WHO RUNS THE WORLD?

 

TERENCE MCKENNA ON SOCIETY

 

The truth does not require your participation to exist. 

Bullshit does. 

Terence McKenna 

Culture is a perversion. It festishizes objects, creates consumer mania, preaches endless forms of false happiness, false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. 

It invites people to dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines. 

Terence McKenna 

Isis Unveiled. Helena P. Blavatsky. An Excerpt

Hierophant Knowledge / Self Knowledge :: Isis Unveiled. Helena P. Blavatsky (1877). An Excerpt 

Before The Veil 

It is nineteen centuries since, as we are told, the night of Heathenism and Paganism was first dispelled by the divine light of Christianity; and two-and-a-half centuries since the bright lamp of Modern Science began to shine on the darkness of the ignorance of the ages. 

Within these respective epochs, we are required to believe, the true moral and intellectual progress of the race has occurred. The ancient philosophers were well enough for their respective generations, but they were illiterate as compared with modern men (women) of science. 

The ethics of Paganism perhaps met the wants of the uncultivated people of antiquity, but not until the advent of the luminous "Star of Bethlehem", was the true road to moral perfection and the way to salvation made plain. 

Of old, brutishness was the rule, virtue and spirituality the exception. Now, the dullest may read the will of God in His revealed word; men (women) have every incentive to be good, and are constantly becoming better. 

This is the assumption; what are the facts? On the one hand an unspiritual, dogmatic, too often debauched clergy; a host of sects, and three warring great religions; discord instead of union, dogmas without proofs, sensation-loving preachers, and wealth and pleasure-seeking parishioners' hypocrisy and bigotry, begotten by the tyrannical exigencies of respectability, the rule of the day, sincerity and real piety exceptional. 

On the other hand, scientific hypotheses built on sand; no accord upon a single question; rancorous quarrels and jealousy; a general drift into materialism. A death-grapple of Science with Theology for infallibility - " a conflict of ages". 

At Rome, the self-styled seat of Christianity, the putative successor to the chair of Peter is undermining social order with his invisible but omnipresent net-work of bigoted agents, and incites them to revolutionize Europe for his temporal as well as spiritual supremacy. We see him who calls himself the "Vicar of Christ", fraternizing with the anti-Christian Moslem against another Christian nation, publicly invoking the blessing of God upon the arms of those who have for centuries withstood, with fire and sword, the pretensions of his Christ to Godhood! 

At Berlin - one of the great seats of learning - professors of modern EXACT sciences, turning their backs on the boasted results of enlightenment of the post Galileonian period, are quietly snuffing out the candle of the great Florentine; seeking, in short, to prove the heliocentric system, and even the earth's rotation, but the dreams of deluded scientists, Newton a visionary, and all past and present astronomers but clever calculators of unverifiable problems. 

Between these two conflicting Titans - Science and Theology - is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man's (woman's) personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of a mere animal existence. Such is the picture of the hour, illumined by the bright noonday sun of this Christian and scientific era! 

Would it be strict justice to condemn to critical lapidation the most humble and modest of authors for ENTIRELY REJECTING THE AUTHORITY OF BOTH THESE COMBATANTS? Are we not bound rather to take as the true aphorism of this century, the declaration of Horace Greeley: " I accept UNRESERVEDLY the views of no man (woman), living or dead"? Such, at all events, will be our motto, and we mean that principle to be our constant guide throughout this work. 

Among the many phenomenal outgrowths of our century, the strange creed of the so-called Spiritualists has arisen amid the tottering ruins of self-styled revealed religions and materialistic philosophies; and yet it alone offers a possible last refuge of compromise between the two. That this unexpected ghost of pre-Christian days finds poor welcome from our sober and positive century, is not surprising. Times have strangely changed; and it is but recently that a well known Brooklyn preacher pointedly remarked in a sermon, that could Jesus come back and behave in the streets of New York, as he did in those of Jerusalem, he would find himself confined in the prison of the Tombs. 

What sort of welcome, then, could Spiritualism ever expect? True enough, the weird stranger seems neither attractive nor promising at first sight. Shapeless and uncouth, like an infant attended by seven nurses, it is coming out of its teens lame and mutilated. The name of its enemies is legion; its friends and protectors are a handful. But what of that? When was ever truth accepted a priori? Because the champions of Spiritualism have in their fanaticism magnified its qualities, and remained blind to its imperfections, that gives no excuse to doubt its reality. 

A forgery is impossible when we have no model to forge after. The fanaticism of Spiritualists is itself a proof of the genuineness and possibility of their phenomena. They give us facts that we may investigate, not assertions that we must believe without proof. Millions of reasonable men and women do not so easily succumb to collective hallucination. And so, while the clergy, following their own interpretations of the BIBLE, and science its self-made CODES of possibilities in nature, refuse it a fair hearing, REAL science and TRUE religion are silent, and gravely waiting further developments. 

The whole question of phenomena rests on the correct comprehension of old philosophies. Whither, then, should we turn, in our perplexity, but to the ancient sages, since, on the pretext of superstition, we are refused an explanation by the modern? Let us ask them what they know of genuine science and religion; not in the matter of mere details, but in all the broad conception of these twin truths - so strong in their unity, so weak when divided. Besides, we may find our profit in comparing this boasted modern science with ancient ignorance; this improved modern theology with the "Secret doctrines" of the ancient universal religion. Perhaps we may thus discover a neutral ground whence we can reach and profit by both. 

It is the Platonic philosophy, the most elaborate compend of the abstruse systems of old India, that can alone afford us this middle ground. Although twenty-two and a quarter centuries have elapsed since the death of Plato, the great minds of the world are still occupied with his writings. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, the world's interpreter. And the greatest philosopher of the pre-Christian era mirrored faithfully in his works the spiritualism of the Vedic philosophers who loved thousands of years before himself, and its metaphysical expression. 

Vyasa, Djeminy, Kapila, Vrihaspati, Sumati, and so many others, will be found to have transmitted their indelible imprint through the intervening centuries upon Plato and his school. Thus is warranted the inference that to Plato and the ancient Hindu sages was alike revealed the same wisdom. So surviving the shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal? 

Plato taught justice as subsisting in the soul of its possessor and his greatest good. "Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims." Yet his commentators, almost with one consent, shrink from every passage which implies that his metaphysics are based on a solid foundation, and not on ideal conceptions. 

But Plato could not accept a philosophy destitute of spiritual aspirations; the two were at one with him. For the old Grecian sage there was a single object of attainment: REAL KNOWLEDGE. He considered those only to be genuine philosophers, or students of truth, who possess the knowledge of the really-existing, in opposition to the mere seeing; of the ALWAYS-EXISTING, in opposition to the transitory; and of that which exists PERMANENTLY, in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately. 

"Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas, and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE OF MIND (vous, nous, the spirit), the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded; the Monarch and Lawgiver of the universe; the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty, and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the universe - who is called, by way of preeminence and excellence, the Supreme Good, the God...'the God over all'...He is not the truth nor the intelligence, but "the father of it". Though this eternal essence of things may not be perceptible by our physical senses, it may be apprehended by the mind of those who are not wilfully obtuse. 

"To you," said Jesus to his elect disciples, "it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to them...it is not given;....therefore speak I to them in parables (or allegories); because they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand." 

The philosophy of Plato, we are assured by Porphry, of the Neo-platonic School was taught and illustrated in the MYSTERIES. Many have questioned and even denied this; and Lobeck, in his AGLAOPHOMUS, has gone to the extreme of representing the sacred orgies as little more than an empty show to captivate the imagination. As though Athens and Greece would for twenty centuries and more have repaired every fifth year to Eleusis to witness a solemn religious farce! 

Augustine, the papa-bishop of Hippo, has resolved such assertions. He declares that the doctrines of the Alexandrian Platonists were the original esoteric doctrines of the first followers of Plato, and describes Plotinus as a Plato resuscitated. He also explains the motives of the great philosopher for veiling the interior sense of what he taught. 

(The accusations of atheism, the introducing of foreign deities, and corrupting of the Athenian youth, which were made against Socrates, afforded ample justification for Plato to conceal the arcane preaching of his doctrines. Doubtless the peculiar diction or 'jargon' of the alchemists was employed for a like purpose. 

The dungeon, the rack, and the fagot were employed without scruple by Christians of every shade, the Roman Catholics especially, against all who taught even natural science contrary to the theories entertained by the Church. Pope Gregory the Great even inhibited the grammatical use of Latin as heathenish. 

The offense of Socrates consisted in unfolding to his disciples the arcane doctrine concerning the gods, which was taught in the Mysteries and was a capital crime. He also was charged by Aristophanes with introducing the new god Dinos into the republic as the demiurgos or artificer, and the lord of the solar universe. 

The Heliocentric system was also a doctrine of the Mysteries; and hence, when Aristarchus the Pythagorean taught it openly, Cleanthes declared that the Greeks ought to have called him to account and condemned him for blasphemy against the gods, " - (Plutarch). 

But Socrates had never been initiated, and hence divulged nothing which had ever been imparted to him.) 

As to the MYTHS, Plato declares in the GORGIAS and the PHAEDON that they were the vehicles of great truths well worth the seeking. But commentators are so little EN RAPPORT with the great philosopher as to be compelled to acknowledge that they are ignorant where "the doctrinal ends, and the mythical begins." 

Plato put to flight the popular superstition concerning magic and daemons, and developed the exaggerated notions of the time into rational theories and metaphysical conceptions. Perhaps these would not quite stand the inductive method of reasoning established by those who apprehend the existence of that higher faculty of insight or intuition, as affording a criterion for ascertaining truth. 

Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the NOUS, spirit or rational soul of man, being "generated by the Divine Father," possessed a nature kindred, or even homogenous with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities. 

This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone; the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by PHILOSOPHY - the love of wisdom. 

The love of truth is inherently the love of good; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God. 

"This flight," says Plato in the THAETETUS, "consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom." 

The basis of this assimilation is always asserted to be the preexistence of the spirit or NOUS. In the allegory of the chariot and winged steeds, given in the PHAEDRUS, he represents the psychical nature as composite and two-fold; the THUMOS, or EPITHUMETIC part, formed from the substances of the world of phenomena; and the ---, the essence of which is linked to the eternal world. The present earth-life is a fall and punishment. 

The soul dwells in "the grave which we call THE BODY," and in its incorporate state, and previous to the discipline of education, the noetic or spiritual element is "asleep". Life is thus a dream, rather than a reality. Like the captives in the subterranean cave, described in THE REPUBLIC, the back is turned to the light, we perceive only the shadows of objects, and think them the actual realities. 

Is not this the idea of MAYA, or the illusion of the senses in physical life, which is so marked a feature in Buddhistical philosophy? But these shadows, if we have not given ourselves up absolutely to the sensuous nature, arouse in us the reminiscence of that higher world that we once inhabited. 

"The interior spirit has some dim and shadowy recollection of its antenatal state of bliss has some dim and shadowy recollection of its antenatal state of bliss, and some instinctive and proleptic yearnings for its return." It is the province of the discipline of philosophy to disinthrall it from the bondage of sense, and raise it into the empyrean of pure thought, to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty. 

"The soul," says Plato, in the THEATETUS, "cannot come into the form of a man (woman) if it has never seen the truth. this is a recollection of those things which our soul formerly saw when journeying with Deity, despising the things which we now say ARE, and looking up to that which REALLY IS. 

Wherefore the NOUS, or spirit, of the philosopher (or student of the higher truth) alone is furnished with wings; because he (she), to the best of his (her) ability, keeps these things in mind, of which the contemplation renders even Deity itself divine. By making the right use of these things remembered from the former life, by constantly perfecting himself in the perfect mysteries, a man (woman) becomes truly perfect - an initiate into the diviner wisdom." 

Hence we may understand why the sublimer scenes in the Mysteries were always in the night. The life of the interior spirit is the death of the external nature; and the night of the physical world denotes the day of the spiritual. Dionysus, the night-sun, is, therefore, worshipped rather than Helios, orb of day. 

In the Mysteries were symbolized the preexisting condition of the spirit and soul, and the lapse of the latter into earth-life and Hades, the miseries of that life, the purification of the soul, and its restoration to divine bliss, or reunion with spirit. Theon, of Smyrna, aptly compares the philosophical discipline to the mystic rites: "Philosophy," says he, "may be called the initiation into the true arcana, and the instruction in the genuine Mysteries. 

There are five parts of this initiation: 

I..., the previous purification; 

ll., the admission to participation in the arcane rites; 

lll., the epoptic revelation; 

lV., the investiture or enthroning; 

V. - the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communication with God, and the enjoyment of that felicity which arises from intimate converse with divine beings....

Plato denominates the EPOPTEIA, or personal view, the perfect contemplation of things which are apprehended intuitively, absolute truths and ideas. He also considers the binding of the head and crowning as analogues to the authority which any one receives from his instructors, of leading others into the same contemplation. 

The fifth gradation is the most perfect felicity arising from hence, and, according to Plato, an assimilation to divinity as far as is possible to human beings. 

Such is Platonism. "Out of Plato," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "come all things that are still written and debated among men (women) of thought." He absorbed the learning of his times - of Greece from Philolaus to Socrates; then of Pythagoras in Italy; then what he could procure from Egypt and the East. He was so broad that all philosophy, European and Asiatic, was in his doctrines; and to culture and contemplation he added the nature and qualities of the poet. 

