proyecto que estaban escritas en las pizarras. Sin embargo, no 'hicieron la física bien' y la solución no fue usada en el proyecto.
Los Alamos estaba aislada; en sus propias palabras, "no había nada que hacer allí". Aburrido, Feynman encontró pasatiempos como abrir cajas de caudales, dejando notas graciosas para probar que la seguridad en el laboratorio no era tan buena como a la gente le hacían creer; encontró una parte aislada de la 'mesa' (Los Alamos está en una elevación) donde tocaba el tambor al estilo indio; "y tal vez bailaré y cantaré un poco". Esto no pasó desapercibido, pero nadie notó que "Injun Joe" era realmente Feynman. Se hizo amigo del cabeza del proyecto J. Robert Oppenheimer, que intentó sin éxito llevarle a trabajar a la Universidad de California, Berkeley, después de la guerra.
Principios de su carrera: Universidad Cornell [editar]Después del proyecto, Feynman empezó a trabajar como profesor en la Universidad Cornell, donde trabajaba Hans Bethe, quien había probado que la fuente de energía del Sol era la fusión nuclear. Sin embargo, se sentía sin inspiración; pensando que estaba 'quemado', se entretuvo con problemas poco útiles pero divertidos, como analizar la física del twirling. Sin embargo este trabajo le sirvió en futuras investigaciones. Quedó muy sorprendido cuando le ofrecieron plazas de profesor de universidades punteras, eligiendo finalmente trabajar en el Instituto de Tecnología de California en Pasadena, California, a pesar de serle ofrecida también una plaza en el Instituto de Estudios Avanzados cerca de la Universidad de Princeton, (en la que, en ese tiempo, estaba Albert Einstein).
Feynman rechazó el Instituto por la razón de que no había obligaciones como profesor. Feynman pensaba que sus estudiantes eran una fuente de inspiración y también, durante los periodos no creativos, de confort. Sentía que, si no podía ser creativo, al menos podía enseñar.
Feynman fue llamado algunas veces "El Gran Explicador"; tenía gran cuidado cuando explicaba algo a sus estudiantes, haciendo una cuestión de moral no hacer un tema arcano, sino accesible a otros. (...) 'Pensamiento claro' y 'presentación clara' fueron requisitos fundamentales. (...) Un año sabático, volvió a estudiar los Principia de Newton. Lo que aprendió de Newton lo transmitió a sus estudiantes, tal como el intento de Newton de explicar la difracción.
Los años en el Caltech [editar]Feynman hizo mucho de su mejor trabajo mientras estuvo en el Instituto Tecnológico de California, Caltech, incluyendo investigaciones en:
Electrodinámica cuántica. La teoría por la que Feynman ganó su Premio Nobel es conocida por su precisión. Ayudó también a desarrollar la formulación de integral de camino de la Mecánica Cuántica, en la que todos los posibles caminos de un estado al siguiente son considerados, siendo el camino real una 'suma' de todas las posibilidades.
Física de la superfluidez del helio líquido, en el cual el helio parece tener una falta total de viscosidad cuando fluye. Aplicando la Ecuación de Schrödinger al problema, observó que la superfluidez era un comportamiento cuántico observable a escala macroscópica. Esto ayudó enormemente con el problema de la superconductividad.
Un modelo de la desintegración débil (...). (Un ejemplo de la interacción débil es la desintegración de un neutrón en un electrón, un protón, y un anti-neutrino.) Aunque E.C. George Sudharsan y Robert Marshak desarrollaron la teoría casi simultáneamente, la colaboración de Feynman con Murray Gell-Mann se considera como la principal. La teoría fue de una importancia crucial, y la interacción débil fue descrita con gran precisión.
También desarrolló los diagramas de Feynman, un dispositivo de cuaderno que ayuda a entender y calcular las interacciones entre partículas en el espacio-tiempo. Este método le permitió a él, y ahora permite a otros, trabajar con conceptos que habrían sido más difíciles sin él, como la reversibilidad del tiempo y otros procesos fundamentales. Estos diagramas son ahora fundamentales para la 'Teoría de Cuerdas' y la 'Teoría-M'. (...)
A partir de sus diagramas de un pequeño número de partículas interactuando en el espacio-tiempo, Feynman intentó modelizar toda la física en términos de esas partículas, de sus espines y del acoplamiento de las fuerzas fundamentales. El modelo de los quark era el rival de la formulación del 'partón' de Feynman, y fue el ganador. Sin embargo, Feynman no luchó contra el modelo de los quarks; por ejemplo, cuando se descubrió el quinto quark, Feynman inmediatamente hizo notar a sus estudiantes que el descubrimiento implicaba un sexto quark, que fue realmente descubierto en la década posterior a su muerte.
Después del éxito de la Electrodinámica Cuántica, Feynman estudió la Gravedad Cuántica. Por analogía con el fotón, que tiene espín 1, investigó las consecuencias de una partícula sin masa de espín 2, y pudo derivar las ecuaciones de campo de Einstein de la Relatividad General, pero poco más. Desafortunadamente, en este momento llegó a estar exhausto al trabajar en muchos proyectos importantes al mismo tiempo, incluyendo sus 'Conferencias de Física'.
Durante su estancia en Caltech, se le pidió ayudar en la enseñanza de los estudiantes de licenciatura. Después de dedicar 3 años al proyecto, produjo una serie de lecturas, que se convirtieron en las famosas 'Conferencias de Física de Feynman', la mayor razón por la que Feynman es aún considerado por una gran mayoría de físicos como uno de los grandes maestros de enseñanza de la física de todos los tiempos. Posteriormente le fue concedida la medalla Oersted, de la cual estaba especialmente orgulloso. Sus estudiantes competían por su atención; una vez se despertó cuando un estudiante dejó una solución a un problema en su buzón; no pudo volver a dormir y leyó la solución propuesta. Esa mañana su desayuno fue interrumpido por otro triunfante estudiante, pero Feynman le informó que ya era demasiado tarde.
Feynman fue un influyente popularizador de la física en sus libros y lecciones, notablemente una charla en nanotecnología en 1959 llamada Hay mucho sitio al fondo. Feynman ofreció 1000 dólares en premios por dos de sus retos en nanotecnología. También fue uno de los primeros científicos en darse cuenta de las posibilidades de los computadores cuánticos. Muchas de sus lecciones fueron convertidas en libros como El Carácter de la Ley Física y Electrodinámica Cuántica: La Extraña Teoría de la Luz y la Materia (...)
Vida Personal [editar]La primera esposa de Feynman, Arline Greenbaum (Putzie) murió mientras él estaba trabajando en el proyecto Manhattan. Se casó una segunda vez, con Mary Louise Bell de Neodesha, Kansas, en junio de 1952; el matrimonio fue breve y fracasado.
Feynman se casó más tarde con Gweneth Howarth, del Reino Unido, que compartía su entusiamo por la vida. Además de su hogar en Altadena, California, tenían una casa en la playa en Baja California. Permanecieron casados el resto de sus vidas y tuvieron un hijo propio, Carl, y una hija adoptiva, Michelle.
Feynman tuvo gran éxito enseñando a Carl, usando discusiones sobre hormigas y marcianos como un método para conseguir ver problemas desde nuevas perspectivas; se sorprendió al ver que la misma manera de enseñar no servía para Michelle. Las matemáticas eran un punto común de interés para padre e hijo, y entraron en el campo de los computadores como consultores.
El Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Laboratorio de Propulsión a Chorro) retuvo a Feynman como consultor de informática para misiones críticas. Un compañero describió a Feynman como un 'Don Quijote' en su asiento, más que un físico delante de un computador, preparado para batallar con los molinos de viento.
De acuerdo al profesor Steven Frautschi, un colega, Feynman fue la única persona en la región de Altadena que contrató un seguro contra las riadas después del fuego masivo de 1978, prediciendo correctamente que la destrucción causada por el fuego ocasionaría la erosión del paisaje, causando corrimientos e inundaciones. La riada ocurrió en 1979, después de las lluvias del invierno, y destruyó muchas casas en el vecindario.
Feynman viajó mucho, notablemente a Brasil, y cerca del final de su vida planeó visitar la oscura tierra rusa de Tuvá, un sueño que debido a problemas burocráticos de la Guerra Fría nunca realizó. En esa época se le descubrió un cáncer que, gracias a una extensa cirugía, le fue extirpado.
Los últimos años de Feynman [editar]Feynman no trabajó sólo en física, y tenía un gran círculo de amigos de muchos ámbitos de la vida, incluyendo las artes. Practicó la pintura y logró cierto éxito bajo un pseudónimo, culminando con una exposición. En Brasil, con persistencia y práctica, aprendió a tocar el tambor al estilo samba, y participó en una escuela de samba. Tales acciones le dieron una reputación de excéntrico.
Feynman tenía unas opiniones muy liberales sobre la sexualidad y no le avergonzaba reconocerlo. En ¿Está Vd. de broma, Sr. Feynman? explica que realizó encargos de pintor para casas de prostitución, y de cómo frecuentaba bares de topless.
Feynman tomó parte en la comisión que investigó el desastre del Challenger en 1986. "Para lograr un éxito tecnológico, la realidad debe estar por encima de las relaciones públicas, porque la Naturaleza no puede ser engañada"Feynman fue requerido para participar en la 'Comisión Rogers', que investigó el desastre del 'Challenger' en 1986. Siguiendo pistas proporcionadas por algún informador interno, Feynman mostró en televisión el papel crucial que jugaron en el desastre las juntas toroidales ("O-ring") de los cohetes laterales, con una simple demostración, usando un vaso de agua con hielo y una muestra del material. Su opinión sobre la causa del accidente fue diferente de la oficial, y considerablemente más crítica sobre el papel jugado por la dirección al dejar de lado las preocupaciones de los ingenieros. Después de insistir mucho, el informe de Feynman fue incluido como un apéndice al documento oficial. El libro ¿Qué te importa lo que piensen los demás? incluye la historia del trabajo de Feynman en la comisión. Su habilidad como ingeniero se puso de manifiesto en su estimación de la fiabilidad del transbordador espacial (98%), que se ha visto lamentablemente confirmada en los dos fallos cada 100 vuelos del transbordador hasta el 2003.
El cáncer se reprodujo en 1987, y Feynman ingresó en el hospital un año después. Complicaciones quirúrgicas empeoraron su estado, y Feynman decidió morir con dignidad y no aceptar más tratamientos. Murió el 15 de febrero de 1988 en Los Ángeles, California.
Legado [editar]Feynman era y sigue siendo una figura popular no sólo por su habilidad como conferenciante y profesor, sino también por su excentricidad y espíritu libre mostrados en libros como: ¿Está usted de broma, Sr. Feynman? y otros de gran éxito. Además de su carrera académica, Feynman fue un profesor admirado y un talentoso músico amateur. En su carrera también colaboró en el Proyecto Manhattan, en el que se desarrolló la bomba atómica. Durante aquel tiempo Feynman estuvo a cargo de la división de cálculo del proyecto, consiguiendo construir un sistema de cálculo masivo a partir de máquinas IBM. Durante este período también supervisó la seguridad de las plantas de enriquecimiento de uranio.
Entre 1950 y 1988, Feynman trabajó en el Instituto Tecnológico de California, Caltech, con el puesto de Richard Chase Toleman Professor of Theoretical Physics, encargado de la enseñanza de física teórica.
Durante su vida, Feynman recibió numerosos premios, incluyendo el Premio Albert Einstein (Princeton, 1954), el Premio Lawrence (1962), y el premio Nobel de Física de 1965. Fue también miembro de la Sociedad Americana de Física, de la Asociación Americana para el Adelanto de la Ciencia, la National Academy of Sciences, y fue elegido como miembro extranjero de la Royal Society en 1965. Estaba particularmente orgulloso de la Medalla Oersted a la Enseñanza que ganó en 1972. Pero tal vez el homenaje más relevante no proviene de los premios académicos: poco después de su muerte, un grupo de estudiantes de Caltech escaló el frente de la Biblioteca Millikan de la universidad y colgó un gran cartel de tela con la leyenda "We love you Dick!" ("¡Te amamos, Dick!").
Entre sus trabajos más importantes, destaca la elaboración de los Diagramas de Feynman, una forma intuitiva de visualizar las interacciones de partículas atómicas en electrodinámica cuántica mediante aproximaciones gráficas en el tiempo. Feynman es considerado también como una de las figuras pioneras de la nanotecnología, y una de las primeras personas en proponer la realización futura de ordenadores cuánticos.
El Servicio Postal de los Estados Unidos emitió un sello de correos honrando a Feynman el 5 de mayo de 2005.
Libros [editar]Física
The Feynman's lectures on physics, Vol I,II, III. Con Robert Leighton y Matthew Sands. Español e inglés.
Lectures on Computation.
Quantum mechanics and path Integrals
Divulgación física
The Character of Physical Law.
Six Easy Pieces:Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher.
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time.
Electrodinámica Cuántica: La extraña teoría de la luz y la materia.
Divulgación y pensamiento de Feynman
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman.
Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious character. ¿Está Vd. de broma, Sr. Feynman?: Aventuras de un curioso personaje tal como le fueron referidas a Ralph Leighton.
What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character. ¿Qué te importa lo que otras personas piensen? Aventuras adicionales de un personaje curioso.
Don't You have Time to Think?
Véase también [editar]Diagrama de Feynman.
Problema del aspersor de Feynman.
Enlaces externos [editar] Wikiquote alberga frases célebres de o sobre Richard Feynman. Wikiquote
Enlaces a numerosas fotografías de Feynman (enlace roto disponible en Internet Archive; véase el historial y la última versión)
Un artículo de "Science Now" explicando los diagramas de Feynman
FeynmanOnLine, un sitio de homenaje
Enlaces a sitios sobre Feynman en el Laboratorio de Los Alamos
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
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Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
Sepulcro de Manuel Sandoval Vallarta en la Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres (México)
Nacimiento 11 de febrero de 1899
Ciudad de México
Fallecimiento 18 de abril de 1977
Ciudad de México
Residencia México
Nacionalidad mexicana
Campo Física
Instituciones Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts, Instituto Politécnico Nacional
Alma máter Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts
Premios
destacados Legión de Honor, por el gobierno de Francia (1952)
Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas de México (1959)
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta. (Ciudad de México, 11 de febrero de 1899 - Ibídem, 18 de abril de 1977),
fue un físico mexicano. Sandoval Vallarta fue un destacado pionero de la física mexicana y latinoamericana.
Realizó numerosas contribuciones a la física teórica especialmente a la física de los rayos cósmicos.
Contenido [ocultar]
1 Estudios
2 Docencia y académico
3 Referencias
4 Bibliografía
5 Enlaces externos
Estudios [editar]En 1921 obtuvo del Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT) el grado de Ingeniero Eléctrico y en 1924 el
grado de doctor en Ciencias en la especialidad de Física Matemática, con la tesis “El modelo atómico de Bohr desde el punto de vista de
la Relatividad General y el cálculo de perturbaciones”. En 1927, ganó la beca Guggenheim que le permitió ir a la Universidad de Berlín.
Fue en Alemania donde tuvo como profesores a Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger y Max von Laue. Al final de 1932 regresó al MIT,
donde trabajó con Georges Lemáitre elaborando una teoría cuantitativa del movimiento de una partícula cargada de electricidad en el campo magnético
terrestre.
Docencia y académico [editar]En 1939 se creó el Instituto de Física de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y
se nombró como su director a Alfredo Baños, quien inició un programa de colaboración científica con Sandoval Vallarta en el MIT.
En 1939, fue nombrado profesor titular de física del MIT, donde enseñó física a jóvenes talentosos como Richard Feynman futuro
Premio Nobel de Física. En 1944 dejó su cátedra en dicho instituto al volver a México para ocupar el cargo de Director del
Instituto Politécnico Nacional (que conservó hasta el año de 1947), a pesar de su nueva responsabilidad continuó sus investigaciones.
De 1943 a 1957 produjo en México alrededor de 30 artículos de circulación internacional y dedicó una parte importante de su tiempo a la
promoción y divulgación de la ciencia. Fue Secretario de Educación Pública en el sexenio del presidente Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.
Ingresó en El Colegio Nacional el 8 de abril de 1943 como miembro fundador.
Se le distinguió con la medalla de la Legión de Honor por el gobierno de Francia en 1952.[1]
Recibió el Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes en Ciencias Exactas de México en 1959.[2]
Fue miembro de la Academia Pontificia de las Ciencias desde 1961.
Murió el 18 de abril de 1977 en la Ciudad de México, sus restos mortales fueron trasladados a la Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres en octubre de 1988.[3]
Referencias [editar]? El Colegio Nacional. «Miembros Física, Manuel Sandoval Vallarta». Consultado el 2 de diciembre de 2009.
? Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. «Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes». Consultado el 2 de diciembre de 2009.
? Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres. . Segob. Consultado el 22 de diciembre de 2009.
Bibliografía [editar]Alfonso Mondragón. “Manuel Sandoval Vallarta: Iniciador de la Física Teórica e impulsor de la Ciencia en México”, Revista de Física (Universidad de Sonora), 2003, 31-34.
Enlaces externos [editar]El Colegio Nacional de México
Instituto de Física de la UNAM
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta en la Galería de Pioneros de la Física en México
Discurso de Manuel Sandoval Vallarta al recibir el Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas Memoria del Colegio Nacional p.326, consultado el 4 de diciembre de 2009.
Obtenido de "http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Sandoval_Vallarta"
Categorías: Nacidos en 1988 | Fallecidos en 1977 | Físicos de México | Ingenieros de México | Miembros de la Academia Pontificia de las Ciencias
La soledad del genio
Los biógrafos de Mozart establecieron muy
pronto una relación lógica entre la desgracia en
la que Mozart cayó al final de su vida, y su
celebridad de niño prodigio. No sólo se admiró
al joven Mozart y a su hermana como fenómenos
que los músicos ponían a prueba, que analizaban
los filósofos y que mimaban las princesas de una
parte de Europa. Su propia existencia aparecía
como una emanación de la gracia divina, acorde
con la noción, aun muy arraigada en esa época,
de lo milagroso. El espíritu del gran público
estaba particularmente dispuesto a exaltar la
imagen del niño prodigio. Los últimos años del
músico, el divorcio creciente entre las conven¬
ciones del lenguaje musical de su tiempo y el estilo
que le era propio no podían contrarrestar esta
visión limitada. En la medida en que eligió, en
la mitad de su vida, su libertad de expresión per¬
sonal, la soledad de Mozart fue cada vez mayor.
Lo que la posteridad considera un salto cualitativo
sólo suscitó, entre sus contemporáneos, extrañeza
e incomprensión.
Las óperas y la música de cámara, sobre todo,
provocaron hostilidad. Haydn, que hacía evolu¬
cionar la música galante hacia el cuarteto de
cuerda clásico, aparece como un conciliador: sabe
hacer plausible el nuevo género para los conoce¬
dores y los aficionados. Mozart, tan próximo a
Haydn en la escritura del cuarteto de cuerda, debe
afrontar vivas críticas. Así, en 1782, en el Musi¬
kalischen Kunstmagasin, el influyente compositor
berlinés Johann Friedrich Reichardt reprocha
abiertamente a la música instrumental de Mozart
el hecho de ser "altamente antinatural", puesto
que "primero es jubilosa, pero de repente triste
y, con la misma brusquedad, alegre nuevamente".
Según Nissen (uno de los primeros biógrafos
del músico), Anton Hoffmeister, editor y com¬
positor amigo de Mozart, remitió a éste los hono¬
rarios de los cuartetos para piano y cuerda (K. 478
y K. 493), que se vendían mal, rogándole encare¬
cidamente que no compusiera los otros cuartetos
previstos en el contrato, con la siguiente recomen¬
dación: "Escribe siguiendo el género popular, si
no yo no puedo pagar ni imprimir nada para ti."
A esta incomprensión es posible oponer el
juicio célebre dirigido en' febrero de 1785 por
Joseph Haydn a Leopold Mozart (precisamente
después de haber oído el último y más audaz de
los cuartetos que Mozart le había dedicado, las
"Disonancias", K. 465): "Se lo digo ante Dios,
como hombre honrado, su hijo es el más gran
compositor que conozco personalmente o de
nombre: tiene buen gusto y, además, la más aca¬
bada ciencia de la composición." Entre las exi¬
gencias de su arte y lo que esperaba el público,
el genio de Mozart no encuentra, en su tiempo,
lugar alguno. Un destino que, en cierto modo,
comparte con Goethe. ¿Por qué? Porque su genio,
igualmente inmenso, representa un intento
análogo de acceder a la historicidad, pero minán¬
dola al mismo tiempo desde el interior. Conflicto
que desemboca en un renunciamiento, teórico y
práctico; el escritor decide no publicar el Segundo
Fausto, sin embargo concluido. Se niega, en vida,
a entregar a sus contemporáneos su preocupación
central.
¿Fausto y Don Juan, dos viajeros hacia el
infierno y, por ende, dos hermanos espirituales?
¿Y Mozart y Goethe? ¿Contemporáneos más allá
de su época, ayer y hoy? Allí reside tal vez el
secreto de su profunda actualidad. No se debería
a esa naturaleza humana superior, trascendente,
que se ha atribuido tantas veces a uno y otro, sino
que obedecería, mucho más, a la energía con la
que ambos inauguran la época moderna
Madrid no hacía más que reflejar la situación
general en Europa. Si la muerte del autor de
Las bodas de Fígaro lo arroja a la fosa común
de los ignorados, en 1809 las exequias de Haydn
convocan a toda la vida oficial vienesa, incluida
la guardia de honor del ejército de ocupación
napoleónico.
La grandeza de Mozart resplandece eternamente. Si una
determinada generación dejase de prestarle atención, ¿qué
importaría? Las leyes de la belleza son siempre las mismas y
una moda pasajera sólo podría empañarlas poco tiempo. ¿Ha
alcanzado nuestra época el alto nivel necesario para apreciar
a Mozart? ¿Tenemos hoy en día la sutileza y la sana
ingenuidad que se requieren para comprender
verdaderamente a Mozart?
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
compositor noruego
artículo sobre Mozart und seme Bedeutung fur die musikalische Gegenwart, publicado
el 21 de enero de 1906 en la Neue Freie Press en Viena
Las Voces de los Ángeles: "Los Castrados"
Por Mario Solomonoff
En su libro "Historia de los Castrati", Patrick Barbier inicia el primer capítulo con las siguientes palabras: "Al bajar su cuchillo el docto cirujano o el simple barbero del pueblo, tenían conciencia de estar decidiendo irrevocablemente la gloria o la vergüenza de un hombre?".
Sabemos que, desde la más remota antigüedad, la castración fue aplicada a los hombres como castigo cuando no como supuesto método curativo ante distintas enfermedades. Guerreros victoriosos decidieron frecuentemente hacer castrar a sus prisioneros como medida ideal para doblegar sus espíritus y hacerlos más sumisos a la esclavitud, (se basaban en la consideración de que los animales al ser castrados se vuelven de temperamento más dócil) asegurándose así también que el odiado enemigo no tuviera la posibilidad de reproducirse. Por otra parte, la creencia en cierto período histórico de que algunas enfermedades como la hernia, la gota, la epilepsia, la lepra y aún la locura podían tratarse favorablemente gracias a esta práctica, fue suficiente excusa para adoptarla con increíble asiduidad.
Es sin embargo en el siglo XVI cuando castrados hacen su aparición cantando en las iglesias tras la prohibición del Papa Pablo IV de que las mujeres cantaran en San Pedro. Tal prohibición se basaba en una curiosa interpretación de palabras de San Pablo según quien "las mujeres deben mantener silencio en la Iglesia". Así, niños y adultos castrados reemplazaban a las voces femeninas.
Tiempo después, la medida se extendió también a los teatros de los estados pontificios donde se consideró inadmisible la presencia de mujeres en los escenarios y así muchos de estos notables cantantes de voz "angelical" lograron la admiración del público y colosales fortunas personales interpretando según el caso, tanto roles masculinos como femeninos.
Varias obras de los siglos XVII y XVIII, en los que el rol de un hombre aparece escrito para soprano o contralto, no estaban pensados para una cantante "Travesti" como a veces se cree erróneamente, sino para castrados que poseían estos registros. Es el caso por ejemplo del personaje de Orfeo en "Orfeo y Eurídice" de Gluck, que fue escrito originalmente para un castrado contralto.
Con Italia como principal escenario, dada su histórica tradición canora, la castración de los niños destinados al canto se realizaba entre los 7 y 12 años de edad, es decir antes de que la función glandular de los testículos diera lugar a la muda o cambio de voz. Se trataba casi siempre de niños de condición muy humilde, familia numerosa y aparentes aptitudes para lo que habían sido seleccionados.
La posibilidad de una importante carrera cantando en ceremonias religiosas, teatros o cortes, podía significar un considerable ingreso de dinero no solo para el artista sino también para su familia y los intermediarios en sus jugosas contrataciones. Intereses mezquinos forzaban frecuentemente a los niños a aceptar su castración, si bien una disposición hipócrita establecía que la misma no podía realizarse sin el consentimiento del infante. Lo que tal disposición no explicaba es cómo una criatura de 7 u 8 años podía comprender exactamente a lo que se exponía y aún oponerse a una presión paterna. A menudo, el precio que los elegidos pagaban por someterse a tal intervención no era simplemente no poder procrear en un futuro, sino la propia vida, ya que las precarias condiciones de asepsia de entonces elevaban los porcentajes de mortalidad, según la habilidad del cirujano ocasional, que podía ser un médico o un simple barbero, desde un 10 hasta un 80 por ciento.
Frecuentemente sin embargo, los mismos niños pedían y hasta exigían su castración entusiasmados por la ilusión de lograr fama y dinero, pero quienes no lograban la excelencia artística, solían terminar formando parte de alguno de los numerosos coros de la época.
Si bien la castración producía ciertos cambios morfológicos muy variables según los individuos como ausencia de vello, tendencia a la obesidad, rasgos feminoides, etc, y no pocos psíquicos, la mayoría de los cantantes castrados podía mantener relaciones sexuales prácticamente normales y en muchos casos eran objeto de adoración de las mujeres y protagonistas de romances tempestuosos.
Famosos, sumamente ricos, mimados por el clero y la realeza y de exótico aspecto, despertaban con facilidad el interés de las damas de la alta sociedad, deseosas de huir de la rutina merced a aventuras amorosas particularmente curiosas y sin el riesgo de embarazos indeseados. Así, sabemos que el famosísimo Gasparo Pacchiarotti estuvo a punto de morir asesinado por encargo como consecuencia de su romance con la marquesa Santa Marca, que Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, amigo de Mozart, terminó preso por haber fugado con una joven admiradora cuyos padres le denunciaron y que Giovanni Battista Velluti, mujeriego empedernido y de quien hablaremos más adelante, vivió en Rusia durante cierto tiempo con una duquesa.
El comportamiento psicológico de estos cantantes castrados era muy diferente según el caso.
Muchos de ellos se sentían felices de su condición, a menudo solicitada como hemos visto, y de los logros artísticos que los habían llevado a una posición social de alto privilegio. Otros, en cambio, la vivían como una frustración y guardaban un cierto rencor hacia la sociedad que lo había permitido, aprovechando sus privilegios y poderosas relaciones para mostrarse caprichosos, intolerantes y autoritarios como forma de desquite.
Salvo en los casos en que el niño había solicitado voluntariamente su castración, la causa de la misma solía serie desconocida, ya que las familias acostumbraban esconder la motivación económica inventando accidentes, enfermedades, etc., que supuestamente la habrían hecho necesaria. Es importante tener en cuenta no solo la corta edad del niño cuando era sometido a la operación, sino también el hecho de que al ser preparado para la misma, era llevado a un estado semi-inconsciente emborrachado con ron, o tomando brebajes con contenido de opio o simplemente sufriendo una cierta compresión de las carótidas hasta provocarle un desmayo. La aplicación de agua helada en los genitales era también una forma muy utilizada entonces para lograr un cierto efecto anestésico.
Como para el desarrollo de la laringe es fundamental el aporte hormonal de testosterona, al ser privados de sus testículos antes del cambio de voz, el mismo ya no se produciría y entonces el castrado conservaba una voz de niño, pero en un cuerpo de adulto con anos de ejercicio vocal y respiratorio por sus intensos estudios de canto. El resultado era una voz aguda extraordinariamente dúctil y flexible como la de un niño, brillante y potente gracias a la capacidad torácica y vocal del adulto sumamente entrenado, y al servicio de un artista educado con el máximo rigor en la expresión musical. Como bien dice Barbier: 'Todo contribuía a que los "castrati" fueran asemejados a los ángeles en la imaginería popular... Objeto de contemplación y hasta de veneración, se los vinculaba con la figura tradicional del ángel músico y encaraban a la vez (por su música, mucho más que por sus actos) la pureza y la virginidad". Es interesante recordar que justamente en Nápoles donde existieron los más importantes conservatorios musicales de entonces, los pequemos castrados que allí estudiaban eran enviados vestidos como ángeles a los velorios de niños.
Seguramente los más famosos del siglo XVIII fueron Farinelli y Caffarelli, este último mencionado como Caffariello en "El barbero de Sevilla" de Rossini. Su verdadero nombre era Gaetano Majorano, pero adoptó su seudónimo artístico en homenaje a su primer enseñante, el maestro Caffaro, si bien fue luego Porpora quien completó magistralmente su formación.
Era costumbre que los castrados adoptaran un seudónimo artístico que podía ser el que le atribuían sus admiradores o el que el mismo intérprete elegía en homenaje a algún benefactor o enseñante. Así Carlo Broschi eligió el de Farinelli en agradecimiento a los hermanos Farina, mecenas que pagaron durante muchos anos sus estudios y manutención. La ortografía y la pronunciación no eran demasiado cuidadas en la antigua Nápoles y también Farinelli aparece como Farinello en algunos escritos.
No han quedado muy claros los motivos de su castración puesto que pertenecía a una familia de la baja nobleza, (los nobles no castraban a sus hijos) aunque se supone con ciertas dificultades económicas. En un reciente film sobre su vida se atribuye la decisión a su hermano Riccardo. Si bien no dudamos de que los responsables de dicho film pueden haberse informado exhaustivamente al respecto, resulta extraño que quien seguramente sería en ese momento menor de edad, pudiera tomar tal decisión. En efecto, aunque la Iglesia por un lado admitía de muy buen grado que numerosos castrados cantaran en las ceremonias religiosas, por otro castigaba con la excomunión (castigo gravísimo para la época ) a quien fuera descubierto practicándola en forma ilegal, es decir sin poder aparentemente justificarla como consecuencia de una enfermedad o accidente.
El Más Famoso: FARINELLI
Formado también por el notable maestro Porpora, Farinelli logró una celebridad tan extraordinaria debido a su asombroso talento que fue literalmente idolatrado por cuantos le escucharon. Dotado de cultura, simpatía y distinción, tuvo la amistad y protección de reyes, emperadores y el mismo Papa.
Llamado a la corte de Felipe V de España, permaneció en ella durante más de veinte años como cantante personal del monarca logrando tal amistad e influencia sobre éste, al punto de poder decidir cuestiones de estado. Prácticamente cogobernó España con el rey y muchos sabían que para obtener un favor del monarca, era fundamental convencer a Farinelli. El rey había sufrido de lo que entonces se llamaba "melancolía" y que hoy llamaríamos seguramente "depresión nerviosa", por lo cual la reina no tuvo mejor idea que llamar a la corte al cantante más famoso del mundo para calmar esa angustia. Del éxito que tuvo en su intento, da cuenta cuanto aquí referimos.
Farinelli terminó sus días en su mansión de Bologna, colmada de preciosas obras de arte y recibiendo la visita de poderosas personalidades. Entre las características más sobresalientes de su personalidad, figuran sin lugar a dudas su auténtica modesta y su profundo fervor religioso. Además de reyes y otros gobernantes importantes, recibió con generosidad a músicos como Mozart, Gluck y Rossini y, como sucedía con muchos grandes cantantes de la época, concedía entrevistas a jóvenes en sus inicios de carrera lírica, ansiosos por recibir del gran maestro sus opiniones y consejos.
Nunca les pedía que cantaran para evitar intimidarlos, pero les escuchaba con interés y placer cuando ellos mismos proponían hacerlo. Era su costumbre rezar todas las mañanas y había obtenido el permiso para instalar un altar en su casa. También hacía numerosas peregrinaciones a distintos santuarios. Muchos le insistían para que escribiera sus memorias y consejos, lo que hoy tendría un enorme valor como testimonio, pero él humildemente respondía:"¿Para qué ? Me basta con que se sepa que no he perjudicado a nadie. Que se añada también mi pena por no haber podido hacer todo el bien que hubiera deseado."
En una época en que el promedio de vida no superaba los treinta años, es un dato curioso que la mayoría de estos artistas solían ser muy longevos superando largamente los setenta y ochenta años de edad. No fue una excepción Farinelli, quien ya retirado de la actividad siguió cantando y practicando sus ejercicios vocales hasta tres semanas antes de su muerte acaecida a los setenta y siete.
Nada ha quedado lamentablemente de su mansión -¡más tarde demolida para instalar una refinería!-, donde entre tantas maravillas poseía un violín Stradivarius, otro Amati, y una colección de diez clavecines, cada uno de los cuales llevaba el nombre de un pintor ilustre. Tampoco su tumba se ha conservado al ser destruida por las fuerzas napoleónicas la iglesia de los capuchinos donde se hallaba.
Sí han quedado en la historia sus espectaculares proezas vocales, en las que sin embargo nunca llegaba a caer musicalmente en el mal gusto. La extensión natural de su voz superaba las tres octavas, podía sostener un sonido durante más de un minuto ampliando o disminuyendo el volumen a voluntad y en un aria especialmente escrita para él por su hermano, realizaba vocalizaciones durante catorce compases con una sola toma de aire. Es famoso el desafío que sostuvo con un trompetista en la ejecución de escalas, trinos y los adornos más increíbles. Cuando luego de largo rato el trompetista se detuvo totalmente agotado, Farinelli lo miró con una sonrisa y repitió sus gorjeos agregando nuevas y mayores dificultades ante la mirada atónita del instrumentista jadeante y las aclamaciones de los demás presentes. Según testigos de la época, la emotividad de su canto era prodigiosa. En una ocasión, compartió una obra en la que otro famoso castrado llamado Senesino hacía el rol de un tirano y Farinelli el de su víctima. Durante la primera aria Farinelli cantó de tal modo, que Senesino, olvidando su rol, se lanzó hacia él sollozando para abrazado. Se cuenta también que otro joven y talentoso castrado llamado Gioacchino Conti, lloró y cayó al suelo desmayado tras escucharle durante un ensayo.
¡Lamentablemente hoy nos es imposible siquiera imaginar lo que pudo haber sido el fabuloso canto de Farinelli ya que las únicas grabaciones que se conservan de un cantante castrado, corresponden a un artista relativamente mediocre y ni remotamente comparable a semejante coloso!
El Final de los Castrados
Hacia fines del siglo XVIII eran numerosos los intelectuales, escritores y pensadores diversos que alzaban sus voces airadas contra la práctica de la castración, que consideraban aberrante, y muy particularmente en Francia, donde nunca había sido bien vista. Ya Voltaire y Rousseau la condenaron llamando este último "padres bárbaros" a los progenitores que la consentían para sus hijos y "verdaderos monstruos" a quienes la habían sufrido. Pero fueron sobre todo las ideas libertarias de la Revolución Francesa y más tarde el propio Napoleón, lo que dio comienzo al inevitable fin de dicha práctica. En efecto, si bien el emperador admiraba y protegía al castrado Crescentini, el único, según se cuenta, que logró arrancarle lágrimas de emoción, su opinión al respecto no podía dejar dudas.
Conquistada Roma, estableció en esta ciudad la pena capital para quien la practicara e instruyó a su hermano José, rey de Nápoles para que en ninguna escuela ni conservatorio napolitano se admitiera el ingreso de niños mutilados. También la Iglesia modificó su actitud permitiendo a partir de 1798 que las mujeres actuaran en los escenarios teatrales y declarando el papa Benedicto XIV que nunca era legal la amputación de cualquier parte del cuerpo, salvo en caso de absoluta necesidad médica. Por otra parte los famosos conservatorios de Nápoles que habían sido el gran semillero de "castrati" comenzaban a desaparecer por culpa de malas administraciones y con ellos las posibilidades de formar nuevos artistas de estas características. No obstante, la castración se siguió practicando aún durante un tiempo aunque en muy menor cantidad de casos y ya en 1830, la despedida de Gianbattista Velluti de los escenarios líricos, significó la desaparición definitiva de castrados en la ópera. Solo en el Vaticano y en otras iglesias, siguieron actuando hasta que un decreto del papa León XIII en 1902, prohibió definitivamente la utilización de castrados en ceremonias eclesiásticas. Algunas excepciones se hicieron de todos modos, particularmente con Alessandro Moreschi, el ultimo castrado, quien se retiró en 1913 siendo el único que pudo dejar el testimonio de su voz para la posteridad en grabaciones realizadas en 1902 y 1904.
Moreschi había nacido en Montecompatrio, Roma, en 1858 y es considerado el último cantante castrado de que se tenga noticia. En 1883, con veinticinco anos de edad ingresó en el Coro de la Capilla Sixtina y si bien la mayor parte de toda su actividad vocal se desarrolló en la sede vaticana, el llamado "angelo di Roma" cantó también en universidades, salones y hasta en el Pantheon de Roma en ocasión de los funerales de los reyes de Italia Vittorio Emanuele II en 1878 y su hijo Umberto I en 1900.
Luego de la prohibición de admitir castrados en el coro papal, Moreschi pudo no obstante continuar en él como director del mismo y, en algunas oportunidades, aun como solista.
En 1922, a los sesenta y cuatro años de edad y tras haber cantado "con una lágrima en cada nota" el aria de Margarita del "Fausto" de Gounod en los elegantes salones romanos, moriría olvidado por todos, hasta por aquellos que alguna vez le habrían gritado entusiasmados "Evviva il coltello!" (Viva el cuchillo!) tal cual lo habían hecho otros en los tiempos de esplendor de estas rarezas vocales.
