Posts Tagged ‘quotation’

Today’s Readings

BY: Mark

In the beginning there was one. From this came two and three. Two and three were polar: yin and yang. As they came from one they were the energetic expressions of the creative force, perpetually changing into each other and, through change, evolving. However, their changes needed to be controlled by some higher consciousness. Looking closer at the yin and yang symbol it is evident that its dynamic form is kept in place by a circle. This circle represents the first idea–the prima materia, the word, the origin of duality, the source of creation yet also the limitation of creative expression.

- Dr. Josef Margraf “Morphogenesis and Plant Signature: The Tao of Connectedness” (Alchemy Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 8 )

The grimoire is a palingenesis. The hack and paste of overlapping ages. Some made to look old, others seeming younger in candlelight than the centuries make them. These texts are the lost, the rediscovered, the rescued from flames, and the outright invented. It is a dog-eared tarot gallery.

- Peter Grey, from his Introduction to Howlings [Scarlet Imprint]

Scarlet Imprint is putting on an event called the Summer of Love. In Brighton, on August 20th. In case you were wondering what to do on a summer evening while in the UK.

On the second night, I called out to my soul.
“I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them.”

- Carl Jung, The Red Book, Liber Primus, folio ii (r).

I really need a second desk, just so I can leave The Red Book out. Let myself get lost in it a few times during the course of the day . . .

The Great Work-in-Progress

BY: Mark

Visualization, or using the power of your imagination creatively, is a very important part of magick. We are generally brought up in this society to ‘look down’ on the imagination; imagination is somehow thus removed from reality and not very useful in daily life. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have often heard people say, ‘Oh, it’s just imagination.’

Just imagination! The imagination is the most powerful faculty we possess. We are taught to believe that there is only one ‘real’ reality and that the imagination is removed from that reality; but everything that human beings have created in the world existed first only in the imagination of one person. In order to create something in this outer reality, it first must take form in your own inner reality, then be made material through the application of your Will.

- Rodney Orpheus, Abrahadabra, p. 29

In consider issues of ‘reality’ and ‘being,’ I am reminded of Chapter One, Verse One of the Gospel of St. John: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was God.’ The act of naming something–providing the word–is more than just a way of distinguishing it from something else; it’s a creative act, and in a sense anything that has a name has an existence, even if it is a ‘subjective-objective’ one.

- Jonathan Back, Spirits Walk with Me, p. 5.

Alan Moore on SF in America

BY: Mark

From Alan Moore’s essay about Science Fiction in America in Dodgem Logic #4.

Most nations when required to stave up national identity, perhaps in times of difficulty, will call on reserves of national history or mythology. In Britian, for example, leaders will routinely summon up the spirit of the Blitz, of Winston Churchill or King Arthur when attempting to persuade the country to accept something that it isn’t going to like, like public spending cutbacks or a costly foreign conflict. In effect, what most nations are trying to communicate is ‘Look at what we were.’ America, conversely, is only a little over two hundred years old and its brief history is largely one of genocide and slavery, things that most usually a require a veil drawn over them rather than celebration. Lacking myth or folklore and without a reservation of history to plunder, is America instead employing its projected science fiction futures to say ‘Look at what we will be?’

After all, it is a nation founded more upon projections, dreams and hopes of a quite literal ‘New World’ than most, begun by refugees fleeing the English Civil War like the Northampton families of both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington; by puritans inspired by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to seek out a New Jerusalem where their most fervent prayers would all be realised. Future-fixated from the outset, the new country’s visions of a Promised Land in store for everyone were initially religious and had God as a root cause for all their marvels. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, it was starting to become apparent that America’s best chance of moving forward lay in science and industry rather than divine intervention. In the nation’s fantasies God was to some degree replaced as the sole source of miracles and wonder by the atom-smasher, and conversely there would come to be something of the religious and millenarian in science fiction’s attitude toward science. This tension between a god-struck puritan past and longings for a Hugo Gernsback technological utopia would seem to be apparent in America today, where the most scientifically precocious nation on the planet has Creationism on the school syllabus in Kansas.

The whole article, entitled “Frankenstein’s Cadillac” is a rousing read, and well worth tracking down. Dodgem Logic is Alan Moore’s return to ‘zine making, a bi-monthly magazine that is filled with all manner of wonderful ephemera, insight, and crazy-making.

You can find it on the web at dodgemlogic.com.

Reaching the Void

BY: Mark

“In the Minor Arcana, in which the Sword is the symbol of intellectual life, the Two of Swords shows us a huge flower (the largest of the series) with eight petals and eight branches filling the entire oval holding it. It is the daydream that sprawls across the mind, a collection of plans, myths, information, and theories. The center of the flower contains a black spot in which the void one attains in the perfection of meditation can be sensed in gestation . . . The swords’ blades are essentially black: the purpose of the mind is to reach the void.”

- Jodorowsky & Costa, The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, p. 280

It really doesn’t surprise me that I have an affinity for the Two of Swords, and it is a fitting card for the day. Reaching the void: stage one.

Waite on Alchemy, again

BY: Mark

The profound subtleties of thought seldom find adequate expression even when the whole strength of a truly intellectual nature is brought to bear upon the resources of language, and where the force of direct appeal is unwillingly acknowledged to be insufficient, the vague generalities of allegory can scarcely expect to succeed. It is the province of symbolism to suggest thought, and the interpretation of any sequence of typology inevitably varies in direct proportion with the various types of mind. Each individual symbol embodies a definite conception existing in the mind of its inventor, and in that symbol more or less perfectly expressed, but every student of allegory out of every individual symbol extracts his own meaning, so that the significance of typology is as infinite as the varieties of interpreting intelligence. For this reason, the best and truest adepts have always insisted on the necessity of an initiated teacher, or of a special intellectual illumination which they term the grace of God, for the discovery of the actual secret of the Hermetic art.

Without this light or guidance the unelected student is likely to be adrift forever on a chaotic sea of symbols and the prima materia, concealed by innumerable names and contradictory or illusionary descriptions, will for ever escape him. It is in this way that a thousand unassisted investigators have operated upon ten thousand material substances, and have never remotely approached the manufacture of the Great Magisterium, and, after the same manner, outwearied by perpetual failures in the physical process, that others have rejected the common opinion concerning the object of alchemy, and with imaginations at work upon the loftier aspirations expressed by Hermetic adepts, have accredited them with an exclusively spiritual aim, and with the possession of exclusively spiritual secrets.

– Arthur Edward Waite

Not too much different from the practice of being a successful writer, isn’t it?

Arthur Edward Waite on Alchemy

BY: Mark

This method of interpreting the Hermetic allegories is calculated to exalt the alchemists indefinitely in the estimation of all thinking minds. From possibly avaricious investigators of a by-way of physical science, they are transfigured into dreamers of the sublimest imaginable dream, while if that which they conceived was accomplished, they are divine and illuminated monarchs who are throned on the pinnacles of eternity, having dominion over their infinite souls.

     — Arthur Edward Waite.

Part of his argument that alchemy wasn’t about transforming dross into gold. Of course, he couldn’t say as much in plain language because part of the charm of the alchemical process was having the initiate reduce materials down to their most primal expression. That applies to the instructions as well.