The followers of Plato generally adhered strictly to his psychological theories. Several, however, like Xenocrates, ventured into bolder speculations. Speusippus, the nephew and successor of the great philosopher, was the author of the NUMERICAL ANALYSIS, a treatise on the Pythagorean numbers. Some of his speculations are not found in the written DIALOGUES; but as he was a listener to the unwritten lectures of Plato, the judgment of Enfield is doubtless correct, that he did not differ from his master. 

He was evidently, though not named, the antagonist whom Aristotle criticised, when professing to cite the argument of Plato against the doctrine of Pythagoras, that all things were in themselves numbers, or rather, inseparable from the idea of numbers. He especially endeavoured to show that the Platonic doctrine of ideas differed essentially from the Pythagorean, in that it presupposed numbers and magnitudes to exist apart from things. He also asserted that Plato taught that there could be no REAL knowledge, if the object of that knowledge was not carried beyond or above the sensible. 

But Aristotle was no trustworthy witness. He misrepresented Plato, and he almost caricatured the doctrines of Pythagoras. There is a canon of interpretation, which should guide us in our examinations of every philosophical opinion: "The human mind has, under the necessary operation of its own laws, been compelled to entertain the same fundamental ideas, and the human heart to cherish the same feelings in all ages." 

It is certain that Pythagoras awakened the deepest intellectual sympathy of his age, and that his doctrines exerted a powerful influence upon the mind of Plato. 

His cardinal idea was that there existed a permanent principle of unity beneath the forms, changes, and other phenomena of the universe. Aristotle asserted that he taught that "numbers are the first principles of all entities." Ritter has expressed the opinion that the formula of Pythagoras should be taken symbolically, which is doubtless correct. 

Aristotle goes on to associate these NUMBERS with the "forms" and "ideas" of Plato. He even declares that Plato said: "forms are numbers," and that "ideas are substantial existences - real beings." Yet Plato did not so teach. He declared that the final cause was the Supreme Goodness... "Ideas are objects of pure conception for the human reason, and they are attributes of the Divine Reason." Nor did he ever say that "forms are numbers." What he did say may be found in the TIMAUS: "God formed things as they first arose according to forms and numbers." 

It is recognized by modern science that all the higher laws of nature assume the form of quantitative statement. This is perhaps a fuller elaboration or more explicit affirmation of the Pythagorean doctrine. Numbers were regarded as the best representations of the laws of harmony which pervade the cosmos. We know too that in chemistry the doctrine of atoms and the laws of combination are actually and, as it were, arbitrarily defined by numbers. As Mr. W. Archer Butler has arithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose." 

The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the one evolving the many and pervading the many. This is the ancient doctrine of emanation in few words. Even the apostle Paul accepted it as true..... Out of him and through him and in him all things are. This, as we can see by the following quotation, is purely Hindu and Brahmanical: 

"When the dissolution - Pralaya - had arrived at its term, the great Being - Para-Atma or Para-Purusha - the Lord existing through himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are and will be....resolved to emanate from his own substance the various creatures" (Manava - Dharma - Sastra, book l, slokas 6 and 7). 

The mystic Decad 1+2+3+4 = 10 is a way of expressing this idea. The One is God, the Two, matter; the Three, combining Monad and Duad, and partaking the nature of both, is the phenomenal world; the Tetrad, or form of perfection, expresses the emptiness of all; and the Decad, or sum of all, involves the entire cosmos. The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit - a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason. 

The whole of this combination of the progression of numbers in the idea of creation is Hindu. The Being existing through himself, Swayambhu or Swayambhuva, as he is called by some, is one. He emanates from himself the CREATIVE FACULTY, Brahma or Purusha (the divine male (female)), and the one becomes TWO; out of this Duad, union of the purely intellectual principle with the principle of matter, evolves a third, which is Viradj, the phenomenal world. It is out of this invisible and incomprehensible trinity, the Brahmanic Trimurty, that evolves the second triad which represents the three faculties - the creative, the conservative, and the transforming. 

These are typified by Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, but are again and ever blended into one. UNITY, Brahma, or as the VEDAS called him, AUM or the abbreviated Trimurty. It is but under this trinity, ever active and tangible to all our senses, that the invisible and unknown Monas can manifest itself to the world of mortals. When he (she) becomes SARIRA, or he (she) who puts on a visible form, he (she) typifies all the principles of matter, all the germs of life, he (she) is Purusha, the god (female god) of the three visages, or triple power, the essence of the Vedic triad. 

"Let the Brahmas know the sacred Syllable (Aum), the three words of the Savitri, and read the VEDAS daily." (Manu, book iv, sloka 125). 

"After having produced the universe, He whose power is incomprehensible vanished again, absorbed in the Supreme Soul....Having retired into the primitive darkness, the great Soul remains within the unknown and is void of all form...."

"When having again reunited the subtile elementary principles, it introduces itself into either a vegetable or animal seed, it assumes at each a new form." 

"It is thus that, by an alternative waking and rest, the Immutable Being causes to revive and die eternally all the existing creaatures, active and inert" (Manu, book i, sloka 50, and others). 

He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato. 

Speusippus seems to have taught that the psychical or thumetic soul was immortal as well as the spirit or rational soul, and further on we will show his reasons. He also - like Philolaus and Aristotle, in his disquisitions upon the soul - makes of aether an element; so that there were five principal elements to correspond with the five regular figures in Geometry. 

This became also a doctrine of the Alexandrian school. Indeed, there was much in the doctrines of the Philaletheans which did not appear in the works of the older Platonists, but was doubtless taught in substance by the philosopher himself, but with his usual reticence was not committed to writing as being too arcane for promiscuous publication. 

Speusippus and Xenocrates after him, held, like their great master, that the ANIMA MUNDI, or world-soul, was not the Deity, but a manifestation. Those philosophers never conceived of the One as an animate nature. The original One did not EXIST, as we understand the term. Not till he had united with the many - emanated existence (the monad and duad) was a being produced. 

The ----, honored - the something manifested, dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity - the World-Soul. In this doctrine we find the spirit of esoteric Buddhism. 

A man's idea of God, is that image of blinding light that he sees reflected in the concave mirror of his own soul, and yet this is not, in very truth, God, but only His reflection. His glory is there, but, it is the light of his own Spirit that the man sees, and it is all he can bear to look upon. THE CLEARER THE MIRROR, THE BRIGHTER WILL BE THE DIVINE IMAGE. But the external world cannot be witnessed in it at the same moment. But the external world cannot be witnessed in it at the same moment. 

In the ecstatic Yogin, in the illuminated Seer, the spirit will shine like the noonday sun; in the debased victim of earthly attraction, the radiance has disappeared, for the mirror is obscured with the stains of matter. Such men deny their God, and would willingly deprive humanity of soul at one blow. 