Conclusiones
Pese a las voces indignadas que se alzaron ya hacia fines del siglo XVIII contra la práctica de la castración, y aún durante todo el período de transición hasta la desaparición completa de los cantantes castrados, no fueron pocos los que -como el famoso escritor y melómano Stendhal- la defendieron justificándola por el efecto excepcional que estos intérpretes lograban en el canto. Pero como muy bien concluye Barbier, hoy, lo más importante para nosotros es el redescubrimiento de uno de los mitos más conmovedores de la historia de la música, en la que durante tres siglos "fueron desafiadas todas las leyes de la moral y la razón para concluir la imposible unión del monstruo y del ángel".
Schlichtegroll se refirió a Mozart como un extraño ser que pronto se convirtió en hombre como músico pero siempre continuó
siendo un niño ingobernable necesitado de una guía. Y Niemetschek lo vio grande como artista pero no tan grande en los otros
aspectos de su vida.
No hay dudas que entre ellos y nosotros hay diferencias, aunque no sé si son ellos los diferentes al mirarnos desde su genialidad,
o lo somos nosotros al mirarlos desde nuestras carencias.
En cuanto a Mozart, nadie podrá afirmar jamás que haya transgredido ninguna ley. En todo caso se rebeló ante el corsé de los formalismos,
luchó contra la hipocresía de su época y perdió frente a la envidia ajena. Esa envidia que fue su peor y más grande enemigo.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nació genio por uno de esos misterios indescifrables que, al no disponer de otra explicación más coherente,
atribuimos a una arbitrariedad divina. Ese genio se manifestó a una edad tan temprana y de una manera tan arrolladora,
que lo han ubicado entre los niños prodigio más notables de las historia.
Afortunadamente, el barón von Grimm fue doblemente honesto: observó su propia reacción y la dejó asentada, sin ocurrírsele pensar que
Mozart estaba deformando su niñez porque era sólo un genio musical al que no lo estaban introduciendo en el conocimiento de diversos temas y,
sobre todo, porque aún no le habían enseñado adecuadamente aquellos modales refinados que le hubiesen ayudado a conseguir, más adelante,
un cargo lucrativo con sueldo fijo, y le habrían impedido, además, hacerse de tantos enemigos por decir exactamente lo que pensaba
acerca de la mediocridad de otros músicos o de ser tan arrogante de creerse el mejor cuando, por cierto, identificaba la mediocridad
sin equivocarse jamás y, sin duda, fue el mejor músico de su época. (Tampoco se equivocó con los grandes: sentía un profundo respeto,
entre otros, por Haydn).
Pues bien: quien fue dueño de tantas condiciones, ¿pudo haberse sentido a gusto dentro de los moldes de una vida convencional?
Quien alcanzaría luego los niveles más altos en todas las formas de la música: ópera, sinfonía, concierto, cámara, vocal,
piano o coral (con una producción tan extensa que el último Köchel correspondiente al bellísimo Requiem lleva el número 626),
y sería el mejor pianista, el mejor organista, el mejor director y uno de los mejores violinistas, ¿podía medirse con la misma
vara que a los demás? A propósito: ¿alguien recordaría hoy al Obispo de la Corte Archiepiscopal de Salzburgo y a su secretario
el conde Kari Arco, si no fuera porque éste le pegó una patada en el trasero a Mozart cuando se insolentó con Su Excelencia?
Según Schonberg, Mozart tuvo una capacidad inaudita para hacerse de enemigos y yo pienso que, si se cambia el punto de mira,
se tendrá una idea más bien pobre de lo que tuvo que soportar.
"Las palabras halagadoras, los elogios, los gritos de bravissimo no pagan el correo ni tampoco a los dueños de las pensiones.
De modo que apenas compruebes que no es posible hacer dinero, debes alejarte sin demora...".
"Uno puede mostrarse siempre perfectamente natural con la gente de elevado rango, pero con los demás compórtate como un inglés.
No debes mostrarte tan abierto con todos...", le aconsejaba papá Leopold a Wolfgang, para mayor gloria de la música.
De todas maneras, nunca hay nada que sea del todo malo ni del todo bueno. Y si bien por un lado el padre lo presionó hasta
la exasperación tratando de imponerle un conjunto de valores que Wolfgang jamás pudo compartir, por otro lado le nutrió el
almácigo en donde el talento musical de su hijo se desarrolló hasta niveles jamás vueltos a alcanzar por nadie.
Toda su obra participa de estas virtudes, aunque es a partir de su ruptura definitiva con Salzburgo en 1781 cuando su madurez
musical alcanza el punto más alto. Y es en Viena donde comienza a escribir obra maestra tras obra maestra.
Amó la música de Händel y más aun la de Johann Sebastian Bach, en quien se inspiró para introducir recursos contrapuntísticos
y a cuyo conocimiento contribuyó grandemente el barón Gottfried van Swieten. De Haydn afirmó una vez que, gracias a él,
había aprendido a componer cuartetos.
Un genio llamado Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ketty Alejandrina Lis
El 5 de diciembre de 1998 se cumplirán los doscientos siete años de la muerte de Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, el músico más
grande de su tiempo y uno de los más grandes de todos los tiempos.
Amado por muy pocos, envidiado por muchos y admirado por todos, este hombrecito genial nacido en la hermosa Salzburgo
un 27 de enero de 1756 se expandió en su vida privada con la misma vitalidad que recorre su bellísima música aunque,
¡vaya impertinencia!, sin el rigor estructural que la hace perfecta.
Según los biógrafos que fueron sus contemporáneos, una de sus imperfecciones consistió en haber carecido del más elemental
sentido para la administración razonable del dinero, por lo que, al morir, estaba completamente cubierto por las deudas.
Razón suficiente, al parecer, para que no se encontrara familia, ni amigo ni a ninguno de sus antiguos y poderosos
patrones dispuestos a dejar caer unos pocos céntimos de sus muy razonables monederos, de modo de pagarle un sepulcro
individual por sencillo que hubiese sido.
La indocilidad de su carácter, como bien le cabe a toda indocilidad, mereció seguramente una última y ejemplarizadora lección:
distrajo la mirada de los bien pensantes cuando sus restos tuvieron que ser arrojados a la fosa común del cementerio vienés de
San Marcos. Un final a toda orquesta, como se ve, para quien legó al mundo una de las herencias musicales más formidables que se conocen.
Harold C. Schonberg, en su libro "Los grandes compositores", dice: "Mozart fue uno de los niños prodigio más explotados de
la historia de la música y pagó el precio correspondiente. Los niños prodigio rara vez se convierten en personas con vidas
normales. Se desarrollan en la condición de niños que cultivan determinado talento a expensas de todos los restantes,
pasan la mayor parte de su vida con adultos, descuidan su educación general y reciben excesivos elogios.
El resultado es una niñez deformada, y con frecuencia eso lleva a una edad adulta deformada. La tragedia de Mozart consistió
en que creció apoyándose en su padre y fue incapaz de afrontar las exigencias de la sociedad y la vida".
Estas afirmaciones de Schonberg se agregan a lo sostenido por:
Friedrich Schlichtegroll, primer biógrafo de Mozart, quien en 1793 escribió: "Pues así como este extraño ser pronto se convirtió
en hombre por lo que refiere a su arte, siempre continuó siendo un niño —como tiene que reconocerlo en su caso el observador
imparcial— en casi todos los restantes asuntos. Nunca aprendió a gobernarse. No tenía sentido para el orden doméstico,
la administración razonable del dinero, la moderación y la elección sensata de los placeres. Siempre necesitaba una mano que lo guiase".
Franz Niemetschek, que en 1798 opinó: "Este hombre tan excepcional como artista,
no era igualmente grande en los restantes aspectos de su vida".
"Los hombres que anotaron estos comentarios", continúa Schonberg, "no eran filisteos que lamentaban el hecho de que
Mozart no hiciera una vida convencional. Sabían lo que muchos sabían: que Mozart era su propio y peor enemigo".
La transcripción que antecede tiene una causa y un efecto: de la abundante bibliografía sobre Mozart he seleccionado
estas afirmaciones que pueden leerse en el libro de Schonberg porque son las más aceptadas. Además, por su concisión,
ofrecen mejores posibilidades de manejo. Y para todos aquellos que desconocen la vida de Mozart era necesaria una
lectura a la mano donde pudieran ver de inmediato la manera en que un genio es dicotomizado, a fin de hacerles
comprensible este intento de acercamiento entre el músico elogiado sin reservas y su tan duramente juzgada personalidad.
Es decir, un acercamiento al ser humano como totalidad.
Para esto es necesario plantearse, antes que nada, qué valor pueden tener los negativos juicios de valor de Schlichtegroll
y de Niemetschek. No se trata aquí, naturalmente, de suponer que estos biógrafos fueron un par de malvados que se ensañaron
con Mozart, sino de comprender las razones por las cuales estas personas, apresadas ellas mismas en la compleja maraña de los
convencionalismos de su época, se mostraron tan terminantes en sus apreciaciones.
Las categorías que utilizan, "extraño -(normal)", "niño -(hombre)" "gobernable -(ingobernable)", "grande -(pequeño)", etc.,
no son ni verdaderas ni falsas en sí mismas. El resbalón que se advierte proviene del entrecruzamiento témporo-espacial
desde donde se las emplea. Si se observara el esquema de los parámetros en donde la subjetividad deja su marca,
se vería que éstos nunca lo son en un sentido estricto. En todo caso conforman un encuadre de valores promedio,
por otra parte muy variables según las modalidades de cada grupo social y según las épocas. Cuando decimos,
por ejemplo, que un niño es "muy inteligente", lo estamos ubicando en una categoría de acuerdo a la producción de ese
niño con respecto a los modelos que le sirven de referente.
A su vez, los modelos que, por caso, miden la inteligencia, no están compuestos solamente por la variable "cociente intelectual",
la que no por ser medible deja de tener como base a un ente de razón, esto es, a una hipótesis más o menos cercana a lo
que se supone que es una verdad, siendo la misma hipótesis una suposición o sospecha más seriamente fundamentada
que las simples opiniones de la vida diaria.
Por el contrario, todo modelo se compone de un conjunto de variables que, en el caso del ejemplo citado, nos permitirá
predecir, también con mayor o menor margen de error, qué producción se espera de ese niño a una edad determinada y
dentro de un medio sociocultural dado. Huelga aclarar que el alcance de la categoría "muy inteligente" ha variado muchas
veces, de lo que se deduce que al menos si de parámetros se trata, nada es definitivo. Y muchísimo menos definitivo es el
alcance de los muy discutibles parámetros de "normalidad".
Sin embargo, y aun con todos sus inconvenientes, el método científico necesita seguir apoyándose en los entes de razón porque,
sin una hipótesis previa, no se podría delimitar el campo a investigar, y también le es imprescindible delimitar para que sus
conclusiones sean lo menos erróneas posible. De esta forma la ciencia ha ido avanzando en la construcción de un cuerpo de
conocimientos cada vez más sólido, pero esta solidez, obviamente, no es absoluta sino relativa y, como tal, saludablemente cambiante.
De manera que, si el mismo cuerpo de conocimientos de la ciencia es modificable, los doscientos siete años transcurridos desde la muerte de Mozart permiten, acerca de su personalidad, intentar un enfoque diferente de aquel que se ha ido transmitiendo en abundancia de generación en generación y, así, sumarlo a algunas revisiones que por fortuna ya se han hecho.
De otro modo, muchos podrían seguir pensando que aquellos primeros postes, malamente clavados en zona sísmica, continúan siendo juicios confiables para seguir etiquetando a quien tuvo una inteligencia lejos de todo promedio y una personalidad necesariamente distinta, por cierto, a la de sus contemporáneos.
Schlichtegroll se refirió a Mozart como un extraño ser que pronto se convirtió en hombre como músico pero siempre continuó siendo un niño ingobernable necesitado de una guía. Y Niemetschek lo vio grande como artista pero no tan grande en los otros aspectos de su vida.
He aquí la dicotomía que, con mayor o menor aceptación, perdura hasta nuestros días:
Mozart = Músico excelso + Persona ínfima
Ante tan tajante división se me ocurre pensar que a sus contemporáneos se les podría reconocer, al menos, el haberse adelantado en casi un sesquicentenio a los caminos bifurcados de Borges, pero se me concederá que si Mozart hubiese muerto cinco o diez años atrás, digamos en 1990, ningún biógrafo serio se hubiese atrevido a utilizar semejantes juicios de valor, no porque "no eran filisteos que lamentaban el hecho de que Mozart no hiciera una vida convencional", según los justifica Schonberg, sino por algo mucho más simple: han cambiado los criterios.
Además, y vaya esto como una perla, de los dos párrafos transcritos se extrae, precisamente, que si bien se reconoce la estatura musical de Mozart, tanto Schlichtegroll como Niemetschek no sólo lamentaron, sino lamentaron profundamente que el genial músico no haya llevado una vida convencional.
Y vaya una segunda perla: ¿en qué habrá estado pensando Schlichtegroll cuando juzgó que Mozart no tenía sentido para la moderación y la elección sensata de los placeres?
Ahora bien. Si un escritor cree conveniente apoyarse sin más en opiniones como éstas, es hasta natural que afirme, entre otras cosas, que "la tragedia de Mozart consistió en que creció apoyándose en su padre y fue incapaz de afrontar las exigencias de la sociedad y de la vida". Pero dudo que le asista el derecho de generalizar sobre los niños prodigio sólo porque Mozart lo fue, sentenciando que la consecuencia de serlo es tener "una niñez deformada y con frecuencia eso lleva a una edad adulta deformada".
Porque aquí surge otro interrogante: el de la forma y el fondo.
Es verdad que los niños prodigio no encajan muy bien con su entorno: se aburren con los juegos que divierten a otros chicos de la misma edad y no soportan la lentitud de los métodos de estudio concebidos para la "inteligencia normal", esto es, para los valores promedio.
¿Será lícito, entonces, decir que su niñez está deformada? Si supongo que no, doy el tema por concluido pero lo empobrezco. Si supongo que sí, doy por sentado que la deformación existe, por lo que la debo buscar en alguno de los dos términos de la ecuación: o está deformado el formato de la niñez de los niños prodigio, o están deformados los moldes desde donde los miramos: esos moldes con que nos moldea la sociedad.
Si bien es cierto que toda sociedad, para serlo, debe estar organizada alrededor de un conjunto de valores contenidos en un cuerpo de leyes, no es menos cierto que dentro de cualquier órgano social se van estableciendo hábitos y criterios a los cuales les debemos casi el mismo sometimiento que a las leyes, so pena de quedar excluidos del consenso, sin el cual no sólo quedaríamos solos ante nosotros mismos, sino solos de toda soledad. Y no importa mayormente si necesitamos ese consenso de grupos primarios o secundarios, pequeños o grandes. Lo necesitamos, ya sea para identificarnos o rebelarnos, pues simplemente somos en tanto somos en el otro.
Estas dos clases de leyes, sin embargo, tienen raíces bien distintas: las leyes escritas son una consecuencia de la necesidad de poner límites y brindarle al ciudadano un marco de referencia en el que pueda moverse con reglas de juego claras e iguales para todos y, aun con lo perfectibles que puedan ser, al menos están pensadas y redactadas por juristas que conocen muy bien el tema que tratan.
Las leyes no escritas, en cambio, esas que imponen la corrección o incorrección de algunos hábitos o la conveniencia o inconveniencia de algunos modales, las van imponiendo los poderes establecidos. Poderes cambiantes, muchas veces caprichosos y siempre interesados en sus propios intereses. Estos dos tipos de leyes rigen toda sociedad y son generalmente aceptadas, pues si quebrantamos la ley escrita nos penan, y si arremetemos contra la ley no escrita nos quedamos sin consenso, que es otra forma de penalidad.
Pero la sociedad no es un ente abstracto. Está compuesta por seres humanos concretos, cada uno con su cuota de inteligencia, virtudes y defectos y, si bien somos capaces de tener conductas nobles por lo honradas y generosas, aportamos también una pesada carga que es propia de la condición humana: la soberbia, que es mezquina por naturaleza, envidiosa por convicción y astuta en su proceder, ya que es la gran encubridora de nuestras carencias.
Nuestra soberbia sabe que, de mostrarse tal cual es, chocará contra la soberbia del otro, por lo que no le queda más remedio que fabricar las múltiples máscaras de la hipocresía. Por lo demás, la envidia siempre es altamente destructiva.
Si pudiésemos —y muchas veces hemos podido, ya sea a lo largo de la historia a secas, como de nuestra propia historia personal— destruiríamos al objeto envidiado, pues él nos muestra algo que nos falta, nos señala uno de nuestros espacios vacíos, esos espacios que tanto tememos. Un temor que nos impulsará a buscar por fuera lo que nos falta por dentro y hará que demos demasiada importancia a la acumulación de objetos, ya se trate de dinero, prestigio, poder, adornos varios para el cuerpo o el hogar, y hasta del mismísimo acopio de lectura cuando ella sólo nos sirve para convertirnos en la fugaz estrella de una reunión.
Para poder precisar la figura penal, los juristas deben delimitarla, pero ¿cómo y quién podría delimitar la envidia, la mezquindad o la hipocresía, que son moneda corriente dentro de la vida diaria?
Se podrá argüir que no todos aportamos la misma cantidad pues es justamente el quantum lo que nos diferencia a unos de otros, pero, ¿quién mide ese quantum? ¿Se alteraría en más o en menos por el mero hecho de ajustar nuestros modales a la norma establecida?
Además hay algo mucho más grave: es muy difícil, por no decir imposible, que veamos ese lastre que nos pertenece porque nuestra necesidad de autoestima no lo permitirá, por eso siempre sentiremos que somos víctimas de la maldad ajena y que jamás los otros padecerán la propia. Que son tan nuestras las virtudes como ajenos los defectos.
Y es en esta muy compleja interacción sociedad-uno mismo donde nos vamos formando como personas. Y es desde este muy enrevesado contexto que nos permitimos juzgar la normalidad o anormalidad de la infancia de los niños prodigio, llamados así por tener una inteligencia tan por encima de la nuestra, que esa misma circunstancia debería de inhibirnos el señalarles qué es lo apropiado o inapropiado para ellos, por el hecho de que casi todo su caudal intelectivo se dirige naturalmente hacia un área en particular, en detrimento de todas las demás.
No hay dudas que entre ellos y nosotros hay diferencias, aunque no sé si son ellos los diferentes al mirarnos desde su genialidad, o lo somos nosotros al mirarlos desde nuestras carencias.
Pero, al parecer, el que los no-prodigios constituyamos mayoría casi absoluta nos da el sagrado derecho de suponer que estos niños son unos pobres chicos incapaces de disfrutar de la sana, sincera e interesante vida social en la que estamos inmersos.
Como se ve, el piso de nuestro escenario dista de ser firme y empleamos demasiada energía para caminar por esa cuerda floja que se llama "vida normal", la que, a cambio, nos ¿protege? con el consenso. Una energía que los niños prodigio no están dispuestos a malgastar pues su mismo talento los impulsa hacia el área para la que nacieron dotados.
Los niños prodigio no son anormales. Pueden tener (y de hecho tienen) un formato de niñez diferente del nuestro. Un formato que tememos porque, ante él, corremos el riesgo de que obre a modo de un espejo que nos devuelva nuestra propia desnudez. Podemos sí estar de acuerdo si decimos que los límites que impone la ley son siempre necesarios.
En cuanto a Mozart, nadie podrá afirmar jamás que haya transgredido ninguna ley. En todo caso se rebeló ante el corsé de los formalismos, luchó contra la hipocresía de su época y perdió frente a la envidia ajena. Esa envidia que fue su peor y más grande enemigo.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nació genio por uno de esos misterios indescifrables que, al no disponer de otra explicación más coherente, atribuimos a una arbitrariedad divina. Ese genio se manifestó a una edad tan temprana y de una manera tan arrolladora, que lo han ubicado entre los niños prodigio más notables de las historia.
Perteneció a una familia con excelente desarrollo musical que le permitió un medio ambiente propicio a su inclinación natural. A los tres años arrancaba melodías al piano; a los cuatro, gracias al timbre perfecto de su oído, podía advertir la leve desafinación de un violín (instrumento del que, entre otros, llegó a ser eximio ejecutante), y podía memorizar en media hora una pieza de música o esbozar un concierto para clavecín; a los cinco tocaba el clave con un dominio que asombraba por su corta edad; a los seis ayudó a componer una comedia lírica, todo lo cual impulsó a su padre Leopold Mozart a llevarlo, junto con su otra hija Nannerl, también muy desarrollada musicalmente aunque no como el pequeño Wolfgang, a una gira por Munich y Viena, causando el niño una gran conmoción en la capital imperial por el arte con que tocaba el órgano y el clavecín. Debido al éxito obtenido en ese viaje se organizó otro a París haciendo alto por todas las cortes que pasaban. Los hermanitos Mozart fueron ofreciendo, así, innumerables conciertos ante reyes, príncipes, magnates, académicos eruditos y público en general. Y es en París donde, por primera vez, se publican obras de Mozart: cuatro sonatas para violín.
Luego pasan a Londres, en donde actúan ante la familia real, y Wolfgang compone otras seis sonatas para orquesta. De regreso en el continente siguen ofreciendo numerosos conciertos en diversos países y, después de tres años, retornan a Salzburgo cuando el niño tenía apenas diez años de edad. Es entonces que compone su primer oratorio.
En esa larga gira su nombre fue noticia permanente, tanto que la comunidad musical y científica le dedicó una serie de artículos. Hay una anécdota interesante que ilustra lo fabuloso de este niño: al actuar Wolfgang en París, poco antes de cumplir los siete años, el barón Friedrich Melchior von Grimm casi pierde los estribos. El pequeño tocó el clave, cuyo teclado estaba cubierto con un lienzo, leyó una obra a primera vista, improvisó, armonizó melodías en una primera audición y demostró la perfección absoluta de su oído. En la "Correspondence Littéraire", el barón escribió: "No estoy seguro de que este niño no me turbe la mente si continúo escuchándolo con frecuencia: me recuerda que es difícil defenderse de la locura cuando uno ve prodigios".
Afortunadamente, el barón von Grimm fue doblemente honesto: observó su propia reacción y la dejó asentada, sin ocurrírsele pensar que Mozart estaba deformando su niñez porque era sólo un genio musical al que no lo estaban introduciendo en el conocimiento de diversos temas y, sobre todo, porque aún no le habían enseñado adecuadamente aquellos modales refinados que le hubiesen ayudado a conseguir, más adelante, un cargo lucrativo con sueldo fijo, y le habrían impedido, además, hacerse de tantos enemigos por decir exactamente lo que pensaba acerca de la mediocridad de otros músicos o de ser tan arrogante de creerse el mejor cuando, por cierto, identificaba la mediocridad sin equivocarse jamás y, sin duda, fue el mejor músico de su época. (Tampoco se equivocó con los grandes: sentía un profundo respeto, entre otros, por Haydn).
Pues bien: quien fue dueño de tantas condiciones, ¿pudo haberse sentido a gusto dentro de los moldes de una vida convencional? Quien alcanzaría luego los niveles más altos en todas las formas de la música: ópera, sinfonía, concierto, cámara, vocal, piano o coral (con una producción tan extensa que el último Köchel correspondiente al bellísimo Requiem lleva el número 626), y sería el mejor pianista, el mejor organista, el mejor director y uno de los mejores violinistas, ¿podía medirse con la misma vara que a los demás? A propósito: ¿alguien recordaría hoy al Obispo de la Corte Archiepiscopal de Salzburgo y a su secretario el conde Kari Arco, si no fuera porque éste le pegó una patada en el trasero a Mozart cuando se insolentó con Su Excelencia?
Por esa época un artista era considerado poco más que un sirviente, y trato de imaginar la impotencia y la furia de Mozart ante tan grosera injusticia.
Trato también de imaginar, aunque sin éxito, un prolijo cuaderno con columnas para el debe y el haber que, en una ordenada planificación de la economía, debería haber debido utilizar aquel que era capaz de escribir una larga pieza, nota por nota, luego de escucharla por primera vez. Aquel que era capaz de apuntar una obra compleja mientras pensaba en otra. Aquel que era capaz de concebir un cuarteto de cuerdas, escribir las distintas partes y asentar, por último, la partitura completa. Un prolijo cuaderno para quien tuvo que resignarse a que siempre le pagaran mucho menos que a otros músicos de menores méritos.
Según Schonberg, Mozart tuvo una capacidad inaudita para hacerse de enemigos y yo pienso que, si se cambia el punto de mira, se tendrá una idea más bien pobre de lo que tuvo que soportar.
Él fue su música y, como ella, exuberante: compuso, amó, se divirtió y se enojó con la misma vivacidad, variación y frescura que trasciende de su riquísima obra, y debo decir, en fin, que si por niñez o vida adulta deformada se entiende la que no se ajusta a un promedio, efectivamente Mozart tuvo una niñez y una vida adulta deformada. Pero un promedio es sólo lo que el concepto indica: ni lo mejor ni lo peor. Apenas un término medio.
En cuanto a la relación con su padre Leopold Mozart, siempre fue conflictiva. Los historiadores le cargan las tintas basándose en el testimonio irrefutable de las cartas que le enviaba a su hijo, en donde se advierten sus tremendas y constantes exigencias para que se comporte como una persona normal. (A esta altura resulta tentador cuestionar una vez más a Schonberg y afirmar que la tragedia de Mozart consistió en que su padre creció apoyándose en él).
Leopold fue un buen violinista en una época de muchos buenos violinistas y un hombre que consideraba natural someterse al de arriba, despreciar a quienes él consideraba por debajo de su categoría (sobre todo a otros músicos, olvidando que él mismo lo era), y cuyo máximo objetivo en la vida era juntar unos cuantos ducados de oro a fin de asegurarse una vejez tranquila.
"Las palabras halagadoras, los elogios, los gritos de bravissimo no pagan el correo ni tampoco a los dueños de las pensiones. De modo que apenas compruebes que no es posible hacer dinero, debes alejarte sin demora...".
"Uno puede mostrarse siempre perfectamente natural con la gente de elevado rango, pero con los demás compórtate como un inglés. No debes mostrarte tan abierto con todos...", le aconsejaba papá Leopold a Wolfgang, para mayor gloria de la música.
De todas maneras, nunca hay nada que sea del todo malo ni del todo bueno. Y si bien por un lado el padre lo presionó hasta la exasperación tratando de imponerle un conjunto de valores que Wolfgang jamás pudo compartir, por otro lado le nutrió el almácigo en donde el talento musical de su hijo se desarrolló hasta niveles jamás vueltos a alcanzar por nadie.
Escuchar la difícil música de Mozart nunca es difícil, pues el placer que se experimenta con ella es francamente inefable debido a su elegancia, a su perfecta organización y equilibrio y, sobre todo, a la interminable belleza de su melodía.
Toda su obra participa de estas virtudes, aunque es a partir de su ruptura definitiva con Salzburgo en 1781 cuando su madurez musical alcanza el punto más alto. Y es en Viena donde comienza a escribir obra maestra tras obra maestra.
Amó la música de Händel y más aun la de Johann Sebastian Bach, en quien se inspiró para introducir recursos contrapuntísticos y a cuyo conocimiento contribuyó grandemente el barón Gottfried van Swieten. De Haydn afirmó una vez que, gracias a él, había aprendido a componer cuartetos.
El legado musical de Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart es el siguiente: 22 óperas, 60 obras religiosas, 135 obras vocales, 145 obras instrumentales, 73 conciertos y sonatas, 98 música de cámara, 68 obras para piano y 5 obras varias. Hay 20 Köchel considerados de autenticidad dudosa y apócrifa.
Cuando murió tenía 35 años, 10 meses y 9 días
Richard Feynman
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Richard Phillips Feynman (Nueva York, Estados Unidos, 11 de mayo de 1918 - Los Ángeles, California, Estados Unidos, 15 de febrero de 1988), físico estadounidense, considerado como uno de los más importantes de su país en el siglo XX. Su trabajo en electrodinámica cuántica le valió el Premio Nobel de Física en 1965, compartido con Julian Schwinger y Sin-Ichiro Tomonaga.
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Richard Feynman"Ciencia es creer en la ignorancia de los científicos."
"Cuando estás solucionando un problema, «no te preocupes». Ahora, «después» de que has resuelto el problema «es el momento de preocuparse»."
"El poder de la instrucción es, en general, poco eficaz, excepto en las felices ocasiones en que es casi superfluo."
"En aquel momento descubrí algo sobre la biología: era muy fácil encontrar una pregunta que fuera muy interesante y que nadie supiera contestar.
En física tenías que profundizar un poco más para poder encontrar una pregunta interesante que la gente no supiera contestar."
Fuente: "¿Está Ud. de broma, Sr. Feynman?".
"Es bien curioso, pero en las pocas ocasiones en que he sido requerido para tocar el bongo en público,
al presentador nunca se le ocurrió mencionar que también me dedico a la física teórica.
Pienso que esto puede deberse a que respetamos más las artes que las ciencias."
Fuente: "El carácter de la ley física".
"Estoy convencido de que cuando un científico examina problemas no científicos puede ser tan listo o tan tonto como cualquier prójimo,
y de que cuando habla de un asunto no científico, puede sonar igual de ingenuo que cualquier persona no impuesta en la materia."
"Hay que tener la mente abierta. Pero no tanto como para que se te caiga el cerebro."
"La Física es a las Matemáticas lo que el sexo es a la masturbación."
"La Física es como el sexo: seguro que da alguna compensación práctica, pero no es por eso por lo que la hacemos."
"La Matemática no es real, pero «parece real». ¿Dónde está ese lugar?"
"Las mismas ecuaciones tienen las mismas soluciones."
Nota: Así, cuando se ha solucionado un problema matemático, se puede reusar la solución en otra situación física similar.
Feynman era muy habilidoso transformando un problema en otro que podía solucionar.
"Lo más maravilloso de la ciencia es que está viva."
"Lo que no puedo crear, no lo entiendo."
"Nadie comprende la física cuántica."
"No es verdad que las llamadas 'matemáticas abstractas' sean tan difíciles.
(...) No creo que haya por un lado un pequeño número de personas extrañas capaces
de comprender las matemáticas y por el otro personas normales. Las matemáticas son uno de los descubrimientos de la humanidad.
Por lo tanto no pueden ser más complicadas de lo que los hombres son capaces de comprender."
"No hemos encontrado nada equivocado en la teoría de la electrodinámica cuántica.
Por tanto, yo diría que es la joya de la física, la posesión de la que estamos más orgullosos."
Fuente: "Electrodinámica cuántica".
"No tengo que 'tener' una respuesta. No me siento aterrorizado por no conocer cosas, por estar perdido en el misterioso
universo sin tener ningún propósito; que es el modo en el que la realidad es, hasta donde puedo decir, posiblemente. Esto no me aterra."
"Odiaría morir dos veces, ¡es tan aburrido!."
Notas: Últimas palabras.
"Para aquellos que no conocen las matemáticas, es difícil sentir la belleza, la profunda belleza de la naturaleza...
Si quieres aprender sobre la naturaleza, apreciar la naturaleza, es necesario aprender el lenguaje en el que habla."
"Querida Sra. Chown, ignore los intentos de su hijo de enseñarle Física. No es la cosa más importante.
La cosa más importante es el amor. Mis mejores deseos, Richard Feynman."
"Todos los procesos fundamentales son reversibles."
"Los principios de la Física, tal y como yo los entiendo, no niegan la posibilidad de manipular las cosas átomo por átomo."
"Hay otro tipo de cosa que no entendéis, queriendo decir: no me lo creo, es demasiado descabellado, es el tipo de
cosa que simplemente no voy a aceptar. Con esto espero que estéis conmigo y tenéis que aceptarlo porque es así como
funciona la naturaleza. Si queremos saber el modo en que funciona la naturaleza, la miramos cuidadosamente, observándola
y... ese es el aspecto que tiene. ¿No te gusta? Pues vete a otra parte, a otro universo donde las reglas sean más simples,
filosóficamente más agradables, psicológicamente más fáciles. No puedo evitarlo ¿vale? Si voy a deciros honestamente como
parece ser el mundo para los seres humanos que han luchado tan duro como han podido para entenderlo, sólo puedo deciros el aspecto que tiene."
"Aprende a resolver todos los problemas que ya hayan sido resueltos."
"Para lograr un éxito tecnológico, la realidad debe estar por encima de las relaciones públicas, porque la Naturaleza no puede ser engañada."
¡Aprenda a
tomar en serio lo que es digno de que se tome en serio, y ríase usted de lo demás!
Sea usted razonable por una vez. Usted
ha de acostumbrarse a la vida y ha de aprender a reír.
No, monsieur Harry; no lo ha hecho usted. Usted ha hecho de su vida
una horrorosa historia clínica, de su talento una desgracia. Y usted, a lo que veo, no ha
sabido emplear a una muchacha tan linda, para otra cosa más que para introducirle un
puñal en el cuerpo y destrozarla. ¿Considera usted justo esto?
-¡Qué patético se pone usted siempre! Pero aún ha de aprender usted humorismo,
Harry. El humorismo siempre es algo patibulario, y si es preciso, lo aprenderá usted en
el patíbulo. ¿Está usted dispuesto a ello? ¿Sí? Bien, entonces acuda usted al juez y sufra
con paciencia todo el aparato poco divertido de los agentes de la Justicia, hasta la fría
decapitación una mañana temprano en el patio de la cárcel. ¿Está usted realmente
dispuesto a ello?
Haller no sólo ha ofendido el arte sublime, al confundir
nuestra hermosa galería de imágenes con la llamada realidad, y apuñalar a una
muchacha fantástica con un fantástico puñal; ha tenido, además, intención de servirse
de nuestro teatro, sin la menor pizca de humorismo, como de una máquina de suicidio.
Cuando volví en mí, estaba Mozart sentado a mi lado como antes; me dio un golpe en
el hombro y dijo:
-Ya ha escuchado usted su sentencia. No tendrá más remedio que acostumbrarse a
seguir oyendo la música de radio de la vida. Le sentará bien. Tiene usted poquísimo
talento, querido y estúpido amigo; pero así, poco a poco, habrá ido comprendiendo ya lo
que se exige de usted. Ha de hacerse cargo del humorismo de la vida, del humor
patibulario de esta vida. Claro que usted está dispuesto en este mundo a todo menos a
lo que se le exige. Está dispuesto a asesinar muchachas, está dispuesto a dejarse
ejecutar solemnemente. Estaría dispuesto también con seguridad a martirizarse y a
flagelarse durante cien anos. ¿O no?
Usted quiere morir, cobarde; pero no
vivir. Al diablo, si precisamente lo que tiene usted que hacer es vivir. Merecería usted
ser condenado a la pena más grave de todas.
-¡Oh! ¿Y qué pena sería esa?
-Podríamos, por ejemplo, hacer revivir a la muchacha y casar a usted con ella.
-No; a eso no estaría dispuesto. Habría una desgracia.
-Como si no fuese ya bastante desgracia todo lo que ha hecho usted. Pero con lo
patético y con los asesinatos hay que acabar ya. Sea usted razonable por una vez. Usted
ha de acostumbrarse a la vida y ha de aprender a reír. Ha de escuchar la maldita música
de la radio de este mundo y venerar el espíritu que lleva dentro y reírse de ¡a demás
murga. Listo, otra cosa no se le exige.
En voz baja, y como entre dientes, pregunté:
-¿Y si yo me opusiera? ¿Y si yo le negara a usted, señor Mozart, el derecho de
disponer del lobo estepario y de intervenir en su destino?
-Entonces -dijo apaciblemente Mozart- te propondría que fumaras aún uno de mis
preciosos cigarrillos.
mundo alegórico con manchas de realidad. Esto no ha estado bien en ti. Es de esperar
que lo hayas hecho al menos por celos, cuando nos viste tendidos a Armanda y a mí. A
esta figura, desgraciadamente, no has sabido manejarla; creí que habías aprendido
mejor el juego. En fin, podrá corregirse.
Cogió a Armanda, la cual, entre sus dedos, se achicó al punto hasta convertirse en
una figurita del juego, y la guardó en aquel mismo bolsillo del chaleco del que había
sacado antes el cigarrillo.
Aroma agradable exhalaba el humo dulce y denso; me sentí aligerado y dispuesto a
dormir un año entero.
Oh, lo comprendí todo; comprendí a Pablo, comprendí a Mozart, oí en alguna parte
detrás de mí su risa terrible; sabía que estaban en mi bolsillo todas las cien mil figuras
del juego de la vida: aniquilado, barruntaba su significación; tenía el propósito de
empezar otra vez el juego, de gustar sus tormentos otra vez, de estremecerme de
nuevo y recorrer una y muchas veces más el infierno de mi interior.
Alguna vez llegaría a saber jugar mejor el juego de las figuras. Alguna vez aprendería
a reír. Pablo me estaba esperando. Mozart me estaba esperando.
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Cada rechazo, cada "NO ES JUSTO", cada vez que no sucede lo que querías, te da la oportunidad de NO alimentar a tu EGO. Y la oportunidad de dejar que tu verdadero SER sea LIBRE.
Hoy, DISFRUTA EL RECHAZO. El ardor que sientes es el desencadenamiento del tu alma.
El Tao de la Física
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Yin-yang.El Tao de la Física es el título en español del libro "The Tao of Physics" escrito en 1975 por Fritjof Capra, doctor en física de la Universidad de Viena, director por años del Center for Ecoliteracy de la universidad de Berkeley, California.
El libro consta de tres partes y dieciocho capítulos.
[editar] Argumento
El autor considera que en el intento por comprender el misterio de la vida, el ser humano ha seguido diferentes caminos, entre ellos el del científico y el del místico. La tesis que plantea es: Los conceptos de la física moderna llevan a una visión del mundo muy similar a la de los místicos de todas las épocas y tradiciones. La finalidad del ensayo es explorar la relación entre tales conceptos, motivado por la creencia de que los temas básicos que utiliza para comparar la física con el misticismo serán confirmados, más que invalidados por futuras investigaciones.