NO GOD, NO SOUL? Dreadful, annihilating thought! The maddening nightmare of a lunatic - Atheist; presenting before his fevered vision, a hideous, ceaseless procession of sparks of cosmic matter created by NO ONE; self-appearing, self-existent, and self-developing; this Self NO Self, for it is NOTHING and NOBODY; floating onward from NOWHENCE, it is propelled by no Cause, for there is none, and it rushes NOWHITHER. 

And this in a circle of Eternity blind, inert, and - CAUSELESS. What is even the erroneous conception of the Buddhistic Nirvana in comparison! The Nirvana is preceded by numberless spiritual transformations and metempsychoses, during which the entity loses not for a second the sense of its own individuality, and which may last for millions of ages before the Final NO-Thing is reached. 

Though some have considered Speusippus as inferior to Aristotle, the world is nevertheless indebted to him for defining and expounding many things that Plato had left obscure in his doctrine of the Sensible and Ideal. His maxim was "The Immaterial is known by means of scientific thought, the Material by scientific perception." 

Xenocrates expounded many of the unwritten theories and teachings of his master. He too held the Pythagorean doctrine, and his system of numbers and mathematics in the highest estimation. Recognising but three degrees of knowledge - THOUGHT, PERCEPTION, and ENVISAGEMENT (or knowledge by INTUITION), he made the former busy itself with all that which is BEYOND the heavens; Perception with things in the heavens; Intuition with the heavens themselves. 

We find again these theories, and nearly in the same language in the Manava - Dharma - Sastra, when speaking of the creation of man (woman); 

"He (the supreme) drew from his own essence the immortal breath which PERISHETH NOT IN THE BEING, and to this soul of the being he gave the Ahancara (consciousness of the EGO) sovereign guide." 

Then he gave to that soul of the being (man/woman) the intellect formed of THE THREE QUALITIES, and the five organs of the outward perception. 

These three qualities are Intelligence, Conscience, and Will; answering to the Thought, Perception, and Envisagement of Xenocrates. 

The relation of numbers to Ideas was developed by him further than by Speusippus, and he surpassed Plato in his definition of the doctrine of Invisible Magnitudes. Reducing them to their ideal primary elements, he demonstrated that every figure and form originated out of the smallest indivisible line. 

That Xenocrates held the same theories as Plato in relation to the human soul (supposed to be a number) is evident, though Aristotle contradicts this, like every other teaching of this philosopher. 

This is conclusive evidence that many of Plato's doctrines were delivered orally, even were it shown that Xenocrates and not Plato was the first to originate the theory of indivisible magnitudes. He derives the Soul from the first Duad, and calls it a self-moved number. 

Theophrastus remarks that he entered and eliminated this Soul-theory more than any other Platonist. He built upon it the cosmological doctrine, and proved the necessary existence in every part of the universal space of a successive and progressive series of animated and thinking though spiritual beings. The Human Soul with him is a compound of the most spiritual properties of the Monad and the Duad, possessing the highest principles of both. 

If, like Plato and Prodicus, he refers to the Elements as to Divine Powers, and calls them gods, neither himself nor others connected any anthropomorphic idea with the appellation. Krishche remarks that he called them gods only that these elementary powers should not be confounded with the daemons of the nether world (the Elementary Spirits). 

As the Soul of the World permeates the whole Cosmos, even beasts must have in them something divine. This, also, is the doctrine of Buddhists and the Hermetists, and Manu endows with a living soul even the plants and the tiniest blade of grass. 

The daemons, according to this theory, are intermediate beings between the divine perfection and human sinfulness, and he divides them into classes, each subdivided in many others. But he states expressly that the individual or personal soul is the leading guardian daemon of every man (woman), and that no daemon has more power over us than our own. Thus the Daimonion of Socrates is the god or Divine Entity which inspired him all his life. 

It depends on man (woman) either to open or close his (her) perceptions to the Divine voice. Like Speusippus he ascribed immortality to the psychical body, or irrational soul. But some Hermetic philosophers have taught that the soul has a separate continued existence only so long as in its passage through the spheres any material or earthly particles remain incorporated in it; and that when absolutely purified, the latter are ANNIHILATED, and the quintessence of the soul alone becomes blended with its DIVINE spirit (the RATIONAL), and the two are thenceforth one. 

Zeller states that Xenocrates forbade the eating of animal food, not because he saw in beasts something akin to man (woman), as he ascribed to them a dim consciousness of God, but, "for the opposite reason, lest the irrationality of animal souls might thereby obtain a certain influence over us." But we believe that it was rather because, like Pythagoras, he has the Hindu sages for his masters and models. 

Cicero depicted Xenocrates utterly despising everything except the highest virtue; and describes the stainlessness and severe austerity of his character. "To free ourselves from the subjection of sensuous existence, to conquer the Titanic elements in our terrestrial nature through the Divine one, is our problem." Zeller makes him say: "Purity, even in the secret longings of our heart, is the greatest duty, and only philosophy and the initiation into the Mysteries help toward the attainment of this object." 

Crantor, another philosopher associated with the earliest days of Plato's Academy, conceived the human soul as formed out of the primary substance of all things, the Monad or One and the Duad or the Two. Plutarch speaks at length of this philosopher, who like his master believed in souls being distributed in earthly bodies as an exile and punishment. 

Herakleides, though some critics do not believe him to have strictly adhered to Plato's primal philosophy, taught the same ethics. Zeller presents him to us imparting, like Hicetas and Ecphantus, the Pythagorean doctrine of the diurnal rotation of the earth and the immobility of the fixed stars, but adds that he was ignorant of the annual revolution of the earth around the sun, and of the heliocentric system. But we have good evidence that the latter system was taught in the Mysteries, and that Socrates died for ATHEISM, ie, for divulging this sacred knowledge. 

Herakleides adopted fully the Pythagorean and Platonic views of the human soul, its faculties and its capabilities. He describes it was a luminous, highly ethereal essence. He affirms that souls inhabit the milky way before descending "into generation" or sublunary existence. His daemons or spirits are airy and vaporous bodies. 

In the EPINOMIS is fully stated the doctrine of the Pythagorean numbers in relation to created things. As a true Platonist its author maintains that wisdom can only be attained by a thorough inquiry into the occult nature of the creation; it alone assures us an existence of bliss after death. The immortality of the soul is greatly speculated upon in this treatise; but its author adds that we can attain to this knowledge only through a complete comprehension of the numbers; for the man (woman), unable to distinguish the straight line from a curved one will never have wisdom enough to secure a mathematical demonstration of the INVISIBLE, i.e., we must assure ourselves of the objective existence of our soul (astral body) before we learn that we are in possession of a divine and immortal spirit. 

Iamblichus says the same thing; adding, moreover, that it is a secret belonging to the highest initiation. The Divine Power, he says, always felt indignant with those "who rendered manifest the composition of the ICOSTAGONUS," viz., who delivered the method of inscribing in a sphere the dodecahedron. 