Para Capra los dos pilares de la física moderna son: la teoría cuántica y la teoría de la relatividad abordadas en la primera parte del ensayo. Las filosofías orientales a las que hace referencia en la segunda parte son: el hinduismo, el budismo y el taoísmo.[1]
[editar] Paralelismos
Capra aclara la naturaleza del conocimiento que se va a comparar y el lenguaje en el cual ha sido expresado dicho conocimiento. Compara el conocimiento racional con el intuitivo. En la física se utiliza el método científico y como técnica la experimentación. En el misticismo el método es el yoga o la devoción y la técnica, la meditación.
Inicia recopilando los conceptos de la física clásica, planteados por Isaac Newton.
Espacio y tiempo absolutos.
Las partículas elementales.
La naturaleza causal de los fenómenos físicos.
El ideal de una comprensión objetiva de la naturaleza.
En la tercera parte del ensayo plantea los siguientes paralelismos:
La Unificación.
La dualidad yin-yang y la dualidad onda-partícula
Espacio tiempo como creaciones de la mente
La naturaleza dinámica del universo.
La teoría del campo unificado y la relación vacío y forma.
La danza cósmica y la naturaleza dinámica de la materia.
El cambio y el libro de las mutaciones I Ching.
[editar] Referencias
? Frijof Capra. El Tao de la Física. Barcelona: Sirio. 2000. Tercera edición.
Obtenido de "http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Tao_de_la_F%C3%ADsica"
Fritjof Capra
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Fritjof Capra (Viena, 1 de febrero de 1939) es un reconocido físico austriaco.
Doctor en Física teórica por la Universidad de Viena en 1966, Fritjof Capra ha trabajado como investigador en física subatómica en la Universidad de París, en la Universidad de California (U.C.) en Santa Cruz, en el Acelerador Lineal de Londres y en el Laboratorio Lawrence Berkeley de la U.C. También ha sido profesor en la U.C. en Santa Cruz, en Berkeley y en la Universidad de San Francisco.
En paralelo a sus actividades de investigación y enseñanza, desde hace más de 30 años Capra ha estudiado en profundidad las consecuencias filosóficas y sociales de la ciencia moderna. Sobre este tema imparte seminarios y conferencias, con relativa frecuencia, en diversos países.
Su producción literaria se inició con la publicación de un icono moderno: El Tao de la Física, best-seller que supuso el punto de partida de numerosas publicaciones sobre la interrelación entre el universo descubierto por la física moderna y el misticismo antiguo, principalmente oriental.
Sus trabajos de investigación y divulgación siguientes incluyen estudios en que los postulados aportados por su primer libro se extienden a otras áreas, como la biología y la ecología, enfatizando en todos ellos la necesidad de alcanzar una nueva comprensión del universo que nos rodea como un todo en el que, para comprender sus partes, es necesario estudiar su interrelación con el resto de los fenómenos, pues su visión está basada en que la naturaleza de la realidad es un proceso creativo e interconectado en el que nada puede ser entendido por sí mismo, sino por su pertenencia a la infinita y extensa danza de la creación.
[editar] Bibliografía
Sus principales publicaciones son las siguientes:
1975, The Tao of Physics. (El Tao de la Física)
1984, Green Politics, con Charlene Spretnak.
1982, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. (El punto crucial)
1988, Uncommon Wisdom
1991, Belonging to the Universe: Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality, en coautoría con David Steindl-Rast y Thomas Matus.
1996, The Web of Life (La trama de la vida)
2002, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living
2007, The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance
[editar] Enlaces externos
Más información
La ciencia física es la base de una vida sostenible
Ecoliteracy.org
[editar] Véase también
La Trama de la Vida
Obtenido de "http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra"
8.- La variable más grande entre una alfa y un hombre que es demasiado bueno es el miedo. El alfa le demuestra que no le da miedo estar sin élla.
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Aprendiz de PUA Mensajes: 41
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principios de todo alfa de ahora en adelante: la lucha contra las cabronas - 24-sep-2009, 17:59
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PRINCIPIOS DE AHORA EN ADELANTE:
1.- Cualquier cosa que tengas que perseguir en la vida va a huir.
2.- Los hombres que tienen a las mujeres arañando las paredes por ellos no siempre son excepcionales. Por lo general, son los que parecen no darle mucha importancia al asunto.
3.- Un hombre será apreciado como alguien que ofrece un desafío mental, en la medida en que una mujer no sienta que tiene el control total sobre el.
4.- Muchas veces una mujer deliberadamente no llama, sólo para ver cómo respondes.
5.- Si comienzas siendo dependiente, la decepcionas. Pero si eres algo que élla no puede tener, obtenerte se vuelve un desafío.
6.- Tu actitud sobre ti mismo es la que una mujer va a adoptar.
7.- Actúa como un premio y ellal creerá que lo eres.
8.- La variable más grande entre una alfa y un hombre que es demasiado bueno es el miedo. El alfa le demuestra que no le da miedo estar sin élla.
10.- Cuando un hombre no cede fácilmente y no parece dócil o sumiso, obtenerlo se vuelve más estimulante.
11.- Estar a punto de obtener algo genera un deseo que debe satisfacerse.
14.- Si la asfixias, élla va a ponerse a la defensiva y va a buscar una ruta de escape para proteger su libertad.
16.- El alfa le da a la mujer el espacio suficiente para que no se sienta atrapada en una jaula. Entonces... élla se propone atraparlo en la suya.
17.- Si le dices que no estás interesado en comenzar una relación, élla intentará hacerte cambiar de idea.
18.- Siempre hazle creer que tiene espacio suficiente. Eso hace que baje la guardia.
19.- Más que nada, élla se está fijando en si serás demasiado dependiente emocionalmente.
20.- Élla debe sentir que quieres estar con élla, no que necesitas estar con élla. Solo así te va a sentir como una compañero a su nivel.
22.- El sexo y la “chispa” no son lo mismo.
23.- Antes del sexo, el hombre no está pensando con claridad y la mujer sí. Después del sexo es al revés; el hombre está pensando con claridad y la mujer no.
25.- Un hombre siente de forma intuitiva si la sexualidad sale de la seguridad o de una necesidad. Sabe cuando una mujer tiene sexo para apaciguarlo.
26.- Es más fácil formar hábitos malos que buenos, porque los buenos hábitos requieren un esfuerzo consciente. La espera fomenta este esfuerzo.
27.- Si desconectas la clavija sexual en el último minuto, élla te va a etiquetar como provocador..
28.- Si élla te hace sentir inseguro, deja que tu inseguridad te guíe.
29.- Un hombre de calidad fantasea con una mujer que realmente disfrute el sexo.
30.- Cada vez que un hombre compite con otro, se rebaja.
31.- Cuando es innegable que hay “chispa” sólo hay una llave para el candado.
33.- Cuando alimentas su ego con suavidad, él no intentará obtener el poder con agresividad.
36.- La posición simbólica de poder es de cara al público, pero la posición de poder real sólo se muestra en privado. Y ésta es la única que importa.
39.- Los hombres no responden a las palabras. Responden a la falta de contacto.
40.- Hablar demasiado sobre la “relación” le quita el elemento de lo “desconocido” y, por lo tanto, el misterio.
42.- Si siempre estás FELIZ, y élla sabe que siempre puedes estar SIN élla, élla siente que no tiene PREOCUPACIONES.
43.- Si permites que se interrumpa tu ritmo, creas un vacío. Después, para reemplazar lo que estás dejando, empezarás a esperar y a necesitar más de tu pareja.
44.- La mayoría de las mujeres están hambrientas por recibir de un hombre algo que necesitan darse a sí mismas.
46.- En el momento en que un hombre se esfuerza demasiado para lograr satisfacer los criterios de élla, ya bajó el nivel de esa relación.
50.- El chico bueno da demasiado de sí mismo cuando complacerla a élla con frecuencia se convierte en algo más importante que complacerse a sí mismo.
52.- Cuando te quejas, élla deja de escucharte. Pero cuando hablas con tus acciones, te pone atención.
53.- Cuando una no presta atención a una hombre, sigue intentando asegurarse que el “continúa allí”.
54.- Cuando la rutina se vuelve predecible, es más probable que élla te dé el mismo tipo de amor que le da a su padre; y las probabilidades de que no te tome en cuenta aumentan.
56.- Cuando la tratas de forma casual como si fuera una amiga, élla se va a acercar a ti. Porque quiere que todo sea romántico, pero también quiere ser élla quien persiga.
57.- Un pequeño distanciamiento combinado con un aspecto de autocontrol la pondrá nerviosa, pues pensará que puede estarte perdiendo.
58.- Una mujer deja de apreciar a un hombre cuando tiene interés pero ya no va a cambiar su rutina.
61.- Si te quejas, élla ve debilidad.
62.- Élla percibe a un hombre emotivo como alguien insignificante.
63.- De la misma forma que la familiaridad provoca desdén, un comportamiento un poco distante muchas veces puede renovar su respeto.
64.- Élla va a olvidar lo que tiene contigo... a menos que se lo recuerdes.
65.- Muchos hombres hablan mucho porque están nerviosos; y eso es algo que las mujeres suelen percibir como inseguridad.
67.- Forzarlo a hablar sobre sentimientos todo el tiempo no sólo te hará parecer necesitado,con el tiempo hará que élla te pierda el respeto. Y si te pierde el respeto, le va a poner menos atención a tus sentimientos.
69.- Los hombres tratan a las mujeres igual que tratan a otros hombres. Toman las cosas “con calma” porque no quieren parecer débiles o desesperados.
70.- El elemento sorpresa, tanto dentro como fuera de la relación, es importante para las mujeres y ayuda a la excitación.
71.- Dentro de la recámara, no hagas lo mismo una y otra vez. Varía para que no se convierta en una rutina predecible.
72.- La mayoría de las mujeres tiende a faltarle al respeto a los hombres que parece demasiado maleable.
73.- No temas decir lo que piensas o defenderte. No sólo ganarás su respeto. En algunos casos hasta se sentirá excitada.
74.- Los hombres asumen casi automáticamente que una mujer más cabrona va a ser más asertiva en la cama, y que la chica buena va a ser más tímida.
75.- Cuando una mujer se enamora, de repente hará cosas que antes no hacía, sin darles importancia. Hará cosas por el hombre que no habría hecho por nadie más.
76.- Nunca te respetará como un ser independiente a menos que tengas estabilidad financiera.
77.- Tienes que demostrarle que no aceptarás maltratos. Entonces mantendrás su respeto.
80.- La capacidad para decidir cómo quieres vivir, y la capacidad de escoger cómo quieres que te traten son las dos cosas que te darán más poder que cualquier otro objeto material.
81.- En cualquier tipo de relación, si una persona siente que la otra no está poniendo nada en la mesa, él o ella empezará a faltarle al respeto a la otra persona.
82.- Necesitar a alguien en lo económico no se diferencia de necesitarlo en lo emocional; en ambos casos, élla puede sentir que tiene el control completo sobre ti.
84.- Cuando un hombre está muy preocupado porque no quiere que se aprovechen de él, es una señal de que está viendo “qué puede sacar”.
85.- Las personas te demostrarán que se respetan a sí mismas sencillamente por el hecho de que quieren ser responsables de ellas mismas.
86.- Mientras más independiente seas de élla, más interés va a mostrar por ti.
87.- Si haces muy obvio que estás emocionado por conseguir algo, algunas personas se verán tentadas a balancear una zanahoria frente a tu cara.
88.- Cuando alteras la rutina, el que no estés presente en ciertos momentos es lo que hace que se acerque a ti.
89.- No le recompenses una mala conducta.
90.- Sencillamente élla no va a respetar a un hombre que actúe a marchas forzadas para complacerla.
91.- Si élla no te da una hora, tú no le des fecha.
92.- Por lo general, la mejor forma de ajustar o solucionar el problema es no dejar que élla sepa que lo estás solucionando. Cuando alteras tu disponibilidad o cambias una rutina predecible, mentalmente se va a sentir atraído hacia ti.
93.- Una vez que empiezas a reír, te empiezas a curar.
94.- Puedes salirte con la tuya diciendo muchas más cosas con humor de lo que lograrías con una cara larga.
95.- Una mujer siente que ganó, o que conquistó a un hombre, cuando el come de la palma de su mano. Y en ese momento, empieza a aburrirse.
96.- La tensión que se forma con un hombre que sea un tanto alfa le provoca a la mujer un sutil sentimiento de peligro. Élla se siente un poco insegura porque nunca la tiene en la palma de su mano.
97.- Un hombre sí” que da demasiado, da la impresión de que cree más en la mujer de lo que cree en el mismo. Los hombres ven esto como debilidad y no como bondad.
98.- Siempre sé una persona independiente, e ignora a cualquier persona que intente definirte de alguna forma limitante.
99.- Las personas realmente poderosas no dan explicaciones sobre por qué quieren respeto. Simplemente no se mezclan con personas que no se los dan.
100.- La cualidad más atractiva de todas es la dignidad.
EL ESCORPION......... SI ENVIAN MENSAJES PRIVADOS CON DUDAS YO LES AYUDO.....
Alemania conmemora 250 años de la muerte de Händel, el rey de la música barroca
Alemania conmemora el 250 aniversario de la muerte de Georg Friedrich Händel, un "lobo solitario" que, de vivir hoy, difícilmente podría huir del sinfín de agasajos que le ha preparado su país natal
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Alemania conmemora 250 años de la muerte de Händel, el rey de la música barroca EFE | BERLÍN 14-4-2009 19:56:31
Alemania conmemora el 250 aniversario de la muerte de Georg Friedrich Händel, un "lobo solitario" que, de vivir hoy, difícilmente podría huir del sinfín de agasajos que le ha preparado su país natal durante todo este año.
Exposiciones, conciertos, reediciones de CD e incluso un nuevo vino con el nombre del maestro del barroco consolidan al autor de "El Mesías" como estrella germana de la música clásica barroca.
La localidad alemana de Halle (este de Alemania), en la que nació el compositor en 1685, es el epicentro de las conmemoraciones, con ciclos de conciertos bajo el epígrafe "Händel - el europeo", la reapertura de su casa natal y una nueva exposición en el Museo Händel dedicada a unas de las pasiones del músico: la buena mesa.
La corpulencia del compositor (1685-1759) fue uno de sus signos característicos y probablemente la causa de la apoplejía que le dejó medio cuerpo paralizado y de la que se recuperó en 1737.
Independiente, renovador, solitario y en perpetuo conflicto consigo mismo son algunos de los aspectos de la personalidad del compositor que reflejan dos nuevas biografías puestas a la venta en Alemania con ocasión del aniversario.
Mientras "Georg Friedrich Händel" del musicólogo Franzpeter Messmer explora los vínculos entre la vida privada del compositor y su creación artística, Karl-Heinz Otto ubica al músico en el centro del ensayo "Tumult und Grazie" sobre la ópera, Londres, las divas, la música barroca y los "castrati".
Tampoco la televisión escapa al embrujo de Händel este año y la cadena franco-alemana "arte" dedica al maestro del barroco una serie de reportajes centrados en su obra y su vida, que le llevó a viajar por Alemania, residir en Italia y a afincarse en Inglaterra, tras el éxito que cosechó en Londres con su ópera "Rinaldo" en 1711.
La cadena arte retransmitirá en directo el recital con el que Halle homenajeará a Händel el próximo domingo desde la iglesia Marktkirche, un concierto que recreará el que la abadía de Westmister de Londres dedicó al compositor en 1784, 25 años después de su muerte en esa ciudad, a la edad de 74 años.
La casa museo de Händel en Londres, ciudad en la que el músico vivió más de cuarenta años y considerada la patria de adopción del compositor, también le dedica estos días un exposición con motivo del aniversario de la muerte del músico. En su casa natal de Halle se mostrarán a partir de esta semana manuscritos de Händel pertenecientes a los fondos de la Biblioteca Británica de Londres, junto a pinturas, grabados e instrumentos musicales.
Más de sesenta óperas y oratorios, entre ellos piezas célebres como "Almira", "Radamisto", "Julio César" y "Rodelina" integran la extensa producción musical de Händel, que abarcó desde composiciones vocales, pasando de lo profano a lo religioso, a música instrumental.
El tenor mexicano Rolando Villazón también ha prestado su voz este año a "Alcina", una de las óperas de Händel, de la que interpreta un fragmento en su nuevo CD dedicado a las arias más memorables de la historia operística.
La incursión de Villazón en el universo "händeliano" forma parte de las numerosas reediciones de la obra del maestro del barroco lanzadas al mercado en Alemania coincidiendo con el 250 aniversario de su muerte.
Tras el reconocimiento público en vida -se le erigió una estatua en Londres y fue enterrado en un acto multitudinario en la abadía de Westminster- Händel recibe ahora el homenaje póstumo de las dos naciones que se lo atribuyen como hijo predilecto, Inglaterra como patria adoptiva, y Alemania, como país natal
Whenever I found myself able once more to withdraw myself from the dissipations
and distractions which contact with civilisation forces upon one, no matter how
vigorously he may struggle against their insolence, to the sacred solitude of
the desert, whether among the sierras of Spain, or the sands of the Sahara, I
found that the philosophy of Lao Tze resumed its sway upon my soul, subtler and
stronger on each successive occasion.
But neither Europe nor Africa can show
such desolation as America.
It was therefore during my exile in America that the
doctrines of Lao Tze developed most rapidly in my soul, even forcing their way
outwards until I felt it imperious, nay inevitable, to express them in terms of
conscious thought.
His very simplest ideas, the primitive elements
of his thought, had no true correspondences in any European terminology. The
very first word 'Tao' presented a completely insoluble problem. It had been
translated 'Reason,' the 'Way,' 'TO ON.' None of these covey the faintest
conception of the Tao.
Nothing can be known in itself,
but only as one of the participants in a series of events. Reality is therefore
in the motion, not in the things moved.
*^^^^^^^^^^
^
Our knowledge of anything is in reality the sum of
our observations of its successive movements, that is to say, of its path from
event to event. In this sense the Tao may be translated as the Way.
TAO-> CAMINO
Yet our
experience when analyzed tells {6} us that the only reality of which we may be
sure is this path or Way which resumes the whole of our knowledge.
*****************
To understand it requires an altogether different state of mind to
any with which European thinkers in general are familiar.
Consider electricity. It would be absurd to say that electricity is
any of the phenomena by which we know it. We take refuge in the petitio
principii of saying that electricity is that form of energy which is the
principle cause of such and such phenomena.
There is some thing inherent in the nature of consciousness,
reason, perception, sensation, and of the universe of which they inform us,
which is responsible for the fact that we observe these phenomena and not
others; that we reflect upon them as we do, and not otherwise. But even deeper
than this, part of the reality of the inscrutable energy which determines the
form of our experience, consists in determining that experience should take
place at all. It should be clear that this has nothing to do with any of the
Platonic conceptions of the nature of things.
Despite the essential difficulty of correlating the ideas of
Lao Tze with any others, the persistent application of the Qabalistic keys
eventually unlocked his treasure-house. I was able to explain to myself his
teachings in terms of familiar systems.
***********************+
I hope and believe
that careful study of the text, as elucidated by my commentary, will enable
serious aspirants to the hidden wisdom to understand with fair accuracy what
Lao Tze taught.
I hope and believe
that careful study of the text, as elucidated by my commentary, will enable
serious aspirants to the hidden wisdom to understand with fair accuracy what
Lao Tze taught.
He who knows the Tao knows it to be the source of all
things soever;
the living
face of truth.
****************************+
From 1908 to 1918, the Tao Teh King was my continual study. I constantly
recommended it to my friends as the supreme masterpiece of initiated wisdom,
and I was as constantly disappointed when they declared that it did not impress
them, especially as my preliminary descriptions of the book had aroused their
keenest interest.
********************************
Crowley used meditation and visions to attain a mental
unity with the text and Lao Tzu's mind at the point of the original writing.
This also sheds light on Crowley's
concept of incarnation from past lives -- not necessarily literally so, but
incarnation of the spirit of the former living being.
*************
where Hadit is Tao and Nuit, Teh -- (Yet these are in certain
aspects interchanged!)
The Tao
.
The Teh, The Tao,
source of the Mother source of the Father
#### #### ##########
1. The Tao resembleth the emptiness of Space; to employ it, we must avoid
creating ganglia.((See Liber CCXX...I.22, 'let there be no difference
made among you between any one thing and any other thing.' {WEH NOTE:
Quotation corrected from: 'make no difference between any one thing and
any other thing'} Inequality (an Illusion) and disorder necessarily
result from the departure from homogeneity.)) Oh Tao, how vast art Thou,
the Abyss of Abysses, thou Holy and Secret Father of all Fatherhoods of
Things!
2. Let us make our sharpness blunt;((For sharpness implies a
concentration.)) let us loosen our complexes;((For these are the ganglia
of thought, which must be destroyed.)) let us((On the same principles.
Cf. the Doctrine in CCXX as to the 'space-marks'. The stars are
blemishes, so to speak, on the continuity of Nuit. )) tone down our
brightness to the general obscurity. Oh Tao, how still art thou, how
pure, continuous One beyond Heaven!
3. This Tao hath no Father; it is beyond all other conceptions, higher than
the highest. {5}
************************
CHAPTER XX
THE WITHDRAWAL FROM THE COMMON WAY.
1. To forget learning is to end trouble. The smallest difference in words,
such as 'yes' and 'yea', can make endless controversy for the
scholar.((Consider the 'homoiousios -- homoiousios' quarrel of early
Christianity.)) Fearful indeed is death, since all men fear it; but the
abyss of questionings, shoreless and bottomless, is worse!
1. Emptiness must be perfect, and Silence made absolute with tireless
strength. All things pass through the period of action; then they return
to repose. They grow, bud, blossom and fruit; then they return to the
root. This return to the root is this state which we name Silence; and
this Silence is Witness of their Fulfilment.
That godhood beareth fruit in the
mastery of the Tao. Then the man, the Tao permeating him, endureth; and
his bodily principles are in harmony, {19} proof against decay, until the
hour of his Change. {20}
2. To all seeming, they were fearful as men that cross a torrent in winter
flood; they were hesitating like a man in apprehension of them that are
about him; they were full of awe like a guest in a great house; they were
ready to disappear like ice in thaw; they were unassuming like unworked
wood; they were empty as a valley; and dull as the waters of a marsh.
3. Who can clear muddy water? Stillness will accomplish this. Who can
obtain rest? Let motion continue equably, and it will itself be peace.
4. The adepts of the Tao, conserving its way, seek not to be actively selfconscious.
By their emptiness of Self {17} they have no need to show
their youth and perfection; to appear old and imperfect is their
privilege. {18}
3. We confront it, and see not its Face; {15} we pursue it, and its Back is
hidden from us. Ah! but apply the Tao as in old Time to the work of the
present; know it as it was known in the Beginning; follow fervently the
Thread of the Tao. {16}
CHAPTER XIII
THE CONTEMPT FOR CIRCUMSTANCE.
1. Favor and disgrace are equally to be shunned; honour and calamity to be
alike regarded as adhering to the personality.((And, therefore, 'ganglia'
to be loosened is written, as stated above.))
2. What is this which is written concerning favour and disgrace? Disgrace
is the fall from favour. He then that hath favour hath fear, and its
loss begetteth fear yet greater of a further fall. What is this which is
written concerning honour and calamity? It is this attachment to the
body which maketh calamity possible; for were one bodiless, what evil
could befall him?
3. Therefore let him that regardeth himself rightly administer also a
kingdom; and let him govern it who loveth it as another man loveth
himself.((This does not mean with extreme devotion, but rather with
passionless indifference.)) {14}
2. The wise man seeketh therefore to content the actual needs of the people;
not to excite them by the sight of luxuries. He banneth these, and
concentrateth on those.((The present labour troubles are due to the
absurd cult of material complexities miscalled prosperity.)) {13}
CHAPTER X
THINGS ATTAINABLE.
1. When soul((Neschamah.)) and body((Nephesch.)) are in the bond of love,
they can be kept together. By concentration on the breath((Prana.)) it
is brought to perfect elasticity, and one becomes as a babe. By
purifying oneself from Samadhi one becomes whole.((Here we see once more
the doctrine of being without friction. Internal conflict leads to
rupture. Again, one's Pranayama is to result perfect pliability and
exact adjustment to one's environment. Finally, even Sammasamadhi is a
defect, so long as it is an experience instead of a constant state. So
long as there are two to become one, there are two.))
2. In his dealing with individuals and with society, let him move without
lust of result. In the management of his breath, let him be like the
mother-bird.((I.e., brooding like the Spirit, quiet, without effort.))
Let his intelligence((Binah.)) comprehend every quarter; but let his
knowledge((Daath.)) cease.((He must absorb (or understand) everything
without conscious knowledge, which is a shock, implying duality, like
flint and steel, while understanding is like a sponge, or even like ocean
absorbing rivers.))
3. Here is the Mystery of Virtue.((Of the Tao and of him that hath it.
Virtue -- the Teh.)) It createth all and nourisheth all; yet it doth not
adhere to them; it operateth all, but knoweth not of it, nor proclaimeth
it; it directeth all, but without conscious control. {11}
*************++
CHAPTER IX
THE WAY OF RETICENCE.
1. Fill not a vessel, lest it spill in carrying. Meddle not with a
sharpened point by feeling it constantly, or it will soon become
blunted.((Moderation. Let well alone.))
2. Gold and jade endanger the house of their possessor. Wealth and honors
lead to arrogance and envy, and bring ruin. Is thy way famous and thy
name becoming distinguished? Withdraw, thy work once done, into
obscurity; this is the way of Heaven.((Attend to the work; ignore the
byproducts thereof.)) {10}
+++++++++++++++++++
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATURE OF PEACE.
1. Admire thou the High Way of Water! Is not Water the soul of the life of
things, whereby they change? Yet it seeketh its level, and abideth
content in obscurity. So also it resembleth the Tao, in this Way
thereof!((Hydrogen and chlorine (for example) will not unite when
perfectly dry. Dryness is immobility or death. (Cf. Book of Wisdom or
Folly, the doctrine concerning Change.)))
*********************
THE CONCEALMENT OF THE LIGHT.
1. Heaven and Earth are mighty in continuance, because their work is
delivered from the lust of result.
2. Thus also the sage, seeking not any goal, attaineth all things; he doth
not interfere in the affairs of his body, and so that body acteth without
friction. It is because he meddleth not with personal aims that these
come to pass with simplicity.((See CCXX as to 'lust of result.' The
general idea of the Way of the Tao is that all evil is interference. It
is unnatural action which is error. None {sic} action is commendable
only as a corrective of such; to interfere with one's own true Way is
Restriction, the word of Sin.)) {8}
******************++
3. This Tao hath no Father; it is beyond all other conceptions, higher than
the highest. {5}
*******************++
CHAPTER XXI
THE INFINITE WOMB.
1. The sole source of energy is the Tao. Who may declare its nature? It is
beyond Sense, yet all form is hidden within it. It is beyond Sense, yet
all Perceptibles are hidden within it. It is beyond Sense, yet all
Perceptibles are hidden within it. It is beyond Sense, yet all Being is
hidden within it. This Being excites Perception, and the Word thereof.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, its Name((Teh.
Zero contains all possibilities, for it may be written 0= X (-X), where
X is anything soever and -X its opposite. However complex X may be, it
is always to be cancelled by its -X. Thus the universe is always
potentially anything and everything, yet actually Nothing.)) operateth
continuously, causing all to flow in the cycle of Change, which is Love
and Beauty. How do I know this? By my comprehension of the Tao. {26}
CHAPTER XXII
THE GUERDON OF MODESTY.
1. The part becometh the whole. The curve becometh straight; the void
becometh full; the old becometh new. He who desireth little
accomplisheth his Will with ease; who desireth many things becometh
distracted.((Thus he hath none of them.))
*****************
1. Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance
to the State.
2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either
to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry
which can on no account be neglected.
4. These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth;
(4) The Commander; (5) Method and discipline.
9. The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom,
sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.
10. By method and discipline are to be understood
the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions,
the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance
of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the
control of military expenditure.
13. (1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued
with the Moral law?
(2) Which of the two generals has most ability?
(3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven
and Earth?
(4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?
(5) Which army is stronger?
(6) On which side are officers and men more highly trained?
(7) In which army is there the greater constancy
both in reward and punishment?
17. According as circumstances are favorable,
one should modify one's plans.
18. All warfare is based on deception.
19. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable;
when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we
are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away;
when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
21. If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him.
If he is in superior strength, evade him.
22. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to
irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.
23. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.
If his forces are united, separate them.
24. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where
you are not expected.
25. These military devices, leading to victory,
must not be divulged beforehand.
Thus do many calculations
lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat:
how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention
to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.
16. Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must
be roused to anger; that there may be advantage from
defeating the enemy, they must have their rewards.
Our own flags should be substituted for those of the enemy,
and the chariots mingled and used in conjunction with ours.
The captured soldiers should be kindly treated and kept.
18. This is called, using the conquered foe to augment
one's own strength.
3. Thus the highest form of generalship is to
balk the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent
the junction of the enemy's forces; the next in
order is to attack the enemy's army in the field;
and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
5. The general, unable to control his irritation,
will launch his men to the assault like swarming ants,
with the result that one-third of his men are slain,
while the town still remains untaken. Such are the disastrous
effects of a siege.
6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's
troops without any fighting; he captures their cities
without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom
without lengthy operations in the field.
7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery
of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph
will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
8. It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten
to the enemy's one, to surround him; if five to one,
to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army
into two.
17. Thus we may know that there are five essentials
for victory:
(1) He will win who knows when to fight and when
not to fight.
(2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior
and inferior forces.
(3) He will win whose army is animated by the same
spirit throughout all its ranks.
(4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take
the enemy unprepared.
(5) He will win who has military capacity and is
not interfered with by the sovereign.
The Devil & The Tao
As far as the philosophical underpinnings of Satanism go, one of the best places to start is with Friedrich Nietzsche. While he had nothing (consciously) to do with Satanism, his work is frequently cited by Satanists and modern occultists, and I think more than a few Satanists see themselves as ‘Nietzschean’.
It has to be said before setting off that Nietzsche was acutely, probably painfully aware of how his ideas may be misinterpreted. He loathed the idea that people, "like plundering troops", may pick and choose titbits from his books to use for their own purposes, disregarding material contrary to their own agendas. The racist misinterpretations (far too weak a word!) of the German Nazi party are the most blatant case in point. That said, I disagree with some of his work. In the end Nietzsche was no ’system-builder’—he erected no edifice that must be accepted entirely or fall to the ground. He was an experimentalist, and perpetually played with and revised ideas. It is in this spirit that I read Nietzsche; and here I’m looking at him with an eye to reveal a few misinterpretations less obvious than those of the half-witted anti-Semites. No doubt I’ll end up guilty of a bit of plundering myself, but I prefer judicious plunder to wilful misunderstanding.
Darwinism is the central concept to deal with. It amuses me to see ‘black metal’ bands asked in interviews if they believe in the (supposedly ‘Nietzschean’) philosophy of "the strong over the weak", "survival of the fittest"—as if this would provoke some new and interesting response! We’re talking social Darwinism here of course, but let’s look first at the biological argument.
Darwinian evolutionary theory often seems too obvious to bother arguing with, but this is precisely my problem with it. It’s too bloody obvious. The nail was whacked on the head for me when I read Arthur Koestler’s Janus: A Summing Up. Here he quotes C.H. Waddington, a critical neo-Darwinian:
Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day interpretation [1957], perpetuation as a source for future generations. That individual ’survives’ best which leaves most offspring. Again, to speak of an animal as ‘fittest’ does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology.
Further, Ludwig von Bertalanffy acutely observes that "It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities."
The so-called rationalism of modern—usually ’socially Darwinian’—Satanism rests on very dodgy philosophical ground, simply because when you bother to try and define the terms used in the idea of "the strong over the weak", you’re invariably left with a sense of, "Yeah, and…?" It’s like saying you believe in the philosophy of "winners beating the losers". Jello Biafra nicely undermined knee-jerk social Darwinism with his quip that "the strong prey on the weak, and the clever prey on the strong"; but in the end this just begs the question. Also, orthodox Darwinism inevitably holds that humanity is the latest in life’s progressively ‘better’ attempts at creating organisms. Surely social Darwinism would hold a similar view about contemporary culture? This doesn’t sit too well with the misanthropy, and contempt for the ‘lowering of standards’ in modern society, that is prevalent among many supposed social Darwinists. If the strong really do overpower the weak, why have we been dominated for so long by such a half-assed religion as Christianity? I think many Satanists, in claiming "strong over the weak" to be a universal principle of nature, are actually trying to say, "I’m harder than you and I could have you easily." Or at least, "I could out-stare you, mate." That’s another argument. But as for universal principles—forget it. Evolution and history are far too complex and multi-dimensional to limit themselves to the strategies of a fight in a pub.
Nietzsche was definitely not a Darwinist, and had no faith in "survival of the fittest" as an ‘explanation’. For him, his conception of the "will to power" was the driving force behind all life. It is essentially a conception of creativity, and has far more to do with creative self-mastery than power over others. Nietzsche’s notion that creation must be destructive ("Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values.") is often seen in limited terms. This is only the first step. The second step, often left out, is that the new creation itself must again be destroyed. And the steps go on… Zarathustra is quite explicit on this: "And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again…’" The famous ‘Superman’ isn’t a concept of some inevitable evolutionary goal toward which humanity is inexorably moving (i.e. it’s not Darwinian). It’s a vision of an ideal state of being, of perfect self-mastery and perpetual re-creation, which Nietzsche believed some humans—Socrates and Goethe for example—had already, to an extent, achieved. Together with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, it’s a glorification of the moment, of total involvement in the turbulent flow of immediate experience. "Not to wish to see too soon.— As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)
Comparison with Taoism is illuminating. While our cultural filters place Taoism in some ’soft’ category, and see Nietzschean values as being essentially ‘hard’, the distinction blurs when you consider the supra-cultural state to which both aspire. Nietzsche used the word ‘hard’ many times in describing ideals, as in "all creators are hard." (Twilight of the Idols) But I don’t think we can just accept this word unquestioningly. Its modern connotations evoke more of a mindless thug than a vibrant Superman. Words are subject to mutation; but even if the words themselves remain the same, their meaning is always mutating, for words are "pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)
Before considering Taoism, I’d like to follow a little tangent about Nietzsche’s ‘hardness’. I always thought of Nietzsche (before actually reading him) as some grim Teutonic beast. He was actually vehemently opposed to the Germanic temperament, which he considered mediocre (when in a good mood). He repeatedly praised the southern European disposition, that of light-heartedness, exuberance and cheerfulness. A far cry from the fashionably serious and dreary poses of many modern ‘Nietzscheans’. A key influence on this popular misconception of Nietzsche is probably that famous portrait—the furrowed brow, the dark gaze, the amazingly bushy moustache. It doesn’t do much for his philosophy of light-heartedness. I was tempted to just put this image, of a very stern and worried-looking guy, down to his frequent bouts of illness. I recently found out that I was more justified in this temptation than I guessed. Nietzsche never grew such a moustache. These amounts of hair appeared on his upper lip only during his last ten years of life, during which he was helplessly insane. He was unable to care for himself, and this responsibility fell to his sister, who allowed the ‘tache to flourish and brought people in to do portraits. Poor Freddy had no choice. This picture of an intense mad-eyed walrus is probably not how Nietzsche would have liked to have been remembered! His sister, who managed to distort his work as well as his image, has a lot to answer for.
To return to Taoism… The Tao, usually translated as "way", is seen as that force which underpins, interpenetrates, and flows through the universe. Actually, "flows through" is misleading, as it conjures up images of ‘things’ as vessels through which the Tao passes. Taoism admits of no such duality. And the Tao’s primary characteristic is that it cannot be defined. A definition of it, such as "the process of the universe", may loosen our categories a bit in order to contemplate it, but categories ultimately have to be destroyed if that process is to be fully apprehended. I think Nietzsche was too suspicious or ignorant of ‘mysticism’ to fully admit it, but I suspect any Superhuman state would involve a similar destruction—or transcendence—of categories.
So what is this process, or Tao, that we’re trying to apprehend? In Nietzsche’s words, it is "that which must overcome itself again and again". Nietzsche’s conception of embracing this, of fully participating in the process of life, is shot through with an distinct emphasis on struggle—assertion, strife and conflict. Regarding modern occultural misinterpretations again, it is primarily in this sense that he intended his many references to war. Being anti-state and anti-political, Nietzsche in no way ‘advocated’ bloody economic and territorial battles between nations. He didn’t ‘condemn’ them either. Nietzsche was neither liberal nor fascist. He largely used the word "war" in the sense of resolutely striving for self-mastery without shrinking from—rather, embracing—the inevitable conflicts this quest entails. "I will not cease from Mental fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand…" (William Blake, Milton)
Reconciling this relentless struggle, which is obviously part of the path to self-perfection, with the supposed passive quiescence of Taoism, is itself an ongoing process. Of course, it’s ultimately a false dichotomy, and Christopher S. Hyatt seems to have summed it up best in his book The Tree of Lies:
The concept of surrender has become so distorted that many believe that "surrendering" is in opposition to power, sex and self mastery. This is one of the greatest lies. . . . self mastery is not possible without surrender. This issue cannot be overemphasized. Magic and Mysticism—The Will To Self Mastery and The Will To Surrender—are two sides of the same coin. . . . when power or love are taken to their extreme they become one.
The Tao is a struggle of perpetual self-overcoming—again and again. But as Alan Watts ceaselessly points out, it is a struggle devoid of ‘anxiety loops’. In fully surrendering to the flow of life, one surrenders one’s resistance to the rolling process of destruction and creation, ‘war’ and ‘peace’, that true life constitutes. Passivity is often part of this resistance, as much as frenetic anxiety can be.
Satanism and Taoism are alike in that they are both deeply concerned with the hard/soft, strong/weak distinctions. Satanism seems to emphasize and value ’strength’, while Taoism seems to emphasize and value ‘weakness’. I feel that both may learn from each other. Taoists who have made the clichéd image of the quiescent oriental sage their behavioural ideal would do well to meditate on the Tao at work in an ocean whipped up by a tumultuous thunderstorm, and see how close to ‘nature’ they really are. Hardened Satanists, intent on fortifying their unbending will, would do equally well to take a sword to a piece of solid wood, and then to a pond. The wood will splinter and be destroyed. The pond will passively accept the blade, and effortlessly flow back to perfection once it is withdrawn.
I was made with a heart of stone / To be broken with one hard blow / I’ve seen the ocean break on the shore / Come together with no harm done
Perry Farrell, ‘Oceansize’
Satan’s Ancestry
Those who point the finger at Satan, reveal Satan. Those who fight Satan, give him power. Those who blame Satan, give him influence. Those who talk much of Satan, create him.
But those who worship Satan, tame Satan. Those who passively resist him, earn his respect. Those who accept him, diminish his influence.
And those who analyse him, learn his wisdom.
Lionel B. Snell, ‘The Satan Game’
The Christian devil, Satan, is an archetype. Whether one sees archetypes as creations of the human mind, genetically-rooted universal ‘templates’ of conscious experience, or fully independent spiritual entities, is irrelevant here. Even if archetypes are seen to be autonomous ‘beings’—gods, goddesses, demons or spirits—they are inevitably experienced by means of our own bodies and minds. Our experience of them is filtered through whatever biological, cultural and psychological structures we happen to find ourselves equipped with to make sense of the world. Thus, if we’re talking about the realms of human experience (and what else can we talk about in a useful way?), Satan may be seen to have a history, a mythical family line of descent. Certain universal facts of life, such as the processes of sex, birth & death, will be ever-present in most mythical figures; but the specific figures themselves evolve throughout human history to mirror the complex cultural interactions and upheavals that have ceaselessly manifested since the first time apes developed language, culture and myth—and became human.
In this speculative Satanic genealogy we shall obviously work backwards, climbing down from contemporary branches, down the trunk, and under the ground where the roots lay hidden. So to begin with, how is Satan conceived in contemporary culture?
Modern Christianity has lost much of the medieval iconographic vividness in its conception of Satan, as it is supposedly more ’sophisticated’, and not given to simplistic anthropomorphisms (i.e. Satan as a reptilian, horned, cunning and wily beast-man dwelling ‘down there’ in his burning lair). The most significant manifestation of modern Christians’ concern with their Devil is in the phenomenon known as the ‘Satanic Abuse Myth’. ‘Satanic Abuse’, because the phenomenon centres around the conviction that the Western world is infested with invisible networks of evil Satanists, who ritually abuse and bloodily sacrifice people—usually children—in the service of their Dark Lord. ‘Myth’, because this conviction has uniformly been found, by government-commissioned investigations and independent researchers alike, to be false. Certain cases of abuse have been found where the perpetrators used the paraphernalia of occultism to terrify their victims into submission and silence. But not one case of genuine Satanists, occultists, or pagans harming children for the purposes of magickal ritual has ever been found. So we can see that these obscene Christian fantasies of blood-soaked orgies and child sacrifice are merely the modern version of the medieval equivalents, the witch-hunts (or of the Roman equivalent, where early Christians were accused of similar crimes…). The vividness of these modern scapegoating fantasies seems to have made the mythical figure of Satan himself less necessary. Who needs an image of a subterranean Devil on which to project your repressed fears and desires when you can conjure up such horrifying scenes of ‘actual’ human activity?
Often at the forefront of the cultural panic around Satanism was the self-styled leader of California’s Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey. He seemed amused as well as indignant about the latest bouts of witch-hunt scaremongering. He knew as well as any open-minded observer that more children have suffered abuse and molestation at the hands of trusted Christian priests than have even heard of the Church of Satan. And his codes of Satanic practice are there for all to read: "Do not harm little children. Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food." (from ‘The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth’)
But for Satanists as well as Christians the actual mythical image of the Devil has become less central. LaVey states that Satan is "a representational concept, accepted by each according to his or her needs." This seems mightily hazy without LaVey’s repeated reminders that ‘Satan’ roughly translates from Hebrew as ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’. Satanism is based on the principle of opposition. This is usually seen as opposition to the status quo, specifically Christian morality. Satan is an emblematic concept presiding over the practice of all those wonderful un-Christian things: free sexuality, autonomy, indulgence, harmony with (instead of dominion over) nature, and anti-authoritarianism. Many Satanists seem to slip up on this last one, and it’s here that most Satanism as it stands loses my sympathies. Just as many people forget that Nietzsche’s ‘destructive-creativity’ is meant as a perpetual process, not just a one-off revolution, Satanism can often slip from being an expedient release from Christian programming into being a dogma in itself. It seems to find it hard to challenge itself as an institution. There are many parallels here with the ‘left hand path’ of politics, Marxism. Many unsophisticated Marxists still think that their beliefs could function wonderfully as they stand once capitalism is cast to the ground once and for all, not seeing that their present beliefs are conditioned by their capitalist context. If Western capitalism is ever ‘overthrown’, I think many Marxists will follow their historical predecessors and become the new despots, or just be at a loss as to what to do without ‘the opposition’. Substitute ‘Satanists’ for ‘Marxists’, and ‘Christianity’ for ‘capitalism’, and you have a wildly simplistic, but very revealing analogy.
The influence of Chaos Magick and all its kindred philosophies on modern occulture seems to be a useful counter to this tunnel vision of simple opposition. The heart of Chaos Magick is the practical implementation of Nietzsche’s vision of life overcoming itself again and again, and provides a good antidote to any sliding towards dogma, or dependence on a static adversarial figure.
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To return to Satan, we can see that despite his modern transformations, the popular conception of the Devil still bears the unmistakable hallmarks of pre-industrial Christianity’s vivid image of him. He is almost always bestial. The horns and the cloven hooves are synonymous with the Devil, and a reptilian tail is often attributed to him. Related to this is his unmistakably sexual nature, often seen as a threatening or perverse sexuality, but definitely sexual. The conception of Satan as the rebel angel Lucifer is a bit of an anomaly here, and this figure seems like a more refined, sublimated and ‘humanized’ Devil, all ferality turned into stubborn pride, and sinister sexuality emerging as cunning seductiveness.
Pre-twentieth century Satanism, exemplified by people like Phillipe the Duc D’Orleans and Sir Francis Dashwood, was the domain of rebellious and hedonic aristocrats. Their repudiation of the asceticism of Christianity often involved the kind of debauchery modern Christians are eager to pin on modern Satanists. There is evidence of child murder and ritual sacrifice. Many, however, penetrated beyond frenzied opposition to the Church and discovered the intimately related, but deeper roots of Satan in pre-Christian pagan gods. Bloody sacrifice was usually part of such old paganism, and we’ll return to this later. For now it is sufficient to see that the figure of Satan cannot be separated from the nature gods of the older religions.
Modern Satanists are often quick to deny this connection as being necessary or significant, probably eager to hang on to Satan’s supposed status as a god in his own right, independent of both Christianity and nature worship. I suppose they fear the potency of their god being quelled by his being subtly appropriated into the realm of ‘neo-paganism’, derided (in some cases accurately) by Satanists as wishy-washy. But the connections are there.
For a start, it’s plain that the Christian Satan was evolved as part of the church’s expansion into pagan or ‘heathen’ lands. This process was often complicated by unforeseen overlaps between Christianity and indigenous pagan practices, to a certain extent betraying Christianity’s pagan origins. We see this clearly in Catholicized Central and South American countries, where many natives have blended the invading cosmology into their own. A vivid example of this is the fact that indigenous Mexican mushroom cults call their fungal sacrament teonanácatl, meaning ‘flesh of the gods’. Those cults which survived the Spanish conquest could easily accept the god Jesus, who offers us his flesh to eat, and his mother Mary, who became the new bottle for the old wine of Earth-Mother goddess figures. Invading Christians spreading north over Europe consciously appropriated existing pagan festivals, and built their places of worship on ancient sacred sites to win over the populace. But they still needed to weed out the more overt paganisms. So the widespread Horned God or Goddess, who presided over pagan nature worship and fertility rites, was demonised. Through the installation of dualistic categories of good and evil, and the identification of pagan gods as evil, they gave themselves permission to trample paganism into the ground, and a lot of spiritual clout with which to terrorize natives into obedience.
The greatest insights into Christianity and Satan can be gleaned from exploring the Greek god Dionysus. He is very typical of pagan nature gods: he is horned, signifying kinship with animals (like the closely related goat-god of the Arcadian pastures, Pan, another source of Satanic iconography); he is a ‘dying-and-rising’ god, reflecting the cyclic process of the seasons in nature; and he has a strong wild and untamed aspect, again like Pan, forming a bond with pre-civilised humanity. It’s obvious how Satan, Christianity’s repressed shadow, has derived from such an archetype. In its irrational suppression of sexuality, nature, cyclicity and the body, Christianity latched on to this archetype and pushed it so far away from human experience that it became alien, and we became alienated. The already feral, ego-shattering Dionysian godform became utterly evil and terrifying, a force to be held at bay at all costs.
Now things get confusing. Did not Jesus, like Dionysus, die and rise again? Both are intimately associated with vines and wine; both have been connected to the use of psychedelic mushrooms; the flesh of both is in some way eaten as part of their worshippers’ rites; and both names, according to John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, stem etymologically from the same Sumerian root. There’s almost as much evidence connecting Dionysus with Jesus as there is with Satan.
It’s my feeling that we have here a crucial fork in the history of archetypes. Christianity appropriated the more abstract spiritual motifs of dying-and-rising nature gods (mainly supposed ‘life after death’) and up popped the mythical Jesus. The chthonic associations with the Earth, with sexuality and the body, were all repressed, compressed and demonised into Satan. In this division was lost all cyclicity, all the transformative and change-affirming power of nature’s process. We descended into truly profane time; linear time instead of rhythmic, spiralling, sacred time. Norman O. Brown has noted that "the divorce between soul and body [analogous to the Jesus/Satan split] takes the life out of the body, reducing the organism to a mechanism". Likewise, the conception of an extra-terrestrial, eternal time (Heaven) as sacred renders the Earth profane, and binds us to the linear track of uni-directional historical ‘progress’. We may see ourselves as moving towards this sacred time—but it is an ever-receding carrot-on-a-stick, and tears us away from omni-directional immersion in the moment. "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." (Jim Morrison)
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In Satanism, Satan is seen as embodying the principle of division and duality, that principle without which manifestation—matter, flesh, bodies & sex—cannot occur. This is symbolized in the ‘inverted’ pentagram, where two points are directed upwards and one down. The dual realm of manifestation rules over the singular, united realm of spirit. In the ‘normal’ pentagram the spirit rules the flesh. Jesus is seen as opposing Satan, and embodies the spiritual principle of unity. So what are we to make of the actual historical beliefs and practices of the followers of these two figures? Christianity has turned out to be militantly dualistic, denying the body and ravaging the Earth, glorifying the ’spirit’ and longing for some united heavenly kingdom. And Satanists, while obviously prioritising flesh over spirit, ego over collectivity, are inevitably involved in many practices which approach Dionysian revelry, serving to abolish individual distinction. Also, their emphasis on living for the moment instead of "spiritual pipe-dreams" could be seen to destroy the future-fixation of profane time, following Nietzsche into a whole-hearted immersion in the eternal present.
Our problems in analysing these contradictions betray our present evolutionary and cultural problems. In looking at the splitting of Dionysus, we’re seeing the mythical reflections of a phase in the development of the human species where the increase of city-dwelling and changes in agriculture & economics began to erode our bond with the rest of the biosphere. City walls are the rigidification of human ego-barriers writ large. "When Christians first distinguished themselves from pagans, the word ‘pagan’ meant ‘country-dweller’. For the first centres of Christianity in the Roman Empire were the great cities—Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome itself." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman) In our quest to urbanize our existence, to become as independent as possible from the less comfortable and benign aspects of nature, we have become lost in a mire of confusion. Witness Blake’s disgust at the industrial revolution in his phrase "dark Satanic Mills", and the fact that most of the mill owners were probably devout Christians. Protestantism has been intimately linked to the rise of capitalism by psychoanalytical historians; Satanists advocate material power. A church in Coventry recently held a service in thanks for the car industry; and Jesus advocated shunning possessions and said rich people would have a bloody hard time getting into heaven. Such confusion seems to be the price for living under the sway of false dichotomies like Jesus/Satan, spirit/matter, collective/individual, intellect/instinct.
Culture and civilization are inseparable from material technologies, and things are no less confused in the technophile/Luddite debate. The real dichotomy to be tackled here is that of harmonious/unharmonious technology. Do our tools help us achieve our desires, or do they become our desires? Do you browse the web to kill time and boredom, like TV, or use it to help you do what you want to do in the real world? Is our technology harmonious with nature? In most cases today, the answer is a painful no. We have lost the vision of the first grand tool-using age of humanity, the Neolithic, where culture, agriculture and technology were used to work with and intensify the natural environment.
Reclamation
Our Satanic genealogy has so far reached the figure of Dionysus, and if we delve further back, we find his roots in the pan-European Neolithic worship of the Great Goddess. In Greek myth, Dionysus’ mother is identified as Semele, a mortal. She was, however, sometimes equated with Ge, the Thracian form of the Earth Goddess Gaia.
The male god, the primeval Dionysus, is saturated with a meaning closely related to that of the Great Goddess in her aspect of the Virgin Nature Goddess and Vegetation Goddess. All are gods of nature’s life cycle, concerned with the problem of death and regeneration, and all were worshipped as symbols of exuberant life.
Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
Now I shall lose the interest of yet more die-hard Satanists. I think it’s possible to trace most of Satan’s aspects and characteristics back to the Neolithic (and perhaps Palaeolithic) Great Goddess. It’s true that if you gathered all available books on Goddess worship together, the vast majority of them—in their style, typography, illustrations and attitude—would probably be… well, twee. It’s obvious why the figure of the Goddess is largely consigned to the realm of New Age Pap; but I think a serious, unromantic investigation of the religious and mythical complex termed ‘the Goddess’ will uncover something a lot more challenging, vital and useful than the trite New Age-isms we’re usually presented with.
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This horned aspect is thought by some researchers to derive from the ‘horns’ of the womb, the Fallopian tubes—the form of which can potentially be propriocepted, or felt internally, in states of heightened consciousness (see The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove).
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The Neolithic Goddess, like Satan, was invariably horned; the ox was one of her most revered forms. Being associated with the Earth itself she was often a chthonic (underworld) Goddess, this aspect entering Greek mythology in the story of Demeter and Persephone. It’s worth noting that Heraclitus once said that Dionysus was another name for Hades, lord of the underworld. The whole chthonic goddess & son complex is the basis for our image of Satan ruling over a subterranean Hell.
Another strong link between the Goddess and Satan is the serpent. The serpent in Genesis’ Garden of Eden is often associated with Satan, and Christianity usually extends this association to all snakes. The snake was, along with the ox, the animal most frequently associated with the Neolithic Goddess. The spiral, often symbolizing a coiled serpent, is one of the most common Goddess symbols. Archaic serpent myths from around the world are far too numerous to detail here. However, one extremely early myth (perhaps the earliest), which detours us to an extremely bizarre connection with Christianity, is well worth going into.
In his book Blood Relations, anthropologist Chris Knight proposes that human culture was the result of early female Homo sapiens synchronizing their menstrual cycles. This collectivity, he argues, empowered them to periodically ’sex strike’ during menstruation—females basically refused sex with their partners (but possibly had menstrual sex with male kin) until the men went hunting and brought back enough meat to feed them and their children.
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"The link of blood and magick can also be found in the German word for ’sorceror’, which is ‘zauberer’. The word goes back to OHG Zaubar, MD Tover, OE Teâfor… All three words mean ‘red colour, red ochre, to colour in red’!" (Jan Fries, Helrunar)
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The full thesis is persuasive but very complex. It is enough for now to note that the hypothesized collective act of female synchrony was achieved through tidal and lunar observances, utilizing these natural, universal cycles with which widespread groups of women could ‘phase-lock’ and harmonize their own blood cycles. In the Australian Aboriginal myths of the Rainbow Snake, and its associations with menstruation, water, the moon and women, there is widespread acknowledgement that this ‘cosmic serpent’ (often androgynous) originally gave women power. Knight’s key argument is that this power is the power to periodically unite in saying ‘no’ to sex, to initiate sexual-political change (the Snake symbolizes the united body of ‘flowing’ women). At the same time, it is the powers of shamanism and magic, which Knight sees as evolving as a result of the first ‘proto-cultural’ groups of humans in Africa dispersing inland, away from their coastal origins. The females, robbed of the tide as one of their main cyclic guides, evolved moon-scheduled ritual activities—and thus symbolic culture—to synchronize social, psychic and bodily rhythms.
Somewhere along the line, as the myths and practices of many surviving hunter-gatherer tribes testify, this power was appropriated by men. Knight sees male initiation ceremonies involving cutting the penis or arm (found among Australian Aborigines and other indigenous cultures), together with the existence of extreme menstrual taboos, as evidence for a male take-over of female ritual power. One male Aborigine, speaking of their all-male rituals, told C.H. Berndt that "all the Dreaming business came out of women—everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing; because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women." The surviving Snake myths, propagated by all-male initiation societies, portray the Snake as threatening to women. Part of this threat is derived from myths that describe the Snake swallowing women; Knight feels that this once symbolized the power of synchronized menstruation to unite women, together ‘in the belly of the Snake’. Male initiation societies utilizing the Snake mythology may see this devouring serpent as somewhat threatening, but still desire the womb-return, unity and rebirth of being swallowed. Much as Jonah is willingly cast into the sea to be swallowed, then vomited out by the "great fish" prepared for him by the Lord God.
Knight finds hard evidence of similar ‘Rainbow Snake’ myths across Africa and South America, all related closely to tides, rain, floods, menstruation and lunar cycles. The myths perpetuate these associations, but are often configured to make women see the Snake as a threat. There are some tribes, however, whose women still draw power from the Snake, and celebrate it in menstrual rites. Knight also interprets the myriad ‘dragon’ (i.e. mythical serpent-beast) legends as remnants of this archaic mythical conception of women’s culture-forming menstrual synchrony, and of the male take-over. Many dragon myths speak of many-headed beasts (the Hydra for instance), and this is possibly an echo of the menstrual Snake which comprised many women in unison. Of course the classic dragon tale, across the world, says that valiant men rescue maidens from its clutches, destroy it, and gain power. Given Knight’s theories, there could be no clearer mythical equivalent of a male usurpation of female power: overcoming a reptilian representation of their blood-unity and menstrual ritual potency.
Now, let’s have a look at the Holy Bible. Turn to Revelations 12:
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
And there appeared another great wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. . . . [She gives birth to a sort of second Christ, and flees into the wilderness. Michael casts the dragon out of heaven. The dragon persecutes the woman, who is given eagle wings to escape.]
And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. [Aboriginal Rainbow Snake myths are connected with great floods in Australia's past.]
Very strange to find such a twisted distortion of what may be a primal human myth of the beginning (of culture) in the ravings of a religious visionary supposedly being granted a glimpse of the end. This vision corresponds in some way to the frequent ‘male-appropriation’ myths of modern hunter-gatherers: in depicting the dragon/serpent as threatening to a woman; and in the statement that the denizens of heaven "overcame him by the blood of the Lamb" (12:11). The Lamb is Christ, and Christ is a man who bled from his arms (and, like all Jewish men, he presumably bled from his genitals, when he was circumcised as a child). Interestingly, one New Age commentator on Revelations believes that because the many-headed dragon "has several autonomous decision-making centers, [it] is therefore the very epitome of disorganization, of centrifugal or dispersive forces." (F. Aster Barnwell, Meditations on the Apocalypse) Think back to what Knight believes the original Rainbow Serpent represents, and compare.
And who was this blood-red, water-spewing, many-headed dragon? Saint John the Divine tells us that he was "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan…". A day or so after making this Rainbow Snake-Dragon-Satan link, I started reading The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove. They take a Jungian approach to the few systematic instances of menstruating women’s dreams being recorded. Apparently, some women’s dreams at this time contain strong male figures, often threatening or sinister. Shuttle & Redgrove’s idea is that menstruation can be a time of heightened sexuality and departure from conventions for women, hence its widespread repression and extreme taboo status. They see the appearance of a compelling male figure in menstrual dreams as the appearance of the animus, a Jungian word for the masculine principle in women. Talking about the repression of menstruation leading to a "negative animus", they say: "If the woman’s menstruation is despised, that is, a deep instinctual process in her is ignored or hated, then its spirit will return with all the evolutionary power of those instinctual processes that grew us and continue to energize our physical being. You could say in this way that the Christian Devil was a representation of the animus of the menstruating woman, in so far as the Christian ethic has Satanized woman and her natural powers."
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Avebury henge and surrounding monuments
I want to follow these Goddess/Serpent/Devil associations now by focusing on one specific place (which will also lead us to other areas I’m interested in): Avebury in Wiltshire, with its rich psychogeography and densely inter-related complex of Neolithic monuments.
Michael Dames has analysed the Avebury monuments, synthesizing archaeology, folklore & ethnography, to build a vision of a harmonious cycle of structures embedded in the local geography. They form a ritual landscape which reflects the cyclic narrative of the seasons and of human life. The monuments are seen to celebrate and embody the Great Goddess, conceived in the pervasive form of the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother & Crone. (Being three multiplied by itself, the number nine is frequently given a high status in Goddess-based religions. It seems no coincidence that modern Satanism has adopted this as its central number.)
The massive Avebury henge is approached from the south and west by two long, slightly winding stone avenues. Dames’ contention is that these two avenues are processional serpentine pathways by which young men and women approached the henge for marriage and consummation ceremonies. The men’s Beckhampton avenue, to the west, is largely destroyed. It seems significant, though, that the name Beckhampton derives from the Old English word meaning ‘back’. Dames relates this to the spine, and to Tantric beliefs in the raising of the Kundalini serpent energy from the base of the spine.
Much more evidence survives in relation to the partly intact West Kennet avenue, beginning at the Sanctuary (the name for the remains of a circular wooden temple at the southern foot of Waden Hill). Comparisons with contemporary Neolithic symbolism and ethnographic studies show that the Sanctuary (corresponding to the springtime Maiden) was probably a site for the initiation of young girls reaching puberty. This conjecture, along with the proposed serpentine nature of the processional avenue leading to consummation in the henge, is supported by Chris Knight’s research. Aboriginal mythology equates the Rainbow Snake with the ritual dance through which women collectively synchronize their menstrual periods (or with which men are united in blood-letting initiatory rituals). As the onset of a girl’s puberty is signalled by their first menstruation, Dames’ theories about the function of the Sanctuary and the symbolic serpentine nature of the West Kennet avenue stand on quite firm mythical ground.
At the henge, the male and female snake-avenues conjoin. Dames argues that the so-called ‘D’ feature within the southernmost of the two stone circles inside the henge is a representation of the tip of the phallic Beckhampton avenue snake entering the henge. This is ’swallowed’ by the females’ West Kennet snake, whose gaping jaws may be seen to be symbolized by the southeast and southwest quadrants of the henge, the actual stones representing its teeth. The dual sexual symbolism of the serpent—penetrator and devourer—is not lost on Dames. He speaks of the Beckhampton avenue’s "commitment to bisexuality" as it approaches ritual sexual union in the henge; we’ll return to his androgynous Avebury Goddess later.
The vast stone standing at the point where the West Kennet avenue joins the henge is commonly known as the Devil’s Chair. Also in the Avebury area we have the Devil’s Den long barrow; and there are too many caverns and Neolithic standing stones in the British Isles named after the Devil to catalogue here. The demonisation of indigenous paganism that was such an integral part of Christianity’s conquest of these islands is prolifically demonstrated in such folkloric names.
In 634 CE a Christian church was built up against the west bank of the Avebury henge. On its twelfth-century font is depicted a bishop, armed with a spiked crozier and a Bible, fending off two serpentine dragons. However, the battle waged against the powerful chthonic forces of nature glorified in the Avebury monuments wasn’t some abstract war of symbols. In the fourteenth century most of the stones in the southwest quadrant of the henge were destroyed by Christian authorities trying to eradicate the many "superstitions and questionable practices" still connected with the stones. These bastards destroyed part of our heritage, in the name of Jesus.
Christianity, especially in rural areas with a deep pagan tradition, can never entirely purge itself of the past. In the parish church of Ilkley, West Yorkshire, there is a stone carving which is usually identified as the Romano-British goddess Verbeia (above). In her hands she holds two writhing snakes, resembling the famous Minoan snake goddess statuette found in Knossos, Crete. Verbeia is said to be goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows through Ilkley, forming the familiar goddess-serpent-water associations. However, one historian of Ilkley believes the goddess is only superficially associated with the river itself, and was once associated with the brooks flowing down from springs on the famous neighbouring moorlands. On these moors are numerous prehistoric rock carvings, stone circles, and traces of human settlement dating back to 7000 BCE; Verbeia is probably a survival of more ancient myths in the area. The historian notes the double snake symbol’s connection with healing (look at the British Medical Association’s symbol), and the long-standing reputation of the moor’s waters for healing properties, which survived into Victorian times, when a renowned healing spa was set up near the edge of the moor.
In Dames’ ritual landscape cycle we move from the henge southwards to the awe-inspiring Silbury Hill, a flat-topped conical mound of earth which stands as the largest man-made Neolithic structure in Europe. Known to have been built progressively over many years, added to each August (harvest time), it seems likely that this was the Neolithics’ vision of the pregnant Earth Goddess made flesh. Natural breast- and belly-like hills and mounds were commonly worshipped in many archaic cultures, but the emergence of agriculture signified the rising importance in human participation in nature. Silbury Hill—the Mother Goddess labouring to give birth to the year’s crops—is a monumental testament to a culture whose technology still harmonized with nature, working mythically and practically at precisely the same time.
Excavations have revealed that at the core of Silbury lies a circular wattle fence and stacked layers of turf forming an inner mound. The wattle fence has exactly the same diameter as the Sanctuary, and most projected reconstructions of the wooden temple at the Sanctuary reveal it to be identical in size and form to the inner Silbury mound. Silbury, then, is a fractal reflection of the Sanctuary, which is replicated within and then magnified eight times in the total mass of the Silbury mound. The springtime Maiden has matured into the life-giving Mother of the harvest. A careful study of Dames’ investigations into the harmonic fractal resonances within the Avebury complex (all monuments being based around natural units of measurement taken from the springs feeding into the revered River Kennet) is capable of pushing the rational mind beyond itself into a deep, awe-full respect for the powerful visionary precision of this ‘primitive’ culture.
Of course, being the most provocatively sensuous and voluptuous of all the Avebury monuments (go there!), Silbury failed to escape the demonisation of Christian folklore. There is a legend that the Devil was once on his way to attack Marlborough (just east of Avebury) by dumping an apron, or spade full of dirt on the town. The bishop of Marlborough apparently stopped him at the last minute; the Devil dropped his load, and Silbury Hill was formed.
The last monument in the cycle, before it completes a total gyration and feeds back into itself at the Sanctuary, is the West Kennet long barrow. It is located just southeast from Silbury and almost due east from the Sanctuary. This multiple burial chamber is the Goddess in winter: the Crone, the death-dealing Dark Goddess found (and so often repressed) in many religions. The barrow is constructed—like other European Neolithic burial chambers—to render yet another form of the Goddess’ body. You go in through her stone vulva, and enter a small corridor with five small adjoining womb-tomb chambers.
Despite its belief that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will automatically transport his followers to an eternal realm of happiness, love & old friends on dying, Christianity is terrified of death. Most systems of belief promoting a simplistic, personal and linear form of immortality are—they deny death. "Hell, Luther said, is not a place, but is the experience of death, and Luther’s devil is ultimately personified death." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death) Again we see that Christianity has ruptured, repressed & demonised the cyclic processes of nature. To cultures harmonized with the seasonal rounds, death precedes life just as death follows life. The Avebury cycle, where each distinct monument participates in the unified ritual landscape, suggests a culture where the principle of division has not yet been separated from the principle of unity; death is part of life.
The barrow was built around 3250 BCE, and remained open until around 2600 BCE, when a huge stone forecourt was erected, and the chambers were packed with a mass of chalk rubble, organic material, and bits of bone and pottery (resembling the chalk, soil and vegetable layering found in the core of Silbury, whose foundations are contemporary to the sealing of the barrow). During its ‘active’ time, the barrow was almost certainly used for ritual as well as burial purposes. Dames points out that "the belief that the living can find meaning and reality within putrefying chaos was once widespread", and rightly notes the possible parallels with Tantric practices.
The loving Goddess of Creation has another face. As she brings man into time and his world, she also removes him from it. So she is his destroyer as well. No-one can be a successful Tantrika unless he has faced up to this reality, and assimilated it into his image of the nature of the Goddess. There are many rituals, some of them sexual, carried out among the corpses in real (or symbolic) cremation-grounds, which bring this necessity forcibly home to the practising Tantrika. There, in the red light of funeral pyres, as jackals and crows scatter and crunch the bones, he confronts the dissolution of all he holds dear in life.
Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy
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"Although there is very little information concerning the megalithic monuments of the West, Hindu texts contain the entire ritual for setting them up, and for the orientation of sanctuaries, etc. All studies on European prehistoric religions should thus be based on the Indian documents available." (Alain Daniélou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy)
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We can never know the exact nature of the rites enacted in the West Kennet long barrow, but many of skulls and thigh bones from the dead buried there were found to be absent. The obvious explanation for this is that they were used in Neolithic rituals, probably at the nearby causewayed camp on Windmill Hill, northwest from the henge, where many individual skulls were found. Dames notes that "the widespread use of skull and femur in fertility rites was maintained down to classical times, when the rotting flesh fell off to reveal the clean tools of a new sexuality, with skull acting as female container, encompassing the thigh bone-phallus." I’m also reminded of the use of skulls and thigh bones in various ‘left-hand path’ (i.e. frowned upon) cultic practices in Tibet. It’s clear that any study of Neolithic Goddess-orientated cultures will fruitfully profit from comparisons with non-mainstream Asian religious beliefs.
The Snake Goddess
A few years ago, shortly after I had become interested in paganism, but well before I began any of the above research, I had a very bizarre dream. I dreamt I was an actor in the process of making a film whose director was a very sinister and shadowy figure. There was an unnerving atmosphere on the set, and I kept finding small, partially hidden pentagrams and other similar symbols—sewn into the undersides of cushions and so on. I became convinced that the script and set were devised so that the specific motions and gestures the unwitting cast made during filming would have the equivalent effect of a ritual to evoke the Devil. In the half-dream hypnopompic state before fully waking up, I had the distinct sensation of physical pressure around my anus. Dream logic convinced me that this was in fact Satan. I was vaguely disturbed during the following day, but the dream quickly faded into the past.
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In The Wise Wound, Shuttle & Redgrove investigate the possibility that menstrual cycles have the potential to be affected by lunar cycles in that the pineal gland, which may also affect sexual development, can sense subliminal changes in light. Noting its traditional association with the ‘third eye’ of inner visions, they speculate that "Just as our visible eyes obtain visual information from the outer world, so does our invisible third eye, the pineal, convert into visual images experiences from within the body. This argument is supported by painstaking evidence."
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Earlier this year, I was writing something about the idea that dreams and vision states are in fact the perceptual flip-side to interior bodily sensations. The two realms can be seen as two different ‘channels of perception’ conveying information about the interior processes of the human organism, from visceral energy streams to the sub-molecular goings-on in the brain. Going to sleep one night, having just finished the section on this particular subject, I had a hypnagogic experience that seemed to confirm my theory, and shed revealing light on the dream of the Devil a couple of years before.
I was in a pretty low state, and half-heartedly (pathetically actually) called on the Earth Goddess to visit me in my dreams that night. Soon after, I found myself getting up from the bed and walking across my room. I was suddenly overpowered by incredibly intense body sensations, and felt my mind ‘blacking out’ as if I was fainting. I instinctively ‘knew’ that this was the power of the Goddess overtaking me, and tried hard to surrender to it as I fell down (‘trying hard’ in these situations is a classic mistake!). I found myself lying on the floor, a huge lump obscuring my vision in my right eye. I heard the woman who lives across the hall from me trying to get in. My fall must have been loud, I thought. I took the lump on the right side of my face to be a result of the fall, and desperately tried to work out how I could get up to open the door and let the woman in. I couldn’t move, and feared that I’d really injured myself. At the same time I became aware of rattling noises in my kitchen. There was a distinctly female presence in there. Then I snapped out of it—I had been half-dreaming. I was still in my bed, and the ‘lump’ was a bit of the duvet against my face. I instantly connected the two instances of female presence, one seemingly trying to help me, with my vague plea to the Goddess.
Suddenly, immense surges of energy began to flow around my body, intense and strangely familiar streamings that pushed me into a delicious and frighteningly precarious balance between waking and dreaming. Then I felt pressure around my anus… and what followed can only really be described as being fucked by the, or at least a Goddess. A stupendous thrust of energy rushed up me, and I was immediately propelled into a highly vivid and intense lucid dream. I was flying high above a scintillatingly real landscape, a deep blue summer sky above me, a daytime sky yet dotted with stars. Part of the subsequent dream involved fishing a demonic-looking pike out of a lake—this seemed to be the culmination of a series of intense dreams I had recently had about seeing fish swimming underwater. The pike, once on land, turned into a cute brown seal.
I awoke from the dream after escaping from a very nasty situation by flying straight up through the building I was in, bursting through each floor successively and waking with a jolt on blasting out the top. It didn’t take much meditating on all the sensations and symbols to realize I had almost certainly just experienced a bizarre manifestation of the Kundalini serpent energy.
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Tantrism holds that the deities presiding over the base chakra are Brahman and Dakini—who is the red, menstruating goddess.
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The Kundalini serpent is envisioned in traditional Tantric yoga as being a coiled-up (spiral) reservoir of normally untapped psychosomatic energy, stored in the Muladhara, or base chakra. The base chakra is located in the perineum, just in front of the anus. Kundalini is a goddess at the same time as being a spiral snake energy. Kundalini Shakti is the female principle to Shiva’s male principle in Tantra’s erotic cosmology. The goal of Tantric practice is to awaken the dormant snake Goddess through various yogic methods, causing her to surge up the body and ecstatically unite with Shiva at the highest chakra. This rising can be seen clearly at either end of my dream (and body)—both in the energy thrust up me from my perineum just before sleeping, and in the climactic flight through the floors of a building, eventually out of the top, into waking consciousness.
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The !Kung, a southern African tribe, describe their entry into trance (which they call !kia) in a way that strongly reflects Kundalini experiences. They believe that a primal supernatural potency, n/um, resides in the pit of the stomach or the base of the spine. Frenetic dancing causes the n/um to ‘boil’, and it ascends the body until it peaks in or near the skull?inducing full !kia, and initiating shamanic soul-flight. It is interesting that the social and ritual life of the !Kung has retained one of the most vivid emphases on menstrual puberty rites known. Also, they believe that the power of n/um is most efficiently transferred via the sense of smell. In Tantra, the Muladhara chakra is associated with this sense.
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Many insights (and a tremendous feeling of well-being) flooded through as a result of my Kundalini dream. Firstly, there was the gnostic confirmation of my theories about Satan being (for me at least) a demonised remnant of a primal serpentine Goddess. My dream of a few years ago was undoubtedly the same Kundalini phenomenon, distorted by the Christian cosmology virus, and undeveloped. It seemed to be a ‘confirmation’, rather than being an experience induced by my research, because the Kundalini dream reflected so precisely back onto a dream I had long before any of my research began. And at the time of the second dream, although I had been looking into Goddess myths, I had not really looked at Kundalini. The fish symbolism seemed to flesh out my feeling that the Kundalini phenomenon is the prime model for looking at this experience. In Indian mythology, the fish symbolizes Kundalini’s most primitive form. Interestingly, early Christians represented Jesus (eternal opponent of the serpent Satan) with a fish symbol. Jesus opposes fish to serpents in Matthew 7:10—perhaps yet another example of divisive Christian mythologizing.
Kundalini has been connected by Gene Kieffer (a president of the Kundalini Research Institute in New York) to the UFO contact experience, after personal psychic activity that involved both phenomena. This connection and the sensations I experienced of pressure around the anus (or nearby perineum) inevitably brought to mind the infamous reports from supposed UFO ‘abductees’, who believe themselves to have been improperly probed up the arse by bug-eyed scientists from other planets. Are we looking here at spontaneous Kundalini vision states, either distorted through confusion or overlaid with a space-age clinical myth-structure?
My current belief that visions and the body’s energy processes are complementary has given me a rough rule of thumb in understanding mythology: all the most resonant and meaningful myths will reflect some aspect of biology and evolution. As Shuttle and Redgrove say in The Wise Wound, "mythology and physiology are only two sides of the same thing, which is alive." Of course, evolutionary theory and the physical sciences can be seen as yet another myth-structure; and seen in this way they should, if they are to relate to the general human experience of life, somehow echo the more primeval and recurrent mythologies and archetypes of our cultural ancestry. The idea that the Kundalini serpent, which ascends the spinal column, is the psychosomatic evolutionary force in the human body, can be seen to relate to the fact that we are vertebrates. Our common evolutionary inheritance, along with all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes, is that we have a backbone. We have all physically relived the evolutionary journey of bodily mutation as we gestated in our mother’s wombs. Human embryos, in their earliest stages of development, are successively indistinguishable from fish, reptile, bird and other mammal embryos—at one stage, recognizable gills emerge, and then atrophy.
Our individual lives begin in the amniotic ocean of the womb. Organic life on Earth began in the oceans. And humanity itself may have emerged from a partial return to the ocean. Many anthropologists believe that humans evolved on the shores of east Africa, as hominid apes returned to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This is seen to account for our hairless bodies, the layer of buoyant fat beneath our skin, and possibly our upright posture (a distinct advantage if you’re trying to keep breathing whilst wading through deep waters).
It seems quite fitting that Indian mythology should symbolize evolutionary power through the snake, the skeleton of which is basically a backbone, and the fish, the original spine, which still inhabits life’s womb.