The idea that 'numbers' possessing the greatest virtue, produce always what is good and never what is evil, refers to justice, equanimity of temper, and everything that is harmonious. When the author speaks of every star as an individual soul, he only means what the Hindu initiates and the Hermeticists taught before and after him, viz, : that every star is an independent planet, which, like our earth, has a soul of its own, every atom of matter being impregnated with the divine influx of the soul of the world. 

It breathes and lives; it feels and suffers as well as enjoys life in its way. What naturalist is prepared to dispute it on good evidence? Therefore, we must consider the celestial bodies as the images of the gods; as partaking of the divine powers in their substance; and though they are not immortal in their soul-entity, their agency in the economy of the universe is entitled to divine honours, such as we pay to minor gods. 

The idea is plain, and one must be malevolent indeed to misrepresent it. If the author of EPINOMIS places these fiery gods higher than the animals, plants, and even mankind (humankind), al of which, as earthly creatures, are assigned by him a lower place, who can prove him wholly wrong? One must needs go deep indeed into the profanity of the abstract metaphysics of the old philosophies, who would understand that their various embodiments of the nature of the First Cause, its attributes and method. 

Again when the author of EPINOMIS locates between these highest and lowest gods (embodied souls) three classes of daemons, and peoples the universe with invisible beings, he is more rational than our modern scientists, who make between the two extremes one vast hiatus of being, the playground of blind forces. 

Of these three classes the first two are invisible; their bodies are pure ether and fire (planetary spirits); the daemons of the third class are clothed with vapoury bodies; they are usually invisible, but sometimes making themselves concrete become visible for a few seconds. These are the earthly spirits, or our astral souls. 

It is these doctrines, which, studied analogically, and on the principle of correspondence, led by the ancient, and may now lead the modern Philaletheian step by step toward the solution of the greatest mysteries. 

On the brink of the dark chasm separating the spiritual from the physical world stands modern science, with eyes closed, and head averted, pronouncing the gulf impassable and bottomless, though she holds in her hand a torch which she need only lower into the depths to show her her mistake. But across this chasm, the patient student of Hermetic philosophy has constructed a bridge. 

In his FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE Tyndall makes the following sad confession: "If you ask me whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve the problem of this universe. I must shake my head in doubt." If moved by an afterthought, he corrects himself later, and assures his audience that experimental evidence has helped him to discover, in the opprobrium-covered matter, the "promise and potency of every quality of life," he only jokes. It would be as difficult for Professor Tyndall to offer any ultimate and irrefutable proofs of what he asserts, as it was for Job to insert a hook into the nose of the leviathan. 

To avoid confusion that might easily arise by the frequent employment of certain terms in a sense different from that familiar to the reader, a few explanations will be timely. We desire to leave no pretext either for misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Magic may have one signification to one class of readers and another to another class. 

We shall give it the meaning which it has in the minds of its Oriental students and practitioners. And so with the words HERMETIC SCIENCE, OCCULTISM, HIEROPHANT ADEPT, SORCERER, etc.; there has been little agreement of late as to their meaning. Though the distinctions between the terms are very often insignificant - merely ethnic - still, it may be useful to the general reader to know just what that is. 

We give a few alphabetically. 

AETHROBACY

The Greek name for walking or being lifted in the air; LEVITATION, so called, among modern spiritualists. It may be either conscious or unconscious; in the one case, it is magic; in the other, either disease or a power which requires a few words of elucidation. 

A symbolical explanation of aethrobacy is given in an old Syriac manuscript which was translated in the fifteenth century by one Malchus, an alchemist. In connection with the case of Simon Magus, one passage reads thus: 

"Simon, laying his face upon the ground, whispered in her ear, "O mother Earth, give me, I pray thee, some of thy breath; and I will give thee mine; LET ME LOOSE O mother, that I may carry thy words to the stars, and I will return faithfully to thee after a while." And the Earth strengthening her status, none to her detriment, sent her genius to breathe of her BREATH on Simon, WHILE HE BREATHED ON HER; and the stars rejoiced to be visited by the mighty One." 

The starting point here is the recognized electro-chemical principle that bodies similarly electrified repel each other, while those differently electrified repel each other, while those differently electrified mutually attract. "The most elementary knowledge of chemistry," says Professor Cooke, "shows that, while radicals of opposite natures combine most eagerly together, two metals, or two closely allied metalloids, show but little affinity for each other." 

The earth is a magnetic body' in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago. It is charged with one form of electricity - let us call it positive - which it evolves continuously by spontaneous action, in its interior or centre of motion. Human bodies, in common with all other forms of matter, are charged with the opposite form of electricity - negative. 

That is to say, organic or inorganic bodies, if left to themselves will constantly and involuntarily charge themselves with, and evolve the form of electricity opposed to that of the earth itself. Now, what is weight? Simply the attraction of the earth. "Without the attractions of the earth you would have no weight," says Professor Stewart; and if you are had an earth twice as heavy as this, you would have double the attraction." 

How then, can we get rid of this attraction? According to the electrical law above stated, there is an attraction between our planet and the organisms upon it, which holds them upon the surface of the ground. But the law of gravitation has been counteracted in many instances, by levitations of persons and inanimate objects; how account for this? The condition of our physical systems, say theurgic philosophers, is largely dependent upon the action of our will. 

Helena Blavatsky

Isis Unveiled 

 

Intelligence + Critical Thought + Intellect. Words by Tariq Ali

 

.....A world that is treated virtually as a forbidden subject in an increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity and extols the present as a process without an alternative, implying that we all live in a consumerist paradise. 

A world in which disappointment breeds apathy and, for that reason, escapist fantasies of every sort are encouraged from above. 

Tariq Ali. The Clash of Fundamentalisms 

.....This is not to suggest that the House of Islam lacks its secular intellectuals and artists. 

The last century alone produced Nazim Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Abdelrehman Munif, Mahmud Darwish, Fazil Iskander, Naguib Mahfouz, Nizar Qabbani, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Djibril Diop Mambety amongst many others. 

But these are poets, novelists, film-makers. They have no equivalents in the social sciences. 

Critiques of religion are always implicit. Intellectual life has become stunted, making Islam itself a static and backward - looking religion. 

Tariq Ali. The Clash of Fundamentalisms

ERICA JONG ON HENRY MILLER

 

The Devil At Large. Erica Jong on Henry Miller.

Henry Hero.

Most people are not free. Freedom, in fact, frightens them. They follow patterns set for them by their parents, enforced by society, by their fears of ‘they say’ and ‘what will they think?’ and a constant inner dialogue that weighs duty against desire and pronounces duty the winner.

‘Lives of quiet desperation’ Thoreau called such existence – though today’s version is noisy desperation. Occasionally, a visionary comes along who seems to have conquered the fears in himself (herself) and seems to have conquered the fears in himself (herself) and seems to live with bravado and courage. People are at once terrified of such a creature – and admiring. They are also envious.