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"In the human body, the strait gate leading to the earth-centre, or snake goddess, is the anus." (Alain Daniélou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy)
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Any form of anal stimulation contains the possibility of ecstatic spiritual experience. Phil Hine has pointed out that Ramakrishna experienced Samadhi whilst having a dump on more than one occasion, and this is interesting in relation to Martin Luther’s so-called Thurmerlebnis ("experience in the tower"), a revelation about faith that was to inaugurate Protestant theology. The ‘tower’ was where the toilet was located in Luther’s Wittenburg monastery. "This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower." (Luther) In his analysis of Protestantism in Life Against Death, Norman Brown hones in on the centrality of the Devil to Luther’s theology, and on the ‘anality’ (a Freudian term needing no explanation, for once) of the Devil. He documents Luther’s numerous associations of the Devil with ‘filth’, ‘blackness’ and foul odours, and notes his methods of counter-attack to the Devil’s assaults—at one revealing point he threatens to "throw him into my anus, where he belongs." These scraps of information, the traditional location of the base chakra, and my intuition that Satan may be related back through history to a primeval serpent goddess, seem to be no coincidence.
Many traditions, from male Aboriginal initiation ceremonies to Aleister Crowley’s magick, recognize the power of sodomy to elicit altered states of consciousness, but this is mostly ignored in our own culture due to the extreme taboo associated with anal eroticism (and with altered states themselves). This taboo is clear in homophobia, but is equally present in heterosexuality. Often, sodomy is not merely tabooed, but actually illegal—such is the continuing power of old Judeo-Christian restrictions over modern secular prohibitions. Perhaps (as far as our own culture is concerned) the strength of the taboo against sodomy, and not necessarily the physical act in itself, accounts for its potential to induce powerful spiritual experiences. Spirituality is, at heart, a breakthrough into a wider realm of consciousness, and is thus frequently associated (as in Tantra, Chaos Magick and Satanism) with breaking the conventions and laws that inevitably shape consciousness. The danger here, as ever, is that of becoming obsessed with the breaking of a single restriction. Once a restriction is overcome, new and different restrictions may fall into place. For instance, a Satanist who has endeavoured to break the traditional Christian taboo against rational self-interest and ego-gratification may find him or herself liberated in many ways. Eventually, though, this process of liberation may restrict that person from expressing spontaneous selflessness. The path of liberation has no end.
Sodomy, then, may well be a powerful step on the path of spiritual and sexual liberation, but rigid correlations and associations may eventually become obstacles. Regarding the association of the base chakra with the anus, Phil Hine has cautioned against the idea that chakras, or energy centres, have literal physical locations: "I’m working on a body-alchemy centred approach to the chakras at the moment, and the muladhra, for me, relates to one’s physical sensation of the here & now. A great deal is made of the muladhra being the ’seat’ of Kundalini-shakti—but again, too many people have interpreted Kundalini stuff in terms of getting away from the body, towards some kind of rarified ’spiritual’ state. My own feeling is that the Tantric perspective is less about ‘awakening kundalini’ as though it were something static, and more about ‘becoming aware’ of kundalini’s living presence in, and around us. This necessitates, of course, a change in how we perceive ourselves, and the world we are enmeshed in." (personal correspondence) Hine’s first ‘Kundalini’ experience involved an influx of energy coming down his body. This ‘contradiction’ of the traditional experience can also be seen in Reichian therapy. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of bodily ‘armour’ (rigidified musculature, seen to be arranged in sections like the head, throat, chest, etc.) corresponds well with the chakra system. But in opposition to the yogic assertion that one must work from the bottom up when opening the chakras, Reich advised therapists to work from the top down in undoing armour.
So, anal eroticism is merely one of many gateways to sexual and spiritual ecstasy. And while individual proclivities and specific cultural circumstances channel erotic bodily energy through particular pathways, any broad overview must take into account a holistic view of the body. The many ‘maps’ of the body, from the chakra system to Freud’s anal, oral and genital organizations of sexual energy, are all ultimately limited. The least limited map of bodily energy, the map under which all others may be subsumed, is that described by Freud as ‘polymorphous perversity’ and by mystics as ‘oceanic consciousness’. It is the chaotic, spontaneously self-organizing state a baby experiences before the narrower maps of its culture impose themselves on its body—and which anyone may experience in ecstatic release from cultural boundaries.
In Love’s Body, Norman Brown has pointed out that the human body, in its deepest levels, is not as linear and static as our culture’s vision of it suggests. There is a profound interconnectedness and interpenetration at work. The main component of our linear vision of the body is the divided polarity of the head and the groin, the brain and the genitals. But… "The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. [Richard] Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which the head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head." An aspect of this ancient model can be seen to derive from agricultural fertility symbolism. In corn, the seed is literally in the head of the plant.
Further, echoing our discussion of Kundalini, Brown remarks: "The classic psychoanalytical equation, head = genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The way up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital. The shape of the physical body is a mystery, the inner dynamical shape, the real centers of energy and their interrelation…" The ‘genital organization’ of sexuality, where the genitals are the prime channel for sexual energy, is seen by both Freud and Reich as the ‘healthy’, ‘normal’ mode of eroticism in humans. Neither could conceive of a culture that could withstand the dissolution of this pattern and support groups of polymorphous humans, people for whom sexuality pervades their entire body, and thus their whole lives. Evidently we’re still a long way off from such a culture, but it seems important to recognize that anything less is a limitation of our potential for generating, using and exchanging energies. Brown’s refutation of purely genital sexuality applies equally to all forms of restricted eroticism or spirituality:
Erect is the shape of the genitally organized body; the body crucified, the body dead or asleep; the stiff. The shape of the body awake, the shape of the resurrected body, is not vertical but perverse and polymorphous; not a straight line but a circle; in which the Sanctuary is in the Circumference, and every Minute Particular is Holy…
The Androgyne
Most striking, perhaps, is the sexual ambiguity of the goddess in my dream. She was definitely a feminine presence, yet the rising snake-energy nature of her conjunction with my body put her in the cock-bearing masculine role. This perception was given a bit of consensus validation when I visited a friend in Brighton, who I hadn’t related my dream experience to. He was skimming through another piece I wrote relating to the World Tree being seen as the spine up which the Kundalini serpent rises. Out of the blue, he said, "Oh yeah! I had a Kundalini thing once when I was tripping, lying on the ground at a festival. It was like being fucked by Mother Earth." (I had related the Kundalini goddess to the Earth goddess myself—I had an strange experience of energy rushing up into me from the ground at a Dreadzone gig months before my dream. Also, the base chakra, where the Kundalini serpent is traditionally seen to be coiled and dormant, is connected in the chakra system to the earth element.) On the same journey, I visited a friend who I did tell my dream to. He quickly related it to an experience he had had while on mushrooms next to a vast boulder in the place where the sarsens (local sandstones) used to build the Avebury henge were taken from. He experienced it as a bolt of energy penetrating him from below, and nicely called it "an amphetamine pessary up the psychic jaxxee."
The Goddess is an hermaphrodite.
In Neolithic thought, maleness was an aspect of the universal being, or vessel, which was regarded as female. How could it be otherwise, if she truly encompassed everything? An architectural expression of this view is often found in Indian temples, where the overall form displays the feminine creative shape, based on the womb cell which contains the Lingam or male element.
Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle
On Windmill Hill near Avebury, the oldest structure to be found is a cluster of 32 pits dug around 3700 BCE. Dames points out that this pit grouping can be seen to form the outline of a goddess figure, squatting with upturned arms in the traditional stylization of a woman in labour. The pit corresponding to the vulva is "the largest and most fully furnished of all the pits", containing pottery, worked flint flakes, hammerstones, and sarsen balls similar to others found beneath Silbury. However, if one does take the formation to be a squatting goddess, two of the central pits clearly form a penis shape. A small chalk slab, known as the Windmill Hill amulet, found in an adjacent ditch, bears a design similar to the pit goddess, and also displays lines apparently describing a phallus. Hermaphroditic motifs can be seen in two other carved chalk figurines found on the hill, and Dames also notes an androgynous Neolithic figurine found in Somerset and a Bronze Age goddess figure with a beard which was found in Denmark.
The heretical Knights Templar reputedly worshipped a ‘demon’ named Baphomet, most famously depicted by Eliphas Lévi as a goat-headed half-human deity, clearly male and yet breasted—with two intertwining snakes rising from his lap (an important image in Tantra). Baphomet was naturally taken by the Church to be Satan. The Templars were accused of Devil worship and sodomy, and in the early fourteenth century King Philip IV of France had 54 of them arrested, tortured and killed on heresy charges. Satan himself sometimes has shades of androgyny. Phil Hine has informed me that Robertson Davies, in his collection of short stories High Spirits, holds Satan to be an hermaphrodite. And the figure of the Devil in a seventeenth century drawing called Witchcraft (left), by Claude-Françoise Menestrier, clearly has big dangling breasts.
Kucumatz is equivalent to the Mayan resurrection god Kuculcan and the Aztec culture-hero, moon-god and creator of humanity, Queztalcoatl (both these names mean ‘feathered serpent’). Hunbatz Men, a modern Mayan daykeeper and ceremonial leader, has attempted to reconstruct the initiatory sciences of the ancient Maya in his book Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion. In analysing etymology and surviving Mayan temples, he concludes that the Mayan religion was based around a system of seven energy centres, very similar to the Hindu chakras. In both systems, the realization of a divine serpent-power is the goal. In Tantra, it is Kundalini. In Mayan tradition, the serpent is Kuculcan, but there is also the Mayan word k?ultanlilni—built up from k’u (’sacred’), k’ul (‘coccyx’, the base of the spine), tan (‘place’), lil (‘vibration’), and ni (‘nose’). This amalgamated word embodies the Mayan equivalent of a yogic tradition. Men also discusses a seven-headed serpent form carved on a monolith in Aparicio, Veracruz, Mexico (below), and notes that the Buddha was bitten by a seven-headed serpent while in the river of initiation. "This serpent is called chapat in India. Curiously, the people of the Yucatan, Mexico have the same word and it, too, refers to the seven-headed serpent, just as in India."
Dionysus, familiar to us here as precursor of the Jesus/Satan split and son of the Earth, was raised by women, often jeered at for his effeminate appearance, and referred to by a king in a text by Aeschylus as "man-woman". Alain Daniélou presents copious documentation, in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy, that Dionysus is almost precisely equivalent to the Indian god Shiva—from whom we may also derive another traditional aspect of Satan, the trident, which is closely associated with Shiva. One of Shiva’s principal aspects is the Ardhanarâshvara, the hermaphrodite. "The Prime Cause may be conceived as masculine or feminine, as a god or a goddess, but in both cases it is an androgynous or transexual being."
In Siberian shamanism, as in many shamanic traditions, ritual bisexuality is held to be a sign of sacred power, of dealings with other worlds. Daniélou also notes that the Etruscan prophetess wore a phallus attached to her girdle. Kucumatz (inset), the supreme god of the Quiché Indians, is androgynous, both father and mother of all creation. Jewish mysticism elaborates on the creation myth of Genesis in the idea of the primordial androgynous being, Adam Kadmon, a perfect reflection of the divine (see Genesis 1:27—"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."). S/He is split into Adam and Eve to form humans.
Androgynous figures in mythology represent a state of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity that transcends the apparent opposition of sexes and genders. They are vivid, bodily images of a recurrent spiritual impulse to unite, but not leave behind the ecstatic interplay of opposites—without which unity would be a bland mess, with no contrasts, dynamism or fun. This impulse can be seen more abstractly in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, and the coincidentia oppositorum, or union of opposites, in medieval alchemy. Referring to androgynous motifs in mythology, Mircea Éliade says that this "nostalgia for primordial completeness . . . is found almost everywhere in the archaic world."
So what does this mean for us? A recognition that, potentially at least, gender is less a barrier than a permeable membrane (to paraphrase Carol J. Clover in Men, Women & Chainsaws), and that this membrane may be a gateway to magickal consciousness. Whatever the sexual orientation involved, truly ecstatic sex (ritualized or not) can lead to a psychic intertwining and transmutation of sexual identities. Even in (or maybe especially in) the exploration of the extremities of sexual difference, this potential may emerge. As Chris Hyatt says, opposites taken to their extremes become one. Or—as in the yin-yang symbol, where at the extreme of dark yin we find light yang emerging, and vice versa—the opposites become each other.
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"If no attempt is made to induce the orgasm by bodily motion, the interpenetration of the sexual centres becomes a channel of the most vivid psychic interchange. While neither partner is working to make anything happen, both surrender themselves completely to whatever the process itself may feel like doing. The sense of identity with the other becomes peculiarly intense, though it is rather as if a new identity were formed between them with a life of its own." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman)
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I once went to a talk by two practising process-oriented psychotherapists (therapy based on the work of Arnold Mindell), and the woman there responded to a question about Freud by deriding his ‘oppressive’ theory of ‘penis-envy’, the idea that women are all screwed up because they haven’t got that all-important cock. Later in the talk she got round to talking about sexual experimentation, and expressed tingling excitement about the possibilities raised by strap-on dildos. Now, I think Freud was pretty ridiculous in a lot of his thinking—but not always because he was necessarily wrong, just distorted and one-sided. The pendulum’s swung right across to the other side in many feminist circles, where ‘penis-envy’ is refuted because it’s ‘oppressive’, and then men’s ‘womb-envy’ or ‘menstrual-envy’ is given as an explanation for why men are all screwed up. Hang on! Learn from the androgyne. Maybe both these ‘envies’ exist. And maybe we can ditch that word ‘envy’, and all its associations with eternal frustration. Both Freud and the fundamentalist feminists base their theories on the supposedly unchangeable biological foundation of our sex. But these immutable biological ‘envy’ theories just seem to me to be signs of a lack of imagination. Change ‘envy’ to ‘desire’ and cross-dressing or role-playing may be sufficient to transcend biology, for a time, with enough imaginative energy. Strap-on dildos for women and arses in men need a little less imagination. Still further, there are the presently available surgical techniques of transexualism. And if the permanence of this step scares you off, perhaps soon the intelligent and creative application of new technologies, such as virtual reality or nanotech biomechanics, could offer us unlimited exploration of our inherent sexual plasticity and mutability.
Flesh
It is evident that certain rites and practices of ancient Shivaism or Dionysism, such as human sacrifices, could not be contemplated nowadays. Perhaps I should have avoided mentioning them, as they could easily be used as a pretext for rejecting the whole of Shivaite concepts, but, in my opinion, it was necessary to do so because they reflect tendencies of the human being and aspects of the nature of the world, which it would be imprudent to ignore. They form part of our collective unconscious and risk being manifested in perverse ways if we are afraid to face up to them.
Alain Daniélou, The Gods of Love and Ecstasy
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This myth is cleverly played upon in the early seventies horror film The Wicker Man, which on the surface seems to be a standard cash-in on these lingering suspicions about paganism. However, the way the Christian copper (who is eventually burnt) is lured into the trap is revealing. It’s only because he’s so repressed and suspicious of pagans that he falls for the bait. He comes to the island and is convinced that a ‘missing’ girl is going to be sacrificed—what else would these phallus-worshipping heathens who cavort naked around bonfires be up to? All the ‘evidence’ turns out to be carefully contrived to play upon his rampant Christian suspicions: the girl is part of the plot, he is trapped by his own projected fears, and sacrificed in a ritual for crop success. If this was real life, of course, all the islanders should be up on conspiracy to murder. As the piece of art that it is, the story works perfectly as a delicious example of poetic justice.
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Going right back to where we started, let’s recall that the primary manifestation of the modern Church’s concern with the Devil is its fantasy of rampaging Satanists or pagans sacrificing animals and children to the Dark Lord. Modern human sacrifice is largely a myth; however, I see no reason for doubting that animal sacrifices occur, though not necessarily just by ‘Satanists’ (note Anton LaVey’s 10th Satanic Rule: "Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food."). Almost all religions have a deep, intrinsic history of animal sacrifice, and some still practice it. The Massai of Kenya and Tanzania, though nominally Christian, continue to practice blood sacrifice. So do followers of Santeria, a combination of African religion and Christian symbolism, in the States. They regularly ignore U.S. laws (which prohibit the killing of animals except in licensed butcheries and for animal experimentation) in order to practice their religion. The chief contemporary practitioners of ritual sacrifice seem to be Christians themselves, who slaughter and eat tens of millions of turkeys every year as part of their celebrations of the birth of their god.
Human sacrifice also has a long history. It seems to be the main element of Neolithic Goddess cultures that most modern popularisers of Goddess religions have neglected to deal with. Joseph Campbell has said that "human sacrifice is everywhere characteristic of the worship of the Goddess in the Neolithic sphere"; Avebury is no exception. Dames details many instances of human sacrifice in Neolithic Avebury: a prehistoric urn full of human bones was found in the southern inner stone circle of the henge; an adolescent male was found in the foetal position, with all bones broken, within the Sanctuary; other young men have been found buried along the West Kennet avenue. One was found with a thigh-bone jammed into his jaw—sexual/fertility symbolism which involves these sacrifices in one of the primary concerns of the Avebury monuments, the success of the crops. Dames speculates that the sacrificial victims could have actually been honoured to play this part: "For the victims, the opportunity to end their lives in physical incorporation with the Great Serpent [the West Kennet avenue] may have been regarded as an awesome privilege, an ultimate union with the godhead—son and parent united in divinity." The overwhelming holism of the surviving monuments seems to suggest that life for these people may well have been so unified, and death so deeply intertwined with life in their psyches, that young men could have felt their death to be a privilege, an opportunity to spill their life-blood into the ground and magically give life to the crops and the community—as well as return to the womb of the Earth-Mother.1
The idea of sacrifice, bloody or not, is at the heart of human religious life. Its basis is surely the food chain—the interdependence of all life on all other life, the fact that nothing lives save by another’s death. Alain Daniélou has called blood sacrifice "the sacralization of the alimentary function", that is, the ritualisation of killing and eating. "The whole universe is really only food and eater." (Brihat Aranyaka Upanishad) "The world as sacrifice; this world as food; to be is to be eaten." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body) If the world is conceived of as one divine body, the process of life is divine autophagy—self-eating. It seems that all religious sacrifices may be derived from the recognition of this fact. Most practices are distorted to a greater or lesser degree, but the original function of sacrifice was probably part of the human urge to intensify the processes of nature. Vegetarianism and veganism do not negate the fact that life thrives on death—only an unmagickal, unholistic view of life would hold that plants are not living creatures like the rest of us. And while modern technology makes vegetarianism viable for us all (and meat-eating cruel, relying as it does on modern techniques of slaughter), the symbolism of sacrifice and blood are rooted in the consumption of animal flesh.
What do we actually mean by ’sacrifice’? The dictionary definition is "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else more important or worthy." Alan Watts says that it is an act which makes something holy (sacer-facere), arguing that "sacrifice is only accidentally associated with the cessation, death or mutilation of the offering because it was once supposed that, say, burning bulls on an altar was the only way of transporting them to heaven." (Nature, Man & Woman) This idea is used to stress that ’sacrificing’ one’s sexuality to God does not mean chastity, because if you’re not fucking, there’s nothing there to ’sacrifice’, or ‘make holy’.
These two definitions, ‘giving up’ and ‘making holy’, seem to be at odds—you can’t make your cake holy and eat it—until we look at Shivaite (Shiva-worshipping) practices that forbid anyone to eat any flesh that is not the result of a ritual sacrifice. "One should not eat the flesh of living beings without killing them oneself, i.e., taking a conscious part in their slaughter and making the gods a party to it, since the world which they have created and uphold is itself a perpetual sacrifice." (Daniélou) In a system where "the gods must be offered the first-fruits of the harvest, the first mouthful of all nourishment", this practice makes an offering—gives something up—as well as making the act ‘holy’. In killing for food in the name of Shiva, the sacrifice forms a ritual intensification of nature, of divine autophagy. As in Dionysian rites, the animal is seen as a manifestation of the god, with whom the worshipper communes through the act of eating. You are what you eat. The pagan origins of the Christian communion should be plain. "Eating is the form of redemption. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (Brown)
The practice of Shivaites, of only eating what you yourself ritually kill, seems diametrically opposed to the systems of hunting and eating taboos anthropologists have discovered among hunter-gatherers. Chris Knight postulates a primitive ‘own-kill’ rule: "Culture starts not only with the incest taboo, but also with its economic counterpart in the form of a rule prohibiting hunters from eating their own kills." One’s ‘own blood’, in both senses of blood lineage and totem animal blood, is forbidden. This ‘rule’, he argues, is demonstrated by the fact that their exist so many methods of getting around it. Rules are there to be broken; their boundaries, and thus the rules themselves, are defined by how they are circumscribed. The ways of getting around this rule can be seen in its application only to a man’s ‘first kill’; in tribes where you can eat your own kill provided you apologize to the animal’s spirit; and in customs where you symbolically offer your kill to someone else first, whether it’s another person or a god. Knight sees the latter as the basis of most ’sacrifice’.
His reason for postulating this ‘rule’ is that his model of the origins of human culture sees the first proto-human apes involved in an evolving system of menstrual, sexual, hunting and economic taboos. We looked earlier at how Knight envisions culture as emerging from women synchronizing their menstrual periods. Tied up to this is the idea that the time of menstruation, the dark moon, would be immediately followed by hunting trips, as the moon waxed. Because proto-human females were more burdened by their offspring (human infants take a lot longer to mature), they needed to secure a sure supply of food for themselves and their young. In short, they needed to make damn sure the males didn’t go off hunting, scoff the lot while they’re away, and only come back with scraps (as often happens in groups of apes). Knight believes that part of the women’s menstrual ’sex-strike’ (against procreative, ‘domestic’ sex at least) involved a growing system of associations between menstrual blood and the blood of game animals. The taboo against ‘domestic’ sex during menstruation would be psychically linked to a taboo against eating raw, bloody flesh. In Knight’s model, the women control the fire hearth, and thus it is only through presenting their kills to the women that the men can have cooked flesh, free of the tabooed blood. This way, food for the women and children is assured. Survivals of this taboo system are found in most contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. To take one example, hunters of the Urubu tribe in the Amazonian basin may not bring deer into the village. The hunter deposits his kill at the edge of the clearing, and sends a woman to get it. The Urubu believe that "a hunter who brought his own game into the village would be punished with a terrible fever and become kaù, crazy." Californian Indians even have a special verb, pi’xwaq, which means "to get sick from eating one’s own killing".
Knight’s model is interesting in that so many ecstatic nature-based religious cults directly contravene these postulated ‘primeval taboos’. "Ancient Shivaite or Dionysiac ritual does not allow the cooking of the flesh of the animal victim, which had to be captured after a chase, torn apart and eaten raw." (Daniélou) If prohibitions against eating raw meat form part of the basis of human culture, these later ritual practices may be seen as counter-cultural forces. They evolved during times when human life was beginning to be urbanized, and ‘culture’ was becoming something very alienated from nature. Shivaism and Dionysism all stand against conventional civilization, and aim to ecstatically commune with the natural forces and spirits of the land.
Humans irrevocably evolved into cultural beings in eastern Africa long ago. Some development beyond animal existence was obviously necessary for ‘culture’ to exist at all; thus the raw/cooked, nature/culture, animal/human oppositions. But when the rural/urban opposition arose, as the great cities of Europe, the Middle East and Asia formed, something was slowly lost. Evolution was turned back on itself as human culture, a profound outgrowth of nature, began to isolate and alienate itself from its source. "The Dionysiac rite takes its followers back to a primitive stage, which is the antithesis of the city cults in which the victim is eaten cooked. Here we find a very ancient contrast between the two concepts of food and its associated rites. When Dionysus is himself the victim of the Titans who put him to death and boil and roast him, his being cooked implies that Dionysus, as the god of Nature, is the victim of the gods of the city." (Daniélou)
The menstrual blood and animal blood connection also reveals the second source of sacrificial blood symbolism: menses, the blood which women shed every month as part of their bodily fertility cycles. This may be the original ‘human sacrifice’, in that menstruating women ‘give up’ their womb-lining and their unfertilised egg.
It is possible that shamanistic practises of possession by articulate and helpful spirits originally came from the upsurge of energies at the period. There are indications that these spirits were sometimes seen not only as animals, but as the spirits of unborn children. That is, the blood of the period would come instead of the pregnancy, and the blood spoke with the spirit of the unconceived child. A distressing development of this would be in the rumoured cults where children were aborted for magical purposes: there would be no need for this in a menstrual cult where the natural energies were listened to by women aware of their existence.
Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound
Throughout history, many diverse groups have been accused of child murder or ritual abortion: Dionysian cults, medieval witches, early Christians, Jews in Nazi Germany, Satanists (and non-Satanic pagans) in the modern West. The widespread repression of menstrual power seems to be a good explanation for the projected fantasies that such accusations usually are.
Throughout Aboriginal Australia, there is no other way to arouse the Rainbow Snake than by bleeding, whether this is menstrual blood or the blood of men who cut themselves. The Snake is summoned by and attracted to blood. Perhaps this archaic myth-logic is the origin of the reasoning behind the modern occult theory of blood. Talking of larvæ, or elemental spirits, Eliphas Lévi, a nineteenth century French occultist, says that "such larvæ have an aërial body formed from the vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood ["hence come the histories of vampires", he says later] and in the older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices." In connection with this, he notes that "according to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms." (Note that Paracelsus includes semen along with menses—both are in some sense ‘unborn children’, and both are highly valued in most sex-magickal traditions.) Blood is seen in such occult theory to contain the ‘life-force’ of the organism, and spilling the blood is thought to release this energy—usually to ‘feed’ a god or spirit, so that it can be manifested, or empowered to do the sorceror’s bidding. Such sacrifice is part of many voodoo traditions.
Christopher Hyatt and Jason Black, in Pacts with the Devil, concisely reveal the modern double standards surrounding the issue of animal sacrifice.
Recently, on a national new broadcast, there was a segment taped in New York. The video showed ranks of cages containing sheep and chickens, with NYPD officers standing with military solemnity in front of them. The police, the commentator informed us, had just "rescued" these animals. Not from torture or some other form of lingering abuse, but from a place where a major Santeria festival was about to be celebrated. What was to be the fate of these livestock animals? They would be killed expertly and quickly by a Santero, the blood given to the Orishas as a gift, and most likely (depending on the ritual) the animals would be cooked and eaten that same evening by the men women and children at the celebration.
They point out that we live in a society where someone could be sat at home eating a steak (from an animal cruelly, sometimes slowly killed in a slaughterhouse), spy someone living next door swiftly killing a chicken as part of a ritual, and run terrified to the phone to inform the police about this ‘Satanist’, even if the ritualist ate the chicken later for dinner. Who is more humane? Hyatt & Black also note that all ‘kosher’ meat, drained of blood while a rabbi says a blessing, is by definition ritual sacrifice; yet this is legal. Now, I’m wholly and unreservedly against any animal being killed if it isn’t eaten (unless in self-defence). When it is eaten, I think this falls into the category of personal choice. It’s not my business if people want to eat animals without cruelty. Likewise, it’s not my business if they want to use the animal’s death for spiritual purposes before they eat it. Or if they want to kill it cleanly, then rip it to shreds and eat it raw with their bare hands.
What Hyatt & Black show is the hypocrisy surrounding blood sacrifice in modern culture. I wonder how many fundamentalist Christians involved in spreading the anti-pagan ‘ritual sacrifice’ scam sit down at Christmas and happily chew the cooked flesh of poultry kept in appalling conditions and slaughtered profanely. Given the choice, I would rather the turkey’s death formed part of a Santerian ritual, and its flesh eaten afterwards by people fully conscious of its demise—and of the sacredness of life and death.
Blood
When I first read the evidence for the ‘own-kill’ taboo in hunter-gatherer tribes—which in some extreme cases extends to hunters believing that even having seen their food alive would lead to bad hunting luck—I thought immediately of the modern meat industry. Now we haven’t the slightest chance of seeing the creature we’re eating in its living state. But this modern taboo merely serves to isolate meat-eaters from the reality of death (as one would expect in a Christian-based culture). For hunter-gatherers, who still kill, even though they may not eat their own kills, the reasons are a bit more complicated, and a little less alienating.
As a general example of how the own-kill rule functions in hunter-gatherer societies, let’s look at what is commonly known as ‘totemism’. Say there are several clans of hunter-gatherers living in the same area. Each clan has a ‘totem animal’. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there’s the bear clan and the deer clan. Now, the own-kill taboo would work here by preventing the bear clan from eating bear flesh and the deer clan from eating deer flesh. Each clan would be responsible for the hunting and killing of their own totem animal, and for supplying the meat to the other clan. The own-kill rule therefore functions as part of a reciprocal gift-giving system of exchange. Such exchange systems form part of the basis for human culture and language. Sharing and swapping necessitates communication and agreed-upon behavioural guidelines; and the evolution of such guidelines and communication likewise facilitate more intricate systems of exchange. There is strong evidence that most hunter-gatherers link (or rather identify) this food taboo/exchange system—of which there are countless variations—with incest taboos. Thus, the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea equate the taboo against eating one’s own kill with the taboo against incest. When asked about incest by an anthropologist, a man from the Arapesh tribe said, "No, we don’t sleep with our sisters. We give our sisters to other men and other men give us their sisters."
Not all hunter-gatherer exchange systems are based on inter-tribal marrying that is so male-dominated, as many early anthropologists tried to claim (to vindicate current patriarchy). But whoever controls inter-marrying between tribes, matrilineal kin and totem animals are equated as being tabooed for a very simple reason: they are one’s own blood. "To speak of someone as ‘my own flesh’ means, in many languages of the world, that the person is a close relative, usually by ‘blood’." (Knight) To many tribes, whose word for ‘flesh’ is often the same or similar to their word for ‘kin’, this is more than a figure of speech. Malinowski, speaking of the Trobriand islanders, observed that when men learn that a sister has given birth, they rejoice, "for their bodies become stronger when one of their sisters or nieces has plenty of children." Likewise, a similarly concrete feeling of bodily connectedness is expressed by the Buandik of Australia when talking of totemic animals. When forced by hunger to eat such an animal, "he expresses sorrow for having to eat his Wingong (friend), or Tumung (flesh). When using the latter word, the Buandik touch their breasts to indicate close relationship, meaning almost part of themselves."
In fact, the evidence suggests a cross-cultural pattern in which totemic food avoidances [and incest taboos] are in some sense avoidances of the self. If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ’spirit’, ’substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ’self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy.
Chris Knight, Blood Relations
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"Union and unification is of bodies, not souls. The erotic sense of reality unmasks the soul, the personality, the ego; because soul, personality and ego are what distinguish and separate us; they make us individuals, arrived at by dividing till you can divide no more—atoms. But psychic individuals, separate, unfissionable on the inside, impenetrable on the outside, are, like physical atoms, an illusion; in the twentieth century, in this age of fission, we can split the individual even as we can split the atom. Souls, personalities, and egos are masks, spectres, concealing our unity as body. For it as one biological species that mankind is one—the ’species essence’ that Karl Marx looked for; so that to become conscious of ourselves as body is to become conscious of mankind as one." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body)
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‘Avoidance of the self’ shouldn’t be taken in the modern sense, like ‘running away from yourself’. Implied here is an avoidance of the isolated ego. The hunter-gatherers’ gift-giving and exchange systems imply a commitment to extending the unity an individual feels between hirself and hir clan or totem animal. This unity is felt so strongly that it need not ‘feed on itself’ to bind itself together—it can (and must) be shared with others. It spills over, forming reciprocal inter-tribal bonds of interchange.
Looking back to Shivaite ritual sacrifice, the eating of one’s own kill could be seen as an attempt to regain some personal identity in societies where individuality is suppressed and compromised not to maintain kinship and transcendent blood-unity, but to support an oppressive and unhealthy social structure. However, since the whole point of Shivaism is to transcend the individual, and commune with nature, perhaps new psychic structures are involved. As I said before, Shivaism is counter-cultural. Maybe as the original cultural systems became corrupted in crowded cities, the only tack available to oppose this corruption was to oppose the principles it was based on—however socially useful and healthy they may have been in the past.
I haven’t come across any information about sacrificial practices among hunter-gatherer tribes who practice the own-kill rule, and see common blood as the great unifier. But the whole idea of feeling yourself to be one with animals and other people—in a very tangible way—seems to me to have a strong bearing on blood sacrifice. Sacrifice, in the sense of "giving up something valued", would be truest if one lived with this feeling. Offering the blood (as life-force) of an animal to a spirit would mean much less if the animal involved wasn’t felt to be part of one’s own body. If this feeling was present and real, the sacrifice would truly be a sacrifice.
Following this logic, why bother with animals or other humans at all?
And as Deities demand sacrifice, one of men, another of cattle, a third of doves, let these sacrifices be replaced by the true sacrifices in thine own heart. Yet if thou must symbolize them outwardly for the hardness of thine heart, let thine own blood and no other’s, be spilt before that altar.
Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli
Crowley made exceptions to this ‘rule’ (as he had only one real rule, the often misunderstood "Do What Thou Wilt"); but the concept presented here—spilling one’s own blood as a sacrifice—has interesting resonances. It echoes the idea expressed earlier that menstruation may be the original ‘human sacrifice’. Chris Knight sees the emergence of all-male initiatory societies, involving self-mutilation and the spilling of blood, as a usurpation of female menstrual ritual power and solidarity. While we should obviously endeavour to release menstruation from the repression it has suffered—and all the evidence points to it being the most repressed and stigmatized human bodily function in history—the practice of ritual blood-letting in men today need not carry any of the associations with stealing women’s power that it may have had in the past. I can imagine many a strident feminist deriding men cutting themselves as suffering from ‘menstrual envy’. Well, we’ve already looked at this—I wouldn’t consider it ‘envy’ so much as a desire to partake of the other sex. It is some sort to equivalent of women gaining erotic pleasure and insight through using strap-ons.
It seems that the aboriginal populations who travelled across the Bering Straits from Siberia—those who were to become the native peoples of the Americas—developed the sacrifice of ritual blood-letting further. In his essay, ‘A Fashion for Ecstasy: Ancient Maya Body Modifications’, Wes Christensen details Mayan practices of tattooing, piercing, and blood self-sacrifice. As well as men mutilating their genitals, the piercing of the tongue was common, in men and in women. As Christensen says, "The psychological equation of the penis and the tongue needs little reiteration." His view is that the practice of "pulling spiny cords through holes in the tongue" may have been important for female Mayan ritualists: "If the wounding of the Male expresses the desire to own the magically fertile menstrual flow by mimicking it, the symbol seems less important than its function of linking the opposing forces of mother/father, sky/earth in one ritual practitioner. This way of looking at the rite is less male dominated, as well, as it allows for the pervasive influence of women in the ritual life of shamanistic village life. The tongue sacrifice, then, is the woman sorceror’s rite—a rite in which she symbolically imitates the male to achieve the same equilibrium."
Genesis P-Orridge, who was involved in quite extreme spontaneous self-mutilation as part of his performance art activities in the seventies, has been performing rituals for nearly twenty years, and claims that he never does one without cutting his skin. "I have to make at least one cut on myself, and it has to be a cut that will scar, no matter how small." (Re/Search: Modern Primitives) Obviously, scarification requires care, precision, and knowledge of how different parts of the body will react to incisions. But it could form part of the prime effort underlying all mysticism: overcoming subject/object dualism. Alan Watts has described this in terms of the idea, or feeling, that one is an individual ego contained in a "bag of skin". ‘I’ (the subject) am inside, and you and everything else (‘not-I’, the object) are outside. The skin is seen as the limit-point between these realms. Most people would see this as ‘common sense’. However, as Watts stresses, the skin is as much a bridge as a barrier. Many different forms of energy and matter—sweat, heat, sound vibrations—constantly cross this bridge, though we are usually unaware of it. We are inextricably bound up with the ‘outside’ world, to such an extent that we cannot exist without it. ‘Out there’ thus forms part of our identity, and our true body is the entire universe. "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)
And yet the illusion of the skin as an impassable physical and psychic barrier persists. Thus, cutting the skin could be a very powerful way of shattering this illusion. Scarification can be a form of ego-dissolution. For a start, pain is an intense physical stimulus, and can serve to heighten consciousness. Spiritual practices such as flagellation, bodily restriction, ritual scarification and piercing amply testify to the potency of pain as an intoxicant. In the practice of self-scarification, this alteration of consciousness could shift one’s perception of the wound from being some ’symbolic’ link between the inner and outer realms to being the concrete link which both physics and primitive tribes insist that it is.
Further, this theory opens up an understanding of many bizarre and perverse phenomena in human behaviour. Schizophrenics frequently lacerate their skin, something usually associated with mere self-destructive tendencies. But if we see this as self-destructive in terms of an attempt to overcome the illusion of separate individual existence (the isolated self, or ego), the practice of spontaneous self-mutilation can be seen as part of the healing process that many radical psychiatrists claim schizophrenia actually is. The ’split’ in schizophrenia isn’t the popular caricature of ’split personality’ (which is found in multiple personality disorders), but the split between inner and outer, the retreat of the individual from the outside world. My own view is that this split is not an aberration found only in the ‘mentally ill’, but the standard psychic stance of ‘normal’ modern humans. Ego-dissolving catalysts like intense sex and psychedelic drugs wouldn’t be subject to the repression that they are in our culture if this wasn’t the case. Schizophrenia is thus the shock and confusion of spontaneous liberation from our aberrant ‘normality’, a descent into the depths of the psyche, an intensification of the inner/outer split through which one discovers the illusory nature of this division.
It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating. . . . Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. . . . Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego-boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment. The schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation; an "indescribable extension of inner sense"; "uncanny feelings of reference"; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a distance. . . .
Dionysus, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression; and abolishes the principium individuationis, substituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature. In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, the individual self, the boundaries disintegrating, there is, for those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or, as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it."
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
The Divine Body
‘The Goddess’, like all forms of deity, seems to me to be much more than the ‘personification’ of natural forces, or aspects of ourselves. As the previous discussion of personality and ego-consciousness shows, this is because my conception of a ‘person’ or ‘individual’ is, at root, gradually evolving beyond the atomistic and divisive conceptions I have been indoctrinated with. Our conception of divine personifications will (or should) change along with changes in our conception of personality. Since we can’t safely shift overnight to a chaotic, flux-based state of being, the traditional view of deities will still persist to an extent, as useful focuses for attention and energy; but just as any sexual channels must be subsumed under a broader polymorphic map, lest we become obsessed with any one channel, our relationship to ‘deities’ should be encompassed by a much wider conception of divinity. My brief teenage flirtation with Christianity collapsed mostly because I found the mental idea of God as an old bloke with a beard in the sky hard to get round—and very, very silly. I don’t intend to let my present relationship with the Goddess fall prey to similar abstractions. Indeed, the foundation of my interest in this area is the shattering of abstract, monolithic, other-worldly conceptions of divinity.
Much as my ideas are preoccupied with balance, my present conviction that our ‘physical’ experience is the basis of all ‘mythology’ automatically places a distinct difference, an imbalance in emphasis, between those first two all-powerful beings we encounter—our parents. The physical root of my being is the fusion of a part of my mother with a part of my father, but this explosive cellular union is followed by nine months of incredibly rapid growth and development as part of my mother’s body. Even after physical separation occurred at birth, my mother was probably more or less my ‘world’ for the first months of life, depending on circumstances. Freudianism seems to be right in saying that the primal shock of existence is separation from the mother, first physically and then psychically. I’ve no idea why this is the way things are, but such is the case, and I usually point this out to anyone whose knee jerks in dismissal as a reaction against the idea that the first human conceptions of divinity were female. Now, I think this view is overly simplistic, and should be tempered by the above discussions about androgyny and ego-consciousness, but let’s explore it a bit and see what comes up.
Our earliest level of experience of this world is the experience of being unified with our mother in the ocean of the womb. Our nutrition and blood circulation in foetal existence depends utterly on our connection with our mother’s body via the umbilical cord. We are separated at birth, the umbilical severed, but the new world we are delivered into, the ‘external’ world, is in a sense another womb. "Birth is to come out of a womb; and to go into a womb." (Brown) The idea that the material world is our mother is found in archaic Earth-Mother beliefs; in psychoanalysis, where exploration of the external world is seen as a symbolic exploration of the insides of the mother, where "Geography is geography of the mother’s body" (Brown); and in language, where the word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin mater, mother.
Tantric cosmology sees the ground of existence as the union of the male and female principles, Shiva and Shakti. The manifest world is the product of their interplay, where Shiva is the static principle of consciousness and awareness, and the female Shakti is the dynamic principle of energy and manifestation. This is very similar to the Vedic idea of maya, or illusion. The ‘material’ world is seen as an illusion weaved by the goddess Maya (incidentally, this was also the name of the Buddha’s mother), behind which lies the non-manifest reality of cosmic consciousness. We can also relate this back to the idea that Satan rules the world of manifestation—"The Devil is the lord of the world" (Luther)—and God rules the ‘non-material’ realm of the ’spirit’. Tantra’s Shiva-Shakti cosmology is much more holistic, and does not treat the web of matter weaved by Shakti as ‘illusory’ in the sense of something to be overcome, some cosmic deception that inhibits us. It is seen as the basis of our spiritual quest, the ‘raw material’ with which we should work to transmute ourselves and the world.
We are, at present, part of the Earth. This planet doesn’t ’stop’ at the ground we stand on—its true boundary is the outer edge of the atmosphere, and we are thus inside the Earth. And, like the human body, the Earth’s body doesn’t really ‘end’ in an absolute way at its boundary, or skin. The atmosphere, like the skin, is a bridge as well as a barrier, mediating the transmission of many forms of energy and matter—most notably light and heat—between the planet and the solar system, and the rest of the universe.
The transition from seeing our human mother as our Mother to seeing the world, or the Earth, as our Mother, is central to initiatory rites. In many tribal societies, pubescent initiates are isolated from their biological families. Mothers often grieve, seeing the initiation as a literal death of their child—and the birth of an independent adult. Many initiations take place in subterranean environments—caves or holes in the ground—from which the initiate emerges as a child of the Earth. It is from such underground wombs that mythologies involving the labyrinth as an initiatory complex emerge. In cultures where male-only initiatory societies emerged, the process often became a way of appropriating the power of the mother, and reveals another example of ritual androgyny:
"The young man is put into a hole and reborn—this time under the auspices of his male mothers." Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys "we two are friends," they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or "penis womb." The fathers are telling the sons, "leave your mother and love us, because we, too, have a vagina." Dionysus, the god of eternal youth, of initiation, and of secret societies was twice-born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, and caught the baby in his thigh, saying: "Come enter this my male womb."
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
To a certain extent, though, all this is still abstraction. The transition from a ‘biological’ to a ’spiritual’ mother is as useless and alienating as the Christian spiritual Father concept if our cosmic parent is envisaged in terms of an abstract deity. The importance of ‘rebirth’ is in the rebirth of awareness, the emergence of a feeling that we are fused with, and part of our environment. For the foetus, the fusion with the mother is an obvious fact that is not recognized with conscious clarity, because of an undeveloped sense of awareness and the fact that no other state has been experienced. Our fall from union seems to facilitate—via contrast and separation—a heightened awareness of reality, through which subsequent re-union with the environment may be experienced with greater intensity, "For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union." (Crowley, The Book of the Law)
Since we are dealing with the relationship between human consciousness and the environment, one of the most important areas of interest here is what is commonly known as earth mysteries. This is the investigation of human interaction with the natural landscape in terms of spirituality, especially regarding sacred sites, whether these sites occur naturally or are constructed. There is usually a dualism at work in the investigation of sacred sites, with the scientific disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and ethnography on one side, and paganism, psychology and spirituality on the other. The ’subjective’ side (pagan investigators interested in the past and present use of such sites) is necessarily full of speculation and assumptions—my own writings included—but it does hold the key to approaching an understanding of stone circles, burial complexes, standing stones and all other such sites. That is, the function of sacred sites cannot be understood without an understanding of (which must include an experience that approaches) the mind-set of the people who built them. This task is probably impossible if taken to be a ‘perfectible’ scientific project, but we have much greater access to archaic states of consciousness than we are led to believe.
In trying to convey the idea that the LSD experience can access different modes of consciousness from along the evolutionary line, Timothy Leary quotes the German anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, offering it for comparison with documented accounts of LSD sessions. Von Eickstedt is trying to describe his idea of the spiritual attitude of australopithecines, our early ancestors:
In the way of experience there is dominant, throughout, a kaleidoscopic interrelated world. Feeling and perception are hardly separated in the world of visions; space and time are just floating environmental qualities . . . Thus the border between I and not-I is only at the border of one’s own and actually experienced, perceptible world.
In other words, for pre-hominid apes, and for the earliest humans, the definition of personal identity could be expressed as: I am my experience. This obviously includes the perceptible landscape, so any sacred sites and constructions that predate the evolution of ego-psychology in human cultures should be considered in these terms. This intertwining of human identity and nature is given a more roundabout, but somewhat fuller expression by Chris Knight in Blood Relations:
In this scheme of things [that of Australian Aborigines], human and natural cycles of renewal are mutually supportive and sustainable through the same rites. The skies and the landscape are felt to beat to human rhythms. Everything natural, in other words, is conceptualised in human terms, just as everything human is thought to be governed by natural rhythms.
. . . There seems no reason to discount the Aborigines’ own belief that in their rituals they were drawing upon natural rhythms and harmonising with them to the advantage of their relationship with the world around them. It was not that man was dominating nature; but neither was it that human society stood helpless in the face of nature’s powers. Rather, human society was flexible enough and sensitive enough to attune itself finely to the rhythms of surrounding life, avoiding helplessness by replicating internally nature’s own ‘dance’. Nature was thereby humanized, while humanity yielded to this nature. If the hills felt like women’s breasts, if rocks felt like testicles, if the sunlight seemed like sexual fire and the rains felt like menstrual floods, then this was not mere ‘projection’ of a belief system onto the external world. This was how things felt—because given synchrony and therefore a shared life-pulse, this was at a deep level how they were.
Naturally, the experience of a psychedelic trip does not reproduce the actual mind-set of archaic humans. For us, a trip stands only in relation to our everyday, ‘normal’, experience of the world, and is quite different from the continuous, everyday experience of, say, a Neolithic Avebury resident, for whom such a world-view would be ‘normal’. Nevertheless, such experiences, induced by chemicals or otherwise, should stand as the cornerstone of our understanding of sacred sites—and pre-civilised culture in general. And in any case, we shouldn’t be interested in trying to replicate the mind-set of archaic humanity. Individual initiation isn’t a simple one-way ‘return to the womb’, but a more highly evolved sense of omni-directional unity that follows the experience of division. Similarly, any attempt to re-engineer our culture’s experience of the environment, inspired by prehistoric and existing ‘primitive’ cultures, should be a return to a similar point, but higher up on the evolutionary spiral. "We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but a return of the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the repressed." (Hakim Bey)
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"Mariners sailing close to the shores of Tuscany heard a voice cry out from the hills, the trees and the sky: ‘The Great God Pan is dead!’ Pan, god of panic. The sudden awareness that everything is alive and significant. The date was December 25, 1 AD. . . . The final apocalypse is when every man sees what he sees, feels what he feels, hears what he hears… The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be…" (William S. Burroughs, Apocalypse)
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My conception of the Goddess, then, has less to do with a visualized representation of a vast cosmic woman, ox, or serpent than it has to do with my immediate, moment-to-moment experience of the world I am part of. Even in my Kundalini dream, the ‘presence’ of the Goddess was an intuited fact, not a confrontation with a manifest form. The two instances of feeling Her presence were both experiences of intense body sensations and energy rushes, accompanied by the self-evident dream-conviction that this was the Goddess. In waking life, this perception arises very much along the lines of Phil Hine’s idea that Kundalini is associated with "one’s physical sensation of the here & now". This sensation is not a narrow feeling of mundanity, not the dissipation of mystery and numinosity that is usually associated with the apt phrase "down to earth". It is exactly the opposite: a sense of the intense completeness and fullness of each moment; a paradoxical but perfectly natural feeling of being totally grounded, yet adrift in a vertiginous whirlpool of possibilities.
A related point that interests me is that investigations into the function and purpose of archaeological artifacts are nearly always governed by the sacred/profane dualism. Is this antler-pick just a common tool, or did it have ritual significance? Are these cave paintings just ‘art’ (in the modern, profane, sense of ‘representation’), or were they part of a system of hunting ‘magic’? It’s clear that somewhere the rigid distinction between the ’sacred’ and ‘profane’ arose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the present situation where for most people the ’sacred’ only exists in church on Sundays (if sacredness exists at all). According to Alan Watts, ‘profane’ didn’t always mean irreligious or blasphemous. It merely signified "an area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum). It was thus the proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates, though here again the ‘common’ is not the crude but the communal—the people living in society. By contrast, the sacred was not the merely religious but what lay outside or beyond the community, what was—again in an ancient sense—extraordinary or outside the social order." (Nature, Man & Woman)
Judging from this, the sacred/profane duality arose as a result of the increase in human populations. Beyond a certain point, it seems that the full power and mystery of existence, as felt by the earliest humans, could not be a constant fact of everyone’s experience if "social order" was to evolve. Even beyond this point, it can be seen from Watts’ argument that the sacred/profane distinction didn’t necessarily mean that everyday experience was utterly bereft of spiritual significance. This spiritual poverty, this rigid division of life into the sacred and profane (in their modern senses), has only been the norm of human experience for several hundred years, if that. And in their historical accounts, modern scientists have been projecting this division back in time for far too long. A re-vision of anthropology and archaeology is overdue, necessary and, I feel, imminent.
It seems ridiculous that anyone could assume that prehistoric humans sectioned life into neat compartments, mundane and extraordinary, profane and sacred, with anything like the rigour and inflexibility that the modern West does. Only affluent cultures, where day-to-day survival is not really a pressing issue, can even afford such a distinction. For pre-civilised (i.e. before cities) societies, where existence was dynamic and unstable, life depended on crops and crops depended on weather, among other things. For pre-agricultural societies, life depended on the gathering of food and the hunting of animals, which are subject to even more unstable factors. And these things, agriculture and hunting, were the prime focus for ‘religious’ activity. Gods and goddesses of the hunt, gods and goddesses of the Earth and crops dominated their relationship with the divine. What we consider the ‘mundane’ bits about life, like fuelling our bodies and keeping warm, were for these people projects loaded with importance and significance. In such a society, there’s nothing more significant than staying alive. Thus food, shelter, hunting, farming, communication, the sharing of knowledge and skills, all were imbued with what we would consider ’spiritual’ significance.
The figure of the shaman, "technician of the sacred", stands as the first step in the progressive division of life into the sacred and the profane, but the first shamans could only have stood "outside the social order" in a shallow sense. Early shamans would have depended on the social order for basic support and a purpose for their path’s numerous trials, and the society would have depended on them for communication with deities and spirits, or forces of nature—more often than not for the governing and aiding ‘mundane’ projects like hunting and farming.
In short, life was a unity. Everything depended on everything else. The body was divine, and experience of the body included the environment. For ourselves, living in a culture where the dominant spiritual institutions have insisted not only on separating themselves from everyday life, but directing their spiritual aspirations outside this world, it’s evident that a new vision of spirituality more directly concerned with life, the Earth, our bodies and survival is needed. We cannot live on bread alone, but I don’t want to try to live without it. It’s no coincidence that it took an affluent society like our own, where day-to-day existence is taken for granted, to produce a device capable of utterly destroying the biosphere.
Footnotes
[2008] After reading Timothy Taylor’s The Buried Soul, I’m glad I couched this part in suggestive rather than definitive language. Taylor deftly exposes the naivety of many recent theorists who try to whitewash suffering in the ancient world with arguments similar to Dames’. While Taylor’s arguments are important, I still think it’s important to imagine that attitudes may be radically different in ancient societies, and to not settle on a definitive judgement either way unless evidence is blatant. [back to text]
Books Used/Sampled
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler
William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P.H. Butter
The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
Pacts with the Devil by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt**
The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey
The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton
The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt*
Towards 2012 part II: Psychedelica edited by Gyrus
Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown*
Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown**
Nature, Man & Woman by Alan Watts*
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas*
The Avebury Cycle by Michael Dames**
Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight**
The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy by Philip Rawson*
The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna*
Kundalini, Evolution & Enlightenment edited by John White
Magick by Aleister Crowley
The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley
Re/Search: Modern Primitives edited by V. Vale & A. Juno**
The Holy Bible edited by the Christian Church
Meditations on the Apocalypse by F. Aster Barnwell
The Supernatural by Colin Wilson
The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove**
Men, Women & Chainsaws by Carol. J. Clover
Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Éliade
Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus by Alain Daniélou*
Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons by Manfred Lurker
Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion by Hunbatz Men
The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi
The Psychedelic Reader edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
Dead City Radio by William S. Burroughs (spoken word album)
T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey (spoken word album)
* recommended in relation to the ideas discussed in this essay
** bloody essential
Related Films
The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy
The Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren
Videodrome by David Cronenberg
Crash by David Cronenberg
Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Carrie by Brian de Palma
Alien3 by David Fincher
The Exorcist by William Friedkin
The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorcese
Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola
The Hunger by Tony Scott
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Henry Levin
Written 1997
Published in Archaeologies of Consciousness
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Possibly related
The Origins of Human Society
Dionysus Risen
Chaos and Beyond
The Goddess in Wharfedale
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The Devil & The Tao
As far as the philosophical underpinnings of Satanism go, one of the best places to start is with Friedrich Nietzsche. While he had nothing (consciously) to do with Satanism, his work is frequently cited by Satanists and modern occultists, and I think more than a few Satanists see themselves as ‘Nietzschean’.
It has to be said before setting off that Nietzsche was acutely, probably painfully aware of how his ideas may be misinterpreted. He loathed the idea that people, "like plundering troops", may pick and choose titbits from his books to use for their own purposes, disregarding material contrary to their own agendas. The racist misinterpretations (far too weak a word!) of the German Nazi party are the most blatant case in point. That said, I disagree with some of his work. In the end Nietzsche was no ’system-builder’—he erected no edifice that must be accepted entirely or fall to the ground. He was an experimentalist, and perpetually played with and revised ideas. It is in this spirit that I read Nietzsche; and here I’m looking at him with an eye to reveal a few misinterpretations less obvious than those of the half-witted anti-Semites. No doubt I’ll end up guilty of a bit of plundering myself, but I prefer judicious plunder to wilful misunderstanding.
Darwinism is the central concept to deal with. It amuses me to see ‘black metal’ bands asked in interviews if they believe in the (supposedly ‘Nietzschean’) philosophy of "the strong over the weak", "survival of the fittest"—as if this would provoke some new and interesting response! We’re talking social Darwinism here of course, but let’s look first at the biological argument.
Darwinian evolutionary theory often seems too obvious to bother arguing with, but this is precisely my problem with it. It’s too bloody obvious. The nail was whacked on the head for me when I read Arthur Koestler’s Janus: A Summing Up. Here he quotes C.H. Waddington, a critical neo-Darwinian:
Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day interpretation [1957], perpetuation as a source for future generations. That individual ’survives’ best which leaves most offspring. Again, to speak of an animal as ‘fittest’ does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology.
Further, Ludwig von Bertalanffy acutely observes that "It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities."
The so-called rationalism of modern—usually ’socially Darwinian’—Satanism rests on very dodgy philosophical ground, simply because when you bother to try and define the terms used in the idea of "the strong over the weak", you’re invariably left with a sense of, "Yeah, and…?" It’s like saying you believe in the philosophy of "winners beating the losers". Jello Biafra nicely undermined knee-jerk social Darwinism with his quip that "the strong prey on the weak, and the clever prey on the strong"; but in the end this just begs the question. Also, orthodox Darwinism inevitably holds that humanity is the latest in life’s progressively ‘better’ attempts at creating organisms. Surely social Darwinism would hold a similar view about contemporary culture? This doesn’t sit too well with the misanthropy, and contempt for the ‘lowering of standards’ in modern society, that is prevalent among many supposed social Darwinists. If the strong really do overpower the weak, why have we been dominated for so long by such a half-assed religion as Christianity? I think many Satanists, in claiming "strong over the weak" to be a universal principle of nature, are actually trying to say, "I’m harder than you and I could have you easily." Or at least, "I could out-stare you, mate." That’s another argument. But as for universal principles—forget it. Evolution and history are far too complex and multi-dimensional to limit themselves to the strategies of a fight in a pub.
Nietzsche was definitely not a Darwinist, and had no faith in "survival of the fittest" as an ‘explanation’. For him, his conception of the "will to power" was the driving force behind all life. It is essentially a conception of creativity, and has far more to do with creative self-mastery than power over others. Nietzsche’s notion that creation must be destructive ("Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values.") is often seen in limited terms. This is only the first step. The second step, often left out, is that the new creation itself must again be destroyed. And the steps go on… Zarathustra is quite explicit on this: "And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again…’" The famous ‘Superman’ isn’t a concept of some inevitable evolutionary goal toward which humanity is inexorably moving (i.e. it’s not Darwinian). It’s a vision of an ideal state of being, of perfect self-mastery and perpetual re-creation, which Nietzsche believed some humans—Socrates and Goethe for example—had already, to an extent, achieved. Together with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, it’s a glorification of the moment, of total involvement in the turbulent flow of immediate experience. "Not to wish to see too soon.— As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)
Comparison with Taoism is illuminating. While our cultural filters place Taoism in some ’soft’ category, and see Nietzschean values as being essentially ‘hard’, the distinction blurs when you consider the supra-cultural state to which both aspire. Nietzsche used the word ‘hard’ many times in describing ideals, as in "all creators are hard." (Twilight of the Idols) But I don’t think we can just accept this word unquestioningly. Its modern connotations evoke more of a mindless thug than a vibrant Superman. Words are subject to mutation; but even if the words themselves remain the same, their meaning is always mutating, for words are "pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)
Before considering Taoism, I’d like to follow a little tangent about Nietzsche’s ‘hardness’. I always thought of Nietzsche (before actually reading him) as some grim Teutonic beast. He was actually vehemently opposed to the Germanic temperament, which he considered mediocre (when in a good mood). He repeatedly praised the southern European disposition, that of light-heartedness, exuberance and cheerfulness. A far cry from the fashionably serious and dreary poses of many modern ‘Nietzscheans’. A key influence on this popular misconception of Nietzsche is probably that famous portrait—the furrowed brow, the dark gaze, the amazingly bushy moustache. It doesn’t do much for his philosophy of light-heartedness. I was tempted to just put this image, of a very stern and worried-looking guy, down to his frequent bouts of illness. I recently found out that I was more justified in this temptation than I guessed. Nietzsche never grew such a moustache. These amounts of hair appeared on his upper lip only during his last ten years of life, during which he was helplessly insane. He was unable to care for himself, and this responsibility fell to his sister, who allowed the ‘tache to flourish and brought people in to do portraits. Poor Freddy had no choice. This picture of an intense mad-eyed walrus is probably not how Nietzsche would have liked to have been remembered! His sister, who managed to distort his work as well as his image, has a lot to answer for.
To return to Taoism… The Tao, usually translated as "way", is seen as that force which underpins, interpenetrates, and flows through the universe. Actually, "flows through" is misleading, as it conjures up images of ‘things’ as vessels through which the Tao passes. Taoism admits of no such duality. And the Tao’s primary characteristic is that it cannot be defined. A definition of it, such as "the process of the universe", may loosen our categories a bit in order to contemplate it, but categories ultimately have to be destroyed if that process is to be fully apprehended. I think Nietzsche was too suspicious or ignorant of ‘mysticism’ to fully admit it, but I suspect any Superhuman state would involve a similar destruction—or transcendence—of categories.
So what is this process, or Tao, that we’re trying to apprehend? In Nietzsche’s words, it is "that which must overcome itself again and again". Nietzsche’s conception of embracing this, of fully participating in the process of life, is shot through with an distinct emphasis on struggle—assertion, strife and conflict. Regarding modern occultural misinterpretations again, it is primarily in this sense that he intended his many references to war. Being anti-state and anti-political, Nietzsche in no way ‘advocated’ bloody economic and territorial battles between nations. He didn’t ‘condemn’ them either. Nietzsche was neither liberal nor fascist. He largely used the word "war" in the sense of resolutely striving for self-mastery without shrinking from—rather, embracing—the inevitable conflicts this quest entails. "I will not cease from Mental fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand…" (William Blake, Milton)
Reconciling this relentless struggle, which is obviously part of the path to self-perfection, with the supposed passive quiescence of Taoism, is itself an ongoing process. Of course, it’s ultimately a false dichotomy, and Christopher S. Hyatt seems to have summed it up best in his book The Tree of Lies:
The concept of surrender has become so distorted that many believe that "surrendering" is in opposition to power, sex and self mastery. This is one of the greatest lies. . . . self mastery is not possible without surrender. This issue cannot be overemphasized. Magic and Mysticism—The Will To Self Mastery and The Will To Surrender—are two sides of the same coin. . . . when power or love are taken to their extreme they become one.
The Tao is a struggle of perpetual self-overcoming—again and again. But as Alan Watts ceaselessly points out, it is a struggle devoid of ‘anxiety loops’. In fully surrendering to the flow of life, one surrenders one’s resistance to the rolling process of destruction and creation, ‘war’ and ‘peace’, that true life constitutes. Passivity is often part of this resistance, as much as frenetic anxiety can be.
Satanism and Taoism are alike in that they are both deeply concerned with the hard/soft, strong/weak distinctions. Satanism seems to emphasize and value ’strength’, while Taoism seems to emphasize and value ‘weakness’. I feel that both may learn from each other. Taoists who have made the clichéd image of the quiescent oriental sage their behavioural ideal would do well to meditate on the Tao at work in an ocean whipped up by a tumultuous thunderstorm, and see how close to ‘nature’ they really are. Hardened Satanists, intent on fortifying their unbending will, would do equally well to take a sword to a piece of solid wood, and then to a pond. The wood will splinter and be destroyed. The pond will passively accept the blade, and effortlessly flow back to perfection once it is withdrawn.
I was made with a heart of stone / To be broken with one hard blow / I’ve seen the ocean break on the shore / Come together with no harm done
Perry Farrell, ‘Oceansize’
Satan’s Ancestry
Those who point the finger at Satan, reveal Satan. Those who fight Satan, give him power. Those who blame Satan, give him influence. Those who talk much of Satan, create him.
But those who worship Satan, tame Satan. Those who passively resist him, earn his respect. Those who accept him, diminish his influence.
And those who analyse him, learn his wisdom.
Lionel B. Snell, ‘The Satan Game’
The Christian devil, Satan, is an archetype. Whether one sees archetypes as creations of the human mind, genetically-rooted universal ‘templates’ of conscious experience, or fully independent spiritual entities, is irrelevant here. Even if archetypes are seen to be autonomous ‘beings’—gods, goddesses, demons or spirits—they are inevitably experienced by means of our own bodies and minds. Our experience of them is filtered through whatever biological, cultural and psychological structures we happen to find ourselves equipped with to make sense of the world. Thus, if we’re talking about the realms of human experience (and what else can we talk about in a useful way?), Satan may be seen to have a history, a mythical family line of descent. Certain universal facts of life, such as the processes of sex, birth & death, will be ever-present in most mythical figures; but the specific figures themselves evolve throughout human history to mirror the complex cultural interactions and upheavals that have ceaselessly manifested since the first time apes developed language, culture and myth—and became human.
In this speculative Satanic genealogy we shall obviously work backwards, climbing down from contemporary branches, down the trunk, and under the ground where the roots lay hidden. So to begin with, how is Satan conceived in contemporary culture?
Modern Christianity has lost much of the medieval iconographic vividness in its conception of Satan, as it is supposedly more ’sophisticated’, and not given to simplistic anthropomorphisms (i.e. Satan as a reptilian, horned, cunning and wily beast-man dwelling ‘down there’ in his burning lair). The most significant manifestation of modern Christians’ concern with their Devil is in the phenomenon known as the ‘Satanic Abuse Myth’. ‘Satanic Abuse’, because the phenomenon centres around the conviction that the Western world is infested with invisible networks of evil Satanists, who ritually abuse and bloodily sacrifice people—usually children—in the service of their Dark Lord. ‘Myth’, because this conviction has uniformly been found, by government-commissioned investigations and independent researchers alike, to be false. Certain cases of abuse have been found where the perpetrators used the paraphernalia of occultism to terrify their victims into submission and silence. But not one case of genuine Satanists, occultists, or pagans harming children for the purposes of magickal ritual has ever been found. So we can see that these obscene Christian fantasies of blood-soaked orgies and child sacrifice are merely the modern version of the medieval equivalents, the witch-hunts (or of the Roman equivalent, where early Christians were accused of similar crimes…). The vividness of these modern scapegoating fantasies seems to have made the mythical figure of Satan himself less necessary. Who needs an image of a subterranean Devil on which to project your repressed fears and desires when you can conjure up such horrifying scenes of ‘actual’ human activity?
Often at the forefront of the cultural panic around Satanism was the self-styled leader of California’s Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey. He seemed amused as well as indignant about the latest bouts of witch-hunt scaremongering. He knew as well as any open-minded observer that more children have suffered abuse and molestation at the hands of trusted Christian priests than have even heard of the Church of Satan. And his codes of Satanic practice are there for all to read: "Do not harm little children. Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food." (from ‘The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth’)
But for Satanists as well as Christians the actual mythical image of the Devil has become less central. LaVey states that Satan is "a representational concept, accepted by each according to his or her needs." This seems mightily hazy without LaVey’s repeated reminders that ‘Satan’ roughly translates from Hebrew as ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’. Satanism is based on the principle of opposition. This is usually seen as opposition to the status quo, specifically Christian morality. Satan is an emblematic concept presiding over the practice of all those wonderful un-Christian things: free sexuality, autonomy, indulgence, harmony with (instead of dominion over) nature, and anti-authoritarianism. Many Satanists seem to slip up on this last one, and it’s here that most Satanism as it stands loses my sympathies. Just as many people forget that Nietzsche’s ‘destructive-creativity’ is meant as a perpetual process, not just a one-off revolution, Satanism can often slip from being an expedient release from Christian programming into being a dogma in itself. It seems to find it hard to challenge itself as an institution. There are many parallels here with the ‘left hand path’ of politics, Marxism. Many unsophisticated Marxists still think that their beliefs could function wonderfully as they stand once capitalism is cast to the ground once and for all, not seeing that their present beliefs are conditioned by their capitalist context. If Western capitalism is ever ‘overthrown’, I think many Marxists will follow their historical predecessors and become the new despots, or just be at a loss as to what to do without ‘the opposition’. Substitute ‘Satanists’ for ‘Marxists’, and ‘Christianity’ for ‘capitalism’, and you have a wildly simplistic, but very revealing analogy.
The influence of Chaos Magick and all its kindred philosophies on modern occulture seems to be a useful counter to this tunnel vision of simple opposition. The heart of Chaos Magick is the practical implementation of Nietzsche’s vision of life overcoming itself again and again, and provides a good antidote to any sliding towards dogma, or dependence on a static adversarial figure.
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To return to Satan, we can see that despite his modern transformations, the popular conception of the Devil still bears the unmistakable hallmarks of pre-industrial Christianity’s vivid image of him. He is almost always bestial. The horns and the cloven hooves are synonymous with the Devil, and a reptilian tail is often attributed to him. Related to this is his unmistakably sexual nature, often seen as a threatening or perverse sexuality, but definitely sexual. The conception of Satan as the rebel angel Lucifer is a bit of an anomaly here, and this figure seems like a more refined, sublimated and ‘humanized’ Devil, all ferality turned into stubborn pride, and sinister sexuality emerging as cunning seductiveness.
Pre-twentieth century Satanism, exemplified by people like Phillipe the Duc D’Orleans and Sir Francis Dashwood, was the domain of rebellious and hedonic aristocrats. Their repudiation of the asceticism of Christianity often involved the kind of debauchery modern Christians are eager to pin on modern Satanists. There is evidence of child murder and ritual sacrifice. Many, however, penetrated beyond frenzied opposition to the Church and discovered the intimately related, but deeper roots of Satan in pre-Christian pagan gods. Bloody sacrifice was usually part of such old paganism, and we’ll return to this later. For now it is sufficient to see that the figure of Satan cannot be separated from the nature gods of the older religions.
Modern Satanists are often quick to deny this connection as being necessary or significant, probably eager to hang on to Satan’s supposed status as a god in his own right, independent of both Christianity and nature worship. I suppose they fear the potency of their god being quelled by his being subtly appropriated into the realm of ‘neo-paganism’, derided (in some cases accurately) by Satanists as wishy-washy. But the connections are there.
For a start, it’s plain that the Christian Satan was evolved as part of the church’s expansion into pagan or ‘heathen’ lands. This process was often complicated by unforeseen overlaps between Christianity and indigenous pagan practices, to a certain extent betraying Christianity’s pagan origins. We see this clearly in Catholicized Central and South American countries, where many natives have blended the invading cosmology into their own. A vivid example of this is the fact that indigenous Mexican mushroom cults call their fungal sacrament teonanácatl, meaning ‘flesh of the gods’. Those cults which survived the Spanish conquest could easily accept the god Jesus, who offers us his flesh to eat, and his mother Mary, who became the new bottle for the old wine of Earth-Mother goddess figures. Invading Christians spreading north over Europe consciously appropriated existing pagan festivals, and built their places of worship on ancient sacred sites to win over the populace. But they still needed to weed out the more overt paganisms. So the widespread Horned God or Goddess, who presided over pagan nature worship and fertility rites, was demonised. Through the installation of dualistic categories of good and evil, and the identification of pagan gods as evil, they gave themselves permission to trample paganism into the ground, and a lot of spiritual clout with which to terrorize natives into obedience.
The greatest insights into Christianity and Satan can be gleaned from exploring the Greek god Dionysus. He is very typical of pagan nature gods: he is horned, signifying kinship with animals (like the closely related goat-god of the Arcadian pastures, Pan, another source of Satanic iconography); he is a ‘dying-and-rising’ god, reflecting the cyclic process of the seasons in nature; and he has a strong wild and untamed aspect, again like Pan, forming a bond with pre-civilised humanity. It’s obvious how Satan, Christianity’s repressed shadow, has derived from such an archetype. In its irrational suppression of sexuality, nature, cyclicity and the body, Christianity latched on to this archetype and pushed it so far away from human experience that it became alien, and we became alienated. The already feral, ego-shattering Dionysian godform became utterly evil and terrifying, a force to be held at bay at all costs.
Now things get confusing. Did not Jesus, like Dionysus, die and rise again? Both are intimately associated with vines and wine; both have been connected to the use of psychedelic mushrooms; the flesh of both is in some way eaten as part of their worshippers’ rites; and both names, according to John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, stem etymologically from the same Sumerian root. There’s almost as much evidence connecting Dionysus with Jesus as there is with Satan.
It’s my feeling that we have here a crucial fork in the history of archetypes. Christianity appropriated the more abstract spiritual motifs of dying-and-rising nature gods (mainly supposed ‘life after death’) and up popped the mythical Jesus. The chthonic associations with the Earth, with sexuality and the body, were all repressed, compressed and demonised into Satan. In this division was lost all cyclicity, all the transformative and change-affirming power of nature’s process. We descended into truly profane time; linear time instead of rhythmic, spiralling, sacred time. Norman O. Brown has noted that "the divorce between soul and body [analogous to the Jesus/Satan split] takes the life out of the body, reducing the organism to a mechanism". Likewise, the conception of an extra-terrestrial, eternal time (Heaven) as sacred renders the Earth profane, and binds us to the linear track of uni-directional historical ‘progress’. We may see ourselves as moving towards this sacred time—but it is an ever-receding carrot-on-a-stick, and tears us away from omni-directional immersion in the moment. "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." (Jim Morrison)
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In Satanism, Satan is seen as embodying the principle of division and duality, that principle without which manifestation—matter, flesh, bodies & sex—cannot occur. This is symbolized in the ‘inverted’ pentagram, where two points are directed upwards and one down. The dual realm of manifestation rules over the singular, united realm of spirit. In the ‘normal’ pentagram the spirit rules the flesh. Jesus is seen as opposing Satan, and embodies the spiritual principle of unity. So what are we to make of the actual historical beliefs and practices of the followers of these two figures? Christianity has turned out to be militantly dualistic, denying the body and ravaging the Earth, glorifying the ’spirit’ and longing for some united heavenly kingdom. And Satanists, while obviously prioritising flesh over spirit, ego over collectivity, are inevitably involved in many practices which approach Dionysian revelry, serving to abolish individual distinction. Also, their emphasis on living for the moment instead of "spiritual pipe-dreams" could be seen to destroy the future-fixation of profane time, following Nietzsche into a whole-hearted immersion in the eternal present.
Our problems in analysing these contradictions betray our present evolutionary and cultural problems. In looking at the splitting of Dionysus, we’re seeing the mythical reflections of a phase in the development of the human species where the increase of city-dwelling and changes in agriculture & economics began to erode our bond with the rest of the biosphere. City walls are the rigidification of human ego-barriers writ large. "When Christians first distinguished themselves from pagans, the word ‘pagan’ meant ‘country-dweller’. For the first centres of Christianity in the Roman Empire were the great cities—Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome itself." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman) In our quest to urbanize our existence, to become as independent as possible from the less comfortable and benign aspects of nature, we have become lost in a mire of confusion. Witness Blake’s disgust at the industrial revolution in his phrase "dark Satanic Mills", and the fact that most of the mill owners were probably devout Christians. Protestantism has been intimately linked to the rise of capitalism by psychoanalytical historians; Satanists advocate material power. A church in Coventry recently held a service in thanks for the car industry; and Jesus advocated shunning possessions and said rich people would have a bloody hard time getting into heaven. Such confusion seems to be the price for living under the sway of false dichotomies like Jesus/Satan, spirit/matter, collective/individual, intellect/instinct.
Culture and civilization are inseparable from material technologies, and things are no less confused in the technophile/Luddite debate. The real dichotomy to be tackled here is that of harmonious/unharmonious technology. Do our tools help us achieve our desires, or do they become our desires? Do you browse the web to kill time and boredom, like TV, or use it to help you do what you want to do in the real world? Is our technology harmonious with nature? In most cases today, the answer is a painful no. We have lost the vision of the first grand tool-using age of humanity, the Neolithic, where culture, agriculture and technology were used to work with and intensify the natural environment.
Reclamation
Our Satanic genealogy has so far reached the figure of Dionysus, and if we delve further back, we find his roots in the pan-European Neolithic worship of the Great Goddess. In Greek myth, Dionysus’ mother is identified as Semele, a mortal. She was, however, sometimes equated with Ge, the Thracian form of the Earth Goddess Gaia.
The male god, the primeval Dionysus, is saturated with a meaning closely related to that of the Great Goddess in her aspect of the Virgin Nature Goddess and Vegetation Goddess. All are gods of nature’s life cycle, concerned with the problem of death and regeneration, and all were worshipped as symbols of exuberant life.
Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
Now I shall lose the interest of yet more die-hard Satanists. I think it’s possible to trace most of Satan’s aspects and characteristics back to the Neolithic (and perhaps Palaeolithic) Great Goddess. It’s true that if you gathered all available books on Goddess worship together, the vast majority of them—in their style, typography, illustrations and attitude—would probably be… well, twee. It’s obvious why the figure of the Goddess is largely consigned to the realm of New Age Pap; but I think a serious, unromantic investigation of the religious and mythical complex termed ‘the Goddess’ will uncover something a lot more challenging, vital and useful than the trite New Age-isms we’re usually presented with.
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This horned aspect is thought by some researchers to derive from the ‘horns’ of the womb, the Fallopian tubes—the form of which can potentially be propriocepted, or felt internally, in states of heightened consciousness (see The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove).
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The Neolithic Goddess, like Satan, was invariably horned; the ox was one of her most revered forms. Being associated with the Earth itself she was often a chthonic (underworld) Goddess, this aspect entering Greek mythology in the story of Demeter and Persephone. It’s worth noting that Heraclitus once said that Dionysus was another name for Hades, lord of the underworld. The whole chthonic goddess & son complex is the basis for our image of Satan ruling over a subterranean Hell.
Another strong link between the Goddess and Satan is the serpent. The serpent in Genesis’ Garden of Eden is often associated with Satan, and Christianity usually extends this association to all snakes. The snake was, along with the ox, the animal most frequently associated with the Neolithic Goddess. The spiral, often symbolizing a coiled serpent, is one of the most common Goddess symbols. Archaic serpent myths from around the world are far too numerous to detail here. However, one extremely early myth (perhaps the earliest), which detours us to an extremely bizarre connection with Christianity, is well worth going into.