One who has conquered human fears is recognized as a hero – or heroine. But such a figure inspires mixed emotions. We are provoked by their example, but we are also inclined to blame ourselves for having lived too timidly. So the hero or heroine is often attacked, even killed, because of the envy of ordinary mortals. But if we could see the hero (heroine) as embodying our own aspirations, we would not need to destroy but could rather emulate and learn.

Henry Miller was such a hero. He did not start out fearless but he learned to overcome his fears. And he wrote a book – Tropic of Cancer – that breathed fresh air into American – and world – literature. The fresh air he breathed was freedom. And it was like pure oxygen to those who would take it in. For the others, the fearful, the envious, those who refused to breathe, Miller had to be discredited as a pervert or a sex maniac because his message was too terrifying. Life is there for the taking, he said. And those who refused to live fully had to blame him for their own failure.

Like Byron, Pushkin, George Sand, and Colette, Miller became more than a writer. He became a protagonist and a prophet – the prophet of a new consciousness.

His writings and his life mingled to create a larger myth, a myth that embodies the human attraction toward freedom. Miller’s writing is full of imperfection, bombast, humbug. Sometimes its very slovenliness makes it hard to defend. But the purity of his example, his heart, his openness, makes him unique among American writers. He will surely, however, draw new generations of readers to him. At present, Miller’s reputation still hangs in the balance and even those who have written about him seem to disapprove of him.

Miller is in many ways a world unto himself. One searches in vain for a contemporary to compare him with. Tropic of Cancer burst forth into the world in the same year, 1934, that gave us F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Edna St Vincent Millay’s Wine from These Grapes and Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks.

Not only is Miller’s characteristic style comparable to none of his contemporaries, but his spirit harks back to Whitman or Rabelais. In an age of cynicism, Miller remains the romantic, exemplifying the possibility of optimism in a fallen world, of happy poverty in a world that worships Lucre, of the sort of gaiety Yeats meant when he wrote of the Chinese sages in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, ‘their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay’.

I only knew Henry Miller in the last decade of his life. In a number of ways, he became my mentor.

I was a very young writer, very green and suddenly famous; he was a very old writer, seasoned in both fame and rejection, when we met – by letter – and became pen pals, then pals. I feel lucky to have known him, but in some sense I only got to know him well after his death. 

Miller was the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings, a romantic who pretended to be a rake, an old-fashioned Victorian sexist who could nevertheless be enormously supportive and loving to women, an accused anti-Semite who loved and admired Jews and had no use at all for prejudice or political dogma. He was, above all, a writer of what the poet Karl Shapiro called ‘wisdom literature’. If we have trouble categorizing Miller’s ‘novels’ and consequently underrate them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of ‘the well-wrought novel.’ And Miller’s novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants – undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that ‘eternal and irrepressible freshness’ Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic. 

In the profound shocks and upheavals of the twentieth century, from the trenches of World War l to Auschwitz to the holes in the ozone layer, we in the West have produced a great body of ‘wisdom literature’, as if we needed all the wisdom we could garner to bear what may be the last century of humans on earth. Solzhenitsyen, Primo Levi, Gunter Grass, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir have all written predominantly wisdom literature. Even among some of our most interesting novelists – Saul Bellow, Natalia Ginzberg, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Christina Stead, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Marguerite Yourcenar – the fictional form is often a cloack for philosophical truths about hte human race and where it is heading. The popularity of writers like Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, M.Scott Peck, and Robert Bly in our time also serves to show the great hunger for wisdom. We are, as Ursula LeGuin says, ‘dancing at the edge of the world,’ and it takes all our philosophy to bear it.

Henry Miller remains the most disturbing and misunderstood of prophets. Because even the STYLE of writing he discovered has become convention; it is hard today to grasp how electric his voice was in 1934. The feminist critique of the sixties came in to bury Henry under rhetoric-just as simplistic in its way as the simplistic rhetoric of male supremacy. But the feminist critique, valid as it is, neglects to address the main question Henry Miller poses: how does a writer raise a voice? How does a writer take the chaos of life and transform it into art? The raising of a voice is the red threat through chaos. The raising of a voice is the essence of freedom. It is where every writer, every person, must begin.

Can a woman writer learn anything from Henry Miller’s voice? Doesn’t his sexism invalidate his work? Shouldn’t we boycott his work because of its underlying politics? 

I don’t think so. Just as Shakespeare’s monarchism does not invalidate the beauty of his verse, Miller’s sexism does not annihilate his contribution to literature. Besides, if we proscribe all literature whose sexual politics we do not agree with, we shall have nothing left to read – not even the Bible, Homer, or the novels of Jane Austen (whose heroines are often happy to make conventional marriages). 

In fact, the freedom that Henry Miller discovered in finding his voice can inspire women writers as well as men. 

It is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet – and isn’t that, after all, what women still are? 

The problem of finding a voice is essential for all writers. It may be more fraught with external difficulties for women writers, because no one agrees what the proper voice of woman is – unless it is to keep silent – but it is still basically the same process of self-discovery. To define the self in a world that is hostile to the very notion of your selfhood is still every woman writer’s challenge. It was Henry Miller’s challenge too – for different reasons. In tracing his self-liberation, we can, by analogy, trace our own. 

I do not mean to minimize the differences between the male writer’s odyssey and the female writer’s. The pen, as so many feminist critics have shown, has been treated as analogous to the penis in our literary culture. This accounts for the trouble that feminists, myself included, have with Henry Miller. Henry liberates himself, becomes the vagabond, the clown, poet, but the open road he chooses has never really been open to women. Henry’s picaresque sexual odyssey was, for centuries, a male prerogative. Still, it is useful for writers of both sexes to trace the steps of his liberation. The freedom of Paris plust first-person bravado equals the voice twe have come to know as Herny Miller. 

Listen: 

'I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I AM. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. 

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.....I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing...'

Henry is retracing his steps as an artist here, telling us exactly what happened between his early, unsuccessful efforts at writing fiction, and Tropic of Cancer: he let go of literature. It reminds me of Colette’s advice to the young Georges Simenon: ‘Now go and take out the poetry.’ 

Good advice. A writer is born at the moment when his (her) true voice of authority merges at white heat with the subject he (she) was born to chronicle. Literature falls away and what remains is life – raw, pulsating life: ‘A gob of spit in the face of Art.’ 

For the truth is that every generation, every writer, must rediscover nature. Literary conventions tend to ossify over time, and what was once new becomes old. It takes a brave new voice to rediscover real life buried under decades of literary dust. In unburying himself, Henry unburied twentieth-century literature.

What was it about Paris in 1930 that enabled Henry Miller to find his voice? And what was it about New York that prevented it? 