In his book Blood Relations, anthropologist Chris Knight proposes that human culture was the result of early female Homo sapiens synchronizing their menstrual cycles. This collectivity, he argues, empowered them to periodically ’sex strike’ during menstruation—females basically refused sex with their partners (but possibly had menstrual sex with male kin) until the men went hunting and brought back enough meat to feed them and their children.
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"The link of blood and magick can also be found in the German word for ’sorceror’, which is ‘zauberer’. The word goes back to OHG Zaubar, MD Tover, OE Teâfor… All three words mean ‘red colour, red ochre, to colour in red’!" (Jan Fries, Helrunar)
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The full thesis is persuasive but very complex. It is enough for now to note that the hypothesized collective act of female synchrony was achieved through tidal and lunar observances, utilizing these natural, universal cycles with which widespread groups of women could ‘phase-lock’ and harmonize their own blood cycles. In the Australian Aboriginal myths of the Rainbow Snake, and its associations with menstruation, water, the moon and women, there is widespread acknowledgement that this ‘cosmic serpent’ (often androgynous) originally gave women power. Knight’s key argument is that this power is the power to periodically unite in saying ‘no’ to sex, to initiate sexual-political change (the Snake symbolizes the united body of ‘flowing’ women). At the same time, it is the powers of shamanism and magic, which Knight sees as evolving as a result of the first ‘proto-cultural’ groups of humans in Africa dispersing inland, away from their coastal origins. The females, robbed of the tide as one of their main cyclic guides, evolved moon-scheduled ritual activities—and thus symbolic culture—to synchronize social, psychic and bodily rhythms.
Somewhere along the line, as the myths and practices of many surviving hunter-gatherer tribes testify, this power was appropriated by men. Knight sees male initiation ceremonies involving cutting the penis or arm (found among Australian Aborigines and other indigenous cultures), together with the existence of extreme menstrual taboos, as evidence for a male take-over of female ritual power. One male Aborigine, speaking of their all-male rituals, told C.H. Berndt that "all the Dreaming business came out of women—everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing; because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women." The surviving Snake myths, propagated by all-male initiation societies, portray the Snake as threatening to women. Part of this threat is derived from myths that describe the Snake swallowing women; Knight feels that this once symbolized the power of synchronized menstruation to unite women, together ‘in the belly of the Snake’. Male initiation societies utilizing the Snake mythology may see this devouring serpent as somewhat threatening, but still desire the womb-return, unity and rebirth of being swallowed. Much as Jonah is willingly cast into the sea to be swallowed, then vomited out by the "great fish" prepared for him by the Lord God.
Knight finds hard evidence of similar ‘Rainbow Snake’ myths across Africa and South America, all related closely to tides, rain, floods, menstruation and lunar cycles. The myths perpetuate these associations, but are often configured to make women see the Snake as a threat. There are some tribes, however, whose women still draw power from the Snake, and celebrate it in menstrual rites. Knight also interprets the myriad ‘dragon’ (i.e. mythical serpent-beast) legends as remnants of this archaic mythical conception of women’s culture-forming menstrual synchrony, and of the male take-over. Many dragon myths speak of many-headed beasts (the Hydra for instance), and this is possibly an echo of the menstrual Snake which comprised many women in unison. Of course the classic dragon tale, across the world, says that valiant men rescue maidens from its clutches, destroy it, and gain power. Given Knight’s theories, there could be no clearer mythical equivalent of a male usurpation of female power: overcoming a reptilian representation of their blood-unity and menstrual ritual potency.
Now, let’s have a look at the Holy Bible. Turn to Revelations 12:
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
And there appeared another great wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. . . . [She gives birth to a sort of second Christ, and flees into the wilderness. Michael casts the dragon out of heaven. The dragon persecutes the woman, who is given eagle wings to escape.]
And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. [Aboriginal Rainbow Snake myths are connected with great floods in Australia's past.]
Very strange to find such a twisted distortion of what may be a primal human myth of the beginning (of culture) in the ravings of a religious visionary supposedly being granted a glimpse of the end. This vision corresponds in some way to the frequent ‘male-appropriation’ myths of modern hunter-gatherers: in depicting the dragon/serpent as threatening to a woman; and in the statement that the denizens of heaven "overcame him by the blood of the Lamb" (12:11). The Lamb is Christ, and Christ is a man who bled from his arms (and, like all Jewish men, he presumably bled from his genitals, when he was circumcised as a child). Interestingly, one New Age commentator on Revelations believes that because the many-headed dragon "has several autonomous decision-making centers, [it] is therefore the very epitome of disorganization, of centrifugal or dispersive forces." (F. Aster Barnwell, Meditations on the Apocalypse) Think back to what Knight believes the original Rainbow Serpent represents, and compare.
And who was this blood-red, water-spewing, many-headed dragon? Saint John the Divine tells us that he was "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan…". A day or so after making this Rainbow Snake-Dragon-Satan link, I started reading The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove. They take a Jungian approach to the few systematic instances of menstruating women’s dreams being recorded. Apparently, some women’s dreams at this time contain strong male figures, often threatening or sinister. Shuttle & Redgrove’s idea is that menstruation can be a time of heightened sexuality and departure from conventions for women, hence its widespread repression and extreme taboo status. They see the appearance of a compelling male figure in menstrual dreams as the appearance of the animus, a Jungian word for the masculine principle in women. Talking about the repression of menstruation leading to a "negative animus", they say: "If the woman’s menstruation is despised, that is, a deep instinctual process in her is ignored or hated, then its spirit will return with all the evolutionary power of those instinctual processes that grew us and continue to energize our physical being. You could say in this way that the Christian Devil was a representation of the animus of the menstruating woman, in so far as the Christian ethic has Satanized woman and her natural powers."
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Avebury henge and surrounding monuments
I want to follow these Goddess/Serpent/Devil associations now by focusing on one specific place (which will also lead us to other areas I’m interested in): Avebury in Wiltshire, with its rich psychogeography and densely inter-related complex of Neolithic monuments.
Michael Dames has analysed the Avebury monuments, synthesizing archaeology, folklore & ethnography, to build a vision of a harmonious cycle of structures embedded in the local geography. They form a ritual landscape which reflects the cyclic narrative of the seasons and of human life. The monuments are seen to celebrate and embody the Great Goddess, conceived in the pervasive form of the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother & Crone. (Being three multiplied by itself, the number nine is frequently given a high status in Goddess-based religions. It seems no coincidence that modern Satanism has adopted this as its central number.)
The massive Avebury henge is approached from the south and west by two long, slightly winding stone avenues. Dames’ contention is that these two avenues are processional serpentine pathways by which young men and women approached the henge for marriage and consummation ceremonies. The men’s Beckhampton avenue, to the west, is largely destroyed. It seems significant, though, that the name Beckhampton derives from the Old English word meaning ‘back’. Dames relates this to the spine, and to Tantric beliefs in the raising of the Kundalini serpent energy from the base of the spine.
Much more evidence survives in relation to the partly intact West Kennet avenue, beginning at the Sanctuary (the name for the remains of a circular wooden temple at the southern foot of Waden Hill). Comparisons with contemporary Neolithic symbolism and ethnographic studies show that the Sanctuary (corresponding to the springtime Maiden) was probably a site for the initiation of young girls reaching puberty. This conjecture, along with the proposed serpentine nature of the processional avenue leading to consummation in the henge, is supported by Chris Knight’s research. Aboriginal mythology equates the Rainbow Snake with the ritual dance through which women collectively synchronize their menstrual periods (or with which men are united in blood-letting initiatory rituals). As the onset of a girl’s puberty is signalled by their first menstruation, Dames’ theories about the function of the Sanctuary and the symbolic serpentine nature of the West Kennet avenue stand on quite firm mythical ground.
At the henge, the male and female snake-avenues conjoin. Dames argues that the so-called ‘D’ feature within the southernmost of the two stone circles inside the henge is a representation of the tip of the phallic Beckhampton avenue snake entering the henge. This is ’swallowed’ by the females’ West Kennet snake, whose gaping jaws may be seen to be symbolized by the southeast and southwest quadrants of the henge, the actual stones representing its teeth. The dual sexual symbolism of the serpent—penetrator and devourer—is not lost on Dames. He speaks of the Beckhampton avenue’s "commitment to bisexuality" as it approaches ritual sexual union in the henge; we’ll return to his androgynous Avebury Goddess later.
The vast stone standing at the point where the West Kennet avenue joins the henge is commonly known as the Devil’s Chair. Also in the Avebury area we have the Devil’s Den long barrow; and there are too many caverns and Neolithic standing stones in the British Isles named after the Devil to catalogue here. The demonisation of indigenous paganism that was such an integral part of Christianity’s conquest of these islands is prolifically demonstrated in such folkloric names.
In 634 CE a Christian church was built up against the west bank of the Avebury henge. On its twelfth-century font is depicted a bishop, armed with a spiked crozier and a Bible, fending off two serpentine dragons. However, the battle waged against the powerful chthonic forces of nature glorified in the Avebury monuments wasn’t some abstract war of symbols. In the fourteenth century most of the stones in the southwest quadrant of the henge were destroyed by Christian authorities trying to eradicate the many "superstitions and questionable practices" still connected with the stones. These bastards destroyed part of our heritage, in the name of Jesus.
Christianity, especially in rural areas with a deep pagan tradition, can never entirely purge itself of the past. In the parish church of Ilkley, West Yorkshire, there is a stone carving which is usually identified as the Romano-British goddess Verbeia (above). In her hands she holds two writhing snakes, resembling the famous Minoan snake goddess statuette found in Knossos, Crete. Verbeia is said to be goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows through Ilkley, forming the familiar goddess-serpent-water associations. However, one historian of Ilkley believes the goddess is only superficially associated with the river itself, and was once associated with the brooks flowing down from springs on the famous neighbouring moorlands. On these moors are numerous prehistoric rock carvings, stone circles, and traces of human settlement dating back to 7000 BCE; Verbeia is probably a survival of more ancient myths in the area. The historian notes the double snake symbol’s connection with healing (look at the British Medical Association’s symbol), and the long-standing reputation of the moor’s waters for healing properties, which survived into Victorian times, when a renowned healing spa was set up near the edge of the moor.
In Dames’ ritual landscape cycle we move from the henge southwards to the awe-inspiring Silbury Hill, a flat-topped conical mound of earth which stands as the largest man-made Neolithic structure in Europe. Known to have been built progressively over many years, added to each August (harvest time), it seems likely that this was the Neolithics’ vision of the pregnant Earth Goddess made flesh. Natural breast- and belly-like hills and mounds were commonly worshipped in many archaic cultures, but the emergence of agriculture signified the rising importance in human participation in nature. Silbury Hill—the Mother Goddess labouring to give birth to the year’s crops—is a monumental testament to a culture whose technology still harmonized with nature, working mythically and practically at precisely the same time.
Excavations have revealed that at the core of Silbury lies a circular wattle fence and stacked layers of turf forming an inner mound. The wattle fence has exactly the same diameter as the Sanctuary, and most projected reconstructions of the wooden temple at the Sanctuary reveal it to be identical in size and form to the inner Silbury mound. Silbury, then, is a fractal reflection of the Sanctuary, which is replicated within and then magnified eight times in the total mass of the Silbury mound. The springtime Maiden has matured into the life-giving Mother of the harvest. A careful study of Dames’ investigations into the harmonic fractal resonances within the Avebury complex (all monuments being based around natural units of measurement taken from the springs feeding into the revered River Kennet) is capable of pushing the rational mind beyond itself into a deep, awe-full respect for the powerful visionary precision of this ‘primitive’ culture.
Of course, being the most provocatively sensuous and voluptuous of all the Avebury monuments (go there!), Silbury failed to escape the demonisation of Christian folklore. There is a legend that the Devil was once on his way to attack Marlborough (just east of Avebury) by dumping an apron, or spade full of dirt on the town. The bishop of Marlborough apparently stopped him at the last minute; the Devil dropped his load, and Silbury Hill was formed.
The last monument in the cycle, before it completes a total gyration and feeds back into itself at the Sanctuary, is the West Kennet long barrow. It is located just southeast from Silbury and almost due east from the Sanctuary. This multiple burial chamber is the Goddess in winter: the Crone, the death-dealing Dark Goddess found (and so often repressed) in many religions. The barrow is constructed—like other European Neolithic burial chambers—to render yet another form of the Goddess’ body. You go in through her stone vulva, and enter a small corridor with five small adjoining womb-tomb chambers.
Despite its belief that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will automatically transport his followers to an eternal realm of happiness, love & old friends on dying, Christianity is terrified of death. Most systems of belief promoting a simplistic, personal and linear form of immortality are—they deny death. "Hell, Luther said, is not a place, but is the experience of death, and Luther’s devil is ultimately personified death." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death) Again we see that Christianity has ruptured, repressed & demonised the cyclic processes of nature. To cultures harmonized with the seasonal rounds, death precedes life just as death follows life. The Avebury cycle, where each distinct monument participates in the unified ritual landscape, suggests a culture where the principle of division has not yet been separated from the principle of unity; death is part of life.
The barrow was built around 3250 BCE, and remained open until around 2600 BCE, when a huge stone forecourt was erected, and the chambers were packed with a mass of chalk rubble, organic material, and bits of bone and pottery (resembling the chalk, soil and vegetable layering found in the core of Silbury, whose foundations are contemporary to the sealing of the barrow). During its ‘active’ time, the barrow was almost certainly used for ritual as well as burial purposes. Dames points out that "the belief that the living can find meaning and reality within putrefying chaos was once widespread", and rightly notes the possible parallels with Tantric practices.
The loving Goddess of Creation has another face. As she brings man into time and his world, she also removes him from it. So she is his destroyer as well. No-one can be a successful Tantrika unless he has faced up to this reality, and assimilated it into his image of the nature of the Goddess. There are many rituals, some of them sexual, carried out among the corpses in real (or symbolic) cremation-grounds, which bring this necessity forcibly home to the practising Tantrika. There, in the red light of funeral pyres, as jackals and crows scatter and crunch the bones, he confronts the dissolution of all he holds dear in life.
Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy
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"Although there is very little information concerning the megalithic monuments of the West, Hindu texts contain the entire ritual for setting them up, and for the orientation of sanctuaries, etc. All studies on European prehistoric religions should thus be based on the Indian documents available." (Alain Daniélou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy)
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We can never know the exact nature of the rites enacted in the West Kennet long barrow, but many of skulls and thigh bones from the dead buried there were found to be absent. The obvious explanation for this is that they were used in Neolithic rituals, probably at the nearby causewayed camp on Windmill Hill, northwest from the henge, where many individual skulls were found. Dames notes that "the widespread use of skull and femur in fertility rites was maintained down to classical times, when the rotting flesh fell off to reveal the clean tools of a new sexuality, with skull acting as female container, encompassing the thigh bone-phallus." I’m also reminded of the use of skulls and thigh bones in various ‘left-hand path’ (i.e. frowned upon) cultic practices in Tibet. It’s clear that any study of Neolithic Goddess-orientated cultures will fruitfully profit from comparisons with non-mainstream Asian religious beliefs.
The Snake Goddess
A few years ago, shortly after I had become interested in paganism, but well before I began any of the above research, I had a very bizarre dream. I dreamt I was an actor in the process of making a film whose director was a very sinister and shadowy figure. There was an unnerving atmosphere on the set, and I kept finding small, partially hidden pentagrams and other similar symbols—sewn into the undersides of cushions and so on. I became convinced that the script and set were devised so that the specific motions and gestures the unwitting cast made during filming would have the equivalent effect of a ritual to evoke the Devil. In the half-dream hypnopompic state before fully waking up, I had the distinct sensation of physical pressure around my anus. Dream logic convinced me that this was in fact Satan. I was vaguely disturbed during the following day, but the dream quickly faded into the past.
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In The Wise Wound, Shuttle & Redgrove investigate the possibility that menstrual cycles have the potential to be affected by lunar cycles in that the pineal gland, which may also affect sexual development, can sense subliminal changes in light. Noting its traditional association with the ‘third eye’ of inner visions, they speculate that "Just as our visible eyes obtain visual information from the outer world, so does our invisible third eye, the pineal, convert into visual images experiences from within the body. This argument is supported by painstaking evidence."
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Earlier this year, I was writing something about the idea that dreams and vision states are in fact the perceptual flip-side to interior bodily sensations. The two realms can be seen as two different ‘channels of perception’ conveying information about the interior processes of the human organism, from visceral energy streams to the sub-molecular goings-on in the brain. Going to sleep one night, having just finished the section on this particular subject, I had a hypnagogic experience that seemed to confirm my theory, and shed revealing light on the dream of the Devil a couple of years before.
I was in a pretty low state, and half-heartedly (pathetically actually) called on the Earth Goddess to visit me in my dreams that night. Soon after, I found myself getting up from the bed and walking across my room. I was suddenly overpowered by incredibly intense body sensations, and felt my mind ‘blacking out’ as if I was fainting. I instinctively ‘knew’ that this was the power of the Goddess overtaking me, and tried hard to surrender to it as I fell down (‘trying hard’ in these situations is a classic mistake!). I found myself lying on the floor, a huge lump obscuring my vision in my right eye. I heard the woman who lives across the hall from me trying to get in. My fall must have been loud, I thought. I took the lump on the right side of my face to be a result of the fall, and desperately tried to work out how I could get up to open the door and let the woman in. I couldn’t move, and feared that I’d really injured myself. At the same time I became aware of rattling noises in my kitchen. There was a distinctly female presence in there. Then I snapped out of it—I had been half-dreaming. I was still in my bed, and the ‘lump’ was a bit of the duvet against my face. I instantly connected the two instances of female presence, one seemingly trying to help me, with my vague plea to the Goddess.
Suddenly, immense surges of energy began to flow around my body, intense and strangely familiar streamings that pushed me into a delicious and frighteningly precarious balance between waking and dreaming. Then I felt pressure around my anus… and what followed can only really be described as being fucked by the, or at least a Goddess. A stupendous thrust of energy rushed up me, and I was immediately propelled into a highly vivid and intense lucid dream. I was flying high above a scintillatingly real landscape, a deep blue summer sky above me, a daytime sky yet dotted with stars. Part of the subsequent dream involved fishing a demonic-looking pike out of a lake—this seemed to be the culmination of a series of intense dreams I had recently had about seeing fish swimming underwater. The pike, once on land, turned into a cute brown seal.
I awoke from the dream after escaping from a very nasty situation by flying straight up through the building I was in, bursting through each floor successively and waking with a jolt on blasting out the top. It didn’t take much meditating on all the sensations and symbols to realize I had almost certainly just experienced a bizarre manifestation of the Kundalini serpent energy.
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Tantrism holds that the deities presiding over the base chakra are Brahman and Dakini—who is the red, menstruating goddess.
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The Kundalini serpent is envisioned in traditional Tantric yoga as being a coiled-up (spiral) reservoir of normally untapped psychosomatic energy, stored in the Muladhara, or base chakra. The base chakra is located in the perineum, just in front of the anus. Kundalini is a goddess at the same time as being a spiral snake energy. Kundalini Shakti is the female principle to Shiva’s male principle in Tantra’s erotic cosmology. The goal of Tantric practice is to awaken the dormant snake Goddess through various yogic methods, causing her to surge up the body and ecstatically unite with Shiva at the highest chakra. This rising can be seen clearly at either end of my dream (and body)—both in the energy thrust up me from my perineum just before sleeping, and in the climactic flight through the floors of a building, eventually out of the top, into waking consciousness.
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The !Kung, a southern African tribe, describe their entry into trance (which they call !kia) in a way that strongly reflects Kundalini experiences. They believe that a primal supernatural potency, n/um, resides in the pit of the stomach or the base of the spine. Frenetic dancing causes the n/um to ‘boil’, and it ascends the body until it peaks in or near the skull?inducing full !kia, and initiating shamanic soul-flight. It is interesting that the social and ritual life of the !Kung has retained one of the most vivid emphases on menstrual puberty rites known. Also, they believe that the power of n/um is most efficiently transferred via the sense of smell. In Tantra, the Muladhara chakra is associated with this sense.
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Many insights (and a tremendous feeling of well-being) flooded through as a result of my Kundalini dream. Firstly, there was the gnostic confirmation of my theories about Satan being (for me at least) a demonised remnant of a primal serpentine Goddess. My dream of a few years ago was undoubtedly the same Kundalini phenomenon, distorted by the Christian cosmology virus, and undeveloped. It seemed to be a ‘confirmation’, rather than being an experience induced by my research, because the Kundalini dream reflected so precisely back onto a dream I had long before any of my research began. And at the time of the second dream, although I had been looking into Goddess myths, I had not really looked at Kundalini. The fish symbolism seemed to flesh out my feeling that the Kundalini phenomenon is the prime model for looking at this experience. In Indian mythology, the fish symbolizes Kundalini’s most primitive form. Interestingly, early Christians represented Jesus (eternal opponent of the serpent Satan) with a fish symbol. Jesus opposes fish to serpents in Matthew 7:10—perhaps yet another example of divisive Christian mythologizing.
Kundalini has been connected by Gene Kieffer (a president of the Kundalini Research Institute in New York) to the UFO contact experience, after personal psychic activity that involved both phenomena. This connection and the sensations I experienced of pressure around the anus (or nearby perineum) inevitably brought to mind the infamous reports from supposed UFO ‘abductees’, who believe themselves to have been improperly probed up the arse by bug-eyed scientists from other planets. Are we looking here at spontaneous Kundalini vision states, either distorted through confusion or overlaid with a space-age clinical myth-structure?
My current belief that visions and the body’s energy processes are complementary has given me a rough rule of thumb in understanding mythology: all the most resonant and meaningful myths will reflect some aspect of biology and evolution. As Shuttle and Redgrove say in The Wise Wound, "mythology and physiology are only two sides of the same thing, which is alive." Of course, evolutionary theory and the physical sciences can be seen as yet another myth-structure; and seen in this way they should, if they are to relate to the general human experience of life, somehow echo the more primeval and recurrent mythologies and archetypes of our cultural ancestry. The idea that the Kundalini serpent, which ascends the spinal column, is the psychosomatic evolutionary force in the human body, can be seen to relate to the fact that we are vertebrates. Our common evolutionary inheritance, along with all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes, is that we have a backbone. We have all physically relived the evolutionary journey of bodily mutation as we gestated in our mother’s wombs. Human embryos, in their earliest stages of development, are successively indistinguishable from fish, reptile, bird and other mammal embryos—at one stage, recognizable gills emerge, and then atrophy.
Our individual lives begin in the amniotic ocean of the womb. Organic life on Earth began in the oceans. And humanity itself may have emerged from a partial return to the ocean. Many anthropologists believe that humans evolved on the shores of east Africa, as hominid apes returned to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This is seen to account for our hairless bodies, the layer of buoyant fat beneath our skin, and possibly our upright posture (a distinct advantage if you’re trying to keep breathing whilst wading through deep waters).
It seems quite fitting that Indian mythology should symbolize evolutionary power through the snake, the skeleton of which is basically a backbone, and the fish, the original spine, which still inhabits life’s womb.
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"In the human body, the strait gate leading to the earth-centre, or snake goddess, is the anus." (Alain Daniélou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy)
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Any form of anal stimulation contains the possibility of ecstatic spiritual experience. Phil Hine has pointed out that Ramakrishna experienced Samadhi whilst having a dump on more than one occasion, and this is interesting in relation to Martin Luther’s so-called Thurmerlebnis ("experience in the tower"), a revelation about faith that was to inaugurate Protestant theology. The ‘tower’ was where the toilet was located in Luther’s Wittenburg monastery. "This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower." (Luther) In his analysis of Protestantism in Life Against Death, Norman Brown hones in on the centrality of the Devil to Luther’s theology, and on the ‘anality’ (a Freudian term needing no explanation, for once) of the Devil. He documents Luther’s numerous associations of the Devil with ‘filth’, ‘blackness’ and foul odours, and notes his methods of counter-attack to the Devil’s assaults—at one revealing point he threatens to "throw him into my anus, where he belongs." These scraps of information, the traditional location of the base chakra, and my intuition that Satan may be related back through history to a primeval serpent goddess, seem to be no coincidence.
Many traditions, from male Aboriginal initiation ceremonies to Aleister Crowley’s magick, recognize the power of sodomy to elicit altered states of consciousness, but this is mostly ignored in our own culture due to the extreme taboo associated with anal eroticism (and with altered states themselves). This taboo is clear in homophobia, but is equally present in heterosexuality. Often, sodomy is not merely tabooed, but actually illegal—such is the continuing power of old Judeo-Christian restrictions over modern secular prohibitions. Perhaps (as far as our own culture is concerned) the strength of the taboo against sodomy, and not necessarily the physical act in itself, accounts for its potential to induce powerful spiritual experiences. Spirituality is, at heart, a breakthrough into a wider realm of consciousness, and is thus frequently associated (as in Tantra, Chaos Magick and Satanism) with breaking the conventions and laws that inevitably shape consciousness. The danger here, as ever, is that of becoming obsessed with the breaking of a single restriction. Once a restriction is overcome, new and different restrictions may fall into place. For instance, a Satanist who has endeavoured to break the traditional Christian taboo against rational self-interest and ego-gratification may find him or herself liberated in many ways. Eventually, though, this process of liberation may restrict that person from expressing spontaneous selflessness. The path of liberation has no end.
Sodomy, then, may well be a powerful step on the path of spiritual and sexual liberation, but rigid correlations and associations may eventually become obstacles. Regarding the association of the base chakra with the anus, Phil Hine has cautioned against the idea that chakras, or energy centres, have literal physical locations: "I’m working on a body-alchemy centred approach to the chakras at the moment, and the muladhra, for me, relates to one’s physical sensation of the here & now. A great deal is made of the muladhra being the ’seat’ of Kundalini-shakti—but again, too many people have interpreted Kundalini stuff in terms of getting away from the body, towards some kind of rarified ’spiritual’ state. My own feeling is that the Tantric perspective is less about ‘awakening kundalini’ as though it were something static, and more about ‘becoming aware’ of kundalini’s living presence in, and around us. This necessitates, of course, a change in how we perceive ourselves, and the world we are enmeshed in." (personal correspondence) Hine’s first ‘Kundalini’ experience involved an influx of energy coming down his body. This ‘contradiction’ of the traditional experience can also be seen in Reichian therapy. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of bodily ‘armour’ (rigidified musculature, seen to be arranged in sections like the head, throat, chest, etc.) corresponds well with the chakra system. But in opposition to the yogic assertion that one must work from the bottom up when opening the chakras, Reich advised therapists to work from the top down in undoing armour.
So, anal eroticism is merely one of many gateways to sexual and spiritual ecstasy. And while individual proclivities and specific cultural circumstances channel erotic bodily energy through particular pathways, any broad overview must take into account a holistic view of the body. The many ‘maps’ of the body, from the chakra system to Freud’s anal, oral and genital organizations of sexual energy, are all ultimately limited. The least limited map of bodily energy, the map under which all others may be subsumed, is that described by Freud as ‘polymorphous perversity’ and by mystics as ‘oceanic consciousness’. It is the chaotic, spontaneously self-organizing state a baby experiences before the narrower maps of its culture impose themselves on its body—and which anyone may experience in ecstatic release from cultural boundaries.
In Love’s Body, Norman Brown has pointed out that the human body, in its deepest levels, is not as linear and static as our culture’s vision of it suggests. There is a profound interconnectedness and interpenetration at work. The main component of our linear vision of the body is the divided polarity of the head and the groin, the brain and the genitals. But… "The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. [Richard] Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which the head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head." An aspect of this ancient model can be seen to derive from agricultural fertility symbolism. In corn, the seed is literally in the head of the plant.
Further, echoing our discussion of Kundalini, Brown remarks: "The classic psychoanalytical equation, head = genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The way up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital. The shape of the physical body is a mystery, the inner dynamical shape, the real centers of energy and their interrelation…" The ‘genital organization’ of sexuality, where the genitals are the prime channel for sexual energy, is seen by both Freud and Reich as the ‘healthy’, ‘normal’ mode of eroticism in humans. Neither could conceive of a culture that could withstand the dissolution of this pattern and support groups of polymorphous humans, people for whom sexuality pervades their entire body, and thus their whole lives. Evidently we’re still a long way off from such a culture, but it seems important to recognize that anything less is a limitation of our potential for generating, using and exchanging energies. Brown’s refutation of purely genital sexuality applies equally to all forms of restricted eroticism or spirituality:
Erect is the shape of the genitally organized body; the body crucified, the body dead or asleep; the stiff. The shape of the body awake, the shape of the resurrected body, is not vertical but perverse and polymorphous; not a straight line but a circle; in which the Sanctuary is in the Circumference, and every Minute Particular is Holy…
The Androgyne
Most striking, perhaps, is the sexual ambiguity of the goddess in my dream. She was definitely a feminine presence, yet the rising snake-energy nature of her conjunction with my body put her in the cock-bearing masculine role. This perception was given a bit of consensus validation when I visited a friend in Brighton, who I hadn’t related my dream experience to. He was skimming through another piece I wrote relating to the World Tree being seen as the spine up which the Kundalini serpent rises. Out of the blue, he said, "Oh yeah! I had a Kundalini thing once when I was tripping, lying on the ground at a festival. It was like being fucked by Mother Earth." (I had related the Kundalini goddess to the Earth goddess myself—I had an strange experience of energy rushing up into me from the ground at a Dreadzone gig months before my dream. Also, the base chakra, where the Kundalini serpent is traditionally seen to be coiled and dormant, is connected in the chakra system to the earth element.) On the same journey, I visited a friend who I did tell my dream to. He quickly related it to an experience he had had while on mushrooms next to a vast boulder in the place where the sarsens (local sandstones) used to build the Avebury henge were taken from. He experienced it as a bolt of energy penetrating him from below, and nicely called it "an amphetamine pessary up the psychic jaxxee."
The Goddess is an hermaphrodite.
In Neolithic thought, maleness was an aspect of the universal being, or vessel, which was regarded as female. How could it be otherwise, if she truly encompassed everything? An architectural expression of this view is often found in Indian temples, where the overall form displays the feminine creative shape, based on the womb cell which contains the Lingam or male element.
Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle
On Windmill Hill near Avebury, the oldest structure to be found is a cluster of 32 pits dug around 3700 BCE. Dames points out that this pit grouping can be seen to form the outline of a goddess figure, squatting with upturned arms in the traditional stylization of a woman in labour. The pit corresponding to the vulva is "the largest and most fully furnished of all the pits", containing pottery, worked flint flakes, hammerstones, and sarsen balls similar to others found beneath Silbury. However, if one does take the formation to be a squatting goddess, two of the central pits clearly form a penis shape. A small chalk slab, known as the Windmill Hill amulet, found in an adjacent ditch, bears a design similar to the pit goddess, and also displays lines apparently describing a phallus. Hermaphroditic motifs can be seen in two other carved chalk figurines found on the hill, and Dames also notes an androgynous Neolithic figurine found in Somerset and a Bronze Age goddess figure with a beard which was found in Denmark.
The heretical Knights Templar reputedly worshipped a ‘demon’ named Baphomet, most famously depicted by Eliphas Lévi as a goat-headed half-human deity, clearly male and yet breasted—with two intertwining snakes rising from his lap (an important image in Tantra). Baphomet was naturally taken by the Church to be Satan. The Templars were accused of Devil worship and sodomy, and in the early fourteenth century King Philip IV of France had 54 of them arrested, tortured and killed on heresy charges. Satan himself sometimes has shades of androgyny. Phil Hine has informed me that Robertson Davies, in his collection of short stories High Spirits, holds Satan to be an hermaphrodite. And the figure of the Devil in a seventeenth century drawing called Witchcraft (left), by Claude-Françoise Menestrier, clearly has big dangling breasts.
Kucumatz is equivalent to the Mayan resurrection god Kuculcan and the Aztec culture-hero, moon-god and creator of humanity, Queztalcoatl (both these names mean ‘feathered serpent’). Hunbatz Men, a modern Mayan daykeeper and ceremonial leader, has attempted to reconstruct the initiatory sciences of the ancient Maya in his book Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion. In analysing etymology and surviving Mayan temples, he concludes that the Mayan religion was based around a system of seven energy centres, very similar to the Hindu chakras. In both systems, the realization of a divine serpent-power is the goal. In Tantra, it is Kundalini. In Mayan tradition, the serpent is Kuculcan, but there is also the Mayan word k?ultanlilni—built up from k’u (’sacred’), k’ul (‘coccyx’, the base of the spine), tan (‘place’), lil (‘vibration’), and ni (‘nose’). This amalgamated word embodies the Mayan equivalent of a yogic tradition. Men also discusses a seven-headed serpent form carved on a monolith in Aparicio, Veracruz, Mexico (below), and notes that the Buddha was bitten by a seven-headed serpent while in the river of initiation. "This serpent is called chapat in India. Curiously, the people of the Yucatan, Mexico have the same word and it, too, refers to the seven-headed serpent, just as in India."
Dionysus, familiar to us here as precursor of the Jesus/Satan split and son of the Earth, was raised by women, often jeered at for his effeminate appearance, and referred to by a king in a text by Aeschylus as "man-woman". Alain Daniélou presents copious documentation, in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy, that Dionysus is almost precisely equivalent to the Indian god Shiva—from whom we may also derive another traditional aspect of Satan, the trident, which is closely associated with Shiva. One of Shiva’s principal aspects is the Ardhanarâshvara, the hermaphrodite. "The Prime Cause may be conceived as masculine or feminine, as a god or a goddess, but in both cases it is an androgynous or transexual being."
In Siberian shamanism, as in many shamanic traditions, ritual bisexuality is held to be a sign of sacred power, of dealings with other worlds. Daniélou also notes that the Etruscan prophetess wore a phallus attached to her girdle. Kucumatz (inset), the supreme god of the Quiché Indians, is androgynous, both father and mother of all creation. Jewish mysticism elaborates on the creation myth of Genesis in the idea of the primordial androgynous being, Adam Kadmon, a perfect reflection of the divine (see Genesis 1:27—"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."). S/He is split into Adam and Eve to form humans.
Androgynous figures in mythology represent a state of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity that transcends the apparent opposition of sexes and genders. They are vivid, bodily images of a recurrent spiritual impulse to unite, but not leave behind the ecstatic interplay of opposites—without which unity would be a bland mess, with no contrasts, dynamism or fun. This impulse can be seen more abstractly in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, and the coincidentia oppositorum, or union of opposites, in medieval alchemy. Referring to androgynous motifs in mythology, Mircea Éliade says that this "nostalgia for primordial completeness . . . is found almost everywhere in the archaic world."
So what does this mean for us? A recognition that, potentially at least, gender is less a barrier than a permeable membrane (to paraphrase Carol J. Clover in Men, Women & Chainsaws), and that this membrane may be a gateway to magickal consciousness. Whatever the sexual orientation involved, truly ecstatic sex (ritualized or not) can lead to a psychic intertwining and transmutation of sexual identities. Even in (or maybe especially in) the exploration of the extremities of sexual difference, this potential may emerge. As Chris Hyatt says, opposites taken to their extremes become one. Or—as in the yin-yang symbol, where at the extreme of dark yin we find light yang emerging, and vice versa—the opposites become each other.
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"If no attempt is made to induce the orgasm by bodily motion, the interpenetration of the sexual centres becomes a channel of the most vivid psychic interchange. While neither partner is working to make anything happen, both surrender themselves completely to whatever the process itself may feel like doing. The sense of identity with the other becomes peculiarly intense, though it is rather as if a new identity were formed between them with a life of its own." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman)
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I once went to a talk by two practising process-oriented psychotherapists (therapy based on the work of Arnold Mindell), and the woman there responded to a question about Freud by deriding his ‘oppressive’ theory of ‘penis-envy’, the idea that women are all screwed up because they haven’t got that all-important cock. Later in the talk she got round to talking about sexual experimentation, and expressed tingling excitement about the possibilities raised by strap-on dildos. Now, I think Freud was pretty ridiculous in a lot of his thinking—but not always because he was necessarily wrong, just distorted and one-sided. The pendulum’s swung right across to the other side in many feminist circles, where ‘penis-envy’ is refuted because it’s ‘oppressive’, and then men’s ‘womb-envy’ or ‘menstrual-envy’ is given as an explanation for why men are all screwed up. Hang on! Learn from the androgyne. Maybe both these ‘envies’ exist. And maybe we can ditch that word ‘envy’, and all its associations with eternal frustration. Both Freud and the fundamentalist feminists base their theories on the supposedly unchangeable biological foundation of our sex. But these immutable biological ‘envy’ theories just seem to me to be signs of a lack of imagination. Change ‘envy’ to ‘desire’ and cross-dressing or role-playing may be sufficient to transcend biology, for a time, with enough imaginative energy. Strap-on dildos for women and arses in men need a little less imagination. Still further, there are the presently available surgical techniques of transexualism. And if the permanence of this step scares you off, perhaps soon the intelligent and creative application of new technologies, such as virtual reality or nanotech biomechanics, could offer us unlimited exploration of our inherent sexual plasticity and mutability.
Flesh
It is evident that certain rites and practices of ancient Shivaism or Dionysism, such as human sacrifices, could not be contemplated nowadays. Perhaps I should have avoided mentioning them, as they could easily be used as a pretext for rejecting the whole of Shivaite concepts, but, in my opinion, it was necessary to do so because they reflect tendencies of the human being and aspects of the nature of the world, which it would be imprudent to ignore. They form part of our collective unconscious and risk being manifested in perverse ways if we are afraid to face up to them.
Alain Daniélou, The Gods of Love and Ecstasy
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This myth is cleverly played upon in the early seventies horror film The Wicker Man, which on the surface seems to be a standard cash-in on these lingering suspicions about paganism. However, the way the Christian copper (who is eventually burnt) is lured into the trap is revealing. It’s only because he’s so repressed and suspicious of pagans that he falls for the bait. He comes to the island and is convinced that a ‘missing’ girl is going to be sacrificed—what else would these phallus-worshipping heathens who cavort naked around bonfires be up to? All the ‘evidence’ turns out to be carefully contrived to play upon his rampant Christian suspicions: the girl is part of the plot, he is trapped by his own projected fears, and sacrificed in a ritual for crop success. If this was real life, of course, all the islanders should be up on conspiracy to murder. As the piece of art that it is, the story works perfectly as a delicious example of poetic justice.