The New York Henry left when he settled in Paris in March 1930 was nowhere as fraught as the New York of today, but it still bore certain similarities to it. In New York it was dishonour to be an unknown writer; in Paris one could write ecrivain on one’s passport and hold one’s head high. In Paris it was assumed (it still is) that an author had to have time, leisure, talk, solitude, stimulation. In New York it was, and still is, assumed that unless you fill up your time with appointments, you are a bum. More than that (and more important, particularly for Henry) was the American attitude toward the vagabond artist – an attitude that unfortunately persists to our day. ‘In Europe,’ as his friend the photographer Brassai says in his book on Henry Miller, ‘poverty is only bad luck, a minor unhappiness; in the United States, it represents a moral fault, a dishonour that society cannot pardon.’ 

To be a poor artist in America is thus doubly unforgivable. To be an artist in America is to be a criminal (its criminality only pardoned by writing bestsellers or selling one’s paintings at outrageous prices to rich collectors and thus feeding the obsolete war machine with tax blood). But to be poor AND an artist: this is un-American. 

Which of us has not felt this disapproval, this American rejection of the dreamer? ‘Poets have to dream,’ says Saul Bellow, ‘and dreaming in America is no cinch.’ 

In the last few years we have seen a dramatic replay of these attitudes in the debates over censorship and the National Endowment for the Arts. Our essential mistrust of dreamers leads us to cripple them with restrictions of all sorts. We seem not to understand that the basic riches of our country – wealth and emotional health – come from our creative spirit. Even with Japanese conglomerates buying our movie companies, even with statistics that prove our movies, music, television shows, and inventions are our biggest exports in real dollar terms, we still honour the money counters and money changers over the inventors and dreamers who give them something to count and change.

This is a deep-seated American obsession, and one whose historical genesis we must explore in retracing Henry Miller’s steps. It comes, of course, out of puritanism’s assumption that the dream life and imagination are suspect. And it results in a love-hate relationship with sexuality – a violent alternation between fascination and disgust which I call sexomania/sexophobia. We must understand how Henry was buffeted by these powerful forces and how he fled to Europe to be reborn. 

‘It was the scorn which ultimately Miller could not stand,’ says Brassai. ‘It was the scorn that he wanted to escape. Madness and suicide threatened him.’ 

‘Nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America,’ Miller writes in Tropic of Capricorn. 

Miller’s life as a protagonist, as a mythic hero – or antihero – is intimately related to this struggle between Puritanism and the life of the dreamer. Henry made a religion of art (as did his disciples). In doing this he was following in the footsteps of Whitman, his model of the American writer. 

There are at least two Millers in the books and articles that have been written about Henry. One is the real, historical Henry Miller, born in 1891 in New York, died in 1980 in Los Angeles – a character full of contradictions. The other is Miller the mythic hero or antihero, whose hegira is emblematic of the hegira of the American artist. 

Constrained by Puritanism, provoked by a society in which dreaming is no cinch, Miller the anti hero creates a way for an American – or anyone – to be an artist, and in doing so makes a path for all of us. One is continually struck by the interplay between these two Millers, but my interest is principally in the Miller who leads the way for a creator – particularly a creator who comes from a culture where creativity itself is suspect. Since I long ago gave up the Ph.D programme for the life of a professional author, I approach Miller with a writer’s rather than a scholar’s point of view. Like many storytellers, Henry was an outrageous self-mythifier and critics have pointed out the disparities between ‘the truth’ of his life and the grandiosity of his fictions. He tells the same story differently on every occasion, they complain. 

My point of view is necessarily different. In tracing the steps of another writer, I have empathy for the creative process itself and an understanding of its difficulties. I EXPECT  a writer to ‘lie’ in order to get at a deeper truth. I take for granted that imaginative writing exaggerates and rearranges ‘facts’ in the name of a higher fiction. I also understand how hard it is to survive one’s own fame. 

Henry’s writing is often misunderstood precisely because of the ways it parallels – yet deviates from – his own life. Since he uses the name ‘Henry Miller’ for his fictive protagonists, readers are thrown even more astray. This is a fate I know well because it has also been my own. Though I have called my heroines by different names, the parallels between my life and the mythic lives I lead in my novels have often had the effect of leading my self-appointed judges to attack me personally. Henry was one of the first to see this parallel between our fates, and as a result was enormously kind to me. Curiously enough, it fell in part to Henry to rescue my first novel from the obscurity that might otherwise have claimed it. And since I believe in the universal law by which circles get completed, I find it not at all odd that it falls in part to me to puzzle out the many contradictions of his posthumous reputation. 

A large part of the problem Miller presents to the literary critic comes from his perception of the chaos of life and his passionate need to reflect that chaos in his books. Henry Miller is the poet of what Umberto Eco calls THE CHAOSMOS. When he writes, he is in touch with pure desire – the desire to be one with the primal flux of creation, the desire to be as creative as a god. 

“I like desire. In desiring things no one is wounded, deranged nor exploited. Creation is pure desire. One possesses nothing, one creates and lets go. One is beyond what he (she) does. One is no longer a slave. It’s an affair between oneself and God. When one is truly rendered naked everything is done without effort. There is no recompense – the effort, the deed itself suffices. Deed is desire and desire deed. A complete circle.” 

How to write a coherent book about such a primal force? It is not easy, as all Miller’s biographers attest. Clearly Henry Miller did not WANT to be the subject of a biography and he spread confusion even as he scattered clues. He knew he had told many tales that were not true and he was nervous that someone might catch him in his lies. A good example of Henry’s ambivalent relations to the truth is the way he hated his pal Brassai’s rather accurate portrayal of him in Grandeur Nature, a book not yet translated into English, perhaps because Henry despised it so. He felt he had adequately chronicled his own life in his books, and wherever there was some fictionalisation that did not correspond to the ‘facts’ (in which, anyway, he did not believe), he was more than happy to provide chronologies, interviews, conversations that elucidated the truth, HIS truth, for his rapt listeners. (Some of these ‘documents’ also contain plenty of fiction.) he was an artesian writer, so overflowing with stories and ideas that to this day he still defeats bibliographers and biographers. Whenever you think you have read all the essential Miller, another pamphlet, brochure, treasure trove of letters, watercolour or print turns up with more Henry, ever more Henry. He embodied in both his writing and his life the paradigm of the writer as the giver of gifts, the voyager into the underworld who comes back with a boon for humankind. 

Ironically, Henry Miller is best known for his worst writing – the boastful graphic sexual scenes in the Tropics, Quiet Days in Clichy, and Sexus. These finally interest me less than the transcendentalism of The Colussus of Maroussi, his spiritual travel book about Greece. For me Maroussi is his central work and it stands squarely in the American transcendental tradition. It has a kind of perfection and purity that you can find in books like Walden. And yet, paradoxically, without the scandal surrounding the ‘sexual’ writings, Miller would perhaps not be known at all. 