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Going right back to where we started, let’s recall that the primary manifestation of the modern Church’s concern with the Devil is its fantasy of rampaging Satanists or pagans sacrificing animals and children to the Dark Lord. Modern human sacrifice is largely a myth; however, I see no reason for doubting that animal sacrifices occur, though not necessarily just by ‘Satanists’ (note Anton LaVey’s 10th Satanic Rule: "Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food."). Almost all religions have a deep, intrinsic history of animal sacrifice, and some still practice it. The Massai of Kenya and Tanzania, though nominally Christian, continue to practice blood sacrifice. So do followers of Santeria, a combination of African religion and Christian symbolism, in the States. They regularly ignore U.S. laws (which prohibit the killing of animals except in licensed butcheries and for animal experimentation) in order to practice their religion. The chief contemporary practitioners of ritual sacrifice seem to be Christians themselves, who slaughter and eat tens of millions of turkeys every year as part of their celebrations of the birth of their god.
Human sacrifice also has a long history. It seems to be the main element of Neolithic Goddess cultures that most modern popularisers of Goddess religions have neglected to deal with. Joseph Campbell has said that "human sacrifice is everywhere characteristic of the worship of the Goddess in the Neolithic sphere"; Avebury is no exception. Dames details many instances of human sacrifice in Neolithic Avebury: a prehistoric urn full of human bones was found in the southern inner stone circle of the henge; an adolescent male was found in the foetal position, with all bones broken, within the Sanctuary; other young men have been found buried along the West Kennet avenue. One was found with a thigh-bone jammed into his jaw—sexual/fertility symbolism which involves these sacrifices in one of the primary concerns of the Avebury monuments, the success of the crops. Dames speculates that the sacrificial victims could have actually been honoured to play this part: "For the victims, the opportunity to end their lives in physical incorporation with the Great Serpent [the West Kennet avenue] may have been regarded as an awesome privilege, an ultimate union with the godhead—son and parent united in divinity." The overwhelming holism of the surviving monuments seems to suggest that life for these people may well have been so unified, and death so deeply intertwined with life in their psyches, that young men could have felt their death to be a privilege, an opportunity to spill their life-blood into the ground and magically give life to the crops and the community—as well as return to the womb of the Earth-Mother.1
The idea of sacrifice, bloody or not, is at the heart of human religious life. Its basis is surely the food chain—the interdependence of all life on all other life, the fact that nothing lives save by another’s death. Alain Daniélou has called blood sacrifice "the sacralization of the alimentary function", that is, the ritualisation of killing and eating. "The whole universe is really only food and eater." (Brihat Aranyaka Upanishad) "The world as sacrifice; this world as food; to be is to be eaten." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body) If the world is conceived of as one divine body, the process of life is divine autophagy—self-eating. It seems that all religious sacrifices may be derived from the recognition of this fact. Most practices are distorted to a greater or lesser degree, but the original function of sacrifice was probably part of the human urge to intensify the processes of nature. Vegetarianism and veganism do not negate the fact that life thrives on death—only an unmagickal, unholistic view of life would hold that plants are not living creatures like the rest of us. And while modern technology makes vegetarianism viable for us all (and meat-eating cruel, relying as it does on modern techniques of slaughter), the symbolism of sacrifice and blood are rooted in the consumption of animal flesh.
What do we actually mean by ’sacrifice’? The dictionary definition is "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else more important or worthy." Alan Watts says that it is an act which makes something holy (sacer-facere), arguing that "sacrifice is only accidentally associated with the cessation, death or mutilation of the offering because it was once supposed that, say, burning bulls on an altar was the only way of transporting them to heaven." (Nature, Man & Woman) This idea is used to stress that ’sacrificing’ one’s sexuality to God does not mean chastity, because if you’re not fucking, there’s nothing there to ’sacrifice’, or ‘make holy’.
These two definitions, ‘giving up’ and ‘making holy’, seem to be at odds—you can’t make your cake holy and eat it—until we look at Shivaite (Shiva-worshipping) practices that forbid anyone to eat any flesh that is not the result of a ritual sacrifice. "One should not eat the flesh of living beings without killing them oneself, i.e., taking a conscious part in their slaughter and making the gods a party to it, since the world which they have created and uphold is itself a perpetual sacrifice." (Daniélou) In a system where "the gods must be offered the first-fruits of the harvest, the first mouthful of all nourishment", this practice makes an offering—gives something up—as well as making the act ‘holy’. In killing for food in the name of Shiva, the sacrifice forms a ritual intensification of nature, of divine autophagy. As in Dionysian rites, the animal is seen as a manifestation of the god, with whom the worshipper communes through the act of eating. You are what you eat. The pagan origins of the Christian communion should be plain. "Eating is the form of redemption. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (Brown)
The practice of Shivaites, of only eating what you yourself ritually kill, seems diametrically opposed to the systems of hunting and eating taboos anthropologists have discovered among hunter-gatherers. Chris Knight postulates a primitive ‘own-kill’ rule: "Culture starts not only with the incest taboo, but also with its economic counterpart in the form of a rule prohibiting hunters from eating their own kills." One’s ‘own blood’, in both senses of blood lineage and totem animal blood, is forbidden. This ‘rule’, he argues, is demonstrated by the fact that their exist so many methods of getting around it. Rules are there to be broken; their boundaries, and thus the rules themselves, are defined by how they are circumscribed. The ways of getting around this rule can be seen in its application only to a man’s ‘first kill’; in tribes where you can eat your own kill provided you apologize to the animal’s spirit; and in customs where you symbolically offer your kill to someone else first, whether it’s another person or a god. Knight sees the latter as the basis of most ’sacrifice’.
His reason for postulating this ‘rule’ is that his model of the origins of human culture sees the first proto-human apes involved in an evolving system of menstrual, sexual, hunting and economic taboos. We looked earlier at how Knight envisions culture as emerging from women synchronizing their menstrual periods. Tied up to this is the idea that the time of menstruation, the dark moon, would be immediately followed by hunting trips, as the moon waxed. Because proto-human females were more burdened by their offspring (human infants take a lot longer to mature), they needed to secure a sure supply of food for themselves and their young. In short, they needed to make damn sure the males didn’t go off hunting, scoff the lot while they’re away, and only come back with scraps (as often happens in groups of apes). Knight believes that part of the women’s menstrual ’sex-strike’ (against procreative, ‘domestic’ sex at least) involved a growing system of associations between menstrual blood and the blood of game animals. The taboo against ‘domestic’ sex during menstruation would be psychically linked to a taboo against eating raw, bloody flesh. In Knight’s model, the women control the fire hearth, and thus it is only through presenting their kills to the women that the men can have cooked flesh, free of the tabooed blood. This way, food for the women and children is assured. Survivals of this taboo system are found in most contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. To take one example, hunters of the Urubu tribe in the Amazonian basin may not bring deer into the village. The hunter deposits his kill at the edge of the clearing, and sends a woman to get it. The Urubu believe that "a hunter who brought his own game into the village would be punished with a terrible fever and become kaù, crazy." Californian Indians even have a special verb, pi’xwaq, which means "to get sick from eating one’s own killing".
Knight’s model is interesting in that so many ecstatic nature-based religious cults directly contravene these postulated ‘primeval taboos’. "Ancient Shivaite or Dionysiac ritual does not allow the cooking of the flesh of the animal victim, which had to be captured after a chase, torn apart and eaten raw." (Daniélou) If prohibitions against eating raw meat form part of the basis of human culture, these later ritual practices may be seen as counter-cultural forces. They evolved during times when human life was beginning to be urbanized, and ‘culture’ was becoming something very alienated from nature. Shivaism and Dionysism all stand against conventional civilization, and aim to ecstatically commune with the natural forces and spirits of the land.
Humans irrevocably evolved into cultural beings in eastern Africa long ago. Some development beyond animal existence was obviously necessary for ‘culture’ to exist at all; thus the raw/cooked, nature/culture, animal/human oppositions. But when the rural/urban opposition arose, as the great cities of Europe, the Middle East and Asia formed, something was slowly lost. Evolution was turned back on itself as human culture, a profound outgrowth of nature, began to isolate and alienate itself from its source. "The Dionysiac rite takes its followers back to a primitive stage, which is the antithesis of the city cults in which the victim is eaten cooked. Here we find a very ancient contrast between the two concepts of food and its associated rites. When Dionysus is himself the victim of the Titans who put him to death and boil and roast him, his being cooked implies that Dionysus, as the god of Nature, is the victim of the gods of the city." (Daniélou)
The menstrual blood and animal blood connection also reveals the second source of sacrificial blood symbolism: menses, the blood which women shed every month as part of their bodily fertility cycles. This may be the original ‘human sacrifice’, in that menstruating women ‘give up’ their womb-lining and their unfertilised egg.
It is possible that shamanistic practises of possession by articulate and helpful spirits originally came from the upsurge of energies at the period. There are indications that these spirits were sometimes seen not only as animals, but as the spirits of unborn children. That is, the blood of the period would come instead of the pregnancy, and the blood spoke with the spirit of the unconceived child. A distressing development of this would be in the rumoured cults where children were aborted for magical purposes: there would be no need for this in a menstrual cult where the natural energies were listened to by women aware of their existence.
Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound
Throughout history, many diverse groups have been accused of child murder or ritual abortion: Dionysian cults, medieval witches, early Christians, Jews in Nazi Germany, Satanists (and non-Satanic pagans) in the modern West. The widespread repression of menstrual power seems to be a good explanation for the projected fantasies that such accusations usually are.
Throughout Aboriginal Australia, there is no other way to arouse the Rainbow Snake than by bleeding, whether this is menstrual blood or the blood of men who cut themselves. The Snake is summoned by and attracted to blood. Perhaps this archaic myth-logic is the origin of the reasoning behind the modern occult theory of blood. Talking of larvæ, or elemental spirits, Eliphas Lévi, a nineteenth century French occultist, says that "such larvæ have an aërial body formed from the vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood ["hence come the histories of vampires", he says later] and in the older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices." In connection with this, he notes that "according to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms." (Note that Paracelsus includes semen along with menses—both are in some sense ‘unborn children’, and both are highly valued in most sex-magickal traditions.) Blood is seen in such occult theory to contain the ‘life-force’ of the organism, and spilling the blood is thought to release this energy—usually to ‘feed’ a god or spirit, so that it can be manifested, or empowered to do the sorceror’s bidding. Such sacrifice is part of many voodoo traditions.
Christopher Hyatt and Jason Black, in Pacts with the Devil, concisely reveal the modern double standards surrounding the issue of animal sacrifice.
Recently, on a national new broadcast, there was a segment taped in New York. The video showed ranks of cages containing sheep and chickens, with NYPD officers standing with military solemnity in front of them. The police, the commentator informed us, had just "rescued" these animals. Not from torture or some other form of lingering abuse, but from a place where a major Santeria festival was about to be celebrated. What was to be the fate of these livestock animals? They would be killed expertly and quickly by a Santero, the blood given to the Orishas as a gift, and most likely (depending on the ritual) the animals would be cooked and eaten that same evening by the men women and children at the celebration.
They point out that we live in a society where someone could be sat at home eating a steak (from an animal cruelly, sometimes slowly killed in a slaughterhouse), spy someone living next door swiftly killing a chicken as part of a ritual, and run terrified to the phone to inform the police about this ‘Satanist’, even if the ritualist ate the chicken later for dinner. Who is more humane? Hyatt & Black also note that all ‘kosher’ meat, drained of blood while a rabbi says a blessing, is by definition ritual sacrifice; yet this is legal. Now, I’m wholly and unreservedly against any animal being killed if it isn’t eaten (unless in self-defence). When it is eaten, I think this falls into the category of personal choice. It’s not my business if people want to eat animals without cruelty. Likewise, it’s not my business if they want to use the animal’s death for spiritual purposes before they eat it. Or if they want to kill it cleanly, then rip it to shreds and eat it raw with their bare hands.
What Hyatt & Black show is the hypocrisy surrounding blood sacrifice in modern culture. I wonder how many fundamentalist Christians involved in spreading the anti-pagan ‘ritual sacrifice’ scam sit down at Christmas and happily chew the cooked flesh of poultry kept in appalling conditions and slaughtered profanely. Given the choice, I would rather the turkey’s death formed part of a Santerian ritual, and its flesh eaten afterwards by people fully conscious of its demise—and of the sacredness of life and death.
Blood
When I first read the evidence for the ‘own-kill’ taboo in hunter-gatherer tribes—which in some extreme cases extends to hunters believing that even having seen their food alive would lead to bad hunting luck—I thought immediately of the modern meat industry. Now we haven’t the slightest chance of seeing the creature we’re eating in its living state. But this modern taboo merely serves to isolate meat-eaters from the reality of death (as one would expect in a Christian-based culture). For hunter-gatherers, who still kill, even though they may not eat their own kills, the reasons are a bit more complicated, and a little less alienating.
As a general example of how the own-kill rule functions in hunter-gatherer societies, let’s look at what is commonly known as ‘totemism’. Say there are several clans of hunter-gatherers living in the same area. Each clan has a ‘totem animal’. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there’s the bear clan and the deer clan. Now, the own-kill taboo would work here by preventing the bear clan from eating bear flesh and the deer clan from eating deer flesh. Each clan would be responsible for the hunting and killing of their own totem animal, and for supplying the meat to the other clan. The own-kill rule therefore functions as part of a reciprocal gift-giving system of exchange. Such exchange systems form part of the basis for human culture and language. Sharing and swapping necessitates communication and agreed-upon behavioural guidelines; and the evolution of such guidelines and communication likewise facilitate more intricate systems of exchange. There is strong evidence that most hunter-gatherers link (or rather identify) this food taboo/exchange system—of which there are countless variations—with incest taboos. Thus, the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea equate the taboo against eating one’s own kill with the taboo against incest. When asked about incest by an anthropologist, a man from the Arapesh tribe said, "No, we don’t sleep with our sisters. We give our sisters to other men and other men give us their sisters."
Not all hunter-gatherer exchange systems are based on inter-tribal marrying that is so male-dominated, as many early anthropologists tried to claim (to vindicate current patriarchy). But whoever controls inter-marrying between tribes, matrilineal kin and totem animals are equated as being tabooed for a very simple reason: they are one’s own blood. "To speak of someone as ‘my own flesh’ means, in many languages of the world, that the person is a close relative, usually by ‘blood’." (Knight) To many tribes, whose word for ‘flesh’ is often the same or similar to their word for ‘kin’, this is more than a figure of speech. Malinowski, speaking of the Trobriand islanders, observed that when men learn that a sister has given birth, they rejoice, "for their bodies become stronger when one of their sisters or nieces has plenty of children." Likewise, a similarly concrete feeling of bodily connectedness is expressed by the Buandik of Australia when talking of totemic animals. When forced by hunger to eat such an animal, "he expresses sorrow for having to eat his Wingong (friend), or Tumung (flesh). When using the latter word, the Buandik touch their breasts to indicate close relationship, meaning almost part of themselves."
In fact, the evidence suggests a cross-cultural pattern in which totemic food avoidances [and incest taboos] are in some sense avoidances of the self. If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ’spirit’, ’substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ’self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy.
Chris Knight, Blood Relations
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"Union and unification is of bodies, not souls. The erotic sense of reality unmasks the soul, the personality, the ego; because soul, personality and ego are what distinguish and separate us; they make us individuals, arrived at by dividing till you can divide no more—atoms. But psychic individuals, separate, unfissionable on the inside, impenetrable on the outside, are, like physical atoms, an illusion; in the twentieth century, in this age of fission, we can split the individual even as we can split the atom. Souls, personalities, and egos are masks, spectres, concealing our unity as body. For it as one biological species that mankind is one—the ’species essence’ that Karl Marx looked for; so that to become conscious of ourselves as body is to become conscious of mankind as one." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body)
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‘Avoidance of the self’ shouldn’t be taken in the modern sense, like ‘running away from yourself’. Implied here is an avoidance of the isolated ego. The hunter-gatherers’ gift-giving and exchange systems imply a commitment to extending the unity an individual feels between hirself and hir clan or totem animal. This unity is felt so strongly that it need not ‘feed on itself’ to bind itself together—it can (and must) be shared with others. It spills over, forming reciprocal inter-tribal bonds of interchange.
Looking back to Shivaite ritual sacrifice, the eating of one’s own kill could be seen as an attempt to regain some personal identity in societies where individuality is suppressed and compromised not to maintain kinship and transcendent blood-unity, but to support an oppressive and unhealthy social structure. However, since the whole point of Shivaism is to transcend the individual, and commune with nature, perhaps new psychic structures are involved. As I said before, Shivaism is counter-cultural. Maybe as the original cultural systems became corrupted in crowded cities, the only tack available to oppose this corruption was to oppose the principles it was based on—however socially useful and healthy they may have been in the past.
I haven’t come across any information about sacrificial practices among hunter-gatherer tribes who practice the own-kill rule, and see common blood as the great unifier. But the whole idea of feeling yourself to be one with animals and other people—in a very tangible way—seems to me to have a strong bearing on blood sacrifice. Sacrifice, in the sense of "giving up something valued", would be truest if one lived with this feeling. Offering the blood (as life-force) of an animal to a spirit would mean much less if the animal involved wasn’t felt to be part of one’s own body. If this feeling was present and real, the sacrifice would truly be a sacrifice.
Following this logic, why bother with animals or other humans at all?
And as Deities demand sacrifice, one of men, another of cattle, a third of doves, let these sacrifices be replaced by the true sacrifices in thine own heart. Yet if thou must symbolize them outwardly for the hardness of thine heart, let thine own blood and no other’s, be spilt before that altar.
Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli
Crowley made exceptions to this ‘rule’ (as he had only one real rule, the often misunderstood "Do What Thou Wilt"); but the concept presented here—spilling one’s own blood as a sacrifice—has interesting resonances. It echoes the idea expressed earlier that menstruation may be the original ‘human sacrifice’. Chris Knight sees the emergence of all-male initiatory societies, involving self-mutilation and the spilling of blood, as a usurpation of female menstrual ritual power and solidarity. While we should obviously endeavour to release menstruation from the repression it has suffered—and all the evidence points to it being the most repressed and stigmatized human bodily function in history—the practice of ritual blood-letting in men today need not carry any of the associations with stealing women’s power that it may have had in the past. I can imagine many a strident feminist deriding men cutting themselves as suffering from ‘menstrual envy’. Well, we’ve already looked at this—I wouldn’t consider it ‘envy’ so much as a desire to partake of the other sex. It is some sort to equivalent of women gaining erotic pleasure and insight through using strap-ons.
It seems that the aboriginal populations who travelled across the Bering Straits from Siberia—those who were to become the native peoples of the Americas—developed the sacrifice of ritual blood-letting further. In his essay, ‘A Fashion for Ecstasy: Ancient Maya Body Modifications’, Wes Christensen details Mayan practices of tattooing, piercing, and blood self-sacrifice. As well as men mutilating their genitals, the piercing of the tongue was common, in men and in women. As Christensen says, "The psychological equation of the penis and the tongue needs little reiteration." His view is that the practice of "pulling spiny cords through holes in the tongue" may have been important for female Mayan ritualists: "If the wounding of the Male expresses the desire to own the magically fertile menstrual flow by mimicking it, the symbol seems less important than its function of linking the opposing forces of mother/father, sky/earth in one ritual practitioner. This way of looking at the rite is less male dominated, as well, as it allows for the pervasive influence of women in the ritual life of shamanistic village life. The tongue sacrifice, then, is the woman sorceror’s rite—a rite in which she symbolically imitates the male to achieve the same equilibrium."
Genesis P-Orridge, who was involved in quite extreme spontaneous self-mutilation as part of his performance art activities in the seventies, has been performing rituals for nearly twenty years, and claims that he never does one without cutting his skin. "I have to make at least one cut on myself, and it has to be a cut that will scar, no matter how small." (Re/Search: Modern Primitives) Obviously, scarification requires care, precision, and knowledge of how different parts of the body will react to incisions. But it could form part of the prime effort underlying all mysticism: overcoming subject/object dualism. Alan Watts has described this in terms of the idea, or feeling, that one is an individual ego contained in a "bag of skin". ‘I’ (the subject) am inside, and you and everything else (‘not-I’, the object) are outside. The skin is seen as the limit-point between these realms. Most people would see this as ‘common sense’. However, as Watts stresses, the skin is as much a bridge as a barrier. Many different forms of energy and matter—sweat, heat, sound vibrations—constantly cross this bridge, though we are usually unaware of it. We are inextricably bound up with the ‘outside’ world, to such an extent that we cannot exist without it. ‘Out there’ thus forms part of our identity, and our true body is the entire universe. "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)
And yet the illusion of the skin as an impassable physical and psychic barrier persists. Thus, cutting the skin could be a very powerful way of shattering this illusion. Scarification can be a form of ego-dissolution. For a start, pain is an intense physical stimulus, and can serve to heighten consciousness. Spiritual practices such as flagellation, bodily restriction, ritual scarification and piercing amply testify to the potency of pain as an intoxicant. In the practice of self-scarification, this alteration of consciousness could shift one’s perception of the wound from being some ’symbolic’ link between the inner and outer realms to being the concrete link which both physics and primitive tribes insist that it is.
Further, this theory opens up an understanding of many bizarre and perverse phenomena in human behaviour. Schizophrenics frequently lacerate their skin, something usually associated with mere self-destructive tendencies. But if we see this as self-destructive in terms of an attempt to overcome the illusion of separate individual existence (the isolated self, or ego), the practice of spontaneous self-mutilation can be seen as part of the healing process that many radical psychiatrists claim schizophrenia actually is. The ’split’ in schizophrenia isn’t the popular caricature of ’split personality’ (which is found in multiple personality disorders), but the split between inner and outer, the retreat of the individual from the outside world. My own view is that this split is not an aberration found only in the ‘mentally ill’, but the standard psychic stance of ‘normal’ modern humans. Ego-dissolving catalysts like intense sex and psychedelic drugs wouldn’t be subject to the repression that they are in our culture if this wasn’t the case. Schizophrenia is thus the shock and confusion of spontaneous liberation from our aberrant ‘normality’, a descent into the depths of the psyche, an intensification of the inner/outer split through which one discovers the illusory nature of this division.
It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating. . . . Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. . . . Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego-boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment. The schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation; an "indescribable extension of inner sense"; "uncanny feelings of reference"; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a distance. . . .
Dionysus, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression; and abolishes the principium individuationis, substituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature. In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, the individual self, the boundaries disintegrating, there is, for those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or, as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it."
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
The Divine Body
‘The Goddess’, like all forms of deity, seems to me to be much more than the ‘personification’ of natural forces, or aspects of ourselves. As the previous discussion of personality and ego-consciousness shows, this is because my conception of a ‘person’ or ‘individual’ is, at root, gradually evolving beyond the atomistic and divisive conceptions I have been indoctrinated with. Our conception of divine personifications will (or should) change along with changes in our conception of personality. Since we can’t safely shift overnight to a chaotic, flux-based state of being, the traditional view of deities will still persist to an extent, as useful focuses for attention and energy; but just as any sexual channels must be subsumed under a broader polymorphic map, lest we become obsessed with any one channel, our relationship to ‘deities’ should be encompassed by a much wider conception of divinity. My brief teenage flirtation with Christianity collapsed mostly because I found the mental idea of God as an old bloke with a beard in the sky hard to get round—and very, very silly. I don’t intend to let my present relationship with the Goddess fall prey to similar abstractions. Indeed, the foundation of my interest in this area is the shattering of abstract, monolithic, other-worldly conceptions of divinity.
Much as my ideas are preoccupied with balance, my present conviction that our ‘physical’ experience is the basis of all ‘mythology’ automatically places a distinct difference, an imbalance in emphasis, between those first two all-powerful beings we encounter—our parents. The physical root of my being is the fusion of a part of my mother with a part of my father, but this explosive cellular union is followed by nine months of incredibly rapid growth and development as part of my mother’s body. Even after physical separation occurred at birth, my mother was probably more or less my ‘world’ for the first months of life, depending on circumstances. Freudianism seems to be right in saying that the primal shock of existence is separation from the mother, first physically and then psychically. I’ve no idea why this is the way things are, but such is the case, and I usually point this out to anyone whose knee jerks in dismissal as a reaction against the idea that the first human conceptions of divinity were female. Now, I think this view is overly simplistic, and should be tempered by the above discussions about androgyny and ego-consciousness, but let’s explore it a bit and see what comes up.
Our earliest level of experience of this world is the experience of being unified with our mother in the ocean of the womb. Our nutrition and blood circulation in foetal existence depends utterly on our connection with our mother’s body via the umbilical cord. We are separated at birth, the umbilical severed, but the new world we are delivered into, the ‘external’ world, is in a sense another womb. "Birth is to come out of a womb; and to go into a womb." (Brown) The idea that the material world is our mother is found in archaic Earth-Mother beliefs; in psychoanalysis, where exploration of the external world is seen as a symbolic exploration of the insides of the mother, where "Geography is geography of the mother’s body" (Brown); and in language, where the word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin mater, mother.
Tantric cosmology sees the ground of existence as the union of the male and female principles, Shiva and Shakti. The manifest world is the product of their interplay, where Shiva is the static principle of consciousness and awareness, and the female Shakti is the dynamic principle of energy and manifestation. This is very similar to the Vedic idea of maya, or illusion. The ‘material’ world is seen as an illusion weaved by the goddess Maya (incidentally, this was also the name of the Buddha’s mother), behind which lies the non-manifest reality of cosmic consciousness. We can also relate this back to the idea that Satan rules the world of manifestation—"The Devil is the lord of the world" (Luther)—and God rules the ‘non-material’ realm of the ’spirit’. Tantra’s Shiva-Shakti cosmology is much more holistic, and does not treat the web of matter weaved by Shakti as ‘illusory’ in the sense of something to be overcome, some cosmic deception that inhibits us. It is seen as the basis of our spiritual quest, the ‘raw material’ with which we should work to transmute ourselves and the world.
We are, at present, part of the Earth. This planet doesn’t ’stop’ at the ground we stand on—its true boundary is the outer edge of the atmosphere, and we are thus inside the Earth. And, like the human body, the Earth’s body doesn’t really ‘end’ in an absolute way at its boundary, or skin. The atmosphere, like the skin, is a bridge as well as a barrier, mediating the transmission of many forms of energy and matter—most notably light and heat—between the planet and the solar system, and the rest of the universe.
The transition from seeing our human mother as our Mother to seeing the world, or the Earth, as our Mother, is central to initiatory rites. In many tribal societies, pubescent initiates are isolated from their biological families. Mothers often grieve, seeing the initiation as a literal death of their child—and the birth of an independent adult. Many initiations take place in subterranean environments—caves or holes in the ground—from which the initiate emerges as a child of the Earth. It is from such underground wombs that mythologies involving the labyrinth as an initiatory complex emerge. In cultures where male-only initiatory societies emerged, the process often became a way of appropriating the power of the mother, and reveals another example of ritual androgyny:
"The young man is put into a hole and reborn—this time under the auspices of his male mothers." Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys "we two are friends," they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or "penis womb." The fathers are telling the sons, "leave your mother and love us, because we, too, have a vagina." Dionysus, the god of eternal youth, of initiation, and of secret societies was twice-born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, and caught the baby in his thigh, saying: "Come enter this my male womb."
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
To a certain extent, though, all this is still abstraction. The transition from a ‘biological’ to a ’spiritual’ mother is as useless and alienating as the Christian spiritual Father concept if our cosmic parent is envisaged in terms of an abstract deity. The importance of ‘rebirth’ is in the rebirth of awareness, the emergence of a feeling that we are fused with, and part of our environment. For the foetus, the fusion with the mother is an obvious fact that is not recognized with conscious clarity, because of an undeveloped sense of awareness and the fact that no other state has been experienced. Our fall from union seems to facilitate—via contrast and separation—a heightened awareness of reality, through which subsequent re-union with the environment may be experienced with greater intensity, "For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union." (Crowley, The Book of the Law)
Since we are dealing with the relationship between human consciousness and the environment, one of the most important areas of interest here is what is commonly known as earth mysteries. This is the investigation of human interaction with the natural landscape in terms of spirituality, especially regarding sacred sites, whether these sites occur naturally or are constructed. There is usually a dualism at work in the investigation of sacred sites, with the scientific disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and ethnography on one side, and paganism, psychology and spirituality on the other. The ’subjective’ side (pagan investigators interested in the past and present use of such sites) is necessarily full of speculation and assumptions—my own writings included—but it does hold the key to approaching an understanding of stone circles, burial complexes, standing stones and all other such sites. That is, the function of sacred sites cannot be understood without an understanding of (which must include an experience that approaches) the mind-set of the people who built them. This task is probably impossible if taken to be a ‘perfectible’ scientific project, but we have much greater access to archaic states of consciousness than we are led to believe.
In trying to convey the idea that the LSD experience can access different modes of consciousness from along the evolutionary line, Timothy Leary quotes the German anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, offering it for comparison with documented accounts of LSD sessions. Von Eickstedt is trying to describe his idea of the spiritual attitude of australopithecines, our early ancestors:
In the way of experience there is dominant, throughout, a kaleidoscopic interrelated world. Feeling and perception are hardly separated in the world of visions; space and time are just floating environmental qualities . . . Thus the border between I and not-I is only at the border of one’s own and actually experienced, perceptible world.
In other words, for pre-hominid apes, and for the earliest humans, the definition of personal identity could be expressed as: I am my experience. This obviously includes the perceptible landscape, so any sacred sites and constructions that predate the evolution of ego-psychology in human cultures should be considered in these terms. This intertwining of human identity and nature is given a more roundabout, but somewhat fuller expression by Chris Knight in Blood Relations:
In this scheme of things [that of Australian Aborigines], human and natural cycles of renewal are mutually supportive and sustainable through the same rites. The skies and the landscape are felt to beat to human rhythms. Everything natural, in other words, is conceptualised in human terms, just as everything human is thought to be governed by natural rhythms.
. . . There seems no reason to discount the Aborigines’ own belief that in their rituals they were drawing upon natural rhythms and harmonising with them to the advantage of their relationship with the world around them. It was not that man was dominating nature; but neither was it that human society stood helpless in the face of nature’s powers. Rather, human society was flexible enough and sensitive enough to attune itself finely to the rhythms of surrounding life, avoiding helplessness by replicating internally nature’s own ‘dance’. Nature was thereby humanized, while humanity yielded to this nature. If the hills felt like women’s breasts, if rocks felt like testicles, if the sunlight seemed like sexual fire and the rains felt like menstrual floods, then this was not mere ‘projection’ of a belief system onto the external world. This was how things felt—because given synchrony and therefore a shared life-pulse, this was at a deep level how they were.
Naturally, the experience of a psychedelic trip does not reproduce the actual mind-set of archaic humans. For us, a trip stands only in relation to our everyday, ‘normal’, experience of the world, and is quite different from the continuous, everyday experience of, say, a Neolithic Avebury resident, for whom such a world-view would be ‘normal’. Nevertheless, such experiences, induced by chemicals or otherwise, should stand as the cornerstone of our understanding of sacred sites—and pre-civilised culture in general. And in any case, we shouldn’t be interested in trying to replicate the mind-set of archaic humanity. Individual initiation isn’t a simple one-way ‘return to the womb’, but a more highly evolved sense of omni-directional unity that follows the experience of division. Similarly, any attempt to re-engineer our culture’s experience of the environment, inspired by prehistoric and existing ‘primitive’ cultures, should be a return to a similar point, but higher up on the evolutionary spiral. "We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but a return of the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the repressed." (Hakim Bey)
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"Mariners sailing close to the shores of Tuscany heard a voice cry out from the hills, the trees and the sky: ‘The Great God Pan is dead!’ Pan, god of panic. The sudden awareness that everything is alive and significant. The date was December 25, 1 AD. . . . The final apocalypse is when every man sees what he sees, feels what he feels, hears what he hears… The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be…" (William S. Burroughs, Apocalypse)
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My conception of the Goddess, then, has less to do with a visualized representation of a vast cosmic woman, ox, or serpent than it has to do with my immediate, moment-to-moment experience of the world I am part of. Even in my Kundalini dream, the ‘presence’ of the Goddess was an intuited fact, not a confrontation with a manifest form. The two instances of feeling Her presence were both experiences of intense body sensations and energy rushes, accompanied by the self-evident dream-conviction that this was the Goddess. In waking life, this perception arises very much along the lines of Phil Hine’s idea that Kundalini is associated with "one’s physical sensation of the here & now". This sensation is not a narrow feeling of mundanity, not the dissipation of mystery and numinosity that is usually associated with the apt phrase "down to earth". It is exactly the opposite: a sense of the intense completeness and fullness of each moment; a paradoxical but perfectly natural feeling of being totally grounded, yet adrift in a vertiginous whirlpool of possibilities.
A related point that interests me is that investigations into the function and purpose of archaeological artifacts are nearly always governed by the sacred/profane dualism. Is this antler-pick just a common tool, or did it have ritual significance? Are these cave paintings just ‘art’ (in the modern, profane, sense of ‘representation’), or were they part of a system of hunting ‘magic’? It’s clear that somewhere the rigid distinction between the ’sacred’ and ‘profane’ arose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the present situation where for most people the ’sacred’ only exists in church on Sundays (if sacredness exists at all). According to Alan Watts, ‘profane’ didn’t always mean irreligious or blasphemous. It merely signified "an area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum). It was thus the proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates, though here again the ‘common’ is not the crude but the communal—the people living in society. By contrast, the sacred was not the merely religious but what lay outside or beyond the community, what was—again in an ancient sense—extraordinary or outside the social order." (Nature, Man & Woman)
Judging from this, the sacred/profane duality arose as a result of the increase in human populations. Beyond a certain point, it seems that the full power and mystery of existence, as felt by the earliest humans, could not be a constant fact of everyone’s experience if "social order" was to evolve. Even beyond this point, it can be seen from Watts’ argument that the sacred/profane distinction didn’t necessarily mean that everyday experience was utterly bereft of spiritual significance. This spiritual poverty, this rigid division of life into the sacred and profane (in their modern senses), has only been the norm of human experience for several hundred years, if that. And in their historical accounts, modern scientists have been projecting this division back in time for far too long. A re-vision of anthropology and archaeology is overdue, necessary and, I feel, imminent.
It seems ridiculous that anyone could assume that prehistoric humans sectioned life into neat compartments, mundane and extraordinary, profane and sacred, with anything like the rigour and inflexibility that the modern West does. Only affluent cultures, where day-to-day survival is not really a pressing issue, can even afford such a distinction. For pre-civilised (i.e. before cities) societies, where existence was dynamic and unstable, life depended on crops and crops depended on weather, among other things. For pre-agricultural societies, life depended on the gathering of food and the hunting of animals, which are subject to even more unstable factors. And these things, agriculture and hunting, were the prime focus for ‘religious’ activity. Gods and goddesses of the hunt, gods and goddesses of the Earth and crops dominated their relationship with the divine. What we consider the ‘mundane’ bits about life, like fuelling our bodies and keeping warm, were for these people projects loaded with importance and significance. In such a society, there’s nothing more significant than staying alive. Thus food, shelter, hunting, farming, communication, the sharing of knowledge and skills, all were imbued with what we would consider ’spiritual’ significance.
The figure of the shaman, "technician of the sacred", stands as the first step in the progressive division of life into the sacred and the profane, but the first shamans could only have stood "outside the social order" in a shallow sense. Early shamans would have depended on the social order for basic support and a purpose for their path’s numerous trials, and the society would have depended on them for communication with deities and spirits, or forces of nature—more often than not for the governing and aiding ‘mundane’ projects like hunting and farming.
In short, life was a unity. Everything depended on everything else. The body was divine, and experience of the body included the environment. For ourselves, living in a culture where the dominant spiritual institutions have insisted not only on separating themselves from everyday life, but directing their spiritual aspirations outside this world, it’s evident that a new vision of spirituality more directly concerned with life, the Earth, our bodies and survival is needed. We cannot live on bread alone, but I don’t want to try to live without it. It’s no coincidence that it took an affluent society like our own, where day-to-day existence is taken for granted, to produce a device capable of utterly destroying the biosphere.
Footnotes
[2008] After reading Timothy Taylor’s The Buried Soul, I’m glad I couched this part in suggestive rather than definitive language. Taylor deftly exposes the naivety of many recent theorists who try to whitewash suffering in the ancient world with arguments similar to Dames’. While Taylor’s arguments are important, I still think it’s important to imagine that attitudes may be radically different in ancient societies, and to not settle on a definitive judgement either way unless evidence is blatant. [back to text]
Books Used/Sampled
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler
William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P.H. Butter
The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
Pacts with the Devil by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt**
The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey
The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton
The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt*
Towards 2012 part II: Psychedelica edited by Gyrus
Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown*
Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown**
Nature, Man & Woman by Alan Watts*
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas*
The Avebury Cycle by Michael Dames**
Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight**
The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy by Philip Rawson*
The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna*
Kundalini, Evolution & Enlightenment edited by John White
Magick by Aleister Crowley
The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley
Re/Search: Modern Primitives edited by V. Vale & A. Juno**
The Holy Bible edited by the Christian Church
Meditations on the Apocalypse by F. Aster Barnwell
The Supernatural by Colin Wilson
The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove**
Men, Women & Chainsaws by Carol. J. Clover
Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Éliade
Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus by Alain Daniélou*
Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons by Manfred Lurker
Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion by Hunbatz Men
The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi
The Psychedelic Reader edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
Dead City Radio by William S. Burroughs (spoken word album)
T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey (spoken word album)
* recommended in relation to the ideas discussed in this essay
** bloody essential
Related Films
The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy
The Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren
Videodrome by David Cronenberg
Crash by David Cronenberg
Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Carrie by Brian de Palma
Alien3 by David Fincher
The Exorcist by William Friedkin
The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorcese
Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola
The Hunger by Tony Scott
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Henry Levin
Written 1997
Published in Archaeologies of Consciousness
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