That Miller was a transcendentalist in the indigenous American tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman he himself apparently knew. He referred to Whitman as an ancestor and influence. (He also regarded Maroussi as his best book). He was a mystic in the way of Thomas Merton and Lao-tzu, seeing in ordinary life the way into the extraordinary. Like many liberators who seek first to liberate themselves, he saw in sex one path of self-liberation-a way out of the body through the body. In this, he is not so different from Whitman or from Colette. 

He was always seeking ‘life more abundant’ as he says at the end of Colussus of Maroussi. Sex was one path toward abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letter-writing, and painting were still others. He saw the world in terms of abundance rather than scarcity, and it often seems that this distinction is the most critical one of all where writers are concerned. Writers tend toward either free flow or toward agonised laconicism – Henry Miller being at one extreme and Samuel Beckett at the other. 

Henry Miller was as great a conversationalist as he was a writer. He was the primeval author, in the primeval cave, telling stories to keep the tribe awake and alive, safe from the sabre-toothed tigers outside. Like any shaman, he worked in a variety of forms: voice, watercolour, the photographs he posed for, the documentaries he conspired in. In many ways, he anticipates Cindy Sherman, Art Spiegel-man, and other postmodernist artists, using his own photographic or painted persona to create his own oeuvre. In other ways he is like Picasso, inventing and reinventing his wives and his muses in many of the different characters that appear in his books. All of them are Woman or Muse, just as Henry himself, the autobiographical protagonist who bears his name, is Everyman. To speak of him as the real historical Henry Miller is a mistake, for had he not elevated his life above mere autobiography and made it emblematic nobody would be interested in it but himself and perhaps a few enemies, relatives, friends. 

Because Henry Miller became his own protagonist, the appreciation of his work is further confused. Always, when a writer is transformed this way, it makes the assessment of the work more problematic, for some will inevitably see  him as a villain and in reaction others will plump for him as hero. We have seen both these responses to Miller in recent years and it is doubtful that either view has been accurate. 

This transformation is what all artists seek: to become like mythic heroes (heroines) – Prometheus, Achilles, Odysseus, Alcestis, Athena – so that we mortals can see our fates reflected in their journeys as we do in the journeys described in ancient myths. 

But Henry is not a hero to all. Many see him as a villain. His fate has not been so different from de Sade’s: either canonized by cultists or burned at the stake by puritans, either hailed by hippies seeing a hip father figure or dismissed by literary Anglophiles who would prefer that American literature consisted only of Henry James. 

Things are not so simple. Our apprehension of Miller, as of de Sade, implicates our entire apprehension of sexuality, our notions of sexual politics, as well as our notions of what constitutes literature. That is why he is such a pivotal and important figure. 

‘Life is that which flows..’ said one of Miller’s Paris roommates, Michael Fraenkel, in an essay about the composition of The Tropic of Cancer. The paradox for every creative artist is that life flows and art must stand still. But it must stand still like the hummingbird, as Miller would say. It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art. 

Miller’s art is always bursting the boundaries of form as we know it. It strains beyond the frame of the picture. This is partly its subject, and it also accounts for the difficulty a form-ridden commentator has with it.

Postmodernists have already discovered Miller as the artist of the future. But the artist who is ahead of his (her) time never has an easy job making a living IN his (her) time. Witness Vincent van Gogh. And Emily Dickinson. And Walt Whitman. Miller is an artist of similar protean and prophetic gifts. If he has to date received little literary consideration, it is because he cannot be formally categorized. But rather than seeing this as a fault – as many of his detractors do – I see it as his very subject matter. Henry’s ‘message’ was the message of all the Zen masters and mystics: that there is no stability, only flux. ‘The angel is my watermark!’ he writes in Black Spring. 

Henry Miller’s recent biographers try, willy-nilly, to fit him into pre-existing patterns; and when they fail, they blame HIM. But Henry’s very message is that life is formless, and that creativity partakes of the divine chaos. He struggles with this paradox in every book. 

Ironically, we live in an age when literary biography is more read than literature. Writers’ lives tend to have more commercial viability than their own books. In his most fertile time, Henry Miller could never have been published by a mainstream New York publisher, yet in his centennial year several vied to bring out books ABOUT him. I suspect that if Tropic of Cancer came upon us today, it would still have trouble finding a publisher despite our much vaunted (but essentially fake) ‘sexual revolution’. Yet Miller the protagonist continues to inspire books and films. 

What is it that we find in the lives of writers – particularly nonconformist writers – that thrills us, makes us identify? The story of a person inventing himself (herself)? The story of a person finding personal freedom in an age of corporate and totalitarian conformity? Has the myth of the nonconformist writer hitting the open road become a substitute for the initiatory ritual Robert Bly and others claim our society lacks? Why else do so many novels and movies about writers strike a resonant chord in readers who are not writers? 

Surely there is no more toilsome, self-flagellating profession than that of author. Ingrown toenails, Henry called us. Voltaire said, ‘The only reward to be expected for the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.’ But the average nonwriter seems to see in authorship a relaxing, hedonistic profession, affording ample time for travel, dalliance, and debauchery, an aristocratic profession carried out in dreamily scenic places, with lovely members of the opposite sex in attendance. The average nonwriter sees the writer as someone who has made ordinary life heroic. 

Contrary to popular myth, authors lead ‘a sort of life’ (the phrase is Graham Greene’s), imprisoned behind a desk. Painful solitude is required for the cultivation of literature, and even a bad book requires that one be good at cutting oneself off from other human beings in order to write it. A writer’s most ecstatic hours occur alone, yet the myth of hedonism persists. And the fact is that many writers ruin themselves trying to live up to it. Or maybe it is true that in a world where busy-ness and business drown out every spiritual pursuit, the writer’s solitude is the most envied pleasure of all. ‘A sort of life’ it may be, but vastly preferable to the kind of empty busy-ness that characterises most people’s lives. 

Miller was a happy man (for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books (as he boasts of lechery), he was in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation-and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves. 

So we come to the paradox of biography – especially the biography of a writer who amply chronicled his own life in many forms. (Biography is one of the new terrors of death’, said Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Alexander Pope’s friend. And in 1891, in his The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography.’) Who can chart the events in a person’s life with accuracy and without distortion? No one. Not even the person himself (herself). That is why biographies must be rewritten for every age, for every new wrinkle in the zeitgeist. That is why biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier. 

With a writer who has already mined his (her) own life in letters, in novels, in paintings, and in films, the biographical problem becomes even more vexing. Even the most seemingly autobiographical writer changes, heightens, and rearranges ‘fact’ to make his (her) fictions. It is naive to read his (her) stories literally, but it is equally unsatisfactory to read them as if they had no connection to his (her) life. 

I hope I can make peace with all these paradoxes by writing about Henry Miller in the same spirit that he first wrote to me in 1974 – with complete candour and no hidden agenda. It will not be the last word on Henry Miller, but the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said. 

ERICA JONG. 1993

The Devil at Large. Erica Jong on Henry Miller